The Concept of Freedom

in Surrealism, Existentialism,
and Science Fiction
MICHELE K. LANGFORD

• Modern French science fiction seems to pose problems for French science
fiction authors and Anglo-Saxon critics as well. Gerard Klein, who perhaps
more than any other French science fiction writer has analyzed the particular
characteristics of French science fiction, has reported a state of crisis in the
field, and Maxim Jakubowski in his survey of French science fiction says that
"Despite its qualities French science fiction has always been more concerned
with psychology," with authors lacking for the most a genuine sense of the
epic.'
In order to determine some aspect of the problems of French science fiction
I propose to examine the concept of personal and social freedom in French
science fiction, and to situate science fiction among the major movements of
the twentieth century-surrealism and existentialism. Surrealism gained
momentum from the rejection of social values that coincided with the First
World War, and existentialism developed the problems of personal freedom
and social responsibility that were brought forth by the Second World War.
The Third World War is in some instances the focus of the third major
movement, science fiction, since we exist within the psychological climate of
such a war if not in its immediate reality. As we live with the threat of the
restriction of human freedom and the fear of nuclear war, we experience an
existential "unease" -a social malaise-that in some way makes the world
described by Orwell in 1984 just as "real" for us as if in fact his anticipation
of our world had been exact in its details. Society is more than ever perplexed
about its future and anxious about an evolution into unexplored territory. In
my discussion of science fiction in France, I will mostly discuss the work of

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Gerard Klein, since he has elaborated a personal theory of science fiction

that tends to situate it in the philosophical context of personal and social
responsibility.
The parallels to be found between surrealism and existentialism do not prove
any relationship between them. Their rapprochement sparks, however, a
number of considerations that Georges Bataille explores in "Le Surrealism
et sa difference avec I'Existentialism":

The profound difference between Surrealism and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre is
found in the existential character of freedom: If I do not enslave it-Freedom will exist: It
is Poetry. words not needing to serve anymore for some useful designation break loose and
such an outburst is the image of free existence, which is never given but at that moment. 2

Such a definition of freedom in literature suggests that not only surrealist

poetry but poetry in a much wider sense is freedom. When words break loose,
destroying the human and natural reality of the world to exalt the feeling of
existence, we are in the heart of poetry. The power contained in the release
of tension with the unbridling of words evokes Lautreamont's universe, but
Baudelaire's "Invitation au Voyage" is also a rupture of reality, not unlike
Jules Verne's fantastic voyages; for when literature doesn't mirror the world
as we know it, "as if" becomes the "what if" of science fiction. In this sense
fiction precedes science: the alternate reality exists first. The moon is conceived
as a world rather than a god, a disk, or a plate before the rocket is put in place
to get there.
Baudelaire suggests a link between poetry, existentialism, and science fiction
when he states:
Our life is used up with stupid curiosity. Yet there are things that should excite men's curiosity
to the highest degree, and it seems judging by ordinary daily life that they do not inspire any:
Where are our dead friends?
Why are we here?
Do we come from somewhere else?
What is freedom?
Can it be reconciled with Providential law?
Is the number of beings finite or infinite and the number of life-sustaining worlds?3

Baudelaire's idea of freedom is of course quite different from Sartre's, for

whom freedom is linked to choice, and "true choice-can be made only with
the conscience we have of ourselves." For Sartre, Baudelaire is incapable of
choosing between being and existing; if he feels judged by others as an object-a
guilty object-he will affirm his freedom opting for vice, remorse, or a number
of other tricks, but when he is on the territory of freedom, he backs off,
frightened by his own gratuitousness. Pushed to the limits of his own
conscience, he will hold onto a determined universe where good and evil occupy
a set place. His choice is to be torn between being and existing and to have
a bad conscience."

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Andre Breton's definition of freedom as a free activity of the mind can be

no more tolerated by Sartre's philosophy, since the surrealist decision is "not
to decide any longer," believing that a large part of our psyche lies outside
the consciousness." For Sartre, such a decision goes against the notion of
freedom and responsibility itself.
Freedom is also at the heart of science fiction, and the projection of the self
into "pure existence" corresponds to a disintegration of the real world.
Freedom then becomes power-a power of decision that recreates the universe.
Jules Verne starts many of his voyages by the negation of what we know to
be true: the limits of our world, historical events, and, less obviously but
perhaps more subversively, he proceeds to destroy the social order and humanist
principles. In Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Captain Nemo's own
existence is the affirmation of chosen and assumed freedom as defined later
by Sartre. In this sense Verne, in possession of "pure freedom" -existential
freedom-can be considered in the same vein as Sade or Lautreamont.
Sartrean freedom has a selfish and subjective quality that prompts Sartre
to attribute it to all mankind, adding to it the notions of responsibility and
engagement, making of existentialism a humanism, but the existential' 'rnoi'
remains in total solitude. Vincent, the protagonist of "L'Ecume du soleil"
by Klein, is a stranger in existentialist terms. From an event that is a common
theme of science fiction-the arrival on earth of a foreign vessel-Vincent will
define his own existence in relationship to his world and the universe.
The arrival of the vessel, creating turmoil for the town (not unlike the plague
in Camus' novel-in fact, the burning crater keeps spreading), will not stir
Vincent, who spends his summer nights on the roof looking at the stars. Vincent
is at first reluctant to join in the agitation, isolating himself from what he
considers a temporary interruption of the collective sleep of the town. The
quest for knowledge that motivates the scientist Baldini seems irrelevant to
the young man: "Nothing is worthy of knowledge in itself, and there is no
knowledge worth keeping for oneself. There is only ... the forgotten dream
of such knowledge which would legitimate solitude. "6 Yet the same desire
to "dream" the universe unites Vincent and Baldini, putting them in opposition
to the rest of the town who fear the unknown.
In this way Vincent isn't a romantic hero, estranged from society, longing
for an absolute, but he belongs to a minority-a sort of "happy few" who
for Klein constitute a social group distinct from what he calls "the dominant
group." It is significant that Vincent is a lumberjack-a job that separates him
from society-and in the summer further removes himself by living "up there"
in the mountains."
Vincent's quest is essentially a poetic, and, more precisely, a surrealist one,
which is in opposition to Baldini's scientific curiosity that would drive him
to possess a thing so as to tear it apart, weigh it, and analyze it. In contrast,
Vincent would only like to ask it "permission to look at it," and if he wants

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to possess a speck of it, it is only to "smell the odor of the void, and the fire
of these still regions" (p. 62).
But poet and scientist recognize each other as "strangers," brothers in the
feeling of alienation, without relieving their own sense of solitude: "Something
like two drops of water sliding on the leaves .. : stopping nowhere, absorbing
and refracting the light of the world without ever holding it" (p. 69). However,
we soon witness a shift, as the scientific and poetic reaction to the event becomes
a metaphysical reaction toward life in general. Like Camus' characters in The
Plague. each man reacts uniquely to the incident, and metaphysical
considerations seem to be the topic that brings them to a feeling of solidarity.
We discover that Vincent has written an abstract novel in the past; Ferrier,
the calm, pragmatic physicist, reveals his passion for Mallarme; as for Baldini,
he can only repeat, "I don't understand," as this "new key" fallen from the
sky destroys the scientific principles on which his work was based.
The significance of the existence of this' 'superstranger' is minimized, even
nullified, by Vincent's realization that one cannot be sure of the existence of
any human, anyway, and that the existence attributed to others is based on
an association with one's own existence which is pure speculation; others could
be finely detailed stones.
Vincent proceeds to devalue further the scientific-poetic quest: "There is
no poetry and by extension no literature, only metaphysics," he states. "Style
has no sense unless it expresses a conception of the world . . . . It can only
indicate if we consider the Universe as an esthetic construction or as a trap
or both . . . . The problem is to know if it is possible to have a conception
of the world" (p. 80).
In "L'Ecurne du soleil " we can see metaphysics as equal to science fiction:
"It has no reality outside of the ideas from which it is made." As Vincent
says, "We can accept being unhappy as long as it leads somewhere, but it
never leads anywhere." For him, the universe is not absurd, it is nothing.
It contradicts itself. Metaphysics is its most evident contradiction and the most
esthetic. And here is where the parallel with science fiction seems most
pertinent: "Considered as an elaboration of possible destinies, although
gratuitous, it is not without charm. It becomes a sort of beneficial drug that
can prevent humanity from doing harm" (p. 82).
In his opposition to surrealism Sartre objects to what he considers an escape
from our human condition. Poetry has long been considered such a distraction,
and in the eighteenth century Rernond de Saint-Mard affirmed that poetry's
only goal is to agitate us so as to hide the humiliating spectacle that saddens
us-the sight of ourselves." Similarly, science fiction takes us away from the
reality of our world, alleviating temporarily our unhappiness, as a beneficial
drug.
Futility is, however, the dominant notion in the elaboration of possible
destinies. For Klein it seems that nothing is ever established. Nothing possesses

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intrinsic worth, and, expresses Vincent, "our life or our destruction has value
only if someone admits to such value." Vincent finds a solution to the existential
dilemma as he opts for the surrealist path. He returns to a childlike innocence,
and a sort of guessing game leads him to discovery: "To think, to think,"
says Vincent, "and then to look for an absence or a presence." Such
concentration is not unlike Breton's directed dream, and when Vincent reaches
the aliens, he perceives first a voice, the voice of an insect, or a woman, or
words spoken between cliffs, or the voice of a cool shadow. He then is able
to hear the children of the void with his eyes and smell still with his eyes the
odor of the silver vapors (p. 93).
Vincent is aware that the arrival of the sun's emissaries will not change
anything: "The event will glide on the town like rain on the surface of tiles";
even for Vincent, who feels chosen among all others, the notion of engagement
is absent when he walks into the fire. For him scientific gains are irrelevant,
and the idea of sacrifice briefly suggested is abandoned, as the only remaining
impulse is the poetic one: the projection into pure existence and, in Georges
Bataille's terms, the affirmation of freedom.
Jean-Pierre Andrevon has noted that each of Klein's stories deals with death
so as to "predict it, seize it, and leave it behind. "9 In this sense Vincent's
walk into the fire could be compared to the rite of passage of the primitive
societies which is a substitute for death, allowing rebirth. Vincent briefly
experiences "being" differently when he is stretched in the same instant to
both the extremities of a fragile bridge across the void. But when he is reborn,
it is to his original life, having affirmed his humanity against the aliens'
difference.
Such affirmation, however, must not be mistaken for a Camusian lucid choice
to continue the hopeless struggle. When Vincent describes what it is to be
"human," he does so in poetic terms: "He spoke to them of the coolness of
the water, the leaves of the trees, and the human hands, the touch of hard
polished marble, and the transparency of the water" (p. 94).
In choosing a poetic affirmation of being, Vincent returns to his solitude.
When solidarity is expressed in Klein's work, it is in terms of parallel activities.
As we have seen, poet and scientist work together without the possibility of
true exchange. Even love, which permits the synthesis of the self and the other,
is expressed in parallel terms. In "Les Hotes" a couple leaves behind their
bodies to be "reborn" into a different species. They share a similar experience,
but they don't share selves. The merging of two humanities doesn't take place:
[she] " 'I feel in me a drop of water that is forming, that hangs and that will
detach itself and go up instead of falling . . .' "; [he] " 'That's
true ... ' They looked at each other and laughed" (p. 91).
In "Le Monstre" Marion allows herself to be "eaten" by a monster from
another world who uses her husband's voice to call her. The process by which
she is absorbed is described as in other stories in sensual terms: her body is

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transformed and her being is dissolved, dispersing in a moist, warm,

comfortable sphere which she knows is good and beautiful (p. 113).
It is as if Klein pursued an absolute with which he couldn't unite without
the destruction of the self. Klein seems to be experiencing a dilemma.
"L'Ecume du soleil" sets forth a universe conceived as the negation of an
ultimate power, implying a refusal of all traditional values of existence, religious
and secular. He thus portrays a character who affirms his freedom in terms
of individual choice.
The writing process is for Klein accompanied by a spirit of revolt. But while
Breton sees surrealism as serving the cause of the revolution and Sartre sees
existentialism as implying a social and political engagement, Klein conceives
science fiction as removed from political action. 10 Klein is, therefore, forced
to deal with the feeling of futility inherent in revolt without action. In his
excellent study on war and literature, Leon Riegel has shown that after 1918,
the cult of self in literature is replaced by the cult of action. II
To escape a sense of gratuitousness when establishing humanity's relationship
to the world away from reality, Klein defines science fiction's readers and
writers as constituting a social group distinct from the dominant culture,"
thus effecting a shift: by detaching science fiction from the rest of the culture
he removes it from the social context. By assigning to it a specific position
in the social class structure as recruiting authors and readers almost exclusively
at the border of the middle and lower bourgeoisie, he in fact situates it in a
social and literary no-man's-land,
What Klein seems to resist more than the continuation of the negative reaction
of the dominant culture toward science fiction (alternating between ignoring
it, assigning it to a ghetto, and what he terms a "proces en dissolution"-a
dissolution proceeding) is the "recuperation" of science fiction by the dominant
culture and mainstream literature, making it an acceptable literary genre.
Perhaps he also fears science fiction becoming the major-the
dominant-cultural and literary movement of the end of the twentieth century.
Although a cohesive "group," science fiction for Klein does not constitute
any sort of school-it is for him a mode of expression. 13 But in reality it finds
its definition between two modes of being: by essence between science and
fiction, and more specifically for Klein between science and poetry, or between
the rational and the dream-it cannot be forced to define its existence in one
mode or the other. The scientist reserves the right to dream, the poet the right
to affect his destiny.
Klein suggests that science fiction presupposes adhesion to a group-a group
which, just as surrealism and existentialism, takes in France an antibourgeois
position. But it shares also with the other two movements a paradox: although
its intent is to contest the "intellectualism" of the dominant culture, both from
the moment it enters into a dialogue and in the elaboration of its theories, it
becomes a sort of philosophical movement (at least in the sense of a

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weltanshauung, if not a system), and from that moment (Klein seems aware
of this danger), the movement becomes quite "recuperable" (re-absorbable)
by the dominant culture.
As is the case with surrealism and existentialism, science fiction poses great
demands on the individual, although of different sorts. It necessitates a
prodigious amount of culture, yet it requires having maintained through its
acquisition a powerful sense of the wonderful. Both surrealism and
existentialism often suggest a religion. Breton has been called the pope of
surrealism, and parallels have been made between Sartre's existentialism and
a religion where only God is missing. For Gerard Klein it seems that science
fiction requires a similar act of faith that includes a belief in the scientific
wonder. It is perhaps to avoid this sort of association that Klein has been called
the orchestra leader of French science fiction."
Klein, who no longer writes fiction, notes that in many cases French science
fiction authors, despite their sense of wonder, lack the triumphant optimism,
the appetite for conquest that characterizes American science fiction." But,
more than a resolutely pessimistic attitude and more than a persistent interest
in psychology as suggested by Jakubowski, French science fiction seems to
be caught in a dilemma. For the looker who, like Klein, contemplates the effect
of the arrival on earth of an alien vessel, or Rene Barjavel who goes looking
into the future in Le Voyageur imprudent, looking doesn't remain impartial,
it is not an optic shared by all, and to the' 'what if' of science fiction is added
"what if I am-what if I were. " I could say that caught between the present
and the future French science fiction seems to be in the conditional.
Between two realities, the author seems thrust back to his own being, and
thus is forced to confront problems of existence. In this way what began as
a remedy to existential anxiety becomes its source. Thus the protagonist of
"Hurricane on the Secretary of State" by Michel Jeury asks repeatedly: "Am
I a 'Salaud'?"16 Certainly an echo to Sartre's "Salaud"-a man who leads
an inauthentic existence.
Gerard Klein was largely correct in stating, however, that neither Kafka,
Beckett, Ionesco, nor Sartre in Nausea, Camus in the Plague, nor even Celine
in Journey to the End ofthe Night have chosen science fiction to express purely
existential problems. Science fiction seems to reside in yet something else,
something that includes the scientific wonder. Science fiction seems to transcend
both surrealism and existentialism in an affirmation of pure freedom, and in
this sense it is perhaps one of the truest forms of literature: "To write," says
Klein, "is perhaps to attempt to return to the source of the 'non dit' [the unsaid],
to translate a secret tremor that seizes one at the approach of an object as
undefinable as it is inaccessible, true literature seems to always tend towards
its own beyond. "17

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Notes
This paper was presented at the June 1984 meeting of SFRA at the University of
Missouri-Rolla.
I. Gerard Klein, "Pourquoi y a-t-il une crise de la science-fiction francaise?" Fiction (Sept.
1967); Maxim Jakubowski, Traveling Towards Epsilon (London: New English Library. 1976).
p.26.
2. Georges Bataille, "Le Surrealisme et sa difference avec l'Existentialismc." Critique, 2 (July
1946). 110. Translations here and throughout are my own.
3. Charles Pierre Baudelaire, "Mon coeur mis a nu," Oeuvres completes (Paris: Editions
Gallimard, 196\), p. 1275.
4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1963), p. 98.
5. William Plank, Sartre and Surrealism (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Research Press. 1981).
6. Gerard Klein. Le Livre d'or de Gerard Klein (Paris: Presses Pocket. 1979). p. 73. Subsequent
short story quotations are from this work and will be cited parenthetically in the text.
7. Gerard Klein, Introd. to Le Livre d 'or de Michel Jeury (Paris: Presses Pocket, 1982), pp.
13,64.
8. Remond de Saint-Mard, "Sur la poesie en general," in L 'Esthetiquecirceenne by Alice M.
Laborde (Paris: Nizet, 1969), p. 240.
9. Jean-Pierre Andrevon, quoted by Michel Jeury, in Introd. to Gerard Klein, p. II. In a critique
of La Loi du Talion in Fiction, 236 (Aug. 1973), Jean-Patrie Ebstein (Jean-Pierre Andrevon)
wrote: "In other words, Gerard Klein is haunted by death and all his stories become a means
to predict it. to seize it. to guess it, and to get rid of it" (my translation).
10. Gerard Klein says, "I think that a writer. and particularly a writer of science fiction, doesn't
need to wear his political credo on his sleeve as much as he needs to be curious in the strongest
sense of the word about the social. political. scientific. and cultural reality of the world in
which he lives and react to it with scrupulous honesty in his work." Ailleurs, 32 (Dec. 10,
1960). 17.
II. Leon Riegel, Guerre et litterature (paris: Klincksieck, 1978). p. 544.
12. Klein. Introd. to Michel Jeury, p. 13.
13. Ibid., p. 14.
14. Back cover of Le Livre d'or de Gerard Klein.
15. Gerard Klein, Preface. Sur I 'autre face du monde, by Andre Valerie (paris: Robert Laffont,
1973), p. 5.
16. Michel Jeury, Le Livre d'or (Paris: Presses Po~ket, 1982).
17. Gerard Klein, Introd .. Les Perles du temps (Paris: Denoel, 1982), p. 150.

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