Breton at a Crossroads in 1945

This talk addresses André Breton’s thinking about the concordance he found in Hopi culture with surrealist thought through the objects he collected on his trip to the American West to get a divorce, remarry, and visit the Pueblo Indian villages in 1945, emblematized by the arrow under his foot in his description of a crossroads in Arizona in the “Ode to Charles Fourier” (1947). He simultaneously wrote the “Ode” and kept a “Travel Notebook While Visiting the Hopi Indians” while on this trip. Standing on an arrow at a crossroads as “proof” of his experience, the physicality of his feeling, akin to the shiver of recognition by which he defined “convulsive beauty” in 1937, provides further confirmation of the object as capable of “poetic consciousness,” as he had claimed in the first Manifesto. In both the “Ode” and the “Notebook,” Breton makes reference to the world-changing events of the Trinity test of the bomb on July 16th, 1945, and then to the August bombings in Japan, while he was on his trip, in his expression of hope that surrealism might realize the potential for social change Charles Fourier had imagined in the 1830s. The “Ode”’s final image of an eagle-like bird caught in the moment when it raises “its weight of wings,” culminates Breton’s vision for the liberating potential for Fourier’s ideas in the aftermath of World War Two, though a metaphor that compares the great animal, sacred to the Hopi, to the arrow under his foot, whose flight also remains “potential,” while he was standing at a crossroads in history.