Arcanum Paradoxa

Ostensibly the forerunner of modern chemistry and usually considered a ‘pseudo-science’ Alchemy first emerged in Egypt during the Hellenistic period. At roughly the same time, a form of Alchemy associated with medicinal aspects of Taoism emerged in China.
The general objective of Alchemy was the creation, through transmutation, of some type of marvellous, quintessential substance, often considered a miraculous elixir, a panacea, for curing all ills, bestowing immortality or spiritual enlightenment.
Known as the art of Khemeia, Alchemy had its theoretical basis in metallurgy, Zoroastrianism, Stoic pantheism and Aristotle’s Four Element theory of matter. The first significant exponent of Alchemy was Bolos ‘Democritus’ of Mendes (circa 200BC) whose treatise, Physika et Mystica, dealt with dyeing and colouring, the creation of gems, silver, and the transmutation of metals, specifically the transmutation of lead or iron, into gold. One tenet of alchemical doctrine was that the prime matter (prima materia) or raw material of transmutation comprised the least valued, most disregarded, of all the elements. Common or ‘despised’ material, both ‘contemptible and precious’, formed the basis of The Work, the opus alchymicum.

There is a secret stone, hidden in a deep well, worthless and rejected, concealed in dung and filth... (Johann Daniel Mylius: Philosophia Reformata, 1622)

Khemeia did not flourish during the Roman era, as various Emperors, notably Diocletian, feared that the transmutation of base metals into gold would undermine economic stability. A notable exponent of the Work in later times was the mystic Zosimos of Panopolis (Akhmim) whose Hermetic Encyclopaedia (a 28 volume compilation of existing and original texts) is dated 300CE. However, as Khemeia was considered ‘pagan learning’, much ancient knowledge of the art was lost during the Christian riots in Alexandria in 400CE.
The Arabs revived interest in Khemeia in the seventh century, as part of a general fascination for Greek science and thought. In the Arabic language the word ‘Khemeia’ became ‘al-kimiya’ and it was this form of the word that became the European term ‘alchemy’.
To define Alchemy as a pseudo-scientific forerunner of modern, scientific chemistry is an oversimplification. From the earliest times Khemeia comprised a resonant, symbolic framework for imaginative speculation. This speculative aspect of the art soon overshadowed its ‘practical’ metallurgical objectives, leading to a well-deserved aura of obscurantism and uncertain interpretation.
In the period between Bolos and Zosimos, Holmyard observes, ‘alchemical speculation ran riot’ as diverse practitioners created a complex body of doctrine, ascribing symbolic meanings to the sequence of metallic colour changes, incorporating all contemporary strands of speculative thought into alchemical theory, including Egyptian magic, Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, Babylonian astrology, Christian theology and pagan mythology.
Works of Khemeia were invariably couched in an ‘enigmatical and allusive language’ and often ascribed to semi-legendary or mythical authors such as Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, Moses, Miriam (the legendary sister of Moses), Agathodaimon, Theophrastus, Ostanes, Cleopatra and the goddess Isis. Thus, almost any contemporary, metaphysical speculation was assimilated into eclectic alchemical thinking: many sayings, stories and myths were endowed with alchemical interpretation, or incorporated into the Hermetic worldview.
By the Byzantine era Stephanos of Alexandria, a philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who flourished during the reign of the Emperor Herakleios I (610-641), had come to view Khemeia as primarily a ‘mental process’. Following F. Sherwood Taylor, E. J. Holmyard quotes Stephanos’ denigration of practical alchemy as a "burden of weariness", observing that by this time (the seventh century) alchemy had ‘very largely become a theme for rhetorical, poetical and religious compositions, and the mere physical transmutation of base metals into gold was used as symbol for man’s regeneration and transformation to a nobler and more spiritual state’.
So, well before the rise of medieval European alchemy, the tendency to regard The Work as an internalised, psychic process or phenomenon was established. Khemeia could easily be dissociated from physical chemistry and metallurgy and defined as some kind of ‘spiritual’ discipline. Now, the objective was not the transmutation of external phenomena, but the transmutation of the adept himself, and this transformative process was expressed in an obscure, introspective, mythic vocabulary of symbols and complex terminology.
In modern times a fascination with alchemy as an internalised, mental process has been continued by the Surrealists and the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). During the inter-war years and roughly around the same time both Jung and the Surrealists claimed Alchemy as significant in their respective investigations:

…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, 1930)

Jung and the Surrealists (particularly Andre Breton and Max Ernst) were operating against the backdrop of a revival of interest in alchemical symbolism in France and Germany. The works of Zosimos had been translated into French and published by Berthelot and Ruelle in 1887-1888. Herbert Silberer, who proposed a connection between alchemical thought and modern psychology, had anticipated Jung’s researches.
In France the Surrealists were influenced the alchemical novels of Francois Jolivet-Castelot and the esoteric writings of Fulcanelli and Grillot de Givry. De Givry drew attention to the hermetic influences at work in the art of painters like Bosch, Bruegel, Cranach and Baldung. Initially Andre Breton saw alchemical thought as a way of re-investing poetic language with a sense of mystery: this soon evolved into a more ambitious proposition, the deployment of an ‘alchemy of language’ to transform consciousness, and by transforming consciousness, change life.
On the other hand Jung’s interest in alchemy was triggered by an ancient Taoist text called The Secret of the Golden Flower translated by Richard Wilhelm and for which he wrote a commentary in 1929. As a result of this work he was motivated to research Western Alchemy, which he subsequently defined as ‘the historical counterpart to my psychology of the unconscious’, and a bridge between Gnosticism and the modern world.
The culmination of these explorations was Jung’s attempt to correlate the ‘transpersonal’ element of his psychological paradigm with modern physics. The ultimate acausal reality or, to use the medieval term, unus mundus, forming the underlying transformative matrix of alchemical processes, can be understood, he argued, as simultaneously both psychic and material. This underlying unus mundus is both the indeterminate universe of psychic symbols and the pre-geometric, ‘implicate order’ of high-energy physics.
At the heart of Jung’s Analytical Psychology is the process of Individuation or self-becoming. Individuation is a non-linear, centralizing developmental process culminating in an enhanced synthesis of the conscious and the unconscious spheres. This synthesis also incorporates a paradoxical harmonisation of contradictory elements, a union of opposites – including, for example, the masculine and feminine principles, the animus and anima – correlating with the alchemical coniunctio as symbolised by the hermaphrodite or androgyny.
Jung felt that elucidation of the opus alchymicum would shed light on the symbolic structure of the Individuation process, because the alchemist’s hope of creating philosophical gold was only a partial illusion: ‘for the rest it corresponded to certain psychic facts that are of great importance in the psychology of the unconscious.’
If the alchemists projected the process of Individuation into the phenomena of chemical change, then the same is true for the poet who, likewise, by a synthesis of automatism and active imagination, projects the same process into the phenomena of poetic (artistic) creation. He or she initiates a transmutation of the ‘prime matter’ of language into the aesthetic ‘gold’ of poetry.
Part of this process is a sustained regression into the sphere of the unconscious (the ‘dizzying descent into ourselves’ mentioned in the Second Manifesto) during which imprints of the individual’s psychological and biological development are uncovered in symbolic form. Thus, the alchemical process, by engaging with the Individuation process, establishes a psychobiological frame of reference for both psychological development and imaginative, poetic creativity (‘inspiration’).
Alchemy, viewed from the Jungian perspective, can be seen as a quest for inner psychic unity and wholeness (actualisation) achieved through a non-rational mode of self-knowledge. However identification of poetry (or perhaps the poem itself) with the alchemical arcanum paradoxa and defining poetic inspiration in the context of a psychobiological, existential substrate, highlights a conflict with conventional ideas tending to categorise writing and/or poetry, as ‘literature’.
Academic and other definitions of poetry as ‘literature’ displace the poetic act of imaginative creation from the interior psychobiological universe to the external world of cultural-linguistic structures where the preferred paradigm is communicative. Furthermore, the current ‘postmodernist’ cultural-linguistic aesthetic model presupposes that everything depends upon language and linguistics to the extent that ‘being’ itself becomes literally indefinable in non-semiotic, extra-linguistic terms. This inevitably inhibits understanding of artistic creativity as in innate psychoactive phenomenon effectively blocking access to sources of inspiration in the indeterminate quantum vacuum of the unus mundus.
The raison d’etre of the ‘literary’ paradigm is communication. In contradistinction, the raison d’etre of the ‘alchemical-surreal’ paradigm is transformation: transformation energised by inspiration, where ‘inspiration’ is defined in terms of psychic energy. In this paradigm of transformation the Jungian valuation of symbols (distinguished from ‘signs’) as ambiguous emanations of non-linguistic or extra-linguistic or even pre-linguistic being is a key factor.
For Jung the psychic presence of symbols (including ‘archetypal’ symbols) is always experienced as ‘numinous’, a categorical term he borrowed from the Kantian-Friesian religious thinker Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). Otto was seeking to extend or deepen the epistemological scheme of his predecessor Jakob Friedrich Fries. This scheme included the notion of Ahndung, a German term which can be translated as ‘aesthetic sense’. Otto expanded the meaning of Ahndung ‘beyond the merely aesthetic’ by introducing the category of ‘numinosity’, the alleged quality of the sacred.
Otto argued that numinosity is the prime characteristic of the collective experience underlying all religions. This experience can involve a sense of overwhelming power, the mysterium tremendum. The mysterium stands as the first cause of all ‘religious awe’, and, in certain respects, if one follows Jung in the matter, accounts for the sense of power and autonomy apparently exhibited by unconscious contents and symbols.
The association of archetypal symbolism with cross-cultural mythic imagery on the one hand, and Otto’s numinosity concept on the other, was one way that Jung, through his writings and researches, endowed psychological processes such as Individuation with ‘spiritual’ qualities. Part of the attraction of Jungian psychology is his overt identification of self-becoming, or personality formation, with the model of the spiritual quest, articulated through an all-pervasive symbolism shared with the alchemical magnum opus, other mystical belief systems or even mainstream theological precepts. As Anthony Storr explains, Jung was able to do this because he identified the integrated Self with an archetypal symbol of totality identical with the underlying reality of Judaeo-Christian monotheism, the imago Dei.
If the raw material of poetry is language, the essence of poetic practice is active imagination or artistic creativity. It is inevitable that imaginative creativity, in pursuit of inspiration, will engage with that innate process of psychological integration Jung called Individuation. From this perspective the poem may appear as a by-product of the process. For the poet, as for the alchemist, the psycho-activity of inspiration arising from the process of self-becoming is the prime factor. It is this psycho-active effect which dissolves the barriers between the conscious and the unconscious, exposing the subject to the autonomous ‘power’ of symbolic otherness, enhancing creative capability.
For many this dissolution is most satisfactorily defined as an ‘archetypal’, visionary, even mystical, experience. Indeed, for some, even the most wilfully mundane or blatantly secular poems can still radiate, however feebly, an aura of the ‘numinous’, investing the text with all the fascination of an alien artefact.
Grounding poetic practice in a fundamental, psychobiological, ontological matrix de-emphasises, even dissociates, ‘pure poetry’ from the cultural-linguistic epiphenomenal ‘foreground’ superstructure of modern ‘literary’ discourse. It is also the case that, contrary to Jung’s position, pro-active engagement with the principium individuationis from an aesthetic perspective may not accord with traditional ‘religious’ paradigms of human perfectibility or divine purpose.
Thus, the alchemical process of inner purification may well amount to a Promethean affront to doctrines of redemption and predestination. Then, the poet, like the alchemist of old, may stand accused of Faustian occultism – or even the heresy of the Free Spirit, interestingly defined by Vaneigem as ‘an alchemy of individual fulfilment’. The declaration of intent in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism to attain the ‘total recovery of our psychic force’ through a ‘systematic illumination of hidden places’ and excursions into ‘forbidden territory’ must be understood in the context of Romantic metaphysical revolt in the tradition of Miltonic Satanism, Byron and Sade. It is not an affirmation of the ‘spiritual quest’, or the unio mystica described as the supreme desideratum by Jung and other exponents of perennial, pan-religious syncretism.
Furthermore Jung’s identification of the integrated Self with any ‘divine’ reality or purpose is open to question in the post-religious context that is the present evolutionary situation of society. Primordial being may exert or radiate a ‘numinous’ attraction of otherness, or the subject may experience such an inspirational effect. It does not follow that experience of this effect is experience of the ‘sacred’. This is true, even if the effect or experience can be shown to be the result of a quasi-objective incursion of, or from, the unus mundus. Only those predisposed, perhaps by cultural conditioning, to a totalising ‘religious’ reading of fundamental experiences can promote such an interpretation without fear of contradiction. Again, if the raw matter of the procedure comprises the least valued, most disregarded, of all the elements, such common or ‘despised’ material. Stuff ‘of no price or value’ (Dyas Chemica Tripartita) will also form the basis of the poet’s Work. Such poetic work is unlikely to meet with approval from the custodians of cultural probity, the proponents of canonical, high-minded artistic or literary greatness.
Is the true poet an exceptional individual?
If the answer is yes, then poetry will reflect the compulsion of such individuals to seek their own path and forge their own identity through an oracular, alchemical poetry, which, like the ancient works of Khemeia, may well appear enigmatical and allusive to the uninitiated.
Digital art: Inner Alchemy III, 2001
Arcanum Paradoxa was published by Atlantean Publishing in The Monomyth Supplement 44, January 2009
Hermetic Art Gnostic Alchemy Of The Imagination (1985) on The Alchemy WebsiteOstensibly the forerunner of modern chemistry and usually considered a ‘pseudo-science’ Alchemy first emerged in Egypt during the Hellenistic period. At roughly the same time, a form of Alchemy associated with medicinal aspects of Taoism emerged in China.
The general objective of Alchemy was the creation, through transmutation, of some type of marvellous, quintessential substance, often considered a miraculous elixir, a panacea, for curing all ills, bestowing immortality or spiritual enlightenment.
Known as the art of Khemeia, Alchemy had its theoretical basis in metallurgy, Zoroastrianism, Stoic pantheism and Aristotle’s Four Element theory of matter. The first significant exponent of Alchemy was Bolos ‘Democritus’ of Mendes (circa 200BC) whose treatise, Physika et Mystica, dealt with dyeing and colouring, the creation of gems, silver, and the transmutation of metals, specifically the transmutation of lead or iron, into gold. One tenet of alchemical doctrine was that the prime matter (prima materia) or raw material of transmutation comprised the least valued, most disregarded, of all the elements. Common or ‘despised’ material, both ‘contemptible and precious’, formed the basis of The Work, the opus alchymicum.

There is a secret stone, hidden in a deep well, worthless and rejected, concealed in dung and filth... (Johann Daniel Mylius: Philosophia Reformata, 1622)

Khemeia did not flourish during the Roman era, as various Emperors, notably Diocletian, feared that the transmutation of base metals into gold would undermine economic stability. A notable exponent of the Work in later times was the mystic Zosimos of Panopolis (Akhmim) whose Hermetic Encyclopaedia (a 28 volume compilation of existing and original texts) is dated 300CE. However, as Khemeia was considered ‘pagan learning’, much ancient knowledge of the art was lost during the Christian riots in Alexandria in 400CE.
The Arabs revived interest in Khemeia in the seventh century, as part of a general fascination for Greek science and thought. In the Arabic language the word ‘Khemeia’ became ‘al-kimiya’ and it was this form of the word that became the European term ‘alchemy’.
To define Alchemy as a pseudo-scientific forerunner of modern, scientific chemistry is an oversimplification. From the earliest times Khemeia comprised a resonant, symbolic framework for imaginative speculation. This speculative aspect of the art soon overshadowed its ‘practical’ metallurgical objectives, leading to a well-deserved aura of obscurantism and uncertain interpretation.
In the period between Bolos and Zosimos, Holmyard observes, ‘alchemical speculation ran riot’ as diverse practitioners created a complex body of doctrine, ascribing symbolic meanings to the sequence of metallic colour changes, incorporating all contemporary strands of speculative thought into alchemical theory, including Egyptian magic, Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, Babylonian astrology, Christian theology and pagan mythology.
Works of Khemeia were invariably couched in an ‘enigmatical and allusive language’ and often ascribed to semi-legendary or mythical authors such as Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, Moses, Miriam (the legendary sister of Moses), Agathodaimon, Theophrastus, Ostanes, Cleopatra and the goddess Isis. Thus, almost any contemporary, metaphysical speculation was assimilated into eclectic alchemical thinking: many sayings, stories and myths were endowed with alchemical interpretation, or incorporated into the Hermetic worldview.
By the Byzantine era Stephanos of Alexandria, a philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who flourished during the reign of the Emperor Herakleios I (610-641), had come to view Khemeia as primarily a ‘mental process’. Following F. Sherwood Taylor, E. J. Holmyard quotes Stephanos’ denigration of practical alchemy as a "burden of weariness", observing that by this time (the seventh century) alchemy had ‘very largely become a theme for rhetorical, poetical and religious compositions, and the mere physical transmutation of base metals into gold was used as symbol for man’s regeneration and transformation to a nobler and more spiritual state’.
So, well before the rise of medieval European alchemy, the tendency to regard The Work as an internalised, psychic process or phenomenon was established. Khemeia could easily be dissociated from physical chemistry and metallurgy and defined as some kind of ‘spiritual’ discipline. Now, the objective was not the transmutation of external phenomena, but the transmutation of the adept himself, and this transformative process was expressed in an obscure, introspective, mythic vocabulary of symbols and complex terminology.
In modern times a fascination with alchemy as an internalised, mental process has been continued by the Surrealists and the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). During the inter-war years and roughly around the same time both Jung and the Surrealists claimed Alchemy as significant in their respective investigations:

…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, 1930)

Jung and the Surrealists (particularly Andre Breton and Max Ernst) were operating against the backdrop of a revival of interest in alchemical symbolism in France and Germany. The works of Zosimos had been translated into French and published by Berthelot and Ruelle in 1887-1888. Herbert Silberer, who proposed a connection between alchemical thought and modern psychology, had anticipated Jung’s researches.
In France the Surrealists were influenced the alchemical novels of Francois Jolivet-Castelot and the esoteric writings of Fulcanelli and Grillot de Givry. De Givry drew attention to the hermetic influences at work in the art of painters like Bosch, Bruegel, Cranach and Baldung. Initially Andre Breton saw alchemical thought as a way of re-investing poetic language with a sense of mystery: this soon evolved into a more ambitious proposition, the deployment of an ‘alchemy of language’ to transform consciousness, and by transforming consciousness, change life.
On the other hand Jung’s interest in alchemy was triggered by an ancient Taoist text called The Secret of the Golden Flower translated by Richard Wilhelm and for which he wrote a commentary in 1929. As a result of this work he was motivated to research Western Alchemy, which he subsequently defined as ‘the historical counterpart to my psychology of the unconscious’, and a bridge between Gnosticism and the modern world.
The culmination of these explorations was Jung’s attempt to correlate the ‘transpersonal’ element of his psychological paradigm with modern physics. The ultimate acausal reality or, to use the medieval term, unus mundus, forming the underlying transformative matrix of alchemical processes, can be understood, he argued, as simultaneously both psychic and material. This underlying unus mundus is both the indeterminate universe of psychic symbols and the pre-geometric, ‘implicate order’ of high-energy physics.
At the heart of Jung’s Analytical Psychology is the process of Individuation or self-becoming. Individuation is a non-linear, centralizing developmental process culminating in an enhanced synthesis of the conscious and the unconscious spheres. This synthesis also incorporates a paradoxical harmonisation of contradictory elements, a union of opposites – including, for example, the masculine and feminine principles, the animus and anima – correlating with the alchemical coniunctio as symbolised by the hermaphrodite or androgyny.
Jung felt that elucidation of the opus alchymicum would shed light on the symbolic structure of the Individuation process, because the alchemist’s hope of creating philosophical gold was only a partial illusion: ‘for the rest it corresponded to certain psychic facts that are of great importance in the psychology of the unconscious.’
If the alchemists projected the process of Individuation into the phenomena of chemical change, then the same is true for the poet who, likewise, by a synthesis of automatism and active imagination, projects the same process into the phenomena of poetic (artistic) creation. He or she initiates a transmutation of the ‘prime matter’ of language into the aesthetic ‘gold’ of poetry.
Part of this process is a sustained regression into the sphere of the unconscious (the ‘dizzying descent into ourselves’ mentioned in the Second Manifesto) during which imprints of the individual’s psychological and biological development are uncovered in symbolic form. Thus, the alchemical process, by engaging with the Individuation process, establishes a psychobiological frame of reference for both psychological development and imaginative, poetic creativity (‘inspiration’).
Alchemy, viewed from the Jungian perspective, can be seen as a quest for inner psychic unity and wholeness (actualisation) achieved through a non-rational mode of self-knowledge. However identification of poetry (or perhaps the poem itself) with the alchemical arcanum paradoxa and defining poetic inspiration in the context of a psychobiological, existential substrate, highlights a conflict with conventional ideas tending to categorise writing and/or poetry, as ‘literature’.
Academic and other definitions of poetry as ‘literature’ displace the poetic act of imaginative creation from the interior psychobiological universe to the external world of cultural-linguistic structures where the preferred paradigm is communicative. Furthermore, the current ‘postmodernist’ cultural-linguistic aesthetic model presupposes that everything depends upon language and linguistics to the extent that ‘being’ itself becomes literally indefinable in non-semiotic, extra-linguistic terms. This inevitably inhibits understanding of artistic creativity as in innate psychoactive phenomenon effectively blocking access to sources of inspiration in the indeterminate quantum vacuum of the unus mundus.
The raison d’etre of the ‘literary’ paradigm is communication. In contradistinction, the raison d’etre of the ‘alchemical-surreal’ paradigm is transformation: transformation energised by inspiration, where ‘inspiration’ is defined in terms of psychic energy. In this paradigm of transformation the Jungian valuation of symbols (distinguished from ‘signs’) as ambiguous emanations of non-linguistic or extra-linguistic or even pre-linguistic being is a key factor.
For Jung the psychic presence of symbols (including ‘archetypal’ symbols) is always experienced as ‘numinous’, a categorical term he borrowed from the Kantian-Friesian religious thinker Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). Otto was seeking to extend or deepen the epistemological scheme of his predecessor Jakob Friedrich Fries. This scheme included the notion of Ahndung, a German term which can be translated as ‘aesthetic sense’. Otto expanded the meaning of Ahndung ‘beyond the merely aesthetic’ by introducing the category of ‘numinosity’, the alleged quality of the sacred.
Otto argued that numinosity is the prime characteristic of the collective experience underlying all religions. This experience can involve a sense of overwhelming power, the mysterium tremendum. The mysterium stands as the first cause of all ‘religious awe’, and, in certain respects, if one follows Jung in the matter, accounts for the sense of power and autonomy apparently exhibited by unconscious contents and symbols.
The association of archetypal symbolism with cross-cultural mythic imagery on the one hand, and Otto’s numinosity concept on the other, was one way that Jung, through his writings and researches, endowed psychological processes such as Individuation with ‘spiritual’ qualities. Part of the attraction of Jungian psychology is his overt identification of self-becoming, or personality formation, with the model of the spiritual quest, articulated through an all-pervasive symbolism shared with the alchemical magnum opus, other mystical belief systems or even mainstream theological precepts. As Anthony Storr explains, Jung was able to do this because he identified the integrated Self with an archetypal symbol of totality identical with the underlying reality of Judaeo-Christian monotheism, the imago Dei.
If the raw material of poetry is language, the essence of poetic practice is active imagination or artistic creativity. It is inevitable that imaginative creativity, in pursuit of inspiration, will engage with that innate process of psychological integration Jung called Individuation. From this perspective the poem may appear as a by-product of the process. For the poet, as for the alchemist, the psycho-activity of inspiration arising from the process of self-becoming is the prime factor. It is this psycho-active effect which dissolves the barriers between the conscious and the unconscious, exposing the subject to the autonomous ‘power’ of symbolic otherness, enhancing creative capability.
For many this dissolution is most satisfactorily defined as an ‘archetypal’, visionary, even mystical, experience. Indeed, for some, even the most wilfully mundane or blatantly secular poems can still radiate, however feebly, an aura of the ‘numinous’, investing the text with all the fascination of an alien artefact.
Grounding poetic practice in a fundamental, psychobiological, ontological matrix de-emphasises, even dissociates, ‘pure poetry’ from the cultural-linguistic epiphenomenal ‘foreground’ superstructure of modern ‘literary’ discourse. It is also the case that, contrary to Jung’s position, pro-active engagement with the principium individuationis from an aesthetic perspective may not accord with traditional ‘religious’ paradigms of human perfectibility or divine purpose.
Thus, the alchemical process of inner purification may well amount to a Promethean affront to doctrines of redemption and predestination. Then, the poet, like the alchemist of old, may stand accused of Faustian occultism – or even the heresy of the Free Spirit, interestingly defined by Vaneigem as ‘an alchemy of individual fulfilment’. The declaration of intent in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism to attain the ‘total recovery of our psychic force’ through a ‘systematic illumination of hidden places’ and excursions into ‘forbidden territory’ must be understood in the context of Romantic metaphysical revolt in the tradition of Miltonic Satanism, Byron and Sade. It is not an affirmation of the ‘spiritual quest’, or the unio mystica described as the supreme desideratum by Jung and other exponents of perennial, pan-religious syncretism.
Furthermore Jung’s identification of the integrated Self with any ‘divine’ reality or purpose is open to question in the post-religious context that is the present evolutionary situation of society. Primordial being may exert or radiate a ‘numinous’ attraction of otherness, or the subject may experience such an inspirational effect. It does not follow that experience of this effect is experience of the ‘sacred’. This is true, even if the effect or experience can be shown to be the result of a quasi-objective incursion of, or from, the unus mundus. Only those predisposed, perhaps by cultural conditioning, to a totalising ‘religious’ reading of fundamental experiences can promote such an interpretation without fear of contradiction. Again, if the raw matter of the procedure comprises the least valued, most disregarded, of all the elements, such common or ‘despised’ material. Stuff ‘of no price or value’ (Dyas Chemica Tripartita) will also form the basis of the poet’s Work. Such poetic work is unlikely to meet with approval from the custodians of cultural probity, the proponents of canonical, high-minded artistic or literary greatness.
Is the true poet an exceptional individual?
If the answer is yes, then poetry will reflect the compulsion of such individuals to seek their own path and forge their own identity through an oracular, alchemical poetry, which, like the ancient works of Khemeia, may well appear enigmatical and allusive to the uninitiated.

Arcanum Paradoxa was published by Atlantean Publishing in The Monomyth Supplement 44, January 2009
Hermetic Art Gnostic Alchemy Of The Imagination (1985) on The Alchemy Website
 

Digital art: Inner Alchemy III, 2001

Elements of Transmission

 

In automatic drawing graphical lines represent transient trace elements of transmission along neural pathways.

In his text The Automatic Message (1933), Andre Breton explained Surrealism's role in the 'determinaton of the precise constitution of the subliminal' but he also acknowledged that the conditions which validate an 'automatic' text or drawing are insufficiently known. Previously (1916) Austin Spare had defined automatism as an 'organic impulse' produced when the mind is in a 'state of oblivion'. By this means, he said, 'senasation may be visualised'. Just as Surrealists argue that Freudian theory helps to disentangle automatism 'from the sphere of spiritualist mystification' (Rosemont) it may be possible, as an extension of this approach, to suggest that automatist spontaneity is a manifestation of a little-recognized principle of self-activation, or self-determination, that is an essential property of reality.

Illustration: Lucifer Rising, 2006

Medium Of Doubt

 

Collage, an ambiguous, complex medium of doubt, to quote Werner Spies, is an aesthetic of radical juxtaposition. In his personal treatise Beyond Painting (1947), Max Ernst, with reference to both Rimbaud, and the famous 'chance encounter' from Book 6 of Les Chants de Maldoror, defined collage as an 'alchemy of the image...' . However,the photomontage style of collage finds its origins in the work of the Berlin Dada Movement who in turn were inspired by the inadvertent imagery generated by early cinema special effects and the composite images of 'trick photography'. The term photomontage was invented by the Berlin 'monteurs', Raoul Hasmann and Hanna Hoch.

From the Freudian perspective it may be that collage exemplifies one of the two 'laws' governing the behaviour of unconscious processes or phenomena (such as dreams): the law of Condensation, or Compression, as it is also called. (The second 'law' is the law of Displacement.) Freud explained Condensation as the 'inclination to create new unities out of elements that we would certainly have kept separate in waking thought...' In 'The Enormous Face' section of his novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), J G Ballard refers to the 'planes of intersection' operative on 'a third level, the inner world of the psyche' where, as on other levels, such 'planes' interlock at oblique angles and where one finds 'fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies...'

Elsewhere is the same book Ballard asserts that images are born at the intersection of such planes, when 'some kind of valid reality begins to assert itself.'

Illustration: Psychic Citadel, 2002

Crisis Of The Object

 

Max Ernst paraphrased the classic postulate of Lautreamont as ‘the fortuitous encounter – upon a non-suitable plane – of two mutually distant realities’ (Inspiration to Order). Here, a fruit-drying machine replaces the notorious sewing machine; an analogous object (octopus) replaces the umbrella and the ‘non-suitable’ plane of the dissecting table is replaced by a desolate landscape – in the background? Maldoror. Revised from Crisis of the Object, Letter of Introduction, 1972.

Illustration: Crisis of The Object III The Ducassian Encounter, 1972

The Convulsionist Group

 

Could you tell me about the group you formed called The Neo-Surrealist Convulsionist Group?
It is tempting to say we were just a group of alienated teenagers…! We formed the thing around 1968 and it only lasted until around 1971 or 1972. There were about five or six participants based in Chelmsford, Essex. Other places included Colchester, Ipswich and Witham… people used to meet in coffee bars after school – we were all sixth formers doing art or literature, mainly as a way of avoiding sport. The associations continued after everyone left school and tried to get jobs. Some poetry was written and experimental prose cut-up; atonal electronic music was composed and lots of paintings and collages produced. There were occasional expeditions or ‘pilgrimages’ to ‘displaced destinations’ such as the old Hungerford Bridge, the Victoria Embankment Gardens (for the Sullivan Memorial – very ‘convulsive’), The Atlantis Bookshop, or the Dashwood Mausoleum and Hell Fire Caves at West Wycombe. But mainly there was a lot of loafing around, drinking coffee and snogging – or going to see Hammer Horror films and German Expressionist movies at the NFT. There was one exhibition at Hylands House – the exhibition was for all the school leavers but we managed to commandeer a room – as the Convulsionists were the general organisers of the show it was quite easy to get the space! We came up with the term ‘Convulsionism’ after the phrase ‘Beauty will be convulsive…’ (from Breton’s Amour Fou). I felt it implied the ‘visceral’ idea - my ideal work of art was to be a meaningless allegory generated by a kind of neurological spasm or frisson that could be transmitted to the viewer – well, if it gave me a frisson it might give you one as well. One old policy document from my archive says: "CONVULSION IS CONCERNED WITH THE BEAUTY OF PURE IMAGINATION AND FANTASY AND IS VIOLENTLY OPPOSED TO CONTRAPTON IN ANY FORM" (Convulsively Produced Notes On Convulsion, 1968). Earlier, I mentioned some key influences… I should add the Lost Generation to the list – the Francophile ‘Yellow Nineties’ Decadent poets and artists (Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson et al) and, also, the ultra-Symbolist absurdism (as we saw it) of Laforgue and Alfred Jarry – we were quite keen on ‘Pataphysics as I recall… There was some empathy with English Pop Art, so we rather revelled in the Mass Media – Pop Music (The Doors, Brian Auger), Jazz (Indo Jazz Fusions, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus), Science Fiction and ‘cult TV’. It was ironic that the real Surrealists disbanded in 1969 (Andre Breton died in 1966) so we settled for being Neo-Surrealists!

Illus: Convulsionist Portrait I: Within The Glass [collage/xerox & pencil],1969

from the Neon Highway Interview With Jane Marsh, 2006

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.

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illus: Nothing is Sacred, 1976

Cast The World Away : Emily Jane Bronte

Describing a violent encounter at Wuthering Heights, Isabella Linton says to Nelly Dean “I was in the condition of mind to be shocked at nothing; in fact I was as reckless as some malefactors show themselves to be at the foot of the gallows.” This statement, perhaps, more than any other in Emily Bronte’s only novel, conveys the crucial character of the work; perhaps, also, it is the key to an understanding of the author’s frame of mind.

In her introduction to the book (1900) Mrs Humphry Ward referred to the character of Heathcliff as the product of ‘a deliberate and passionate defiance of the reader’s sense of humanity and possibility’. In fact, since its initial publication in 1847, the defiant tone of Wuthering Heights has attracted admiration, bafflement and outrage in equal measure; and today encompassing all media (including theatre, dance, music and film) it has achieved the status of a mythic text – rather like Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, or Dracula.

From whence stems this peculiar, magnetic attraction?

It is often the case that the book is misunderstood on many levels.

Rather lamely, Charlotte Bronte tried to explain or defend he sister’s work as the product of a naïve, isolated, country girl, marooned in the wilderness of the Yorkshire Moors, the mere vessel of Fate or impersonal inspiration. Yet criticism of the book’s faults (usually moral) serves to point us toward further positive insights into this testament of ‘perverted passion and passionate perversity’. Certainly Charlotte was correct when she drew attention to the storm-heated and electrical atmosphere pervading the story, over which ‘broods the horror of a great darkness’ (Genesis 15:12). We know the novel caused some anger among many straight-laced souls, ‘indignant’, said Mrs Ward, ‘to find that any young woman, and especially any clergyman’s daughter, should write such unbecoming scenes and persons as those which form the subject of Wuthering Heights, and determined if it could to punish her.’ Typical English reaction!

We may imagine our author in some heavenly sphere, gazing down on our sorry, fallen world, possibly enjoying a quiet, sardonic smile, ‘half-amused and half in scorn’ at the expense of those critics and arbiters of taste, who, over time, have condemned or, alternatively, defended her work; she might smile, half in scorn, at the somewhat ludicrous appellations she has been awarded: ‘The Sphinx of English Literature’, ‘The Mystic of the Moors’ and so on.

But we would be wrong – it is rather unlikely that Miss Emily Jane Bronte resides in heaven.

For some, no doubt, heaven is a desirable residence, but for her, as for the heroine of her novel, it would be an uncongenial place of exile.

Initially, the book subverted Victorian expectations of propriety; it upset expectations about women writers and also the prim stereotype of the respectable clergyman’s daughter. Even now, Wuthering Heights is disconcerting in different ways. It seems that almost everyone has entertained misleading assumptions about the work. In her Preface to a recent (2003) edition Lucasta Miller explains how as a youngster she assumed that the novel was ‘the locus classicus of bodice-ripping romantic fiction’. However, she says, ‘I seem to have made an error as comical as that of Emily Bronte’s Lockwood when… he mistakes a pile of dead rabbits for his hostess’s pet cats.’ Miller’s phraseology here points to a comic factor; but what form of comedy is this?

A dark comedy no doubt, even ‘gallows humour’. In Lightning Rod, an introduction to his Anthology of Black Humour, Andre Breton illustrates this with a well-known anecdote, borrowed from Freud; of a condemned man who led to the gallows on a Monday morning, exclaims ‘What a way to start the week!’ This darkly ironic, mirthless humour, the anarchic subversion of expectations, upending preconceptions of life and literature whilst also making us laugh is a matter of ‘attitude’; an attitude which may, according to Mark Polizzotti, take the form of ‘both a lampooning of social conventions and a profound disrespect for the nobility of literature’. In Emily Bronte’s work, including some of her poetry, there is abundant evidence of ‘attitude’, this predilection for ‘savage’, ‘gallows’ or Black Humour and a devastating, nihilistic cynicism forming the base of her particular, uncomfortable, convulsive aesthetic. Here, says Breton, following Leon Pierre-Quint, is a way of affirming, above and beyond ‘the absolute revolt of adolescence and the internal revolt of adulthood’ a superior revolt of the mind.

Indeed, a superior revolt of the mind. From a historical perspective it might be noted that this particular form of humour has uniquely English (or Anglo-Irish) roots, as Breton correctly identifies Jonathan Swift as the original inventor or precursor. Swift, he says was a man who ‘grasped life in a wholly different way, and who was constantly outraged’. His work embodied a ‘remarkably Modern spirit’, due to ‘the profoundly singular turn of his mind’. Consequently ‘no body of work is less out of date’. We can with confidence say the same about the work of Emily Jane Bronte.

The broad outline of Emily’s brief life is quickly told: she was born in 1818, the fifth of sixth children. The family was then living in Thornton near Bradford, West Yorkshire; her father was the Reverend Patrick Bronte and her mother Maria (nee Branwell). In1820 the family moved to Haworth, taking up residence in the old parsonage house. In 1821 her mother died and her mother’s sister, Elizabeth (‘Aunt Branwell’, a ‘strict’ Methodist), moved in to maintain the household and help bring up the children.

In 1824 the six year-old Emily attended the Cowan Bridge Clergy Daughters School, founded in 1823 by the Reverend Carus Wilson. Wilson was a Calvinist whose religious views would have been even stricter than those of Aunt Branwell (an Arminian Methodist). The regime was very harsh and the following year, after an outbreak of typhoid caused the death of her two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, she was removed from the school. Cowan Bridge was the basis for the grim ‘Lowood Institution’ described by Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre. It is very likely that these experiences would have had a profound, almost traumatic, effect on the young Emily. In 1835 she attended Margaret Wooler’s Roe Head School, Mirfield for three months. In both of these institutions she was unhappy and always returned to the apparently self-enclosed world of her family circle. Her first extant poems date from this period. Then, in 1838 she was employed as junior teacher at Miss Pratchett’s Law Hill Girl’s School at Southowram near Halifax. While there Emily continued to write poems and, it is said, began to develop the ideas which eventually surfaced in Wuthering Heights. High Sunderland Hall, a nearby seventeenth century manor house, with weirdly baroque decorative features and inscriptions, made, it is claimed, a particular impact on the young teacher’s imagination.

With her sisters Charlotte and Anne plans were made to establish a school at Haworth. In 1842, as part of this project, Emily accompanied Charlotte to Brussels where they both attended Madame Zoe Heger’s Pensionnat de Demoiselles with the objective of improving their languages. Emily stayed in Brussels for about nine months (Feb-Nov) where she made ‘rapid progress’ in French, German, music and drawing, returning home with Charlotte in early November after the death of Aunt Elizabeth. Emily then flatly refused to go back to Brussels and remained at Haworth in the role of housekeeper while Charlotte returned to the pensionnat to continue her studies.

Later, back in England, Charlotte discovered Emily’s poems in her notebooks and eventually persuaded her to join in a joint publishing venture. The subsequent volume Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell was privately published by Aylott & Jones in 1846. Wuthering Heights was published by Thomas Cautley Newby in 1847. Emily, who for the duration of her short literary career was known to the public as Ellis Bell, died on 19 December, 1848 at the age of 30. Her illness (‘consumption’) and state of mind has long been the subject of speculation: was she Anorexic? Did she have Asperger’s? Did she suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder? Even the dimensions of her coffin (16 inches wide, 5 foot 7 inches long) have become the subject of research. We have one last memory of Emily (or ‘Ellis Bell’) ‘leaning back in his easy chair drawing his impeded breath as he best could, and looking, alas! Piteously pale and wasted…’ listening, half-amused, as Charlotte read aloud from the North American Review where she/he was described as ‘a man of uncommon talents but dogged, brutal and morose’.

Her sister, Anne, died the following year in 1849 and a new edition of Wuthering Heights with selections of her poetry (edited by Charlotte Bronte), appeared in 1850. Charlotte herself died after pregnancy complications in 1855.

It is reported that Emily ‘never bothered to converse with people who did not interest her.’ According to Charlotte, the novelist Ellis Bell sometimes smiled, but ‘it was not his wont to laugh’. In Brussels she cut a singular figure, with her ‘old fashioned and somewhat dishevelled clothes’ and ‘dreamy look’. It seems the other young ladies found the Bronte girls odd, particularly the strange appearance of Emily ‘who never followed the fashions’ and favoured straight skirts and outmoded wide gigot sleeves ‘when the vogue was for the opposite.’ But, as Constantin Heger observed, ‘Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old’. Defined by her ‘upright, heretic and English spirit’, Emily has always exerted a fascination for critics and biographers her persona and character somewhat distorted by an undeserved reputation for ‘strange innocence and spirituality’, to quote Mrs Humphry Ward, who also drew attention to a strength of will and imagination which appeared ‘inhuman and terrible’ to many readers and some who met her. The only pictorial image we have of Emily is an unsmiling girl of about sixteen with a distant but intense gaze, staring out of the picture, and evading eye-contact with the observer. This detail from of a group portrait (known as ‘The Pillar Portrait’) made around 1834 by her brother is the only authentic image of Emily we have, as all others are disputed, including the so-called ‘Profile Portrait’ which may, in fact, be a picture of Anne.

Sister Charlotte was much in awe of Emily in her guise as poet and novelist Ellis Bell, the embodiment of a ‘strong original mind, full of strange though sombre power…’ who often preferred the company of animals to human beings and who found in bleak, moorland solitude ‘many and dear delights’ including the decisive experience of a rare form of liberty. Charlotte went so far as to say ‘Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it she perished.’ Mrs Ward, she herself a novelist of repute, leaves us a vivid image of this ‘wayward, imaginative girl, physically delicate, brought up in loneliness and poverty’ immersed in literary interests. ‘One may surely imagine’ surmised Mrs Ward, ‘the long, thin girl bending in the firelight over these pages from Goethe…’ She is reading, it would appear, a recent translation of Dichtung und Wahrheit from a current edition of Blackwood’s (1839).

When she asserted that Wuthering Heights was the ‘epitome of a whole genre’ and of a ‘whole phase is European feeling’, Mary Augusta Ward placed welcome emphasis on the cultural context of Emily’s writing. A context which her contemporaries, unduly influenced by Mrs Gaskell’s and Charlotte Bronte’s image of the isolated semi-rustic, passive, young authoress (the unwitting conduit of shocking inspiration only explained by a kind of mystical naiveté), found expedient to ignore. Modern scholarship has long understood that this has been extremely misleading. The sisters were immersed in the cultural trends of the age and read widely, although their preference was clearly for Romanticism, rather than the socially-conscious Realism then fashionable. Emily’s poetry and fiction show traces of her chosen influences: Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, De Quincy, Cowper, Carlyle, Scott, and Wordsworth among others. Despite this, she remained true to her own unique vision, fusing these English Romantic trends with her own Christian upbringing (Milton, The Bible) and German Horror. Wuthering Heights is, in fact, pure Sturm und Drang, albeit with a particular North English twist (spoof dialect, local folklore), and her distinctive sardonic, ‘dry, saturnine humour’. It was a paroxysmal revenge melodrama, a classic of the ‘literature of transgression’; a toxic compendium of foul language, legal chicanery, amorality, dereliction, domestic violence, hysteria, hauntings, dreams, hallucinations, cruelty to animals, child abuse, moral degradation, forced marriage, sadism, male inadequacy, ‘monomania’, alcoholism, class snobbery and implicit sibling incest, not to mention low-church fanaticism, witchcraft, necrophilia and disease, all set in a remote, inhospitable landscape of ‘bleak winds, and bitter northern skies, and impassable roads.’ Catherine Earnshaw’s love-obsession for the alien ‘gypsy’ foundling anti-hero Heathcliff (a ‘fierce, wolfish, pitiless man’, the archetypal Byronic demon lover; an Imp of Satan, an ‘incarnate goblin’, a psychopath, a ‘moral poison’ or Monster From The Id; part vampire, part werewolf with, according to the rather impressionable Isabella, ‘sharp cannibal teeth’) is an inhuman, ambivalent compulsion eventually transformed into a self-destructive death-wish. Both protagonists starve themselves to death. This latter theme being, possibly, an amplification of one of Emily’s own traits; it is said that, when angry or unhappy, she might withdraw into silence and go on hunger strike as an act of defiance.

When Mrs Humphry Ward refers to the author’s ‘deliberate and passionate defiance of the reader’s sense of humanity and possibility’ she was attempting to itemise aspects of the novel seen as failings and faults like ‘monstrosity’ or ‘mere violence and excess’, yet, without this frame of mind, this ‘passionate defiance’ the novel would lose it’s essential, that is, its excessive, character: recall that scene where Cathy and Heathcliff observe the Linton children in the midst of a tantrum: ‘Isabella – I believe she is eleven, a year younger than Cathy – lay screaming at the further end of the room, shrieking as if witches were running red hot needles into her.’

This ‘deliberate and passionate defiance’, this reckless condition of mind ‘to be shocked at nothing’, is no aesthetic flaw; it is, rather, the very source of Emily Bronte’s unique vision. Wuthering Heights is a full-frontal assault on the cultural norms of literature and our idealised, complacent view of reality. Perhaps Miss Emily Jane Bronte had a cunning plan: to outrage the reader by exposing the psychopathology of the human condition, by deploying ‘a complete science of human brutality’ to quote Edwin Percy Whipple of the North American Review (October, 1848). Perhaps she was satirising our socialised sense of propriety and unquestioned assumption of normality.

For Rosemary Jackson, Wuthering Heights is a prime example of ‘Female Gothic’, a nineteenth century mode of women’s writing initiated by Mary Shelley. Female Gothic comprised a ‘violent attack on the symbolic order’ (the terminology is Lacanian) utilising non-realistic techniques such as sensationalism, melodrama, romance and fantasy to disrupt the ‘monological’ vision of patriarchal society, the ‘symbolic order of modern culture’. These women writers were seeking to achieve a ‘breakthrough of cultural structure.’ Yet it would be wise to listen to Pauline Nestor when she says that, rather like her anachronistic dress sense, Emily’s novel stands outside the fashionable literature of her day. She had no interest in writing a ‘novel-with-a-purpose’ or a polemic on the state of ‘the people’, or any kind of well-meaning exploration of ‘community’. Emily was no feminist, says Nestor, her strengths were ‘personal and idiosyncratic’ her work was devoid of ‘partisan politics’ with no sense of shared ideology or a ‘common cause’. Again, we may suggest that this rejectionist attitude, this idiosyncratic line of thinking, is a great strength; one of the character traits that makes Emily’s work always ‘modern’, forever compulsive, undiluted by transient, didactic distractions.

Much has been made of the childhood relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff, wild children of the moors or young savages, inhabitants of a sovereign domain of untrammelled liberty or the ‘free play of innocence’; although in the book rather less is made of this than we are lead to believe by enthusiastic critics. For Georges Bataille this is the core concept of Wuthering Heights seen as a campaign of revenge waged by Heathcliff to regain this childhood kingdom and his lost love, even though Catherine’s love for Heathcliff is strangely un-erotic and almost a form of unconscious psychic projection.  Certainly a key turning point in the story is when he overhears Catherine telling Nelly that marriage to him would degrade her social standing. He runs from the house in rage and disillusion. An incident probably inspired by a similar moment of rejection in the early life of Byron (Moore’s Life Of Byron was published in 1830).

For Bataille, Emily Bronte was the object of a ‘privileged curse’ through her ‘profound experience of the abyss of Evil’. He defined the story as ‘the revolt of Evil against Good’. In Bataille’s terminology ‘Evil’ is ‘essentially cognate with death’ and ‘Good’ is everything that supports the system of ‘reason’ as ‘calculations of interest’ for the benefit of a collective ‘will to survive’; a variation on the long-standing Socratic philosophical-moral formula which postulates Reason as virtuous and preaches ‘virtue’ as the only route to human happiness. In her novel and through the character of Heathcliff, Emily explored an alternative viewpoint in which virtue plays no part and happiness is found through revenge and power over the weak. Bataille says the ‘wild life’ of the children ‘outside the world’ enables the ‘basic conditions of poetry, of a spontaneous poetry…’ For some readers this leads to explaining Emily’s work as a form of ‘pagan’ or pantheistic nature worship – although justified by her Romantic influences, in the end this is just another anodyne normalisation strategy which quickly morphs into the mythic ‘mystic of the moors’ scenario. Bataille, on the other hand, saw Emily as an example of a poete maudit in the same category as Sade, Baudelaire and her near-contemporary Edgar Alan Poe.

She was cursed with ‘an anguished knowledge of passion… the sort of knowledge which links love not only with clarity, but also with violence and death.’ It is certainly the case that in her only novel, and in her poetry, we find an overwhelming fixation on the subject of death. This is not surprising given the circumstances of the Bronte family, haunted by illness, bereavement and tragedy, and vulnerable also, via conventional channels of enculturation, to a strictly Protestant, non-conformist influence which accentuated an idea of death as a transcendental phenomenon, together with a very real prospect of Eternal Damnation. At a young, impressionable age Emily would have been exposed to all these influences, especially at Carus Wilson’s school. Wilson was known as an ‘excessive’ Calvinist Evangelist an adherent of the doctrine of predestination who frequently preached on the topics of ‘humility’ and the ‘deaths of pious children’. The girls were subject to a harsh, ascetic regime that included the learning by heart of long Biblical texts and many other shocking privations imposed in a damp, unhealthy environment. Given the added nightmare of the deaths of her two sisters it is very plausible that these circumstances had a traumatic and lasting impact on a vulnerable, homesick six year old. It is likely, too that she found some corroboration in this fatalistic worldview from the life and poetry of William Cowper who, prone to phases of insanity, haunted by the early death of his mother, believed he was doomed to Eternal Damnation and thought that God demanded he sacrifice his life by suicide.

Together with Poe, Emily Bronte counts as a Navigator of Death (Thanatonaut);  all her work is haunted by ‘the sea of death’s eternity’ (‘The Night of Storms has Passed’) and permeated by an apocalyptic/eschatological theme of death both as a lasting refuge from the horrors of life and as a transition to a hyper-real mode of perceptual transfiguration.  

It has been suggested that Poe saw his poetry as a ‘voyage of exploration, an attempt to conjure up, dramatize and discover the world that exists beyond death.’ (Richard Gray). In Emily’s poem ‘A Day Dream’ she writes ‘rejoice for those that live/ Because they live to die.’ However, this not a simple case of morbid fascination, as we may discern other influences, such as Shelley’s visionary Neo-Platonic Romantic poetic theory (the lifting of the veil), as well as her own Protestant inheritance, through which this fascination for death is refracted. In her untitled poem known by the line ‘I am the only thing whose doom’ (1839), Emily discards all earthly consolations, even hope itself, and finds mankind ‘hollow servile insincere’. Yet, she finds in herself the same corruption: ‘But worse to trust my own mind/ And find the same corruption there’.

These sentiments may echo the moral framework of ultra-Protestant thinking where the status corruptionis is the fundamental, basic state of humanity in a fallen world; a world where man stands in a negative relation to God, or even against God. A position implied in the Catherine-Heathcliff relationship, and even, perhaps, in the way that Cathy Linton (the Younger Cathy, Catherine’s daughter) is fascinated by the Fairy Cave and would appear to practice the dark arts of Black Magic (she is occasionally referred to as a witch or an ‘accursed’ or ‘damnable’ witch. She even threatens the inhabitants of the Heights with the traditional maleficent practice of sticking pins into human figures). For fundamentalist Evangelicals like Carus Wilson it is probable that his fixation on the concept of salvation was cognate with a similar fascination for sin together with a horror of superstitious ‘abominations’ as defined in Deuteronomy 18. As Max Weber has shown, the overarching project of salvation religion has been the de-magification or disenchantment of the world (entzauberung der welt), so the references to folklore and witchcraft may well be symptomatic of the wider, defiant tone of Wuthering Heights part of an unspoken quest to regain the enchantments of a pre-moral universe of Animism and inhuman forces. As Bataille has said elsewhere, with reference to both Nietzsche and Andre Breton; magic, like Catholicism, is one of those traditions that ‘give us a slightly uneasy image of the very ancient foundation of non-moralist religion’. The greater the moral power of salvation, the more weight must be attributed to Sin and the ‘abominations’ of idolatry and witchcraft. This great weight of Sin ensures the believer finds the Fall of Man to be absolute and finds human existence to be a condition of pure and total Evil from which there is no escape. The radical rift between God and Man, between humanity’s pre- and post-lapsarian existence is so great, the externality and incomprehensibility of God is so absolute, that affliction and anxiety, depravity and horror comprise the totality of the sinner’s life, for, as the Good Book says, ‘the wages of sin is death’ (Romans 6:23).

It is easy to read Wuthering Heights in the light of this post-lapsarian state, and it is the case that almost all of Emily Bronte’s poetry conforms to a similar, if ambivalent, pattern. Yet it is also likely that Emily, wrestling with these eschatological-ontological themes as she ‘worked through’ the side-effects of her childhood traumas – particularly the Cowan Bridge disaster – was not entirely subservient to the strictures of moral damnation, even though she used the tropes and vocabulary of her religious upbringing to explicate her agonistic worldview. How could it be otherwise?

There will always be anti-secular apologists for faith who will claim or reclaim Emily for their theological agendas. This will range from the quasi-New Age characterisation of an isolated ‘mystic’, a ‘heretic’, or a ‘visionary’ nature poet, to those who see her as a forerunner of the postmodern, post-secular ‘return’ of religion, mediated by the casuistry of theological notions such as the ‘apophatic , unnameable and ineffable’. Her poetry corroborates Bataille’s summarisation of her character: ‘Though few people could have been more severe, more courageous or more proper, she fathomed the very depths of evil.’

In the poem ‘How Clear She Shines’ Bronte dismisses Life as a ‘labour void and brief’, she says that Hope is nothing but a ‘phantom of the soul’, while existence itself is but the despotism of death. However in ‘Honour’s Martyr’ she states a personal credo of passionate defiance: ‘Let me be false in other’s eyes/ If faithful in my own.’ Consequently this means that, as Emily penetrates further into her creative life, she rejects the ‘world without’ with its guilt, hate and doubt, and ‘cold suspicion’. Instead, she exalts the ‘world within’ the world of her imagination, (sometimes envisaged as an angelic personification), ‘Where thou and I and Liberty/ Have undisputed sovereignty’. She breaks away from the shackles of inherited, tyrannical belief, even though she faced condemnation in a fantasy trial (‘Plead For Me’) where her prosecutor is Reason ‘with a scornful brow’, who mocks her overthrow, and comes to judgement ‘arrayed in all her forms of gloom’. In a scenario that corroborates Bataille’s exposition, the poet implores the ‘radiant angel’ of her Imagination to speak against Reason on her behalf, uttering a plea for one who has ‘cast the world away’, who has ‘persevered to shun/ The common paths that others run/And on a strange road journeyed on…’

This ‘strange road’ is surely an immersion in the creative process, as she longs to ‘cast my anchor of desire/ Deep into unknown eternity’ (‘Anticipation’). Even though she may be tormented by strange visions that ‘rise and change/ And kill me with desire…’ (‘The Prisoner [A Fragment]’) Emily Bronte, wilfully or not, made some of ‘those excursions to the bottom of the mental grotto’ to which Andre Breton refers in Lightning Rod his introduction to Black Humour. As Bataille said, it is wrong to see the poetry as revelations from the world of the ‘great mystics’, even though ‘the imprecise world which the poems reveal to us is immense and bewildering’. Emily’s world ‘is less calm, more savage’ and, crucially, its violence is not ‘slowly reabsorbed in the gradual experience of an enlightenment’; far from it. Emily, who rejected as vain ‘the thousand creeds’  by which humanity consoled itself (‘No Coward Soul’), who was uninterested in mystical ‘enlightenment, saw Wuthering Heights as an assertion of outrage, a reversal of theological-moral norms and an expression of her ‘passionate defiance’, an attitude of mind possibly derived from the traumatic events at Cowan Bridge and the deaths of both her sisters and her mother. The last thing she was interested in was ‘enlightenment’, an unnecessary aspiration for a damned poet who has lifted the veil of mundane existence only to reveal a destitute landscape where, to quote her sister Charlotte, ‘every beam of sunshine is poured down through black bars of threatening cloud.’ As Lucasta Miller says, the tendency of the book is a constant ‘striving beyond itself’, but what the book does not do is ‘offer a conventional moral standpoint’. Instead Bronte offers a ‘visceral’ depiction of psychic extremes and anti-social criminality without the consolation of a moral compass. In this world of ‘threatening cloud’, the radical externality of God ensures that all morality is meaningless, all existence chaotic and pointless.

These are forays into dangerous territory, and, for Emily, this forbidden domain was the psychic landscape of Stanbury Moor and her final destination was Ponden Kirk (‘Penistone Craggs’) a massive outcrop with a ‘ceremonial passage’ (‘Fairy Cave’); a site, rich in local folklore, hinting at chthonic forces and a primeval world of dread beneath or beyond mundane reality as depicted in the story. It is tempting to see this prominence of gritstone rock as the topographical epicentre of Emily’s psychic universe and, as ‘Penistone Craggs’, it functions as an understated focal point in the fictional domain of Wuthering Heights. Even though in the overall scheme of the novel Penistone Craggs is a minor detail, it is well to recall that, according to Freud, the mechanism of displacement ensures the most essential elements of a dream are represented ‘merely by slight allusions’. The young Cathy Linton is particularly attracted to the abrupt descent of the outcrop, ‘especially when the setting sun shone on it and the topmost Heights; and the whole extent of the landscape besides lay in shadow …“And what are those golden rocks like, when you stand under them?” she once asked.’ Later, she announces that, one day, when she is older, “I should delight to look around me from the brow of that tallest point.”

Perhaps it was here, on some solitary excursion to ‘the brow of that tallest point’, that Emily experienced an anti-epiphany, a sudden counter-Calvinist turn of mind, an acceptance of her status, not among the righteous ‘chosen’ of the elect, but among the reprobates – among the damned. Here, at this high place, her very own heart of darkness where below her the landscape ‘lay in shadow’, she decided to unleash upon her readers the savage power of her imagination. Rather than seek expiation for her sins she decided to comit an unsparing act of revenge against a complacent society. It has been observed that the novel reads as a ‘scrap of history torn from the communion of the saints of old and flung in the face of the modern world, out of its context, to startle its dainty self-restraint’ (Harrison quoted in Marsden). Like Jonathan Swift who, in writings such as A Tale Of A Tub and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation Of The Spirit, excoriated the religious ‘enthusiasts’ of his day, she was consumed by a constant feeling of outrage fuelled by her own traumas, incited by her own demons. In the poem ‘From A Dungeon Wall In The Southern College’ (1844), a stern, judgemental voice derides various worldly vanities including Mirth, and, significantly, Love. This is a repressive voice of strict moral rectitude for which Love is ‘a demon meteor willing/ Heedless feet to crime.’

So be it, thought Emily, as reckless as a malefactor at the foot of the gallows, here is the subject of my novel; I will trace the path of this ‘demon meteor’. The story will tell a tale of ‘heedless’ crimes induced by the ‘monomania’ of forbidden, obsessive, sado-masochistic Love, through a harsh narrative laced with acerbic humour. It is no disservice to Emily to say that this literary project, including many, if not all, of her poems, was of an unashamedly therapeutic character. It was not some kind of visionary experience or spiritual revelation or ‘subjective encounter with the divine’ (Marsden) but rather an act of will, more akin to a work of exorcism. The culmination would be a mode of self-induced mind-expansion helping to overcome a fragmented psychological state and integrate multiple, self-contradictory interpretations of a warped existence. It is not surprising that we find the resulting psychic material expressed in culturally-conditioned theological, ‘symbolic’ or ‘spiritual’ terms; for its ultimate form the aesthetic outcome will usually depend upon this kind of enculturation.

The total nihilism of the novel and some poems is one strand of evidence, as is also that vein of saturnine humour verging on blasphemy. One thinks of Isabella Linton laughing at the ridiculous figure of the sanctimonious, pharisaic family servant, old Joseph, kneeling in a pool of Hindley Earnshaw’s blood and uttering incomprehensible supplications to the Almighty. In one childhood incident, the young Catherine outrages the same righteous zealot when she throws a ‘dingy’, devotional book entitled The Helmet of Salvation into a dog kennel, ‘vowing I hated a good book’. Lockwood’s nightmare of the ‘Pious Discourse’ of the ludicrous preacher Jabes Branderham entitled ‘Seventy Times Seven and the First of the Seventy First’ in the Chapel of Gimmerden Sough is clearly a satirical attack on low-church religious mania (Branderham may have been based on the prominent Methodist preacher and revivalist, Jabez Bunting, or the well-known Methodist clergyman William Grimshaw of Haworth, or both). The sermon descends into chaos and violence. Elsewhere in the novel there are moments of macabre, almost absurd, knockabout, as when Hindley threatens to murder Nelly Dean by ramming a carving knife down her throat: ‘“But I don’t like the carving knife, Mr Hindley,” I answered, “It has been used for cutting red herrings – I’d rather be shot if you please”’.

Surely Catherine Earnshaw speaks for our author when she appears to reject the possibility of redemption. Appearing to commit The Unpardonable Sin, ‘the sin that no Christian need pardon’, she even rejects Heaven itself: “There is nothing” cried she, “…heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights…”.

Unsurprisingly these defiant and desperate sentiments are echoed by Heathcliff (a symbolic figure bearing some resemblance to Milton’s Satan), when he claims: ‘I have nearly attained my heaven; and that of others is altogether unvalued and unwanted by me!’ Perhaps the most shocking character in a gallery of grotesques, Heathcliff embodies the dark power of Emily’s ‘rebellious imagination’ (Miller) her ‘revolutionary’ imagination and dreams (Bataille), and, as Charlotte Bronte wrote in her Preface to the 1850 Edition: ‘Heathcliff, indeed, stands unredeemed; never once swerving in his arrow-straight course to perdition…’

Perdition? Does Emily Bronte care about Perdition?

One feels that she summoned her own ‘radiant angel’, her Imagination, as a counter-force to lifelong threats of Perdition and Damnation from sundry authorities, Methodists, Calvinists and conventional others. The default of God envelopes Wuthering Heights in that ‘great darkness’ of the world’s night, but Emily Jane Bronte persevered to shun ‘the common paths that others run’, she ‘cast the world away’. Remaining recalcitrant to the very last, refusing all medical treatment in her final days and hours, she bequeathed to us one of the most disturbing works of English literature.

When Andre Breton said in The Manifesto of Surrealism ‘Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality’ he was placing the imaginative faculty at the centre of the surrealist adventure. For Emily Bronte, whose works exemplified the ‘unsparing quality’ of an uncompromising assault on Victorian complacency, the imagination was hyper-real, not an avenue of escape. It disclosed a ‘world within’, a dangerous, forbidden, uncharted realm, ‘Where thou and I, and Liberty/Have undisputed sovereignty’.

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illus: Emily Jane Bronte. 
 Patrick Branwell Bronte, The Bronte Sisters (1834) [detail] 

An abridged version of this essay was previously published in The Licentiam