It might be well to remember, too, then, how Jacques Derrida has written that style is “a means of protection against the terrifying, blinding, mortal threat [of that] which presents itself, which obstinately thrusts itself into view.” Style, for him, is what attempts to cover up, in the classical sense, the wound of our mortality, our emptiness, or what absents that knowledge, but it differs from the classical conception in that it always fails, and in that through the failure an essential drama of the poem, however comic or tragic on the surface, works itself out. It is just this sort of vision that Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet and critic, has used to describe the work of André Breton. Breton’s style is characterized by a reliance on automatic writing, on subordinate clauses that correlate rather than subordinate, on interruptions and resumptions of trains of thought, on abrupt shifts in the contexts of language, on syntactic disjunction, on ellipses, on the linking of unrelated words and the elimination of surface grammar… in short, on any number of strategies to disguise theme. For Paz, Breton is a mannerist poet, a stylist, in the true sense: he generates a vision, coincident with his reworking of language, that attempts to extract itself from the usual patterns imposed by traditional language styles, traditional habits of thought.

So it is, I believe, in Breton’s poem, “Always for the first time,” where the stylistic leaps literally fill the “rift” between the beginning of love and its decline so that the narrator in the end can lean over the enormous void of time that has elapsed since that beginning of the affair and thus behaves as if “always for the first time”:

Statements of the theme are simply not going to work in the poem, for they would be unconvincing lies; instead, the poem has to enact a sense of always beginning. That is, the poem’s style has to enact a beginning that will counter the potentially elegiac end to the relationship. Breton accomplishes this by linking various sets of images such as the references to sight, to angularity, to flowers, to the rift of time between them, so that each time one image or another from these sets is mentioned it seems to emerge from a new context. Yet syntax of associations begins to emerge: “the house at an angle” in line 17 suggests “the diagonal slant of girls” and the “T-square of dazzling light” in line 19, but the references to house, girls and light suggest connections that have not yet been explained. The images perhaps connect suddenly in the next few lines with the reference to the curtain (of the house), to the woman (one of the girls?), and to the invisible (dazzled by light?), though these links are themselves tenuous. As the poem says later, the images seem to be “flaring out in the center of a white clover,” constantly adding new categories of association along different categories of thought — geometry, aesthetics, draftsmanship, and decor, thus forcing us to see connections differently we see the items; they connect as if for the first time. But there is always a haunting since the poem, in modulating images, is building a history, a time for itself.