INCIDENTAWLY PHILIP I&aNTIA:
A STUDY OF THE l?cECICS OF SURREALISM
Stephen C. ktt
B.A.,
University of Tormto, 1974
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
in t h e Departzrrent
SlNX FRASER UN-ITY
October 1976
This t h e s i s may not be
repruduced in whole o r in part, by photoropy
or other mans, without p e d s s i m of the author.
A l l r i g h t s reserved.
N m :
Stephen C. Bett
Degree: Master of A r t s (English)
Title of Thesis: Incidentally Philip m t i a : .
A Study of the Poetics of Surrealism.
Ekamining Camnittee:
Chairrperson: Michael Steig
Robin Blaser
Senior Supervisor
Peter Quartermain
=tern& Examiner
Associate Professor
University of British C o l W i a
I h e r e b y g r a n t t o Simon F r a s e r U n i v e r s i t y t h e right t o l e n d
my t h e s i s o r d i s s e r t a t i o n ( t h e t i t l e of which i s shown below) to u s e r e
of t h e Simon F r a s e r U n i v e r s i t y L i b r a r y , and t o make p a r t i a l or s i n g l e
c o p i e s o n l y f o r - s u c h u s e r s o r i n r e s p o n s e t o a r e q u e s t from t h e l i b r a r y
of a n y o t h e r u n i v e r s i t y , o r o t h e r e d u c a t i o n a l i n s t i t u t i o n , on i t s 'own
b e h a l f o r f o r one of i t s u s e r s .
I f u r t h e r agree t h a t permission f o r
m u l t i p l e copying of t h i s t h e s i s f o r s c h o l a r l y p u r p o s e s may b e g r a n t e d
b y me o r t h e Dean of Graduate S t u d i e s .
It i s u n d e r s t o o d t h a t c o p y i n g
or p u b l i c a t i o n of t h i s t h e s i s f o r f i n a n c i a l g a i n s h a l l n o t b e a l l o w e d
w i t h o u t my w r i t t e n p e r m i s s i o n ,
T i t l e of T h e s i s / ~ i s s e r t a t i o n:
TNCTllFNTAI I Y PHTl TP I A W T A .
Author :
/
(signature )
Stephen B e t t
(name )
(date)
,
iii
ABSTRACT
This t h e s i s attempts t o locate and unravel the poetics of Surrealism.
The
chief cmcern is for the "image," the dynamic center of the poetry, and mst
especially for its dialectical and aesthetic properties.
Such properties are
celebrated by the surrealist i n a desire t o restore t o his text the hidden
qualities associated with the unconscious mind.
Philip Lamantia is an a p
propriate poet t o be studied here for two important reasons: as an American
often grouped w i t h the frontier-like San Francisco Renaissance, he brings t o
the blank page a regard for language as sarrething in which the poet violently
lives, and as a third generation surrealist, he experinvants w i t h e a r l i e r
techniques in order t o wrest the image f m the logical constructs in which it
is ordinarily grounded.
The mthdology crucial to examining such a s u b j e c t r w t inevitably arise
•’ranthe subject i t s e l f .
Doctrinaire surrealist theory, found especially in
the writings of And& Breton, directs our attention t o the problematics of
cmtemporaq thought and poetic procedure,
states the principles (both those
to be held and those t o be debunked), and indicates a fresh direction t o be
pursued by Surrealism.
The overall position taken, and the actual t e r n used-
as Bretm and others apply t h e m i n the theoretical mifestoes--are here interpreted for t h e i r poetic value, and w i t h analytical reference t o those poets
and philosophers cited and championed.
.
The poetry of Lamantia can be meaning-
fully examined as the continuation of the poetic experience which surrealist
theory and its radical claim t o unlock the human mind have intrduced into
contemporary Arrrerican poetic concerns.
-Inan initial study, touching on the corpus of Lamantials work and relating it t o a school of thought heretofore largely unstudied i n English criticism,
cne is hesitant about offering dogmatic conclusions.
The poetry i t s e l f pur-
psrts, above all, t o be a lived experience, a dangerous and exciting claim
which paradoxically tends t o deny the world as it is normdlly perceived.
Hclwever, it is hoped that the experience is shown t o
lie in the rigorous use t o
which Lamantia, as an announced surrealist, has put the image:
the system-
a t i c break up of conventional d e s of expression, brought t o realization
through the practise of " a u t m t i c writing";
the ensuing violence of the
image drawn forward in t h e text; and the final revelation of its a u t o n q
erupting out of what Lamantia, l i k e other s u r r e a l i s t s , sees as a freed
"The Bureau of Surrealist Enquiries has been Open
since 11 October 1924 at 15 rue de Grenelle, Paris,
from 4:30 to 6:30 every day except Sunday."
b u i s Aragon
I am grateful t o R a b i n Blaser f o r his careful and
sensitive supervision of t h i s thesis.
The work has also
benefitted f r m the cc~mu3ntsof George Ebering, J e w
Zaslove, and my wife Pam McDanald.
vii
TABLE: OF CO-S
Approval Page
Abstract
Quotation
.
.
.
Acknowledgmnts
.
Table of Contents
1, Introduction
.
. .
.
.
iii
.
v
.
vi
.
vii
1
. .
3. The Dialectic of the Winduwpane
.
4. The Violence of the Autonmus Image
.
List of References
Bibliography
ii
.
2. %m Distant Realities
P,ppendix
.
.
.
. .
.
.
.
24
.
52
. .
81
.
114
. .
116
.
155
"Let us not mince words
...only the marvelous
is beautiful."
Andre' Breton
IT""
-one
has yet comnitted t o paper a s t d y of surrealist poetry as it
finds i t s e l f on this side of the Atlantic one o r ixo generati-
a f t e r its
mopean inception; and in attempting t o do so one W a t e l y faces the
prdlems of historical--not
t o m t i o n literary--context.
Strictly speaking,
the inauguratian of the school knclwn by the nam "Surrealism" takes place in
paris around the nucleus of poets ~ n d & Breton, Philippe Soupault and Louis
Aragon:
t h e "Litt6rature" group of the early nineteen twenties.
Nonetheless,
it is w i t h equal certainty t h a t the h p l u l s e for such a beginning can be
located -what
e a r l i e r , i n the anti-art experiemnts of Dada conducted i n
Zurich during the f i r s t war.
But even this innocent s o r t of biographical
pendantry tends t o b e c m misleading when we read the early t r a c t s and provisos
signed by such familiar nams as Arp, Breton, Picabia and Tzara, all of wham
made the transitian rather easily frcm Dada t o Surrealism:
here we indeed find
a philoscphical and a r t i s t i c attitude which dates back t o F'rench Synbolism and
i n a d d i t i m draws forward into the m c d e m world the disquieting misanthropies
of de Sade and LautxS-t,
as w e l l as the h e m t i c i s m of Th-
vaughanI1 the
Rmaissance and medieval alchemists, and even the pre-somatic c m t r a r i t i e s of
Heraclitus.
But one must begin sanewhere, and by so doing make certain
assmpti(11~about where and h m t o enter a discussion regarding an art
m-t
or 'experience' whose sensibility is as diffusely threaded as that of
the century into which it has been, in the s t r i c t e s t sense, l'psychologically"
born. T h e purpose of an introductory chapter, then, must necessarily be t o
deal in generalities sufficient t o outline the framework of Surrealism as it
was gathered together i n the Europe of the twenties in order t o suggest
poss'ible reasons as t o its ccmtinwd validity for Amricans practising it
during and a f t e r the second w a r and, mre specifically still, t o place its
chief recent m a t - - P h i l i p Lamantia--where he very much belongs within
such a sensibility.
The f u n d m e a l vocabulary of Surrealism, in other words,
m t b e recalled with sm care for i t s actual history while a t the sarre t i n e
such tern as indicative of a living p o e q w h i c h has by no means
becart2 repetitive or s t a t i c ; tern which, canversely, have c m t o inform
mch recent avant-garde poetry, particularly that associated with postmdern
schools i n New York and San Francisco.
It should be noted f i r s t , therefore,
that a certain twentieth century consciousness pervades a l l surrealist texts:
m e which, according t o the surrealists themselves, calls upon the poet t o
re-open a discourse with the world, a discourse t h a t had been l o s t t o a l l
but alchemists and misfits in a mrass of fo&
methodologies and closed
rhetoric--a re-opened discourse which speaks as often f m
the brain.
sense.
I&
bowel as fmm
Indeed, one is tempted t o talk of a "move~t.rent"in precisely t h i s
For increasingly as we m r g e in the eclecticism of the present
aentury and read again the Syrclbolists and a r i c a n Ranantics who heard it
caning i n the nineteenth, we too hear i n our madness a l'traditiml'--one very
much unlike Eliot' s t but a tradition nmetheless.
It is international in
scope, moving fram Whitman t o W i l l i a m s , •’ran Nerval t o Jarry, and in Amrica
is straddled singularly enough by Lamantia whose precursors can likewise be
heard f r m both sides of the Atlantic.
secmd note, equally important here.
And this brings us abruptly t o a
Lamantia's rumoured 'break1 w i t h
Surrealism in 1946, a t the age of nineteen, can really be described as a
break in nam m l y and not in poetics.
His association w i t h the Beat
nuvarent and w i t h the f m u s Six Gallery reading which launched the San
bancisco Renaissance in 1955 carries forward the early manmtum t o a scene
in which the active voice of the poetry i t s e l f remains essentially unchanged.
Like the italicized 'break1 his subsequent 'return' t o Surrealism in 1966 is
made a l l the mre adamant and unccanprcanising as he himself suggests when he
..
.my ul-te
"return" to surreality since 1966 when I aq?& began the
&uous and exciting attenpt a t purely autcmtic writing as defined by
in his Manifestos of Surrealism of 1924 and 1929....
I believe ~ u t - ~ a l i autanatism
st
t o be the basic discovery and activity
t h a t bridges the gap between the unoanscious and the canscious Levels of
being, between the poetic manrelous and the seemingly ordinary.
'Iherefore aut~~natism
is the only path of discovery f o r the poetic
revelatim of man in his t o t a l i t y . Indeed I have
t o the r e a l i z a t i m
t h a t pure s u r r e a l i s t poetry i n our century is the only fundamntally new
and original developlrwt since the beginnings of recorded literature? I f i n a handful of words one may surmrarize the two fundamntal
statemnts--the manifestoes offered by Bretm in 1924 and 1929-those words would inevitably work themselves i n t o such phrases as a
'revolution of language', a 'spilling of the hitherto u n t a p w unconscious
mind', a 'systematic attack on the so-called citadel of reason':
these phrases
r i n g t r u e as not only the cbjectives but a l s o the methodological bases of
Surrealism.
And yet imediately, as history shm, there is a certain
nearness or proximity here as we11 t o the mainstream of European and Amsrican
Modemism.
To be sure, the important and influential magazine t r a n s i t i m ,
edited by the Amxican poet Eugene Jolas during the intexbellum years, f i l l e d
its pages an the me hand with f i r s t generatim French surrealists and m the
other w i t h instalhmnts of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Gertrude Stein, and the
Amxican Imagists.
We see here an epoch of avant-garde writing, and yet me
which can be carved i n t o the mre or less distinctive p i t i o n s of W d s m
and (running almgside and often counter t o it) of Surrealism; the former
manifesting i t s e l f as an outgrawth of English and Amsrican Rananticism and
the l a t t e r as a further radicalization of the once exuberant, i f s~m3times
inchoate, dreampoetry of French Symbolism. Where the Amsrican Imagists, f o r
example, would see themselves for the most part practising an objectiw
language which could uncover certain truths about the condition of man in the
-ern
world, the second or t h i r d generation surrealists in mrica--st
notably Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, who in the early nineteen forties
took a the younger Lamantia as associate editor of t h e i r surrealist magazine
viwS;rW
t h e unconscious mind, or the dream-producjng mind, as indeed the
7
cplly way o u t of the vicious tautology they deduced "reason" t o be; that is, as
a way dam to the underlying p r h r d i a l ccmdition of man, a cmditim
penwating a l l human history, including the present.
This curious distincticn,
then, which the surrealists w i l l have us m&e between themselves and Modemism,
&ile it is one including ~ t h o d sas much as ends, can perhaps be seen best of
a l l in hindsight.
For Philip Lamntia a t least--=
both an American
surrealist and a posmernist--we read that it b e m s the v i t a l matter of
making and maintaining a persmal stance.
In 1974, a f t e r roughly thirty years
of surrealist activity, he is d o p a t i c a l l y able t o s t a t e that poetry must
speak •’ran the subjective heart of language, reinventing o r remaking the
relaticwhip betwem man and the world rather than simply crafting an image of
it f r m pre-existing cultural settings or fontnilas:
4
Rejecting "craftsmanship" , the surrealist viewpoint, reqecting
sovereignty of mind, the primacy of human desires and m e i r i c exaltation,
considers and finds true poetry t o be an instrurrent of knowledge, of
d i s a x e r y , of unveiling, and of hurrran freedan. Authentic poem is
certainly the highest principle of language, but one which has generally
been lost and which surrealism aims t o restore, illuminating ~ n d r 6
B r e m ' s saying: "Language has been given t o man so that he may make
surrealist use of it," together with Benjamin ~ 6 r e t ' sgenial affirmation ,
"poetry is the source and crown of all thought." Surrealism's f i f t y
years of poetic evidence d m s t r a t e the i n i t i a l steps taken tmards this
suprerne disalienation of humanity with its language, an emancipatory
leap in opposition t o the civilized debasertwt and fragmmtation of
language by reason, t h a t is, language conditioned t o serve as aesthetic
cbject, submission-to-reality, n a t i m a l chauvinism, ente-tt
neo-form1 energy-fields, stylization, mirror-trickery, everyday speech,
pseudo-revoluticnary mystification, personal confession, conscious selfexpression and other idiocies--all of which, I insist, can be sumred up i n
theself-condemned mnstrosity that was Ezra Pound, his worthless emula ors
and *at generally passes for poetry and good writing i n this country.
f
L-tia's
argment here is basically two-prmged:
Century must be 'an ins-t
that poetry in the -em
of knadedge and of human freedm' and that in
6
as an 'aesthetic
t o the existing
central mssage
i
of surrealism as its poets core t o define it: a f m d m t a l diatribe with the
cultural order w h i c h makes man's l i f e in the world a pattern or r i t u a l of
days, and which equally makes of his language, in turn, a syntactical
stxucture t o be observed a t a l l costs--even a t the cost, mst importantly, of
human "desire."
One is forced t o face the revolutionary sense of Lamantia's
s t a t e ~ ~ n tmreover,
s,
i f one recognizes revolutim in the arts as an ongoing
process and a living social c d m t on behalf of the artist.
Given this,
it is an interesting fact that during the w a r thirty years earlier--&en
Iamantia was f i r s t involving himself as a teenager with View magazine--the
chief historian of the surrealist mvement i n Eurcpe, Maurice Nadeau, was i n
the follming words carefully appraising the mvement as it existed t o that
date:
The fact still remains that, thanks t o Dada, surrealism in its early days
rejected the literary, poetic, or plastic solution. Dada had dealt art
so pwerful a b l m that it was not t o recover for several years. The
surrealists' arbition was not t o build a new aesthetic upan its ruins.
It has been noted that art ultimately found a place within surrealism.
This was not entirely the f a u l t of the surrealists. The m v w m t w a s
envisaged by its founders not as a new a r t i s t i c school, but as a mans of
knmledge, a discovery of continents which had not yet been systematically
explored: the unconscious, the marvellous, the dream, madness,
hallucinatory states-in short, i f w e add the fantastic and the marvellous
a s they occurred throughout the world, the other side of the logical
decor. The f i n a l goal remained the reconciliation of two hitherto warring
realm : man and the world.
Perhaps m r e than any other second o r third generation surrealist--and m r e
than any other Amrican poet-Lamantia
can be seen t o return t o the
fundhmta.1 vision of the movemmt Nadeau outlines here : namely, "the other
side of the logical decor."
H e t r e a t s his poetry not so much as an objective
but as a m s t o knawledge (an inevitable subjectivity) wherein the
mthod of d p l y personal, o r "automaticw expression is accepted by him as
a e surest mute to what Surrealism defines as the nm.rvelous," the
reconciliation of man and world in the present tense.
I
Throughout the history of the movement, the true doctrinaire
surrealists, follming i n the steps of Breton, have remained almost
~ c t i l i o u sin observing that such a reconciliation can only be achieved by
uniting once and for a l l the conscious and unconscious minds.
F m the outset
t h i s has been the simple, straightforward tenet of a l l surrealist tracts.
And
+
it is finally, the manifestoes proclaim, a p r h x y act containing the seeds of
a magical o r "gnostic" truth.
To praperly unite the microcosm that is man,
where we include i n "man" the camplex of a l l his individual desires, with
the macrocosm which is his k d i a t e world clothed in the uniform of reason
and limiting human action t o a linear procession of logical steps--to unite
these two divergent forces requires the poet, in effect, t o use his language
to reopen such a "reason" t o the infinite and free possibilities of the
innermost dream.
Says Surrealism, furthemre, it is the unassailable right
and moral duty of the poet t o do so.
In his rhetorical staterrent of 1932 i n
Les Vases Ccar~nunicants,Breton had sLnrared t h i s q quite emphatically:
The poet of the future w i l l s m u n t the depressing notion of the
irreparable divorce of action and dream....
He w i l l mintain a t any price
in each other's presence the two terms of the human relation, by whose
destruction the mst precious cmquests would instantaneously became null
and void: the objective awareness of r e a l i t i e s , and t h e i r internal
develcpmt in what, by virtue of a sentimmt individual on one han ,
universal on the other, is magical about it u n t i l proved otherwise. !
Since the cmscious mind, taken separately, can readily be seen
to establish an a r t i f i c i a l r e l a t i m w i t h the world6--one which creates maning
simply out of ritual, habit or objectivity--Surrealism proposes t o appeal
directly t o the unchartered half of reality, the unconscious mind. Here it is
hoped the d i l m s of reason and freedm, of the social man and the
L e t i a ' s poetic t o find this elenv3ntal sense of the subjective dream as a
@s&rkroan@@
lying alongside the "castle" of objective reality.
In one stanza
fran the early poem "I Am m g ' (1943-451, the p e t gives the manifesto of
kis surrealism. The poetics is defined by the movertent of irrrages t w a r d a
of the unconscious landscape, a landscape contained in a rooan:
I am follawing her t o the wavering m n
t o a bridge by the long waterfront
t o valleys of beautiful arson
t o •’laversdead i n a mirror of love
t o m n eating wild minutes f m a clock
t o hands playing i n c e l e s t i a l pockets
and t o t h a t dark roan beside a castle
of youthful voices singing t o the m.
faere w e note a literary-artistic and a personal frame of reference ~mving
ccgltrapuntally i n the lines as Lamantia a t once pays hmage t o his precursors-
the "•’lavers" of Baudelaire and the "wild minutes" of Mi--and allws the
m m t of his lines t o follcw one •’ran another w i t h a kind of litanic,
sexual energy.
(In the present poem, having noted its title and the
beatific eroticism of the sixth line, m e might even c a l l such an energy
~ n a n i s t i c ,the poet truly 'engaging' himself through the careful
identification of h i s subjects. )
By follwing his m e
to the "wavering
m"the poet attempts a figurative ems-tion with the dark landscape of
the subterranean.
Qre
could say t h a t in searching out the hidden Real, the force or
desire linking man with the universe, it becames i n c h t upon the poet t o
q l e t e himself with his m e , t o make himself "youthful" in the face of the
world:
a union between the "fact" of himself, so t o speak, and the dream which
extendsthat fact, together making a resolved ccmsciousness--a voice singing
the 'logos' of consciousness i n hammy with the celestial macrocosm.
But
again we must ask, what i s the nature of this "unconscious1' as a poetic force;
*at
is it t h a t issues forth as the poet mves toward an actualization of the
subterranean? What are the strange subjects, too (the bridge, valleys,
flmers, men, and so on) , appearing before him as he nears his rendezvous with
the muse? Is the issue not an expression of the mvemnt i t s e l f ? And is
t
not always the particular of desire? In such a ~ ~ ~ m nSurrealism
er,
seem t o center all its principles around the notion that msciousness is
born f r m the union of conscious experience and 'poetic' experience; defining
the union as one between the rational mind which places order in the universe
by linguistically labelling even its miraculous forms and the human desire
which i n s i s t s on undercutting t h a t order.
The mverrent of h e text, i f one
can speak of it this way, is thus •’ram being-in-the-world t o psyche:
fran such a being only t o find its climax in psyche.
starting
Undoubtedly this is a
far rermve from the m r e s t a t i c classicism--against which Surrealism rebels-where mind is continually divorced •’ranthe body and the body •’ram mind.
kbreaver, Surrealism always begins with the negation and m e s t o the
'
legitbization of the poetics conceived out of the wedlock of mind and body.
The mtaphor of this poetics, then, must be the mement of desire i t s e l f :
9
a
thing which inevitably escapes d e f i n i t i m simply because it is not m t a h e d
by stasis.
It mves increasingly through i t s e l f , like mist through a garden,
carrying the poetics nearly beyond grasp.
For when the human hand m s out
to grasp such a mist that hand is l e f t hanging onto the ragged edge of the
dream.
Surely this is the undeniable sense of desire expressed by m t i a
the fraqrmt belm-given
here in the surreal lexicon as being predicated
by the unconscious dream:
Swept •’ran the clouds
W e are amng gardens under the sea.
There is no rule here
No seasons and no misery
There are only our desires
Revealed in the mist.10
This is truly the unruled arena underlying the rational mind, o r rather
rnderlying the mindfulness of consciously ascribed order (me notes the
double-entendre of "rule" in the poem)
as a varporous chart
a&,
when
.
The subterranean world exists here
supsrimposed m the heavily traced map of
m s c i o u s experience--or experience dictated by a cultural need for the
linguistic signposts of o r d e r - - m s tcwards f u l f i l l m n t as the illumination
of darkness.
To i l l d a t e consciousness--the sum reality of the conscious
and unconscious worlds--Surrealism is suggesting that man must f i r s t r i d
himself of the onerous logic of empirical experience (defined for him by
the social setting) before he can enter the m r e individualized logic of
the dream; that the poet must necessarily address himself t o the second of
these two separate logistical systems i f he is t o express in a r e a l and
maningful way the s t a t e of h i s human consciousness.
To exploit the logic
of conscious experience contrived, as it were, out of the reasonableness of
social w d i e n c y by forcing t h a t expediency on 'desire' is =rely t o engage
the poetics i n a divisive action, and hence t o spoil any realization of the
dream.
O r as Charles H e n r i Ford most effectively and deliberately states in
his catchy, rhythmic counterpoint:
"This is what I write/on a page torn from
the scalp of night:/when you s p l i t the world in two,/one half lives, the other
dies for you. 11 11
'I'his 'dark room' of Lamantia's, we are saying--=
in Iorca's "duende"
(dark sounds)12-is
the arena the poet wishes t o enter led by the vaporous
strains of desire.
But we should be equally quick t o add that such accents or
tones are never given as the dark, forboding sirens of ghouls and goblins.
the aontrary, they express the unsonscious sounds of a finely tuned
rmatterV
: in short, the sounds of pure thought preceding raticnal discourse;
soundsr even, containing a kind of pre-logic of t h e i r awn in diametrical
clpposition t o the upper world of q r i e n c e conditioned by the social
I
necessity of a restrictive language.
So the poet moves •’ranone world of
tlcover-all" matter t o another, indeed t o t h i s dream-like world of imbedded
ntter, And yet, of course, i f the echo of t h i s deeper world is t o be heard
a t a l l the unconscious must be entered without disturbing it. This is to
say the poet must o v e r m his natural urge t o charge into the waters of the
conscious, even though he m y f e e l helpless t o do otherwise; he must curb
this tendency t o carry with him that part of h i s experience which is
conditioned by the rational world, for such a load w i l l simply cause him t o
thrash about as he gasps for air and the still waters of the pure dream w i l l
remain l o s t forever.
Scnnehw the poet must manage his aquatic venture so as
to make its terms his awn. H e must s t r i p off the logic of a i r , so t o speak,
while he fathm the water--after which he w i l l be able t o superimpose the
two blueprints thereby illuminating his consciousness i n its t o t a l i t y , 13
It therefore becomes the ultimate task the surrealist takes upon
&elf
reality.
t o make a neat inversion of the two states which constitute his
He does this simply by, f i r s t of a l l , recognizing that the world of
concrete forms cantinuously alludes t o m kind of double identity or double
sense.
("The ground is a double place/ a double lining/like a reversible
hatmen m sink our n a i l i n t o the top of t h i s hat/it is imediately
transfonred into a funnel/inside our head."14)
In other words he realizes
that each concrete fom-t existing i n the world presents an imposing twofold
Wality:
i t s rational or logical sense is almst l i t e r a l l y folded in with its
dreamlike sense, its otherness.
One quality "speaks" to man ccnsciously, the
unconsciously.
The surrealist, then, i n taking the inposition of such
a =condite world as a virtual statemnt of fact, simply intends to enphasize
a t has not been previously emphmized,
t o w e i g h t the scale in favour of the
l a t t e r values--not so much to destroy the f o m r , perhaps, a s t o irrevocably
-strate
the congruency of the two. For the sake of nothing short of
human l i f e in the modern world, art must s h w the conscious mind t o be in a
the
very real way contoured and mulded by its suppcsed antithetical cousin:
~ n s c i o u s ,its estranged double.
It is thus t h a t t h i s double exrerges in
the explosion of Surrealism t o balance the scale in its poetry.
"The world
of dream and m m r y is the r e a l world" Jean Arp ironically but forcefully
.
contends, "It is the blood relative of art.. ."15
But an analogy pertaining t o a specific, concrete form might be mre
usefully placed here t o i l l u s t r a t e what i s m a n t by the inversion of a double,
and mreover t o shcrw h w the inversion can ccm t o have a maning in language.
Logically, for example, we would not think that a right-hand glove could be
wde to f i t the l e f t hand.16
Still,
l d n g 'surrealistic' solution.
hand i n one of two ways:
just as easily we can propose the fol-
A right-hand glove can be placed
by putting it on back-to-front o r inside-out.
pint, quite simply, is t h a t while the reality of the glove &s
the sane-the
on the l e f t
The
precisely
'matter' of which it is ccarppsed being unaltered--our sense of
this reality is explored and its doubleness fathared by the inversion; an
hbedded matter has core t o the fore.
The otherness of the inverted glove,
the surrealist might therefore say, although it can only be talked about as
an "otherness" o r as the reverse side of the glove, can thus be applealed to:
the "other side of the logical decor."
In other words, although logic
forces us t o say--as the logician Wittgenstein has said--that "What we
cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,
the secondary sense
13
lwking behind the form leaves us an image in the mind even while the i n i t i a l
fom, the linguistic signpost "glove, " is logically l o s t •’ranthe mind.
Breton w i l l go so far as t o suggest that the
,
of
imaginative thought finally precludes such a silence, that it is constantly
spiraling in on the labyrinth of b d , that, in effect, so long as there is
wstery the poeec can be engaged i n precisely 'that1.
In essence it becaws
for the s ~ e a l i s t as continuous reworking of Rimbaud's idea that
what
it brings back f r m 'there' has form, it gives form; i f it is fomiless, it
gives the formless. 1 1 l 9
The central difficulty i n all t h i s l i e s of course with language i t s e l f .
hk have already noted Lamantiats cements for instance, about "craftsmanskip, I'
%tylization" and "everyday speech," a l l of which he seems t o equate w i t h a
facile "submission-to-reality" and "mirror-trickery
.
'I
What L m t i a
abviously seems to be implying is that inasmuch as a surrealist wishes t o
s t r i p away reason i n order t o discover the otherness of prelogical forms he
must unreservedly contest a l l rational modes of expression, whether such
expression might be carried out on the everyday pages of newsprint o r i n the
poetical text.
Here again we need to attempt an approximtion of Surrealism's
roethcd for dealing w i t h such a problematic.
We begin by noting that because
its logic appears t o be conscious, language seems always t o give w i t h one hand
while taking away with the other.
it a t a conscious level.
This is haw we face language, how we know
W e construct our forms out of two minds, so t o speak,
out of our rational sense and out of our dreams.
And yet a t best, when we
corn t o talk of these forms we find t h e i r nature can only be spoken of on one
plane, a Linearly f l a t plane utterly lacking in perspective.
The double sense
i
e have created out of our consciousness suddenly beccaues a flatness i n our
language, a curiosity wherein the dream is syntactically locked.
We find we
canonl y speak of one glove when there are in fact two:
the glove we preceive
and its double, the formless glove we dream (like Margritte' s
-sitionally
beside the man).
fish stan&g
It is for this reason that while the conscious
world is t i e d t o the stasis of hrguage it b e c m s the fundamental p-se
of
s u r r e a l i s t poet t o undo the so-called "logic of experience" which •’rustrates, even obliterates, the dream.
To keep reality truly intact, there-
fore, one nrrust be willing e i t h e r t o "pass over i n silence" its hidden,
larger park--or
better, t o take that part whole •’ran the roots and allow it
the m b i l i t y necessary for its full expression in language.
The surrealist
poet must confront the ambiguous flatness of his language so much so that he
makes of it a transparency for the s u b l h .
For example, the reader of the
following l i n e o r two by the New York poet John Ashbery (who f e l t the touch
of Surrealism in his early work) is asked t o s t h l e through the image "tent,"
pausing o r not pausing a f t e r it and thereby finding its form inverted in the
reality of the lines:
you come through but
are incarparable the lovely t e n t
mystery you don't want surrounded the real20
What we notice in Ashbery's lines is the "duplicityw revealed i n the text.
The r e a l i t y of the image "tent" is dealt out as a doubleness reading inner
and outer,
That is, the "tent" as a form is given, by the ambiguity of its
place in the passage, a double meaning:
it either is the Real, the form locked
in poetic tim, o r it is inverted in p t i c space t o become the mysterious
place lying around the Real.
-t;
As readers we feel this double sense of
t h e ambiguous placing of the image forces our response.
pame a f t e r it
vie
When we
read the "tent" as the Real surrounded by formlessness.
And when v
e do not pause vie read the "tent" as a vapour covering the hidden
bal. The Real, it can therefore be said, c a ~ tso be the inherent duplicity
In his essay on Jack Spicer ("The Practice of Outside"),
,-s
Robin Blaser
the principles a t work as the poet's voice is opened t o the Real; where
& a l i t s e l f is necessarily of a double nature and where the poet gives up
his thought t o a linguistic expression lying inevitably outside his vmanhood,n
outside the conscious o r f i n i t e sense he has of himself and his thought.
His
very words must always be this 'othert (what Breton c a l k the " s u b l h point"),
and hence establish and care t o r e f l e c t the distance between a conscious mind
which thinks and the language that speaks.
This distance, which is in turn
what we care t o knm as the Real, is seen as a "duplicity," the s u b l k area
in which thought moves backwards and forwards •’ran the closeness of mind t o
the openness of the word.
Says Blaser, "It is within language that the world
speaks t o us with a voice t h a t is ncw our am.... The dictation remains
persistently of the world and as it is unknm, it moves into the language
as the imageless mves into the image. "21
poetry.
.
(Spicer:
"This i s n ' t skit it is
S h i t m t e r s i n t o it only as an image.1t22) In other words, it is by
practising this 'outsidet, by respecting its otherness, that the poet's
language becams the true and actual Real.
Because the real is a constant
duplicity in i t s e l f , as our thought mves tmard it, our language sits as its
qen reflection "always a t the edge of a meaning1123
: it "always enters the
peculiar experience t h a t the real is not what it seem and yet is there i n
the language. "24
Waning, or the cmsciousness that is ascribed to maning,
is the double sense apprehended in language: belief and disbelief, reason and
unreason, thought and unthought, the k n m and the u n k n m
kc-
double, " writes Spicer. 25)
.
("Each thing
./Has
The practice of language thus becares a
Continuous "re-opening of discourse"26 where the thought it expresses is nwed
o r a terror, "27 we are warned.
But our attention, like Spicer ' s f is drawn t o
t h i s openness, "to what he called the surrealism of the poet, the under-the-
r e a l which cares forward when the fixed-real dissolves. lJ8
&herwise.
It c m o t be
To keep thought mving requires a continual re-opening of the
language that reveals it and an assurance t h a t discourse w i l l not be closed up
jn the conscious &d.
The truth of consciousness cannot be revealed a t all
without the otherness of language opening t o it and showing i t s duplicity as
reality i t s e l f .
Like a l l surrealists, Lamantia talks of opening the constructs of a
language mde f l a t or two d h m s i o n a l by its cultural usage.
In the poem
"Put Dawn the Whole of Babylon," he suggests that the semantic value, the
real force lying mderneath language, has long been destroyed:
f o r the goodwilled destroyers of words
THESE
must be PUT IX3dN
for they're inside us29
And i f the s m t i c value of linguistic expression--which, alas, is tied like
a glove t o the conscious--if
it i s inevitably made s t a t i c , the poet asks, haw
a u l d it be otherwise than that the expression of unconscious or prelcgical
values w i l l be l o s t also.
In his poem addressed t o Henry Miller, for instance,
the poet voices his objection:
vocabulary/.
"you talk from the depths of this drunken
.. C But 3 To raise a beard on your ear w i l l take centuries.
It
30
Tfie criticism seems t o imply that the novelist attempts hearing a conscious
wisdom in the 'unconscious' s t r e e t s of Clichy -.what
for is l i f e i t s e l f .
he ought t o be listening
Very likely Lamantia is reacting t o Miller's "Open Letter
t o Surrealists Everywhere, " which for a l l its gnawing h m u r makes a rather
diffuse and hence weak argument against the
surrealist^.^^
In the f i n a l
analysis it seems Miller, as usual, takes upon himself the role of a pedestrian
Midas bitten w i t h the country a i r s of Pan rather than w i t h Apollo's ivory lyre.
~t is likewise i n t h i s s p i r i t that Eugene Jolas had e a r l i e r brought his
-ifesto
clwn
of c r i t i c a l r e f o m frm Delphi t o New York, proclaiming i n the nam
of ~ u r r e a l i s m"The Revolution of the Word" to combat "the industrialisation of
~ r e s s i o n ,and the banalisation of words voided of t h e i r primitive rreaning.
33
precisely here Surrealism argues t o make a "trial of language" (Aragon) , t o
d e fold together, once and for a l l , the reality-defying distinction that is
mde by c l a s s i c i s t and quasi-mdernist alike between what m knows and what
he doss not knw.
H c u then does Surrealism propose t o unite the two worlds, given the
divisive action perpetrated by language and its social forms? How does
Surrealism propose to illuminate consciousness i f the language which serves
its snraller half is useless t o describe the vast and unknown region lying
beneath ordinary mindfulness? Breton, i n the f i r s t manifesto of Surrealism,
offers that the only way out of the q u a p i r e l i e s i n automatic expression;
since the unoonscious is the ' a u t ~ ~ n a t i csupplanat
'
t o rational experience,
the argmnent goes, it is only through rendering psychic experience
autmtically--that
is without mind--that the unconscious can be revealed.
Breton thus defines Surrealism as follows:
Surrealism, noun, msc., Pure psychic autcmatism by which it is intended
t o express, either verbally or i n writing, the true function of thought.
Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and
outside a l l aesthetic o r moral preoccupations. 34
The precept which underlies this central statamt is t h a t because "thought"
is pre-vexba.1 it must therefore be grounded in the unconscious.
To reveal
thought whole, then, without passing it through the s t a s i s of rational
h q u a g e , thereby rendering it anbiguous, it must be expressed without the
h p o s i t i o n of reason--autcaMtically.
Tristan Tzara suna~lrizest h i s in his
Phrase "Thought is made in the r n ~ t h , "the
~ ~a priori
condition of f u l l
18
.cmsciousness.
TO give thought i n its pure s t a t e without subjecting it t o
=ason, therefore, is t o forego the s t a t i c logic of conscious expression and
reveal whole the pre-logical 'desire' in which all thought is wrapped.
as
Or,
puts it: " i t ' s only by musing the muthlthat you manage t o say ah...
11
36
~lparticipatei n a process rather than confront results. I,37
Autcinatism is of course a technique.
&d
It has the p e r t o reveal the
in its naked state; rather, not the mind i t s e l f but the pure energy which
conveys it. Again Surrealism forces us back t o the energy of desire or the
mwt-ent of the dream.
William Carlos W i l l i a m s , for instance (himself
touched t o so= extent i n Paterson by the work of Soupault and others)
perhaps more neatly than any other poet articulates the pr@sition
here.
for us
In the f o l l d n g lines this seminal author of Awrican postrtmdernism
isolates space and tke shwing h w it is always tirrre, o r rather the "howlu-the energy of t k - - t h a t enters the narrative as the poet's mst natural
voice. It is as though he were unclothing the historicity of events by the
process of narrating ' time' , and by this narrative voice axning, eventually,
t o provide new ~ a n i n gfor space (note also t h i s "hwl" is where Ginsberg's
energy is l a t e r t o enter) :
There is no direction. Whither? I
cannot say. I cannot say
m r e than how. The how (the howl) only
is a t my disposal (proposal) 38
...
S t i l l , a mre direct, m r e surrealistic example f r m Arp may perhaps best
show h w thought might be conveyed autanatically by the poet's m k b g use of
the mvem.nt or energy of the dream. Arp's phrase is this:
the dream holds a star in its muth just as the c a t
holds a muse in its m ~ t h ~ ~
The mtaphor a t work i n such a passage--as we have said elsewhere of all
Surrealism--is 'desire'; the desire t o discover the sdden logic of the
aansciousness.
*taphor
This is mre than mre anthropamrphisn:
the poet is creating
in order t o reveal bare thought, thought that extends beyond "stars"
a d 9nice"
per se,
thought t h a t exists i n the mouth of consciousness.
is no conscious logic in the language Arp uses here.
There
It is finely tuned in
its attenpt t o reveal uncmscious matter as "duende," as in t h i s additional
f r a w t of his, d
g
,
"The clouds swoon and writhe in t h e i r beds b l w
as corntries of flesh."4o Reason is thruwn over so as to reveal autoaMtically
the thought which precedes it and which is untramueled by the inevitability
of it.4 1
So Lamantia, too, following i n the tradition and okrthrowing the
dictates of reason delivers h i s "Autamatic World" ( t i t l e of the poem belcrw-circa 1943-45) as the route t o "the raw-mat city" of unccaoprmised desire:
So c m w i t h me
dam the boulevard
of crawling veins
Don't be afraid
blood is cheap!
A paradise song?
A dirty story?
A love sonnet?
Scream it out!
Then we ' 11 have the humn walls
tunbling down to m t our march
into the raw-mat city:
. .
. .
Don't ask m what t o do!
Keep on going
we' 11 end up scxrewhe~f a s t
an the m n perhaps!
After the lesson of Breton's "E2cquisite Corpse," the a u t m t i s m of chance
m d s ,becaws, in Lamantia's hands, a blend of the f e r t i l i t y of consciousness
9rm' ) , the mysticism of chance ("white") and the psychic unconscious
:
('lblwl~)
I'm thinking then
a chain of words
breaking a t the f i s t f a l l of words
I'm thinking green funnels of l i g h t
s i f t i n g w h i t e water
•’1- in blue
43
t h a t cut a breast of honey t o free the air
~ u t a m t i mis the technique whereby 'self1--which is always conscious--may
be cut off and set a d r i f t , and whereby the psyche i t s e l f may be revealed i n
the jmckqmsition
(a l a
Isidore Ducasse, a l i a s ~autr'eamnt) of conscious
action and rational experience abandoned:
And this is the road t o oblivion happiness
Cutup an the unknown and another acre of poems
.
.
. . . . . .44
Here caw the flagcms of Isidore Ducasse
The net effect sought in this shake-up of language is a return t o
the primitive values of a pure thought which precludes the objective
representatian of forms; o r t o what Hugo B a l l referred t o as a "return t o the
d e e p s t alchemy of the ~ o r d . " A~s ~Apollinaire wrote i n his inportant essay
m'"The New S p i r i t And The Poets" (circa 1918),
To explore truth, t o search for it, as much i n the ethnic
doeoain, for example, as i n t h a t of the imagination--
those are the principle characteristics of the new s p i r i t .
Following his own American Rmmtic tradition into the pos-rn,
46
hmntia
likewise looks t o the primitive t o squeeze alchemical values out of the most
fundmental of existences, " the existence lying d e e w than art ("I'm in
agmy looking or making up cannibal m u s / .
in the primitive lies the magic, the
..balinese tits,
.
For
and the soul is caught by it
a new perspective (perhaps Lamntia has Max Emst's "frottage" mthod in
mind.,here) :
A soul drenched in the milk of marble
goes through the floor of an evening
that rides l o s t cn a naked virgin
50
It gains pmer aver the d u l l man..
.
A m s t as though taking Breton's m t t o of the surreal alchemist ("I
t\x3ddappreciate your noting the m k a b l e analogy ...betmen the Surrealist
&forts and those of the alchemists:
the philosopher's stone is nothing m r e
or less than that which was t o enable man's imagination t o take a stunning
revenge on a l l things.. ."51)
, Lamantia takes
identification the " H e m t i c Bird."
for the subject of his close
The alchemical magic that exists i n these
follming lines undercuts time; having entered the substratum underlying
logical, sequential events the poet b e m s the birdsong:
I stand
with my feathers entangled i n your navel
with my wings opalescent in the night
and shout words heard tcmrrw
in a l i t t l e peasant cart 52
of the seventeenth century
!the primitive, the alchemical, functims a s the point of release to the
mcmscious chant, t o the poetics of incantation ("Your l i p s touch alchemic
gold torn fron the femur bone of/poetry,"
Lamantia writes.53)
And
the chant-
what Mary Ann C a m calls the "secular litanic" f ~ n n ~ ~ - - s t a nadtsthe basis of
oansciousness, written (the word made flesh; the plain-song of Surrealism)
across the face of the unconscious:
I beam ready t o offer nyself t o the smooth red snakes
entwined in the heads of sorcerers
.
despite ny body flying
despite the lizards who crawl into the a l t a r s where
the patents are being prepared
despite the intrusion of doctors1 maids
and egyptologists
despite the old Doric temple carried i n by the art lavers
despite the nest of mad beggars
the chant is heard
and the words of the chant are written in the oceanic gardens55
"The Mass is poetry i n action," says Lamantia; this, the incantation of the
Wt who descrhes himself as "Bishop of ~ l c h e m i a "(is
~ ~he Bishop to "Pope
22
ma&11?)
.
Here the alchemical language of autamtism becon-es
white
the xeligiosity
gone into gold
green
gone into gold 58
black
gone into gold
green gone into gold
end t o which this occultatim reaches, one is cautioned, is not the resurrecticn of prophets but the resurrection of the unconscious and the cons-
matian of desire.
Its aim, according to the credo set dam by Breton, is to
discover the resolution of dream and reality:
I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream
w h i c h are seemingly so ccntradictory, i n t o a kind of absolute
surreality, i f one may so speak.
L e t us not mince words:
1s always beautiful, a n p i n g marvelous is beautiful, i n fact
marvelous is beautiful. 9
...
and reality,
reality, a
the marvelous
only the
Thus we have, too, the expression of the "nmvelous1' as the primitive union of
man and his world brought forward out of myth and into the present Real.
In
fact, the "marvelousll is undoubtedly the mst highly charged term i n the swlealist vocabulary; its lexical value being always kinetic, never potential,
it suggests the actualmvement away •’ranreason, away f r m stasis, away t o
the resulution of desire i n the realized consciousness.
is the sacred cau of Surrealism.
Significantly, it
One might even say that t o disbelieve it,
like Erysichthon who cut dawn Ceresl sacred oak, is t o be over=
with a
spiritual famine : the blasphemous Erysichthon, we rerrerrber fm Wid, becam
So hungry t h a t i n his ravenous greed "The old king's teeth
tore at his
wasted body/And i n despair he a t e himself to death. lv60 Says L a m t i a , then:
It is a strange nmrwt
as we t e a t ourselves apart in the silence
of t h i s landscape
of this world
t h a t seems to go beyond its am existence61
b r e w e r , the 'lmrvelousl' figures as the m v m t out of the classical m l d ,
out of the mtaphysical ennui; as Parker Tyler writes of the poet, "his
m&omChas3
exploded into a poemw6* And finally, it is of course the
rnvertmt out of the language of mindfulness, with the resonance as w e l l of
verlainels conclusion t o his " A r t ~dtique"--"and a l l the r e s t is
says simply
and heartily:
"The white has l o s t its t a i l
the gentle has grm hard
and won't leave its place
and between the slow and e gray
the ca-tms weep periods. l1
a
This poetics is of madness, of mimelous lunacy:
senses" Rimbaud talked about.
~rown
has cautioned,
the "derangement of the
(Indeed, "Resisting madness" as Norman 0.
"can 12 the maddest way of beingmad."65)
It is
perhaps the f i r s t poetics t o take seriously, above a l l , the unconscious
d l i n g s which call the poet t o fathom the well of his own desire.
For
the surrealists surely take a stand here, not against madness but in its
favour.
(We mrmkr too the story of Minyas' daughters who would continue
the nnmdane chores of the household rather than celebrate the feast of
Bacchus:
they were appropriately turned i n t o bats.)
The c r i t i c Paul Green
has forthrightly concluded, "Perhaps we are 1earningCfm-n Smrealism3that
the only way t o transcend our madness is t o experience it."66
touched by the ~ ~ l r v e l o u ssays
"
Lamantia--driven mad by desire:
I am touched by the marvelous
as the mrmaids' nimble fingers
go through my hair
that has care d m forever fran my head
to cover my body
67
the savage f r u i t of lunacy
"I am
2.
'.EWD DISTANT TIES
"...the fortuitous encomter upm a dessectingtable of a sewing-machine and an umbrella"
Ccsrtte de ~autr&xmnt
Ts recapitulate, for a mment, vie have suggested that the dream has
k c m with Breton's f i r s t d f e s t o the true world of poetic experience.
As
w
t
c
m stated, "I have always been amazed a t the way an ordinary observer
lads
SO
much mre credence and attaches so much more importance t o waking
events than t o those occurring i n drearrs. "l h p i r i c a l r e a l i t y is suspect:
.
the dream, alone, is the arena "where nothing is invented" (Eluard) 2
Moreover, when we look back to the central distinction created by Lamantia
out of his own Beat and surrealist worlds-the
two influences which weigh
upan h b - w e can see clearly the decision which is reached and the poetics
which cams t o be defined:
the empirical world of the "naked lunch" or the
"reality sandwich" of Burroughs and Ginsberg is curiously thrum over by
Iamantia in favour of that 'unreal' world of the dream ('curiously', because
the imagery which propels the decision remains i t s e l f Beat):
Junk's unlimited and sold by Agents
that I can rrake pcems that I spin the day t o
Tim Buck m o t h a t 1 lose tension and head
floats forever a f a r inscape of l m n trees AND
PX) mRF: REALITY SANIlWICHES :!!3
m e surely catches, here, the echo of Robert Denos' stat-t:
l e t us accept dreaming it is the poem of the new
" L e t us dream
day.'14
The mdus operandi involved i n these surreal dream visians, we have
suggested, is given with the atllomatic break-up of language.
"n poems, Arp
Writing of his
has noted, "I tore apart sentences, words, syllables.
I tried
to break down the language into atom, in order t o approach the creative. A t
length I rejected art, because it distracts us •’ran the depths and disturbs
the pure dream."5
Because the dream entertains an incorrigible logic of its
0.m i k is l e f t for the surrealist--as he sees hiniself-to
divorce himself
fran his rational, conscious w i l l and a t m t t o mirror his experience through
kis own uncmscious appraisal of it. He therefore attenpts, without
I
mindfulness, t o voice his consciousness as an equation:
the conscious
world is seen as a part of overall 'reality' only by the addition of its
natural and inevitable fluwing into the unconscious orb.
The two worlds
together are thus proposed as an expression of total consciousness.
Or as
m t i a himself so marvelously puts it, w i t h cmsciousness so f u l l b l m the
\
mcanscious can be seen t o t r i c k l e across the suddenly e l m t a l face of
conscious lucidity:
worlds/.
"Your whole body is a wing,/Daughter of half-seen
../You have b e c m so m n m t a l / . ../Water is trickling dawn your
lucid breasts. "
The encounter of the conscious and unconscious worlds, because t h e i r
logics seem so inherently opposed, can only be revealed by chance.
Or, t o
give this i n other words, because the ground on which the encounter of these
b m "distant realities" (Reverdy's phrase) takes place is so mte t o the
rational mind which operates always 'above boardt--indeed, because the
occasion of t h e i r rreting is so inevitably sublimated, mn can only force his
view of it by placing himself a t the disposal of his wildest, mst autcnnatic
language where thought is truly given in his muth.
W e thus cone, now, t o
me of the mst f m u s images which has withstood the passage of t h t o
play a major role i n surrealist thought and poetics : Iautr6amnt' s "the
fortuitous encomter upan a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an
~ ~ b r e l l a . In
" ~ order t o unfold what is =ant by such an incredible image,
We shall begin where Breton himself begins i n his f i r s t manifesto--with
hud.
For as Breton mkes it perfectly clear i n 1924:
k are still living under the reign of logic
....
But i n this day and age
logical mthods are applicable only t o solving problem of secondary
h t e r e s t . The absolute rationalism that is still i n vogue allows us to
consider only facts relating directly t o our experience
Under the
pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed t o banish frcxn the
mind everything t h a t may rightly o r wrongly be tern& superstition, or
fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in
....
I
I
conformance with accepted practices. It was, apparently, by pure chance
that a part of our mtal world which we pretended not t o be concerned
with any longer-and, i n nty opinion by f a r the mt important part-has
been brought back t o light. For this we must give thanks t o the
discaveries of Sigmund Freud.
*
Freud's theory concerning the patterned or 'structured' association
of imiges which speaks t o man froan his unconscious is so well knuwn that there
little point in restating it here.
It is enough t o say t h a t every pet--
surrealist o r not--creates his work t o a greater o r lesser extent in the
juxtaposition or association of words and images.
W i t h the surrealists,
hmver--who take Freud always i n poetic rather than l i t e r a l doses--this method
of randcnn association becam an obsession.
( F r e d , incidentally, c a l l s this
child's play i n his "The Relation of the Poet t o Day-dreaming.")'
The image is
automtically given, each word follawing fran its antecedent, as the poet
selflessly enters the labyrinth of his unconscious dream.
In fact, an example
from Arp nicely gives the visual and audio proportions of such an experitrent:
the sky nams sky sky by trade and sky during its hours is
large leap and blue
the leapfrog laughs blue
the m s t r o u s frog grows in the mnstrous sky
it grows unceasingly
it spies an the earth
These images of Arp's, Freud and Breton alike would argue, stem from the pet's
unconscious.
By letting himself sxbmit and 'muth' his awn randcnn thoughts
and inpressions Arp has revealed, autcmaticdlly , the shapes and colours of his
uncmscious s t a t e ,
By mixing the natural senses (sight, sound, etc.) so that
the poet perceives the frog t o sound "blue," and so on,
Arp has indeed slurred
the logic of 'the real' and rendered i n a 'surreal' way the logic of the dream.
In this present case, the two distant r e a l i t i e s of sight and sound have
hccm one s w r e a l i t y , and the m r e fundarrental distance between man and h i s
world has be-
marvelously, i f only sorcewhat, reduced.
Moreover, the poet
has forced the natural images which are perceived by the 'natural' senses
28
into an unrelenting m t m r p h o s i s (indeed, even more unrelenting is his image,
"the crayfish has the bestial voice of a raspberry"ll).
The qualities of such
a mtarrorphosis are "so positive and so forceful," writes the c r i t i c Roger
shattuck, that the contradic&xions inherent in the two r e a l i t i e s a t t
k conscious level "fuse (s) into fresh values. 1112
Furthermre, these "fresh values" sought by Surrealism i n the juxtaposition of disparate r e a l i t i e s involve f a r m r e than did, by contrast, the
etaphysical notion--which Sarrtuel Johnson later eschewed as 'heterogeneous
ideas yoked by violence together1--simply because, unlike the Metaphysicals
a posteriori, Surrealism presents a l l its 'yoking' where it belongs,
who worked -
- priori).
according t o them, i n thought (a
The point here--and it is a v i t a l l y
important one--is that Surrealism, from ~autre'amntt o Lamantia, is attempting
t o destroy the whole notion of "idea" by directing the attention right back t o
thought i t s e l f , or rather t o the 'image matter' which is thought i n its purest
state.
In other words, "ideas" are deplored for being merely the groupings--or
better, rationalizations--of
the prirrrordial W e s of thought into a logical
structure which necessarily tends t o falsify the f u l l import of such rrodes.
In
actual f a c t there 'is' a violence done to language by the automatic nature of
the surrealist text; but s t s i c t l y speaking, it is not a "forced" violence-rather it i s one quite naturally caused by language or by what Jolas properly
calls the "chemistry of words.1113 For such a violent series of juxtapositions
really mirrors the original s t a t e of h g e s developed by a language.
The auto-
m t i c yoking that is done t o a l l words i n the surrealist text therefore simply
recalls t o the page the original fullness of human thought.
One might even
say that images are in fact pre-yoked, existing i n the unconscious; that before
~IE
apens
Uhis
I
mouth t o speak the unity of a l l images is his fundamental reality.
The disparat&ess of such images--especially as between those whose distance •’ram
m e another is great, like the "urrbrella" and the "sewing-machineu--only appears
as a disparateness when they are placed together in a language whose function
is a s s m d t o be logical.
What Surrealism proposes t o do, then-and
t o r e c a l l Nadeau's phrase--is
WF?
do w e l l
speak •’ran "the other side of the logical decor":
that is, t o take the r e a l i t y of interflowing h g e s and write it dawn, as it
m e , w i t h a 'closed muth'
.
It simply allms, via the practise of aut~natism,
the inherent unity of a l l images together making up consciousness(or surreality)
to f l w onto the page unheedful of the 'idea separating', distorting, and rationalizing mindfulness of language.14 In this way, then, the disparate r e a l i t i e s
of the 'shattered teacups' (as in the following fragment of Lamantia's) are
replaced i n t h e i r whole s t a t e as a 'statue':
The teacups shattered upan the leg? of ancient lovers
becone a statue in R a r e before you 5
This problem concerning the assunvtd disparateness of images brings us
to a second point--one which follows inevitably, and with equal importance. The
resultant marvelousness of an automtic t r e a t n m t of images carries w i t h it an
implied c r i t i c a l corrment about the whole context of art.
In short, the sur-
realists are saying that the interpretive sense of a text is l o s t i n these very
juxtapsitians.
de texte no longer be justified o r
Not only can explication --
tolerated, but m r e to the point, it no longer even works.
Wtthews, sums it up this way:
One c r i t i c , J. H.
"Just as Dadaism placed i t s e l f outside art t o
invite reconsideration of the very basis of art, so surrealism-as its poetry
shaws--eludes c r i t i c a l cc~rmentaryso f a r as this postulates c r i t e r i a other than
its ayn.... It demonstrates that we are i n the presence of a firm conviction
seeing no solution in any e f f o r t t o explicate the imagery t o which the surrealist
p e t ' s k l i e f s and technical preoccupations bring him. "I6 With Lamantia, furtherrrPre, one ought t o note the additional fuel of the quarrel he shares with other
k r i c a n p o s ~ e r n i s t sagainst the New Critics whose formalist ideas on poetry
1
I
I
=re gaining support about the t k w he was f i r s t e q e r h t i n g with Surrealism
-
in View.
There is a certain ironic playfulness, even bitterness, over such
c r i t i c s and the ideas they have extrapolated f r m Eliot and Eliot1s view of the
~ t a p h y s i c a l s . In the follming lines from Lamantials poem,
"There Are Many
pathways TO The Garden" (which seems to take off directly •’ram Marvell's w e l l
knawn poem), the sm kind of earnestly ironic statement that can be inferred
from ~autre'amnt
' s "dissecting table" may be seen here as well.
The "fingers"
which are wont to " ~ la tdesert" (one thinks of "The Waste Land" and "The D r y
salvages") and which attenpt t o legitimize or "marry" themselves t o the distant
images of "lily" and "fig-foot" are likely none other than those of the explicator of texts himself, the academic c r i t i c or the academic poet:
I f you are bound for sunqs empty plum
there is no need t o mxk the wine tongue
but i f you are going to a rage of pennies
over a stevedore's wax ocean
then, r-r:
a l l long pajams are frozen dust
unless an axe cuts my flaming grotto.
As your fingers melt a desert
an attercrpt is made t o marry the lily-and-fig-foot
mrrmids wander and play with a living cross
a child invents a sublim bucket of eyeslg
and I s e t free the dawn of your desires.
dragon
It becomes of the utrrrost importance t o note, in the overview, that
there exists i n all surreal juxtapositions a rnverwnt between not just empirical
r e a l i t i e s but actual states of being:
the cmscious and unconscious.
For by
putting together disparate images t o create h i s overall surreal image the surr e a l i s t is noting the great distance which l i e s between the conscious perception
of things and the (possible) dream-state in which all these things--including
the human consciousness--are actively and pre-eminantly engaged.
In the ultimte
sense, then, there is nothing linguistically "cute" intended by the association,
in the following poem •’ran Benjamin ~ Z r e t ,of 'suitcase, sock and endive' (a
=ality salad!)
w5ich eventually results in 'onions being lent i n order t o
e m armchairs1; what the poet is a f t e r , rather, is a conplete re-ordering of
the modes of experience and the entertahment of the notion that a l l forms have
an e l m t a l and unified place i n the human consciousness:
An old suitcase a sock and an endive
have arranged for a rendezvous between two blades of grass
sprouting on an a l t a r draped i n drooping bowels
This has resulted in the founding of a bank specializing in
mortgage loans
which lends onions in order to earn armhairs
And so this world goes on
A l i t t l e cupful of sand here,8
a broken bedspring there...
So what we are really saying, therefore, is t h a t while much has been written
about the surrealist's celebration of contradiction such a notion has about it
the air of a misleading half-truth.
do) that the poetics c
The c r i t i c s who suggest (and many of them
a to
~ an abruptness i n "fresh values," a "marvelous
conjunction," a "shock" t o established modes of thought and reason, or s a w such
thing, are i n fact foisting Dada's nihilism on the careful dialectics of Surrealism (see chapter three).
For in the juxtaposition of b g e s there is, as
I hope t o shm, a process t h a t goes f a r beyond such mundane ends and reaches
for a form of the highest poetic absolutism where image and meaning becaw a
marvelous 'radiance1. pllerleau-Ponty is suggestive here when he asks:
"What
is irreplaceable i n the work of art? What makes it f a r m r e a voice of the
spirit ...than a means t o pleasure?
The fact that it contains, better than
ideas, 'matrices of ideas1--the f a c t that it provides u s with symbols whose
maning we never stop developing..
. [a
rreaning that veers]
toward a second-
it a l m s t r ejoins the mute radiance of painting. "I9 (cf.
order v a l where
~
Lamaritia' s "statue i n Rcxn?
a page o r so ago)
.
Again, the experience of association is m r e than a matter of linguistic
acrobatics, it is mre than metaphysical conceit.
For example, the follawing
'automatic' lines from L m t i a ' s "Inside The Jowney" take simple figurative
&mguage and extend it t o a kind of marvelous, unequivocal irrationality precisely a t the point where we actually anticipate (as poor 'conscious readers'
of language) the least offense, the mildest of mtaphors t o occur out of the
20
innocent phrase "which is t o say" :
...
escape was a door I kept shutting a l l around m AND on
those who m e carving me, symbolically they said, f o r the
f i r s t course a t the restaurant for the i n i t i a t e s of the
lake of love--which i s t o say, sperm ran high that year,
breaking over the brains of those who know hcw t o conduct
themselves properly i n t h i s world: which is t o say, l i f e
goes on gathering wool for the mthers of a l l the daughters
whose t m p s s p i t live lobsters and whose insatiable
desire f o r sans seasalt paradise makes thunder break in
my skull: which is t o say, very imply and without mtaphor,
that my brain was oppressing r
e.
28
Here we have an expression of the imaginative equation which stands a t the
center of Surrealism wherein each consciously disparate r e a l i t y united with
another equals an uncanscious surreality.
And fortunately for us, since one
of its roots--or branches rather--is s t i l l attached to a poetic convention,
it can be examined and talked about critically.
Here is a clear case of the
straightforward metaphor plundered by autcanatism; plundered so violently that
it reflects the duplicity of the Real--that is, it reflects the double nature
or double sense of pure language.
The metaphor is wrenched -st
out of
recognition (certainly out of a l l proportion) beaning more of afumelopening
as a window on reality.
mrvelously s u b l h :
A t the l e a s t it is
A t the most it is
the transparency of language opening discourse to the
eternal double, t o the estranged double--the unconscious dream.
In effect, the
innocent conjunctions stray from that which is perhaps even insipid t o that
which'borders on the ineffable. 2 3
Of course it is stating the obvious t o say that we are no longer concerned with seven types of anbiguity.
By Lamantials uwn admission, it is the
%xxin"--the
categorizer of expsrience into rationally digestable groupings--
that must be autcanatically r m v e d f r m the text.
No m r e are we made t o suffer
dosed mtaphor reflecting the s t a t i c language of the rationally minded poets.
ath her, following the international scene of anti-formalists like the Uruguayan
~ a u t r 6 m n t ,the avant-garde poet can continue to open h i s language and "know
.
now that poetry mt lead s e w h e r e " (Breton) 24
In point of fact, where it
leads i s t o an unequivocal expression of the mst primitive, mst pure desire.
For in the imaginative equatim where consciousness is seen as the funnelingof the rational into the dream there l i e s an energy so undaunted i n its lust•’dsexuality that the doi&le sense of the masculine and feminine, the positive
and the negative, are forced together by an act of rape.
In essence, what all
surrealist poets share as a poetic (mst notably ~ g r e t )i s the a b i l i t y t o
rape figurative language by forcing against it on all sides the totally dis-
1
I
1
1
i
I
I
parate images which dramatically stand as a reflection of true and actual reality.
&I
the "dissecting table" of ~autr6amontit can in f a c t be seen t h a t Surrealism
has care t o act out not a marriage of logical convenience but the rape of such
a mrriage.
.
b
~ e t a p h o qwas never for ~ a u t r & r m n t ..the bringing together
elemGts into one qualitative context so that we
of
rejoice t o see that what was l o s t has been found.... Fk3
are not made happy in 'that' sense by the accidental
encounter of the sewing-machine and the mbrella. They
do 'not' belong together as do the red rose and my love.
Y e t Lautr6mnt, playing on scgne obscure need of our sensibility,
is able t o e n l i s t our aid in foisting on one another these
two alienated objects, which have t h u s beccane campanions
for eternity
The image is always the imposition of sane
object or a l i t y on another, it is never a marriage, always
a rape.. . Y5
....
.
And t9 this Max Emst' s r-ks
I
1
Lionel Abel explains here:
...
L
a
may be added :
A readymade reality, whose naive purpose seems t o have been
s e t for once and for a l l (an umbrella), suddenly found in
the presence of another very distant and no less absurd
reality (a sewing-machine), i n a place where both must 'feel
out of place' (on a dissecting table), w i l l be robbed of
its naive purpose and of its identity; its false absolute
w i l l be transorrred, by mans of a relative, into a new
absolute, y t i c and true: utbrella and sewing-machine w i l l
make love. 6
me desire t o reach past the s t a s i s of rational discourse and open it t o its
dream dram its energy-like
Duchamp's nude descending the staircase--from the
very disparateness of conscious forms.
Believing t h a t " a l l the words contained
in any text possess potentially the characteristics of fenale animal behavior
capable of being released a t w i l l by creative man the interpreter" the second
generation surrealist, Guy Cabanal, hence proposes that poetry becarres "an a c t
of absolute love realized by rape and caswmated by s c d o ~ n i z a t i o n . ~ ~ ~ ~
Fk3 must naw c m back t o Freud, and m r e specifically t o what Sur-
realism has borrowed f r m him.
I have suggested e a r l i e r that autamatism is a
technique, a mans t o an end, and that the end is the close discovery of the
dream for the purpose of divining the uncharted half of ccplsciousness.
Chance
happenings are simply the important mans, the mthodolcgy by which that uncharted half my be revealed such t h a t the conscious world can be placed beside
the unconscious.
Autmtism thus becoms the mthod by which the equation
of the t w o opposed logistical systems--the inner man and man-in-the-world--my
be made.
Likewise, Freud's technique of the free association (where images
m l y appear t o collide randcanly and reinvest their dif f e r e n e s vis-&is
one
another) is not a matter of indifference--to J?reudr2* o r t o Surrealim-but
the mans t o an end.
The mechanism of the autanatic impulse which engages the
distant r e a l i t i e s so that they may ccm together a t the conscious level in
Surreal language is seen, by Surrealism, as the fundamntal impulse t o by-pass
35
conscious language and unite the two worlds of k
n
m and unknm experience.
ut
us now look a t Freud's theory of the "dream-work" t o see hcw these two
worlds are shaped and how they c o t o
~ be linked by language--keeping i n mind
Freud's datedness, perhaps, but i n the perspective of Breton's c-ts
in the
1924 manifesto:
"F'reud very rightly brought his c r i t i c a l faculties t o bear
upon the dream.
It is, in f a c t , inadmissible that this considerable portion
of psychic activity
...has still today been so grossly neglected.
It
29
A s Freud pointed out with h i s "dremwork" the conscious is but a
"distorted substitute" of the unconscious.
In taking the 'dream' as a parti-
cular of the unconscious experience, he writes:
The dream as ranmbered is not the r e a l thing a t a l l ,
but 'a distorted substitute' which, by calling up other
substitute-ideas, provides us w i t h a means of approaching
the thought proper, of bringing into consc usness the
unconscious thoughts underlying the dream.
38
Here the important distinction is t h a t of the 'manifest dream' and the 'latent
dream1--that is, where the visual extent of the perceived dream is informed
by its obscure and latent maning.
Freud explains:
...
the process by which the latent dream is t r a n s f o m d
into the manifest dream is called THE DREAM-WRK...what
has t o be accaplished by the dremwork is the transformation
of the latent thoughts, as expressed in words, intojl
perceptual forms, most c m n l y into visual images.
The mchanism which, in the general sense, mves back and forth •’ran the mif e s t conscious and the (latent) unconscious which i n f o m it is precisely what
Breton sought t o explore through autamtic writing ("The Magnetic Fields" for
example)
.
The vital question, therefore, becanes that of discovering the missing
Step o r link between, i f vie may borrow yet another s e t of terms, this time f m
transformational linguistics, the latently "deep" (or conceptual) and manifestly
"surface" structures into which, respectively, a l l linguistic experience is
.
~cnceivedand reasoned out (diagram fmtnoted) 32 ~ o a mCharsky, f o r example,
-lains
the d i s t i n c t i m i n the follawing way:
...[aIsystem
of propositions expressing the meaning of a
sentence is produced in the mind as the sentence is realized as a physical signal, the two being related by certain
fonnal operations t h a t , i n current terminology, we may call
'gramnatical t r a n s f a m t i o n s ' . Continuing with current
terminology, we can thus distinguish the 'surface structure*
of the sentence, the organization i n t o categories and phrases
t h a t is d i r e c t l y associated with the physical signal,
f r m the mderlying 'deep s t r u c t u r e t , a l s o a system of
categories and phrases, but with a mre abstract [i.e. conceptual] character.
I f this approach is correct i n general, then a person
who knaws a specific language has c m t r o l of a grarrsnar
t h a t 'generatest ( t h a t is, characterizes) the i n f i n i t e
set of potential deep structures, maps them onto associated
surface structures, and determines the semantic and phonetic
interpretations of these abstract abjects. 33
...
Perhaps the philosopher Merleau-Ponty has articulated the question presently
before us best of a l l when he writes,
But what i f language expresses as much by what is between
words themselves? By t h a t which it does not "say" as by
what it "says"? And what i f , hidden in enpirical language,
there is a second-order language in which signs once again
lead the vague l i f e of colors, and i n which significations
never f&ee themselves campletely fran the intercourse of
signs?
Again we face the double nature, the double sense of language; the apparent
lightness of its enpirical expressim and the darkness hidden within.
The
poets have noted this duplicity (especially i n the America of WhitTMn and his
ancestors where the love of language is real and approaches, always, the automtic).
Emily Dickinson speaks of "A mute of Ehmnescence...A
35 ; Marianne Moore writes,
~ochineal"
Y e s l i g h t is speech. Free frank
impartial sunlight, m n l i g h t ,
s t a r l i g h t , liqh ouse l i g h t ,
are language.
%
Rushof
--and of course Whitman, i n "A Song of the Rolling Earth," sings out:
I swear I begin t o see l i t t l e or nothing i n audible words,
A l l merges toward the presentation of the unspoken rrreanings of
the earth 37
This, then, is what autcanatic writing proposes t o achieve:
t o supply in the
act of writing the intermdiary and f o m r l y unrecognized step wherein the deep
structure can be revealed in spite of its awkward and ambiguous manifestation
in the surface structure. 38 "If the depths of our mind contains within it
strange forces capable of augn-mting those on the surface, o r of waging a
victorious battle against them," writes Breton in the f i r s t manifesto, "there
is every reason t o seize them.... It 39
*
*
*
W e have already spoken (with reference t o the r a p of figurative
language) of Surrealism's automatic fusion of conscious but disparate realities-that is of r e a l i t i e s or images forcibly thruwn together i n the surface structure
of language.
But we need now t o s t a t e hm such a connection hints a t or c a t ~ s
to mirror the unconscious dream,
of language.
the deep structure embedded in the 'thought'
It is the connective force--the energy behind the "howl," so t o
speak--pushing these conscious imges together that is of vital importance here.
It is t h i s connective force which causes the marvelous rape of cmscious ex-
pression, which turns t h a t insipidly benign mtaphor into sawthing far less
conventional, f a r m r e radically open t o discourse.
words, does discourse become truly maningful.
Only here, between the
Again we must agree with
brleau-Ponty when he says,
A s f a r as language is cmcerned, it is the l a t e r a l relation
of one sign t o another which rrakes each of them significant,
so that maning appears only a t the intersection of and
a s it were i n the interval between words.... Since the sign
has neaning only i n so f a r as it is profiled against
other signs, its rneaning is entirely involved in language
Like a charade, language is understood only through the
interaction of signs, each of which, taken separately, is
equivocal or banal, and rnakes sense only by being d i n e d
w i t h others. 40
....
The forum of canbination Pkrleau-Ponty speaks about is indeed what Herbert
*adr
i n talking of Surrealism, describes a s the "hallucinatory r e a l i t y of the
poem. "41
It is, f u r t h e m r e , the area of true dr-
s u r r e a l i s t poetics.42 W e irmgine a hyphen t o exist
(even c r i s i s ) in the
~~ these disparate
images coming together across the surface of language; a hyphen which acts
out a kind of t a c i t signification of the crisis lying amidst and becanscious word-signs.
the
And this imaginary hyphen, mreover, is nothing short
of t h e mst marvelous f a c t of all s u r r e a l i s t poetry:
pointing t o t h e embdded dream.
it is in f a c t an arrow
But h m can we p l i t e l y and consciously speak
of the hyphen since not only does it involve the impropriety of rape but it
a l s o leaves no visible trace? Because it is not representational, because it
i s n o t given a fixed position in time and space, because it is not i t s e l f
it is--nonetheless--a
Yet
functioning of "the other side of the logical decor."
L e t us put it t h i s way.
structure of a language.
Time and space are fixed notions i n the surface
But because any two k g e s joined i n Surrealism
by an imaginary hyphen are necessarily disparate, o r d i s t a n t , t h e i r caning
together produces an abstraction fran t h and space, o r from the f i x i t y of
the surface structure.
This is t o say that before the joining the images
represent two separate, fixed things i n a language; after they are ccanbined
they b e m , i n the combination, u t t e r l y devoid of a representational and
referential value.
For exanple, we might think of the images "blind" and
I
I
l
a fixed signpost in the language--because of t h i s inscrutability we can only
refer t o it as a functioning outside the closed logic of time and space.
I
I
I
'tchairw (I t r u s t the reader w i l l believe m when I say 1 choose these images
ccgnpletely a t rand--autamatically):
chair."
put together they becorrre a "blind
F u r t h e m r e , we can
A non-representational image has been produced.
sense t h a t an imaginary hyphen n m l i e s beheen the two o r i g i n a l m r d s .
More
i n p r t a n t l y still, the conscious logic which previously existed f o r both
"blind" and "chair" has becom unfixed i n t h and space--an abstraction,
a 'distraction' from concrete r e a l i t y :
we simply cannot see a blind chair
occupying any point i n space a t any time. And yet, a t the same the, it must
be admitted t h a t the caning together of the two signs does occupy an abstract
time and space, simply because we can conceive o f , o r 'dream up', such a
dination.
There is a new logic born here, a l b e i t a much f i n e r logic (one
~ a u t r 6 a m n taccords t o the poet 43)
W e can only conclude t h a t it is the logic
of the unconscious, o r the deep structure.
To further i l l u s t r a t e
t h i s point, we might r e c a l l the "wild minutes" of Lamantia's poem i n the
previous chapter, and our a l l u s i m t o DaLi.
as a mtal picture--as
I f we now think of such an image
a depiction of a freely mving tim and space, an
openness, o r a funnel--we can see t h a t out of the closed sense of the surface
structure a new r e a l i t y has been shaped and mlded.
Likewise., we are forced
to conclude t h a t t h a t r e a l i t y is the double of the autcsnatic mind which has
produced it--it is t h e dream.
In this way, then, Reverdy's aesthetic involving
the juxtaposition of the two d i s t a n t realities becaws the f u n d m t a l ethic
underlying s u r r e a l i s t poetry in a l l its manifestations.
In the words of
Octavio Paz, "the poet does not copy r e a l i t y , he produces
Michel Butor, for example, produces o r r e i n v e n t s r e a l i t y in
bmn")
.
( j u s t as
his
"~oweau
Piherever ordinary, banal q u a l i t i e s which n o m l l y represent r e a l i t y
in the fixed sense are inverted by the c r i s i s of an unfixed tine and space--
all
it the arrowhead of the imaginary hyphen--an underlying r e a l i t y must
dramatically and explosively errerge.
!!?he "imaginary," a s Breton states, "is
what tends t o becaw the r e a l . "45
So i n essence it is the imagination alone, signifying the abstraction
from the and space, which rapes the seeming distance lying between r e a l i t i e s
prceived with the autanatic mind--like the realities, "escape was a door,"
"sperm ran high that year," and " l i f e goes on gathering wool" from Larriantia' s
"Inside The Journey" where we started this point.
And equally, it is the sam
imgination automatically triggered which, i n - t u r n , points t o the l a t e n t dream
residing in the unconscious:
and 'life-wool'.
the collective sense of 'escape-door',
'sperm'
For when the poet automatically o r instinctually associates
images one with the other he is, i n fact, using his bagination (a
- priori)
to look beyond the rational and i n t o the dream where a l l r e a l i t y is t r u l y rooted,
'
I
upheld and t i e d i n a marriage.
!!?hepoint a t which imagination i t s e l f begins
is therefore remved •’ran ordinary mindfulness and the subsequent temporal and
s p a t i a l rationalizatians which c m a f t e r and impose themselves upon the
experience of i n i t i a l thought (the deep structure). Lamantia notes this too
in "Inside The Journey" where he says:
In another time, I was W i n g blcbeprints f o r the Eternal, but
the work was interrupted by sans ogre who jumped out fran behind
a slab of magenta sky
...
-
.
.
And t h a t is not the mst of it--for
.
I took a look i n t o the great
vacuum of this world, in order t h a t the journey in space of that l i f e
t h a t puts F + w t o s h e . . .would terminate a t the junction where
I might be able t o m e wkile in a s t a t e of suspended animation,
since i f I did not move in t h e vacuum the vacuum would m v e within
rre. And this mvemnt...would only lead t o my ejection f r m t h i s
world. 46
The only distance t h a t t r u l y e x i s t s , in other words, is the distance between
latency and its manifestation--the conscious and the unconscious, the "vacuum"
of the self and the "vacuum" of the world; and it is a distance bridged,
I
I
I
I
finally, by the poetic imagination interceding as the a u t a ~ t i cplacen-ent of
abstract tim and space amidst and betwen the conjunction of disparate images.47 The logic of such an intercession, it bears repeating, is a fine one;
in view of its going beyond the m e representational and into the abstract.
mt
it is nonetheless r e a l and goes t o the heart, or should w say t o the
muth of thought.
One would do w l l t o note carefully here the words of Octavio
Paz: "One of the cardinal functions of poetry is t o shuw the other side, the
wnders of everyday l i f e :
the world."
not poetic i r r e a l i t y . b u t the prodigious reality of
48
Hopefully, w have now sham h w the juxtapositions of images cut
across the surface of language; and further, haw autmtism--as the vehicle
for poetic abstractim--is able t o point i n the direction of the dream.
But w e
have yet t o explore the v i t a l i t y of this notion of unfixed tine and space, t o
see h w and why it is rooted in the poet's unconscious.
We have yet t o explore
the poet's instinctual awareness of it as a part of the language of the Real
(that is, the collective Real of speaker and hearer i n a language, of writer
and reader).
Roger Shattuck puts us on the right track where he says the
''mxle of juxtaposition offers new resources for paying attention t o what has
always been therew4';
and Eluard too where he writes,
" [in] his adolescence
mn is obsessed by the nostalgia of h i s childhood; i n his maturity, by the
nostalgia of h i s youth; i n old age, by the bitterness of having lived.
The
poet's images grw out of s o ~ t h i n gt o be forgotten and scmthing t o be rambered.ll5'
To put it quite simply, t h i s process of forgetting and renemhering
the 'prodigious reality1 of the world, this process which a f t e r a l l produces
the poetry is one which Surrealism seems t o draw f r m again and again.
It is
M i e d i n the f u l l e s t sense i n Jungls w11 known expression, the "collective
The collective unconscious can perhaps be described as the true area
of imaginative thought lying like a cloud-belt im&iately over the deep
structure; an area which gives meaning and license t o the notion of individual
consciousness, or selfhood (the inner man as opposed t o man-in-the-world), and
which carries that s e l f h o d f r m the deep structure up t o the surface, where,
unfortunately for man, it has become l o s t i n the a r t i f i c e of representational
language.
Hence the desire the poet seeks t o understand by his voyage into
the unconscious, into the bcrwels of the deep structure, is the 'desire for
selfhood' (the marvelous union of the inner-dream with the outer world).
And it is for this reason too t h a t Breton, for one, is not stumbling when he
offhandedly states,
I have had occasion t o use surreally words whose maning I have
forgotten. I w a s subsequently able t o verify that the way i n
which I had used them corresponded perfectly w i t h t h e i r
definition. This would lead one t o b e l i e ~ 5 ~ t h we
a t do not
"learn," that a l l w ever do is "relearn".
It can be said, then, that by appealing t o this inherent sense of the
"collective unconscious" the surrealist pet allaws himself--by seeing his self
a u t ~ ~ n a t i c a l l yi n, the unfixed images he produces--to becane engaged i n the
universal thought; he a l l m himself--and again takes it as his unassailable
right--the luxury of disengaging h i s conscious sense •’ram the inevitable
mbiguity which comes of the linguistic expression of that universal thought.
For the surrealist poet attempts, finally, t o fatham the desire of selfhood
by reaching further than ever before, by reaching so deeply as t o tap the
collective experience which hugs it like a v e i l (or as Arp says, ' t o disturb
the pure dream' )
.
By expanding the r e a l i t i e s of the images he -uses, and by
uniting the distant form which are mere impressions a t the conscious level,
the poet can therefore attempt to locate the superreal and uniform source of
a l l such images--indeed of all images he is capable of imagining.
As Jung
notes, "the artist does not follaw an individual impulse, but rather a current
of l i f e which a r i s e s not directly •’ran consciouness but f m the collective
unconscious of the &em
psyche. "52 Insofar a s he is following the collective
current, we might add, the poet is led t o the seat of his desire i n s e l f i d ;
he understands himself, in t h i s sense, as an Edenist--the world having b e m
his poem. 53 And i f he is able t o put this 'collective l i f e ' i n t o words and
h g e s by a u t m t i c a l l y appealing t o thought the poet w i l l have overccme the
prcblem of mindfulness which has continually held back (because it w i l l always
insist on rationalizing) the fundarrental truths of the dream, and therefore,
finally, of consciousness i t s e l f , of man and world.
The "collective unconscious," then, is a kind of s e d h t which need
be brouFpIt up, f o r it houses the eternal s e l f - o r rather, anchors it a t a
m v e f ran ordinary mindfulness.
(Lamantia puts the question : "How much
sand f l o a t s in the teacup of your dreams..."54)
It must be revealed, says the
poet, by chance:
I w a n t t o play fanatically over your daylight
see the thunder-bridge return t o t h e font
and bring you t o where the dream emnates
through the paper-shackling r e a l i t y
f u l l optics
drenched w i t h the juice of chance55
And it must be revealed too by alchemy (as the poet crosses the fixed bound-
aries of time and space t o re-enter the world of thought):
I'm writing this from l o s t Atlantis
I wonder when I ' l l get back
t o the alchemical c a s t l e
where I can rebegin my work 56
l e f t off i n the Middle Ages
These a r e the f u n m t a l purposes t o which the s u r r e a l i s t ' s techniques are
put; these explorations of the collective unconscious being the raisons d 1 6 t r e ,
me p&
behind t h e i r invention.
The fresh values created by the encounter
of distant r e a l i t i e s are values which lead t o a new formation of attitudes
concerning consciousness.
No longer i s consciousness Limited t o conscious
reason, wherein the a l t e r ego policies the s e l f , but it is the universal expression of selfhood-the
self which moves in all things, which exists i n a l l things
and by which a l l things create its existence, its t o t a l consciousness.
What
a history is folded, folded inward and inward again, in the single word I,"
said Whitman in his ~ r i r r e r57
. Postmdernism h e now, w i t h poets like Lamantia,
c m t o place that "I" i n language as an image mving up •’ran the sedirtlent into
the muth of thought. 58 Again, it is lorca' s "duende" one ought t o recall :
the sound of desire, of the "I" disclosed out of the abstraction of history.
Lamantia thus writes froan his Mount Parnassus:
The gull flew by wires and stones on whatmythos b u i l t
I think of you, Land of Weir
my house of water on the hill
my dreams in a naked ~ r a w d ~ ~
Dramatically, in t h i s poetry "the 'I' always points to an 'us'....
,Go
But it seems we are really discussing an idea that predates the notion
of the collective unconscious; and not only an idea but the very well-spring
of all avant-garde poetry as it mves (as Paz, for one, contends) in a continuity of under-the-real language from F&mmticism t o the postxmdern.
the " p e t r y of correspondences" that we are really talking about:
It is
the cor-
respndence of forms moving backward and forward throughout historical t k .
The "I" of the poem opens always t o the collective truth; not as a fixed form
but an unfixed one, continuously alive.
Nowhere m r e than here does poetry
open a discourse--beyond that of philosophy--in the direction of the absolute.
It is i n this sense, surely, that Spicer can write ;in a l e t t e r t o the dead
mrca that "Things do not connect; they correspond.
That is what makes it
possible for a poet t o translate real objects, t o bring them across language
as easily as he can bring them across time....
That is hcrw we dead rren write
to each other. "61 W c a l l t h i s the poetry of disclosure, that "Between t m
r e a l i t i e s one can always find an aspect of similitude. "62 ~tis also the
'point s u b l b ' of Breton, "the meeting place for a l l
...linkings and relation-
ships.. ."63; "the place a t once abstract and precise, where a l l the contraries
are identified, that is, a mtaphoric 'double' of surrealist poetry in its
mst subtle, d i f f i c u l t , illogical state. 1'64 And it must
be stressed here
as
well, of course, t h a t the language of f o r m l i s t poetry cannot hope t o deliver
the "I" of selfhood since it sees history i n terms of a fixed tim and space.
I
I
I
Above all, i n t h i s mtaphoric double situated i n the prodigious reality of
a continually disclosing history l i e s the desire of that eternal "I1'of p e t r y
disclosing its essential truth.
W i t h h i s poem "Correspondences"--which is doctrinal t o Symbolisre-we can f e e l
The f i r s t
two stanzas of "Correspmdencesl' are offered here as they are particularly
germane :
Nature is a temple where living p i l l a r s
Let s o m t k s errerge confused words;
Man crosses it through forests of symbols
Which watch him with intimate eyes.
Like prolonged echoes mingling f a r away
i n a unity tenebrous and profound,
vast as the night and as the limpid day,
p e r f m ~ s ,sounds, and colors correspond. 65
I
I
In the l a s t century Baudelaire took note of t h i s sense of desire.
such a poetry of disclosure about t o mve forward into Surrealism.
I
I
Wallace Fawlie explains the import of such a correspondence in which the world
housing man is seen a s a fundamenhl unity--beyond the confines of t i n e and
space :
The s u r r e a l i s t e x p e r k t is the mst recent way (and
the mst ancient a s w e l l ) of reconciling man with the
universe.... The a c t of writing f o r the poet was always the
a c t of discovering the unity of the world, and there the
s u r r e a l i s t s have fervently perpetuated the lesson of
Baudelaire. For Baudelaire and the s u r r e a l i s t s , the
inngination is not s-ly
t h a t faculty of the poet which
creates and combines images. It is the faculty which goes
much m r e deeply, in the discovery of the ancient belief i n
the world's unity. It is the faculty able t o c a l l upon
the subconscious forces which r e l a t e this belief. 66
This brings us a t l a s t t o Paz who is perhaps the f i r s t really t o note
the m o v a m ~ tof the disclosing "I" from the Romantics t o the present and who
t a l k s about living the poem (as an analogue of continuous tinw3):
This belief [that the pcet creates a personal mythology out
of the fragmnts of philosophies and religions] is the
true religion of rmlern poetry, fran Romanticism t o Surrealism,
but more
and it appears i n a l l poets, s o ~ t i x e s*licitly
often explicitly. I am talking a b u t 'analogy'. The
belief i n correspondences between a l l beings and worlds
predates Christianity, crosses the Middle Ages, and, through
Neoplatonism, illuminism, and occultism, reaches the nineteenth
century. Since then, secretly o r openly, it has never f a i l e d
t o nourish western poets, from Gcethe t o Balzac, •’ran
t o Yeats and Pessoa.
Baudelaire and Mall&
Analogy outlived paganism and w i l l probably outlive
was the
Christianity and contemporary scientism.
principle before a l l principles, before the reason of
I f analogy
philosophies and the revelation of religions
turns the universe i n t o a poem, a text mde up of oppositions
which becorne resolved in correspondences, it also makes
the poem a universe. Thus, we can read- the universe, we can
live the p m . 6 7
... e ~ t ]
....
The tradition Paz speaks about (and which he c a l l s "other") finds its present
realization especially i n a poet l i k e L m t i a .
In a poem l i k e "The Ancients
Have Returned Among U s , " f o r example, we see the sense of t h i s collective
experience expressed by the Word of the poet disclosing not the f i x i t y of the
past but a duplicity w h i c h opens t o the present.
Lamantia is being careful
here t o note that h i s language does not, cannot, close off that which is l o s t ,
that which is to be regained by an idealistic returning.
On the contrary,
he is noting the v i t a l i t y of the hnguage autamatically a t his disposal: a
v i t a l i t y which keeps the vision ever present, which returns the p r b r d i a l t o
the voice of poetry--where it belongs--as a living reality.
The only r e a l
return t o be made is the return t o the double sense of language where the
'shadm' i s drawn forward from the text: a retym, even, as Paz puts it,
"...to
the original source of language, t o the m m n t when speaking is synonymus
with creating."68
It is the duplicity of language, finally, that reveals the
universal, or the collective, as the "ordinary":
THE ANCIENTS HAVE FZ3WW3D
AmNG
us
in a way humning t h r u crystals of light--most unexpected
the ancients sizzle and dazzle
not as we imagined nor can put our machines t o nor
make comprehensible by words o r songs or mtaphors
The ancients have truly returned t o us
and have unfurled flags of sudden Cloud Rings
from rivers crossing the mst ordinary streets
.
I can hear the ancients from the muth of
fog & dazzling wind sonatas beloved of hunchback adepts
& dimmbered mumnies whose Living Light
crackles from the diapason of This Constant Present Mawnt
.
The ancients have returned
unfurl repeatedly into your Ear the s c r o l l
of living legends, the talk of multiplying flowers
foanrtd over books without words i n libraries
b u i l t by f i r e to the laboratory that dissolves
constantly into an ocean of anti-matter
Truly the wisdm of the ancients is written everywhere you can
not see it and
secreted nowhere other than through the tachygraph
under the cascade of capillary muntains
forever registered before this instant gave birth
its opposite which is snaking beyond the distance
betwen you and I mnman & opal of the sun
&
their music played f r m buzz & bleats
you can not hear except through periscopes
s e t d m m n g vascular whales
mating froan the c r i s i s of rock & shale under
the disappearing a t l a n t i s of corn cultures &
reappearing before the wheat altars on
the plains of the westem wind & western winter froan
which the words & l e t t e r s were handed d m
the elevators of Tomrrow over the Deluge
the great night giant sends us today by blood-lined
cups..
.
Cups the legends reveal & the ancients
are beginning t o pass around as i f they were ordinary
m i l k bottles for the children newly born frcm
top
- branches of the Tree with its roots
going back
69
t o the starfields of Every Night.
"Analogy" says Paz, "conceives of the world as rhythm:
corresponds because everything f i t s together and rhyms
and analogy are but n-s
for lniversal rhythm."'l0
everything
.... Correspondence
Chle feels t h i s sense of
rhythm throughout surrealist poetry--by the very correspondence of the lines,
not t o m t i o n the analogies s e t up in their meanings:
a celebration of
those who give themselves up t o the essence of a l l
things
ignorant of surfaces but struck by the mvement of
a l l things
flesh of the flesh of the world pumping with the very
m m t of the world (Ai& Cesaire) 71
Here i n the poetry of correspondences we feel and hear, out of a
doubling language, the rhythm of p r h r d i a l objects i n tune with the luminous
sounds of man's desire; the found-object, perhaps, discovered in the ordinary,
in the present illuminated by the Word.
So, i n the following lines Lamantia sees the wind as mtaphorical
agent mving through the universal consciousness, carrying with it the cloudLike memry of collective
' sense ' :
Always the wind bears the breasts of the bottcm stairway
L e t us enter the wind's murrsny as i f it were not less than
Genius....l;et this pass through the pharaonic knot prepared
in the ccn-ununal future where the winds s h a l l unlatch all
the leaves .72
....
reo over, the wind beccms its am song--since it too is a part of this collective expression. (Bretan writes:
prf-
"The lucid wind c a r r i e s t o me the l o s t
of existence/At last freed f r m its limits..
Or to put it another
my, in this poetics mtaphor is loosed t o the automatic and constantly conveys
rreaning, which i s t o say it "corresponds."
"What/Is this song swallmed up&
dusk i n the haunted wood," asks Aragon. 74 I t . is the universal larent, the song
of the collective m r y mde ordinary and ever present (Impold Bloam's
"love's old sweet song" carried through and against the discordant voices of
night-tam).
It is carried, noiselessly, in "the l i p s of the air" ( L m t i a ) :
No wonder the night is m a r e d with ectoplasm
eagle's blood f l w s over t h e planets
and we c a s t a s p e l l f o r seven hawks t o f l y out of the m n
t h a t silence may prevail
t o s o startle the noisy villagers
for us t o hear the songs t h a t break
from the l i p s of t h e air 75
The song, as the ultimate found-object, draws the fettered self--the s e l f
fettered by language--back t o i t s source i n the collective unconscious which
antecedes selfhood
...a u t m t i c a l l y :
We have cane t o a place where the nightingales sleep
We are f i l l i n g up the oceans and the plains
with the old images of our phosphorescent bones (Lartlantia)76
This universal lmt speaks i n its primitive tones, speaks a priori
77
("Prenatal plagiarism'' Mina Loy calls it )
It is delivered s t r a i g h t f r m
the psyche of the poet who has divorced himself f r m the a r t i f i c e of mindfulness.
Humanity is t i e d i n correspondence with the universal s e l f , reveal&
through the marvelous.
And t h i s t r u l y is the sense of the marvelous revealed
50
in rmmry,
md engaged; the sense of the m e l o u s - - t h e r e a l l along-contained
mving i n cansciousness f r m the seat of existence, mving the hunwl sensibility
by engaging its b g i n a t i m :
Aurora the c a t of the morning
has sent a message of a e r i a l f i r e
whose n m b r is water & abyss of the bone
whose age is always about t o becam and
has always been no less than t k
We can play host t o the marvelous
and have it burn us t o the s a l t of rmmry
where an invisible stone contracts a l l thought
t o draw out the words
that s h a l l crackle your sleep
to wake us up beyond the Pleiades78
Thus Lamantia m s , inevitably, t o deliver the
c ~ m n a n ~of
t shis
Sur-
realism i n collective terms, as an active and meaningful presence, a unified
structure of thought in which man and world correspond; c c x r m n m t s which
bum i n t o the rock-face
the nam of An&
(is the "Mason's Wrd" here an unconscious play on
Masson?) :
And the sea moved over the terrace i n t o my marble stomach
that I saw the c l e f t on the rock disclose the Mason's Word
what am I sa ing t h a t my l i p s might be burned by
angels & sirens?
...Ah,
S
Finally, it seems t h a t although Surrealism is generally irreverent about
any and all orthodoxy, its o c c u l t i s t nature seems t o require t h a t i n the
expression of pure thought the poet's alchemical imagination is pre-destined
to create order out of chaos, t o supply t h e chart whereby the pattern of the
collective identity might be revealed i n t a c t , and below it the marvelous-the desire f o r selfhood consum~teda t l a s t .
Here Lies, says L a r ~ n t i a ,the
opium dream a t the center of consciousness, beyond icon
per se and
further than the 'desire' t o decipher what the icon represents:
y e t no
!
51
A l l the images of Jesus were slapped together like I s r a e l
And all was cool in the opium fields80
3.
THE DIALECTIC OF THE WINDOiWPANE
"Shuttle-cock and battle-door
A l i t t l e pink-love"
Michael Benedikt has quite rightly suggested t h a t "the subject matter
[of ~ u r r e a l i s n 3is not so much the objects involved as the poet's treahrent
of t h a n , which is as ' id&
fixes, ' i n the sense of erotic obsessions.
With no
m r e facetiousness than the Surrealist himself would court, one might say
that the lover's s t a r e and the poet's style are related, the lover's acts and
the a c t of p c e t q corresponding. " l Indeed, a l l surreal objects are fixed ideas,
in the sense that they sit i n the muth of consciousness.
Wreover, because
they are themselves the discernible 'matter' of,which pure thought is ccsnposed
-
(a priori) and because such objects are too wild, too a u t c k ~ t i c a l l ygiven to
have ever figured in conscious elcperience they have a fundanentally p r k r d i a l value.
Thus the poet loves them.
Thus he b e m s i n the name of his
'ob-jectst--in the t r e a t n m t of them (the word made flesh)--the lover mving
through language t o deliver these straight out of t h e i r latency and up into
the free air of consciousness in order that t h i s obsession for themmay be
realized.
It follaws, then, that the m v m t into and out of the dream is
p r k i l y an erotic one--and even m r e , t h a t it is in a mst f u n d m t a l way
onanistic.
Whatever image the surrealist finds there, it is a l l the same:
as Lanantia says, it is "the worship that counts."'
This alchemical pcet
is in truth involved in aworship that transforms objects f i t 0 recognizable
shapes, shapes by which the poet regains sight of the consciousness in which
he and his thought-objects had been divorced.
This is (as Tan Fblfe has
popularized the phrase) "the shock of recognition" the poet feels.
It is the
mawelous shock of seeing in his objects the quintessential realization of
h i s old desire for selfhood.
We have continually stressed the element of "desire" without which
Surrealism would be s t a t i c indeed (we shall yet caw t o the m m n t where
Artaud and Breton s p l i t the hairs of Surrealism, nearly ravaging its desire).
me term goes far beyond 'longing' t o find its acute value in the marvelous.
mving said this much, however, the difficulty of closer definition becaws
t&armrk
t o expropriating the term in the nam of clinical psychoanalysis.
" ~ e s i r e "has t o do, for example, with Duchaxp's nude descending the staircasefor, i f not i n so many words, a l l nudes descent into the depths of t h e i r selfhood, a l l nudes are led by a desire for the realization of consciousness.
But
h m , or i n what images, is this desire mst effectively expressed? After much
searching we are led back t o the obvious, back t o the s u b l k l y occult-like
sense of spirituality which characterizes a l l Surrealism.
W e are led, as
Breton says, t o "love i n which the obsessive ideas of salvation and the damnation of the s p i r i t blend and mrge, for the supreme edification of man";
we are led t o "turn tmard those who are not afraid t o conceive of love as
the s i t e of ideal occultation of all thought. l g 3
beyond sentiment t o the image o f l ' ~ a d j a"4,
We are led, in a word,
t o the continual temptation of
'soul' i n the poetics where s p i r i t and sexuality are made whole by the poet's
copulation w i t h pure thought.
flesh:
This is the maning of Nadja, the image made
t o copulate with the occult dimnsions of historical t k , the
heavenly and the profane; t o copulate with Nadja, the soulful embodimat of
human loss and anbiguity, t o s-ge
oneself i n wholeness w i t h the tragedy
and ccknic farce of the humn conditim and thereby t o elevate the soul discovering birth i n death and majesty i n human debasemnt.
What poet does
not have his Nadja? By these t e r n , the surreal Lamantia has three, namd
Bianca, Jeanlu and L u l .
A s for Bianca, she is the personification of the soul-
ful experience of selfhood, sublime and outraged, mystical (beyond objective
tirre and space) and accessible only through poetry:
BIANCA
She is turning
w i t h the charm of a bird
i n t o two giant l i p s
and I am now f a l l i n g i n t o the goblet of suicide
she is the f i r s t w c g ~ nand f i r s t man
and I am l o s t i n the search t o have her
S
I am looking beyon the hour and the day
t o find you BIANCA
mis
figure, this pure f o m , is an i n t r i n s i c part of the poet's psyche.
than ego, she functions a s a transparency t o the poet's selfhood:
of glass lying between his conscious and unconscious worlds.
More
the sheet
She is the " l i t t l e
pink-love," a s Mina Loy puts it, acting as shuttle-cock between the two worlds:
Shuttle-cock and battle-door
A l i t t l e pink-love
And feathers a r e strewn 6
The conscious and unconscious worlds are, as we have said, both by
logic and experience f a r removed. ("This is the distance between IW and what
7
I see," says Lamantia. ) Here we have the root-source of man's pain: his
distance from selfhood, from the desire t o be whole.
W t i a ' s , then, we take "man" t o read
I n the following poem of
conscious' and his "double" t o read
the 'unconscious' o r 'dream' :
Y m is in pain
ten bright b a l l s bat the air
f a l l i n g through the window
on which his double leans a net the air rnade
t o catch the ten bright b a l l s
Man is a roam
where the malefic hand turns a knob
on the unseen unknown double's door
Man is i n pain
with h i s navel hook caught on a stone quarry
where ten bright b a l l s chose t o land
AND where the malefic hand carves
on gelatinous a i r THE WINDOW
t o slam shut on h i s shadcrw's tail
I
Ten bright balls bounce into the unseen
unknown double's net
Man is a false window
through which his double walks t o the truth
t h a t f a l l s as ten bright balls
the malefic hand tossed into the air
Man is i n pain
ten bright spikes nailed t o the door! 8
w v e r much aspects of t h i s poem elude paraphrase, a stanza by stanza accounting of events would read as f o l l m s .
Underneath man, and where he cannot see
it, the unconscious double is conjuring balls in the a i r .
Stanza two describes
the r e a l i t y of the "malefic hand" opening the door t o the dream ('malefic' t o
m because he does not know it). In stanza three, man is tied by the Lnnbilical
cord t o only half of reality, the conscious half; here the conjuror's balls
have landed, having appeared out of thin air, as it were, and dropped i n man's
lap (much t o his horror and surprise) ; reality (the malefic hand) then replaces
the door which separated the conscious and unconscious worlds--and which presurrably kept man happy in h i s illusion that his conscious world alone was a l l
of reality--with a window (man can now view h i s double i n the unconscious).
Stanza four:
the balls now drop back into the unconscious world whence they
came and m is able t o view the spectacle; he becaws h i s own windm naw,
seeing into his unconscious.
Stanza five:
the vision has been too terrifying
and man reinvests the door i n place of the window, nailing it shut; he prefers
t o l i v e in the illusion that he is master of his own house, thus crucifying
himself.
The "mssage" of the poem is clear:
it is i n man's awn best in-
terests t o arouse himself t o the f a c t that he inhabits two worlds.
In order
t o find h i s salvation he must effectively mrge them.
Such a mrging, of course, can com only w i t h the rejection of mindfulness, by stripping off the logic of the upper world ("the sky i s pealing its
9
skin off!" says Lammtia
The poet therefore begins, i n effect, t o look
).
frm the conscious world tmard the dream--much as "a landscap looks through
a window"1•‹ (are we not reminded of Magritte? 11)
.
H i s purpose is t o capture
effectively the transparent pose of one world opening t o its double, where the
81you'1and " q s e l f " are merged, as Lamantia says, by love:
FLm
As I
As I
As I
a windw I see the w r l d
would see love
would see you
would see myself
This act of vision
Is an a c t of love 12
For, again, it is t o 'Nadja' t h a t the surrealist is drawn (to "the vaginal
s h o p ~ i n d o w s " ~ ~As
) . the painter and poet, Arp, had put it:
Tkis world i s simply the curtain coxealing the true
mise-en-s&e of the eternal spectacle .I4
Aware of the restrictive social logic that codifies human desire, the sur-
realist equally realizes he can only c m t o h i s Nadja by chance (Lamantia:
"So much for poetic prosodic bullshit/images crawl under this s l i c e of windowpane"15)
.
The prcblem he encounters here, and which he must resolve, is the
dialectical problem of t h i s windowpane,
this sheet of glass lying neatly
between the outer and inner worlds of rational experience and superrational
desire.
Breton recalls a particular phrase that occurred t o him in a dream
in 1919 : "In truth, t h i s phrase astonished E;
I have not, unfortunately,
remakered it t o this day, but it was smething like:
in two by the windm'
'There is a ran cut
.... 16
I'
A discursive note seems as necessary as it is unavoidable here, since
he have nm c m upon t h a t which is the very dynamic of a l l surrealist thought
I
58
and activity; u p t h a t which gives the juxtapositions discussed in the preceding
chapter t h e i r essential maning, t h e i r c r i s i s , t h e i r fundamntal e l a s t i c i t y
and resolve.
W e have already encountered-in
e f f e c t i f not in name--what one
c r i t i c has called the "basic double center" of Surrealism:
"reality and dream,
presence and absence, identity and distance, intimacy and loneliness, unity and
m l t i p l i c i t y , continuity and discontinuity, language and silence, mobility and
irmobility, c l a r i t y and obscurity, and so on. "17 In this chapter then, and the
one following, it b e c m s incumbent upon us t o realize t h a t the double center
referred t o here is t h a t which employs a mtamrphic relationship between a
perceiver and the object perceived:
such t h a t one beccms less certain of the
distance between the two, while a t the s m t h one is less hesitant in
calling t h a t distance the true area of the dream i t s e l f .
("Do you o c c a s i ~ n a l l y
wonder a t the/ inscrutable nature of visual experiences, an undeniable and f a r
f r m optcmtrical/ distance?"18) A s the language opens t o receive this foreshortening distance, mreaver, we s h a l l find s u r r e a l i s t poetry enter the
absolutism we have been hinting a t a l l along.
But t o do this we must turn our
attention t o what Herbert Read c a l l s " t h i s dreaded word d i a l e c t i c "19: the
"machine" of Hegel's which Breton, in no uncertain terms, d r e w i n t o the chassis
of Surrealism:
.
The essential point is that a t r u l y unique summa of k m l e d g e
was put t o work in such a case [poetryf, and it was submitted
to the action of a machine which was then colnpletely new
since Hegel w a s the inventor of it, a machine whose p e r
has proved t o be unique: the d i a l e c t i c a l machine. I say t h a t
even t d a y it is Hegel whom w e must question about h w wellfounded o r ill-founded Surrealist activity i n the arts is.
H e alone can say whether this activity was predetermined in
time; he alone can teach us whether its future duration is
likely t o be masured in days or centuries. ["Surrealist
S i t u a t i m of the 0bject,"1935~
m e basic nature of Hegel's dialectic can be grasped easily enough.
Simply, any proposition o r doctrine cannot e x i s t without its negation--for
the kncrwledge of one implies an equal understanding of the other (eg. the Self
and the N o t Self, or Pure Being and Nothingness).
Y e t it f o l l w s m i a t e l y
that t o admit the co-existence of two such p o l d c a l l y uncomfortable doctrines
i n a state of temporary equilibrium--and we have already admitted it since
v.e can conceive of each--emphatically demnds sane s o r t of resolution be exacted on a higher plane.
Such a resolution, therefore, must take what i s es-
sential t o each of the original propositions (one thinks of their conceptual
l i f e , their deep structures), creating a third doctrine:
Being.
f o r example, Actual
What is operative here is that which Hegel appropriately enough c a l l s
the principle of opposition and interaction; the third doctrine cabining
the original thesis and its antithesis in a synthesis which, i n turn, mves
the dynamic of thought one step closer t o the ideal o r Absolute Mind--what
1
Hegel c a l l s "Geist. " The three propositions are now knawn as a triad.
However, w e soon enough find that the synthesis c q l e t i n g the t r i a d also has
its negation; that is, it beccms the thesis of a second t r i a d demanding its
resolution, as well, on a s t i l l higher plane.
Thus it is, Hegel argues, that
thought m e s i n an expanding series of triads •’ram the f i n i t e t o the infinite,
•’ran the inchoate t o the Absolute.
And thus it is also, as we can see, that
the ultimate unity of thought is dependent upon its remaining open t o the
perpetual change (opposition and interaction) which establishes its link t o
.
the Pure Mind (or "mouth" as Tzara defines it)
But for our purposes, con-
cerned as we are with the duplicity of poetic language, perhaps we are best
put i n the mood by one of Surrealism's "gnostic" heroes, who according t o one
c r i t i c "Breton claims...as
a surrealist dialectician.
...
lf21:
.
~eraclitus
In one of h i s oracular aphorisms, Heraclitus s t a t e s :
"The teacher of mst m
is ~ e s i o d . They think t h a t he knew very many things, though he did not understand day and night. For they are one. w22
Already we sense t h i s d i a l e c t i c in the poetry as it centers and pushes
forward the c r i s i s of its disparity.
I?UE
A t l e a s t inasmuch as Hegel starts w i t h
Being (or Identity) as h i s i n i t i a l thesis and mves toward the eventuality
of Pure Mind, we too, in r e s t r i c t i n g ourselves t o poetry, can see the concrete
mrd-image a s a s t r u c t u r a l identity pulling against the a n t i t h e t i c a l blankness
which surrounds and negates it; furthermre, w e can sense the d i a l e c t i c a l
validity where one disparate image is juxtaposed w i t h another producing i n
the blankness (the "imaginary hyphen") an unconscious synthesis of the fo&
and the unfomd.
Indeed, an Hegelian -tator
d i a l e c t i c a l process" says W a g g a r t , "...gains
by mans of a transcendent argument..
. If
helps us out here:
"The
its validity and importance
the lower C i e
. mre concrete o r
conscious3 categories be admitted, and ultimately, i f the 1-st
category of Being, be admitted, the rest f o l l m s t i e .
of a l l , the
that the Pure Being o r
identity of any image i s contained in the Absolute Idea by virtue of the
existence of Non Being--the hyphen--likewise equal t o
it3."23
Furthernore,
says MdIaggart (and again we follaw our analogy t o poetry), because the absolute
consciousness is a synthesis and not a denial of its lesser parts, we can see
a transcendent mvement necessarily merge from the lesser (ie. more sensuously
conscious) image :
...each laver category only e x i s t s as a mcanent of
the Absolute
Idea, and can therefore never by i t s e l f s a t i s f y the demands
of the mind. And, i n like manner, the world of pure thought
anly e x i s t s a s an abstraction from concrete r e a l i t y , so t h a t ,
granted pure thought, we are compelled by the necessity of
the d i a l e c t i c t o grant the existence of som sensuous int u i t i o n also. 24
There is, hcwever, a cautionary note which must be observed here before
can proceed effectively.
It derives both f m actual historical considera-
tims and f r m the curious and often blurred line which has separated philosophy and poetry throughout the ages.
W e must remaker two things:
that Sur-
realism's use of the dialectic is a f t e r all post-Marxian and, concOmitantly,
that surrealist poetry, both in its aims and its methods, is more of a reopening of social experience than a philosophical idea.
Breton's infatuation
with Hegel's dialectic coincides with his, Breton's, stormy love a f f a i r w i t h
the Ccamnxnist Party (circa 1928-38, from the Second manifesto t o the M i c a n
meting with Trotsky and the irreconcilable opposition t o "social realism''
encompassing the "Aragon affair" and many surrealist excomications--a11
of which cannot possibly be dealt with here).
This means t h a t the dialectic
of Hegel's--which is a f t e r all a logical dynamic--is t o be turned around 180
degrees (just as Marx and Engels turned Hegel upside-down) i n order t o become
an experiential dynamic, that is i n order t o coincide with Surrealism's aims
as they were firmly established i n the f i r s t rmifesto:
Surrealism's distrust
of logic and the "idea" and the placing of the automatic and the mawelous
h g e i n t h e i r favour has been abundantly noted.
Thus we must caution that
Hegel's Absolute Mind or "Geist"--the result of a highly systematic logical
synthesis--becms replaced as a goal by the "marvelous" i t s e l f functioning as
the synthesis of man and world caning about via the experience of language,
or rather via the experience of the reality of language as a duplicity.
The
estranged features of language are united ipso facto.
Our second point, then, concerning the distinction between poetry and
philosophy thus follows.
Whereas philosophy can be said t o be the logical
pursuit of the mind, poetry is the event or the experience of a doubling
language.
But just as the duplicity of language can be seen t o open the mind
to &race
the dream alongside reason, poetry, i n the overview, can be seen
to open the philosophical idea t o the m e l o u s .
~tis in this way that Sur-
realism can be shawn t o have found an impetus i n Hegel; and in t h i s way too
that WE? can echo M a g g a r t by saying that each conscious image only exists as
a mnrtnt of the marvelous, and can therefore never by i t s e l f satisfy the dermnds
of language; and, in like manner, the world of pure thought only exists as an
abstraction •’ran the a-logical, so that, granted pure thought, w e are ccak
pelled by the necessity of the dialectic t o grant the existence of
sensuous intuition also.
soaru3
supra-
W e must agree, it seems, that the dialectical machine
which synthesizes the polarities of the mind is one that can be reproduced
poetically in order t o synthesize the polarities of language:
the philosophi-
cal mchine can be seen as the motivating force underlying the poetry.
The
dialectic of Hegel's which unites the thesis of Pure Being with its antithesis
(Nothingness) t o produce Actual Being as the i n i t i a l step tuward "Geist" or
Absolute Mind is not a t a l l dissimilar t o the surrealist mthcd of synthesizing the "glove" with the "formless glove" t o produce the surreal image of the
" ~ e l o u s , "one which poetically reconciles man and h i s world.
The dialectic therefore presents nothing we have not said i n the f i r s t
two chapters.
It m r e l y helps us t o articulate it in a m r e profound way.
In
order t o arrive a t full consciousness the poet must wed t o his extant conscious
experience h i s p r e e x i s t e n t unconscious desire; and further, that such a
synthesis is forced by the imaginary hyphen (the second-order language MerleauPonty talks about) acting as the negation o r antithesis t o the f i n i t e disparateness of conscious experience.
So the dialectic involved here is truly that
of reconstructing true and actual reality f r m the i n i t i a l identity, the Pure
In other words,
~eingness,of f i n i t e imges t o their f u l l unity in thought.
the mst mundane image existing as an expression on the surface of language
has, i n spite of a seeming insignificance in t e r n of its f i n a l resolve in
consciousness, a place i n that higher consciousness a l l along.
not recognize this place explicitly.
(Again, Waggart:
We simply do
"The Absolute Idea
is present t o us i n a l l reality, in a l l the phenomena of experience, and in our
am selves. Everywhere it is the soul of a l l reality.
But although it is
-always present t o us, it is not always explicitly present.
In the context of
~cnsciousnessit is present i ~ t @ i c i t l ~ . " * ~ Thus
)
the desire the poet feels t o
be i n tune with the duplicity of the Real--to be i n tune with language beyond
its seeming disparateness a t the conscious level--is the desire t o reconcile
all experience, both apparent and drearred; t h i s desire for selfhood emrging i n
the double-edge of poetic language being, i n short, the result of an imp1
dialectical synthesis.
Another Heigelian c r i t i c ,
KOjzve,
explains here :
...
Individuality i s a synthesis of the Paticular and the
Universal, the Universal being the negation or the antithesis of the Particular, which is the thetical given,
identical t o i t s e l f . In other words, Individuality is a
Totality , and q 6 b e i n g which is individual is, by this very
fact, dialectical.
But the thetical conscious and the unconscious which supports it and
gives it identity have no r e a l meaning when taken separately.
Rather, together
they make up the subjective man, the thesis--with the objective otherness of
the antithetical "hyphen" taking up the slack o r acting as a hinge t o the dream.
It is the unconscious, in other words, which allows the conscious t o recognize
otherness, for in the dream presides the fulcrum for equilibrium between subject at-$ object, forcing the synthesis between the cmscious and the disparateness of its expression in language.
.
A s ~ o j z v enotes:
as soon a s there is a Realitv of
What exists i n -realitv
since we in fact speak of r e a l k c
w h i c h one speaks--&
there can be f o r us only Reality of which one speaks--what
e x i s t s i n r e a l i t y , I say, is the Subject that haws the Object,
or, what is the sarre thing, the Object known by the Subject.
This double Reality which is nonetheless one because it is
equally r e a l i n each aspect, taken in its whole o r as Totality,
i s c a l P i n Hegel "Spirit" (Geist) o r (in the Logik) "absolute
Idea. I'
h?
SO the hyphen, we can see, plays a t r u l y important p a r t in the poetics: as
the negative power it forces the conscious t o "know" it--and t o becane whole
with the unconscious by t h a t knowledge.
Furthennore, we must also add, such a
transcendence leans taward the higher sense of otherness which is the doublesense, the f u l l e r sense of objective language;
"...by
ccanpleting one another,
the thesis and the antithesis get r i d of t h e i r one-sided and limited o r ,
better, (subjective) character, and a s synthesis they reveal a mre caprehen-
sive and hence a mre ccknprehensible aspect of the (objective) real. 1128
Therefore, the "relation of the thesis and antithesis derives its whole meaning from the synthesis, which follows them, and i n which the contradiction
ceases t o e x i s t a s such b e i n g on a higher plane3 .l12'
~mrvelous, then-which
The Absolute o r the
is infinite--can only be approximated by resolving the
opposingtendencies of the f i n i t e .
Thus by being "conscious" we admit the
hyphenated poetic i n t o our consciousness, and by consciously knowing t h a t
hyphen t o e x i s t i n experience i n f a c t we transcend the conscious and becare
closer t o the mawelous.
Indeed, a s Hegel s t a t e s it we can amst f e e l t h i s
hyphen slipping i n t o the consciousness l i k e a wedge, opening thought to the
eternal double language:
"We make ourselves f i n i t e by receiving an Other i n t o
our consciousness; but in the very f a c t of our knowing this Other we have
transcended this limitation. "30
'
W can naw me a return t o the poetry t o see h m Surrealism f o l l m s
a d i a l e c t i c and attempts t o force a synthesis expressive of the i n f i n i t e , the
-lous.
But f i r s t one f i n a l word:
the process, it must be r e m ~ k r e d ,
is always one of re-creation, of re-inventing the world; or rather of dialectically re-inventing what is already there, implicit i n the collective m r y .
~n this there is the openness t o re-construct continually.
We take our mark
frm the c r i t i c who writes,
The surrealist resolution within the realm of poetry, while
effective, is always t o be recreated, as the polarities
are always suffered or &served. The m m t of repose is
no mre habitable than the point s u b l k : " I t was never
a question of my living a t that point. From then on it
would have ceased t o be sublirre, and I h u l d have ceased t o
be a man," says Breton t o his daughter a t the endof L ' m u r
fou. Surrealist poetry is never s t a t i c : many of the poetic
procedures are definite vehicles whereby the poet is enabled
t o act out the play of opposites and r e s ~ l u t i o n . ~ ~
What, we are asking, is the dialectical issue involved i n this
"windaprle" acting as mtaphor of the condition between the inner and outer,
subjective man and man-in-the-world?
Very simply, it is this : the sheet of
glass, i n its transparency, grants a synthesis of the opposed worlds which
Lie on either side.
But the problem inherent in such a dialectic naturally
becorms one of perception alone, of seeing the temporary synthesis of the
first t r i a d as the f i n a l one:
unconscious worlds.
the absolute synthesis of the conscious and
It becanes a problem of (visual) definition, of seeing
the windowpane in the right perspective; of trying t o decide where the glass
begins and where it ends, that is the actual thickness of the glass which
lies between the conscious eye and the vision it attempts t o f i x and draw
near,
It b e c ~ s i, n fact, a question of defining or deciding upon the acute
proportion of things and thereby of seeing them i n terms of the dreamlike
distance they i n t e r ~ p t . In
~ ~other words the real obstacle the poet encounters
when he attempts t o 'focus' h i s eye and see through the glass is really one
of going beyond t h a t part of h i s Pure h i n g which is his logical, rational,
mnscious experience.
Easily enough the p e t realizes t h a t h i s identity-in-
i t s e l f is an illusion, t h a t without the necessary synthesis w i t h the non-self
kcis ego blocks o r closes off a true perception of things; indeed t h a t "sub-
jective vision" a s Mondrian has stated, "veilCs] the true reality."33
He
wants t o reach t h a t point, i n short, where he can say (with Koger Vitrac) " I
have l o s t my sight, the one t h a t keeps objects a t a distance. "34
He w a n t s
t o draw the vision t o him, t o shorten the distance he dreams between the object
and the eye-and he does t h i s , simply, by abandoning himself t o the dream,
4o
ll
to the doubling language of the dream, or mre specifically s t i l l t o the
I
I,
I
'logos' which discloses that &em.35 W e spent the l a s t chapter on this point.
It n w remains t o be densnstrated t h a t such an a b a n d o m t t o the 'word'
I
I
II
Y
involves a dialectical mving f r m the t h e t i c a l "eye" (pronounced " I , " a f t e r
Zukofsky) t o the otherness of the glass, its negation, i n order that the vision
fixed on i t s other side might be synthesized with t h a t perceiving eye.36 The
'word', then, we begin t o say, a c t s as the cbjectification through which passes
the subject hawing its negation.
For t o give himself up t o it the p t w i l l
be able not only t o confront t h a t which negates him, but he w i l l a l s o be able,
by it, t o hold h i s consciousness in f u l l , drawing the vision, as it were, i n t o
d i r e c t contact with the eye; the lens-like glass of the window having been a t
last resolved.
( " I t is w i s e t o l i s t e n , " says Heraclitus "not t o me but t o the
Word, and t o confess that a l l things a r e one. "37)
The Hegelian c r i t i c ,
Hyppolite, notes in accordance with us the enterprise the poet sets before
him.
"Everything transpires" says Hyppolite, "as though there were an h-
~ d i a t elived-experience t h a t must be given expression, an expression which
i
8
m d d be a discovery both in the sense of a revelation and an invention.
The
most general form of expression, which alone deserves the description since
a l l others refer t o it i n sane way, is human language, which might be called
the logos of 1ived;experience o r the logos of Being, its universal revelation.
TO express Being would seem t o be the proper enterprise of man. 1138
The s u r r e a l i s t is trying t o see through t o the other side of himself,
to no less than the final otherness of the world.
Y e t what he invariably
encounters--no matter h m closely he strains himself t o look, no matter how
hard he rubs h i s eyes t o see--what he invarialjly encounters is the glass itself:
the separation, the temporary matter standing a s obstacle between the
particular s e l f and the universality of the v i s i m .
Although he knows it is
pointless t o remain locked within the subjective eye which sees only i t s e l f
looking out--in the 'act' of looking out--he finds himself equally a t an
inpasse t o draw toward kim through the dream the objective world he cannot
help but knaw is there, alnr>st rubbing against the mind.
Philip Whalen, f o r
me, has expressed such an impasse poignantly--albeit from a Buddhist rather
than a s u r r e a l i s t pcsition--where he says t h a t having overcame the subjective
rationalizations of the ego it now becams "Not I love or hate :/ [Ibut 3 WHAT
IS I T I'M SEEING?/ &/tJHOrs L O O ~ G ? 39
"
Without identity, in other words,
there is no illusion of lwe o r hate, there is simply confrontation with the
not-self.
Hence the p e t faces the a n t i t h e t i c a l glass k n d g i t m a s u r e s his
desire but unable, a t the sam time, t o have t h a t desire passed effectively
through t o him.
H e faoes the transparent silence of the windaw-a
kind of blue
substance, mde "blue" by the desire it r e f r a c t s and stubbornly discloses
from the f a r side.
desire :
And i n the silence l i e s Nadja, the s t i l l e d embodirrent of
Along those well-knm, but rarely inhabited surrealist
corridors winding into a Labyrinth--SILENCEin guise of a
Blue Worn, faster than light, s p i l l s through the cage I
hold in my brain: maledictorious milk.
W i t h the aloneness of a thief escaping cinematically under the
s t r e e t s , I sunanon petrified tears once the o i l t o s e t off
machines of Desire. ( L m t i a )40
...
Y e t of course, the desire reflected i n the glass emits no sound--only the poor
"shadm" of an old sought a f t e r music:
Sorewhere beside child-like hands on a cross,
two m m e t
t o raise t h e i r arms t o a glass heaven
41
continually breathing a shadm of decayed pianos. (Lamantia)
This refraction forced by the antitheticalwindcw is in truth the "panic
blue" that Aragon talks of:
"Who was it t h a t unchained the banished fear/
Put sand on the roof, i n s m i a i n t h e i r hearts/
And daubed the windawpanes
w i t h panic blue?" 42 The poet, as a voyeur, tries t o bring forward his vision
i n order t o objectively re-invent the world.
And ironically--or perhaps not
so ironically--it is t h i s sarre voyeurism, the rethod of his bringing the world
close-up (as through the a r t i f i c e of a binocular), that stills the vision i n
the extended eye of the glass?3Che notes easily that the problematic entertained here by the Amrican Kenward E h l i e (poetic heir t o Frank OIHara who
was touched by Surrealism i n New York) seems only too agonizingly accurate:
Surprised we haven't worn out our windcrwpanes, 44
windwanes, windowpanes, using our binoculars.
One feels the windwanes lying on a l l sides blurring and negating the eye.
Looking for the resolution of his selfhood, the poet finds only what is antithetical to him. "I look a t the window fram" writes Whalen, "cbud I learn/
this/ I've deceived myself" .45 Resolution is yet t o c-.
So f a r the dialectic
has mved only f r m the i n i t i a l thesis, as Hegel has it, t o its antithesis.
The
glass, we are forced t o discover--because it refracts the illusion of desire,
even contains it as a mirage--has becom confused with the synthesis it pretends
to reflect; and the poet is forced t o face such an illusion.
Yet who could
p u t t h i s m r e cleanly and appropriately for us than Wittgenstein when he says:
"One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and
over again, and one is m r e l y tracing round the •’ram through which we look a t
it."46These words should be underlined a thousand th-es. The problem is
mde apparent with them: the mzthodology of the poetics i t s e l f has gotten
i n the way.
The windowpane which the poet activates for his dialectical
solutian t o the subjective and objective worlds has becanr! his bane.
The poet is stopped dead in his tracks.
How is he t o recover from the
nothingness that is forced upon him? How is he t o cirmentthem2thodology
which has, i n effect, brought him t o a nullification, rather than t o a
realization, of his f u l l existence, his consciousness, his claim t o selfhood?
H w as Eluard asks, is he t o 'abolish the grimace of zero'? 47
In order t o resolve the enigm, the surrealist takes a tentative step.
He mves his thought forward t o enter the antithetical matter. of the window-
pane, t o verify its proportions, i t s physical sense.
In t h i s way, then, man
begins t o encounter his otherness, o r rather the e l l i p s i s of himself.
prism breathes with us, " says Eluard 48 (and Breton:
their flaming hair i n the black night/
and kissesu4')
.
"The
"Beautiful windows with
Beautiful windows of warning cries
This, therefore, becares the poett s penultimate frontier:
to chart his dream he must chart the mthodology he used in the f i r s t place
to s e t himself out on the voyage.
H i s desire has becare fraught with the
metaphor which stays his poetics and he is forced t o reel back on his otherness
again and again as t h i s "panic blue. It 50
Nevertheless, this too needs sm qualification:
the glass the poet is mving ever away f r m dissimulation.
since even by entering
the
By so living
'word' of h i s poetry he is i n fact tracking the d i a l e c t i c of the Real, f o r t o
be a t once both an identity and its negation (ie. himself and the glass a s they
are lived i n the
' logos ' )
is t o be "consciousw (KOjBve ' s usage) of a transcend-
ence; to be synthetical and approach absolute Being--that is t o approach the
surreal.
(Hegel explains:
"Dialectic
...is this
imnanent going beyond,
in which the one-sidedness and the limitation of the specific-determinations
of the Understanding are represented as what they a r e , namly, as t h e i r
fown3negaticn.
Everything t h a t is f i n i t e is an a c t of d i a l e c t i c a l self-
..."Therefore" add Koj&e, "it is the Real i t s e l f t h a t is
dialectical ...because it implies i n addition t o Identity EBeingIl a second
f und-tal
constituent-elemnt , which Hegel c a l l s Negativity ."51) It is
overcoming. "
precisely by t h i s poetic, furthermore--this
going forward i n thought--that the
poet has care face t o face w i t h the refraction o r mirage of h i s desire; cane
upon h i s Nadja not yet given form but as vapor, the beginnings of tangibility.
(Larrantia:
"Bianca
emblazoned i n bile!/
...? in t r u e baroque dream/ ...walls of y r great cunt/
I ' m chocking t o see you Bianca/ Bianca a vapor... "52)
has made the r i g h t step by entering the glass:
He
the escape has been made, a t
l e a s t f o r the m m n t , •’ram the f i x i t y of t h and space i n the conscious world.
Like the " l i f e of the individual," the poetic too "belongs t o the category of
action and not of 'thing'.
i n Citself 3
Through action the Cpoetickegates what is fixed
...and transcends C i t s e l f l . "
( ~ ~ ~ ~ o53
l i tThe
e h 'wad' negates
the one-sidedness of its cmscious expression by assuming its natural doubleness, by unfolding its natural duplicity--and it transcends the surface of
language; "a negation of the negation and a return t o t o t a l i t y , "
Hyppolite
c a l l s it.54O r once mre, in the oracular "gnosticism" of Heraclitus:
"They
,
mderstand not how t h a t w h i c h is a t variance w i t h i t s e l f agrees with i t s e l f .
=re
is attunernmt of opposite tensions, l i k e t h a t of the bow and of the
I1
harp*
55
H e r e i s t h e arena entered wherein the poetic energy is purely psychic,
where the " r e a l i t y sandwich" has turned away from the experiential and c a w i n
on t h e brain, i n on pure thought ("Green things grow/ Salads/
or
the cerebral,
' 1 5 ~
says Mina Icy). The synthesis of the poet and the glass is in t h i s way
achieved:
h i s identity and its negation are perceived a s a oneness.57
We have
here an expression, a t last, of the entry i n t o the preverbal--or as Larrantia
puts it , i n t o "inaudia" :
I am paid by l i g h t
light
is
house
of
MINT!
- it's
indescript!
I've gone i n t o inaudia! 58
F'urther, t h i s "house of MINT1' is where the analogy o r the correspondence begins:
in 'indescribable' thought.
The 'word' tends t o crystalize i n the synthetic
unity of abstract tirru3, resolving the t h e t i c a l and a n t i t h e t i c a l :
it is the beginning of t h
crystals on the window pane 59
Or t o put it another way, the 'word' correlates and actualizes the unity of
.
thought and i n its f u l l resonance transcends the notion of conscious tire
returning t o it its i n f i n i t e , multi-directional flow.
the resolution of opposition.
In correspondence l i e s
A s Paz says, "Analogy is the mtaphor in which
otherness dreams of i t s e l f a s unity, and difference projects i t s e l f i l l u s i v e l y
as i d e n t i t y
....
Analogy is poetry's way of confronting otherness.
~nalogy
+&es thought back t o the p r h r d i a l rment--the beginning of the beginning,
"az calls it--where the thought t h a t is poetry stands a t a m v e from and
ahead of sequential the.
In this way, then, Paz explains
ultra-Rommtic, though it is a m s t redundant to say so...
.
" ..Surrealism
lt61;
Cis]
f o r "the
~urapeanavant-garde breaks w i t h a l l traditions and thus continues the Ranantic
tradition.
..."62
In a word, Surrealism deals w i t h otherness by becoming
'other'.
*
*
*
Here i n the midst of the glass, hwever, the poet runs against the next
apposition t o his thought:
of the next.
the synthesis of the f i r s t t r i a d b e e m s the thesis
The vision has b e c m grounded i n the sense of beingness of the
the a n t i t h e t i c a l "otherness" of the windm i n the previous
resolved glass:
t r i a d has synthesized t o becm an inscrutable, t h e t i c a l "itness" in the present
stage of thought.
(As Lamantia says i n a genuine ridicule, "What i f it were/
turn a t blindman' s buff and you were ' it'/ Running over a gigantic
mirror.. ."63)
an is thus blinded w i t h the realization of being.
Although generalizations tend t o become merely contentious, especially
when they are used t o describe experiences which a r e f u n d m t a l l y different,
there m y nonetheless be s o r ~value in c a p r i n g ideas which have, conversely,
evolved i n a pattern one f r m the other.
Such is the case with Symbolism and
Surrealism (there being no need here t o go i n t o the quarrels w i t h which the
l a t t e r school on occasion has besieged the fomr--quarrels which, in any
event, often sound mre like the precocious misunderstandings of a &ern
generation with its forebears). Dada and Surrealism can be seen to have
evolved quite naturally •’ram the Synbolist tradition:
radical "other" in l i t e r a r y history.
the lineage of the
And y e t out of this evolution, o r per-
haps even because of it, there is a point which might be mde t o help ill u s t r a t e our discussion of Lamantia.
Such a point concerns, i n the mst
general t e r m s , the evolution f r m s m o l t o surreality (what Bretm called an
evolution from the mysterious t o the marvelous).
I•’ m e thinks of how certain
p e t s have given sensual representation t o certain images--hges
pertaining
to colour make an obvious example-an increased tendency tmard a dialectical
style of resolution may be apprehended, above a l l , in Surrealism. (Mallam6
may be said t o be dialecticalvhereas Baudelaire and others are not.
My p i n t
here is that ' a l l ' surrealists are dialectical i n t h i s sense-whether
o r not
they are familiar with Hegelian logic; especially poets like P6ret and
Larrantia.)
We start simply by noting that i f ' c e r t a i n Symbolists' mixing of
the senses is purely sensate (for its own sake) it is still finely rational:
me thinks of Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat," for example, o r that other travelogue
which mixes its metaphors of the Amxican Mid-West and California--Laforguels
Such a Symbolist w i l l i n t h i s way invariably see green as green.
"Albums."
("Green waters seeped through all my seams ,I' says ~ i r r b a u d . ~ O
~n) the other
hand, haever, Dada, with its wilder and ultimately m r e irrational, plastic
mixing sees green as red:
cut-up poems.
here m e thinks of Picabia's collage poems or Tzara's
But it is finally l e f t t o a surrealist like Lamantia t o transcend
a l l vestiges of the conscious and aspire t o the superrational:
I
greeness' of green, its f e r t i l i t y o r its essence.
seeing the
Thus the Dadaist (Schwit-
ters) says,
Blue is the colour of your yellcw hair.
Red is the cooing of your green bird. 65
-whereas
Lamantia, in his poem "The Owl," puts it wisely, surreally:
66
H i s c o l o r i s green green
The thetical green is balanced by the antithetical green.
In other words, the
dream--the distance lying between perceiver and the object perceived has fused
(by i t s signification
"green green") into a synthesis of the conscious and
minds.
The 4x0 have becom for the first time the thetical subject
approaching its wholeness in the marvelous.
There is a Zen saying which is
quite appropriate here:
Before a man studies Zen, t o himmuntains are muntains
and waters are waters; after he gets an insist into the
truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master,
muntains t o him are not muntains and waters are not
waters; but a f t e r t h i s when he really attains t o the abode
of r e s t , muntains are once more muntains and waters are
waters. 67
What has actually happened
of satori:
iB that the s u r r e a l i s t ' s poetic has reached a
an absolute synthesis of the voice and the word.
have GONE THRU: "68)
The p e t and his 'wordf have bec-
khd
(Lamantia:
"We
a unity with the
vaporous h g e of Nadja:
my ccanpass points t o the f i f t h direction i n space your
typwriter eyes
The beautiful Lul a vapor
her breasts vapor
her fingers vapor
(Lamantia)69
A s i n the Zen "koan," the riddle has been assimilated i n vapor and the glass
broken by love:
I f you w i l l
COE
you w i l l c a - ~
I can not see you for your hands tremble
If this is the time I shall hold it
The s t a r s have gone over the mountain
Meridians l a t e r your smile broke glass
(LEmantia)70
Again, what has h a p p e d dialectically is t h a t the "itness" of the glass (the
synthesis of the f i r s t t r i a d having mved t o the thesis of the next) has faced
the 'word1--the text of the poet; and in t h e i r opposition one truly hears the
nystical tearing and shattering that signifies the "manrelous" apprehended.
~ y p p o i i t e ,c o m t i n g on Hegel, shcws the p h e n m o n for us:
"Opposition is
qualitative and since there i s nothing outside of the Absolute,
i t s e l f absolute
, and
is
opposition -
it is only because it is absolute that it can transcend
..
.
i t s e l f . . " (Hegel)
Thus Hyppolite concludes :
I f the Absolute i s t o be truly productive [infinite],
it
must be conceived as a negative p e r , an internal activity
wkich posits division and opposition within i t s e l f in order
t o negate it. We have here the mystical image of an Absolute
which divides and tears i t s e l f apart i n order t o be absolute
Ca3 mystical notion. t r a n s f o m d through a dialectical
philosophy which is validated by the intensity of the intellectual thrust that it brings into being. 71
...
..
In a sense then we can. even say that love is the negative force here:
its
otherness represented by the vaporous Nadja revealed by the word. Indeed we
note this phenamenon throughout Surrealism, as for example Ducharnp mved by an
ironic lave t o actually paint the 'Logos1 on glass ("The bride stripped bare
by her bachelors, even").
Surely by appealing t o the superrational essence of its objects
Surrealism is i n t h i s way able t o deny the conscious world of self and rational
experience.
But l e t us go quickly t o an example from Lamantia t o s h w h w
this is so.
The f i r s t stanza of his poem "Infernal Landscape" is given. as
A windm that never ends
where infant eyes are unhooked
•’ranthe paper c l a n
who stands on a shattered mirror
picking rocks •’ranhis heart
In t h i s landscape where the conscious looks t w a r d the dream innocence (the
innocence of the soul) i s finally loosed •’ran the claim of empirical or
evidential ("paper") tragic-wisda ("clwn"). The mirror is shattered i n the
collage of the 'word', beccnning a i r ; the innocent soul can n w look beyond its
am h g e and into the otherness of the dream.
The poem continues:
In the absence of light
pulled through mist
my eyes are imprisoned
...72
Air ("mist") , like the w i n d w e , separates the eye f r m what it views.
see nothing; here s e l f and other mingle freely and mrge.
The senses have been
denied the very objectivity which had forced the separation of the two worlds-they (the senses) are seen a t l a s t a s the c u l p r i t which forced the panic blue
of man's separation f r m h i s unconscious realization in the dream.
(~eraclitus:
"Eyes and ears are bad witnesses for m, since t h e i r souls lack understand-
By entering the poetic v i a t h e "itness" of the glass which turns t o a
synthetic vapor the poet has a t l a s t found a place t o leave off h i s conscious
self.
H e steeps himself in the superrational whereby things are seen i n
essence, f i n a l l y without fonn (fonn being an illusion perceived by the conscious s e l f )
.
Says one c r i t i c , "man is here3 viewed i n d i a l e c t i c a l essence,
alone able t o a t t a i n the polar point zero where beyond tine and gravity
antinomies dissolve. 11 74
"A great c r i s i s is born, " writes Aragon, "an intense
uneasiness which gradually becoms more precise.
The beautiful, the good,
the just, the true, the r e a l ...many other abstract words go bankrupt a t the same
mnmt.
Their opposites, once preferred, soon m r g e with them.
One single
substance of the mind f i n a l l y reduced in the universal m l t i n g pot....I
shall
be unable t o neglect anything, f o r I am the passage frcm the shadcw t o the
Light, I a m a t the s a m tine the west and the dawn.
I am a limit, amark.
Let
everything mix with the wind, here are a l l the words in my muth. "75 Indeed,
the 'word' i s i n the mouth and the poet becares in his poetics the passage
frcm shadm t o l i g h t , •’ran vapor t o absolute thought.
In the f o l l m i n g poem
of Fbbert Desnos, then, we are not extrapolating frcxn the text when we read
the love object as the poet's desire f o r h i s own selfhood--rather we are doing
the poem justice:
I have dreamed of you so much, walked so much, spoken
and lain w i t h your phantom that perhaps nothing mre is l e f t m
than t o be a phantom among phantams and a hundred tines m r e shadm
than the shadm which walks and w i l l joyfully walk
m the sundial of your l i f e . 76
m e poet has becare truly l o s t i n the winda~pane. He has l e f t his self there,
has resolved himself with h i s 'word' and continues himself now as pure thought.
mist
therefore, is what is mant by the superrational:
beyond the nuance of colour and form.
the essence of things,
Indeed as B i l l Knott (alias Saint Geraud,
a kind of postrnodem ~ a u t r e ' m n t )concludes :
To look a t things i n a new slant is fine
But i t ' s mre fun
To jmp into the slant and disappear forever77
The discovery of the superratimal is the legacy of autamatism, the
escape from mindfulness.
lbreover, it is by h i s treatmnt of the object that
the surrealist moves, dialectically, through the windvane and i n t o the
dream.
"When a l l else, f a i l s , " says Breton,
" C the mind 3 ...calls upon chance,
a divinity even more abscure than the others t o whcm it ascribes all its
aberrations.
Who can say t o m that the angle by which that idea which affects
it is offered, that what it likes i n the eye of that wcanan [who has become
impressed upon the mind 3 is not precisely what links it t o its dream.
...,78
It is, in Breton's words, the "angle" of thought moving into the image which
changes the course of the poetic toward the absolute dream:
the angle of the
"hyphen" lying between words, like the hands of a clock rotating through the
positims of selkood t o reach s i x o'clock, as it were, the hour of twilight
showing on the clock-face--the
into the dream:
hour hand mving d m
from the minute hand
the vertical angle of the hyphen as oxymoron linking the con-
scious and unconscious worlds of man in an ultimate correspcndence.
Hence
'chancer--or rather the angle of c h a n c e - - k c a s i t s e l f the absolute w i t h i n the
poetic, a dialectical synthesis of forms and the f u n d m t a l junctim where
sense.
79
The s u r r e a l i s t ' s 'freedcan of imagination', h i s freedom t o engage
thought i n the muth, all-
the m m n t of pain in the glass t o mtamrphose
i n t o the suprem mmnt of psychic engagement: here the glass which hadseparated the cmscious world from the dream cclmes alive, the -t
worlds e l e c t r i f i e s .
W
S !" 80)
(Lamantia:
between
"DIANA
INVEFCI%EX YOU'I;L BE FRIED IN COLORED/
F u r t h e m r e , this superrational e l e c t r i c i t y i n the poetics can
be seen t o corn f u l l circle proving the legitimacy of the vision and the funda-
m t a l t r u t h of the i n i t i a l rmvemnt into the dream.
For the canscious image
('Diana Invertrex') in f a c t exists a l l along where its f i n i t e identity is
s u b s m d by the marvelous Absolute; where cmsciousness under t h i s e l e c t r i c
scrutiny, in wkich the image ccms alive by feeding on the current of its s e l f
and its profound otherness, is l e f t t o discover " t h a t the transcendent is
.
nothing e l s e than the original unity, o r primary imediacy" (Hypplite) 81
In
other words, just a s we say the d i a l e c t i c cones t o knm i t s e l f , caws f u l l
c i r c l e and "validates
E i t s m'7point of departure, "82 s o too the poetic
cones t o place i t s e l f (and t o pace itself) by its
Of
own 'charge', by the primicy
.
its images disclosing "the
-knwledge of M i a c y i t s e l f . . ."83 The
h g e b e c m s , here in this l i g h t , the suprem r e a l i t y of the poetry:
auto-
m a t i s m opening the world of forms made chaotic in the surface of language to
the superratimal order emanating frcan unconscious thought.
By the juxtaposi-
tion of conscious images chaos is hence made t o r e f l e c t upan i t s e l f a s the
primary 'logos' of intransigent Being fueled by its conceptual l i f e in the
deep structure.
i t s e l f . ' 1 84)
(Hyppolite:
"The logos of Being is Being reflecting u p
For finally, the synthesis of the dialectically opposed forms--
the two worlds--is forced by t h e (a-logical) imagination a t t h e
m ~ r r u 3 n tof
nakedness where the conscious logic of the poet's s e l f (which has created the
illusion of s e l f ) is given q in favour of the s u p r m and superrational
logic of the poem's essence alone:
the treatrrent (worship) of its objects.
The synthesis is exacted where the image of desire ("Jeanlu" in Zamantia's poem)
is realized a s a consciousness, a s a wedding of the physical and dreamworlds
(" sperm"
and "seer" respectively) :
By the windm cut in half Jeanlu
The earth is emptying Jeanlu
soon spansules of e t e r n i t y
explode you Jeanlu
Jeanlu who is
seek/sperm. 85
The f i n a l ~ t a p h o quoted
r
here is not a synthesis created out of language (there
is no cohesion of syntactical, semantic o r phonological. elements i n the surface
structure).
Rather the poet has delivered himself out of the surface structure
by the a u t m t i s m of h i s language; the poem is thus liberated and springs d i r e c t
frcan the deep structure.
I t is what the poem not the poet says, f i n a l l y , t h a t
counts--for the r e a l i t y of the unconscious lies i n the inner-logic of the dream
expressed surreally i n t h e verse.
of need"
Does the poem not then work as the "algebra
(Burroughs' phrase)?86 The superrational essence of things is
revealed :
The poem says JUNK IS KING/ movieflashback t o a n t i p loveroom
ossified sex organ room in the poem's mouth saying
a t whorehouse in tropics kanka high priestess of a secret c u l t
a t Mirml thru jungles of copper bells.. .*7
Thus t h e images b e c m what they w i l l , or rather 'are' what they w i l l in the
revealing of t h e i r logic.
canals i n t o weathers
has
ti
..."88)
(Says Lamantia, "stone changes mirrors i n t o boats
By entering the poetic the absurd o r nonsensical
kind of abject realism about it (Like Mayakovsky ' s "Drink Van Huten' s
cocoa! 118')
--simply because it represents the circular d i a l e c t i c of f u l l con-
sciousness.
Hence the poet works unconsciously as alchemist mawelling a t
the super-natural mtamrphoses of forms.
It becc~nesh i s function t o stay out
of the forum of poetry (in the sense that Ernst argues the "author" out of the
frottage):
for it is only i n such a way t h a t he can escape the consciously
imposed limitations of tim and gravity i n the experiential world he wishes t o
leave.
So we have, then, the superrational expression--the
poet delivering
the essence of things straight •’ran his muth--and where the inner-logic of
the --the
dream.
poetics--beccanes the only real measure of the journey into the
A s B i l l Knott so marvelously puts it:
A starry sweatband of cheese
Whose hands are t a l l e s t scorchmark ever'to dance scented with
(lifeguards
Srnashing the bloodfilled who's who
Like a snmflake
Of blue antelope
Which is-carving a l l the other snmflakes
Whose tentacle is backed i n t o a comer
Like a whirlpool facing a pineneedle
Hmling a t the asbestos autopsy
Playing a f l u t e of balconies-on-a-string
O f f which the b i t t e r lampshades t h a t resisted our birth
(successfully
Toss purple capsules of carousel90
Likewise, this is indeed the invocation t o surreality, delivered here •’ran the
very psyche of a very surreal Lamantia:
I f you are bound for the sun's e q t y plum
there is no need t o mock the wine tongue
but i f you are going t o a rage of pennies
ob-r a stevedore1s wax ocean
then, remnbr : a l l long pajams aregfrozen dust
unless an axe cuts my flaming grotto.
"In the narre of your own logic we say t o you:
JLfe stinks, Gentlemn. "
Antonin Artaud
(Letter To The Chancellors
Of the European Universities)
"A s w p e r of iron and mrcury
is spread out on a t a b l e of green water
and the knives, forks and spoons devour it!"
P h i l i p Lamantia
Having addressed ourselves t o the d i a l e c t i c a l m v ~ lying
t
a t the
center of the poetry-the
c r i s i s of consciousness, we have called it--# must
new c m t o t a l k about the aesthetic attitude •’ran which both the theory and
h
practice of Surrealism is made.
and d i f f i c u l t :
The topic is a t the saroe the straightforward
stxaightforward i n the sense t h a t the s u r r e a l i s t s propose t o
hold oppositions in a mrvelous balance, and d i f f i c u l t in the sense that while
doing so t h e i r works reveal both a nihilism and an empirical positivism, amst
in the s e breath.
One is certainly made mare t h a t it is the poetry's
systematic avoidance of "ideast' a s such which'challenges the c r i t i c ' s analytic a l entry i n t o the text (not to rention the near impossibility of his making
an unscathed e x i t f r m i t ) . Hawever, notwithstanding the f a c t that exegesis
m y here seem c a p a r a b l e t o the task of Sisyphus, our job, I believe, can be
=aged
i f we keep in mind t h a t the s u r r e a l i s t imagination is very much the
product of the d e r n world.
context.
In this a t l e a s t we are provided with a solid
The subject of this closing chapter, then, the autonay and violence
of the "image" brought forward i n language, must be viewed i n l i g h t of Surrealism's emergence, in 1919, f r m a social r e a l i t y which included a ~ c h a n i z e d
m r l d w a r coupled w i t h the artistic r e a l i t y of the Dada movement which i n a
s t o i c a l way attempted t o conclude t h a t w a r , t o put the finishing touches on it.
The sense of nihilism remiins w i t h Breton's f i r s t manifesto; yet it is tempered
by the feeling t h a t Dada's brand of expression had reached its l i m i t , that even
in a destructive world art is still necessary and, more important, still pssible.
The disclaiming a r t i s t i c voice can be seen not a s a denial but as a
further evolution--or reopening--of
the social one.
Perhaps the clearest
W l e one could c i t e shming the aesthetic sensibility remaining through even
the mst destructive s t a t e m n t s is the case of Man Ray and his work t i t l e d
"Object To Be Cestroyed" (1923): Man Ray was evidently insulted enough t o make
a replica of the object a f t e r two visitors t o a 1957 exhibition l i t e r a l l y
fired shots into it.'
No matter how n i h i l i s t i c the themes of surrealist art,
in other words, the imagistic reality remains significant and evocative; the
place assigned t o art being, t o paraphrase Hans Richter, a hole i n the (cultural) void.
But we need, perhaps, take a closer look a t som of the issues
or conditions which sustained the legacy of "anti-art" offered t o Surrealism by
Dada before we can go on t o discuss the surrealists' proposal of forcing a
return t o a r t , before we can go on t o examine q e i r mthod for, ultimately,
enlisting a fresh t r e a t x m t of the poetic "image" i t s e l f .
I t must be noted that, like others, Wallace FawLie is a f t e r a l l re-
calling simple historical f a c t when he suggests that the social upheaval of
the early &em
period is t o a large degree responsible for the sensibility
underlying Surrealism.
"The direct experience with war" he states, "accounts...
for the sense of f u t i l i t y and the philosophy of nihilism apparent i n much of
the surrealist art and literature....
It is significant that the genesis of
surrealism, between 1916 and 1922, developed under the influence of the w a r
and that the l i t e r a r y works most admired by the surrealists, the writings of
I a u t & m n t and Rimbaud, carre into being a t the t i r e of the other w a r , t h a t
of 1870, in a carparable s p i r i t of defeatism, i n a canparable urgency t o des-
troy traditional values. "
It is a violent age which produces a violent poetry,
a poetry whose language reflects the experience--even be-s
of reality.
the experience-
Whereas in Zurich Dada had attempted, contemptuously, t o ignore
the r e a l i t y of Europe embroiled in what they believed t o be an absurd, essentially non-ideological war, Surrealism, in the aftermath of the war, quite
assuredly proposed once and for a l l t o polarize art an a social level.
Was
the purpose of art, they argued, t o console and reinforce the institutional
valms of i t s bourgeois patrons and overseers (being invariably one and the
s m ) or was it, as Dada had been
i n s m m l in
showing, t o obliterate such
values, replacing them with prirm,rdial ones? These are broad issues of course.
But for their part the surrealists believed it necessary t o re-address a much
abused and disillusioned public t o the liberating possibilities of unconscious
expression.
The logic of producing mass w a r as a way t o solve the problems
of modem culture (and as a way also t o assert the culture's own identity) i s
thus seen, by this new generation of artists, i n direct r e l a t i m t o the f u t i l i t y
of carrying out human discourse as a system of l i t t l e more than formal
generalizations.
The result is a rhetorical superfluity--the poetic bankruptcy
of a figurative and conformist culture attenpting t o cammunicate w i t h i t s e l f
through a figurative and conforming language.
Only by making a "revolution
of the word," the surrealists insisted, can the hidden Real be disclosed.
Qlly by violently wresting subjective experience out of a dynamic language can
poetry truly address i t s e l f t o and speak of reality.
This is the evolving
context of Surrealism as Tzara and others l e f t Dada t o join Breton's c i r c l e in
1919.
It is a context of w a r and the increasing pessimism of the age.
Yet
it is the occasion as well for a new art and a new sense of the "image" in
poetry which m r g e s out of the destruction.
A s Antonin Artaud, for one,
arws , it is a matter of going "outside of thought"4 where thought is defined as a process of the logical mind:
Poet of the black, a virgin's bosom
still haunts you,
b i t t e r poet, l i f e ' s ended for you,
the e n t i r e town's a f i r e
the sky's being drained away by the rain
andyourpen goes gnawing away a t the heart of l i f e .
Forest, forest, eyes swarm on
over the proliferating pinecones;
hairs of the storm, poets
ride off on horses, on dogs.
Eyes rage, tmgcles twist,
the sky flaws i n t o n o s t r i l s
l i k e a nourishing blue m i l k ;
I dribble d m now frcan your muths
women, harsh and vinegar-hearted.
(1925)5
I i n v i t e t o the black f e a s t s of love
Where the sour w i n e of noises spurts
The wanderer who chases across the night
And the adolescent without any rtemry
1
I
And anyone who finds his phrases
In the labyrinths of his dream..
.
(1923)6
I t is with scare significance, here, Wat we are quickly able t o note
haw history repeats i t s e l f twenty-five years l a t e r .
In the midst of another
I
war we can see the Amrican Lamantia d r a w on the same marvelous energy of
I
I
anarchistic love, making t h a t love a contemporary f o r m f o r h i s own
"Thoreauvian" c i v i l disobedience.
In the poem optimistically, i f ironically,
t i t l e d "A Civil World" (1943-45) the duplicity of Lamantia's language brings
forward the apocalyptic shadow out of a s t a t i c and absurd cultural malaise:
In a m m t t h e i r faces w i l l be visible.
You s h a l l see the wcanen who w a l k in a night of offensive sunl i g h t t h a t cuts through their cardboard thighs.
A s the s t r e e t i s cleaned by the presidents of the nation, I can
see the bowlegged rn mving over t o copulate w i t h the maniacs.
.
Quietly the m t h e r s are k i l l i n g t h e i r sons; quietly the fathers
are raping t h e i r daughters.
But the w o r n .
The eye wanders t o a garden in the middle of the street.
There are poets dipping t h e i r d i m n d - l i k e heads in the luminous fountain. There are grandmthers playing with the delicate
toys of the chimra. There are perfumes being s p i l t on the garbage.
There is a drunken nun flying out of a brothel.
The w o r n are a11 colors.
Their breasts open l i k e f l m r s , t h e i r flesh spreads.over the park
l i k e a blanket. Their h a i r is soaked i n the blood of t h e i r lovers,
' those who are the mirrors of this night.
As with Artaud before him (the irascible "Address To The Pope" and the letters
1
t o "The Chancellors Of The European Universities" and "The Buddhist Schools"),
~amantiaoffers a course of disobedience, a course fraughtwith the aesthetics
of violence, purification and exorcism.
The " logical decor" of post- f i r s t - w a r
Europe and the "mrican Dream" of post-second-war America are seen by these
bm surrealists of different generations as the real anathema of societies
which produced mass w a r , the ultimate discord, as t h e i r way of camunicating
The thematic issues of the poetry are startlingly similar.
with themselves.
For example, it i s the image of the "machinew--the expedient conveyor of a
closed modem discourse--that is seen as emblemakic of twentieth century
values, t h a t is seen t o have b e c m an extension or even a 'replacem=nt' of
man i n the world.
In a very calculated way the surrealist therefore levels
his f i r s t act of scorn against the machine, against that which epitcxnizes
the "phoney,
"*
conformist sense of his world.
dhists, saying "Like you, we reject progress:
.... Devise f o r us new houses."'
Naxcotica,
Artaud c a l l s out t o the Budc m and tear down our houses
Likewise, m r e than three decades l a t e r in
where he includes a translation of Artaud's "Letter To 'Ibe Legis-
l a t o r Of The Law On Narcotics," calling the French surrealist "the greatest
poet...Ctd
be read by everyone who wants t o BlUNG DOWN THE C K C OF SHIT
HOLDING UP WAR FAMINE AND THE MURDERERS OF THE SOUL!,"
Lamantia
carries
denounce popular culture presided over by the bowgeoisie:
Wanwhile yr much flaunted machine age drags with it incredible
ANGUISH, 3NSANITY, STUPIDITY fxrformad on a MASS SCALE. The
plague i s on and fear stalks yr hearts, you bastards, bastards
precisely because you are r a b b l m , public selfish security
hounds, because you have no saints among you, because you are
the pissants of all tine--grey, black, dull, dud suited l i t t l e
rren and wckoen! ...y ou, turds, fuckedup middleclass liberals and
notsoliberal intellectuals DROP DEAD WITH YR ASS HOLE3 MAMPOJ
M3UX-l ~ M X I V A T E D L W I S ! ! ! It i s I W H O A M T H E L A W ! ...lo
W e are truly fed up
w i t h m t a l machine of peace & w a r
nuclear mnoxide brains, cancerous ccsnputers
to
We've had enough dynams & derricks
thud-thud-thudding valves
pulley
of the Devil Mankin's invention. ?I
&
..
Since the postnodern pcet finds h e l f jolted and increasingly remved
•’ranWalden, the disclosure of his aesthetic sensibility, he proclaims, must
becoE aggrandized i n a counter-flaunted violence.
"Look, look a t the machine revolving," says Alfred Jarry i n his "Song
of the ise em braining ,"
.
m t i e r s trembling."112
"Imk, look a t the brain flying, / Look, look a t the
Mcdern man's existence is seen by the twentieth
century avant-garde t o have b e c m a kind of illusory and r i t u a l i s t i c copulation with his conscious expression, epitanized by the machine.
"The m a c i n g
machine turns on and off," says Lamantia, "and the warnan and the man m a c i n g
,
I
I
I
together/ out of mutual crucifixions/ disgorge/ t-rs
for the dead."13
This is the human condition Surrealism comes t o (after Dada) ; a meaningless
I
I
presence mirrored and supported by the s t a t i c , mechanical language out of
I
which man has modeled his rational, conscious l i f e .
As Breton claims, "the
logical rrechanism of the sentence alone reveals i t s e l f t o be increasingly
pcwerless t o provoke the m t i v e shock in man which really makes his l i f e
.
rreaningful "14 Thus we ncw core t o face the f u l l inpact of Lamantiats poem
"Inside the Journey" discussed--with regard t o the rape of metaphor--two
chapters ago.
Here the poet speaks of a human reality dragged dawn by the
linguistic machine representing the "great vacuum of
t h i s wor ld" :
-
and as I opened t o I T I saw its
Body that i s a vast rmchinery, in perpetual mation, for the sole
consuption of a certain kind of etherealized e x c r m t transmuted out of the b e s t i a l layers of the h u m cmdition become
entirely the cretinized image of God with whm, be it added, this
mchine copulates prpetually15
One senses that the 'word' has been covered over, hidden away by modern culture.
Aragon has written that "the mawelous is opposed t o the mechanical,"
I
88
and mre, t h a t it is "always the materialization of a m r a l symbol i n violent
apposition t o the m r a l i t y of the world •’ranwhich it arises.
what then,
we must ask, i s the precise m r a l i t y of the world t h a t Surrealism violently
wishes t o disobey, and t o create i n its stead the materialization of superreal
desire? Jung perhaps draws the picture mst clearly when he suggests t h a t
the &em
s e n s i b i l i t y is continuallyreactingto the m r a l i t y of none other
than the Victorian era, "an age of repression, of a convulsive attempt t o keep
anaemic ideals a r t i f i c i a l l y alive i n a framwork of bourgeois respectability
by constant mralizings. "17 This m r a l i t y can be said t o be one which covers
o r hides the "word" i n a social discourse:
a tautological manner of speaking
wherein the culture answers i t s e l f , j u s t i f i e s i t s e l f , by appealing t o its awn
logic.
Such a logic, the surrealist would concur with Jung, makes of art an
embellished repository f o r t h a t culture's "illusions, its hypocrisy, its
half-truths, its faked, overwrought emtions, its sickly m r a l i t y , its...sapless religiosity, and its
taste"
18
:
short, an a r t which denies
the greater half of r e a l i t y , the marvelous r e a l i t y of t h e dream and desire.
The machine-like r e a l i t y Which emrged in the previous age has care t o bury
the present one i n the similitude of its awn construct of mchanical imagery
and cppressive jargon.
exanple, by
B G Wand
~
This is the cultural sense graphically parodied, f o r
Dali ' s film "Un Chien Andaloul' (1929) where the ant-
infested hole i n the crucified hand of humanity is held before the cold lens
of the cartlera (and, by extension, parodied a s recently a s F e l l i n i t s "Ram"
with its roller-skating p r i e s t s i n t h e i r ecclesiastical fashion shcrw).
It
is in such a s p i r i t t h a t Lamantia seems t o allude t o ~ u h e and
l h i s andalusian
ants when he writes:
The Antiquities c m out t h r u the curtain of Fuck, they have
reopened the holes of my arm
I keep chewing the leg of civilizations, a t the origin of incest
mrphine is equivalent t o the apotheosis of cannibal
mtherhood19
A s we have been saying, the central problem goes back t o Freud's
prognostication that man i n the mdern world is no longer mter of his
muse. lo
Michael Benedikt , for exanple , has undoubtedly put his finger on
llSurrealism's mst fundanental (not t o m t i m grandiose) assuptian" when
he says "mn is i n a c r i s i s .
Man has l o s t touch w i t h himself.
He can no
longer think of himself in terms of great sustaining generalities, which
create his sense of reality.''21
There is an imbroglio of sorts involved here,
in t h a t m has absented himself from the images which express h i s hidden
desire and which--because of t h e i r seeming d i s t a n e frcan him--cannot be consciously attached t o his waking l i f e .
The surrealist Ren6 Daumal mst surely
expresses t h i s when he writes:
But the great black anti-suns, well-springs of truth
in the established surface of things, i n thegray v e i l
of the skin, corn and go and brea one another
F
in, and m nanu3 these absences. 2
(This, incidentally, is the D a m 1 of whom Breton has written:
"He who speaks
in this manner having had the courage t o say that he is no longer in control
)
of himself, has no reason t o prefer being away from us [Sthe s u r r e a l i s t s ~ . "23
It is precisely because the surrealist, in Daumal's words, wishes t o "narre
these absences" t h a t he cannot revert t o the stunning nihilism of Dada
("stunning" in both senses of startling and stupifying)
.
Rather, i f the pcet
is t o discover that which expresses the hidden desires of man he must profoundly appeal t o the duplicity of the imaginative language he has a t hand;
he must grapple with the autoncsny of forms and irmges ever lying just beneath
the surface.
This, simply, is what Surrealism praposes t o do.
Eugene Jolas
provides us, here, with a summation of these issues:
The tragic feeling of standing isolated in his c o r n s is
a f a t e the sensitive ran of today cannot escape. In spite
of the progress of machines, this ever present antimony
between his wishes and his phenclmenalworld produces i n him
a negative attitude, a nihilism t h a t is a paralysis. While
the mtaphysical preoccupation projects the longing f o r a
transcendental solution of t h i s dilemna, the man who has
sensed violently the currents of his age frequently sees no
such p o s s i b i l i t i e s and postures grotesquely a kind of
anarchy....
The poet's awareness of the condition leads
him t o an explosion of dynamic and aphoristic self-expression... K i n order t o l l i b e r a t e the imaqination which has been
enchained by the dictatorship of the cliche, the newspaper,
the Calvinistic surrogate of magic.24
In the l a s t chapter we m t i o n e d t h a t images 'are' what they have a
w i l l t o be, t h a t is t h a t they speak f r m a p r k r d i a l source, containing w i t h i n
them an inscrutable s o r t of being o r 'itness."
This is not only t r u e of the
h g e s t h a t e x i s t i n s u r r e a l i s t poetry but it is the very basis of the theoreti-
cal position underlying the doctrinaire core of the mvement.
It is the most
fundmental and mst crucial step, both philosophically and poetically, taken
by poet and manifestowriter alike:
the t e r m s 'marvelous', 'primitive' and
'autcmtic' revolve around this notion t h a t each image has an i n t r i n s i c
autonony about it--through what Roger Shattuck has called "an integrity of
l i n e ."25
counts.
W e have said it is the poem' s logic, and not the p t ' s , which
It is precisely here t h a t the "phenomenal world" Jolas speaks about,
whereby the essence of what i s is contained i n the subjective a c t of its apprehension (and which, incidentally, mved Dada t o its celebration of urinals
and mustachioed Mona Lisa's) , and Freud's conclusion t h a t conscious rmn is not
the master of his a m house b e a m poeticized together--kcorre an "aesthetic,"
a philosophic and poetic attitude.
But let us go back a step o r so before we becm too digressive i n a
m r a s s of phenmolw-cum-psychology and ask what, a f t e r all, do we mean
91
*en w e imply that by revealing thought automatically the surrealist poet
is engaging the primitive and marvelous mchanism which calls forth his desire?
1t is very simply this:
thought can only be rendered whole by appealing
spontaneously t o the mst elenmtal of desires, the desire for selfhood; and
that t o realize this desire s i t t i n g ever-ready i n the muth of man--idling on
the very t i p of h i s tongue--is t o have in f a c t heard the purr of the marvelous.
'It is t o have already given by the hearing, the justification for poetic
existence w i t k i n consciousness.
Automatism therefore b e c e s crucial t o this
e n g a g a ~ n t ,for without his conscious w i l l , without rrindfulness, the surrealist
sham he can effect a mtamrphosis of what he knms by rational experience
I
I
I
drawing forward what he does not knm.
By opening
his language and delivering
I
I
I
I
thought •’ran the muth, he can, for instance, release action f r m event and
I
1
event from action; t h a t is t o say he releases the verb f r m the noun and vice
versa.
He has broken syntax and released each a r t i c l e of speech to its most
f u n d m t a l and unconscious truth:
each l i n e and word b e c e s an integrity.
The verb "to look," for example, is as much a complete image as the noun, any
noun, it is seeking t o find.
The act, we are saying, is as autonmus as the
event it corns t o ccanplete and is as much an image as is the completion. No
concept is excluded:
each is capable of transformation, of metamrphosis back
its primrdial and imagistic state.
inml=o
("We have t o f i r s t l e t legs, wings,
hands grow and then l e t them f l y sing form m i f e s t themselves..." writes
.
Arp ) 26
mreover , this is haw the aesthetic of what I. am calling the
"autonc~llousimage" derives •’ran the dialectic of Surrealism. The poet mves
with the essence of things, through the windawpane and into the dream; effecting, autamatically , the mtamrphosis •’ran the canscious world t o the unconscious by taking actions and events a s basic images and loosing them and h i m
self t o the dream.
Indeed as Arp so graphically d m n s t r a t e s :
I
A n m g h i s dead o r alive, sweetened o r salted, heavy o r
l i g h t servants bring h i m he hurls out the windcrw: cigars,
navies, aparbwnts, railrcads, regular coffees, sex appeals,
houses, r n u s w , e t ~ . ~ ~
This, then, is hcrw the poet arrives a t the marvelous.
His spontaneous and
simultaneous reaction t o c ~ c i o u s n e s sbespeaks the superrationality of his
pre-logical thoughts, a superrationality whereby anytking a t a l l is possible
because it is rneasured in the dream; whereby, for instance, as Mina Loy
'scrutinizes', even a dead m t h can lay an egg:
Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes
Have I not
Scaru3where
Scrutinized
A dead white feathered m t h
Laying eggs?28
The m t i v e f o r taking Mina m y t o make a point about the superrational
function of images is, of course, not coincidental t o her association with
I
I
Ill
I!
the Imagist and Objectivist movee~~~ts.
Williams' "no ideas but in things" and
Zukofsky, a s the leading l i g h t of Objectivismwith h i s c a l l f o r a "return t o
the object," both play an important, v i t a l p a r t in our discussion here.
The
only r e a l difference between Objectivism's and Surrealism's desire t o return
to the object--and it is certainly not one of aesthetic canmitmnt--the only
r e a l difference concerns t h e i r logics and, eventually, t h e i r penetration.
Both
see the cbject as an autonomy, an otherness, separated f r m the "I" (the r e a l
difference here being t h a t Surrealism attaches a dialectic, as we have seen,
t o resolve t h a t dream-like distance between perception and representation).
But Zukofsky explains h i s position w e l l enough and it seems rather needless
f o r o*urpurposes t o draw fine distinctions over t h i s issue between him and
Breton :
An Objective: (Optics)--The lens bringing the rays frcan
an object t o a focus.
That which is airred a t .
(Use extended
I/
Il
t o pcetry)--=sire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars. 29
p ere Zukofsky places historicity i n the object itself-the
rays emanating froan
the abject as though it were a dynam, an energy source.
he tension is implied
between the "I" behind the lens and the d
m it sees.
But the aesthetic is
s k s t a n t i a t e d or justified, says Zukofsky, when we realize that Nature is the
creator of objects and that she herself is timeless and insistent ("Ebphasize
d e t a i l 130 tixws over--or there w i l l be no poetic object. '130)
desires to hold perfection by seeing the object as t i m l e s s :
say the object exists in the 'poem' rather than in tim.
.
Thus the "I"
which is t o
(In one of his am
.
poems Zukof sky writes : " A l l the questicns are answered w i t h t h e i r own words" 31)
Hence we can see too t h a t while the penetration o r thrust of the dialectic
a U m s Surrealism t o activate the object t o a greater degree, to s e t the d y n m
in f u l l operation such that the object becaws a viably autonamus "subject" 32
h e v e r y sense--still both Objectivist and surrealist alike are perhaps for
the first tim (and t h i s is t h e i r true likeness) stripping the object of its
referential value i n order to see it for i t s e l f , its perfect autonckny.
It is
the itness of the "Red Wheelbarrcrw" W i l l i a m s confronts us w i t h and the itness
of the apparitional faces Pound likewise draws us t o w i t h h i s "In a Station of
the Wtro" (one might even c a l l the "Red Wheelbarruw" an early poetic manifestation of Magic Realism).
The c r i t i c , Walter Sutton, indeed seems t o sum
t h i s up cogently when he writes:
"The effect of this distinctively modern
theoryC0bjectivisml)is t o place a value on the poetic image as a unique
r e a l i t y rather than as a representation or symbol of a pre-existing reality. I1 33
In t r u t h one is only stressing the obvious by pointing out the easy transition
from such an aesthetic t o the ready-mades and collages (and t h e i r poetic counter-
parts) produced under the nam of Surrealism.
Again, the mot force of such an
endeavor has a m r e calculated e f f e c t the further language is opened.
put it m r e strongly, m r e specifically:
Or to
because the m e l o u s logic of sur-
r e a l i s t P0et.r~opens i t s e l f mre t o the "other" than does objectivism o r
m g i s m the object is given a greater autonomy, a far less representational
reality.
here.
Nicolas Calas, the s u r r e a l i s t , has an interesting cammmt t o mke
In a 1940 interview he states t h a t ,
The reaction t o the t e r r i b l y abstract form the school of
painting was leading t o was unconsciously f e l t i n the need
of adding t o the painting very concrete materials such as
rope and paper--collages.
In this way the r e a l i t y t h a t
painters w e r e denying was reappearing.on a l l sides. But
it is only with Surrealism t h a t the concrete object is
definitely reborn. Its form i s brutal and aggressive
Historically t h i s was the only possible solution; it was
necessary for an object t o e x i s t f i r s t , t o be touched,
seen...for its creator t o understand himself as artist....34
It i s the images expressed i n words that i s the poetry...
....
it i s the poet 'touching' the duplicity of language who recognizes in
words a natural "autonornus l i f e " (Nadeau); it is he who by referring t o the
automatic syntax of the dreamwill find the 'logos' of the Object caw across
the silence and speak t o him of its reality.
P k keep coming back t o language.
But it is undoubtedly the insistence of discourse i t s e l f that forces us t o
do so:
the insistence of its doubleness.
No longer, whether i n Objectivism
o r Imagism and mst especially i n Surrealism, does the language of the poem
rrerely signify the nuance of the objects contained in its text.
Rather, it
discloses them a s inscrutable fact.35 Words "are not pretexts f o r objects so
much a s objects are pretexts f o r words," says the poet i n the s p i r i t of such
a mdemism. 36
Here we have the elmental. music of the spheres, the t r u t h
of correspondences:
The sound of words a s they f a l l away from our muths
Nothing
Is less important
And yet t h a t chair
this table
namd
Assu-w i d e n t i t i e s
take their places
Almost as a kind of music.
(Spicer) 37
I t is, of course, f u n ~ t a l l important
y
t o understand t h a t what
is involved here l i e s w e l l beyond anthropanorphism (such a tern goes against
the very grain of Surrealism). M s t e~tphatically,the poet, here, is not
giving h i s conscious experience t o unconscious things:--on
is allowing things t h e i r m innate consequence.
straightforward and abvious.
otherwise.
the contrary he
The distinction should be
The poet functions as an observer; he cannot do
He cannot w i l l his daily experience and expect t o lord it over his
unconscious self since, while such an experience may be multifarious, it is
always a half-truth and illusive of total consciousness.
(Ashbery:
nmwnt/ Of utterance is the true one; likewise none are
"Each
Again,
which, i n any event,
there is no linguistic cuteness here, no anthropc~11c>rphism
could only corn from the conscious mind.
Therefore i f a "nugget1' gives off
blood (as in L m t i a ) it is not the poet's, but rather a blood much m r e
prifnitive and consequential--"the blood of the air":
A s a rose runs dawn an alley a purple nugget, giving off
sore blood, is suspended i n a i r . 39
It really would seem that too much emphasis cannot be placed on t h i s
point.
In fact one could even say that a whole tradition of thought l i e s a t
the back of what we are talking about:
dating back a t least t o the p h e w
rrenolcgists who "want t o 'return' t o the cbject (Husserlls version of W i l l i a m s '
'no ideas but in things ' is ' Zu den Sachen selbst ' ) ,"40 and
m7re
recently as
their thought is pushed forward into the existentialism of writers like Sartre
and de Beauvoir.
A t any rate, as f a r as surrealist p t r y is concerned--and
when thinking of the autonmus image, the way objects are violently made t o
'speak1--we are again plunged into the poetry of the "other."
When Rimbaud
was calling f o r a "systemtic derangement of the senses" he was setting the
precedent not only for a new aesthetic concerning the elevated position of
the object in poetry but a precedent for a l l artists who wished t o be truthful
about man's real position i n the world.
For i f the senses were ever said t o
define man's world i n terms of t i m e and space--that is, i f by fixing the objects
he sees i n time and space so that man can take his cues f r m these objects,
and by conundrum, support his exaggerated sense of himself-then
a shake-up of
the senses would rightly enough have the h d i a t e effect of liberating the
abjects around h i m so t h a t no longer do they define paranoid man but begin
to take on a l i f e of t h e i r a m , a l i f e no longer centered i n the values of man
who is himself no longer a t the center of the universe.
SO=
force
Hence we can say with
that any real d e r a n g m t of the senses opens the world of objects
out&ard from the human psyche--taward otherness, taward the expression of
new values; outward a s the microcosm mves out t o c q l e t e the macrocosm,
andnwhereman, too, centers and grounds neither the microcosm nor the macrocosm.
In such a context Breton notes that the new "subject in poetry... Cceased t o 2
be held t o be rnerely indifferent
unforgettable sentence:
song. "'41
...when ~autre'arnontflung down i n
Maldoror the
'A man or a stone or a t r e e w i l l begin the fourth
Here i n f a c t we have, as Paz has inferred, a new "vision of the ax-
respmdence between the macrocosm and the microcosm..
. calong with the new3
consciousness that the "I" is a f a u l t , a mistake in the system of the universe. "42 For the currespondent, i f one can put it that way, is himself the
'found-object':
the "otherness" that has been found.
Once m r e it necessarily
follows, according t o the surrealists, that personification is nothing m r e than
a stupidity, it has no ~ a n i n gi n the mdern world (Breton: "Certainly, it is
no longer a question today of asking oneself whether the rock thinks or the
flcwer suffers... "43)
.
In putting the object fully on v i e w the dissecting
table of ~ a u t r & a m nserves
t
f i n a l l y a "gnostic," not a closed, s c i e n t i f i c
function44: it dces not r e l a t e the cbject t o empirical man but rather t o m n l s
increasing need t o remake himself and his values in accordance with the discovery of his am innate otherness divorced fran h i s established systems of belief.
It releases man, in other words, •’ran the f a l s e sense of security which i n the
end can only f r u s t r a t e and turn against him; it releases him t o discover his
desire i n the otherness he shares w i t h the d j e c t s of h i s universe.
Thus i n
surreal lexicon where images are appreciated f o r t h e i r d i r e c t emrgence a s
essence, and too because man is not a t the center of his universe, the images
a p r i o r i , and without mindfulness, i n an
surrounding the s e l f can only be given approximation of their cxn voice.
It is i n such a s p i r i t , then t h a t Tzara
declares, "I give the sam importance t o a crocodile, as t o an active mineral
(sic), as t o an herb. " 45 Moreover, as Hyppolite notes, "In its imrediate
form self-consciousness is Desire and the object which it confronts is nothing
e l s e than the object of i t s desire.
Consciousness in this case is identical
with l i f e , and the creature mved by desire does not consider the object of its
desire a s somthing essentially alien.
As a living creature he experiences the
character of 'being other' only as a marnent within an encounter thatCwil1
y e t be J
...resolved i n satisfaction.
"
46
I f one can say, a f t e r a l l , that "Sur-
realism proclaims the omnipotence of desire, "47
it hec-s
absolutely *a-
tive t o add parenthetically t h a t the post-Copernican artist can only find t h a t
desire within the autonoq of the a l i e n objects around him--= a c ~ s a t i o n
for the autonomy he a s a man has l o s t .
The c r i s i s of &em
man's personality
i n t h i s way causes a s h i f t i n the artist's cornlogy such that the abject gains
not a prominence but a shuddering inevitability. 48 W s need not look too f a r
afield t o find an artist who speaks f o r others in voicing h i s ccrmnitmmt t o such
an inevitability, who addresses h i s manifesto thus t o the autoncany of the object
and proclaims its distance from the E r e anthropomrphic:
Instead of this universe of "signification" (psycholoconstruct a
gical, social, functional), we must -...to
world both mre s o l i d and mre inmediate. ~;et
it be f i r s t
of a l l by their presence t h a t objects and gestures establish
themselves, and let t h i s presence continue t o prevail over
whatever explanatory theory t h a t may t r y t o enclose them i n
a system of references Cwhich i s an i d e a l i z a t i o n 3 , whether
ermtional, sociological, Freudian o r metaphysical.
In t h i s future universe of the [work of a r t 3 , gestures
and objects w i l l be there before being sorwthing; and they
w i l l s t i l l be there afterwards, hard, unalterable, eternally
present, mcking t h e i r mn "meaning," t h a t meaning which
vainly t r i e s t o reduce them t o the r o l e of precarious tools
No longer w i l l objects be Irerely the vague reflection
of the hero's vague so&$, the image of h i s t o m t s , the
shadm of h i s desires.
....
I/
No longer w i l l the cbject be the shadow of the poet's desire, says Surrealism
likewise, it w i l l be t h e very avatar of protean man's desire; for "the object
11
I
/I
1I
.
assms the.. .shape of desire and a c t s upon our contemplation" (Dali) 50
Octavio Paz was quoted i n t h e l a s t chapter as saying that Surrealism is i n f a c t
syrrptamtic of an ultra-Romticism.
hk see the sense of t h i s in the mvemnt
11
I
forward from Objectivism where Nature was recognized as the creator not merely
I
of the cbject in r e a l i t y but of the object in the poem. And while Romanticism
I
m y be the progenitor of Nature mving i n t o the poem it is l e f t t o Surrealism,
really, t o "autamate" i t s language and give this Nature a s a product, or a
projection rather, of the Real.
The objects t o which Surrealism returns are
thus not personas merely, but actual existences.
the object wkich a f t e r a l l draws the eye, 51
For it i s the "density" of
"the Sartrean nausea which exudes
from things existing"52 t h a t sits i n the e l e c t r i c a l chair of the s u r r e a l i s t
poem. And it is inevitable, too, since by opening discourse the s u r r e a l i s t
evokes the heart of desire lying i n the phenawnological:
an k q e of the
object i n i t s prinordial s t a t e , " a t once absolute and fragile."53
t h a t imiges, inasmuch as they e x i s t in language, are autonmus.
Thus it i s
Further,
I
because man is not a t the center of his world his separation f r m them confers
their autonomy.
We must naw turn our attention t o these images revealed
v5olently as the objects of desire.
*
*
A t the height of Surrealism i n 1929 Luis ~ G u e and
l
Salvador D a l i , as
has been m t i o n e d , collaborated on the film "Un Chien Andalou."
In the space
of a few f r m s , o r in one image, this film offered a shattering s m t i o n of
S u r r e a l i e - b o t h of its sta-t
and its technique.
Panning an evening sky,
the c m r a catches a thin cloud mving across the face of a f u l l m n ; i n the
following franes the shot is duplicated, this t k taking as the canera's
subject a g i r l ' s eye with a razor blade mving through it, slicing the eye in
two.
The image i s undeniably violent, and yet it is also ultimately aesthetic
f o r what it purports is a new way of seeing.
The dream is no longer objectified,
i t . i s no longer "out there" before the eye--rather the objectification of
r e a l i t y has been shockingly destroyed and out of t h i s destruction the s h t h
sense becares engaged and mves irrevocably inward on the dream.
In this f i n a l
section, then, we shall try t o shm h w s t a t a n t and technique cane together--
as aesthetic-in the "violent image"; the epitome of the surreal juxtaposition
of r e a l i t i e s t o which Lamantia has made an especially large contribution.
I;et
us begin by taking a cursory look a t the 'razor blade' m t i o n e d
above, for surely this image i t s e l f has an important place i n the 'poetics as
the mtaphorical agent divorcing and making distinct the mind's two opposed
worlds of behaviour.
In the following passage, for example, we might note that
not only does Lamantia seem t o allude t o
B G L E image
~ ~ S but
he also seems intent
on hanging for a m m t onto the violence the razor blade undeniably discloses:
Within closets f i l l e d w i t h nebulae
the blood shot eyes
swim upward f o r the sun
This world of serpents and weeping
wcgnen
is crushed in the violence
of a swamp large enough t o contain
the e n o m u s razorblade of the night
...54
What we are faced with here is the sense of the razor blade lccnning LP
I i n the
text as the abject of the poet's desire.
It is the "itness" of the razor
violently coming forward in the language that becores the apparent subject of
the passage:
the 'cutting reality' moving the poetic scene f r m one world t o
a deeper one, •’ran the conscious t o the unconscious. 55 Again, an allusion
t o ~ G u e my
l
figure in the next Larnantia fragment, but it i s the razor-like
glass i t s e l f which receives the f u l l poetic attention.
Like the "formless
glove" we have m t i o n e d before, the irrage of the glass can be said t o have
mved out of the shadms of a double language:
The children who are ten feet t a l l are wet.
56
Their faces are scorched, t h e i r eyes cut by glass.
Surrealism wishes t o reconcile a l l forms emanating f r ~ the
n conscious
and unconscious minds (like the glove and the formless glove) i n order t o
arrive a t truth.
There is perhaps nothing new in such a s t a t m t , and yet the
t e c h n i p with which the surrealist seeks t o force the reconciliation involves
an energy that m u s t be freshly considered for it is psychic in a sublime way.
It is even violently psychotic; an energy which delivers thought straight
from the muth before the disparity of notions can gain t h e i r foothold i n
rational mindfulness.
What we are dealing w i t h , it seems, is the behaviour
of the surreal anarchist, ccmplete with the aesthetic resonance emanating
from such figures as de Sade and ~ a u t r e ' m n t . The act of poetry, says Surrealism, must be psychically charged, even misanthropic (as i n Sartre's story
"~rO~trat~
where
1 ~ " the hero's desire is t o assassinate humanity) i f the "word"
is t o erupt •’ranthe mouth like a bullet.
~tis m e p l i t i c a l act, poeticized
tkrough the experience of a unique language.
Bretm implores that
Surrealist a c t consists of
The simplest Cand most i~1.~elousSI
dashing d m into the street, pistol i n hand, and firing
blindly, as f a s t a s you can pull the trigger, into the crwd.
Anyone who, a t least a c e in his l i f e , has not dreamd of thus
putting an end t o the petty system of debaserrent and cretinization i n effect has a w e l l - efined place in that crawd, with
his belly a t barrel level. 59
I think it was Kenneth Patchen who once identified himself with what he called
the "unoccupied left":
t h i s seems an apt description too of the doctrinaire
surrealists. 58 A t least the ironic nature of such an irreverence as Surrealism's
t o a l l social forms would have this t o be so.
ccms fornard i n their language like a bullet.
"...when
irony becomes really revolutionary
It is the hidden R e a l which
A s Nicholas Calas suggested,
...it becc~nessomthing much m r e
cruel than what i s understood when we use the term irony.
it 'l'h~m3urnoir,' black bile.
Breton has called
It is laughter of the mst disagreeable kind
and with the most disturbing effects.
...We
scream Knot from the pulpit but 3
from the midst of the iconoclastic mb. "59 Here, truth becares the materialization of staterrent and style functioning in terms of one another so as t o
spring the underlying r e a l i t i e s of poetic experience violently from the wedge
of danguage and t o create the new and less limited experience of t o t a l consciousness out of it.60 There l i e s here an escape frcm the "idea" in favour of the
act, the event of the "word":
an escape frcm all utopias of the mind.
Truly man is i n tmil; and the surrealist captures him there.
Yet
it is important, a t the sarrre t i m e , t o note that such a tmil is notking
i f not an apt mirror expression of the chaotic s t a t e of the universe.
In fact
it is only because of this disorder that the poet can recognize his desire
a t all.
For chaos shapes the hand of desire as the autonmus image perceived
(no m a t t e r how dimly) within his conscious experience.
In other words, were
it not for the chaos and t u n m i l he finds himself in, the poet's sense of desire
muld remin entirely subliminated and beyond his recognition.
The turmoil
the surrealist perceives lying i n the s t a t i c language of c u l t u r a l discourse-a language inevitably a t loose ends with itself--is the turmoil of the conscious
wrld.
And yet there is a certain nobility, indeed a considerable nobility, in
the knowledge of t h i s , one which allows art t o remain a possibility.
It is
because of t h i s uncertain s t a t e that the poet is able t o see in h i s underlying
desire a mrvelous union of the inner and outer worlds, of the microcosm and
the macrocosm.
Such a reconciliation is that between what Apollinaire--the
poet who ironically enough rejoiced a t his experience of the world's most
destructive war--called the noble and the tragic.
"Our history is noble and
writes Apollinaire--a t h e t o be echoed by Axrican postmdernists
62
(like Ferlinghetti ) concerned with both the "logical decor" and the
tragic, "61
"Arrrerican Dream."
By combining such notions as
the noble and the tragic, the
poet is able t o close the distance frcxn his desire, able to enter the apoca-
lyptic truth of h i s actual condition:
the outer m r l d is reflected in the inner
m r l d , its chaos of forms b e c m s shudderingly acute.
-let
Kenneth Rexroth, for
traces the lives of the poet suicides and lunatics (not a few of whom,
w note, are surrealists) --Cr&el,
Rigaud , Artaud , Mayakofsky, Desnos , Saint
Pol Roux, Max Jacob--and answers himself by saying,
Was t h e i r end noble and tragic,
Like the mask of a tyrant?
63
Like Agartmnnon's secret golden face?
when the poet is singing for destruction he is r e a l l y taking h i s plaoe in
the poetics of desire, challenging the namelous t o spring out of a debased
h
m condition.
Thus ~ime' &saire, speaking as a black s u r r e a l i s t from
colonized Marrinique, announces, "I must begin/.../
world that's worth beginning:/
The m d of the World, no less. 1164 ? ~ l i in
~,
turn, is echoed by Charles H e n r i Ford:
~ C O I T Ythe
~
The only thing i n the
"Wlcare the end of the world!/
end of the world! "65 ; and celebrated by Lamantia :
It is you who are caning--Beautiful
Destruction!
I sing you, Destruction, f o r your yelp l i v e bodies of l i v e r against
this humanity of snake and dead dogs In the highes putresence you
glaw l i k e neon BEAUTIFUL, DESTRUCTION OF THE FjORLD!
S
Ill /I
llIl
~lllll
~llllll
Ihe aesthetic which i n f o r m the 'beautiful destruction' is one which, l i k e
1111111
the experience of the Gorgons' head, runs the f u l l gamut from abject t e r r o r
to horrendous beauty.
It I
And l i k e the i n f m u s Medusa there is a l s o the sense
~Ml11
~~'11l1
11I~l11
1~11111
t h a t the "neon" sign t o which Lamantia draws our attention is one which can
1/11
tum its viewer t o stone.
But the "neon" has a further function as w e l l .
It
;I1
11111l
l i t e r a l l y illuminates t h e sign, "BEAVTIEUL DESTRUCTION OF THE WRLD,"
w i t h an
e l e c t r i c a l force, violently fusing the two polar images in a ~ ~ l v e l o usynthesis.
s
Tne e l e c t r i c i t y of the world is of course a nodern mtaphor (and a man-made
notion); so it must be equally noted t h a t man's am mans of ccar~rmnication-the neon sign--is here being ironically pceticized by Lamantia's apocalyptic
nessage.
(One thinks, perhaps, of Marshall McLuhan's phrase, "image over-
load.")
Mary Ann Caws provides an interesting note about the dramatic place
of the "electricity" rretaphor in s u r r e a l i s t poetry.
*
She writes:
The s u r r e a l i s t image is necessarily shocking--it
the conventional laws of association and logic,
objects which compose it, instead of seeming t o
side naturally and n o m l l y , "shriek a t finding
destroys
so t h a t the
f i t side by
themselves
IIIIIII
lllllll
/I1111
together." But the same electrical force t h a t s p l i t s up the
habitual relationships of the o n i i n q world has the paver t o
fuse a l l t h a t has previously been separate. weton w i l l frequently use the mtaphor of e l e c t r i c i t y in h i s theoretical
writings, with a l l its implications of intensity, shock, fusion,
and a highly dramatic quality proper t o surrealism. H e thinks
of poetry as a "conductor of mental electricity" and h i s
of a partcriterion f o r the success of art is the achie-t
icular "fusion of the &d and the heart i n a verbal o r
p l a s t i c m l d which shms itself in s a w way t o be e l e c t r i c a l l y
appropriate t o it."67
Cmwnting on Surrealisw-this fusion of mind and heart--fiche1
&iris indmitably adds t h a t "what attracted roe f r m the f i r s t , and what I
have never repudiated.. .is the manifestation of a w i l l t o find i n poetry a
total system."68 Again, it is the sm Gorgonish head--only one which is now
extended and contemporized t o include a cmplete "anarchy" of forms--that
Surrealism celebrates a s i t s aesthetic attitude:
the nobility, the beauty,
the comdy, the t e r r o r of the destructive a c t imnortalized in the violence
of the pcetuy.
Certainly there is great beauty i n the tragic just a s there is
often i n great camedy; and t o produce these diverse worlds together is funda-
mtal t o the s u r r e a l i s t sensibility.
To be sure, these t m instances are
given t h e i r due in Lamantia:
0 the mirror-like d i r t
of freshly s p i l t blood
t r i c k l i n g dawn the w a l l s
t h e w a l l s t h a t reach the stars!69
2.)
Each bridegrocm s h a l l inherit a laugh of childhood
t h a t w i l l announce the coming of ny felons
s o f t w i t h murder. .70
.
The s o f t , lazy motion one imagines of the snakes coiling over the head of
b d u s a carries with it an absurd humour which in an equally proportionate,
terriFying way turns the viewer--and our imagination also--into a very real,
very hard stone.
One is reminded, not coincidentally perhaps, of Alfred
Jarry's 'Pataphysics, that circular mnstrosity of contradiction which caroe t o
feed the s u r r e a l i s t s ' niinds.
Writing t o Marinetti (in 1903)--although speaking
perhaps mre of himself--Jarry
s t a t e s , " I t is true t h a t in your works surprise
aims l e s s a t laughter than a t the beauty of the horrible."'ll
Jarry's sense of
the beauty contained in the horrible has about it an anarchy of the mst absolut
kind.
Lamantia's own passion for anarchy is w e l l d o c m t e d .
of the nucleus of San Francisco's Anarchist Circle fo&
A s a mmber
k d i a t e l y after
W r l d W a r 11, which included such anarchist-pacifist poets a s Rexroth, Everson
and Duncanr7* h i s pcetic voice can be readily appreciated r i g h t f r m the early
wwk of 1946:
I met you i n the solitude of violence 73
In the pcm "Celestial Estrangement," f o r instance, Lamantia recognizes the
duplicity of the image where men a r e "wingless birds," where "toy d o l l s are
nailed t o the beds," where conscious r e a l i t y emits "the odor of imperishable
sweat/ putrescent h u m b e l l i e s stuffed w i t h revolvers and nuns. t174 Like
earlier s u r r e a l i s t s , Lamantia takes f r m the double nature of images what he
perceives t o be worldly debasement and mikes use of theviolencecontained
therein: he brings forward the inherent, l a t e n t energy of the image i t s e l f
and pushes it t o the limits of t r u t h , "revolvers and nuns" e r g i n g together
from t h e 'thought' of language.
This is the alchemy of the word, the sur-
realist poet's wrenching the marvelous out of language:
the inner and the
outer together, the "nun" and the "revolver", pacifism and anarchy, the
positive and the n i h i l i s t i c .
One must concur with Parker Tyler who writes that
"the danger of daring is the active root of Lamantia's poetry. I t is violence
as victory--a victory over what is t e r r i b l y true. " 75 This anarchist-pacif ist
v o i e remains tkroughout h i s work.
response,'
S ~ i n pgr e s d l y of the v o l m
...I suppose this is what Philip Lamantiass book is actually con-
cerned with."76
This holding oppositions together over the f u l c m of a violent imagery
is what the surrealists seem t o =an when they refer t o the electricity of
wrience.
For Lamntia the process is one of purification, as s m of his
l a t e r work especially sham ("World without End," circa 1970):
Bring the sarcophagus of the immrtal w a i l . I unwrap the
box of fears and n a i l the corridor of nude wonders below
the street t h a t smiles. Black f i r e slakes the f i s t
of water below the winter loneliness into7fhe spectral slum you
made, my chicken l a i r of beauty's corpse.
Here the poet is revitalizing the s t a t i c , ritualized circuitry of a t i r e d
culture, forcing the canstmct into a new, a u t m t i c m l d .
The purification
of r i t u a l is made by desperately vilifying the bogus reality of the conscious
mind :
desperate surrealism
Geneva of movies, who a t e the dogbrick sandwich?
I've cut a loaf of it
and splattered eiou--chaos
(Lamntia) 78
...
With the violent energy underlying the autonmus image standing as his true
incantation the poet begins his dialectical fusion of reality, transforming
the old disparate values into the new realization of consciousness where,
indeed, the f i r e and the rose are held as one:
.
Core ny r i t u a l wax and circles
my rose spitting blood
When the day i s lit up by our magic candles
and the hours yell their sadistic songs and suck hard
into the night when the cats invade our skulls
then we w i l l know the destructive ones have gone
out i n t o the world t o watch the cataclysm k g i n
as the f i n a l wave of fire pours out fran t h e i r hearts ( m t i a )79
This is w e l l beyond anthropocenttrism when 'the rose s p i t s blood', f o r the
paranoiac and Daliesque 'hours' are m t m r p h o s e d i n t o the autonornus image of
'cats invading the s k u l l s ' , and the old, disparate and unrealized consciousness is put t o the f i r e .
But more importantly still, the purification has not
evolved from the poet's rational experience, it has not ken forced from the
repetition of old rituals of discourse.
Rather it springs directly out of
language and rnves directly with t h a t energy a s the actualization i t s e l f
of the marvelous.
and its f i r e .
The a c t is spntaneous.
b b r v e r , t h a t is its purity
Therefore says Lamantia, the s u r r e a l i s t is:
..
.getting down t o
the super-real work of
transmuting the Earth with
--love of
80
bv the Fire prepared •’ran the tire of Onn!
Bv opening h i s language t o reveal the "itness" of the images locked witkin,
the s u r r e a l i s t can c m t o appreciate even the machine--no longer as an
a n t h r m m h i c r e p l a c m t of man-in-the-world,
but as an a u t o n ~ ~ l l ~r euasl i t y ,
a source of marvelous energy, a shuddering object ironically capable of disclosing desire.
One thinks of Duchamp's "chocolate grinder" and the equally
"humurous" machines of Picabia and Man Ray.
Man is placed back in the world
by art: because he, and he alone, is the supreme inventor--he even invents
himself.
One does not c r i t i c a l l y have t o pry
sense of t h i s .
OF
the poem t o gather the
The duplicity i t s e l f inherent i n its text makes the dis-
closure mrvelously, ecstatically:
t h e s t a t i c poem is a new invention
MBOCO the asthmathic
HwS2
10054
mumbimba
there's a machine
81
mchine
(Tzara)
As
Michael Benedikt notes, "to bring about: change, it is not enough t o
a l t e r convention; f a r rrrore inportant is challenging the realities upheld by
convention. "82
What, then, are the precise realities challenged by Surrealism?
hk have already given a cursory glance a t the 'machine'; it may be interesting,
n w , t o look a t its f u l l e r ramifications i n the image of the modern city--for
surely this r e a l i t y , the c i t y , represents much o r a l l of what is upheld by
convention, and in the poetry subsequently beccanes the mtaphoric crisis of
The c i t y , let it be noted f i r s t , functions i n surreal poetry as the
ircinic glorification of the surface nature of language.
That is t o say, as
a symbol it is the coalescence of a l l external p h e n m a i n the rationally
experienced world, it is the foremost place i n t o which man extends h i s conscious w i l l .
Man here extends h i s understanding of himself, his values and
prerogatives, becoming m-in-the-city
a l l things he sees and feels.
and therefore denying the autoncary of
But here too, in the f m u r of the c i t y , lies
the trapped o r pent up violence of h i s conscious expression.
The cityscape
becms his anachronism, h i s a r t i f i c e , the mirror of his half-perceived s e l f .
Its ' r e a l i t y ' is held together by c m t , that metaphorical syntax of the
language:
the blocks and sidewalks of uniformly s t a t i c words which have b e m
the primary elemat of the modern experience and sensibility.83
This cemnt,
then, is what binds conscious experience and gives a superficial logic t o
human reason, w h i l e underneath the pre-logical, s u r r e a l i s t i c unconscious ebbs
and flows t o the disturbance of a marvelous sea (Ford i n f a c t titles one of
I
I
his poems "Undersea Disturbmce On Times Square"84). It is w i t h this knowledge
of things t h a t Salvador Dali declared:
Perhaps no image has produced e f f e c t s t o which the word
ideal can m r e properly be applied than the t r m d o u s image
which is t h e staggering ornamental architecture called the
"Modem Style." No collective e f f o r t has p-duced a dream
world so pure and so disturbing as the "Modem Style" buildings,
these being, apart from architecture, the true realization in
themselves of desires grown solid. Their mst violent and
cruel automtism p i t i f u l l y betrays a hatred of r e a l i t y and a
need for seeking refuge in an ideal world, just a s happens
in i n f a n t i l e neurosis. 85
AS a s u r r e a l i s t , therefore, Lammtia too c a l l s on the energy of a reopened
discourse t o deliver, autcpnatically, the truth about the neurotically debased
and y e t p e r f u l human r e a l i t y :
mstl glass a u t m b i l e s snake by t o decay decay is
living a n t h i l l
where yr autcanobiles l i f t t h e i r s k i r t s and s t i f f
pricks of dead indians going i n reverse
autombile graveyards where I e a t fenders, bodies I c&ch mustards of
engines I devour whole gallons of mlding c h r o ~I whip cheese
from cannibal hoods86
0 peaple I hate the
And in this surreal and superrational poetics where the autonomus images of
glass and autombiles, and automobiles and graveyards, are seen in juxtaposition, and where t h e noble and the tragic are superimposed, t r u t h b e c e s
an energy, a s u b l h and psychic perception.
The brutal becomes graceful--
appositions are held together i n definition of the 1~lrve1ou.s. "I love the
grace of this industrial s t r e e t , " Apollinaire proclaims. 87 The c i t y is i n
the muth, says the s u r r e a l i s t , it is the hub of conscious experience; and
by being so perceived becores synonmus with the dream, containing the
ironic contradictions of the positive and negative poles.
The surrealist
c a l l s the dream forward out of his language, then, i n the following way:
Tmrrm is a c i t y
m r e beautiful mre red than the others
The l i n e of the horizon
shines
l i k e a bar of steel
l i k e a thread t h a t we must cut
s o a s not t o r e s t
ever ( ~ o u p a ~ l . t ) * 8
The poet thus reveals consciousness by his desire for truth suprimposed on
the reality of h i s concrete experience.
"1 am thirsty c i t i e s of France and
of Europe and of the world, " writes Apollinaire8' : & dream has k e n entered
through thought, through the muth prior t o language, and the poet's desire
for selfhood has been fathomed in tern of the marvelous contra-experience.
Here, then, by the ~ t a p h o rof the c i t y , the poet has truly taken thought
in the muth--the a u t c a ~ t i cenergy of the noble and the tragic--and delivered
it t o the air as his illuminated consciousness.
The city, the metaphoric
crisis, has becaw the erotic object of the pbet ' s desire.
bdeed we turn this
penultimate note t o the Lamantia who writes:
Irrarense blank void, m l t i n g structures, sperm steel, the l a s t
roasted cock, geanetry of i n e r t horizontal planes, phases of
toxicomic mnsters I open the door of the air!
*
*
*
The aesthetic of the autonmus image thus serves a fundamental pur-
pose for the surrealist:
shaving him that in order t o find anything but an
unreal and distwbing separateness •’ram things he r w t trace the sclperrational
images around him d m the ladder of his desire and into the dream.
Here he
w i l l find a l l images are rooted t o his selfhood and that together, collectively, they illuminate his ultimate consciousness.
With this accounted for
we are now finally able t o hold a f u l l understanding of the dialectic represented by the windowpane which forced the aesthetic of the autonmus image i n the
f i r s t place.
It is this:
the surrealist has had t o celebrate the intrinsic
itness of images i n t h e i r conscious manifestation i n language so as t o force
t
desire.
into play his m m m ~ toward
In other words, without i n i t i a l l y
entertaining his isolated view of the so-called r e a l i t i e s o r stimuli around him
111
and separate from him the poet's curiosity t o f o l l m these essences into the
unconscious depths underlying his custpiqued.
experience would not have been
Therefore we must conclude that the dialectic which i n i t i a l l y showed
him the nakedness of the windowpane, as glass, is precisely the s n dialectic
which allms him the aesthetic necessary t o propel the poetics toward a f u l l
engagemnt of the deep-seated self.
The windowpane has in this way truly
functioned as the shadow of his real existence as a f u l l consciousness.
says:
Arp
"The intelligent shadm lays its thinkerl.s brow on its thinker's
finger./ It's obvious it thought t o i t s e l f that I ' m not the shadow of a
shadow/ but that I'm self-created."91
One need only add that the self-created
shadow celebrated here, like a l l r e a l i t i e s , can, a f t e r a l l , have been created
only in selfhood, i n the poet's consciousness.
No matter how hard it t r i e s ,
111
1111
Ill
1111
11~11
'/ 1,
111111
urn1
/!/Ill
1111
of course, the conscious mind cannot explain why the possession of t h i s shadm
/I /
is ultimately desirable.
IUII
leaves us
This, says Surrealism, is where language always
(and why art is always necessary). Fk3 have the mans but not the
matter i t s e l f .
Hence it is l e f t t o autcknatism t o overshoot the unsatisfied
mans or ~ c h a n i c sof language and aim straight for the dream where desire is
bound up.
The shadms are thus violently drawn forward.
But a poem of Arp ' s
may just as well s h w how the collective forms of the hidden Real can be
revealed automatically by forcing a synthesis of the dialectics involved in
the windowpane.
The poem hardly needs any CO-t
for the "muteness" of the
"cosmic forms"--the collective forms energized by the autamatic depiction of
the bare desire expressed by the "stained-glass windahis"--is abundantly a p
parent.
One need only see that the entry into the unconscious is revealed by
noting that the p e m is i t s e l f observing an inner-logic, a superrational logic
of its am,by making i t s e l f knuwn as the f u l l - b l m •’om of all it addresses
Il11
IUII
Ill
111
I
imagistically; in other words the poem alone, one can readily f e e l , i s intuitively the consciousness itself-the
poet himself being rrrerely an a u t m a t i c
&server of the f a c t :
THE FORMS THAT I CFEATED ETWEEN 1927 AND 1948 AND THAT I
cxGLED COSMIC FORMS
WERE VAST FORMS
THESE COSMIC FORMS SEEMED MUIT3
BECAUSE THEIR LANGUAGE2 GOES BEYOND THE WAVES PERCEPTIBLE TO
MAN
WHEN I VISITED THE CATHEDRAT; OF CITECRES IN 1948
THE FULLNESS THE AUGUST GRANDEUR AND THE PEF@ECTION OF THE
STADED-GLASS WlNEQWS
THAT NO AFT WILL EVER MANAGE TO SURPASS
LED ME TO REFLECT ON THE LIMITS OF OUR STRENGI'H
AND TO REDUCE THE REIGN OF OUR UNFOLDING.
ITHUSCHOSE FROMTHENON
mRE PRIMITIVE FORMS
PARTIALLY RECrILINEAR FORMS
THAT PERMTmD ME TO A!l?Il?ACT TO INTERCEPT TO INCLUDE MOVE-
MENTS
AND IDEAS APPROACHING
THE HUMAN IMAGE.^^
Finally, we close the chapter with Lamantia and a definitive passage
describing how the poet, rernoved from rational mindfulness, is l e f t open t o
reveal consciousness as it is--superreal:
It's useless to ask who's behind these eyes
alive
o r nare the creatures c&g
out of the exploding iris
A supper of iron and mrcury
is spread out on a table of green water
and the knives, forks and spoons devour it!g j
Here Descartes' phrase "I think, therefore I am" is inverted and shawn a s the
f u n d m t a l consciousness:
I am contained by desire, therefore I have
"thought" and it is my desire.
Conscious experience is irrevocably exposed
as being useless t o fathom desire, and in its place the images which connect
in selfhood--the
"supper of iron and mrcury"--and which are called upon i n
their essence, are seen, marvelously, a s making up the p t ' s consciousness.
!@reover, it is f i n a l l y l e f t t o the implerrents of the surreal poetics--"the
\
P
w
w
kn'ves, forks and spoons1'--to devour it. So the poet is inextricably linked
/eats
the universe which is his e l e r r ~ n t a lfood.
One is, a f t e r a l l , what one
and by the eating, so t o speak, the poetics proves the m a l .
The phen-
/
enon i s perhaps captured by Breton when he says, "No one, when he expresses
himself, does anything mre than c m t o tenns w i t h the possibility of a
very obscure reconciliation between what he knew he had t o say with what, on
the s-
subject, he didn't know he had t o say and nonetheless said. "94
APPENDIX
Text of an unanswered letter sent t o Philip Lamantia, arch 1976:
Under the supemision of Rabin Blaser I am currently writing a Masters
thesis on the s u r r e a l i s t inpulse underlying your work (thesis t i t l e :
INCIDEWUXLLY PHILIP LAMANTIA:
A study of the poetics of Surrealism).
Al-
though I take warning f r m your poetry t h a t such an endeavor might be canstrued
as m r e l y academic--and therefore t o be rnet w i t h h o s t i l i t y by you as a poet--I
-lore
you t o read on before making any judgmnts.
Let rne begin by saying
simply t h a t my project does not attempt t o entrench Surrealism in the groves
of acaden-e.
I am not explicating your poems (as a student of the s i x t i e s
I deplore the New Criticism).
aim,
rather, is t o provide a c r i t i c a l res-
ponse t o the e c l e c t i c and surreal poetics which informs much of the postmdern
era.
The favour I am asking of you is t h a t you might provide
~lle
with
s m de-
tails regarding influences and concerns; naturally I take the abjectives
emanating from these concerns upon myself.
May I ask you, then the following
questicns?
-
how seriously did/do you take Breton's f i r s t manifesto
(specifically autcmatism, the marvelous, the placing of
F'reud); what importance, as a second o r t h i r d generation
s u r r e a l i s t , did/do you place m the manifesto?
-
/
do L a u t r e m n t ' s u h r e l l a and sewing machine mt, f o r you,
on a dissecting table (ie. does the image dialectically
resolve the tension of "distant realitiesu--as Reverdy
and Hegel seem t o suggest); o r do you put words together
simply because t h e i r r e s u l t s appeal t o your libido, whatever?
does Z e n infhence you a t a l l here (ie. do you believe
polarities sinply don't exist in the f i r s t place) ?
do you consider San Francisco o r New York more important
t o the sense of place in your poetry; does your sensibility,
for instance, prefer Whalen's work t o Ashbery's, o r vice versa
(ie. does your atta-t
t o surrealism point you i n the
direction of Kyoto or P a r i s ) ?
would you describe Olson's "Projective Verse" (form dictated
by content) as being important t o you viz. surrealism?
do you agree with Zukofsky i n making a 'return t o the object':
and would you then c a l l the object the source of your 'desire'?
does the following phrase of Apollinaire's have significant
maning t o you 30-60 years later?:
"I love the grace of the
industrial street"
do you see Ford, Tyler and yourself as primarily Arrrtrican
poets or surrealists (your lineage in Whitman and W i l l i a m s
or Rimbaud and J a m ) - - o r i s such a distinction a
cretinizatim?
would you c a l l your Amxicaness 'Beat' o r 'San Francisco
Renaissance', o r is this too an idiocy?
I hope there is nothing in these questions t o infuriate you--and I thank you
for looking a t thern.
Needless t o say I am most interested in any
you might care t o offer, kindly or otherwise.
ccarrc.lents
LIST OF
FUmixmqc~s
Chapter 1
See Kenneth Rewoth, "The Spiritual Alchemy of Th~aughan
," i n
W i t h Eye and E a r (New York : Herder and Herder, 1970) , pp. 1-10.
The New Amxican Poetry Circuit CU.S . ~ . 2 , n.8.
, n.p.,
n.pag.
Philip Lamantia, "The Grim of Pcetry," in City Lights Anthology, ed.
,by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1974), p.250.
Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. by Richard Hauard
(Harmndsworth, England: Penguin Books Ltd. , 1973) , p. 86.
Cited i n Nadeau, p. 332.
A s Pierre Reverdy w r i t e s :
"I've had wind
I've had sky
A t b o t t m everything we see is a r t i f i c i a l "
Pierre Reverdy, Selected Poems, trans. by Kenneth -0th
New Directions, 1972), p.45.
(New York:
Philip Lamantia, Touch of the Marvelous ( ~ o l i n & : Four Seasons
Foundation, 1974), p.3.
AZberto Giac-tti,
f o r instance, carre t o r e j e c t h i s s u r r e a l i s t p r i c d
(1929-35) f o r being "nothing but masturbation, " c i t e d i n Lucy R. Lippard, ed ,
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970), p.141.
Surrealists on A r t (Englewmd C l i f f s , N.J.:
.
A t the aqe of 18 L m t i a writes accusinqlv i n h i s review of a New
Directions anthology (Five Young Arerim poets) "Man, in t h e modern world,
definitely s p l i t s h i m e l f i n halves, living i n r e a l i t y and i n the s p i r i t ,
without realizing the relationship between these two realms." view, 5th S e r . , l
(March 1945) , p. 50.
lo"Awakened From Sleep, " in Touch, p. 12.
Charles Henri Ford, Flag of Ecstasy, ed. by Edward B. G e m (los
Angeles: Black Sparrcw Press, 1972), p.52.
117
l21 a m referring t o LOrCalS essay "Theory and Function of the Duende"
Penguin Books
in Lorca, ed. & trans. by J.L. G i l i ( H ~ n d S W O rEngland:
~,
Inc., 1967), pp.127-139.
l3Having thus ' overturned h i s lake' Ford (in "!the overturned Lake")
speaks of holding h i s blueprint of the unconscious against his conscious
experience :
"I should l i k e t o pick you up, as i f you w e r e a w m of water,
hold you against the l i g h t and see your veins flaw
with fishes; reveal the animal-flowers t h a t rise
nightlike beneath your eyes."
Ford, Flag, p.57.
-
l4A l a i n Jouffroy , cited i n J.H. Matthews , Surrealist Poetry i n FYance
(Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1969), p.160.
15
Jean Arp, Arp on Arp , ed. by Marcel Jean
(New York: The Viking Press, 1972), p.216.
&
trans. by JoachimNeugroschel
l6The analogy here c a w s by way of Wittgenstein who has talked of the
Kantian problem "about the r i g h t hand an6 the l e f t hand, which cannot be mde
to coincide." Wittgenstein, hawever, suggests that--mathematically--the two
• ’ o m are nonetheless congruent: "A right-hand glove could be put on the l e f t
hand, i f it could be tumed around i n f o u r - d k s i o n a l space." Ludwig W i t tgenstein, Tractatus mgico-Philosophicus, trans. by D.F. Pears & B.F.
MzGuiness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), pp.69-70.
17
18
"Where is the g r i l l t h a t would show t h a t i f its external outline
Is no longer jwctaposable with its internal outline
The bid *Passes..."
Breton, "Fata Morgans," trans. by Clark Mills in Jams Laughlin, ed., New
Directions 1941 (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941), p.660.
Cited in Nadeau, p.79.
.
20 John Ashbery , The Tennis Court Oath (Middletam, Ccnn : Wesleyan
University Press, 1968) , p. 11.
Octavio ~ a z incidentally,
,
has quite rightly placed the New York school under
the influence of Surrealism: "In English-speaking countries the influence of
Surrealism was belated and superficial ( u n t i l the appearance of Frank O'Hara
and John Ashberry Csic3, in the f i f t i e s ) I' Octavio Paz , Children of the Mire,
trans. by Rachel Phillips (Canbridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975),
pp.143-4.
.
L.
A
Jack Spicer, The Collected Books of jack Spicer, ed. by Z h i n Blaser
Black Sparrow Press, 1975), p.279.
(Ias Angeles:
22 I b i d . p.225.
23 Ibid.
, p. 313.
24 Ibid., p.296.
25 Ibid., p.46.
26 Ibid., p. 309.
27 Ibid., p.309.
29 Philip Lamantia, in The Beats, ed. by Seynour Krim (Greenwich, Conn. :
Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1960), p.132.
30 Lamantia, "To You Henry Miller Of The Orchestra The Mirror The Revolver
M O f the Stars Of Stars," in Touch, pp.41-2.
i
Ironically enough Miller prefers Dada t o Surrealism f o r the very reasons
"The Surrealists are
I a m n t i a accuses him (Miller) of being un-surrealistic:
too ccnscious of what they are doing." H e n r y Miller, The Cosrological Eye (New
York: New Directions, 1961) , p.163.
32
Eugene Jolas , ed.
, transition.,
18 (Nov. 1929) , p. 175.
33 See Louis Aragonls introduction t o Paul Eluard, Uninterrupted Poetry:
Selected Writings, trans. by Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions,
19751, p.xxvii.
"
Says Aragm elsewhere, "the word l i t e r a t u r e can only be used pejoratively
cited i n Lippard, Surrealists on Art, p.42.
And Breton: "Language has been given t o man s o t h a t he my make s u r r e a l i s t
use of it. I' And& Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. by Richard Seaver
University of Michigan Press, 1972), p.32.
& Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor:
...
34 Breton, cited in Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism ( b n d m : Thams
Hudson, Ltd. , 1972) , p. 72.
& E.
35 Tristan Tzara, c i t e d in Manuel L. ~rr>s-\. .mda (New York:
Merrill Co., Inc., 1971),p.120.
cf. the "ethnopoetics" of Jercme
Bobbs-
36 Arp on Arp, p.467.
37 Such is the nessaqe of a
1964 p m by the Gennan concretist, Claw
B r m r
It is irrpossible-to reprduce the typography here. But the following
amm~taryof B r e m r ' s should provide the reader w i t h the visual mechanics of
the pcem:
"In the f i r s t line, the text is written word wer word. In the lines that
follow Edam the p a g e l , the l a s t word is separated word for word and
line for line, u n t i l the t e x t is legiblermid-point on the pagel). Then the
process is reversed. This a r r a n g m t is intended t o arouse curiosity,
t o reveal s c n ~ t h i n g ,and then again t o kccane obscure; t o arouse the
reader's curiosity, t o reveal sowthing t o him, and then again confront
him with himself....CIn3 a world i n which one is led astray f r m
himself, concrete poetry invites the reader back t o himself."
cited i n Emwtt-~ i l l i a m s ,ed. , kthology of Concrete Poetry (New York: Sawthing Else Press, 1967), unpaginated.
Incidentally, concrete poetry ought not t o have a place in the avant-garde, l e t
alone in Surrealisw-because it must inevitably operate on formalist principles.
It is a closed-form, whereas Surrealism's is open. People are mislead i n thinking t h a t while concrete poetry can have (properly) sm kinetic value it is
th9refore necessarily "open." It i s n ' t . Each concrete poem, by its very nature,
subsumes i t s e l f as an aesthetic e n t i t y , a unity. It becoms t h a t aesthetic
cloud Rexroth s p a k s o f , and Robbe-Grillet speaks o f , floating in the air without a corpus--never exploding i n t o a corpus. Because it can only explode i n t o
i t s e l f : t h a t i s why we c a l l it "concrete," t h a t is its closedness. Pkanwhile, Surrealism ventures c l e a r of the concrete. A s Ashbery remarks, "hair
does not evoke a concrete image/ the splendid.. "
is, p. 79. )
.
.
William Carlos W i l l i a m s , Paterson (New York:
New Directions, 1963),
Arp, Arp on Arp, p.203.
Ibid., p.97.
its psychic
The leqacy
- - of t h i s automatism stems of course from Dada:
and p l a s t i c expressiun can be found in the ready-mades of Duchamp and & Ray
o r i n the random paper collages of Hausmnn, Baader, e t a l . Arp defines t h i s
"chance art" as "Realities, pure and independent, w i t h no maning o r cerebral
intention. We rejected a l l mimsis and description, giving f r e e rein t o the
~ l & t a r y and Spontaneous.. .I declared t h a t these works were arranged
'according t o the law of chance,' as in the order of nature, chance being f o r E
simply a part of an inexplicable reason, of an inaccessible order.
" (Arp on
.
...
"Exquisite Coqse"
Arp, p.232); its n i h i l i s t i c and
l i t e r a r y expression can be found in the
game ("The exquisite/ corpse/ s h a l l drink/ the bubbling/ wine"
--cited i n Lippard, p.87) which Breton developed under the influence of Jacques
~ a c h 6 ;and of course its legitimate l i t e r a r y expression lies, f i r s t and f o m s t ,
in Breton and Soupault's "The Magnetic Fields" ("The corridors of the big hotels
are q t y and the cigar m k e is hiding, etc."--cited in m k r t pbthemell,
ed., Dada Painters and Poets (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., 19511,
-p.232.).
S0~t12 exa~ples
of 'pure automatism' in poetry even prefigure Dada, a s for instance
Apollinaire's collection Calliqranms. But chiefly the ground is broken by
Breton, Aragon and Soupault:
"Suicide"
a b c d e f
g h i j k l
m n o p q r
s t u v w
X Y Z
Aragon, c i t e d i n Grossman, p.142.
The a i r c r a f t are weaving the telegraph w i r e s
and the waterfall is singing the exact same song
A t the coachmen's hangout the a p e r i t i f s are a l l orange
but locomtive engineers a l l have w h i t e eyes
the lady has l o s t her smile in the woods.
Soupault, c i t e d i n Michael Benedikt, ed., The Poetry of Surrealism: An Anthology,
trans. by Benedikt e t a 1 (Boston: L i t t l e , Brawn & Co., 1974), p.108.
..
42 Philip Lamantia, Touch, p.20.
43 p h i l i p Lamantia, "Intersection," i n Selected Poems (San Francism:
City Lights Books, 1967), p.38.
44 Philip Larmntia, "Flaming Teeth," i n The Blood of the Air (San
Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1970), p.35.
It is interesting t o note t h a t the post-Victorian e r a pushed many authors with
varying aesthetics working quite independently of Dada (notably Virginia W l f
and Joyce, although Joyce w a s in Zurich a t the t b of the Cabaret Voltaire).
The "stream of consciousness," espoused by Woolf (belaw) i s a twin t o autamatism
and not unlike Kerouac' s t o follow, and Burroughs' "cut-up" (or "fold-in")
nethod (a mthod, incidently, used by many writers of Beat prose--Holmst
Trocchi, Harrington, Douglas m l f , e t a l l .
Woolf: "Examine f o r a m m t an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The
mind receives a myriad impressions--trivial, fantastic, evanescent, o r engraved
, incessant shcwer of
with t h e sharpness of s t e e l . F'ran a l l sides they c o ~ an
inumerable at-;
and a s they f a l l , as they shape themselves i n t o the l i f e of
bnday o r Tuesday, t h e accent f a l l s differently f r m of old....l;et us record the
a t a s a s they f a l l u p n the mind in the order i n which they f a l l , let us trace
the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight
o r incident scores upon the consciousness." virginia Wool•’, The C o m n Wader
(New York: Harcourt, Brace 6 World, Inc., 1953), pp.154-5.
Kerouac (in his "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose") "Not 'selectivity' of
expression but folluwing f r e e deviation (association) of mind i n t o limitless
flm-m-subject seas of thought..."; cited in George Dardess, "The Logic of
S p t a n e i t y : A reconsideration of Kerouac's 'Spontaneous Prose Method,"'
Boundary 2, vol. 111, no.3 (Spring W E ) , p.744.
And Kerouac again (in h i s "Belief and Technique f o r W e m Prose"):
"1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten paqes,
for
- 2.
t o everything, open, listening
7. Blow a s deep a s you want t o blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from b a t t a m of the mind
13. m v e l i t e r a r y , gramnatical and syntactical inhibition
15. Telling the true story of the world in i n t e r i o r monolog
17. Write in recollection and amazerent f o r yourself
.
21. Struggle t o sketch the flow t h a t already e x i s t s intact
in mind
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, caning i n from
.."
under, crazier the better.
Jack Kerouac, "Belief & Technique f o r Modern Prose," in A Casebook on the B e a t ,
ed. by Thomas Parkinson (New York: Thanas Y. C r w l l Co., 1966), pp.67-8.
Burroughs is generally mre "scientific" i n his application of the cut-up,
since h i s end is less aesthetic, mre "political" (his advocation of the E
W t e r , f o r instance, a s a t o o l with which t o break d m control systems).
He is also contradictory--inevitably--in
his aesthetics, advocating unconscious
spontaneity a t one rmwnt and denying it in the next:
"You can not w i l l spontaneity. But you can introduce
the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of
Cutting and rearranging a page of written words
scissors
introduces a new dirrension i n t o writing enabling the writer
t o turn k g e s i n cineramic variation. Images s h i f t sense
under the scissors wll imges t o sound sight t o sound
sound t o kinesthetic. This is where Rimbaud was going
with his color of vowels. And h i s systematic derangerru3nt
of the senses. The place of mscaline hallucination:
seeing colors tasting sounds sxelling forms."
The
William Burroughs, "Notes on Vaudeville Voices, and The Cut up Method," i n Moderns ed. by LRRoi Jones (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 19651, pp.345-7.
" I t ' s not unconscious a t a l l , i t ' s a very d e f i n i t e operation
the simplest way is t o take a page, cut it d m the
middle and across the middle, and then rearrange the four
sections. Ncw t h a t ' s a very simple form of cut-up i f you
want t o get sm idea of one r e a r r a n g m t of the words on
....
...
t h a t page. I t ' s quite conscious, there's nothing of
a u t m t i c writing o r unconscious procedure involved here." cited i n Daniel
Odier , The Job: Interview with ~ i l l i A
Burroughs (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd. ,
1969), p.14.
45 Cited in Grossman, p. 118.
46 G u i l l a m Apollinaire , SeleCted Writings, trans. by Roger Shattuck
(New York: New Directions, 1971), p.227.
47 In h i s "Letter t o Elaine Feinstein," which follows the seminal essay
of postmodemism, "Projective Verse,''
Charles Olson notes the "primary":
"I am talking from a 'double axis': the replacement of Classicalrepresentational by the 'primitive-abstractl....I man of course
not a t all primitive i n t h a t stupid use of it as opposed t o the civilized.
One mans it now a s ' p r i m r y , ' as how one finds anything, pick
it up as one does new--fresh/ f i r s t . Thus one is equal across
history forward and back, and i t ' s a l l levy, as present is, but
sd that way, one states...a different space-time."
Charles Olson, Selected Writings, ed. by Robert Creeley (New York: New
Directions, 1966), p.28.
This s p a c e - t k moving fomard and back i n the clothing of history is part of
what Octavio Paz mans by the "other1' tradition in poetry (see chapter 2 )
.
48 Philip Lamntia, "Secret Weapons ," i n Destroyed Works (San Francisco :
Auerhahn Press, 1962) , unpaginated
A s Marshall McLuhan wryly puts it: "The Balinese, who have no word for art,
Marshall McLukan and Harley
say, ' W do everything a s w e l l a s possible."'
Parker, Through the Vanishing Point (New York : Harper & R m , 1969) , p. 243.
.
49 Indeed Lamntia pays homage t o the primitive i n the celebration of h i s
awn nam:
"Lamtines:
A species of herbivorous rrermaidl i k e m a l s native t o Africa and the Americas,
inhabiting the mouths of larger rivers. They
play, i n West-African myth, a role similar t o
t h a t of the Sirens i n Europe.
m t i a , Blood, frontispiece.
50 Philip L m t i a , "Plumage of Recognition, I' i n Touch, p. 32.
Emst s t a t e s the purpose of the "frottage" as f o l l w s :
"The frottage process--based on nothing other than the
intensification of the i r r i t a b i l i t y of the mind's faculties
by appropriate technical mans, excluding all conscious
m t a l guidance (of reasori, t a s t e o r morals) and reducing
t o a minimum t h a t active part of what has hitherto been
called the "author" of the work--was conseqwntly revealed
as the true equivalent of t h a t which w a s already knawn
as automatic writinu. I'
Cited in Lippard, P . 121.
Lamantia gives the occult-like sense of the automatic in his note t o the reader
on the title-page of Blood:
"TO T ~ ~ R E A D E R
I am not the I who writes,
but the eye i s ours t h a t parts the f i r e
in the things unseen and then, seen. "
Breton. Manifestos ,p. 174.
52 Lamantia, Touch, p.6.
cf. Ashbery: "The c a r t unleased/ Ashes over every p a r t of the century...";
Tennis, p.51
54 Mary Ann Caws, The Pcetry of Dada and Surrealisn (Princetm, N. J. :
Princeton University Press, 1970), p.31.
55 L m m t i a , "The Diabolic Condition," i n Touch, p.27
It is perhaps the chant inspired by an A-pllinaire "concerned with the...words
whose rreaning w i l l have t o be changed" (Selected Writings, p.871, and by Hugo
Ball: "we have charged the word with forces and energies which made it poss i b l e f o r us t o rediscover the evangelical concept of the 'word' (logos) a s a
m g i c a l cceoplex of images." (Cited i n Grossman, p.118.) The l i t u r g i c a l sense
of,such a chanting is evident i n a l l of B a l l ' s poetry; f o r example:
"gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori
gadjam g r m berida b h b a l a glandri galassassa laulitalcmins"
Cited in Hans Richter, Dada: A r t and Anti-Art, trans. by David Britt(Imdon:
Tharres & Hudson, 1970), p.42.
And did the sm San ~ r a i c i s c oRenaissance which produced Laroantia not a l s o
deliver W l u r e ? :
"Oh Philip Lamantia--magnetic
hungers. Our dream! The beasts' perfection. "
Michael W l u r e , The New Book/ A Book of Torture (New York : Grove Press, 1961)
p.58.
56
57
58
59
Lamantia, "Table of Visions," i n Destroyed Works, unpaginated.
Ibid
., "Opus Magnum. "
Ibid., " T i l l The ]End Of Time."
Breton, Manifestoes, p.14.
60 Ovid, The Metamrphoses, trans. by Horace Gregory (New York:
Viking Press, 1960), p.242.
The
I m t i a , "A Winter Day, I' i n Touch, p. 18.
W i t h Lamantia the sense of t h i s m E n t is usually given i n p l a s t i c t e r n , often
in term of Pop Art (a l a Liechtenstein) , o r even ~p Art:
"The sun is riding i n t o your eye
virgins are bursting
f ran under ny flaming palms"
(Touch, p .2 1)
"Burnt stars
Oceanic gardens
where the clouds axe soaked i n t o my eyes" o ouch p.9)
And i s not de Chirico too a precursor t o Pop Art? In h i s poem t o the painter,
Apo&linaire gives the appropriate p l a s t i c image:
"I b u i l t a house in the middle of the ocean
Its windms are rivers which f l w out of rrty eyes" (Selected Writings,
p.101.)
62 Parker Tyler, The W i l l of Eros : Selected Poems 1930-19701 (Ias Angeles :
Black Sparrw Press, 1972), p.103.
63 Paul Verlaine, Selected Poems, trans by C .F. MacIntyre (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1970), p.183.
65 Norman 0. Br-,
"Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the
Mind," i n The Radical Vision: Essays for the Seventies, ed. by Leo H m l i a n
Inc., 1970), p.107.
& Frederick R. K a r l (New York: Thomas Y. C r w e l l Co.,
66 Paul Green, "The Relevance of Surrealism with sives," Mosaic, 2, No. 4 ( S m r 1969), p.70.
Canadian Perspect-
67 Larrantia, "The Touch Of The Marvelous," i n Touch, p.4.
In Shelley's translation the madness of the poet i n Plato's Ion speaks f o r
itself:
"For the authors of those great poems which we admire, do
not a t t a i n t o excellence through the rules of any art,
but they u t t e r t h e i r beautiful melodies of verse in a
s t a t e of inspiration, and, a s it were, possessed by a
s p i r i t not t h e i r awn. Thus the composers of l y r i c a l
poetry create those admired songs of t h e i r s i n a state
of divine insanity, l i k e the Corybantes, who lose a l l
control over t h e i r reason i n the enthusiasm of the sacred
dance; and, during this supernatural possession, are
excited t o the rhythm and harmony which they c m u n i c a t e
to m. Like the Bacchantes, who, when possessed by the
God, draw honey and milk f r m the rivers, in which, when
' they c a w t o t h e i r sense, they find nothing but s h p l e
water. For the souls of the poets, a s poets t e l l us,
have this peculiar ministration i n the world. They t e l l
u s t h a t these souls, flying l i k e bees from flawer t o
flower, and wandering over the gardens and the madows,
and the honey-flowing fountains of the Muses, return t o
us laden with the sweetness of nu3lody; and arrayed a s
they a r e in the plumes of rapid imagination, they speak
truth. For a Poet is indeed a thing ethereally l i g h t ,
winged, and sacred, nor can he compose anything worth
calling poem u n t i l he b e c o n ~ sinspired, and, as it
were, mad, o r whilst any reason r d n s in him."
Plato, Five Dialogues of ~ l a t o ,ed. by Ernest kysand trans. by P .B. Shelley
(Inndon: J . M . Dent & Sons Ltd.1 1938),pp.6-7.
Even Lcnginus, when arguing against t h e L k e of mtaphors which are overly bold,
admits that what is causing them is precise1y"theenthusim of the Cpoet3."
T.S Dorsch , trans. , Classical ~iter-&ycriticism (Hmndsworth , Ehgland:
Penguin Books Ltd., 1972), p.141.
.
Chapter 2
~ n d r e Bretm
'
, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. by Richard Seaver
The University of Michigan Press, 1972), p.11.
&
Helen
R. Lane (Ann Arbor:
C\
L
Paul Eluard, Uninterrupted Poetry: Selected Writings, trans. by Lloyd
Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1975), p. 127.
' Elias Wilentz , ed. , The Beat Scene (New York :
Corinth Books, 1960) ,
p.178.
Cited in J. H. Matthews , Surrealist Poetry In Franan (Syracuse, N .Y. :
Syracuse University Press, 1969) , p. 63.
Cited in Manuel L. Grossman, Dada
Inc., 1971), p.136.
(New York:
The Bobbs-Merrill Co.
'
Philip Lamantia, "Awakened From Sleep," in Touch Of The MarJelous
(Bolinas: Four Seasons Foundation, 1974), p.12.
/
Comte de ~ a u t r 6 m n t ,&s Chants de Maldoror, trans. by Guy Wernharn
(New York: New Directions, 1966), p.263.
.
Although chronologically taking his place alongside Rimbaud, a s Wallace Faczrlie
notes, " ~ a u t r 6 a m t ' sstar was never in eclipse in the s u r r e a l i s t heaven. H e
might we11 be called the r e a l founder of the mv-t."
Wallace ~ a w l i e ,Age Of
Surrealism (Bloomhgt~n
: Indiana University Press, 1972) , p. 199.
*
Breton, Manifestoes , pp .9-10.
Wallace F m l i e writes m r e than 20 years a f t e r the manifesto:
"Breton was one of the f i r s t k e n c b n , who was not a psychoanalyst,
t o study F'reud....Breton's enthusiasm and veneration f o r F r e d ,
as f a r a s I h a w , have never diminished. He believes t h a t Freud
is one of the greatest forces i n helping m d e m man t o rediscover the
waning and the v i t a l i t y of words. " (Fawlie, p.105. )
See F'reud, On c r e a t i v i t y And The Unconscious, trans. by I .F. Grant Duff
(New York: Harper & Raw, 1958), pp.44-54.
loJean Arp, Arp on Arp, ed. by Marcel Jean and trans. by Jwchim
Neugroschel (New York: The Viking Press, 1972), p.173.
Arpr Arp
C3-l
Arp, p.132
l2Shattuck ' s intrcduction t o Guillaume A p l l i n a i r e , Selected Writings,
trans. by Roger Shattuck (New York : New Directions, 1971) , p. 49.
Shattuck defines " s u r r e a l i s t distortion" a s a cambination of "the tragic and
the ccanic i n t o a new awareness where w e f e e l the p u l l of both poles." (Ibid,p.49.)
Thus Jacques ~ r & e r t ,i n "Pall-Bearers," qives the ironic juxtaposition of
"a g i r l i n a black cassock w i t h a p r i e s t i n a bikini
..."
a conscientious director w i t h a company objector
Cited in Michael Benedikt , ed , The Pcetry of Surrealism: An Anthology, trans.
by Benedikt e t a 1 (Boston: L i t t l e , Brown & Co., 1974), p.330.
And Lamantia gives the s e i n h i s s a t i r i c a l
11
'
guns are dancing
i n front of the m v i e queens"
Lamantia, "Automatic World," in -Touch, p. 21
.
l3Eugene Jolas , "Logos ," transition, No. 16-17 (June 1929) , p. 27.
l4Breton seems t o object t o the s t r e s s on "distant" in Reverdy's s t a t e m n t
aoncerning the "juxtaposition of two mre o r less distant r e a l i t i e s " a s making
way t o an " a posteriori aesthetic" (Manifestoes, pp.20-21). By adding the
condition of 'automatism' t o the method of juxtaposing images Breton f e e l s t h a t
Surrealism corrects the wrong and puts thought back where it should be--ahead
of conscious experience and conscious, o r willed, language. It is only by
"revealing Ethe 3 interplay" of images automatically, says Breton (Manifestoes,
p. 158) , t h a t Surrealism can go the f u l l step of t o t a l l y engaging the 'unconscious '
mind. kt ''it clearly be understood," he adds, "that we are not talking about
a simple regrouping of words o r a capricious redistribution of visual images,
but of the re-creation of a s t a t e which can only be f a i r l y ccanpared t o that of
mdness..
." (Manifestoes, p.175.)
l5m t i a , "Mirror and Heart," in Touch, p.24.
Lb
J. H. M a t t h e w s , ed., An Anthology of French Surrealist Poetry
(Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1966), p.24.
Lamantila, Touch, p.14
~ g r e t ,i n Benedikt , ed.
, The Poetry
of Surrealism:
An Anthology, p -225.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. by Richard C. Mccleary (Evanston,
Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp.77-8.
longinus, following Aristotle and Theophrastus, suggests that such phrases
("as i f , " "as it were, " and " i f one may put it l i k e t h i s " ) "mitigate the boldness" of mtaphor. Here, clearly, quite the opposite is the case. The metaphor
has been extended, boldly, beyond i t s own expectations. See T.S. Dorsch,
,
trans. , Classical Literary Criticism ( ~ m n d s w o r t h Ehgland:
Penguin Books
Ltd., 1972), p.141.
21 Philip L m t i a , Selected Pceris (San Francism: City Lights Books, 1967),
p.41.
22 See Eric Sellin, "The Esthetics of Ambiguity: Reverdy' s U s e of Syntactic
Simultaneity," i n About French Pcetry from Dada t o "Tel Qllel," ed. by Mary
Ann Caws (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974), pp.112-125.
"The nucleus of the new poetry is a poetic image which is not mtaphor as
such nor any specific rhetorical device and, f u r t h e m r e , is not r e a l l y an
image as we generally interpret t h a t word. It is not depiction, parallelism,
o r analogy, although it m y occur w i t h i n such frmworks; it is rather a
glimpse a t the universal, a confrontation with an irreductible ambiguity.
It does not dazzle us with aptness of carparison between known units
but rather enlightens us o r a t l e a s t stuns us by giving us an impulse
i n t o the area of the ineffable. Such poetry must, perforce, be mystic,
and we cannot avoid the word. " (p. 114. )
23 See J.H. Mtthews, Surrealist Poetry In France, pp.109-110.
" A s used by Eluard, the s k l e word -c
m ("like") functions
.
l i k e a trip wire: by the k r w we realize i t has served its purpose,
it i s too l a t e for us t o r e t r e a t ; r e a l i t y has been booby-trappd, and
the bridges c u t behind us....& this way, Eluard discovers the
i n f i n i t e possibility of the real, illuminated by the internal l i g h t of
desire. "
Matthews elsewhere similarly notes:
"...the conjunction
'because1 is used in his poems in a rmWer
t h a t overturns the principle of cause and effect, as t h i s is generally
understood and applied i n our rational society....
(And no one w i l l be able t o use the road any mre because
the l e t t e r s w i l l be hysterical machine-guns)
.Instead of being a fence t o keep out the m e l o u s , the conjunction
a windm upan it."
has beJ . H . Matthews, "Benjamin Peret: Marvelous C o n j u n ~ t i o n ,in
~ Mary Ann C W I ed-,
About French Poetry from Dada t o "Tel Quel," p.129.
..
24 See Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. by ~ i c h a r dH ~ ~ a r d
(Hmndsworth, England: Penguin Books Ltd , 1973) , p. 81.
"...it is apropos of the Chants de Maldoror
that Breton wrote
-.
t h i s key sentence f o r s u r r e a l i s t activity: We know naw t h a t
poetry &t lead somewhere. ' I'
.
25 Lionel Abel, "A B and C on ~ a u t r & r m n t", View,
- 4 t h Ser. , 4 ( k c . 1944),
pp. 151-2.
N.J.:
26 Cited i n Lucy R. Lippard, ed. , Surrealists on A r t (Englewod ~ l if fs ,
(Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970), pp.126-7.
Cited in J . H . Matthews, Surrealist Poetry In France, p.179.
Matthews explains Cabanel's m s i t i o n :
"TreatLg it as an ' a c t bf love with words, ' Cabanel maintains
t h a t poetry is produced mst efficaciously by inventing nonnal
mdes of contact (sodomization) and by possessing words despite
the resistance they offer(rape). A s he understands, it, rape 'adapts
i t s e l f t o extrm decomposition w i t h i n the framework of the sentence,
by the f a c t t h a t the syllable and even the l e t t e r s , not subjected t o
any order, can break up constituted words, thus becaning an i n f i n i t e
source of new words. ' " (Ibid. , p. 180. )
...
28 See Sigmund Freud, A General I n t r d u c t i o n To Psycho-analysis, trans. by
Joan Riviere (New York: S h n and Schuster, 19631, p.107.
"We do l i t e r a l l y deny t h a t anything i n the dream is a matter
of chance o r of indifference, and it is precisely by enquiring
i n t o such t r i v i a l and (apparently) unmotivated d e t a i l s t h a t
we expect t o arrive a t our conclusion."
29 Breton , Manifestoes , pp. 10-11.
30 Freud, A General Introduction To Psycho-analysis
31 Ibid.
. ww. 1.51 - 160.
, p. 103.
I
I
32 ch-ky
explains how transformticnal linguistics sees the 'hnguage
grid' we a r e here discussing:
"The generative gramnar of a language should, ideally, contain
en&qmnents,
a central syntactic ccanponent and hYo interpretive - a
phonological component and a serrantic component... CEach3
of the two interpretive canponents maps a svntacticallv senerated
structure onto a l'concrete" interpret&on,- in one cas;! phonetic and
i n the other, s m t i c . . . . T h u s the syntactic component must provide
for each sentence...a semantically interpretable deep structure and
a phonetically interpretable surface structure...."
Chomsky, Current Issues In Linguistic Theory (The Hague: Wuton, 19701,
-10.
pp.9
See also Ronald W. Langacker, Language and i t s Structure (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1967)) p.95.
CONCEPTUAL STRUCIZTRE
/t\
SURFACE S
T
T
R
~
Phonological Rules
L_r_i
\L
PHONETIC MANIFTCSTATION
O r as Parker Tyler conceives it:
"That unbroken thing, mving behind h i s eyes
Sound converted i n t o image, image
I n t o writing, writing i n t o vision. "
Parker Tyler, The W i l l Of Eros: Selected Poems 1930-1970 (Los Angeles:
Sparrow Press, 1972), p.93.
..
33 Noam Chomky, Language And Mind (New York:
Jovanovich, Inc., 1972), pp.28-30.
Black
Harcourt, Brace,
34 Wrleau-Ponty , signs, p. 45.
'' Emily Dickinson,
The Canplete Pcerns of l3nily ~ i c k i n s o n ,ed. by Thorns
L i t t l e , Brown
Co., 1960), p.619.
H. Johnson (Boston:
&
36 Marianne Mmre, Collected Poems (New York:
37 W a l t Whitman, Ieaves Of Grass (New York:
1965), p.167.
Airrrcnt Publishing Co.
, Inc.,
38 Parker Tyler's long poem "The Granite utterf fly" i s an excellent
example here: the poem tries--throuqh the e n a c m t of pcetry (which is unconscious and instinctual)--to trace i t s e l f back t o the oriqinal impulse o r
deep structure, the emkdded b u l s e , t o see why it c m and what the (surreal)
process is. The process, o r d i a l e c t i c , is the highly stylized vivacity of
the imaqination, given i n strophe and antistrophe--his the poet discovers i n
canto 6; the process is revealed a s the s t a t i c m t i o n of the 'Granite Butterf l y ' , the imagination mving through space and recalling actual, emlxdded events;
f i n a l l y , canto 9 disoovers the original impulse t o be the violence of r e a l i t y
i t s e l f (Alexei's castration) which the process of poetry--the imaginative act-has s&liminated and concealed; the horrendous a c t of r e a l i t y thus revealed
a t l a s t , the unconscious is fathmed and the poem done.
39 Breton, h n i f e s t c e s , p. 10.
40 Merleau-Ponty
, Signs,
41 Herbert Read, ed.
p .42.
, Surrealism
(Lcndon:
Faber and ~ & r ,1971), p. 77.
42 In h i s essay " C r i s i s of the Object ,"Breton calls for a " t o t a l
revolution of the object." H e talks of freeing the found-object and the readymade •’ran their mundane function--indeed w e think, perhaps, of the "incorporated
6 Paalen when we read:
abjects" of ~ i r and
"This a b i l i t y t o reconcile ...two imagesCkccms a transcendence3 of
the object's m i f e s t existence
L a reversion7 t o an i n f i n i t e series
of l a t e n t possibilities....The object's conventional value then becames
t o i t s dramatic value...."
entirely subordinate
Andrg Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. by Simon Watson Taylor (New York:
H a r p e r & Raw, 1972), p.279.
...
...
43 See ~autr&anont,Maldoror, p.334.
"A logic e x i s t s f o r poetry. It is not the same a s t h a t f o r
philosophy. Philosophers a r e not a s much as pets CsicJ.
Poets have the right t o consider themselves above philosophers."
44 Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire, trans. by Rachel Phillips (Cambridge,
Harvard University Press, 1975) , pp .139-140.
mss. :
45 Cited i n Mary Ann Caws, The Poetry Of Dada And ~ u r r e a l i s n(Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), p.77.
46 l a m n t i a , Selected Pcems, p. 4 1
47 See Roger Shattuck in his intrcduction t o Apollinaire's Selected
Writings, pp.33-35.
"In consideration of the function of the imagination
there is contained a mthcd of classifying imagery: according
t o the distance of the associative leap. The distance can
be reckoned m l y i n the nebulous terms of 'normal' association
...
but most images do seem t o f a l l easily i n t o place sawvhere
along this scale....In this provisional scale of association,
there are a t one end the underrunding images of cliche
pcetry which c a l l upon Only those reactions close t o the
surface of the reader's mind; and a t the other end are the
e x t r a images, as of dada and surrealism, where the leap
is often t o o g r e a t t o allclw any but a private span t o be
b u i l t from t e r m t o term.. .I1
Shattuck characterizes t h i s distance i n useful tern as the distance perceived
i n imagination between two points, and as crossed by it. Unfortunately he
insists on dealing with language only on a cmscious level by implying t h a t a
"demanding" image is demnding only because the distance carried by ' conscious
association is great. What is 'demanding' about such a distance, rather, is
t h a t the two points from which the images c m have nothing a t a l l i n c o m n .
a --posterI f the pcet s t a r t s from the conscious s t a t e , where the logic canes io r i , and moves t o the unconscious, where the reverse is true, he has not made
an association (as between two s t a t i c points within 'conscious ' language) ;
rather the poet has s e t out, by h i s imagination, the balance of two d i s t i n c t l y
apposed worlds of experience. He has created not an associative image but
an equation t h a t accounts f o r a l l of r e a l i t y , a l l of consciousness.
.
48 Paz, Children of the Mire, p.51.
49 Icoger Shattuck, "'I'he Mode of Juxtaposition," i n Caws, ed. , About E'rench
P e t r y from Dada t o "Tel Quel," p.20.
50 Paul Eluard, "Poetic Evidence ," trans. by George Reavey , in Herbert
Read, ed., Surrealism, pp.172-3.
Breton, M a n i f e s t ~,s p. 34
JI
52
C. G. Jung , " ' Ulysses ' : A Monologue, " i n The S p i r i t in Man, A r t and
Literature, ed. by S i r Herbert Read e t a 1 and trans. by R.F.C. Hull (Princeton,
N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1972), p.117.
53 An interesting example of how the two seemingly distinctive notions of
the "unconscious" and the "collective u n c o n s c i o ~ smiaht
~ ~ be set tarether
Turn of theascrew.
springs t o mind out of Robert H e i h ' s a r t i c l e m ~ h g
Rabert Heilman, "'The T u m of the Screw' as P m , " in W i l b u r Scott, ed..
Five Apgmaches of Literary C r i t i c i s m (New York : Collier Books, 1966) , .
~p.283-301.
Heilman, arguing from an archetypal o r mythological point of view, sees Jams'
story as an allegory of the Eden myth--quite overlooking the question of the
Governess ' r e l i a b i l i t y as a narrator. Hawever, the archetypal and Freudian
interpretations of the story might be resolved by admitting, with the Freudians,
t h a t the narrator has created or loosed the forces of e v i l a s a r e s u l t of her
unsatisfied sexual fantasy ( m r the mysterious uncle) , but t h a t the e v i l she
neurotically conjures i n her unconscious mind has its p a r a l l e l a l s o i n the wider
q t h s of Eden and original sin--#at
is, i n the collective unconscious of
western man.
55 Philip Lamantia, "Blue Iacus,I1 i n The ~
1970 ) , p -8.
Four Seasons ~ ~ u n d a t i ,o n
l OfdThe Air (San Francisco:
56 L m t i a , "Astro-mancy," i n Selected Poems, p.92.
57 Walt W
h
i
m
, An Am-rkan P h ~ r ed.
,
by Horace Traubel (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 19701, p.4.
58 In an a r t i c l e on the "ethnopcet" Jerom Rothenberg, Kevin Pcwer suggests
t h a t "...the 'if of the autobiography doesn't display i t s e l f a s a force which
derives i n t o history but rather as a poetic intelligence, a receptacle i n t o
which history f l m s and is carried by the vector of the poem i n t o the present."
Kevin Pwer, "Pack U p Your Troubles i n Your Old K i t Bag and Smile, Smile, Smile,
f r m Diaspora t o Galut ,'I Boundary 2, 3 (Spring 1975) , p. 686.
And as Rothenberq himself notes, such a history mves throuqh the poet's
language re-uniting t h a t l o s t "I" in the oneness of its universal expression:
"ethology the visions
of McClwe & Chomsky a l l
the speakers of deep tongues point
a route this generation
w i l l be priviledged t o assume
a universal speech
in which the kingdoms of the world
are one .I'
(Rothenberg, op.cit., p.547.)
59 Philip Lamantia, "Fragments F'rcm An Aeroplane ," i n M s t a s i s (San
Francisco: The Auerhahn Press, 1959), unpaginated.
60 See Caws. The Pcetry Of Dada And Surrealism, p. 139.
"...Eluard points out a s Baudelaire'smst significant
contribution his realization t h a t the 'I' always points t o an
'us'.
Here the l a s t two points of Eluard's poetic program
are c l a r i f i e d and united. A s the poet realizes o r creates
unlikely resemblance which is the image he recreates h h e l f ,
the observer, and the whole cammunity of men--that is, he
makes himself comnon. ' "
...
the
61 Jack Spicer, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, ed. by Robin Blaser
(Los Angeles : Black Sparrcrw Press, 1975) , p. 34.
Same1 Charters, i n an essay on Spicer, notes the follwing:
"Surrealism, as it breaks up the sense of mvemat within the
poem, could be considered even anti-poetic, but in h i s questioning
of poetry Spicer s t i l l moves as a poet. He uses the method
--the sound--of surrealism--the limitless tying together of
unlikes that i s % l i c i t in s u r r e a l i s t technique--but in the
larger outlines of the poun he is still m i n g through image t o idea."
s
Oyez , 1971) , pp. 39-40.
Samuel Charters, S m POE?II/P ~ t (Berkeley:
62
Nicolas Calas , i n J a m s Laughlin, ed. ; New .Directions '1940 (Norfolk
Conn : New Directions, 1940) , p. 388.
.
63
64
Caws, The 'Poetry Of 'Dada.'AndSunrealism, pp. 32-3.
Ibid., p.15.
65
1 use two translations of the p ~ m ,one for each stanza--respectively:
Qlarles Baudelaire, Selected Poems, trans. by Geoffrey Wagner (Iondon: Cox &
Wyman Ltd., 1971), p.23; C.F. MacIntyre, trans., French Synblist PmtYy
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p.13.
66 Faulie, Age of Surrealism, pp.188-90.
67 Paz, Children of the Mire, pp. 55-6.
68 Octavio Paz , Alternating Current, trans. by Helen R. Lane (New York:
The Viking Press, 1974) , p. 55.
Lamantia, Selected Poems, pp.77-9
Paz, Children of the Mire, p.63.
A h 6 &saire, Return t o my Native Land, trans. by John Berger & Anna
(Hmndsworth, England:
Penguin Books Ltd., 1969), p.75.
Lamantia, "World without End," in Blood, p. 42.
Breton, "Fata Morgano," trans. by Clark Mills, in J m s Laughlin, ed.,
New Directions 1941 (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941), p.658.
74 Louis Aragon, Aragon: Poet of the French Resistance, ed. by Hannah
Josephson and Malcolm Cowley, trans. by Rolfe Hunphries and Malcolm Cowley
(New Yak: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc., 19451, p.21.
75 Lamantia, "Capricorn Is A Wounded Knee," in Selected Poems, p.91.
76 Lamantia, "A Winter Day," i n Touch, p.19.
/ /
Jonathan W i l l i a m s ,
Mina Loy, Lunar Baedeker & T i m - ~ a b l (~ighlands:
~~
1958) , p. 37.
Mina Lay: wife of Arthur Craven, dadaist & h e r ~o actually 'discovered'
the urinal ahead of Ducharp (according t o ,&ragon) and who disappeared in shark
infested waters.
And again Loy gives f i n e expression t o the notion of the 'collective unconscious'
i n these lines: "The loquent mnsciousness/ of living things/ pours i n torr e n t i a l languages. " (Ibid , p .2 3. )
.
/H
L m m t i a , "She Speaks The Mrning's Filigree," i n Selected Poems, p. 81.
79 Lamantia, "The Analog, " i n Charles Bukowski , Philip Lamantia, Harold
Penguin Books Ltd. ,
1969), p.113.
Norse : Penguin Modem Poets 13 (Harmondsworth, England:
*'
LioMntia, "Flaming Teeth," i n Blood, p. 34.
The icon i t s e l f i s unimportant, but t h a t it represents, as symbol, the collective reaching i n t o the desire of selfhood--that is the justification f o r its
existence; and in this alone it expresses i t s oneness with the universal consciousness.
A s L a o r e Kandel gives it:
"love touches love
the temple and the god
are one"
L a o r e Kandel, The Love Book (San Francisco: Stolen Paper Review Editions,
1966), p.11.
and, tkne cosmic sense of it:
transforms i n t o one enormus m u t h
between my legs
suckfucking oh t h a t lovely cock
(Ibid., p.3.)
big grand and t e r r i b l e "
Chapter 3
Michael Benedikt, ed., The Poetry Of Surrealism: An Anthology, trans. by
Benedikt et a 1 (Boston: L i t t l e , Brown and Co., 1974), p.xxii.
2.See Philip Lamantia, "Secret Wapons," i n Destroyed Works (San
Francisco : Auerhahn Press, 1962) , unpaginated.
take junk/ the imago mundi made fran Dada/
"Take garbage/
t h e worship t h a t counts...''
.../
.../ i t ' s
And& Breton, Manifestoes of S~rreal-jm,trans. by Richard Seaver and
Helen R. Lane (Ann War: The University of Mi&gan press, 19721, pp.180-1.
4
The n m s a k e and heroine of Breton's no~el--"She is less a character
than a continual t a p t a t i o n . " (Manifestoes, p .15. )
In answer t o the question "Who are you?", Nadja replies: "I am the soul in
l i n b . " Andr6 Breton, Nadja, trans. by Richard ~
m ( N d~ WYork: Grove Press,
Inc., l96O), p.71.
..
Philip Lamantia, "The Touch Of The Marvelous, " i n Touch Of The
Marvelous ( B o l i n a s : Four Seasons Foundation, 1974) , pp. 4-5.
Mina m y , Lunar Baedeker
19581, p.35.
&
Time-Tables (Highlands:
Jonathan W i l l i a m s ,
~amantia,"Vacuous Suburbs," i n Estroyed Works, unpaginated.
*
Philip L m t i a , "Man is i n pain," in Selected Pcans (San Francisco:
City Lights Books, 1967), p.48.
L m t i a , "Frcm The Front, 'I i n Destroyed Works, unpaginated
.
loJean Arp, Arp on Arp, ed. by Marcel Jean & trans. by Joachim Neugroschel
(New York: The Viking Press, 1973) , p. 445.
''
One thinks of Magritte's double canvases and painted glass landscapes
&
,'I
"La C o n d i t i m hamine I , " "Les P r m a d e s
(eg. "Le s o i r qui t
dlEuclide, I' "Le Damaine d' Arhneim, and so on)
.
l2Philip h r m n t i a , "Upon the earth eyes opened i n wonder, " in ~ r o t i cPoens
(Philadelphia: The Walton Press, n. d. ) , p. 2.
l3Lamntia, "Subconscious Wxico City N e w York ,I' in Destroyed Works,
unpaginated.
l5Lammtia, "This World's Beauty," in Destroyed Works, unpaginated.
l6Cited in J%urice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. by Richard
Hmard (Harmondsworth, Ehgland: Penguin Books Ltd. , 1973) , p. 87.
2-5nn Caws, The Poetry Of Dada And Surrealism (Princeton, N. J. :
Princeton University Press, 1970 1 , p .19.
Frank O t H a r a , The Selected Pogns
(New York: Random House, 1974), p.40.
l9Herbert Read, ed.
..
..
..
, Surrealism
of
Frank O I H a r a , ed. by Donald Allen
(London : Faber and Faber, 1971) p. 38.
..
2o Breton, Manifestoes, p. 259.
21 Wallace Fcwlie, Age Of Surrealism
Press, 1972), p.12.
(Bloomington: Indiana university
.
.
Heraclitus, i n W. H. S Jones, trans. ,'Hippocrates ,'Vbl IVJ 'Heracleitus
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p.483.
LL
'
John E. McTaggart, Studies 'In'The 'HegelIan ~ i a l e c t i c(New York :
Russell & Russell, Inc., 1964), p.21.
24 Ibid., p.28.
25 Ibid., p.3.
26 Alexandre ~ o j g v,
e Introduction To The Reading Of Hegel, trans. by
J m s H. Nichols, ~ r (New
,
York : Basic Books, Inc. 1969) , p. 238.
27 Ibid., p.174
28 Ibid., p.181.
30 Frederick G. Weiss , ed. , Hegel:
Harper & R w , l974), p.251.
The Essential Writings (New York:
31 Caws , The Poetry Of Dada And Surrealism, p .l6.
32 Kenward Elmslie puts his finger on t h e problem when he writes:
"you in the view and no
you in the view and no
express f l m
express flow
firm shiny
firm shiny
express flow
express flaw
you i n the view and no
you i n the view and no
r e a l walls
r e a l walls
black-whi
black-whi
terror
terror
black-whi
black-whi
real walls
real walls"
Kenward Elmslie, m t o r Disturbance
l g i ' l ) , p.63.
33
(new Yo&:
Cited in C. H. Waddingtan, Behind
MIT Press, 1970) , p. 39.
c o l h i a University Press,
+war-ce
(c-ridge,
Mass. : The
34
m m c e (Syracuse, N.Y.:
Cited i n J . H . Matthews, Surrealist P w t r y ~n
Syracuse University Press, 19691, p.76.
35 See Matthews , Ibid. , pp. 76-7.
CHe3 r e l i e s upon the
"Vitrac looks t o the Logos t o create a vision
word t o bridge the distance estimated by the eye between m and
the things they wish t o see. In the poetic vision, the word,functioning
as hriage, beccms the instrument by which the imagination subjugates
objective elemmts, considered valuable m l y s o f a r a s they can be
subjected t o a form of transmutation for which the magnum opus
provides a parallel. "
....
36 See Breton' s "Surrealist Situation of the Object ," i n Manifestces ,
~p.277-8.
"The greatest benefit &which Surrealism has achieved 7
is
the f a c t t h a t w e have succeeded i n ' d i a l e c t i c a l l y reconciling
these two terms--perception and representation
...
..."
37 W.H.S.
Jones, p.471.
38 Jean Hyppolite, Studies on Marx and Hegel, trans. by John O ' N e i l l
(New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1969), p.169.
39 Philip Whalen, On Bear's Head (New York : Harcourt, B r a c e & World, Inc.
and Coyote, l969), p.91.
In Zen Buddhism the p o l a r i t i e s simply do not e x i s t in the f i r s t place. Whalen,
here, is s t a t i n g an eastern propositon f o r a western audience, an audience
f o r whom the "I" has a particular maning.
40 Philip Larrantia, " f e s a n t , I f i n Touch of the Marvelous (San ~ r a n c i s c o :
Oyez, 1966), p.59.
-
41 Lamantia, "By the Curtain of Architecture, " in View, 3rd Ser
(June 1943) , p.56.
., 2
42 Louis Aragon, P e t of the F'rench Ilesistance, ed. by Hannah Josephson
and Malcolm Cmley, trans. by Rolfe H q h r i e s and Malcolm Cuvley (New York:
Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc., 1945), p.22.
43 In Robbe-Grillett s novel, The Voyeur, ge-trical
space and sequential
tim2 are disolvcd frarre by •’ram. The m j o r recurring image i n the n w e l
is t h a t of the "figure eight" suggesting, anr>ng other things, a pair of
binoculars w i t h which the reader (as voyeur and chief character i n the novel)
is asked t o look i n t o the Real and t o r e i n v e n t t k and space around him.
Larrantia too has a poem called "Binoculars" in which he attempts t o get a t the
Real a s it pertains t o certain junkie friends and poets:
"HomRD HAKr
the spoon the unconscious
the tooth the grwl
a s p l i t i n g rod i n the bad morning
yr black coat on a wicker basket chair"
Philip Lamantia, Ekstasis (San Francisco : The Auerhahn Press, 1959) , unpaginated.
-
Whalen, Bear, p.146.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G.E.M.
Anscarhi? (New York: MaQnillan, 1958) , p.48e.
47 See Paul Eluard, Uninterrupted Poetry: Selected Writings, trans. by
Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1975), p.37.
"To unite winq and dew
H e a r t and cloud day and night
Windm and land of everywhere
To abolish
"
The grimace of zero.
In view of this, i s n ' t Araqon beinq -just a ' l i t t l e more than ironic here:
.
..
"Hand me the binoculars so t h a t I can take one last look
A t the laundry dryin9 i n the windows. "
(Benedikt, ed., The Poetry Of Surrealism: An Anthology, p.157.)
..
48 Eluard, Uninterrupted Poetry, p. 37.
49 Cited in Caws, The Poetry Of Dada And Surrealism, p.81.
50 See Philip LErmantia, " S t i l l P9, " i n Donald M. Allen, ed. ,
The New Amrican Pwtyy (New York : Grove Press, Inc. , 1960) , p. 157.
"There is this distance be-
me and what I see
.
It is N m l e s s what I long f o r
a spoken word caught i n its c x ~ nm a t saying naming
This nothing ravishes beyond ravisking
There is this look of love Throne Silent look of love"
52 L m t i a , "Infernal Muses, " i n DeSfrOyed Works, unpaginated
.
54 Ibid., p.12.
55 W.H.S. Jones, p.485.
Hegel draws the s m proposition from nature where he says:
"The bud disappears when the blosscm breaks through, and we might
say t h a t the f o m r is refuted by the l a t t e r ; i n the sm way when
t h e f r u i t corns, the blossm may be explained t o be a f a l s e form
of the plant's existence, for the f r u i t appears as i t s true nature in
place of the blossm. These staqes are not merely differentiated;
they supplant one another as being incmpatible with one another.
But the ceaseless a c t i v i t y of t h e i r rn inherent nature makes them
a t the sarne 'cine m m t s of an organic unity, where they not
rerely do not contradict one another, but where one is a s necessary
as the other; and t h i s equal necessity of a l l ~ t constitutes
s
alone and thereby the l i f e of the whole. "
(Weiss, ed., Hegel: The Essential Writings, p.7.)
56 Loy, Lunar Baedeker, p.37
57 See David ~ l t z e r Luna
,
(Los Angeles:
Black Sparrav Press, 1970),
p.34.
"The windm r a t t l e s .
What does glass knm?
My poems are gardens
from my muth, l i k e
ivy out of B o t t i c e l l i ' s
teenage seashell brides. "
58 Lamntia, "The Third Eye," i n Selected P m , pp.68-9.
59 Lamantia, "It was a tim I didn't see the beast," in Ekstasis,
unpaginated
.
60 Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire, trans. by Rachel Phillips
(Cwridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p.73.
61 Ibid., p.131.
Ibid., p.134.
63 Philip Lamantia, "Altesia o r the Lava law of mt Rainier, " in
The B l o o d Of khe Air (s& Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1970) , p. 7.
e W i l l Of Eros: Selected PCXIIX 1930-1970 (Los Angeles:
Black Sparrm Press, 19721, p.89. "The poet, blinded with being...";
"Agony of itness
" (Ibid. , p. 106) ; "Weighted with weight of the a m s p h e r e "
(Ibid., p.106).
W i l l i a m Everson (Brother Antoninus) too has h i s own incredible phrase: "the
William Everson, The ~ e s i d u a l
s t i f f l i n g accumulation of sheer/ existence..."
Y e a r s (New York: New Directions, 1968), p.17.
...
.
64 Arthur Rimbaud, A Season In H e l l & The Drunken Boat, trans. by Louise
New Directions, 1961), p.95.
~ a r g s e(New York:
65 Cited in Manuel L. G r o s s m , Dada (New York : The Bobbs-errill
Inc., 1971) , p.86.
Co.
,
66 Lamntia, Selected Poans, p.44.
According t o the ironically pithy criticism proposed by H i t l e r , Surrealism
is insane, Dada and Symbolism are merely criminals:
" A s f o r t h e degenerate artists, I forbid them t o force
t h e i r so-called experiences upon the public. I f they
do see f i e l d s blue, they are deranged, and should go t o
an asylum. I f they only pretend t o see them blue, they
are c r k i n a l s , and should go t o prison."
Adolf Hitler, cited in krergreen Review, 6, No.23 (Mar.-Apr. 1962), p.12.
67 Cited i n D.T. Suzuki , Essays i n Zen Buddhism ( F i r s t Series) (New
York: Grove Press, Inc., 1961), p.24
68 Philip Lamntia, "Bones, " i n Narcotics (San Francisco:
Press, 1959), unpaginated.
The Auerhahn
69 Philip Iamantia, "U.S.S. San Francisco," in Richard Kostelanetz, ed.,
P o s s i b i l i t i e s of Poetry (New York: Dell Publishing Co. , 1970) , p.256.
70 Lamantia, "Deirdre, " in W s t a s i s , unpaginated
.
i
73 Heraclitus, i n T.V. Smith, ed. , From m a l e s t o Plat0 (Chicago: The
university of chicago Press, 19681, p.10.
I4
N o m Lorre Goodrich, "Gothic Castles in Surrealist ~ i c t i o n , "in
Proceedings of the Comparative Literature Syrrpsium: From Surrealism t o the
Absurd,III (Jan. 1970) , p.148.
75 Cited i n Caws, The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism, pp.52-3.
76 Kabert Denos , The Voice, trans. by W i l l i a m K u l i k (New York : Grossman ,
1972), p.29
Mary A& Caws says of t h i s particular poem:
"...in its splendid concision and perfect motion f r m shadow t o
the union of shadows, t o t h e i r contrast with the sunlight and t o
the f i n a l inner union of shadow and sun, t h i s is one of the mst
moving poems ever composed. "
(Caws, The Poetry O f Dada And Surrealism, p. 183. )
77 B i l l Knott, Nights of Naani (Eoston: Barn Dream Press, 1971) ,
mpaginated.
Indeed, one would assure such a liberation as t h a t which Surrealism proposes
In Japan, Yamanaka Ckiruo writes
would have a wide international. * p a l .
( i n h i s "Internationalization of Surrealist Thought"):
"Surrealism is the liberation of human being.. .It w i l l
advance t m a r d the d i a l e c t i c a l solution of antinomies,
such a s action and dream, logical necessity and natural
necessity, objectivity and subjectivity."
Cited i n Shantih, 3, No. 2 (1975), p.43.
78 Breton, Manifestces, p.13
79 As Herbert Read says, "With the surrealists.. .the ideal i s nothing e l s e
than the m t e r i a l w o r l d reflected by the human mind, and translated i n t o images."
Herbert Read, "Surrealism and the R m t i c Principle," i n The Philosophy
of Modem A r t (London: Faber and Faber, 19691, p.117.
What, then, is t h i s material world? And what are the new imges into which
Surrealism translates i t ? Again Read suggests t h a t what is a t issue here is
a dialectics, a synthesis of inner and outer fonns, creating a new s e n s i b i l i t y
(a superrationalism). H e defines dialects as follows:
"Dialects is nothing more than a logical explanation of how such a
change takes place
The change must take place in a d e f i n i t e way.
Between one phase and another of t h a t developmnt there must intervene an active principle, and Hegel suggested that this principle
was actually one of o p p s i t i m and interaction. That is t o say, t o
there must previously exist two elexrents
produce any new situation
...
...
s o opposed t o each other and yet so relat o each other
Lie. consciousness and consciousness 3 a ~ a at solution
o r resolution is demnded; such a solution being i n e f f e c t
a new phase of developmnt which preserves s m of the
elenents of the interacting phases Lie. the marvelous and
the automaticJ, eliminates others cie. reason and i t s
m y s a t e l l i t d , but is qualitatively different C i e
supperrational3fran the previously existing s t a t e of
opposition. "
(Ibid., p.115.)
What does Hegel actually say about t h i s process, i n terms of art? Ekactly
what Breton says, t h a t it is the artist who has the 'freedan of thought'
(Hegel c a l l s it the 'freedm of rationality') t o force t h i s d i a l e c t i c i n t o
play and t o find the resolution therein f o r the consciousness t h a t has been
battling between the inner and outer worlds of expgrience.
Hegel :
"The universal need f o r expression i n art ' l i e s . .in man' s
rational impulse t o exalt the inner and outer world i n t o
a s p i r i t u a l consciousness f o r himself, a s an object i n
which he recognizes h i s am self. H e s a t i s f i e s the need
of t h i s s p i r i t u a l freedm when he rrakes a l l i t h a t exists
e x p l i c i t for himself withinland in a corresponding way
realizes this h i s e x p l i c i t s e l f without, evoking thereby,
in t h i s reduplication of himself, what is in him i n t o vision
and i n t o knowledge f o r his m mind and f o r that of others....
This is the f r e e rationality of man, i n which, a s a l l
action and knowledge, s o a l s o art has its ground and
necessary origin."
(I use a different translation f r m the one quoted by Read. )
George Wilhelm Hegel, The Introduction t o ~ e g e ls' ~hilosophyof Fine A r t ,
trans. by Bernard Bosanquet (London: Kegan Paul, 1905) , p. 96.
...
.
.
80 L m t i a , "Crab, " in Ikstroyed Works, unpaginated
.
82 Ibid., p.173.
83 Ibid.
, p.173.
As Hypollite notes, the cyclical nature of Hegelian dialectics (expressed by
Hegel's phrase "Being is Meaning andtMeaning is Being") is essential:
"Everything happens as though the one and only category, the
Absolute, were assuming specific forms and developing i t s e l f
t o the point where it has exhausted its riches...to the point
where it can validate i t s rn point of origin z i n ~ e i n g l . "
(Ibid. ,p.l78.)
85 L m t i a
Jeanlu
"
,
I'
in Destroyed Works, unpaginated
.
86 Likewise Allen Ginsberg, discussing the epist-logical
distance between
language and truth--between language and event--arrives a t his own theory about
the occultation of language a s p r i m r y feeling, where "the seed of p m t i c s is
m t r a " : t h a t is, where "language is purely magic s p e l l , and t h a t i t s function
is t o be 'only' magic spell, o r mantra, o r prayer.... ~n other words i f YOU
knm you're going t o use language t o say 'Oh! ' then the 'oh! ' is identical with
the body m v m t of saying 'Oh!' o r with the feeling
Since ' l i f e ' cannot
be categorized, magical behavior within it cannot be ruled out....Therefore...
one would have t o use language t h a t was identical w i t h the behavior of the
e n t i t y i t s e l f , rather than descriptive of the behavior of the entity. And t h a t
language behavior i t s e l f is prayer." Cited from an interview in The Arnerican
Pcetry Review, 3, No.3 (1974), pp.52-3.
....
87 Lamantia, "Fin D d Mundo, "
i n Cestroyed Works, unpaginated.
89 Vladimir Mayakosky , Poems, trans. by Dorian Rottenberg (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1972), p.101.
The image i s made a l l the more absurd too when we read i n a footnote: "'e
day's newspapers carried s t o r i e s about a convict sentenced t o death who agreed
t o shout out these words during his execution, the firm having promised t o
provide for his family." (Ibid., p.272.)
Knott, unpaginated.
Larmntia , "There A r e Many Pathways To !The Garden, " i n -Touch,
p.l4
.
Chapter 4
pp.72
See Kenneth Coutts-Smith
75.
, Dada
(London:
Studio V i s t a L t d
., 1970) ,
&
See Hans Richter, Dada: art and anti-art, trans. by avid B r i t t (London:
Tharres and Hudson, 1970), p.75.
Wallace Fowlie, Age M Surrealism (Bloomington: Indiana university
Press, 1972) , pp. 21-2.
*
When Artaud t a l k s about going "outside of thought" a s he does i n the
f o l l m i n g exerpt from a letter t o Jacques Riviere, is he not clearly talking
about thought as it becares manifest i n representational language (and not
the pure thought t h a t Tzara pronounced t o be i n the muth) ? Afterall, he is
undeniably referring t o the d i f f i c u l t y of transcribing the deep structure t o
the surface :
w,a jerkiness
which derives •’ram the very essence of inspiration and which
is due t o my incorrigible i n a b i l i t y t o concentrate upon an
object. Out of physical weakness, a weakness t h a t derives
f r m the very substance of what is called the soul and t h a t
is the emanation of Our nervous force which coagulates around
objects. But the e n t i r e age suffers f r ~ tnh i s weakness.
Exarples : Tristan Tzara,
Breton, Pierre Reverdy But i n
t h e i r cases, the soul is not physically affected, not subs t a n t i a l l y affected. I t is affected a t a l l points w'nere it
joins up with scarething else. It is not affected outside of
thought. "
Antonin Artaud, Artaud Anthology, ed. by Jack ~irschrnan,trans by H i r s c h m
e t al. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1965), p.20.
Indeed, the problem as Artaud defines it elsewhere is between the body, which
is consciousness, and the mind which continually undermines it:
"If e are t o explain consciousness, it i s n ' t enough t o
shake up the fluids, consciousness not being an ' e s p r i t
de corps' but the volume of a body up t o the point where it
eUxws its way i n t o 'existence', against the mind t h a t w i l l
suppurate it. "
(Ibid., p.175.)
(After a l l , a s Artuad continually says, " I t is the body t h a t w i l l remain..
without the mind,. the mind, ie the patient. 'I--Bid. , P. 188.)
So f a r Wtaud sounds t o be i n c m p l e t e - a g r e m t w i t h Briton and the mainstream
of Surrealism. Again, here, he sees mindfulness--and its subsequent manifestation i n language as t h e chief hindrance t o surreality:
"There i s in t h e forms of the human Word I don't know what
aperation of rapaciousness, what self-devouring greed going
on; whereby the poet, binding himself t o the object, sees
himself eaten by it. That is a c r b weighing heavy on t h e
idea of the Word-made-flesh, but the r e a l c r h i s in having
a l l w e d the idea i n the f i r s t place."
(Ibid., p.100.)
But the s p l i t between t h e two--Breton and Artaud--is seen t o emrge when A r t a d
seems t o change course in midstream becoming the thorn i n Surrealism's side by
answering h i s "FiT THE THE FUCK I I EOR?" (Ibid., p.229) with h i s am sense
of self-creation, a self-creation which seemingly denies the autoncq of
external phenomsna by suggesting there is i n f a c t no l i m i t t o the s e l f :
"I am quite aware of the jerkiness of my
.
..
.
"Occa~ionallyI ' v e summoned
objects t r e e s
o r animals t o cone near
the human heads because
I ' m still not sure
of the limits by which the
body of my hlxral1
Self may be stopped."
.
Antonin Artuad i n Michael Benedikt, ed.
An Anthology, trans. by 18enedikt e t a1 (Boston:
p.282.
,me
poetry Of Surrealism:
L i t t l e , B r m and Co., 19741,
Ibid. ,p.284.
I
Philip L a m t i a , Selected Poems (San Francisco:
1967), p.21.
City Lights Books,
One notes t h a t i n lherican l i t e r z t u r e and language the R c m t i c term
"illusion" (of Eh~rson,Thoreau and Whitman) is replaced w i t h "phoney"--by
Salinger and others--not a s a signal of popular culture s o much as a masure
of how f a r t h a t culture has c m .
Cited in Patrick Waldberg , Surrealism ' (London: Tharres and Hudson,
1972), p.60.
Philip Lamntia, Narcotics (San Francisco:
unpaginated.
II
Lamantia, "Voice O f Earth !&diums,"
The Auerhahn Press, 1959),
i n Selected Posms, p.84.
l2Alfred Jarry , Ubu Roi , trans. by Barbara Wright (New York : New
Directions, 1961) , p. 1.69.
l3Lamantia, "Terror Conduction," i n Selected Poems, p.49.
In the typogaphical version of "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
Even" Duchamp gives a non-erotic synopsis of the love a c t a s it is p e r f o m
by detached and mchine-like beings.
writes :
O f the "Bride" herself, f o r example, he
...
...
"The Bride
is a reservoir of
love gasoline
distributed t o the m t o r w i t h
quite feeble cylinders"
Cited i n Lucy R. Lippard, ed., Surrealists on Art(Ebg1ewood C l i f f s , N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, Inc. , 1970) , p. 45.
l4~ n d r zBreton, Manifestes O f Surrealism, trans. by Richard Seaver
and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1972), p.152.
cf. Eluard's conclusion t o h i s poem "Yves Tanguy":
"You and I had decided t h a t nothing could even be defined
Except according t o the pressure of a single finger placed by
chance on the controls of a broken-down machine."
Benedikt, ed., The Poetry Of Surrealism: An Anthology, p.185
b m n t i a , Selected Poems, p. 42
cf. Frank OtHara: "The banal machines are exposing themselves/ on nearby
hillocks of arrested color..."
Of Frank
Frank OtHara, m e Selected P c a ~
O'Hara, ed. by Donald Allen (New York: Randm House, 1974), p.34.
l6Cited in Lippard, p.37.
l7C.G. Jung, "Sigmund Freud i n h i s Historical Setting," in The S p i r i t
In iulan , A r t , And Literature, trans. by R.F .C. Hull (Princeton, N J :
..
Princeton University Press, 1972) , p. 34.
Roger Shattuck, i n h i s The Banquet Years, defines the a r t i s t i c sense of the
period as one of f u n d m t a l change ( a t l e a s t i n France) :
"Artists sensed t h a t t h e i r generation promised both an end
and a beginning. No other equally brief period of history
C1885-19141has seen the r i s e and f a l l of so many schools
of cliques and isms. Amid this tum.mil, the fashionable
salon declined a f t e r a l a s t abortive flourishing. The
=cam
i n t o its own, p o l i t i c a l unrest encouraged
innovation in the arts, and society squandered its l a s t vestiges
of aristocracy. The twentieth century could not w a i t f i f t e e n
it was born, yelling, i n
years f o r a round n&r;
1885Cwith the death of Victor Hu~oJ."
Roger Shattuck ,The Banquet Years (New York : Random House, 1968) , p. 4.
Philip Lamntia, "U.S. S. San Francisco," in Richard Kostelanetz, ed.
P o s s i b i l i t i e s of Poetry (New York: Dell Publishing Co.,Inc., 1970), p.257.
20 Expressionism was perhaps the f i r s t art mv-nt
t o f u l l y recognize
this phenomnon a s fact. One thinks of Abel Gance's film "The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari," f o r exanple.
Benedikt, ed., The Poetry Of Surrealism:
A n Anthology, p.4.
Benedikt , ed.
An Anthology, p. 310.
, The
Poetry Of Surrealism:
Breton, Manifestas, p.173
Eugene Jolas , rev. of "Gottfried Baum," transition, No. 5 ( ~ u g u s t
-8
. F
25 Shattuck ' s intrcduction t o G u i llaApollinaire ,selected Writings,
trans. by Roger Shattuck (New York: New. Directions, 1971), p.26
,
26 Jean Arp, Arp on A r p , ed. by Marcel Jean and trans. by Joad-&'n
Neugroschel (New York : The Viking Press, 1972) , p .96.
Arp on Arp, p.135.
Lay, Lunar Baedeker & Tim-Tables
(Highlands:
Jonathan WilLiams,
29 Louis Zukofsky , Prepositions (New York : Horizon Press, 1967) , p. 20.
W.W.
31 Louis Zukofsky , A l l the collected short
Norton & Co., Inc., 1971), p.224.
FCE?IIE
1923-1964 (New York:
See Mary Ann Caws, Andrd Breton (New York : 'IthJayne Publishers, Inc. ,
1971), p.58. "Nothing t h a t surrounds us is an object
f o r us, f o r us everv..
thing i s a subject" (Breton)
.
JJ
Walter Sutton, Amrican Free V e r s e (New York : New Directims , 1973) ,
p.121.
34 J m e s Laughlin, ed.
Directions, 1940), p.387.
, New
Directicos 1940
(Norfolk. Conn. : New
35 mrleau-Ponty explains the function of "pure language" here:
"As d i f f i c u l t as the ventures of Rimbaud and M a l l d may
w e l l have been they had this much in c m n : they freed
language f r m the control of 'obvious f a c t s ' and trusted it t o
invent and win new relationships of meaning. Thus language
ceased t o be ( i f it ever has been) simply a tool o r mans the
writer uses t o canrmznicate intentions given independently of
language. In our day, language is of a piece with the writer;
it is the writer himself. It is no longer the servant of
significations but the a c t of signifying i t s e l f , and the writer o r
man speaking no longer has t o control it voluntarily any
mre than living man has t o p r d t a t e the means o r d e t a i l s
of h i s gestures. From n m on there i s no other way t o
comprehend language than t o dwell i n it and use it....
Distinctions of figure and ground, sound and maning,
conception and execution are now blurred....In going
from 'signifying' language t o pure language, l i t e r a t u r e
freed i t s e l f a t the sm t h painting did from the
resemblance t o things..
Maurice Pkrleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. by Richard C. MSleary (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1964). pp.232-3.
."
36
(New York:
~ e n s e ,i n a t t W i l l i a m s , ed., An mthology of Concrete ~ c e t r y
S m t h i n g E l s e Press, k c . , 1967) unpaginated.
31
Jack Spicer, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, ed. by Robin Blaser
(Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 19751, p.74,
38 John Ashbery , Rivers and Mountains
Winston, 1966), p.27.
(New York:
Holt , Rinehart and
39 Philip Lamantia, "A Civil World," i n Touch Of The Marvelous
(Bolinas: Four Seasans Foundation, 1974), p.10.
The cmscious world of l i n g u i s t i c expression is u t t e r l y inappropriate as Larry
Eigner suggests here:
"I am, f i n a l l y , an incoqetent a f t e r all
so the words go up
i n t o thin a i r "
Larry Eigner , From The Sustaining fir (Eugene, O r e . : Toad Press, 1967) ,
pp .15-16.
40 William Spanos, "A Dialogue on O r a l Poetry,"
1975) , p.542.
Bocndary 2, 3 (Spring
41 Breton, "Surrealist Situation of the Object ,"in Manifestces , p.246
42 Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire, trans. by Rachel Phillips
(Canbridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p.78.
43 ~ n d &Breton, Surrealism And Painting, trans. by Simxl Watson Taylor
(New York: Harper & R m , 1972), p.186.
A s Rexroth too notes, we are not concerned, here, with Laforgue's formulaic
(via Wyndham Lewis) : "Describe h u m beings a s though they were machines,
landscapes as though they were chemical formulas, inanimate objects as
though they were alive. "
Kenneth Rexroth, "The Influence of French Poetry on Amsrican," in Assays
(New York : New Directions, 1961), p. 156.
44
I use the word "scientific" as ~ o j k v emans it when he says :
"...science is born from the desire t o transform the World
i n relation t o Man; i t s f i n a l end i s technical application.
That i s why s c i e n t i f i c knowledge is never absolutely passive,
nor purely contemplative and descriptive. Scientific exprience
perturbs the Object because of the active intervention of the
Subject, who applies t o the Object a mthcd of investigation
t h a t i s h i s own and t o which nothing i n the Object i t s e l f
corresponds.
Alexandre ~oj&e, Intrcductim To The Reading Of Hegel, trans. by J m s H.
Nichols, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1969), pp.176-7.
45 Cited in Man1131 L. &ossman, Dada (New york : The ~ o b b s - e r r i l lCo. ,
Inc., l 9 7 l ) , p.124.
One notices a similarity as Olson l a t e r coins and defines the tern "objecti-m":
"Objectism is the getting r i d of the l y r i c a l interference of the
individual as ego.... For a man is k e l f an object Cin
nature3, whatever he may take t o be his advantages, the
mre likely t o recognize himself as such the greater h i s
advantages, particularly a t t h a t m t t h a t he achieves
an humilitas sufficient t o make him of use."
Charles Olson, "Projective V e r s e , " i n Selected Writings, ed. by Robert Creeley
(New York: New Directions, 1966) , pp.24-5.
-
46 Jean Hypplite, Studies On W x And Hegel, trans. by John 0 ' ~ e i l l(New
Basic Books, Inc., 1969) , p. 3.
N e a l Oxenhandler especially notes the union of h g e and s e l f i n Breton's
work :
"For An& Bretm, who sees consciousness as i n the world,
whose existence is in the Heideggerian sense a being-in-theworld, the image derronstrates, t o paraphrase Merleau-Ponty,
h w consciousness is glued t o things of the senses."
Neal Oxenhandler, "Cocteau, Breton and Ponge: Situation of the Self," in Mary
Ann Caws, ed., About French Poetry fram Dada t o "Tel Quel" (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1974), p.58.
York:
47 Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. by Richard Howard
(Kmndsworth, England: Pengmh Books Ltd., 1973), p.53.
48 See Mary Ann Caws , The Poetry Of Dada And Surrealism (Princeton, N. J. :
Princeton University Press, 1970), p.78.
"Along w i t h the i n t e r i o r c r i s i s of personality goes an exterior
crisis of the object, i n which t h e r e a l and the irraginary
q u a l i t i e s have beccane interchangeable
Picabia's s t a t e m n t about himself has a certain profoundity here which corrects
its bravado: "Pk,I ' m Francis Picabia. It's my weak point."
Cited i n Jacques Michel, "Francis Picabia' s new worlds, "Manchester Guardian,
22 Feb. 1976, n.p., cols. 1-4.
..."
49 Alain Robbe-Grillet , For A New Novel, trans. by Richard Hward (New
York: Grove Press, Inc., 1965), 21.
50 Cited i n Lippard, p.96.
Richard Hmard, in an a t t q t t o understand the avant-garde in A~hbery,
discovers the poem-object a s t h e force a l t e r i n g perception, changing the p t i n
its self-propulsion :
"It is a l m s t a catalogue of the rodemist principles Ashbery has
recited, a post-symbolist enchiridion: the poem a s simultaneous
structure, impersonal, autonomous, released from the charge of
expression, of assertion; the poem is arbitrary construct, absurd,
self-dest~foying, no longer a s p i r h g t o convince o r even t o hoax;
the pcan as an agent of t r a n s f o m t i o n , equal i n value t o the
p t himself and therefore capable of changing him; the poem a s
~ a n of
s escape from identity, leading i n t o a world of contemplation,
indifference, b l i s s . "
Richard Hmard, Alone With Arferica (New York: Athenem, 1971) , p.22.
Likewise, Jonathan Cott has noticed:
"Ashbery distances h i m e l f through h i s 'hard' tone and problemtic
syntax Lie. wrenching himself from the hoax of the ~ o e ~t e r s o n a l".
Jonathan Cott , "The New American Poetry, " in Richard ~oskelanetz,ed. , The New
American Arts (New York: Collier Books, 1967), p.149.
51 Mary Ann Caws congratulates Tzara's insightful ccmrents about the nature
of the object i n Picasso's work, and thus concludes:
"The s t a t i c rendering of an object or...the s t a t i c interpretation
of a situation, would deny t o the object o r the situation the
v o l m o r the density which is its mst important
characteristic."
(The Poztry Of Dada And Surrealism, p.118.)
52 Micheline Tison-Braun, "Tristan Tzara: 'Avant que l a nuit.
Caws, ed., About French P o e t r y from Dada t o "Tel Quel," p.167.
..' ,
I'
in
53 See J. H. Matthews , ed. , An Anthology of French Surrealist Poetry
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966), p.19. "The s u r r e a l i s t
approach endows poetry w i t h a quality a t once absolute and fragile."
54 Lamantia, "The h o r n u s Window, I' in Touch, p. 15.
55 One can a l s o see the sharp definition of fonns in the hard l i n e of
M r i c o , D a l i and Magritte as they develop out of Gauguin and Matisse; this
sense of definition becoming, as Dali defines it, "paranoid," o r m k i n g the
distinction between s e l f and other i n landscape canvases.
56 Lamantia, "A Civil World," in Touch, p.10.
57 Breton, Manifestoes, p.125.
of Poetry":
"Surrealism is the business of poets who cannot benefit by
surrealism. It w a s the f i r s t appearance of the Logos t h a t
said, 'The public be d a m d , ' by which he did not man
t h a t they did not matter o r he wanted t o be crucified by
them, but t h a t really he did not have a word t o say t o
them. Tkis was surrealism. " (Collected Books, p.169. )
A s Spicer notes in h i s "Te-k
58 One might c a l l the s u r r e a l i s t s "floating socialists."
Calas , in
Laughlin, ed. , New Directions 1940 P o 390In h i s Prologue t o Cables t o the Ace, ~
h e rm
t o n addresses h i s readers a s
the "Rabble" saying t o them, "The realm of the s p i r i t is two doors d m the
hall. There you can obtain more soul than you are ready t o cope w i t h , Buster
37
...
.CThe pcxt 3 has changed his address and h i s poetics are on vacation..
Go shake hands with the ccsnics i f you demand a p r e f a ~ . " Thomas e r t o n ,
Cables t o the Ace (New York : New Directions, 1968) , p. 1.
.
60 Herbert Read suggests t h a t Surrealism is dialectivally materialist,
for it m&es
"...a realization of the fundamntal contradictions of
r e a l i t y , and Cmves'r tawards a synthesis which i s
anything but i d e a l i s t i c
CIt'3renews l i f e i t s e l f by enlarging the sensibility, by making rrren more conscious
of the possible
of the t e r r o r and beauty, the wonder
_
.
f o m of beins. "
Herbert Read, "surreali&n and t h e Romantic Principle," i n The Philosophy of
Modern Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), pp.138 & 141.
....
61 A p l l i n a i r e , Selected Writings, p. 131
62 See Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Tyrannus Nix?
1969), p.1.
(New York:
New ~ i r e c t i o n s ,
63 Kenneth Rexroth, The Collected Shorter Poems (New York : New
Directions, 1966) , p. 270.
64 & b s a i r e , Return t o my Native Land, trans. by John Berger and
Anna Bostock (Harmndsworth, England : Penguin Books Ltd. , 1969) , p. 60.
In h i s introduction t o cgsaire's poetry, Mazisi Kunene ccgrments:
"The violence is the violence of colonial history, the s m violence
t h a t had tensed every p a r t of t h e poet's anger. The anger is
concrete since it derives not •’ran a detached sympathy but
from a r e a l and degrading experience of poverty and humiliation
suffered by Gsaire " (Ibid , p. 29. )
.
.
65 Charles Henri Ford, "Poem in Three T h ~ s , "in J m s Laughlin, ed.,
New Directions 1941 (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941), p.439
66 Philip L m t i a , "Apozarnantica, " i n Cestroyed Works (San Francisco:
The Auerhahn Press, 1 9 6 2 ) , unpaginated.
The purification which corns of destruction is not i d l e wishfulfillmnt either.
It i s a t the base of poetic experience harking back t o cavalry and the t r a g i c
beauby of the crucifixion and of the blood t h a t washes humanity clean. Is this
not what L m t i a is maning here?:
"The sun is bleeding over the sky!
Beauty be q prophecy and
youth my analog of wisdm,
Sel-ected Poems, p.75)
t o s t r i k e notes of wild mndrous song..."(
cf. m r c a ' s image in h i s poem "Crucifixionfl:
" ~ l o o df e l l on the mountains, and angels went in search of it
but t h e i r chalices held only wind..
Federico Garcia Lorca, Poet in New York, trans. by en Benlitt (New York:
Grove Press, Inc., 19551, p.109.
Also Marlowe's Faustus who can only be saved by the violent vision:
."
"See, see, where Christ's blood streams
in the
finnamnt
w soul, half a drop. ~ h my
,
Christ !"
Christopher Marlowe, The C o ~ l e t ePlays I ed. by J.B. Steane (Hmn-orth,
England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1969), p.336.
One &rap would save
67 caws, The P e t r y Of Dada And Surrealismi p. 70
..
Cited i n J H b b t t h e w ~ , S k r e d i s t Poetry In France (Syracuse :
Syracuse University Press), p.83.
69 Lammtia, "Autmatic World," in Touch, p. 21.
cf. Blake's irmge from Songs of E x p 5 e n c e ("Londm"):
"And the hapless s o l d i e r ' s sigh
Runs i n blood d m Palace w a l l s . "
W i l l i a m Blake, Poems and Prophecies, ed. by Max Plowman (Lmdon:
Sons Ltd., 1927), p.38.
J.M.
mt
&
70 Lamantia, "Mirror And H e a r t , I' i n Touch, p. 24.
c f ; (1)The t r a g i c beauty in the poetics of Bla ke, the canvases of Van Gogh
and the cinematic mntages of Peckinpaw, and
(2)the t r a g i c c m d y of Burroughs describing the 'hostile' Auca Indians of
Ecuador: "I have precise instructions for Auca raiding. It's quite simple
You cover both e x i t s of Auca house and shoot everybody you don't wanna fuck."
William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, The Yage Letters (San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 1969), p.38.
'I
Cited in Shattuck, The Banquet Y e a r s , p.240
1.5
,see ~ruceCook, The Beat Generation (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, l W l ) , p.60.
"Philip m t i a was i n it Cthe Anarchist Circle2 a s just
a precocious kid," says Rezoth.
"
Philip Lamantia, "you f l e e into a corridor of stars," i n Erotic Poems
(Philadelphia: The Walton Press, n.d.) , p. 3.
74 Lamantia, "Celestial Estrang-nt,"
in Touch, p.9.
75
Tyler's introduction t o Philip -tia,
Francisco: Oyez, 1966), n.p.
ouch of the L"lawel~us(San
76 Philip Whalen, On Bear' s Head (NewYor]~
: ~ a r c o u r t ,Brace
Inc. and Coyote, 1969), p.191.
&
World,
77 LuMntia , "World without h d , " i n The Blocd of the Air (San
Francisco: Four Seasons ~ o u n d a t i m ,1970) , p. 43.
Lamantia, "From The Front , I 1 i n Destroyed Works, unpaginated.
Lamantia, "The ~ i a b o l i cCondition," i n Touch, p.28.
L m t i a , "Astro-mcy,
"
in Selected Poems, p. 92.
Tristan Tzara, "The Jugglers," in Selected Poerru;, trans. by Lee
(London: Trigram Press, 1975), unpaginated.
Benedikt, ed., The Poetry Of Surrealism:
An Anthology, p.xi.
Where Futurism once celebrated the speed and dynamics of the city,
Surrealism now takes a much broader perspec<ive seeing-*
ironic contradiction
t
t h i s when he writes:
it expresses. Benjamin ~ 6 r e captures
"I'd l i k e t o speak t o you l i k e a subway-train broken down
i n front of the entrance
t o a station
i n t o which I s t r i d e with a s p l i n t e r i n one toe..." (Ibid, p.223.)
84 See Charles Henri Ford, Flag Of Ecstasy, ed. by Edward B. G e m i n
(Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1972), p.29.
85 Cited i n Lippard, pp.99-100.
cf. F'ritz Lang's "&tropolis," reputed t o be Hitler's favourite film:
underground c i t y f i l l e d with hard-working a u t m t o n s .
the
L m m t i a , "Hypodermic Light," i n Destroyed Works, unpaginated.
87 GuillaApollinaire, Zone, trans. by Samuel Beckett (Dublin: The
Dolrren Press, 1972), p.11.
cf. the mechanics i n the photography developed by S t i e g l i t z and Man Ray; and
the f o l l m i n g lines of Frank O I H a r a :
..A locomotive is more mlodious
than a cello. I dress in o i l cloth and read music
by Guillaum Apllinaire's clay candelabra."
k a n k ~ ' ~ a r The
a , selected Poems Of Frank 0' Hara, ed. by Donald A l l m (New
York: Randm House, 1974), p.8.
".
88 Cited i n Matthem. Surrealist Poetry ~n
&an=,
p.26.
"'
Apollinaire, Selected Writings, p.133.
..
Lamantia, "U.S S San Francisco, If i n Kostelanetz, 4. , ~ o s s i b i l i t i e s
of Poetry, pp.256-7.
93 Larrantia, "Intersection. " in Selected Poems, pp. 37-8
94 Breton, Manifestces. p. 159.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A l l e n , Donald M.,
1960.
ed. The New Amxican Poetry. New York: Grove P r e s s , Inc.,
Apllinaire, G u i l l a m . S e l e c t e d Writings.
York: New D i r e c t i o n s , 1971.
Apollinaire, Guillam. Zone.
D o h P r e s s , 1972.
Apollinaire, G u i l l a m .
corn P r e s s , 1973.
Trans. by Roger Shattuck.
Trans. by Samuel Beckett.
Calligrams.
New
Dublin: The
Trans. by'Anne Hyde Greet. U.S.A.:
mi-
Aragon, Louis. Aragon: P o e t o f the French Rcsistancc. Ed. b y Hannah Josephson
and Malcolm CaJley. Trans. b y R o l f e Hmrphries and Malcolm Cowley. New
York: D u e l l , Sloan & P e a r c e , Inc., 1945.
Arp on Arp. Ed. b y Marcel Jean.
New York: The Viking P r e s s , 1972.
Arp, Jean.
Trans. by Joachim Neugroschel.
Artaud, Antonin. Artaud Anthology. Ed. by Jack Hirschman. Trans. by
Hirschman e t al. San Francisco: C i t y L i g h t s Books, 1965.
Ashbery, John.
R i v e r s and M ~ u n t a i n s . New York:
H o l t , Rinehart and Winston,
1966.
Ashbery, John.
The Tennis Court Oath.
U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 1968.
B a u d e l a i r e , Charles. S e l e c t e d Poems.
Cox & W p m Ltd., 1971.
Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan
Trans. by Geoffrey Wagner.
London:
Eknedikt, Michael, ed. The P o e t r y o f Surrealism: An Anthology. Trans. by
Benedikt et al. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974.
Blake, William. Poems and Prophecies.
J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1927.
Ed. b y Max Pl-.
London:
Breton, And&.
" F a t a m r g a n a . " Trans. by C l a r k Mills. In New ~ i r e c t i o n s ,1941.
Ed.by James Laughlin. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941.
B r e t c n , And&.
.1960.
/
Nadja.
Trans. by Richard H m d .
New York : Grove P r e s s , I n c
Breton, Andre. Manifestoes o f Surrealism. Trans. by Richard Seaver and
Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: U n i v e r s i t y o f Michigan P r e s s , 1972.
.,
Breton, Andre'. Surrealism and Painting.
New York: H a q x r & Rcw, 1972.
Trans. by Sinon Watson Taylor.
Brcrwn, Norman 0. "Apcealypse : The Place of msterv in the Life of the Mind. "
In The Radical Vision: Essays for the ~&&es. ~ d by
. Leo Hamlian
and Frederick R. K a r l . New York: Thomas Y. C r w e l l Co., Inc., 1970.
Penguin Mcdem Poets.
Bukowski, Charles; Lamantia, Philip; and Norse, Harold.
Harmndsworth, England: %-quin Books Ltd., 1969.
Burroughs, William. "Notes on Vaudeville Voices, and The Cut up Wthcd."
In The Wems. Ed. by LeRoi Jones. London: MacGibbon & K e e , 1965.
Burroughs, William. The Job: Interview with William Burroughs.
Daniel Odier. Iondon: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1969.
B w ~ o u ~ ~ sWilliam,
,
and Ginsberg, Allen.
City Lights Books, 1969.
The Yage Letters.
Ed. by
San Francisco:
Calas, Nicolas. "The Meaninq of Surrealism, an Interview with Nicolas Calas."
I n New Directions 1940. - Ed. by Jams &ughlin. Norfolk, C m . :
New Directions, 1940, pp.385-95.
Caws, Mary Ann. The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism.
Princeton University Press, 1970.
Caws, Mary Ann.
And& Breton.
New York : Twayne Publishers, Inc.
Cdsaire, h
'
.
Return t o my Native Land.
Bostwk
.
, 1971.
Trans. by John Berger and Anna
Hanmndsworth , England : p&guin Books Ltd , 1969.
Charters, Samuel.
Chomsky, Noam.
Princeton, N.J.:
Scm Pcems/ Poets.
.
Berkeley:
Oyez, 1971.
Cwrrent Issues in Linguistic Theory.
The Hague: Mouton, 1970.
Chomsky, Noam. Language and Mind.
Inc., 1972.
New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,
Cook, Bruce.
New York:
The Beat Generation.
Charles Scrjbner's Sons, 1971.
C o t t , Jonathan. "The New Arrerican Poetry. " In The New Arrerican Arts.
Ed. by Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Collier Books, 1967.
Coutts-Smith, Kenneth.
Dada.
mas, . Robert. The Voice.
Landcn:
Studio Vista Ltd., 1970.
Trans. by William Kulik.
New York: Grossman,
1972.
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Johnson. Boston: L i t t l e , Brown & Co., 1960.
Ed. by Thomas H.
Dorsch, T.S., trans. C l a s s i c a l L i t e r a r y C r i t i c i s m .
Penguin Books Ltd.1 1972.
Eigner, Larry.
From t h e S u s t a i n i n g Air.
E l m s l i e , Kenward.
1971.
mtor Disturbance.
~ m n d s w o r t h ,England:
Eugene, Ore.: Toad P r e s s , 1967.
New York: Columbia u n i v e r s i t y P r e s s ,
.
Eluard, Paul. " P c e t i c ~ v i d e n c eI' Trans. by George Reavey.
Ed. by H e r b e r t Read. Zondm: Fa& and Faber, 1971.
Eluard, Paul. ~ n i n t e r r q t e dPoetry: S e l e c t e d Writings.
Alexander. New York: New D i r e c t i o n s , 1975.
In ~ u r r e a l i s m .
Trans. by Lloyd
Evergreen Review, 6 , No. 2 3 (Mar.-Apr., 1 9 6 2 ) , 12.
Everson, William.
The R e s i d u a l Years.
New York:
New D i r e c t i o n s , 1968.
Tyrannus Nix?
New York:
New D i r e c t i o n s , 1969.
F e r l i n g h e t t i , Lawrence.
Ford, C h a r l e s H e n r i . "Poem i n Three Times." In New D i r e c t i o n s 1941.
b y Jams Laughlin. Norfolk, Corm.: New D i r e c t i o n s , 1941.
Ford, Charles Henri. F l a g o f E c s t a s y . Ed. b y Edward B. Germain.
Angeles : Black S p a r m P r e s s , 1972.
F m l i e , Wallace.
1972.
Age of Surrealism.
Ed.
Los
Bloanington: Indiana U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s ,
Freud, Sigmund. On C r e a t i v i t y and the Unconscious.
Duff. New York : Harper & R m , 1958.
Trans. b y I.F. Grant
e e u d , Sigmund. A General I n t r c d u c t i o n t o Psycho-analysis.
R i v i e r e . New York: Sinon and S c h u s t e r , 1963.
Ginsberg, Allen. "Words And Consciousness."
No. 3 (1974), 52-4.
Trans. b y J o a n
The Amxican P o e t r y Review, 3,
Goodrich, Norma Ihrre. "Gothic C a s t l e s in S u r r e a l i s t F i c t i o n . " In
Proceedings o f the Ccanparative L i t e r a t u r e Symposium: From S u r r e a l i s m t o
Be Absurd. Ed. by Wolodyrtyr T. Zyla. Labbock, Texas: The Texas Tech
P r e s s , 1970.
Green, Paul. "The Relevance of S u r r e a l i s m w i t h s m Canadian P e r s p e c t i v e s . "
Pbsaic, 2 , No. 4 ( S m r 1969), 59-70.
Grossman, Manuel L. Dada. New York: Bobbs-&mill
Co., Inc.,
1971.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm. The I n t r o d u c t i o n t o Hegel's Philosophy o f F i n e A r t .
Trans. by Bernard Bosanquet. London: Kegan P a u l , 1905.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm F r i e d r i c h . Hegel: The E s s e n t i a l Writings.
F r e d e r i c k G. Weiss I New York: Harper & ~ m 1974.
,
Ed. by
Heilman, R o k r t . "The l3.m-1of the Screw as Poem." I n Five Approaches of
L i t e r a r y C r i t i c i s m . Ed. by W i l b u r Scott. New York: Collier Books, 1966.
Howard, Richard.
A l m e W i t h &rim.
New York : Atheneun, 1971.
Hyppolite, Jean. S t u d i e s on Mam and Hegel.
York: Basic Books, Inc., 1969.
J a r r y , Alfred. Ubu R o i .
1961.
Jolas , Eugene.
Trans. by John ~ ' N e i l l . New
Trans. by Barbara Wright.
Review of " G o t t f r i e d Benn
.
"
New York: New D i r e c t i o n s ,
transition,
No. 5 (August, 1927) ,
146-9.
Jolas, Eugene. "Logos. " t r a n s i t i o n , No. 16-17 (June, 1929) , 25-30.
Jolas , Eugene. "Statement.
"
t r a n s i t i o n , No. 18 (NW.
Jones, Jeanetta L., d i r e c t o r .
N.D.,
, 1929) , 175.
The New Amxican Poetry Circuit.
San ~ r a n c i s c o ,
N.P.
Jcnes, W.H.S.,
trans. H i p p r a t e s , Vol. IV/ Heracleitus.
Harvard U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 1967.
Carrbridge, Mass.:
The S p i r i t i n Man, Art and L i t e r a t u r e . Ed. by S i r Herbert Read
Trans. by R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
P r e s s , 1972.
Jung, C.G.
e t al.
'
Kandel, Lenore.
1966.
Kerouac, Jack.
the Beat.
1966.
The Lcnre Bmk.
San Francisco: S t o l e n Paper Review E d i t i o n s ,
"Belief & Technique f o r Modem Prose." In A Casebook on
Ed. by Thornas Parkinson. New York: Thcnnas Y. C r o w e l l Co.
Kerouac, Jack. " E s s e n t i a l s o f Spontaneous Prose."
(Spring 1975) , 743-5.
Knott, B i l l . Nights of
,
Boundary 2 , 111, No. 3
~aani. Boston: Barn Dream P r e s s , 1971.
~ o j a v,
e Alexandre. I n t r o d u c t i o n t o t h e Reading o f ~ e g e l . Trans. by J m s H.
Nichols, Jr. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1969.
Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. P o s s i b i l i t i e s o f Poetry.
Co., 1970.
Krim, S e y m u r , ed.
1960.
The Beats.
New York: D e l l Publishing
Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett P u b l i c a t i o n s , I n c . ,
(June, 1943) , 56.
L m t i a , P h i l i p . Riview of New Directions Anthology, Five Young AnErican
Poets. View,
- 5 t h Ser., 1 (March, 1945) , 50-1.
Lmmtia, P h i l i p . Ekstasis.
San Francisco: The Auerhahn P r e s s , 1959.
L m t i a , P h i l i p . Narcotics.
San Francisco: The Auerhahn P r e s s , 1959.
Larrantia, P h i l i p .
Destroyed Works.
San Francisco: Auerhahn P r e s s , 1962.
Lamantia, P h i l i p .
Touch of the Marvelous.
Lamantia, P h i l i p .
Selected Poems.
San Francisco: Oyez, 1966.
San Francisco: C i t y Lights Books, 1967.
Lamantia, P h i l i p . The Blood of the Air.
Foundation, 1970.
San Francisco: Four Seasons
Lamantia, P h i l i p . "The C r b of Poetry." In C i t y Lights Anthology.
Lawrence F e r l i n g h e t t i . San Francisco: C i t y Lights Books, 1974.
Lamantia, P h i l i p .
1974.
Touch of t h e Marvelous.
Bolinas: Four Seasons Foundation,
Langacker, Ronald W. Language and i t s S t r u c t u r e .
Jovanovich, Inc., 1967.
.
h u t r ? m n t , Comte d e Les Chants d e Maldoror.
York: New Directions, 1966.
Lippard, Lucy R., ed. S u r r e a l i s t s on A r t .
H a l l , Inc., 1970.
b r c a , Federico Garcia.
Poet in New York.
Grove P r e s s , Inc., 1955.
New York: Harcourt, Brace,
Trans. by Guy Wemham.
Englewccd C l i f f s , N.J.:
Lunar Baedeker
&
Tim-Tables.
Prentie-
Harmndsworth,
Highlands: Jonathan Williams, 1958.
&cIntyre, C.F., t r a n s . French Symbolist Poetry.
C a l i f o r n i a Press, 1971.
Marlme, Christopher. The Complete Plays.
England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1969.
New
Trans. by Ben B e n l i t t . New York:
b r c a , Federico Garcia. Urca. Ed. and t r a n s . by J.L. G i l i .
England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1967.
b y , Mina.
Ed. by
Berkeley: University of
Ed. by J.B.
Steane.
Hmndsworth,
Matthews, J.H.,
University
S u r r e a l i s t Poetry in France.
Matthews, J.H.
University Press, 1969.
Syracuse, N.Y.:
Syracuse
Matthem, J.H.
%enjamin pgret: Marvelous Conjunction.11
Poetry f r m Dada t o "Tel Quel." Ed. by Mary Ann Caws.
Wayne S t a t e University Press, 1974.
About French
Detroit:
Mayakovsky, Vladimir. Poems.
Publishers, 1972.
Moscaw: Progress
E l u r e , Michael.
1961.
Trans. by Dorian Rottenberg.
The New ~ o o k /A Book of Torture.
New York : Grove Press,
iWLuhan, Marshall, and Parker, Harley. Through the Vanishing Point:
Space i n Poetry and Painting. New York: Harper & Rm, 1969.
W a g g a r t , John E. Studies in t h e Hegelian Dialectic.
Russell, Inc., 1964.
W l t z e r , David,
Luna.
New York: Russell &
Los Angeles: Black Sparrcw Press, 1970.
Wrleau-Pmty, Maurice. Signs. Trans. by Richard C. McCleary.
Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964.
W r t m , Thomas.
Cables t o t h e Ace.
New York: New Directions, 1968.
Michel, Jacques. "Francis Picabia's new worlds."
22 Feb., 1976, N.P., cols. 1-4.
Miller, Henry.
more, Marianne.
The Cosmological Eye.
Collected Poems.
Evanston,
New York:
Manchester Guardian.
New Directions, 1961.
New York: Mamillan, 1957.
Mothemell, Robert, ed. Dada Painters and Poets.
Schultz , Inc , 1951.
.
New York: Wittenborn,
Nadeau, Maurice. The History of Surrealism. Trans. by Richard H-d.
Hmndsworth, England: Penguin Books Ltd., 1973.
O'Hara, Frank. The Selected Pcems of Frank O'Hara.
New York: Randcm House, 1974.
Olson, Charles. Selected Writings.
New Directions, 1966.
Ovid.
The &tamorphoses.
Press, 1960.
Ed. by Donald Allen.
Ed. by Robert Creeley.
Trans. by Horace Gregory.
New York:
New York : The Viking
J -
-
---
In About French P E W from Dada t o "Tel Quel." Ed. by Mary Ann
Caws. ~ e + ~ o iWayne
t:
Sta-te University P r e s s , 1974.
Paz , Octavio. ~ l t e m a t i n gC u t m ? r ~ t . Trans. by Helen R. Lane.
The Viking P r e s s , 1974.
New Yo&:
Paz , Octavio. Children of t h e fire. Trans. by Rachel P h i l l i p s .
Mass.: Harvard University P r e s s , 1975.
Plato. Five Dialogues o f Plato. Ed. by Ernest Rhys.
London: J . M . Dent & Sons Ltd., 1938.
Cambridge,
Trans. by P.B. Shelley.
P m e r , Kevin. "Pack Up Y o u r Troubles in Your Old K i t Bag and Smile, Smile,
Smile, •’ran Diaspora t o Galut. " Boundary 2 , 3 (Spring 1975) , 683-705.
&ad, H e r b e r t .
The Philosophy of Fbdem A r t .
Read, Herkrt, ed.
Surrealism.
-
k n d o n : Faber and Faber, 1969.
Lmdon: Faber and Faber, 1971.
Reverdy, P i e r r e . Selected P m w .
New D i r e c t i o n s , 1972.
Trans. by Kenneth Rexroth.
New York:
Rexroth, Kenneth.
Assays.
New York: New Directions, 1961.
Rexroth, Kenneth.
1966.
The Collected Shorter Poems.
R e a o t h , Kenneth.
With Eye and Ear. New York: Herder and Herder, 1970.
Richter, Hans. Dada: Art: and Anti-Art.
Tharres & Hudson, 1970.
New York: New Directions,
Trans. by David B r i t t .
Rhbaud, Arthur. A Season i n H e l l & The Drunken Boat.
New York: New Directions, 1961.
~arsse.
Robbe-Grillet , A l a i n . For a New Novel.
York : Grove P r e s s , I n c , 1965.
.
Robbe-Grillet , Alain. The Voyeur.
Grove P r e s s , Inc., 1966.
London:
Trans. by Louise
Trans. by Richard Hmard.
Trans. by Richard Howard.
Rothenberg, J e r o m . "A Dialogue on O r a l Poetry."
(Spring 1975) , 509-548.
New
New York:
Boundary 2 , 3
S e l l i n , E r i c . "The E s t h e t i c s of Ambiguity: Reverdy's U s e of S y n t a c t i c
Simultaneity." In About French Poetry from Dada t o " T e l Quel."
.Ed. by Mary Ann Caws. D e t r o i t : Wayne S t a t e University Press, 1974.
Shattuck, Roger.
The Banquet Years.
New York: Random Hause, 1968.
S h a t t u c k , Roger. "The M c d e o f J ~ w s i t i a n . ~n mUi
~ m c Phc e t r y from
Dada t o " T e l Quel. " Ed. by Mary
Caws. b t m i t : Wayne S t a t e
U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 1974.
s m i t h , T.v. , ed. F r m T h a l e s t o P l a t o .
Chicago P r e s s , 1968.
Chicago:
The m i v e r s i t y of
S p i c e r , Jack. The C o l l e c t e d Books of Jack S p i c e r .
Los Angeles: Black Sparrow P r e s s , 1975.
S u t t o n , Walter.
Anerican Free Verse.
m.
b y Robin B l a s e r .
New York: New D i r e c t i o n s , 1973.
Suzuki, D.T. E s s a y s i n Z e n Buddhism ( F i r s t S e r i e s ) .
Inc., 1961.
New York: Grove P r e s s ,
Tison-Braun, Micheline. " T r i s t a n Tzara: 'Avant q u e la nuit..."'
In
About French P m t r y frcxn Dada t o "Tel Quel." Ed. by Mary Ann Caws.
D e t r o i t : Wayne S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s , 1974.
T y l e r , P a r k e r . The W i l l o f E r o s : S e l e c t e d Poems 1930-1970:
Black Sparrow P r e s s , 1972.
T z a r a , T r i s t a n . S e l e c t e d Poems.
P r e s s , 1975.
Trans. by Lee Hamood.
V e r l a i n e , Paul. S e l e c t e d Poems. Trans. b y C.F. MacIntyre.
U n i v e r s i t y of C a l i f o r n i a p r e s s , 1970.
Behind qpearance.
Waddington, C.H.
Waldberg, P a t r i c k .
Surrealism.
Los Angeles:
Cambridge, Mass.:
Berkeley:
The MIT P r e s s , 1970.
London: T h e s & E. Hudson, Ltd., 1972.
Whalen, P h i l i p . On B e a r ' s Head.
a n d Coyote, 1969.
New York: H a r c o u r t , Brace & World, Inc.
Leaves of Grass.
New York: A i m n t P u b l i s h i n g Co., Inc.,
Whitman, W a l t .
1965.
Whitman, Walt. An A m r i c a n Primer.
C i t y L i g h t s Books, 1970.
W i l e n t z , E l i a s , ed.
The B e a t Scene.
Ed. b y Horace T r a u b e l .
New York: C o r i n t h Books, 1960.
Williams, I h - r e t t , e d . Anthology of C o n c r e t e Poetry.
E l s e P r e s s , 1967.
Williams, William Carlos.
~ i t t g e k t e i ,n Ludwig.
Ansccanbe.
Paterson.
San ~ r a n c i s c o :
New York: S ~ r ( l ~ ! t h h g
New York: New D i r e c t i o n s , 1963.
Philosophical Investigations.
New York: Maanillan, 1958.
Trans. b y G .E .M.
.
Wittgenstein , Ludwig. .'Tractatus
-Loqico-~hilosophicus Trans. by D - F Pears and B .F. McGuiness
London: Routledge & Kegan P a d , 1974.
.
Won, KO.
"Surrealism i n Japanese Poetry.
Woolf, Virginia.
Inc., 1953.
The C o m n Reader.
Zukofsky, Louis.
Prepositions.
" Shantih, 3,
No. 2 (1975) , 39-44.
New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
New York: Horizon Press, 1967.
Zukofsky, Louis. AL;L t h e c o l l e c t e d s h o r t poems 1923-1964.
Norton & Co., Inc., 1971.
New York: W.W.