Alchemy of the World: André Breton and Hector Hyppolite’s Otherworldly Revolution

abstract: This article reconsiders the political and artistic relationships between André Breton and the Haitian painter Hector Hyppolite. While initially supportive of Hyppolite’s revolutionary amalgamations of Vodou, the occult, and Christianity, Breton eventually abandoned his enthusiasm for the artist and talked little about Haitian art for the remainder of his life, which most critics either ignore outright or attribute to his temperamental, itinerant personality. Working against the scholarly grain, I argue that the origin of Breton and Hyppolite’s schism lies in their divergent approaches to the otherworldly as a politically relevant aesthetic mechanism. Breton’s later texts profess an alchemical poetics, which can reconstitute our connections with the mythic substrata of human civilization and transfigure material conditions. Hyppolite, meanwhile, enfolds the mythic and the otherworldly into material reality, which positions artists as agents of material change. These differences illuminate the nuances of Breton’s and Hyppolite’s engagements with otherworldliness as well as their brief, complicated encounter.