Surrealism: Three Views

 The view for surrealism comes from The Craft of Surrealism: On Accessing the Unconscious in Our Fiction by Anita Felicelli (LitHub).

Her definition I have chewed on - going under the surface. We have a lot of surface here, but the underlying reality roils from history's actions and expectations. Sometimes we have been misled by how our history is taught; other times, we repress our history. We have not always lived up to what the past thought we of the future would be.

On the page, by means of surrealist writing, I could disengage from the vigilance that I needed to avoid the logic of xenophobia (should I take this hurtful disgust and criticism seriously? or is it that this person has no familiarity with cultures I belong to and a family history like mine?) and make my internal vision more important. Moving that shared illusion, getting underneath surface reality, strikes me as one of the primary powers of surrealist literature and art.

How to execute surrealism appeals to my sense of humor, fed when young by The Marx Brothers. Incongruities are where to find the truth in my experience. They are also fun.

Lethem responded, “There is one classical craft concern for surrealists. Paradoxically—the person who exemplifies this is Rene Magritte—there has to be some meticulous mimetic area. Often, much of the work needs to be meticulously memetic, in order for the deep destabilization of surrealism to flourish, to prosper. So one also has to a ‘realist’ to be a surrealist.” What struck me later is that this is an account of surrealist craft that sits comfortably with the term’s etymology: “superrealism.”

Magritte’s is an interesting case of juxtaposing the mimetic with the nonmimetic to generate surrealism, as were his philosophies around what he was doing. When you think of how some of his paintings operate, you might observe that he depends on a predominant realism against which are juxtaposed, with equal value, a strange or dream-like element.

And what I take as the con side: The Painted Straw Man by Patrick Nathan (Entertainment, Weakly)

While Kissick uses surrealism to mean dreamscapes — the “absolutely deranged” visions of outsider artists, as well as the forms given to our “irrational, incoherent” inner lives — this longing for surrealism feels at odds in an essay that criticizes the dynamics of the contemporary art world. In a market with “little interest in novelty” (again, identity is the novelty du jour), “new culture is made from nothing but old culture.” But this recycling is, at heart, a surrealist enterprise — the collaging of isolated, unrelated phenomena whose juxtaposition generates an energy signature that thrives on sheer strangeness, on the unfamiliar (also known as novelty). What’s more, to base utility (or marketability) on identity treats the self as a discrete, exchangeable object — a surrealist ethos that finds its practical and globalized home in neoliberalism, which is, in its radical flattening of all phenomena into currency, a surrealist application of politics. The art market as it exists today and the art market as it existed in Kissick’s youth are both surrealist markets. It is because of surrealism’s lasting effect on not only this market but on the entire world, the world as most of us experience it, that identity can be a baseline selling point for one of the most complex activities human beings participate in.

Frankly, I think we’ve all had enough of surrealism.

This author approaches from the art side, not the literary. Still, Lethem referenced Magritte, so I think adding it to this post makes sense.

None of this means, contra Kissick, that identity is the issue. Nor at issue are the artists seeking to celebrate and explore their identities — which, again, the art world has historically neglected and excluded, and which are now claiming an authority they’ve heretofore been unable to claim. The issue here is the cynicism that enables buyers, curators, committees, and publishers — the same people who believed, ten years ago, that whatever was new was the work to celebrate — to now believe that identities are the latest toys or trophies. Again, this is just the newest picture in an old frame — and what deserves criticism is the frame. What’s at stake in these arguments is the art market that’s existed all along (or at least since surrealism), which can only exist in a world — and here I mean the real world, the whole world, the big world — that values money and connectivity to such an extent that anything, even a human being, can be reduced to an object and circulated as a stock or a currency. Trumpism didn’t create this art world; this art world and its larger context created Trumpism. This is the trend to protest, and the frame to discard; meanwhile, the people who’ve shaped it and who profit from it are those who’ve earned all the criticism, if not outright scorn, any thinking person can spare.

If I understand correctly, the Internet's connectivity has reduced our individuality to commodities. That strangeness for the sake of strangeness becomes anodyne. Long ago, I thought rock music had run its line by trying to be more and more outrageous until the act became kitsch. The real strangeness seems to me this Sunday morning is what is in the heart of each person when faced with an existence in an uncaring universe.

Lastly, from The Times Literary Supplement:

Magical idealism: A detective story in which individuality is survival by Alberto Manguel

Bonomini was less interested in stories that lead from cause to consequence than in ones in which the eruption of something unexpected demands a revision of conventional ethical assumptions. This eruption might be the sight of a caravan of elephants in the streets of Milan, or the otherworldly appearance of a jasmine flower in a suburban garden, or, in the case of The Novices of Lerna (Los novicios de Lerna) the discovery that the narrator is one of a legion of identical men.

The upending of ethical passivity. Now, that set my mind racing. It means I need to get well enough that the lethargy that has possessed me for the past month or more is defeated. I need to get back to "Chasing Ashes". There cannot be strangeness for the sake of strangeness; the strangeness of existence comes down to ethical choices; it is the confrontation of the individuals with all of their moral, historical, and psychological baggage confronting a world that is not tame, not without its broader and deeper currents, that allows for the surreal.

And Indiana is its form of surrealism.

sch 12/8