So, essay is now finished (printing in the other room as I type) and I thought I may as well share it. Commentary is, as always, quite welcome :)

The Insanity of the Surreal

“It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of the imagination unfurled” – André Breton. To what extent can Surrealism be viewed as the aspiration towards a romanticised version of insanity?

rnWhen Breton and his fellow refugees from the Dada movement first expressed the ideas that would form the basis for the Surrealist movement in ‘Les champs magnétiques’, and then afterwards in the first ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, their intent was to synthesise an art form that took the concepts developing in Freudian psychology and applied them to literature. The notion of the artistic supremacy of the subconscious mind would rise to the fore in their writing, and the concept of automatism as a valid tool for writing would come to dominate Surrealist authors. Breton and his companions preached a philosophy of letting the self free, and of letting the internal suppressed voice be expressed within its own writing; in effect, the deregulation of the conscious mind. To an objective viewer, this could be perceived as a form of insanity, with the lack of conscious control causing the mind to express thoughts that would normally be dormant or buried within the subconscious. Was this a conscious issue with the Surrealists, that their techniques could be creating literature from a lack of sanity due to the lack of authorial control? Or was it merely an unintentional by-product of the psychological techniques being borrowed from mental sciences being applied to literature and art?

When he first defined Surrealism as a concrete concept, Breton wrote “Surrealism, as I envisage it, proclaims loudly enough our absolute nonconformity, that there may be no question of calling it, in the case against the real world, as a witness for the defense.” (Breton, 1924) To the ‘founding father’ of the Surrealist movement, the driving force behind the movement itself was the concept that those undertaking Surrealist art were completely without boundaries. The very word ‘Surreal’ derives from sur-real, being greater or superior to reality. Reality, as perceived with the mind could be considered a form of cage from within the artist was forced to work. Surrealism sought to dissolve those boundaries and create art that was unfettered in its inspiration. The rationality of the creation is secondary, the primary motivation is the creation of literature that is beyond the real and is thus superior to it.

Further, Breton supplied in the first Manifesto of Surrealism specific, concrete definitions of Surrealism. Surrealism, he wrote, was defined as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern” (Breton, 1962). Surrealism was based upon the belief in the superior reality of concepts such as the omnipotence of dreams, and in seemingly unrelated chains of thought. Surrealism can thus be explained as the total detachment of the conscious and the moral mind from the underlying subconscious and its desires.

Surrealism as Breton conceived it did contain somewhat shocking revelations in what he saw as natural expressions of the Surrealist ideal. In the second Manifesto of Surrealism he wrote, “The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.” (Breton, 1962). This action by almost any social or cultural norm would be considered to be completely irrational; the conscious mind and rational thought totally subsumed with an almost lustful urge to merely act on the deepest of subconscious impulses. Does this imply that all Surrealism is attempting to persuade others to bring forth their inner insanity and express it in society? If the actual actions of the Surrealist artists are contemplated, it becomes obvious that this answer is too simple. What the Surrealists were attempting to do was to express their inner minds through their artwork, not to merely act on their inner impulses. The Surrealists wanted to bring forth their subconscious and irrational minds, because they believed that only from these deep centers of emotion and uncontrolled inspiration could art come about that was free from the restraints of their world; art that was superior to anything produced before it.

The seminal work on Surrealism, ‘Les champs magnétiques’, was described by its co-author Philippe Soupault as “indisputably the first Surrealist (and in no sense Dada) work, since it is the fruit of the first systematic use of automatic writing.” (Breton et al, 1933). Although automatic writing had been trialled before, by artists such as Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont, Breton and Soupault were the first to attempt it in an ordered fashion, if such a description can be applied to a technique that thrives on disorder. Indeed, Rimbaud wrote that attempting to write ‘Alchimie du Verbe’, which can be described as a similar attempt to ‘Les champs magnétiques’, had both terrified the writer and made him physically ill. (Rimbaud,1874). Louis Aragon, Breton and Soupalt’s compatriot in launching the Surrealist movement, wrote in 1968 that he doubted that Breton would have been able to produce such as ‘Les champs magnétiques’ alone, as it required a virtually unprecedented confrontation with the “dark depths of the human mind, where horrors and wonders might be encountered that could endanger the sanity of any one individual acting on his own” - much as Rimbaud had feared continuing with ‘Alchimie du Verbe’ (Breton et al. 1933). Upon reading ‘Les champs magnétiques’ it is apparent that the trancelike state, which Breton and Soupault had been describing, had to some extent been achieved, with the collection of eight texts under the same title providing a continuous and evolving look at the technique of automatism.

André Breton’s masterpiece of Surrealist literature, ‘Nadja’, was to further take both the techniques of automatism and the insanity that Surrealism implied and give them flesh as a living human being. Breton sees the title character, Nadja herself, in his novel as in his real life: a living, breathing manifestation of the Surrealist ideal. He writes that the book is about a decisive episode in his life that gives the reader “flashes of light that would make you see, really see” (Breton, 1924). He goes to pains to inform his audience that through his techniques and uses of automatism, and thus through reaching down into the core of his mind to write the book, he has created a work that may not be objectively and correctly true to details: * “Do not expect me to provide an exact account of what I have permitted to experience in this domain. I shall limit myself here to recalling without effort certain things which, apart from any exertions on my part, have occasionally happened to me” (Breton, 1924). * The very existence of Nadja, a woman struck with a kind of wanderlust, who lives day by day in Paris and seems to be a Surrealist image, who says of herself “I am the soul in limbo”; this was what Breton perceived as a beautiful and Surreal personage. This view does seem to diverge from the recurring theme of insanity as Surrealism, until we contemplate the fact that to Breton Nadja herself was a Surrealist ideal. And it is made plain in the novel that Nadja does go insane and is committed to an asylum, where she later died without ever reading the book written about her (Polizzotti, 1960). A person who moved from being seemingly in control to one who gradually lost her mind and her motivations, and went truly insane - “they told me she was mad” (Breton, 1928) is in fact a physical revelation of the Surrealist conception. Nadja truly did become a real-world projection of Surrealism.

Antonin Artaud, in his brief formal association with Surrealism in the mid 1920s, wrote that * “Surrealism is above all a state of mind, it does not advocate formulas. The most important point is to put oneself in the right frame of mind. No Surrealist is in the world, or thinks of himself in the present, or believes in the effectiveness of the mind as spur, the mind as guillotine, the mind as judge, the mind as doctor, and he resolutely hopes to be apart from the mind. The Surrealist has judged the mind. He has no feelings which are a part of himself, he does not recognize any thought as his own. His thought does not fashion for him a world to which he reasonably assents. He despairs of attaining his own mind.” * Artaud himself was an interesting example of one of the early Surrealists. He joined the movement officially in 1924 and was expelled from it two years later due to a political disagreement between himself and the majority of the Surrealists. Despite this official revocation, Artaud continued to write his works in a Surrealist vein. He maintained a lifelong disdain for realism and held enthusiasm for the art of the mad and the non-professional; both of which are hallmarks of Surrealist writers. (Sontag, 1973) In fact, Artaud wrote in a Surrealist style but in a diametrically opposed subject matter. The Surrealist temperament was focused on the love of life, noted during Marcel Duchamp’s eulogy for André Breton in 1966 when he said “the great source of Surrealist inspiration is love: the exaltation of elective love. Susan Sontag states “Surrealism is a spiritual politics of joy.”

It was this ‘politics of joy’ that was so opposed by Artaud, who himself saw living as an act of suffering and anguish. Despite this, Artaud’s expression of his views were decidedly Surrealist in their form, drawing from the deepest parts of the psyche. He wrote “We can do anything in the mind, we can speak in any tone of voice, even one that is unsuitable.” (Artaud, 1921). To Artaud, reality was formed by consensus (Artaud, 1956) in a similar sense to the way the reality of the stage is created from the audience’s accepting of the play. In a letter to Jacques Riviére, Artaud wrote, “I am perfectly aware of the sudden stops and starts in my poems, they are related to the very essence of inspiration … as for myself, I can truly say I am not in the world, and this is not merely an attitude of the mind” (Artaud, 1924). Despite rejecting much of the impetus and results of the Surrealists, Artaud is nonetheless espousing the philosophy of Surrealism, the philosophy of the innermost creation. And Antonin Artaud, with a long and troubled record of a life in asylums, quirky and fearful attitudes to sex and sexuality and mental instability (Sontag, 1973), was not only espousing the ideal of a Surrealist text emerging from beneath the external mind; his own mind and state ensured that what he wrote came from a wellspring of insanity.

Surrealism as a movement did not wither and die out as the twentieth century progressed, it has remained present in art and culture since its founding. A relatively modern example can be found, in all places, in a 1980s music video clip. The clip of the song ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’, performed by Welsh musician Bonnie Tyler, is an example of a modern-day Surrealist piece, claimed by some to be a homage to the writer Franz Kafka’s piece ‘The Trial’, which is classified as a work of Surrealism/Magical Realism (Andrew, 2005). The film, directed by Russell Mulcahy, showcases a woman in a dreamlike state in a boys high school, moving from a room filled with crystal and candles through a corridor in which she espies a variety of increasingly surreal images, including a group of students in tuxedoes eating in a ballroom, young ninjas performing a combination combat/dance with samurai weapons, a pair of fencers who take of their masks to reveal rushing water, and a young man with angelic wings who tosses a dove to the protagonist. The film culminates with a Catholic boys choir with glowing eyes that alternates between singing in hymnal fashion in their robes, and dancing around the protagonist in costumes better suited to an S&M video. As a projection of a dreamlike vision into a ‘real’ form, the video can indeed be counted as Surrealist in its motivation and its influences. Whether or not the video can be counted as insane is perhaps debatable, as it is relatively coherent despite its trancelike atmosphere. However, insanity might be counted to be present here in the form of the protagonist, much as the insanity present in ‘Nadja’ is there through Nadja’s own character and her actions. Both Nadja and the protagonist of ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ are in a sense living in a dreamlike trance, and transcending all that surrounds them, both are living in a world structured primarily from their imaginations; indeed, both are superceding the real and moving within the Surreal, and within the lack of conscious control, the insanity that the Surreal evokes.

The Surrealist movement hammered home to its audience the importance of impulses, feelings, flashes of intuition that come from the dreaming mind rather than from the conscious mind. Dreams were considered to be an expression of the Surreal, and were an inspiration in themselves as source material where the brakes of the conscious mind were off, and the unconscious mind was able to be accessed The elevation of the unconscious mind into the world of waking, free from the confines of logic and reason and without moral or aesthetic concerns: this was the credo that the Surrealists followed. The notion of insanity underlies much of their work, whether the matter was a conscious decision or not. Although the totality of Surrealism cannot be simply summarised as a romanticised version of insanity, nor the aspiration towards that insanity, it is indeed a vital part of the Surrealist tradition. Surrealism sought to bring forth the inner mind, the parts of the mentality that are superior to all external forces and realities in the creation of art. They sought to bring the uncontrolled to life on the page, the canvas, in the ear and in the eye. Not always the insane, but always the captivating and the intense feelings of the unconscious mind; these were the goal of the Surrealists, past and present. In the experiments of Breton and Soupault with automatism, in Dali’s paintings, in Artaud’s rejection and yet embracing of Surrealist techniques; the attempts to bring forth the insanity, the creativity and the superior reality of the subconscious and ‘true’ mind are seen. Whether the audience appreciates the attempt is, of course, irrelevant in the mind of the Surrealists. They have achieved what they set out to do: to express the previously inexpressible in the forms of their art; and they forever changed the world of art as they did.

References

Andrews (2005) Your Love Is Like A Shadow On Me All Of The Time,[Online] [Available http://tinyurl.com/y2apqx] [Accessed 20/10/2006]

Artaud A (1956)* Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings*; translated Weaver H (1976), University of California Press, United States

Breton A (1952) Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism; translated Polizzotti M (1969), Paragon House, New York

Breton A (1962) Manifestoes of Surrealism; translated Seaver R, Lane H (1969), University of Michigan, United States

Breton A (1928) Nadja; translated Howard, R (1960), Grove Press, United Kingdom

Breton A (1924) What is surrealism? [Online] [Available: http://pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/whatsurr.html] [Accessed 22/10/2006]

Breton A, Eluard P, Soupault P (1933)* The Automatic Message; The Magnetic Fields; The Immaculate Conception*; translated Gascoyne D, Melville A, Graham J (1997), Atlas Press London

Total Eclipse of the Heart, 1983 music video, Russell Mulcahy, United Kingdom.

Rimbaud A (1874) Illuminations, [Online] [Available: http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/IlluminationsE.html] [Accessed 22/10/2006]

Scheer E (ed) (2000)* 100 years of cruelty: Essays on Artaud*, Power Publications, Sydney

Sontag S (1973)* Artaud*, The New Yorker, United States

rnSo that’s this session of Creative Arts done. Finish, completio, etc. I must mention here that I’m also grateful for the comments several of you made on the draft version of the first chapter of ‘I, Apostle’ I posted here last week - I’ll be making another post about that story, as well as NaNoWriMo, shortly.

Otherwise? Well, I’ve got to go write episode 20 and Final of Epitheisterra: the D&D Adventure. Should be fun. :)

Alcata’riel.

-Andiyar