Page 209 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature

Notes 27.4 Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual
artworks and writings of the group members. Surrealist works feature the element of surprise,
unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard
their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works
being an artifact. Leader Andre Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all
a revolutionary movement.

Did u know? Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the
most important center of the movement was Paris.
From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual
arts, literature, film and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and
practice, philosophy and social theory.

The word surrealist was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in the preface to his
play Les Mamelles de Tiresias, which was first performed in 1917. World War I scattered the
writers and artists who had been based in Paris, and in the interim many became involved with
Dada, believing that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values had brought the conflict of
the war upon the world. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances, writings
and art works. After the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada activities continued.
During the war, Andre Breton, who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a
neurological hospital where he used Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic methods with soldiers
suffering from shell-shock. Meeting the young writer Jacques Vache, Breton felt that Vache was
the spiritual son of writer and pataphysics founder Alfred Jarry. He admired the young writer’s
anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition. Later Breton wrote, “In literature,
I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with
Lautreamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most.”
Back in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary journal Littérature along
with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. They began experimenting with automatic writing—
spontaneously writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the writings, as well as
accounts of dreams, in the magazine.

Notes Breton and Soupault delved deeper into automatism and wrote The Magnetic
Fields (1920).
Continuing to write, they attracted more artists and writers; they came to believe that automatism
was a better tactic for societal change than the Dada attack on prevailing values. The group grew
to include Paul Eluard, Benjamin Peret, Rene Crevel, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Max Morise,
Pierre Naville, Roger Vitrac, Gala Eluard, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Georges
Malkine, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, Andre Masson,
Joan Miro, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prevert, and Yves Tanguy.
As they developed their philosophy, they believed that Surrealism would advocate the idea that
ordinary and depictive expressions are vital and important, but that the sense of their arrangement
must be open to the full range of imagination according to the Hegelian Dialectic. They also
looked to the Marxist dialectic and the work of such theorists as Walter Benjamin and Herbert
Marcuse.

202 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY