« La théologie s’installe et la foi s’en va » : Situation paradoxale du surréalisme après la Seconde Guerre mondiale selon Julien Gracq

Abstract

A privileged witness to Surrealism after 1945 and a close friend of André Breton, Julien Gracq casts an eye on the movement’s history and nature that was as penetrating as it was distinctive. If, in his view, the reasons for what he regarded as its exhaustion after the war lay in the obsolescence of its culture of scandal and in its technical and political excesses, they were also rooted in its profound absorption into the century’s imagination, beyond the limits of the movement’s theoretical coherence. Yet although Surrealism – an essentially libertarian movement – did indeed constitute a break in literary history, Gracq believes it must above all be understood in terms of its filiations, particularly with German Romanticism and with Lautréamont. Beyond that, in its beginnings it appears as a searing manifestation of the sacred, understood in all its ambivalence, and as a recourse in an era that had scaled back the ambitions of literature and lost its sense of the absolute.