At the boundary of action and dream: Surrealism and the battle for post-Liberation France

Abstract

Upon their return from exile after World War II, Surrealist writers and artists encountered a Parisian intellectual climate transformed by the legacy of the Resistance and nascent Cold War political and cultural battles. Once at the centre of the inter-war avant-garde, Surrealists endured accusations of irrelevance issued by Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre and Communist Party taunts of anti-revolutionary tendencies, advanced by Louis Aragon and others. Yet Surrealism retained and attracted many supporters and as such still constituted a potent threat to Sartre’s and Aragon’s groups. This paper employs Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of boundaries to explore exchanges between and strategic positioning of these cultural entities. In order to fully legitimise their cultural relevance, Existentialist and Communist writers defined the discursive boundaries of their groups in part by comparing themselves with Surrealism. Paradoxically, their very public engagement with the tenets of Surrealism attests to the continued influence of the post-war Surrealist movement.