SLSL Intro "Surrealism"

Thu Nov 14 13:40:56 CST 2002

   "Another influence in 'Under the Rose,' too recent
for me then to abuse to the extent I have done since,
is Surrealism.  I had been taking one of those
elective courses in Modern Art, and it was the
Surrealists who'd really caught my attention.  Having
as yet virtually no acces to my dream life, I missed
the main point of the movement, and became fascinated
instead with the simple idea that one could combine
inside the same frame elements not normally found
together to produce illogical and startling effects."
(SL, "Intro," p. 20)

"Under the Rose"

>From Renee Riese Hubert, Magnifying Mirrors: Women,
Surrealism, and Partnership (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P,
1994), Chapter 10, "Subversion and Creativity:
Remedios Varo and Benjamin Peret," pp. 255-76 ...

"Rosa is mentioned in many lines and many texts,
seemingly without designating and identifiable woman. 
The name can refer to both a flower and a color, which
in true surrealist manner enter into new combinations
and new movements in the course of the text.  Rosa
watches, Rosa dreams, Rosa is an image, Rosa is a
halo, but no single metaphor or principle of analogy
emerges as it does, for instance, in Renaissance or
symbolist lyrics.  Rosa functions as a conjuring word
that opens up the world of imagination." (p. 261)

... on Benjamin Peret, Je sublime (1936) ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0102&msg=52755&sort=date

"the simple idea"

"Il est beau comme la rétractabilité des serres des
oiseaux rapaces; ou encore, comme l'incertitude des
mouvements musculaires dans les plaies des parties
molles de la région cervicale postérieure; ou plutôt,
comme ce piège à rats perpétuel, toujours retendu par
l'animal pris, qui peut prendre seul des rongeurs
indéfiniment, et fonctionner même caché sous la
paille; et surtout, comme la rencontre fortuite sur
une table de dissection d'une machine à coudre et d'un
parapluie!"

http://www.anthologie.free.fr/anthologie/lautreamont/chant06.htm

http://un2sg4.unige.ch/athena/lautreamont/laut_mal.rtf

"As beautiful as the chance meeting on a
dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!"

--Comte de Lauteamont, Maldoror (1869)

http://www.boysoflife.com/maldoror.html

http://www.exactchange.com/completecatalogue/ecbooks/lautreamont.html

   "The image is a pure creation of the mind.
   "It cannot be born from a comparison but from a
juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.
   "The more the relationship between the two
juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger
the image will be--the greater its emotional power and
poetic reality ..."

--Pierre Reverdy, Nord-Sud (March 1918)

Cited in ...

Andre Breton, "Manifesto of Surrealism," Manifestoes
of Surrealism (trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R.
Lane, Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1969 [1924]) ...

"I believe in the future resolution of these two
states, dream and reality, a surrelity, if one may so
speak." (p. 14)

"In the realm of literature, only the marvelous is
capable of fecundating works which bellong to an
inferior category such as a novel, and generally
speaking, anything that involves storytelling.  Lewis'
The Monk is an admirable proof of this.  It is infused
throughout with the presence of the marvelous.... 
Ghosts play a logical role in the book, since the
critical mind does not seize them in order to dispute
them." (pp. 14-5)

Cf. ...

   "The craze for Gothic fiction after The Castle of
Otranto was grounded, I suspect, in deep and religious
yearnings for that earlier mythic time which had come
to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more and
less literal, folks in the 18th century believed that
once upon a time all kinds of things had been possible
which were no longer so. Giants, dragons, spells. The
laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated
back then. What had once been true working magic had,
by the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere
machinery.... a broad front of resistance to the Age
of Reason, a front which included Radicalism and
Freemasonry as well as Luddites and the Gothic novel.
Each in its way expressed the same profound
unwillingness to give up elements of faith, however
'irrational,' to an emerging technopolitical order
that might or might not know what it was doing.
'Gothic' became code for 'medieval,' and that has
remained code for 'miraculous' ...."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html

http://www.vheissu.be/bio/eng/eng_ludd.htm

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/luddite.html

http://parallel.park.uga.edu/~arburke/texts/luddite.html

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/luddite.htm

And back to Breton ...

"The marvelous is not the same in every period of
history: it partakes in some obscure way of a sort of
general revelation only the fragments of which come
down to us: they are the romantic ruins, the modern
mannequin ..." (p. 16)

http://web.archive.org/web/20000824132048/pynchonfiles.com/shock.htm

"It is, in fact, difficult to appreciate fairly the
various elements present; one may even go so far as to
say that it is impossible to appreciate them at a
first reading." (p. 24)

"... Nerval possessed to a tee the spirit with which
we claim a kinship ...." (p. 25)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0108&msg=59035&sort=date

   "SURREALISM, n.  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 thought,
in the absence of any control exercised by reason,
exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

   "ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy.  Surrealism is based on
the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of
previously neglected associations ...." (p. 26)

"Language has been given to man so that he may make
Surrealist use of it....  Words, groups of words which
follow one another, manifest among themsleves the
greatest solidarity." (pp. 32-3)

And from Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (trans. Simon
Watson Taylor, London: Jonathan Cape, 1971 [1926]) ...

"Light is meaningful only in realtion to darkness, and
truth presupposes error.  It is these mingled
opposites which people our life ....  We excist only
in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and
white clash.  And what do I care about white and
black?  Their realm is death." (pp. 23-4)

"Wherever the living pursue particularly ambiguous
activities, the inanimate may sometimes assume the
reflection of their most secret motives: and thus our
cities are peopled with unrecognized sphinxes ...."
(p. 28)

"Future mysteries will arise from the ruins of
today's." (p. 29)

"What are you inscribing in my optic field, tiny tiny
ones, with this tornado of enigmas ....?  What is the
meaning of the cinema of your vibrations ...? 
Attempting to decipher this rapid handwriting, the one
word I can make out among these ceaselessly changing
cuneiform characters is not Justice but Death.... 
Death, as round as my eye, I had forgotten you ....
   "What I forgot to say is that the Pasage de L'Opera
is a big glass coffin, and like that same whiteness
deified since the times when people worshipped it in
Roman suburbs, still presides over the double game of
love and death (L'Amour versus La Mort) played by
libido ...." (pp. 46-7)

"The vice named Surrealism is the immoderate and
impassioned use of the stupefacient image, or rather
of the uncontrolled provocation of the image for its
own sake and for the element of unpredictable
perturbation and of metamorphosis which it introduces
into the domain of representation: for each image on
occasion forces you to revise the entire Universe."
(pp. 78-9)

"...  I draw back a curtain from the window, and find
myself immediately absorbed.  There must be some
purpose that I cannot guess behind this strange minuet
of thoughts being danced out there." (p. 94)

"And what would these bees say to the Baedecker of the
hives?"  (p. 98)

"The world exists in a state of unthinkable disorder:
the extraordinary thing about this is that men should
have habitually sought beneath the surface appearnace
of disorder for some mysterious order ... and they
have no sooner introduced this order into things tahn
they start going into raptures about it, making this
order the basis of an idea, or alternatively
explaining this order by an idea.  Thus everything to
them is providence ...." (p. 203)

http://www.exactchange.com/completecatalogue/ecbooks/aragonb.html

And see as well, e.g., ...

http://www.coventry.ac.uk/liam/new/jill_fenton.htm

http://www.coventry.ac.uk/ccmr/confer2/archive1/Fen.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/surrealism/story/0,1339,554475,00.html

Walz, Robin.  Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular
   Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris.
   Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8300.html

Ch. 1, "The Baedeker of Hives: The Opera Passageway
and Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris," pp. 13-41.  But
note, by the way, the occasional graphic insert and/or
musical number in Aragon's novel, e.g., p. 68, "what
we are clamouring for, make no mistake about it, is
realities, yes RE-A-LI-TIES," cf. ...

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