Cavalier Perspective: Last Essays, 1952-1966

The final book by the founder of Surrealism, translated into English for the first time.

"Cavalier Perspective shows us the lion in winter, André Breton near the end of his life, trying to reconcile all the contradictions of his extraordinary career. It is unexpectedly moving to watch him wrestling with his ghosts, aiming for magic, fitting himself uneasily into the new alien landscape of the 1960s."--Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition

As leader and chief theoretician of Surrealism, director of myriad publications from the 1920s through the 1960s, poet André Breton was a prolific writer of prose. Author of numerous books, essays, and manifestoes, Breton periodically collected his most significant short essays into carefully arranged volumes. His last such collection, Cavalier Perspective, appeared posthumously in 1970; in it, editor Marguerite Bonnet assembled "articles, prefaces, responses to surveys, interviews," written between 1952 and 1966. Modeled on its predecessors, Cavalier Perspective is considered Breton's final book.

Over 50 years after its initial publication, its appearance in English today is a crucial cultural event; here we encounter Breton writing on topics nearest to our present day and most relevant to current social and political issues. Cavalier Perspective finds Breton steadfastly pursuing his anti-fascist, anti-colonialist revolutionary aims in the age of weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and space exploration, concerns largely unknown during Surrealism's more notorious interwar period. Far from conceding the movement's claim to contemporary relevance, and pointedly refusing the imposition of "strict temporal limits," Breton insists on Surrealism's dynamic and dialectical position in the book's titular manifesto, asserting its continuity through its perpetual capacity to respond to the needs of the hour.

More than simply a poet and theoretician, Breton is best considered an "inaugurator of discourse" on the level of a Marx or Freud, and Cavalier Perspective is an essential capstone to his lifetime as the guiding hand behind the worldwide surrealist movement.

Founder, leader, and chief theoretician of the surrealist movement, the poet André Breton was born in Normandy in 1896. A medical student at the outset of the First World War, Breton served in the army at a neurological ward, where he treated patients for post-traumatic stress, including Jacques Vaché, whose iconoclastic views influenced him considerably. In post-war Paris, Breton sought out writers like Apollinaire and Reverdy, began a periodical Littérature with Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon, and helped form a French contingent of Dada under the leadership of Tristan Tzara. But already Breton and his friends were moving beyond the absolute negation of Dada to Surrealism, a movement rooted in pure psychic automatism, desire, chance, poetry, and the marvelous. Under Breton's leadership, Surrealism became the most vital European avant-garde of interwar high modernism, its influence extending to Egypt, Japan, and the Caribbean. Exiled to the United States during the Second World War, due to the Nazi occupation, Breton would return to Paris in 1945 and continue to lead the movement until his death in 1966.

Austin Carder is the translator of Poetries by Georges Schehadé (Song Cave, 2021). He received a B.A. in English from Yale and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown. He lives in San Francisco.

Garrett Caples is a poet and an editor at City Lights Books. He is most recently the author of a book of fables, Proses (Wave, 2024), and a poetry collection, Lovers of Today (Wave, 2021). He lives in San Francisco.