2 - A Surrealist in Chains

Summary

Given that the surrealists advocated freedom from the restrictions of conventional social and moral values, it is hardly surprising that sexual freedom should have been high on their list of priorities. To exercise this kind of freedom was, after all, to be true to one’s instincts and to oneself, as well as to strike out at the stifling restrictions of bourgeois society and the narrow-minded moral instruction of, in particular, the Catholic Church. Buñuel, in describing his attraction to Surrealism, drew attention to the importance the surrealists placed on passion as part of their opposition to traditional values: ‘It was an aggressive morality based on rejection of all existing values. We had other criteria: we exalted passion’ (Buñuel, 107). In this respect, the surrealists championed amour fou, wild love, the kind of passion that in Wuthering Heights forever links Heathcliff and Cathy, and which Buñuel embodied in the lovers of L’Âge d’or, in which, as we have seen, they are obsessed with each other to the exclusion of all else. This said, the question arises as to whether amour fou was a surrealist ideal rather than a reality that affected their personal lives; something that they lived out in their creative work rather than in their amorous relationships – in short, whether it was merely a passion in the head.

The surrealist group that Buñuel joined in 1929 was, in spite of its common philosophy, made up of individuals whose temperament and personality were often very different, but many of them seem to have practised what they preached in terms of their sexual relationships. André Breton, leader of the Paris surrealists, was in most respects an extremely disciplined, intellectual and formal individual, not much given to the more outrageous sexual indulgence of some of his colleagues, but even so his sexual life was far from ordinary. His marriage to Simone Kahn was, for example, an open one in which both partners did as they wished. In 1927 Breton had spent some of the summer in Normandy, where Louis Aragon and his mistress, Nancy, were also staying. Breton took advantage of the situation to sleep with Nancy.