What's in a name?

I don't mind being classed as a "peninsularista" for the purposes of this blog. But if it's going to be "peninsularistas" shouldn't we by rights include professors of Portuguese, Basque, Galician, Valencian and Catalan literature as well?

What intrigues me most about Surrealism, like other incarnations of the Avant-Garde (though much exaggerated), is just how seriously they went about what they were doing. Two examples from L'Amour fou, Mad Love. The first has to do with the concept of hazard objectif or objective chance--that is, the calling forth from the world that which one needs by desire, a sort of reaction of the world to desire:

“A person will know how to proceed when, like the painter, he consents to reproduce, without any change, what an appropriate grid tells him in advance of his own acts. This grid exists. Every life contains these homogenous patterns of facts, whose surface is cracked or cloudy. Each person has only to stare at them fixedly in order to read his own future. Let him enter the whirlwind; let him retrace the events which have seemed to him fleeting and obscure among all others, which have torn him apart. There—if his questioning is worth it—all the logical principles, having been routed, will bring him the strength of that objective chance which makes a mockery of what would have seemed most probable. Everything humans might want to know is written upon this grid in phosphorescent letters, in letters of desire.” (Mad Love 86-7)

The second has to do with Breton's concept of convulsive beauty, which I'll let him explain:

“And it is there—right in the depths of the human crucible, and this paradoxical region where the fusion of two beings who have really chosen each other renders to all things the lost colors of the times of ancient suns, where however, loneliness rages also, in one of nature’s fantasies which, around the Alaskan craters, demands that under the ashes there remain snow—it is there that years ago I asked that we look for a new beauty, a beauty ‘envisaged exclusively to produce passion.’” (8)

“Such beauty cannot appear except from the poignant feeling of the thing revealed, the integral certainty produced by the emergence of a solution, which, by its very nature, could not come to us along ordinary logical paths.” (13)

“Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be.” (19)