The Craft of Surrealism: On Accessing the Unconscious in Our Fiction
I found literary surrealism as a young teenager by way of Anaïs Nin. I’d become obsessed, fascinated with her Cities of the Interior, which felt heightened, using surrealist imagery in the context of the erotic and the forbidden. I quickly found an identification with thoughts she expressed in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1934: Vol. 1.
In Diary 1, she wrote about surrealism as a way to believe in the “the cult of mystery, the evasion of false logic. The cult of the unconscious as proclaimed by Rimbaud.” She explained, “It is not madness. It is an effort to transcend the rigidities and the patterns made by the rational mind.” Part of me disagreed with Nin—surrealism did depend on a willingness to allow for what seemed mad or eccentric, the dreamlife, to sit side by side with the mundane, as coequal forms of understanding, and not as ways of transcending reality, but as ways of getting deeper into what being in the world feels like.
No sooner did I read that than I picked up Rimbaud from the library, and then Breton and somewhere along the way, Baudelaire. Surrealist painters Yves Tanguy, Rene Magritte, Salvador Dalí and Leonora Carrington—and Odilon Redon, a symbolist—became interesting not long after. What all of these writers and artists were tapping into that interested me was the unconscious—how to manifest that into literature and the arts what was accessed in a space nobody else could see struck me as a kind of lifeline to self.
Most of living as a brown immigrant kid seemed like an illusion; many people I met were not what they seemed, their words didn’t always match what was happening, and keeping sorted my different cultures with their different logics, different languages, took a labor that made me feel like none of those systems could be considered fundamental or more crucial than inner life about which little was spoken.
The irrational and disjointed and dreamy take up more room in our inner geographies than the part of consciousness that squarely meets logic or any external systems.
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.
Surrealist techniques from the movement included automatic writing, and when that technique is used, the only craft I could initially identify is in accessing the unconscious, which for me happens at dawn or at night, in sensory deprivation tanks, or out in the wilderness. But once the unconscious is accessed, once you believe that it’s worth paying attention to, there is a workmanship involved in the writing. Intentional choices made during revision can heighten what’s off-kilter in fiction’s surface reality, to allow moments to stand out as surreal rather than purely marvelous or fantastic or science fiction.
My second short story collection How We Know Our Time Travelers is full of waking dreams and half-real dreams on paper in which time is out of joint, but there were intentional choices made to dissolve the boundary between the real and the not by means of a kind of linguistic or imagistic defamiliarization of what’s known, what sits within our culture’s logic.
And contemporary surrealist literature rarely involves automatism. Rather, the technique that has lasted beyond the 1920s and 1930s has been the folding in of unusual juxtapositions that are never remarked-upon or indicated to be aberrational. I’m thinking about a book like Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, in which a man named Colonel Sanders (as in the emblem of Kentucky Fried Chicken) provides the main characters who are traveling from Tokyo to the least developed island in Japan with shelter. The disjunction of American fast food and Japanese landscapes in the novel produces a surreal effect, even if we might argue about whether it’s a surreal novel in a historical, taxonomic sense.
Likewise in Ling Ma’s surreal short story collection Bliss Montage, the author deploys odd, sometimes humorous juxtapositions—one of the stories features a woman who has sex with a yeti—and hyperbolic or exaggerated claims that are presented in the same breath and manner as realistic details. In “Los Angeles,” for instance, a woman lives with 100 ex-boyfriends, kids, and a husband who speaks using ‘$$$’. It’s the absurdity of a woman living with 100 ex-boyfriends and the strangeness of the dialogue—which we nonetheless understand as a characterization of the husband—that generates a kind of surrealism. But what pulls the stories toward the surreal is that mundane or recognizable concerns are given equal weight in that fictional world.
Or take, for instance, Laura van den Berg’s recent novel State of Paradise, a Florida in which people find themselves getting belly buttons that deepen so much you can stick first a Chapstick and later a fist inside and portals are opened to other realities through technology. Family relations and various systems, including a psychiatric one, however, are constructed with an eye toward verisimilitude. Van den Berg has hinted that her surrealism may come from friction between systems. As in Ma’s work, van den Berg’s real details of Florida (in and of themselves odd to many of us outside the place) are juxtaposed against more interior or hallucinatory visions, like the perception of being able to put a fist inside your belly button.
These authors’ choices prolong a state of equivocation about where the edge of reality is. Imaginatively engaging with the dramatic events of these stories, requires us to take as true that someone could live with 100 ex-boyfriends, that someone’s belly button could expand to those levels and that there are portals that allow for access to other realities (also a theme in Ma’s short story “Office Hours”), all amid other narrative events that we recognize as part of shared reality. The speculative and the surreal often go hand in hand, but the surreal today demands more restraint than science fiction, I think, to keep readers suspended just outside mutual realities rather in a wholly different one—and to give their imaginations room to play with possibilities rather than dictating any sort of meaning.
Satisfaction, or an imposed narrative order that communicates more clear but limited meanings, is often beside the point with the surreal. Themes of time and memory, in particular, allow for subtler movements that create an atmosphere of the surreal and an expansive feeling of potentiality. Yoko Ogawa’s lovely The Memory Police is set on an island of forgetting. As people lose their attachment to things—hats, roses, boats, you name it, they literally disappear. Little by little, the ordinary slips away, generating a feeling of estrangement from surface reality but not in a way we’d mistake for the marvelous.
Absence also animates Jonathan Lethem’s As She Climbed Across the Table, featuring a love triangle between a man, a woman, and a wormhole named Lack and generates a strangeness around memory, time, and age in his entertaining The Arrest, which is set post-apocalypse, at a point when technologies cease to work. From Lethem’s first novel, Gun with Occasional Music, speculative noir that featured a scientific process that makes animals stand and talk and creates “babyheads,” he’s folded surrealist elements into fiction. Sometimes an off-kilter quality is produced by juxtaposing and rupturing different genre expectations. I interviewed Lethem for a profile about one of his other books, and I asked him what he thinks the craft of surrealism would be.
What we’re able to access through our inner visions is incredibly important to a rich perception of our lives.
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.
For an artist who enacts this tactic to produce a highly startling degree of contrast (a little more in line with the presence of Murakami’s Colonel Sanders), there is the detailed mimetic quality of Dalí’s images that produces hesitation based on the substance of what he is representing: melting clocks and musicians and tall, spindly-legged elephants. A similar surrealism takes on a violent character in Luis Bunel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalu; the film was made with the intention of excluding any concept or image for which a rational or psychological or cultural explanation.
It’s the capaciousness and malleability of the term “surrealism,”—sometimes produced with elements of the absurd, speculative, symbolist, the bizarre, and the allegorical—that allows for the claim that both Ogawa and Dalí are surrealists. Inside that term, too, the reconstructive language of Rimbaud meets both van den Berg’s fictional expanding bellybutton and Carrington’s painting of her lover Max Ernst—in which he stands with what seems like a coat that morphs into a furry merman’s tail, in front of what looks like a frozen white horse. And the funny, absurd, and minimal story of a woman having 100 ex-boyfriends shares a bedroom with the poetic erotica of Nin and the disorienting, speculative tilt of many of Lethem’s books.
The irrational and disjointed and dreamy take up more room in our inner geographies than the part of consciousness that squarely meets logic or any external systems. The vastness of the unconscious, largely unremarked upon in a modern, mechanized, corporate-heavy society, allows for a million different valences when deployed artistically. To craft surrealism, then, I think, a writer develops an awareness that logic and systems are contingent and becomes skillful at manipulating those contingencies, whether in concept, image, or word choice, to rub away the boundaries between agreed-upon realities and the visions that are constitutive of one’s inner drama. What we’re able to access through our inner visions is incredibly important to a rich perception of our lives—yet it’s given its most assertive voice through surreal fiction and art.
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How We Know Our Time Travelers by Anita Felicelli is available from WTAW Press.
