Surreal Sex or Talking Dirty with the Boys?

In a series of seminars in Paris, the Surrealists thrashed out their views of sexuality. Andy Martin is surprised by their disappointing lack of perversity.

Investigating Sex: Surrealist Discussions 1928-1932, published this week, suggests that either cavemen were precocious Surrealists or that the Surrealists were latter-day hunter-gatherers, since this is in fact the text of a debate between, in the same order, the writers Louis Aragon, Marcel Duhamel, Jacques Prevert, Raymond Queneau and the photographer Man Ray. True, the cavemen might have neglected to add, as Georges Sadoul does, “Everything to do with perversity and experiment''.

These collected transcriptions of a dozen no-holds-barred, round-table sexual seminars in Paris bring together a total of 40 hardline or fellow-travelling Surrealists, the standard-bearers of the French avant-garde who tried to turn Freud and Marx into art. This book offers a revealing snapshot of the movement: the passionate dogma, the heresies, the rifts and excommunications, and conclusively demonstrates how little the Surrealists really had in common. Andre Breton is the only one to be present at all 12 “sessions''.

If there is one disappointment, it is that even the Surrealists cannot manage to come up with anything outstandingly perverse or experimental. The best they could do was to try some early form of aphrodisiacs like Volume Pills and Semenax.

Some of the later episodes involve a few cautious women, who have little to add apart from Madame Lena, an energetic bisexual, who dates her first ejaculation to the age of eight. Otherwise, this is phallocentric discourse at its most phallic. The boys do everything but whip down their pants and compare sizes. Everything you ever really wanted to know about sex is here: how long can you keep it up, how often, and how. Nevertheless, there are some distinctively surreal elements. Thus, for example:

Breton, the “Pope'' of Surrealism, is the most cogent but also the most ideologically driven participant. He prompts, bullies and simply out-talks the opposition. His obsession with the idea of simultaneous orgasm reflects his overriding desire that sex should allegorize the Surrealist synthesis of the real and the imaginary. His opinion is invariably elevated to the status of a universal imperative.

Despite his clamor for non-conformism, Breton is sexually the most conservative of the lot. He abhors homosexuals (“pathological''), extols the primacy of monogamous love over sex, and is no strong advocate of bestiality or necrophilia.

He is determined to get at the “facts'', but the pursuit of truth in these conversations runs into one serious obstacle: namely, how trustworthy are male assertions about sex? Or as Antonin Artaud (who prefers intellectual excitements anyway and storms off) puts it: “In investigations like this one, for most people a degree of ostentation inevitably intrudes.''