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Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality

1994; The MIT Press; Volume: 69; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/778992

1536-013X

André Bretón, Richard Sieburth, Jennifer Gordon,

Media, Communication, and Education

Wireless, a term that has far too recently entered our vocabulary, a term whose success has been far too swift for it not to have carried with it a good many of our era's dreams and for it not to have provided me with one of those rare and specifically modern measures of our mind. It is faint gauges of this sort that occasionally give me the illusion that I am embarked on some great adventure, that I somewhat resemble a seeker of gold: the gold I seek is in the air. What do these words I had chosen indeed evoke? Hints of sandy coasts, a few daddy longlegs entangled in the hollow of a willow-of a willow or of the sky, which is no doubt no more than an extended antenna, then some islands, nothing but islands ... Crete, where I must be Theseus, but Theseus forever trapped in his labyrinth of crystal. Wireless telegraphy, wireless telephony, wireless imagination, as it has been called. An easy induction to make, but also an appropriate one as I see it. Human inventiveness, this faculty of discovery that enables us to possess what had heretofore been unsuspected, is only meted out to us piecemeal over the course of time, and never fails to throw us into a state of considerable perplexity. This reticence on the part of truth would be less alarming if, now and then, it did not pretend to give in to us, to yield up to us the paltriest of its secrets, only to lapse back into bashfulness. The ill humor of the majority of men who, in the end, no longer allow themselves to be taken in by these pathetic revelations, who have decided once and for all to lend credence solely to those givens that remain invariable, the way one might apprehend the mountains or the sea-the ill humor of these men of a classical bent, in short, means that they cannot make the most of a life which, I admit, does not differ essentially from all past lives but which should not see itself futilely constricted to such limits: Andre Breton (1896-19_). I am in the vestibule of a castle, my dark lantern in my hand, lighting up now this, now that shining suit of armor. And don't mistake this for some criminal ploy. One of these suits of armor seems to be almost my size; if only I could put it on and thereby recover something of the consciousness of a man of the sixteenth century. O eternal theater, you demand that not only in order to play the role of somebody else but also to articulate this role, we adopt a mask that resembles it and that the mirror in front of which we pose cast back a foreign image of ourself.