A Very Decadent Idea

In The Painter of Modern Life Baudelaire asserted that ‘sublime thought’ is associated with a neural phenomenon – a ‘nervous impulse’. The notion of such an impulse (a reverberation in the cerebral cortex) displaces the basis of aesthetic response from the metaphysical to the biological – a very ‘decadent’ idea. Why?  

Because the specific form of Aestheticism derived from this proposition treated ‘Beauty’ solely as a stimulus of the nerves – thus art need only address the nervous system. It can, in pursuit of psycho-physical stimulation, safely ignore deadly serious didactics, social polemics and the idle chatter of metaphysics.

Illus: Anxiety of Glamour, 2002 (detail)

 

Visionary Or Nothing

I reach the real through the dream. I invent you reality.
- Clarice 'Hurricane Clarice' Lispector

 Writing poetry is not about language any more than taking a bath is about plumbing….So, galvanised, I write, splintering certain words across blank pages of empty space: why?

Academic and other definitions of poetry as ‘literature’ displace the act of poetic creation from the interior psycho-biological universe to an epiphenomenal world of cultural-linguistic constructs where ‘communication’ is all.

Do I write poetry to communicate? No.

Is my poetry a spiritual exercise? No.

Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, in their different ways, consigned metaphysics to oblivion. What has this to do with me? Everything.

Does this mean that only language remains? No.

I will never concede that poetry is literature. The cultural-linguistic paradigm presupposes that everything depends on language to the extent that Being is literally indefinable in extra-linguistic terms: very convenient – if you are a linguist, a post-modernist - or a plumber. Yet, as we all know, 'the map is not the territory' (Korzybski). 

I know my creativity is an innate psycho-active phenomenon. The raison d’etre of my paradigm is transformation, the ‘circumstantial-magical’ convulsion caused by that particular Beauty, ‘the only beauty that should concern us’ (the enigmatic sphinx, the marvelous precipitate of the ancient alchemists) invoked by the transformation of despised prime matter into pure aesthetic gold. Fantastic? Romantic? Symbolist? Surreal? Pop? Subtopian Materialism? But, of course!

The raw material of creation, rather like a chance encounter in the street, is not so much language but me as poet, my ego and all: and the essence of poetic practice is active imagination, even though it is through language that we unleash the vision thing from another world. It is inevitable that poets, in pursuit of inspiration, will engage, in some way or other, with all those innate processes of inner integration, those ‘inner workings’ that surely exist. From this perspective the poem itself may appear a by-product of the procedure; an exercise in therapy, propaganda or, let’s face it, pure entertainment. Take it or leave it.

For me, as I penetrate the archaic heritage, that archetypal forest of symbols; it is the compulsive activity of inspiration arising from the process of self-discovery that is the prime factor: it is this that dissolves those artificial barriers between fact and fiction, between sleep and waking, between dream and reality, between consciousness and the unconscious, between inner and outer space… Thus the poem is quasi-autonomous; it partakes of the de-familiarizing power of symbolic Otherness. Is it too late to get unreal?

Grounding poetic practice in the ontological matrix dissociates ‘pure poetry’ from the cultural-linguistic, epiphenomenal foreground of ‘literary’ discourse, from the dreary, enervating world of career-writers and fake self-referential experimentalists obsessed with brownie-points and prizes.

I know that unilateral engagement on an aesthetic basis with the principium individuationis does not accord with traditional models of perfectibility or divine purpose; perhaps it can be seen as a promethean affront to the established order, or as a way of repossessing everything that has been expropriated (that is to say, stolen from us) by agents of the Mysterium. This is not some kind of spiritual exercise but a way of accessing, as a psychonaut, the mythopoeic domain, the Enchanter’s Domain: a neo-shamanistic anti-quest that is certainly the very antithesis of enlightenment and salvation. Oh, yes, I know I am a spiritual flaneur, a damned poet and (eye roll) a ‘lost’ soul.

To be damned is to be modern, absolutely modern; and to be modern is to be utterly damned once and for all. The human condition evolves too fast or not fast enough, yet the horizon of change is Fear, and the closer we are to the horizon the less we care about rhyme or reason: blank verse for a blank generation. Eye roll and U bend. And that is why.

Revised version of an article from Stride Magazine, 2002

Illus: Visionary Or Nothing II, 2009

Our Sacred Monsters

…

WHY THE ENGLISH HATE SURREALISM

the standards of virtue now prevalent are incompatible with the production of good poetry

 – Bertrand Russell

Britain has spawned several sacred monsters: acknowledged precursors of Surrealism – from the mysterious, disputed author of The Revenger’s Tragedy to the dream-works of Lewis Carroll (by way of Swift, Sterne, Blake, Coleridge, the Gothic novel, Emily Bronte, and the 'mirth and marvels' of Tom Ingoldsby) – but – paradoxically, Britain has engendered very few self-defined Surrealists, in the contemporary sense.

Notwithstanding an indigenous ‘tendency to irrationality’ and a trend of anarchic fantasy in English art, literature and popular culture (Lottie ‘Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay!’ Collins,  Fred Karno's Army, The Crazy Gang, The Whitehall Follies, Take it From Here, The Goons, Carry On films, St Trinian’s, Screaming Lord Sutch, Basil Brush, Gurney Slade, farcical sex scandals, Union Jack knickers, Madam Cyn) it is clearly the case that, if transposed to these shores, a movement such as Surrealism is quickly regarded as ‘foreign’ or out-of-place.

‘You know, it's just not cricket', says your true-born Englishman in his 'modern rustic' kitchen, his chintzy drawing room or eco-friendly conservatory somewhere in Middle England.

Victorian critics regarded artists or poets who found inspiration in Continental trends – like Swinburne, Wilde, Whistler or Beardsley, for example – as very dubious influences indeed: ‘cuckoos in the nest’ or, even, a dire threat to the moral order. This stance was exemplified by Robert Buchanan in his polemical pamphlet The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day (1872) where, in the course of a vitriolic attack on Baudelaire, he refers to Paris as 'the most debauched city of the world'.  

Like Baudelaire and the Cancan, Surrealism was always going to be seen as just another ‘un-British’ import perhaps reluctantly tolerated but actually seen as a sinister aberration. Most would prefer to deport it back to the sin cities of Europe, where such louche, ‘decadent’ or subversive japes rightfully belong – although all classes often displayed an ambivalent, even prurient, attraction to Le Cancan, ‘Gay Paree’ and bawdy European ‘naughtiness’ in general. Hence the popularity of Variety Show or Music Hall acts like the Tiller Girls (originally named Les Jolies Petites), or the Colonna Troupe of Amelia Newham from St John’s Wood (aka Mlle Colonna) whose high-kicking performances at The Alhambra, Leicester Square, could be relied upon to attract the attention of militant campaigners from the National Vigilance Association.

Likewise, when exhibited at the Grafton Gallery in London in 1893, Degas’ painting In the Café (L’Absinthe) (1875) was found to be a morally repulsive example of the flippant and vulgar artistic ideals of ‘new painters’, sparking a lengthy controversy in the Westminster Gazette; the same picture was loudly hissed by disgusted bidders when put up for auction at Christie’s. Numerous other examples could be mentioned. All of which tends to corroborate the opinion of Bertrand Russell when he said moral indignation ‘is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world’.

One thinks of the 'mad Frenchmen' gently parodied by Arthur Machen through the character of the worried father in his semi-autobiographical novel The Hill of Dreams (1907): 'The parson began to fear that his son was like some of those mad Frenchmen of whom he had read, young fellows who had a sort of fury of literature, and gave their whole lives to it, spending days over a page, and years over a book, pursuing art as Englishmen pursue money...'. Indeed, a regressive and venal Victorianism is still the dominant attitude today in most respectable circles which, even in the twenty-first century, remain resolutely insular in a supercilious, fog-in-the-Channel kind of way. One thinks of that moment in Through the Looking-Glass (1871) when passengers in a railway carriage utter a telepathic chorus of thoughts for Alice’s benefit. “Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!”

In an essay on ‘The Visual Poetics of British Surrealism’ (1996), Michel Remy (‘that most unlikely creature, a French enthusiast for English Surrealism’ to quote George Melly) probed this terrain and explained how the initial progress of Surrealism in England was impeded by an existing, well-established counter-movement defined as the ‘Bloomsbury Spirit’ and exemplified by the theories of Roger Fry and Clive Bell. The dominant character of ‘Bloomsburyism’ (and its subsequent ramifications in the work of Ben Nicholson and Duncan Grant, among others), emphasised the ‘visual centrality’ of clearly delineated conceptions of order, structure, integration and unification. This aesthetic was developed into a doctrine of ‘pure art’ characterised by a militant ‘exclusion of representation’, the pursuit of a metaphysical, ‘spiritual’, ideal of hyper-abstraction; a kind of ethereal, visual music. This viewpoint was later reinforced by other writers, such as critic Clement Greenberg, who – promoting Abstract Expressionism as the epitome of ‘superior culture’ and a counterforce against both Socialist Realism and commercial (capitalist) Kitsch – took a similar approach in the late 1930s. And, of course, the toleration of art only if it has a ‘spiritual purpose’ (i.e. devotional parables, theological propaganda or cautionary tales and righteous fables of renunciation and self-denial) is a typical Puritan strategy. Ideally – like Plato, the Church Fathers and the Iconoclasts– the out-and-out Puritan would banish idolatrous ‘graven images’ (art is idolatry) altogether, but social-cultural pressures are such that a ‘spiritual’ aesthetic of ‘pure art’ provides an expedient, opportunistic alternative to outright abolition. However, to cite Russell again, this ‘generally means that it is bad art.’ 

As recently as 1978, in ‘Alchemy of the Word’, an article on Surrealism for Harpers and Queen, novelist Angela Carter stated bluntly ‘the movement never travelled across the Channel, not even in the Thirties…’ The Dadas are more fashionable now she said, and claimed explicitly that:

‘Surrealist romanticism is at the opposite pole from classical modernism, but then, the Surrealists would never have given Pound or Eliot house room on strictly moral grounds. A Mussolini fan? A high Tory? They’d have moved noisily, but with dignity, to another café’

Consolidated just after the First World War, the stranglehold of moralistic Victorianism (‘The Bloomsbury Spirit’ in the visual arts, Anglo-American Classical Modernism, in the literary sphere) was/is almost total. Despite the limited success of the famous 1936 London exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, where Sheila Legge performed in an event entitled The Phantom of Sex Appeal, Surrealists will always be Outsiders, relegated to the cultural margins – perhaps no bad thing, it might be said.

A Surrealist Declaration of 1947 offered a diagnosis of the English anti-Surrealist ‘paradox’. Aside from immediate factional issues the Declaration identified wider concerns. These included the need to combat reactionary, jingoistic conformist attitudes and ‘diehard militarism’, which may be typical of other (apparently) democratic European societies. Scorning the notion that Surrealist revolt may be dismissed as a ‘sin of youth’ the authors identified the ‘decentralised structure of English society’ as a major problem and, further, highlighted an all-pervasive ‘moral pressure’ from Protestant Christianity as the real enemy. ‘An enemy which attacks Man from the inside… an enemy which is itself infinitely divided and superficially liberal.’

Here, Remy’s analysis of mainstream English abstractionists advancing a ‘teleological’ agenda, inherently reactionary and anti-Surreal in its concern with the moral-spiritual function of art, is telling. He detects a specifically English tendency at work. A ‘disembodied functioning of the spirit’, the legacy of Plato and Aristotle, an exclusive formalism, an ‘optical totalitarianism’, the ‘subordination of the emotion’, a puritanical mode of ‘aesthetic Quakerism’.

    This arises from the innate tendency of the English (in particular) to regard themselves as ‘more radical than the radicals’. Our Anglo-Saxons suffer from a deep conviction that ‘true’ radicalism is embodied in a home-grown tradition of religious non-conformity. This tendency is a political ethos; a pervasive subculture of anti-establishment, reformist dissent that dates back to the Civil War era, or, even earlier, to the Peasant’s Revolt. George Orwell, in his essay 'The Prevention of Literature' (1946) is among those who have defined the basis of English radicalism as the tradition of Milton's Areopagitica and Dissenter Protestantism, quoting a Revivalist hymn ('Dare to be Daniel...') to sum up his notion of the 'heretic' or ‘dissenter’ who 'refused to outrage his own conscience'.

It is undeniable that this heroic-dissident, semi-Calvinist tendency – derived from a Biblical 'we-are-all-sinners' mode of ersatz egalitarianism, is central to an indigenous, iconoclastic cultural formation, closer to Methodism than to Marx, owing allegiance to Geneva rather than to Rome. It is obviously hostile to pure or absolute Surrealism.

For, while the objectives of Surrealism may include, ‘the total liberation of the mind and of all that it resembles’ (Declaration of 27 January, 1925), or ‘the infinite expansion of reality’ (Balakian), or a return to ‘the sources of poetic imagination’ (Breton), it is also necessary to bear in mind that, as a doctrine of ‘absolute non-conformism’ (notre non-conformisme absolu), ‘total revolt’ or ‘complete insubordination’, Surrealism ('this tiny footbridge over the abyss' - Breton again) maintained an implacable stance of opposition to the ideology of family-country-religion, a complex seen as an apparatus of social conservatism, or as a ‘mechanism of oppression’; in fact the Three Fs of ‘traditional’ or ‘cornerstone’ conservatism: Faith, Flag and Family.

Furthermore, it is necessary to recognise that Surrealism was not some form of mysticism, or spiritual ‘heresy’ but, as Maurice Nadeau has said, is a state of mind understood as a tendency ‘not to transcend but to penetrate reality’.

It is still the case that, even in these wacky, Post-PoMo times, self-styled ‘innovative’ poets from these damp and misty isles are obsessed by language in a completely useless manner (academic-philosophical cult of Wittgenstein); they flirt with fake notions of ‘radical’ avant garde modernism and, furthermore, are crippled by a form of ‘ethical’ neo-Puritanism known as ‘political correctness’, or, more rarely, its mirror image; a cult of inverted virtue signalling, known nowadays as Anti-Woke. They may often affect a ‘progressive’ worldview, incorporating derivative, tokenistic, anti-establishment attitudes mixed up with pacifism and anti-capitalism into what is, in effect, a reactionary, conformist sweetness-and-light agenda that consciously or not works in collusion with fundamentalists and reactionaries everywhere.  Just as the hippie was an inverted bourgeois, so todays ‘radical’ is an inverted conservative – an inverted conservative camouflaged by inverted snobbery. This posture is justified by notions of ‘respect’, distorted by the Cultural Cringe, filtered through State Multiculturalism and energised by lip-service to no-nonsense Working Class Heroes, the North-South Divide and Family Values: a classic example of ‘repressive tolerance’ to use a phrase borrowed from Herbert Marcuse, or 'trahsion des clercs', as our French friends would say.

        In his pivotal text An Essay on Liberation (1969) Herbert Marcuse provided an incisive outline of the radical 'new sensibility' which, in pursuit of a primal form of freedom as biological necessity, must pass 'from Marx to Fourier... from realism to Surrealism'. In the aesthetic realm, Marcuse hailed the emergence of 'desublimated "lower" and destructive forms...  mixing the barricade and the dance floor.' This 'new sensibility', he claimed, was not only opposed to the traditional 'establishment' but also attacked the deadly esprit de serieux of the socialist camp: 'miniskirts against the apparatchiks, rock 'n' roll against Soviet Realism'. Perhaps this new, hedonistic, ‘permissive’ idolatrous, unholy zeitgeist, from Desmond Morris’s ICA exhibition Paintings by Chimpanzees (1957) to Kenneth Tynan’s ‘nudest show on Earth’, Oh! Calcutta! (Off Broadway, 1969, The Roundhouse, 1970) marked the final end of Victorianism and of the Bloomsbury Spirit. For a brief moment it looked as though Surrealism had finally found a home or some acceptance at least.

 Yet the force of this argument is somewhat diminished in the light of social facts underlying the so-called Permissive Society of the ‘Sixties, the ‘rebellious’ cultural backdrop to Marcuse’s text (which was as popular in the UK as it was in the USA).

To quote rock critic Robert Christgau: 'There was a sense of rebelliousness... but one of the ways it was rebellious was it wanted to enjoy having more pleasure than it was told it could have. This was much more important than the political element, numerically speaking.' These remarks apply to the US but the same principle applies to Britain, where hedonistic impulses were boosted by the affluence of 'You've Never Had It So Good' consumer boom affluence, greater social mobility, the availability of The Pill and the abolition of National Service. By 1967 this new hedonism had become a fully-fledged, jet-set, high-life of conspicuous consumption, as exemplified by the popular advertising slogan 'When you got it – flaunt it!'

Alan Parker later remarked: 'Images of Ursula Andress coming out of the water in Dr No were more appealing than a monk self-immolating in Saigon'.  Or as Andrew Loog Oldham succinctly put it: 'I didn't have any goals; it was all just a lark'.

Obviously this 'surprise-wave'  New Sensibility ‘Youthquake’ had little in common with any native British notion of alleged 'radicalism'; a tendency which cannot escape either its ascetic origin or the historical legacy of assorted puritanical Lollards, Diggers, Ranters, Levellers and troublesome, lefty clerics in the tradition of John Ball, 'the mad priest of Kent'. Although much diluted, this is a tradition still with us as exemplified by the ‘Anglican Priest and polemicist’ Giles ‘Loose Canon’ Fraser, whose radicalism means little more than attacking the superior attitudes of ‘metropolitan liberals in the media’.

  The New Sensibility was a cultural shift that helps to account for a wider resurgence of interest in Surrealism that surfaced in the ‘Sixties and early ‘Seventies.

In 1969, the University of Michigan published the Seaver & Lane first full length English translation of Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifestoes, (based on the definitive French edition of 1962) followed by the key anthology, Surrealists on Art (1970) from Prentice Hall, edited by activist and critic Lucy R. Lippard. Earlier translations from US sources included Breton’s 1924 semi-autobiographical quasi-novel Nadja (1960) and Maurice Nadeau’s 1964 overview The History of Surrealism (1965) both translated by Richard Howard.

In Britain at that time one might note a Surrealist influence (via Antonin Artaud) on experimental theatre, in, for example, the work of Lindsay Kemp with productions such as Flowers (1966), Salome (1974) and Cruel Garden (1977) that exemplified his unique dramatic style based on myth, ritual and trance states (‘we balance on a knife edge between the serious and the ridiculous’), radical feminist director and poet Jane Arden, Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz. It was Brook and Marowitz who staged a Theatre of Cruelty Season with the RSC Experimental Theatre Group at LAMDA in Jan-Feb 1964 while Brook directed the Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss at the Aldwych Theatre in August of the same year. Marowitz was the author the play Artaud at Rodez, and founded the Open Space Theatre (with Thelma Holt) in 1968.

It was J. G. Ballard who, in the ‘New Wave’ SF magazine New Worlds observed that ‘the images of Surrealism are the iconography of inner space’ (‘The Coming of the Unconscious’, New Worlds, July 1966) pointing to a general diffusion of Surrealism into wider popular culture. The term ‘surreal’ in various interpretations could be applied to social phenomena such as: the ‘underground scene’; to New Left politics and the Mass Media; to the ‘creative revolution’ of advertising and fashion, viewed through the lens of Pop Art, or to ‘cult’ TV shows like The Avengers (1961-1969) masterminded with inimitable panache for ABC Television by producer/story editor Brian Clemens. Discussing the Visual Pop design of record sleeves George Melly in his Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts 1966-1970 noted that ‘Surrealism has remained the most pervasive influence’.

Indeed it is tempting to see in the 1966 appointment of zoologist, socio-biologist and Surrealist , Desmond Morris, author of The Biology of Art (‘the picture-making behaviour of the Great Apes’) (1962) and controversial best-seller The Naked Ape (1967) , as director of the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts), a telling sign of the times. Significantly the ICA had been founded by English surrealists Roland Penrose and Herbert Read (among others) in an Oxford Street cinema basement in 1947. Then, the City of Exeter hosted an influential exhibition The Enchanted Domain at the Exeter City Gallery in 1967 organised by John Lyle with the participation of various significant personalities including Penrose, ELT Mesens, George Melly, Conroy Maddox and Robert Benayoun among others.

Here one might also mention novels by Angela Carter such as Heroes and Villains (1969), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) or The Passion of New Eve (1977). Doctor Hoffman was known in the US as The War of Dreams a title that evokes Carter’s particular style of scary surreality – a psychic locale from where we embark on ‘a desperate expedition to a destination at the heart of the dark in a nameless zone, where we would find the key to an unimaginable secret.’  

Although a purist approach may regard many such tendencies especially those in the advertising and the mass media, as symptomatic of a general dilution and commodification not to be welcomed. It may, on the other hand, seem that the Surrealist spirit, in tune with the New Sensibility of counter-cultural desublimation (symbolised for many in post-imperial Britain by the Profumo scandal), did indeed have the last laugh; gleefully cocking a snook at the strictures of aesthetic Quakerism; giving Mrs Grundy, malcontents of post-imperial humiliation (Peregrine Worsthorne), The Festival of Light and high-minded Leavisite critics from the ‘grammar school ethos’, a run for their money. At least it looked that way for a short while – before the Sixties spirit of ‘anarcho-libertarianism’ (Durgnat, see below), with its ‘swinging’ lifestyle, its subversive art schools and electroluminescent dresses, its 'kinky' PVC boots and jet-age flight attendants in shocking miniskirts, softly and suddenly vanished away during the wasted years of the Thatcher era.

The Turin exhibition, Le Muse Inquietanti (The Disquieting Muses, 1967-1968), organised by Luigi Carluccio, was covered by English mainstream art magazines such as Studio International and Art & Artists and there was considerable interest in the work of Max Ernst, who was the subject of a large illustrated book by John Russell published in 1968 (The spirit of Ernst haunts Annabel, the central character in Angela Carter's surrealist 'collage novel' Love, 1971). That same year the BBC Third Programme broadcast a feature-length tribute to Andre Breton, A Link Between The Worlds (20 March 1968), compiled by Barbara Bray, produced by Douglas Cleverdon .This programme included contributions from David Gascoyne, Jacques B Brunius, Philippe Soupault, S W Hayter and Eugene Ionesco among others, as well as a bizarre radiophonic-dramatic piece by Fernando Arrabal.

Also in 1968, Methuen published the Absurdist, proto-Surrealist Ubu Plays of Alfred Jarry, jointly translated by Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor (who had previously translated Marcel Jean’s The History of Surrealist Painting, 1960), while Jonathan Cape published The Selected Works of Alfred Jarry (edited and translated by Simon Watson Taylor with Roger Shattuck) in 1969.  The then head of BBC Radio Drama, Martin Esslin, had published The Theatre of The Absurd in 1962. This landmark study assimilated Surrealism into a broader panorama of Absurdist heritage (‘an inscape of the mind’) stretching back over a thousand years or more. The BBC had also broadcast Esslin’s adaptation of the Ubu Plays between 1965 and 1968. Along with Beardsley and Mucha, Jarry was subject to something of a revival, in fact George Melly said about The Goons ‘They are our effective surrealists, our democratic Pere Ubus, our sacred monsters’.

In 1970 Lykiard's acclaimed translation of Les Chants de Maldoror was published, while in the following year, 1971, Simon Watson Taylor’s translation of Aragon’s Paris Peasant, a key surrealist text, also appeared. This was followed by the Harper & Row edition of Surrealism and Painting, a compilation of Andre Breton’s writing on visual art which included not only the titular essay but numerous uncollected pieces culled from pamphlets and catalogues. Covering the period 1928 to 1965 this extensive survey (translation by Watson Taylor, again) amounted to ‘not so much a reissue as an original event’ according to an introductory note.

For the generation growing up in the 1960s and interested in film, a key semi-Surrealist influence was the prolific and contrarian critic Raymond Durgnat, chairman of the London Film-maker’s Co-op and advocate of ‘underground cinema’. ‘Fiercely anti-puritan and anti-censorship’ (Rayns), Durgnat was a regular contributor to Films & Filming, and also to the no-frills Motion magazine which emerged from the radical LSE student culture of 1961.

Durgnat contributed to Motion from 1962 and was responsible for the scandalous ‘Companion to Violence and Sadism in the Cinema’ and the anti-establishment polemic ‘Standing Up For Jesus’ (Motion No 6 Autumn 1963) which attacked both the highbrow literary sweetness-and-light critics of the Oxbridge conservative consensus (i.e. Sight & Sound) but also the chic poseurs of what was known as the Free Cinema movement. In April 1963, the ‘watershed year’ of the Summer of Scandal, Durgnat presided over an ICA event on violent cinema called ‘The Art of Scaring You to Death’ based on his Motion ‘Companion’, itself partly inspired by The Romantic Agony by Mario Praz, a key source of transgressive, proto-Surrealist ideas.

Approaching film from a basically Surrealist-Freudian viewpoint (‘images of the mind’), Durgnat held that ‘photography was not essentially realistic, and film not essentially photographic’ (Miller). He watched movies for their ‘poetic’ qualities. He advocated a poetry with ‘no intellectual protocol’; a poetry derived from ‘obvious’ symbols. It was a poetic dimension of the mass media and the commercial cinema; an erotic force, energising popular entertainment at a subliminal level. This obvious symbolism (of carnivals, derelict houses, fairgrounds, mechanical music and mirrors, extended to include railway stations, shop windows, statues, tape-recorders and underwater spaces…) maintained atavistic links to primal myths and fables, links that highbrow critics tend to ignore. In ‘The Angel of Poetry Hovering’ section of his book Films and Feelings (1967) Durgnat wrote how the ‘mute poetry’ of the mainstream blends ‘fact, drama, the ‘Surreal’, dream, magic, and the supernatural powers at their play.’ This ‘oneiric’ definition of popular entertainment and middle-of-the-road cinema is a classic Surrealist position, exemplified by directors like Franju, Bunuel and Jean Rollin, presided over by sexy screen goddesses like Barbarella, Mrs Emma Peel, Modesty Blaise or Lavinia the Black Witch of Greymarsh – as played in Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968) by ‘Scream Queen’ Barbara Steele, resplendent in green make-up.

Wider interest in Surrealism in Britain in the Sixties was further stimulated by independent publishers such as Calder & Boyars.

The Calder & Boyars ‘French Surrealism’ series included works by Breton (Nadja and Arcane 17), Picasso (Desire Caught by The Tail), Aragon (The Libertine), Arp (Collected French Writings) and Tristan Tzara’s Seven Dada Manifestos (translated by Barbara Wright) and in the eighties the Selected Poems of Paul Eluard. The Calder imprint remained for many years a catalytic force, publishing related authors like Burroughs, Beckett (veteran translator of Surrealist poets), Borges, Raymond Roussel, Fernando Arrabal, Georges Bataille (Eroticism, 1962, Literature And Evil, 1973) and Roger Vitrac. The diffusion of these texts in English translation – often for the first time – contributed to a climate in which Surrealism extended its appeal well beyond the sphere of literary and artistic cliques. That Calder regarded his publishing activities as conflicting with endemic anti-Surreal tendencies is evident from his criticism of British indifference to art history, hostility to both intellectual analysis and to any ‘investigation of the creative process.’ As explained in his ‘Introduction’ to A William Burroughs Reader (1982), he lays the blame squarely on British ‘insularity’ and the ‘pioneer Puritanism of the American psyche’, a stance basically the same as that of the Declaration of 1947 – and of Michel Remy in his 1996 essay.

The later history of Surrealism in the UK is limited to the vestigial activities of major figures from the early period and the Melmoth Group of 1979, which disbanded in 1981. One might make reference to the magazine Manticore/Surrealist Communication (1997-2006) published by the Leeds Surrealist Group founded with international links in 1994. He refers to various forms of ‘occultation’ maintaining a Surrealist presence at a subterranean cultural level, sharing a new spirit of gamesmanship infused with a semi-Situationist, semi-occult psycho-geography. This latter theme is also explored by the poet and novelist Iain Sinclair including his more recent work such as London Orbital: A Walk Round the M25 (2002).

In truth, the so-called ‘Permissive Society’, both here and elsewhere, was a minor skirmish in a wider culture war, a skirmish which has since passed into nostalgic obscurity. It was destined to become a faded, but hideous memory of ‘mass national debauch, the breakdown of all known moral standards, the collapse of Western civilization’, a sentiment attributed to Beverley Nichols when reporting on The Twist craze of 1962.

Looking back a decade or so later Christopher Booker echoed these sentiments, describing the ‘Swinging Sixties’ as a case of ‘general world-wide hysteria’.

Booker, a Christian convert and Thatcherite, saw the decade as an egregious example of the Golden Calf Syndrome; a nightmare time when ‘the rebellion of the early Romantics reached its peak’; when ‘the children of the Sixties sought to shake, deafen, blind and drug themselves into the ‘ultimate experience’ on a scale never before seen – until there was almost nowhere further to go.’  Of course, Mrs Whitehouse, Mrs Grundy and the mainstream moralists were victorious in this struggle for moral rectitude. Stigmatised by Tory politicians and their disciples in the media as ‘a time when it all went wrong’, the Sixties and the national debauch of the permissive New Hedonism, soon dwindled into the distance, fast fading in the rear-view mirror or mythologised as a cautionary tale, while Surrealism was seen as just another irresponsible fad.

Speaking for 'serious minded readers' in his Introduction (1979) to The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945-1980, D J Enright exemplified mainstream attitudes when he parenthetically dismissed any interest in Surrealism as a 'regressive' mode of 'internationalism', one of those tendencies 'which reached their modest apex several decades ago'. Enright held the view that ‘internationalism’ was just one of the fads and fancies of contemporary poetry, among which he includes 'free' fantasy, aesthetic narcissism, 'difficult' verse, formalism, Noble Savagery, Concrete Poetry, 'Doing-Your-Own-Thing', Violent Verse, Protest Poetry, the 'Struggle With Words' (language) schools and Confessionalism. He described the latter as 'one of the saddest epidemics of recent years'.

For Enright all of these sad poetic fads were consolatory activities arising from either the eclipse of faith or from trendy education. They represented the antithesis of his anti-surreal ideal; 'the poetry of civility, passion and order'. This sort of 'no-nonsense' talk passes for hard-nosed, trenchant criticism in certain circles, even today. But then – deep down – the English hate Surrealism.

Select Bibliography

Balakian, Anna, Surrealism: Road to the Absolute, Dutton, 1970.

Ballard, J G, A User’s Guide to the Millennium, Flamingo, 1997.

Barthes, Roland, The Language of Fashion, Berg, 2006.

Beer, Gillian, Alice in Space. The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll, University of Chicago, 2018

Booker, Christopher, The Seventies. Portrait of a Decade, Penguin Books, 1980

Breton, Andre, Manifestoes of Surrealism, University of Michigan, 2007.

Breton, Andre, Surrealism and Painting, Harper & Row, 1972

Buchanan, Robert, The Fleshly School of Poetry, Strahan & Co, 1872.

Calder, John (ed.), A William Burroughs Reader, Picador, 1982.

Carroll, Lewis, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Wordsworth Editions, 1993

Carter, Angela, Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings, Vintage, 1993.

Carter, Angela, The Passion of New Eve, Virago Press. 1982.

Clayton, Antony, Decadent London: Fin de Siecle City, Historical Publications, 2005

Cohn, Nick, Awopbobaloobop Alopbamboom, Pimlico/Vintage, 2004

Durgnat, Raymond, Films and Feelings, MIT Press, 1971.

Enright, D J (ed.) The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945-1980, OUP, 1980.

Fiddy, Dick, Brian Clemens, Auteur of The Avengers, BFI South Bank Guide, Jul 2010.

Fraser, Giles, Religious Belief Isn’t Boring, Radio Times 27 Jan-2 Feb 2018.

Innes, Christopher, Avant Garde Theatre 1892-1992, Routledge, 1993.

Levy, Silvano (ed.) Surrealism: Surrealist Visuality, Keele University, 1997.

Machen, Arthur, The Hill of Dreams, Corgi Books, 1967.

Marcuse, Herbert, An Essay On Liberation, Beacon Press, 1969.

Melly, George, Revolt Into Style The Pop Arts 1966-1970, Faber & Faber, 2008.

Melly, George, Don’t Tell Sybil, Atlas Press, 2013.

Miller, Henry K, Poetry in Motion, Sight & Sound, Sept 2014.

Morgan, Robin & Leve, Ariel, 1963: The Year of the Revolution, Dey Street, 2014.

Nadeau, Maurice, The History of Surrealism, Penguin Books, 1973

Orwell, George, Essays, Penguin Books, 2000.

Pavitt, Jane, Fear and Fashion in the Cold War, V&A Publishing, 2008.

Rayns, Tony, Adventures in the Screen Trade, Sight & Sound, Dec 2014.

Remy, Michel, Surrealism in Britain, Ashgate/Lund Humphries, 1999.

Remy, Michel (ed.), On the Thirteenth Stroke Of Midnight, Carcanet Press, 2013.

Robins, Anna Gruetzner/Thomson, Richard, Degas, Sickert & Toulouse-Lautrec. London and Paris 1870-1910. Tate Publishing, 2005

Russell, Bertrand, Sceptical Essays, Routledge, 2004.

Sage, Lorna, Angela Carter, Northcote House, 1994.

Sage, Lorna (ed.), Flesh and the Mirror. Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, Virago Press, 2007.

Waldberg, Patrick, Surrealism (The Paths of Surrealism), Thames & Hudson, 1965.

Worsthorne, Peregrine, Price of Profumo: Tories Smeared, Life Magazine, 21 June, 1963.

illus: Nothing is Sacred, 1976

Second Highway III

Notes from the Neo-Underground

...from all these things I extracted the quintessence. The filth you gave me I have turned to gold. - Baudelaire

Anti-Gravitas

Gravitas is always the problem, never the solution. ‘… the principle result of existential psychoanalysis must be to make us repudiate the spirit of seriousness.’ – Jean-Paul Sartre 
I realised that insouciance is the one thing that can provide inspiration for our lives and yet have no argument to offer in its own defence – Francoise Sagan

Automatism

‘An ‘automatic’ scribble of twisting and interlacing lines permits the germ of idea in the subconscious mind to express, or at least suggest itself to the consciousness.’ – Spare & Carter. It was this principle that Leonardo advocated in his use of that semi-legendary ‘old wall covered with dirt’ or the odd appearance of certain streaked stones, and which Max Ernst later incorporated into his decalcomania idea of ‘inspiration to order’.

British Values

It is a paradox that Britain has engendered many precursors of Surrealism, from Cyril Tourneur to Lewis Carroll (by way of Swift, Blake, Coleridge, The Bronte Sisters, the Gothic novel and the 'mirth and marvels' of the Ingoldsby Legends) and yet very few self-defined Surrealists in the contemporary sense. Despite a dimension of subversive fantasy, a ‘tendency to irrationality’ in English art and literature, and in popular culture generally (Fred Karno's Army, The Whitehall Follies, Round The Horne, Carry On films, Union Jack knickers, farcical sex scandals) it is clearly the case that movements such as Surrealism remain ‘foreign’, indeed maladjusted, when transposed to the British context. ‘You know, it's just not cricket', as they say in the 'modern rustic' kitchens of Middle England.
But Is It Art?
We all know about Style, Content and Genre, the work of Schools, Movements and the historical culture, but what is the purpose of art? The purpose of any work of art is threefold: of course, there are differing degrees of emphasis, but the function of artistic activity is always Therapeutic, and its main purpose is either Propaganda or Entertainment or both. Therapy, Propaganda, Entertainment - look no further.

Convulsion

Please try to forget, if you can, those heretical convulsionnaires, dismissed by Diderot as ‘a sect of fools’, defined by experts of the day as an unfortunate by-product of dysfunctional gynecology or of the 'moral inferiority' of women. A line of argument continued in 1853 by Matthew Arnold when he described Charlotte Bronte's Villette as 'hideous, undelightful, convulsed'. More profitably, consider Baudelaire's view when he said inspiration ‘has something in common with a convulsion’ and noted further that all sublime thought is ‘accompanied by a more or less violent nervous shock which has its repercussions at the very core of the brain.’ 'Beauty' said Andre Breton, 'is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave... it consists of jolts and shocks many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are determined to produce one shock which does.' The constitutive qualities of ‘convulsion’ may be detected in the oneiric aura of Paquita Valdes, as described by Balzac in La Fille aux Yeux d’Or (1835). He wrote: ‘there was something sombre, mysterious, sweet, tender, constrained and expansive, an intermingling of the awful and the celestial, of paradise and hell…’ Again can there be a more convulsive moment than those lines written in 1845 by the 'titanic' Emily Bronte at the age of 27? 'Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire/ And visions rise and change, that kill me with desire.' Further, consider this landscape from Flaubert's Salammbo: 'An immense mass of shadow lay spread out before them, containing vague crests that looked like the gigantic waves of a petrified black ocean.'  A more recent example, ladies and gentlemen, may be the uptempo classy yet anarchic 1960 mambo-cha interpretation of Artie Shaw's popular wartime hit Frenesi by the Edmundo Ros Orchestra with vocals by Caterina Valente; perhaps the ideal soundtrack of convulsive beauty on account of a predominant sense of ‘apparent gratuitousness’ (Breton). It was Garcia Lorca who reminded us that it is not a matter of theatrical intonation, dynamic vocal flourishes, skill or virtuosity (without question in this case), 'but of a style that's truly alive.' Just like a little girl the poet saw in Puerto de Santa Maria singing and dancing a 'corny Italian song... with such rhythms. silences and intention...' that 'she turned the Neopolitan gewgaw into something new and totally unprecedented...' She has duende! Convulsive Beauty is paradise deranged.  

Culture

Culture is tyranny. Enculturation and cultural baggage retard society.

Cultural Seismology

Beneath the outer ideological layer lies a subsurface region called the ‘mantle’ or cultural interior: a complex yet unstable force field of primal values imposed through structural violence. This structural violence is the immediate cause of surface instability leading to shifts and displacements of the cultural landscape. Cultural Seismology is the 'attempt to record the shifts and displacements of sensibility that regularly occur in the history of art and literature' - Bradbury & McFarlane.
Cyber-Junk Style (Cyber-trash)
Subtopian Materialism meets classic B-Movie Sci-Fi in cyberspace littered with cosmic debris. Like techno-eschatology. Well, sort of.
Didacticism?
No thanks. It's art-for-art's-sake, innit

Doubt

Doubt is freedom.
L'esthetique Baudelairienne
The marvelous envelopes and saturates us like the atmosphere; but we fail to see it. - The Salon of 1846.
Beauty always has an element of strangeness... a certain degree of strangeness, of simple, unintended, unconscious strangeness... - The Universal Exhibition of 1855
From all these things I extracted the quintessence. The mud you gave me I have turned to gold. - Draft for an Epilogue for the 2nd Edition of Les Fleus du Mal.

Exi-Noir Underground Style

Black, always black. Like Niccolo Paganini, the original Man in Black or Les Habits Noirs, via the Velvet Undergound.
Remarquez bien que l'habit noir... - Baudelaire, The Salon of 1846, XVIII On the Heroism of Modern Life
Existence
The horizon of existence is untranscendable.
Fashion
Fashion will be discussed according to the gravitation of white letters on nocturnal flesh. - La Revolution Surrealiste
The trick is not any one outrageous item, but in a combination and juxtaposition which is fashionably perverse.
- Mary Quant. 
Fear of the Dark
A Modernist tendency to reject subjectivist forms and movements such as Confessional Poetry, the workings of the Lyric Ego and Romantic Individualism more generally.  Fear of the Dark is a phobic fear of apparent introversion sometimes disguised as a moral argument, of ascetic origin, against ‘self indulgence’, 'egotism' the 'worship of false gods' or ‘ivory tower’ aestheticism. Fear of the Dark is a fear of the psychic depths, fear of the uncanny, fear of the Shadow and the shadow world, fear of the dark-side, Critics who suffer from Fear of the Dark tend to privilege the Apollonian over the Dionysian, the abstract over the figurative and the Classic over the Romantic. At the same time they promote high-brow ideas of elevated taste, great traditions and cultural superiority. This fear can be projected onto the products of consumer society, mass entertainment and mass production, often treated with disdain, derided as Kitsch or denigrated as decadence or even idolatry. Radical nonconformists may well feel they are on an iconoclastic mission to cleanse the world of distracting images and the seductive products of the imagination. However, as Jung says, the Shadow 'cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness'. Furthermore, this fear can be transformed into hatred because it reminds us of our 'helplessness and ineffectuality' in the face of the unknown and the indifference of Nature, an existential theme portrayed by Byron in his poem 'Darkness' (1817). Hence the zealotry of puritans, driven by the 'horror of great darkness' that afflicted Abraham, the prototypical 'God Fearing Man', in Genesis 12 - Fear of the Dark inflated by apocalyptic amplification.

Forbidden Territory

‘…let us not lose sight of the fact that the idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory…’ – Second Manifesto of Surrealism.
Freedom
'The mere word 'freedom' is the only one that still excites me' - Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924. But what is freedom? Freedom is the absence of tyranny. Simple.

Hyper-Culture

After the ‘modern breakthrough’ of the period between 1850 and 1870 the idea of Modernity denoted a permanent transfiguration of the human condition. Yet, in retrospect it seems that this ‘modern’ culture was but a short transition phase between the speedy evaporation of traditional culture and the emergence of another globalised cultural formation. The looming ontological hyper-real collapse of the distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ has given rise to a new trans-national culture – hyper-culture. By the end of the last century the US had been defined as a hyper-power with full spectrum dominance, while the features of mass hyper-culture (emerging in the 1960s and 1970s) were becoming increasingly apparent: on the street the difference between fashionable and unfashionable was becoming more and more difficult to distinguish; ‘authenticity’ was becoming an obsolete concept; gender differences were getting hazy; so-called  post-modernism became an obsessive academic fad with multiple meanings both progressive and reactionary at the same time; Dada opposition to the ‘official’ avant garde became an all-pervasive trend; the elements of technoculture (post-biological-cyborg-biotech-virtuality-cyberdelia-fractal transmutationism) started to mutate with increasing speed of pace in a post-Future Shock landscape where Communist graphics fused with Space Invaders and gave birth to a new divinity: a super secular, Art Deco-gone-Pop-Flapper-Girl-Dolly-Bird waving a Sistine Chapel umbrella.
The Infinite
The objective of Surrealism, said Anna Balakian, was 'the infinite expansion of reality'. But what is the infinite? The infinite, she wrote, is 'the realm at whose borders our faculties fail.'   

Inner Space

We might note various use of the term ‘inner space’, ranging from the theology of the soul (Augustine) to the assertion (by Rorty) that the mind as ‘inner space’ is a misleading invention of Descartes. Novalis famously said in his Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia that ‘Time is inner space – Space is external time’, while Hegel claimed that ‘inner space and inner time’ comprise the psychic environment of poetry. It has been observed that the protagonists in the macabre tales of Edgar Allan Poe inhabit a godless anti-world which is an internalisation of the physical space of the entire American Continent, a space where the borderline between sanity and madness is a new frontier. In 1914, in a letter to Lou Andreas Salome, the poet Rilke claimed that the flight of a bird ‘turns the whole world into inner space’, an experience transmuted into a poem known as the Weltinnenraum Poem. Heidegger said that inner space is ‘the interior of uncustomary consciousness…beyond the arithmetic of calculation…’. In popular culture the term was first introduced at Worldcon 6 in July 1948 by Robert Bloch who said that in Science Fiction the ‘exploration of outer space must eventually give way to an exploration of inner space’, a challenge reiterated by J B Priestly in 1953 and J G Ballard in 1962. Talking about the future of the novel William Burroughs defined himself as a ‘cosmonaut of inner space’, attributing the phrase to Alexander Trocchi. Finally one might recall that Maurice Nadeau described the 'surrealist state of mind' as eternal, and should be understood as a tendency 'not to transcend but to penetrate reality...'
The Jet Age

An uncanny era when Comets mysteriously fell from the sky and the Jet Set flew Pan Am between NYC and Paris to a bossa nova soundtrack. The age of Populuxe Jet Age Moderne architecture, retro-futurism, supersonic research and Chuck Yaeger broke the sound barrier flying the Bel X-1 named Glamorous Glennis. 

The Kaleidoscope Principle

‘One instant leads me numbly to the next and the athematic theme unfurls without a plan but geometric like the successive shapes in a kaleidoscope.’ – Clarice Lispector

Neo-Underground

The Fourth Wave is sometimes termed the ‘Neo-underground’ – Where it’s at.

Non-conformism

For Surrealists non-conformism is total. Most ‘radicals’, however, are non-conformists in a very parochial sense: they are immersed in the protest culture and feel engaged in a high-minded struggle against ‘the establishment’. Our English dissenters like to think they are ‘more radical than the radicals’ even though in actuality they are merely acting-out a pre-determined role; a particularly entrenched mode of the spirit of seriousness, tolerated as a ‘safety valve’ by the very establishment they claim to oppose. The anti-establishmentarian Malcontent stance is usually an affectation of privileged, if disaffected, middle class youth: 'poor little rich kids' with low self-esteem, offspring of The Golden Age of Capitalism. These are the Radical Chic conformist non-conformists, the illiberal liberals, the belligerent pacifists, the authoritarian libertarians, the full time oppositionists, the anti-racist racists, the anti-elitist elitists, the Banbury Saints, the neo-phobic New Age counter-culturalists, the dystopian-utopian anarchists, the unfunny alternative comedians, the repressive multi-culturalists, the anti-feminine feminists (pro-natalist, anti-sexist puritans), the conspiratorial conspiracy theorists, Angry Young Men, refuseniks, iconoclasts (campaigners against 'graven images' and idolatry), dissenters, Levellers, Ranters, Diggers, subversives, hyper-active activists, right-thinking bien pensants and dissidents of all tribes, classes and types - they all aspire to sainthood in conformance with traditional, reactionary, ascetic ideals of goodness and 'virtue' or the received wisdom of heretics. As a character in Look Back in Anger said of that prototype political post-war era antihero Jimmy Porter: 'He doesn't know where he is, or where he's going. He'll never do anything, and he'll never amount to anything.' Sometimes the nonconformist can 'make a difference', but, more often than not, the 'difference' is an outcome of the law of unintended consequences.

Objective Chance

‘…in which natural necessity makes its way through the unconscious to coincide with the human necessity of desire’ – Gerard Legrand (in Ades et al). Objective chance is an occupational hazard.
The Ocean Chart
The Bellman, leader of the Snark Hunt, bought out a large map representing the sea 'without the least vestige of land'. The microcosmic crew were of course delighted 'when they found it to be/ A map they could all understand.'

Open Realism

Open Realism (realisme ouvert – Andre Breton) draws a line in the sand and, as they say these days, it ‘moves on’. From Kitchen Sink and Swinging Bonkbusters to Hammer Horror… nothing is sacred.

The Outland Country

‘He found himself, as he had hoped, afar and forlorn; he had strayed into outland and occult territory.’ – Arthur Machen. The Hill of Dreams, 1907

Paraxis

‘The paraxial area could be taken to represent the spectral region of the fantastic, whose imaginary world is neither entirely ‘real’…nor entirely ‘unreal’…but is located somewhere indeterminately between the two.’ – Rosemary Jackson.
Postsurrealism

The idea of a 'typical post-Surrealist viewpoint' is mentioned by Lucy R Lippard in her discussion of the art of Valerio Adami, a body of work, focused on the principle of metamorphosis, that also draws upon the world of advertising. To quote Adami himself: advertising is 'a language that assails you wherever you go'. He said his aim was to realise a condition where 'time and space spread out into a new psychic action'. Writing about the later films of Luis Bunuel a filmmaker whose aesthetic was rooted in the classic or ‘heroic’ interwar era of Surrealist provocation, Michael Wood observes a certain character pertaining to Bunuel’s work of his later period (1967-1977) or to the social context depicted therein. He notes that this mode of modernity appears ‘thoroughly pleased with itself’ and capable of the ‘firmest suppression’ of any indications of trouble. Crucially, he says ‘This is a world beyond satire, and the old disruptions of Surrealism are not going to make any mark on it, because ordinary life, in this place, is already as arbitrary and erratic as anything a Surrealist could dream up.’ Are there fundamental problems with Surrealism? Taking into account Sartre's critique of a 'curious enterprise of achieving nothingness through an excess of being' one might also add that there are significant issues with Marxism and Hegelianism, political idealism, music, homophobia, infantile regression, anti-consumerism, Westophobia, Postcolonialism, primitivism and the Orientalist Turn To The East which might situate political Surrealism as a precursor to what is now known as the chic pseudo-radical Reactionary Left although the Surrealist Anti-Stalinist emphasis on Liberty (artistic freedom, personal freedom) remains both fundamental and unique. The Surrealists eventually broke with the communists because they refused to accept Socialist Realism as an article of faith. From our present vantage point we should be able to formulate a 'post-surreal' perspective, countering, or, neutralizing such vexatious and problematic questions.

The Post-War Waves

The First Wave was The Angries, the Second Wave was The Satire Boom, and the Third Wave was The Underground. And after the Underground? The Fourth Wave.

The Psychonauts 

Research paradigm derived from the concept of the Psychoanauts (Psychonauten) first discussed by Ernst Junger in his collection of essays Annaherungen: Drogen und Rausch (1970). The term has subsequently been popularised in the occult world by Peter J Carroll in his book Liber Null and Psychonaut : An Introduction to Chaos Magic (1982). Immersive exploration of of the psycho-geography of inner space and/or ‘altered states’ is, obviously, the foundational aesthetic experience; to quote Burroughs, ‘altered consciousness, of course, is a writer’s stock in trade. If my consciousness was just completely conventional, no one would be interested enough to read it, right?’ All Surrealists are psychonauts as the principle is clearly implied in the First Surrealist Manifesto which explains that the discoveries of Psychoanalysis provide for the 'human explorer' (l'explorateur humain) to carry his investigations much further than would otherwise be the case, 'authorized as he will henceforth be not to confine himself solely to the most summary realities'. As the Manifesto states, 'It was a question of going back to the sources of poetic imagination and what is more, of remaining there.' This requires a 'great deal of fortitude' especially if the explorer intends to set up his abode 'in these distant regions where everything seems at first so awkward and difficult.' However, to attain this goal it is ultimately a matter of 'the travelers' 'ability to endure'. 

Radar

Poetry is radar.

Religion

Social evolution is secular, All religion is political: all theology is propaganda. All sacred books are fake news, Faith is an addiction, Morality is The Devil's work. Religiosity is mania but Faithwash, like Greenwash, is nevertheless socially expedient. Fideism is the worst kind of faithwash.

Second Highway
Term used by Huysmans with reference to his new artistic formula (Baldick) ; an extension of realistic Naturalism (the 'highway' marked out by Zola) in pursuit of which the novelist should trace a 'parallel road in the air, a second highway reaching out to regions beyond and hereafter...'. Not only was it required to maintain the accurate documentation and precision of detail demanded by the Realists, but it was also necessary to 'sink well-shafts into the soul' and develop  'a spiritual naturalism'. To extract core samples from the depths of the Soul.

Subtopia

To the critical observer it was an anonymous tract of anomic space lacking in distinctive character or ‘spirit of place'; an interstitial ‘middle state neither town nor country’. In hindsight it seems that this ‘Subtopia’ ('inferior place') was an incitement for the imagination; although it might also have been that the bizarre strangeness was not a subjective projection but a discovery – Subtopia is bizarre in itself.

Subtopian Materialism

A debased form of anti-didactic English Pop associated with the ‘cultural desert’ of the urban fringe. A by-product of the post-war economic boom (The Golden Age of Capitalism) Subtopian Materialism finds inspiration in boring or brutalist architecture, electricity substations, deserted allotments, mass consumerism, retro-futurism, all forms of popular entertainment, and the indeterminate, sub-surreal no-place of featureless suburbia - a locale or terrain vague where ‘nothing really happens’. Like The Room described by Cocteau in Les Enfants Terribles, works of Subtopian Materialism
are 'devoid of intellectual content, devoid... of any worldly aim...' reflecting the commercialised, mass-consumerist aestheticism of the mid-twentieth century.
The Subtopian Voyeur (People Watching)
Hang out on the other side of town, navigate the urban phantasmagoria in search of that 'unconscious strangeness' Baudelaire said was the defining element of Beauty. Get immersed in the Freak Show Scene: the fashions, the types, the attitudes: the friendly, the nasty, or the indifferent.

The Space Age

The atomic space age, the age of The Nuclear Dream and technocratic fantasy dressed by Courreges and Cardin.

‘Sometimes I have a feeling I’m an astronaut shot out into space.’ – Federico Fellini.

Tabloid Impressionism

(1) A Neo-Nonsense, absurdist anti-didactic trash aesthetic; a form of post-surreal Urban Alchemy. The principle of Objective Chance applied to the mass media, particularly in its most disreputable aspects where the Spirit of Seriousness is much diminished, or, with luck, completely absent: downmarket advertising, the tabloid press, junk mail, celebrity culture and scandals, tacky TV, mass production movies, porn mags, burlesque fashion and so forth. As Durgnat said, discussing ‘Mute Poetry in the Commercial Cinema’: ‘…academics often ignore or deprecate the popular mythology from which the mass media so often derive their intimacy of resonance with their audience.’

(2) A slangy literary style. A form of verbal slumming or nostalgie de la boue often incorporating found phrases and wacky neologisms from the mass media.
Teleology?
You must be joking. There is no master-plan.

Veronica Lurk

Bonjour Maitresse!

Bibliography

Ades, Dawn et al, The Surrealism Reader, Tate Publishing, 2015
Balakian, Anna, Surrealism Road to the Absolute, Dutton, 1970
Baldick, Robert, The Life of J-K Huysmans, Daedalus, 2006

Ballard, J G, A User’s Guide to the Millennium, Flamingo, 1997

Balzac, Honore de, The Girl with the Golden Eyes, Sphere Books, 1970
Baudelaire, Charles, Selected Writings On Art and Literature, Penguin Books, 1992
Benjamin, Walter, Charles Baudelaire, Verso, 1997
Bradbury, Malcolm/McFarlane, James Modernism 1890-1930, Penguin Books, 1981

Breton, Andre, Manifestos of Surrealism, University Of Michigan, 2007
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Burroughs, William S, Word Virus, Flamingo, 1999
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Carroll, Peter J, Liber Null and Psychonaut, Samuel Weiser, 1987

Cocteau, Jean, Les Enfants Terribles, Vintage Books, 2011
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Jackson, Rosemary, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, Methuen, 1981
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Lippard, Lucy R, Pop Art, Thames & Hudson, 2001

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Miles, Barry, William Burroughs El Hombre Invisble, Virgin Books, 1993
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Sagan, Francoise, Bonjour Tristesse, Penguin Books, 2013

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illus: Beyond Writing, 1975