The Avant-garde, Madness and the Great War

Abstract

If, strictly speaking, it was not the first world war which engendered the sur-realist movement, it was certainly its catalyst. Most of the future surrealists, writers or artists, belonged to the war generation. One can only be struck by the coincidence that so many of them were doctors or nurses during the war years and had contact with shell-shock victims or were shell-shocked themselves. Yet, if the surrealists often claimed their dual origins — war and mad- ness — they practically never linked the two; in short, from the end of 1918 shell-shock seemed no longer to be of interest to them. What is the solution to this paradox?