Religion is ritual doing and myth serves to sanctify those actions in story. As religion is cast aside, ritual demeaned, the stories remain and become reinterpreted, developing plot and becoming fiction. As Barthes discusses in “Myth Today” of Mythologies, mythic speech serves to propagate the status quo where political speech, in contrast, questions and posits alternatives to the state of being. When Breton declares the need for new myth-making in his various surrealist writings, he is both undermining the current state of art, literature and politics but also suggesting that it become the foundation for a new state.
This in some sense also parallels his belief that automatic writing uncovered the true self which was then to be shared as a literary vision of something more true, more real than developed within the confines of effort. He urged everyone to participate in this method because it would re-animate their very being. In an age, now, where the personal is political, it is difficult to see how this call to self-awareness is not political.
Yet, Breton remained unclear about his political stance, despite having been too knowledgeable a Marxist to remain a member of the Socialist and then Communist Party in France, his support and partnership with Trotsky in the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, and ongoing political references in his general writing. As Sartre rose to eminence in post-World War II France, he chastised Breton and the surrealists for their lack of engagement. In both the instances mentioned, that is Breton’s postulation to develop a new mythology or seek the silent self, Breton is deeply engaged in undermining the current political position.
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