Surrealism’s three phases

No major creative writer in Spain covers as much ground as Alberti in these critical years from 1927 to the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. Equally important is that the sweep of his work matches in all essentials the evolution of Surrealism itself as the movement’s thinking was directed in Paris by André Breton and his circle, notably in the manifestoes of 1924 and 1929 and in the journals La Révolution surréaliste (1924–29) and Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930–33). Alberti, for his part, was actively involved in the nearest Spanish equivalents of these journals, first with regular front-page contributions to Giménez Caballero’s La Gaceta Literaria (1927–32), especially in its stridently Freudian early days, then as founder–editor of the pro-Soviet Octubre (June 1933–April 1934) which was banned definitively after the Asturian miners’ uprising in October 1934. But Alberti is not only a major player in the Freudian and Marxist phases that demarcate Surrealism’s heyday; he is also acutely sensitive to the metaphysical implications of the surreal that emerged in the late 1920s when, briefly, the Hegelian ideal of transcendence via the union of opposites led to the notion of subject–object integration and ‘the surrealist object’. This theme, central to Dalí’s ‘paranoia-critical method’, underpins Sermones y moradas where, as we shall see, materialist rigour combines with a fervent transcendentalism to create a manic form of materio-mysticism. That Alberti was attuned to this thinking shows his instinctive grasp of French theory, while it also reflects his personal circumstance not only in terms of his religious upbringing but also as regards his artistic bent which brought contact with the likes of Maruja Mallo and artists of the Vallecas school, as well as Dalí.