Notes on André Breton, Novalis, and the Absolute

Surrealism, like Romanticism, rejected a world disenchanted by reason, emphasizing dreams, feelings, and the irrational. Both movements shared an ethics focused on love, emancipation, and creativity. And both movements expressed a longing for the Infinite. This essay examines surrealist co-founder André Breton and his engagement with early German Romantic writer Novalis. Breton was familiar with Novalis’s ideas by 1925. Yet, Breton’s public acknowledgement of Novalis before 1938 was largely ambivalent, likely due to concerns about being labeled as mystical. Nevertheless, Novalis’s influence persisted, particularly in Breton’s poetics of the infinite, unknowable, totality: the Absolute. Beginning in 1938, Novalis became an increasingly visible source for Breton’s Surrealism. But the Romantic author’s imprint had been there all along.