Two clarifications

In the discussion about poetry in "Surrealism is and is not something particular" below, there were a few formulations that raised questions/objections from Aase Berg, and forced me to the following clarifications:

”form is secondary”

It is certainly characteristic for poetry that content and form are not separate things, that language details have a spiritual meaning. It’s actually not the least specifically that which I am referring to here: in poetry there does not exist any stylistic choices, it is about different tracks of the spirit that one chooses to explore or not explore. It is not about a given content which one chooses which guise to give. It is the content that creates a form for itself in one’s hands according to its own dynamic. Form is then secondary in the sense that it shows afterwards what form it took – and that various distinctions and classifications based on form (”this is a surrealist poem, but this one is more expressionist”) are of limited interest.

”domestications of poetry”

I mean domestication in the sense of taming a wild animal, learning to exploit something to make it carry out labour in the safe sphere, mastering great powers for small, local, if you will petty, purposes, the typical example being home and family, but just as much career and ego.

A domesticated use of poetry is for example writing casual poems with the purpose of sublimating strong feelings and smooth over conflicts in the events of national disasters or funerals. But this isn’t extremely common these days.

Far more common is when a collection of poetry is regarded as an entry in the cv for stipend applications rather than as something flammable, when poet becomes a profession in the phonebook, when poetry is regarded as a textual genre rather than as an adventure or a desperate research task, etc. And it is also when, to connect it with the question of form, and relating to the latter aspect (”textual genre”), somebody so to speak ”is using the poetic form” to express a certain line of thought, a certain fix idea, a beloved memory, a certain courtship of either an object for seduction or a judge of taste, to demonstrate one’s wide reading, one’s elegant versification skills, one’s consciousness of heritage or of trends or of both, instead of following its own dynamics.

And it is probably foremostly the latter, ”using the form” that I am referring to in the text.

And I keep talking about these things in the post about American poetry below.

The Nightlight Market

–What is Neosurrealism?

”Neosurrealism” has been repeatedly launched as a catchphrase for minor directions within art and literature where people eclectically pick up some alleged lessons from surrealism and put them back in a more or less conformist framework within cultural production. It has been particularly big in the US, perhaps needless to say. Some time ago, it was mainly used for pop-influenced Dalí-ist painting, but today this current is mainly (and more properly) referred to as ”fantastic art”.

Instead, there has been in recent years several efforts to put the headlight on surrealist influences in American poetry, often but far from always referred to as ”neosurrealism”. This includes a number of different efforts, with academic theses (Tursi, Lampe), popular introductions (Joron, Caples) and online discussions. Usually it has been about promoting the legacy of Philip Lamantia, and usually it has been put in stark contrast against the organised surrealist movement on the whole and against Chicago surrealism and Franklin Rosemont specifically. In the last year, there has been attempts to tie such threads together, perhaps the most ambitious one being the upstate New York poet John Thomas Allen launching ”The New Surrealist Institute”, publishing a comprehensive anthology of neosurrealist poetry, and seeming to claim to spearhead a movement.

There are many confused domestications of surrealism and they hardly merit detailed study. For lack of something better to do during a short while this summer, when this particular one turned up a few times clustered I was pulled into checking it up. And then it took several weeks for some books to arrive, which I maybe ought not to attempt any detailed summary without having read. It’s not that I am so very interested in the situation of surrealism in the US, even though I would agree that surrealism’s trajectory in that particular country is a critical case for its entire post-classic history. In fact I should apologise for length, I just wanted to make this overview accessible once I laboriously obtained it, and couldn’t help restating a number of basic points about poetry in the connection.

Why neosurrealism?

Obviously, the word ”neosurrealist” is pointless, implying either an imagined historical rift breaking up surrealist continuity, or an ambiguous volontary departure without the imagination to find something positively given to characterise the new direction.

From the viewpoint of surrealism, a course correction relevant to surrealism typically makes sense to integrate into surrealism, rather than break off as a separate branch. And furthermore, to the extent that such developments have indeed needed to be organisationally separate, and have had something relevant to offer, in the past, they have often (relevantly) preferred to refer to their own direction by its own characteristics rather than its distance to - but still dependence on - surrealism (clear in the cases of Acephale and the Sociological College, of Lettrism and Situationism, somewhat less clear but still positively stated in ”Cobraism”, nuclearism, imaginism etc). Claiming to be a neo- is like not quite living up to the real thing while unable to come up with something original.

Also, in the literary discussion in the US, it seems like ”neosurrealism” has been used interchangeably with ”soft surrealism”: which is even clearer about what it concerns: a vague inspiration without any serious commitment.

Neosurrealism may be used as a descriptive term. Just like we might give the descriptive name ”postsurrealism” to any direction manifested by someone with the intention of leaving surrealism (regardless of whether it succeeds or not), we might call ”neosurrealism” any attempt to reinvent surrealism (volontarily or involontarily) without picking up the trail of historical continuity. Inventing the wheel over again. 

This might be the local enthusiasts who pick up some old book by Breton and wants to start it up again, unaware of the contemporary movement. Such neophytes are often quite happy to join forces and pool resources once they find the movement, and their ”neosurrealism” is just a temporary phase.

Though if they feel intimidated by the presence of peers, and by the distinctions made from historical experience, they might feel a need to defend their own individual version of ”neosurrealism” with its particular compromises, additions, subtractions and emphasises, and with themselves as the foremost theorists, and stubbornly maintain their alleged uniqueness. In some cases this would express mainly a nostalgia over the real dynamism of some youthful heroic years against the wind before finding accomplices. But empirically, it seems like most such cases instead involve a reluctancy to apply surrealism broadly, to see political and philosophical implications, and to grapple with it on the level of everyday life – and instead to reduce it again to either literature or pictorial art.

Not only is this remarkably similar to the common old boring academic approach, and tends to go hand in hand with common old careerist concerns, where the ”autonomy” is mainly an autonomy of pragmatism, where you should be free to make your own choices about all the concessions you are doing for the sake of attention by critics and publishers, and not be criticised for it.

It is a bit weird, isn’t it, that restricting poetry to the literary context, staying alone, and adapting to expectations in the literary market, is considered free, autonomous, mature and advanced –while integrating poetry with other necessities of life, joining up with each other, and working within a demanding tradition and utilising reciprocal questioning and criticism, is considered dogmatic, narrowminded and isolated.

Surrealism and literature

A lot of the discussion about neosurrealism is about categorisation, who is a neosurrealist and who is not. At the same time, some of these categorisers regret that those who talk about surrealism, especially those who defend it, always always tend to talk about dividing and demarcation lines. Well, it’s not like anyone can actually decide who’s a real surrealist and who’s not. Any demarcation line needs to be identified and negotiated based on the purpose with it. That’s why it might occasionally be interesting to discuss delineations, specifically in order to reveal one’s purposes. 

There are crucial and quite simple demarcation lines since surrealism does in fact rest on a break. That is for example (in this connection) the break with considering literature as the major battlefield, considering the poem a valuable goal in itself within the system of personal expression, formal elegance, stylistic innovativity, reflection of influences and current trends, and of the development of the history of literature.

In surrealism, the poem is an integrated part in an investigation and an invocation of poetry with the overall aim to transform life and change the world. Anyone who merely wants to write good surrealist poems is not a surrealist. The surrealist keeps writing such poems (or not!) with something else in mind.

And while there are various tropes and manouevres that are common in texts by surrealists, there is no such thing as defining characteristics of a surrealist text. A text recognisable as utilising the same elements as characteristic earlier surrealist texts does not by power of that become a surrealist text. A text based in a surrealist outlook and a surrealist aim is a surrealist text. Especially if written by a surrealist. While other texts relevant for that outlook and aim, and utilising particular poetic means in that spirit, can very well be surrealist texts (of the ”unconsciuously surrealist” genre if you will…) Any eagerness to define criteria for surrealism on the stylistic level seems to reveal an aim to reduce surrealism to a mere topic for academic study within a particular field and to miss completely what surrealism is about.

The current US advocates of neosurrealism position themselves completely within the field of cultural production (especially literature). Someone described it is as that there is currently a vacuum and an open contest for the position as dominant paradigm of the time (after postmodernism), and then considering that surrealism is a suitable candidate for that competition. Of course, even if this was a correct analysis of the current situation in culture (which I’m sure it’s not), surrealism couldn’t care less about competing over that position…

A poet remains a poet and this is not dependent on designations.

However, the question of who is a great poet and who is not, this must be stressed, DOES NOT MEAN THE SAME THING from a literary and a surrealist perspective. From the literary viewpoint, a great poet is a writing person who writes powerful and impressive poems by mastering the tools of the trade, is aware of canon and utilises it for own purposes, is consistent and designs an oeuvre, a body of work that has a central direction and every now and then offers technical novelties and stylistic brilliance, and exerts a significant influence on other writers.

Most of this is just irrelevant from a surrealist perspective, where a great poet is a researcher without a safety net, if you will fearless psychonaut, with no credentials and no relevant possessions except curiosity and sensibility, mediating the poetic message and furthering it in a dynamic form that forces open some unusual sector of the realm of possibilities and changes the perspective on things, who explores poetry and tries in one way or another to stay true to it, in different areas and significantly including writing poetic texts. The genre of your texts matters little, innovation matters little, your civil position matters little, your ”impact” matters little. Of course, experienced careerists and clumsy beginners alike are capable of writing scattered inflammable poetic outbursts. Certainly, someone can be a great poet from a literary and a surrealist viewpoint alike, but the criteria are very different, and many more are great from only one of the perspectives and ridiculous from the other…

Surrealism is on the other side of a dividing line. Exploring the poetic is an extraliterary challenge. The quest will take very diverse routes, but seeing the point with and gaining some experience of anonymity, collectivity and automatism is probably a crucial corrective against many of the available domestications of poetry. Remember Tzara’s crucial distinction between poetry as a means of expression and poetry as an activity of the spirit. Surrealism’s break involves starting out from the latter side unequivocally. Surrealists are not writers of a particular style or standpoint, surrealists utilise writing as a vehicle, which is among other things a weapon against a given framework of exploitation, boredom, pragmatism, faith, stupidity, noise, productivity demands and miserabilism. For dismissing the dull seductions of the cultural world. For dismissing civilised thematics and self-administrative concerns. For preferring the unknown.

A sun at night?

A Lamantia disciple and recent ”Science Fiction Surrealist” Andrew Joron published the key text of modern American neosurrealism ten years ago, Neo-Surrealism; or, the Sun at Night: Transformations of Surrealism in American Poetry 1966-1999 (2004). His study is a sketchy overview of surrealist inspiration in American poets. As such it is very readable, and contains some interesting observations, suggestions and reading tips. (Apparently there is also a second edition from 2010 with minor updates, which I have not seen; it might make some of the following details irrelevant but hardly the general argument.)

Without actually defining neosurrealism, his pamphlet works hard to make a lot of contradictions and distinctions within poetry, internal and external. It is rhetorically built up around a central opposition between a successful, domestic literary surrealism led by Lamantia and a sterile, isolated organised surrealism represented by the Chicago group. The alleged good pole of the opposition is where the author is sketching a new canon, where inspiration from surrealism, combined with working within a national American poetry scene, publishing in American literary journals, positioning visavis American literary schools are crucial, and acquiring academic positions is a meriting proof of quality…  Indeed, it seems to be a criterion for his neo-surrealism that it is specifically American and not closely relating to its European models. (”It is not a question of nationalism but of opening a space for cultural selfdefinition” says Joron.)

Of course neither aspect works well to provide a neat separation. Obviously Lamantia, the rimbaldian hero and patron saint of the one pole, himself (as Joron admits) was involved with the organised movement too. Any other writers that Joron recognises as relevant are counted in the literary, non-Chicago camp, including Ted Joans, Rikki Ducornet, and especially Jayne Cortez, despite themselves. (While at the same time Joseph Jablonski is explicitly excluded from the discussion for being ”orthodox” even if his poetry is acknowledged. Joron’s disciple Caples extends the same backhanded recognition to Penelope Rosemont herself.) Joans and Ducornet are very well-known within surrealist collaborations and apparently well-known outside them. Lamantia covered both domestic concerns and international ones, as did Nanos Valaoritis. In fact, Valaoritis wrote an enthusiastic introduction to contemporary American poetry in an issue of the French ”orthodox” Surréalisme in 1977, claiming that the American poets, especially the Californian post-Beats, were all internationalist and non-chauvinistic and relevant to surrealism (he might have been wrong). And Pete Winslow was a hardcore surrealist but is for some reason posthumously considered a neosurrealist. While another serious Lamantian disciple, Laurence Weisberg, is much held forth nowadays by some of the surrealists and some of the neos alike. An Allan Graubard never denied his basic surrealist position yet still has been active on the domestic cultural scene. Ronnie Burk was active on the domestic scene while quite hardcore. In recent times, everybody hails Will Alexander, and both he and Sotere Torregian have repeatedly appeared in surrealist connections, and goddamn even Joron himself was in the recent Hydrolith #2. Such sheep and wolves don’t quite congregate in separate corners of the field. It is a kind of a borgesian, non-exclusive, taxonomy.

If I think an internationalist perspective fits better with the dynamics of poetry than the concern for a domestic literary scene does, and if I think academic positions are statistically likely to suffocate poetry rather than intensify it, I would still argue that the power in a poem is not so much dependent on where the author fits in a constructed classification scheme, and I’m not going to defend the merits of particular poets against a literary judge of taste (for example listing particularly good poets in the organised half). This is confused and obviously breeds confusion.

A lamp that throws no light

Lampe’s 2014 thesis about is basically saying the same as Joron’s pamphlet but in ten times more pages, even though the topic is not explicitly ”neosurrealism” but surrealism in American poets (again disregarding active surrealists). There is useful background information and interesting observations here too, but most of the effort is simply wasted because it is all about discussing whether this or that poem is actually a surrealist poem, in purely textual terms, thus expecting there to be trustworthy stylistic criteria for surrealism, and expecting surrealism to be something that has its full meaning in the literary sphere concerning poems – and thus the whole discussion is of course alien to surrealism.

This restrictive circumscription is conscious and explicit; it is after all an academic work which rests on restricting its question and making this explicit. Its just that in this case such a restriction also removes the ground for saying anything interesting about poetry in the light of surrealism, which otherwise might have been considered to be the topic.

I mean, all the way back from classic structuralism and throughout a more poetically-minded sense of close reading, there are certainly interesting observations to be made about surrealist texts as texts too, even in an academic context, if the question is what they bring, convey and invoke, what they open up towards, not if the question is whether they are to be judged as surrealist or not, according to the narrow criteria one has just put up for oneself (and not even explicitly): this becomes simply a juridical question of no consequence.

An invisible trail in the dark: constructing a canon

The autohistoriography of neosurrealism is more or less this: the American poets reacted against a perceived arrogance of the visiting European exile surrealists during the war, with their lack of understanding of something specifically American, so surrealist inspiration got foothold only through the significantly different and local New York School poetry and then Beat poetry. Then came ”Deep Image poetry” as an antithesis drawing some renewed inspiration from surrealism but staying separate from it, and even more so with its successor ”Language poetry”, and then there were various mini-schools of descendants of these four major domestic trends. The most significant surrealist forum has been, according to the Americans, the little poetry magazine Kayak (and its successor Caliban). This since the surrealist movement, which has itself again been present now in an autochthonous guise since the 60s, has been ”orthodox” and ”isolated” in being active in the international movement rather than focusing on the domestic cultural scene, and therefore lacks significance.

That great neon sign

Apparently, the obsession with expressing something particularly ”American” is shared between a Neosurrealist and most of US culture including Hollywood, Hiphop, Walt Disney and George Bush; this is indeed not necessarily nationalistic but only displays an excessive focus on cultural identity: what we call identity politics, ambiguous when it comes to minority identities, hardly priding when it comes to identities with hegemonic qualities.

(And wasn’t, at least for those who aren’t openly reactionary among those who keep obsessing with what is American, one of the crucial things about it that it would be very including and syncretistic concerning all the various elements brought in by immigrants from all directions (the old ”melting pot” metaphor)? One prospective neosurrealist anthology editor, Mark Tursi, raised the question whether certain named immigrants should be discarded for not being American, and couldn’t understand when this ”innocent” question made some of his correspondents upset.)

Poetry to express your nationality? Hey, even if those old universalist fantasies of poets are obviously vain in parts (which doesn’t make them quite irrelevant by the way), then still isn’t a crucial element in poetry, and a very important reason for people to pick it up, the urgent need to refuse and abandon given cultural identifications and explore metamorphosis and alternative identifications, exotic if necessary?

While the obsession with involvement with the domestic literary scene is probably more instrumental. Teleologically this might be explained as ”in order to be able to influence the direction of national culture”, but practically it is probably just good old careerism. To make a career you need to expose your name in the local context, you need to get personally acquainted with your superiors and your more successful peers who might help you attain positions, connect you with other influential people, etc. Coming into the light within a ”small magazine” gives the required dose of collectivity: you need a certain amount of mutual help in everybody’s parallell goal of exposure, and being associated with the network around a magazine is of course a conveniently non-committal way of doing so, without the risks and efforts and naïvity of an actual collective activity of exploring poetry and its consequences together…

A flash of hipness

It might be good to remember that back in the Beat days, both Philip Lamantia and Ted Joans provided links between surrealism and beat. But while Lamantia at this time was only retrospectively referring to his youth surrealist experience, Joans was actively involved in surrealism. Lamantia became pulled back into surrealism later, but being a Beat legend with a legendary surrealist connection became much more of his heritage than being active in surrealism (and famously acknowledged no particular contradiction between surrealism and neither his Beat stardom nor his catholic faith, or at least no contradiction which wasn’t smoothly appropriated as the psychonaut’s love of contradiction itself…). In contrast with Joans, who remained a surrealist militant his entire life. Nanos Valaoritis too has been spanning both over time, but in his work in North America probably far more as a Beat with a surrealist connection, just like Lamantia. But then, in neosurrealist historiography it is suddenly Corso and Kaufman who are the crucial surrealists in Beat more than Joans and Valaoritis.

Since surrealism is not a style, it is not impossible to write surrealist texts in the Beat language. Personally, I have no love for the Beat idiome, and I do tend to associate Beat looseness of form with lack of concentration, and male-chauvinistic selfsufficience, providing an instructive lesson showing the clear dividing line between lazy stream-of-consciousness spontanism and the seriousness of an automatic enquiry. However I will readily admit that Joans and Lamantia (and Winslow and others, especially if you count Jayne Cortez in this track) reach further than this and provide a starting point for an enquiry into the relationship between B & S that may lead to more interesting conclusions than personal statements of taste and suspicion. Who’s there to do such an enquiry without feeling a need to defend the honour of ordinary American poetry, nor to stop at merely stylistic criteria for purely literary distinctions?

A flicker down the well

Already ”deep image poetry” is essentially neosurrealism, in the early 60s: a pure-blooded homegrown American variety of some kind of surrealism stripped of its morals, its spiritual discipline, its historical experience, its sense of movement, its critical thinking, its politics, its collectivity, its weirdness, its humour, and instead merged with pure literary concerns, good-old eclecticist-seductive Jungian psychology, academic english-language modernism and an overall pretentious modernist syncretism. Significant for this strain is that it considers bombastic romantic stalinist Neruda an even better surrealist than the surrealists, and that the most persistent proponent Robert Bly founded the ”men's movement”.

Already many of the direct followers of this deep image school, and even more so current neosurrealists, were repelled by its pretentiousness, and some by its international outlook and europhilia (but few by its eclecticism and regressive politics). So many lapsed back into a certain playfulness, into Beat-style loose compositional form, ”street” elements and popular culture references, a lot of elements from Science Fiction - and/or into a more experimental approach to language.

Do you like to see my solitary vessel

A cornerpost in the neosurrealist historiographies is the poetry magazine Kayak, edited by George Hitchcock in California 1964-1984, where a lot of the surrealist-influenced American poets published. This is a typical semi-underground magazine with a surrealist tendency, what is usually called ”surrealisant” in French (surrealising). A notable amount of contributions and even the overall presentation is influenced by surrealism, but in very different ways (including the leading ”deep image” poets), and alongside material which is clearly not, and most importantly without any explicit defense of surrealism as such - nor any other explicit platform - for the contributors. A bunch of contributors have also been associated with the historical surrealist movement, a fact which is not mentioned by the neosurrealist historiographers: some of these are claimed for neosurrealism: Valaoritis, Pete Winslow, H R Hays, several not (the national criterion?) like Ken Smith, Michael Bullock, Ludwig Zeller, especially remarkable is the silence concerning John Digby, a persistent contributor whose collages had a significant impact on the magazine’s looks, and who might have started the collaboration back in England but then moved over to the US and was actively involved. Anyway, the journal is deemed way too "eurocentric" for the neosurrealist stick.

I have seen only small fragments of Kayak, but personally I do enjoy such little magazines when they are playful and serious - but its very provinciality, modesty and selfimposed restriction of scope, is not necessarily something good in poetic terms compared with the simultaneous hellraising approaches throughout the diversity of its contemporary US surrealist periodicals, like Arsenal, Antinarcissus, Octopus-Typewriter, Glass Veal, Beef Sphinx, and others… 

The New Candle of John Thomas

There is a very entertaining discussion posted online a few years ago when one of these academics (Mark Tursi) wanted to make a big anthology based on Joron’s concepts.

But apparently that came to nothing and the anthology that eventually did surface was by an enthusiastic newcomer named John Thomas Allen, who also founded the ”New Surrealist Institute” and apparently has been quite active in social media. There is a blog including scattered more or less interesting interviews, reflections and poems. What is weird about it that this NSI is held forth as a new avantgarde movement, separate from other groupings. And at the same time it doesn’t publish collective games or collective statements, everything is presented by the leader personally. The others might not even be aware that they are in a ”group”.

What is explicitly presented as the manifesto of this movement is the anthology, presumably in its entirety, ”Nouveau’s Midnight Sun: Transcriptions from Golgonooza and beyond” (2014). It is a rather thin collection of poems with a personal and enthusiastic but not very thorough introduction by the editor. Of the crowd included in the book, there seems to be a few neosurrealists in the sense of clueless re-inventors, paired with several post-new-york-school-veterans and few post-californian-beat veterans, and their diverse followers, providing a lot of manifest surrealist influence fluctuating between the several-times-watered-down and the faithful-halfdigested and a lot of scattered namedropping of surrealist works and quotes (and a token experienced surrealist in Bogartte). Contributors are introduced not so much with a background sketch nor an attempt to characterise their poetic quest, but with anecdotes as to what they each contributed in the editor’s spiritual quest (or networking trajectory) along with a bit of the usual citing of selected academic degrees and teaching posts, prizes and awards received (seriously! can you Americans stop this? can’t you see that even if being a poet was about credentials - which it certainly isn’t - then simple official acceptance is not one that merits…)

Of sources for his variety of surrealism, Allen in all his texts keeps referring mainly to academic art historian Celia Rabinovitch and the later, ex-surrealist, religious existentialist, David Gascoyne. It follows the ”spiritual” strain in surrealism attributed to Lamantia. There might be such a strain and it might be worth following, but it would be more interesting to found it more in own experience than in renegades and academics. And while we all are happy with the notion of ”profane illumination” and a metaphysical dimension of surrealism, while some of us have dived into thorough studies of alchemy, gnosticism, occultism and whatnot while others have not, any attempts to reconcile surrealism with theology and with churches, also in the vaguest sense, have been either missing the point by reducing surrealism to some kind of profound humanism, or have sensed and somehow lived the obvious contradiction. Citing an academic for legitimity and then admitting one is at a quest of ”combining Surrealism and God” (!) does not sound like a particularly dramatic spiritual departure…

However, and this is important, while Allen speaks of ”a new surrealism” and his title clearly links with Joron’s, he does not in his texts invoke Neosurrealism as opposed to orthodox surrealism, and he does not bring up the national criterion, nor seem enthusiastic about what is American, nor raise the domestic cultural market criterion, and he does not attack Franklin Rosemont. He is simply an energetic enthusiast intent on leading a supposedly sleeping movement to new glory (last time, there was some Internet artists who suggested that Photoshop and the Internet had finally revived the sleeping movement and set it back upon its path to due fame). Maybe it isn’t really sleeping, and maybe it isn’t looking for new glory, and maybe it doesn’t need new self-advertising leaders?

(If indeed this is inteded as surrealism rather than neosurrealism, it may be regarded as a parallell intervention to the recent neophyte surrealist online journal Peculiar Mormyrid. Even looser in its circumscriptions, combining various allegedly surrealist submissions from all around including those of many an organised or experienced surrealist of more exhibitions leanings, it also has a quite different tone. With very unusual (unamerican?) modesty emphasising itself being a ”fledgling” surrealist journal, trying out collective games (though only on the blog part of the webpage and not in the journal, only online and not in the flesh…), mixing texts of different genres and all kinds of images rather than focusing on the poem, it does not make these bold or controversial statements (nor any theoretical-level statements at all), which may perhaps make it look hopelessly timid and vague. But more importantly, at least a small number of participants give the impression that they actually want to play the game, surprise themselves and step into the doorway of the unknown, rather than make a name for themselves.)

Conclusion

In this post, I have made an attempt to understand what people are trying to put into the concept Neosurrealism by way of some significant texts around it. I am not dealing with the poems that are considered to constitute the core of the thing, not even if more programmatic by its advocates. Simply because some of it is ok, some even very good, and quite a bit of it is really poor, and it is not very interesting to sit and judge over poems, especially not to reprimand people for writing poor poems. What I am interested in here is what the concept might mean, if it may constitute a movement, and what relationship it might have to surrealism.

Many people are clearly easy-going eclecticists with a ”fear of touch” who think that actively associating with an actual movement (rather than just a ”school of writing”) is a compromise of integrity. That’s one of the explanations for neosurrealism.

But then this issue of the domestic scene seems crucial. Anyone who is not specifically directed towards the US domestic literary situation, not actively relating to local developments, bickerings, and local minor traditions of using, misusing or refusing foreign influences, and not publishing in domestic journals for the betterment of the national literature, are obviously disregarded as aloof elitists or madmen.

And finally, it seems to still be about the Rosemont factor; the traumatic impact on the peaceful domestic scene by an ultraradical verbal onslaught claiming tradition and principles, like that of the Chicago group. Any living surrealism will question your raison d’être if you are an aspiring writer and academic, and the Chicago group raised this point of view in a version which was rather healthily devoid of shyness, civil concerns and compromise (some of their polemics might not have been quite on target over the years, but the basic argument here is clear as a bell). The massive complaints of how ”isolated” and ”sterile” this do come out as something of a self-contradiction; apparently it did have a rather wide impact in teaching people that surrealism wasn’t something that you could freely adapt to your own fuzzy within-literary concerns, local eclecticism and career dreams without raising some objections…

For a moment there, I had a paranoid thought that these facets of Neosurrealism (whose presence in surrealist networks is symptomatic) would join forces with some of the more bitter old US surrealists in an unholy alliance where open-minded ”lack of orthodoxy”, resentment against old bully Franklin Rosemont, and giving up the hopes of group activity, internationalism and desire for immediate change would form the common ground. But on the other hand, why?

It may be regrettable that the recent resurgence of discussion about surrealist organisation in the US, while having merits in bringing unknown anecdotes and long-circulated rumours into the open (Note: this current discussion may have as its headlight the massive Invisible Heads anthology; but it must be noted that as anthology and long-term documentation its value goes far beyond any such rhetorical function), still retains its bedrock in who did something bad to whom 40 years ago. But it is not confined to that. Not all contacts and alliances being made are based on politeness, shared resentment, or hope of reciprocation. There are still hopes beyond that. Whoever is a surrealist will remain a surrealist for reasons other than making a name and reforming literature. Whoever is a poet will be a poet regardless of labels. Whoever is a careerist will do their careerist thing, and keep aiming for recognition by superiors while eventually turning against their less successful peers or followers, once they have no free additional cred to give. Surrealism has no legitimity to offer.

Neo-surrealism is of course pointless in itself as a label, but possibly pragmatically useful as a warning sign since it is usually applied wherever the major concerns are to claim ”inspiration” from surrealism for reforming literature and promoting careers within the borders of the United States. Even though I would be much more interested in not cementing such a border and instead seeing poets keep on wriggling with the tempting challenges of extraliterary concerns and poetry itself and possibly even become surrealists rather than literary figures one day…  Whoever is badmouthing or misrepresenting surrealism is not a big deal. The main point is that poetry is so much more an adventure, so much more impractical, and even so much more fun, than neosurrealism or any other literary endeavour. Surrealism is about changing life and transforming the world, it does not wish to reform literature and promote careers; this is a simple and useful criterion.

MF

Modes of the possible

(Excerpts from a rather intense email discussion about performance art and some of its implications last autumn, based in an example which we have considered less interesting than the general observations and lines of thought and therefore omitted here, along with a lot of the more peripheral or personally combative points.)

JB:
It is a persistent, goal-oriented effort to solve a puzzle, with which they may not have high hopes of succeeding, only the passion to find new methods of approaching it./.../ The question of body and spirit never finds an answer, but after a passionate and honest attempt at gaining insight, or some kind of result, intuitively, one is once again left at the agnostic point of departure. But if that point would be philosophically or scientifically unsatisfactory, which is also the case regarding "serious" paranormal research, it is not meaningless at all. This is because the answer is found in the work itself: the devotion, the obsession and also the playfulness they possess is in itself a unity of body and spirit, and if performance art is to have a purpose or definition, the process of employing the body in the service of the spirit should be it – in my opinion.
    /.../
    If you take an interest in what music is, you will soon discover that the most important basic qualities are common to all artistic types of expression. I never tire of explaining that my basic view of music is based on music sociologist Christopher Small’s model: music is a social ritual with utopian contents, that is, where people get together to act out an ideal society within spatial and temporal limitations, by the initiation of an intricate network of relations between people, objects and ideas. Where sound structures are only a small, but indispensable component. To varying degrees, it is always about celebrating, confirming and exploring these relations. Small mentions this in passing, but viewing it in this way, as a current, present and time-based activity, makes it possible, from a human perspective, to readily apply this model to all artistic experience. The centre of the activity is what anthropologists call ritual. You could call it »the aesthetic dimension« (to borrow Kant’s expression via Herbert Marcuse, who wrote an excellent book with this title). Art is an other-worldly, or magical, experience of transcending our everyday lives. Anthropologist Hans Peter Duerr has called it a faint remnant of the magic of archaic peoples. But the faintness may indeed vary. For someone like Cecil Taylor, the quality of trance is emphasized in his playing. The connection is exemplified by a comment by an American Indian shaman, after seeing Taylor in concert: »I thought this was secret«; according to Taylor this was the best review he had ever received.

NN:
(...) what you (JB) mean by (...) the idea of virtuality of art. Meaning is achieved when the body is put into the service of the mind in meaningless work that conveys hope. That sounds like existentialism. One has to imagine the performance artist as Sisyphos, that is as being happy, talking with Camus.

MF:
I was reminded by the corporality as a key to performance art. It really is among the most pleasurable aspects (but far more for the performer than for the audience...) that it is hard physical labour of no use. Of course utility can be defined in different ways and one may choose to get stuck in paradoxes. But this is work that is productive and lacks exchange value and lacks a use value according to all conventional criteria of utility. And if one manages to create an atmosphere that allows this ritual potential to start getting realised on a collective basis, which I believe is the core of the model that you (JB) describe as Christopher Small's, then also the audience is pulled into this physical dimension. (On the other hand, the often strong sensation of boredom, sleepiness, spontaneous tickling in the feet, aching butt, or for that matter pain and feeling overrun or pinned down from very high sound volumes, I would rather regard as alienating than utopian physical exchange...) Is this the labor of the body in the service of the spirit? It could also be the other way around. The body is pulling the leg of the spirit. And in the confusion arising in that relationship, yes, the spirit can be realised, and unexpected modes of unity and play and jerky fusions may occur, yes. That is what constitutes its mystique, if you will. You are right there. I do not think NN is right in the interpretation that this is existentialism, because the hope of existentialism consists with a necessary voluntarism in the the very choice of ascribing hope, not in the real hope that may be glimpsed in the type of the work and the type of confusion chosen.
    Nevertheless I think your (JB) explanation of this carries a lot further than the specific expression you are discussing does. This expression seems to be far more nivellating, experimentally placing all imaginable human activities side by side and arbitrarily focusing on one to the point of the absurd but without ascribing it any particular potential. I am sure this is what you describe as play in the context, but play in itself is not nivellating in this postmodern sense, because for play the possibility chosen has an aura and a dynamics from overdetermination by desire, and it is specifically not at all exchangable with anything else.
    Where I want to go is just to once more, as in several discussions, emphasise the distinction between on the one hand a logical potentiality, the very idea that anything is possible, and a manifest possibility, which is the exciting real concrete psychophysical sensation that unexpectedly much is actually possible and it is enticing because it is only that which puts us into contact with the unknown, which is the core of poetry, and which is among the cornerstone of experiencing art and of creating art.
    Earlier I used to criticise CA for getting triggered by what I perceived as merely logical potentiality. He successfully rebuked me and, the way I remember it, emphasised that the logic of desire will make the selection anyway or will step into the activity as a meaning-creating dimension once an activity is chosen. This is quite correct, but also far from dead safe, there are many counterexamples, when instead the path of least resistance, conformism, and/or simple cynicism gets the last word.
    While I kept believing that there was a continuous interplay between logical and manifest potentiality, at least that the moments of the truth of art where in the leap when quantitative (logical) potentiality changed into qualitative (manifest) potentiality. This all sounds fine. But maybe it sounds fine because a hegelian explanation always sounds better than an analytical one. In practice this connection between the two meanings may be almost inexistant: since any genuine artistic activity is based in manifest potentiality, while many artists when they are interviewed or interrogated and expected to explain how their art works often grasp at logical potentiality as a mode of rhetoric and a legitimation; sometimes they will be true to their words and actually make art that expresses the unwillingness to distinguish between good and bad ideas, between hunches worthy of following and those that aren't, between the imaginative and the banal, between the exciting and the deadly boring – but on the other hand there are also those who in spite of these unexciting modes of explanation continues exerting a visionary sensibility in their praxis. That's the way it works. Art.

CA:
I would like to add one or more types of possibility to those listed by MF, and the one which is most important to me is the ontological one.
    If logical possibility is purely speculative and exists by power of the structure of logic, as an additive combinatory extension of a specific emerged pattern, I understand the manigest potentiality of which MF speaks as the experience or epiphany that possibilities are present in a particular moment.
    Now I will refer to these as logical and phenomenological possibility respectively.
    Ontological possibility I would like to see from an objectively rationalist perspective, as referring to a specific geography of possibility unevenly distributed in a dynamically evolving and causally coherent world. The fact that the world is causally coherent leads us to end up in the same question as the rationalists did: Do possibilities not exist at all (strict determinism in Spinoza's style) or does possibilities imply diverging worlds whose different globally coherent principles of selection exclude possibilities within themselves (Leibniz), as well as the question whether determinism can be combined with clinamen or any type of unstable chaotic core.
    What I here refer to as phenomenological possibility does not need to consider these questions. What I here refer to as ontological possibility is not dependent on whether the world is strictly deterministic or not, but instead on whether there are, for the individual human being in a particular moment, several alternatives and a selection is made (regardless of whether the selection couldn't have been made differently based on the dynamical coherence of the world (not of logic)). In this case, this presents itself in the phenomenological sense, but I would like to separate the presentation of this "ontological possibility" from a certain phenomenological singularity which may accompany the perception of the field of possibilities, as an indication of unfolding possibilities or as a receipt that one indeed stands before possibilities.

phenomenological possibility (the appearance of possibility 1)
There might be different singularities for, i e the hunch that there is a dog buried somewhere, that there is more to learn about something, that there is suddenly a wealth of newly acquired alternatives, or a weird object presenting evidence that the world wasn't created the way we thought. I want to distinguish these qualities of the experience from those appearances which are simultaneous with its actualisation, because if one sees a diffuse situation that indulges oneself in an interpretative delirium, then the associated quality of manifest possibility might still occur isolated, for example by elaborating by means of brainwork, without the brain simultaneously pondering a diffuse situation. The singularity, or singularities, I talk about here would be like the sense of possibility, as it presents itself, semi-attached to an actual set of possibilities.

ontological possibiltiy (the appearance of possibility 2)
I would define this as the disenveloping/evolving of a dynamic selective process, such as an interpretative delirium, a selection among alternatives of action or interpretation suggesting themselves and criteria for selection suggesting themselves, speculative fantasies about what one self, organisations, objects or subjects would be able to suggest when their different sides and qualities are combined. This ontological possibility is independent of the question of ontological determinism, and independent of whether the disenvelopment is put to music by the "feeling of possibility" (it could occur unconsciously).
    Thus, I see ontological possibility as an objective operation of the spirit in combination with the workings of other elements (the world) in it.

The virtual

The concept of the virtual has been used in different ways throughout the history of ideas. Most commonly it is synonymous with either the eidetic (the idea), the possible, or the latent. /.../ So is the possible synonymous with the latent? This is a trickier question, but I would like to say no. Both are there and are ontologically real, but the concept of the latent I think should be restricted to something which acts objectively but takes another expression or only is expressed under certain circumstances. /.../ For minds we could say that there are latent tendencies (those that work even when they are not manifested), virtual tendencies (that may be latent or manifest in different situations depending on the actual constitution of the mind or the world), and virtual possibilities (reconfigurations of the virtual constitution of the mind, depending on the totality of the world and thereby not empty logical possibility).
    The separation between the two last mentioned categories perhaps rests on the idea of the statistically probable. Or, on the idea of clinamen. For me, it rests on the idea of time as duration. /.../ This perspective corresponds with the idea of a chaotic core or a clinamen, but retains the idea of a determined virtuality. Time is brought in as a transformatory force, but in contrast to ideas of generative negativity this is about a positive generative field of possibilities actualised in the present and having a virtual structure, including the radically new without being undetermined.
    What I would like to do is putting definitions into discussion to distinguish the virtual from on the one hand the possible and on the other hand the latent. I would also like to distinguish that synthesis of duration form the experience of facing a field of possibilities. This latter distinction is mainly theoretical, but seems important to note. The syntheses of duration continue also when they are not being acknowledged as striking. Though I do believe that the experience of something being full of possibilities often coincides with a synthesising, investigative and selective mental activity before an ambiguous material, testing implications etc. An interpretative delirium or a sudden questioning of habitual conceptions (can carpets fly?).
    One last note about the virtual. If earlier philosophy, inspired by Plato, saw the Idea as something more profound, and perhaps more crystalised, beyond temporary emergences, then post-husserlian philosophy tends to see the eidetic, or virtual, specifically as emergences as such, and that which constitutes the Idea is in large parts temporary emergences (or simulacra). The eidetic is emergence as a whole, and that which is called Idea is temporary and subject to change, with contingencies as raw material. What survives and runs ahead to meet the present, both earlier experience and habitual ways of organising information, constitutes the emergent virtual structure in the present.

/.../

Rituals

Rituals and symbols are everywhere. What makes them magic is their being affirmed. There are magical geographies everywhere. Psychogeographical portals and delimitations. Boundaries and signs that reconfigurate the fields of possibilities of our bodies, our posture, our focuses, what presents itself as possible courses of action. The boundaries separating an audience from performers, separating a performance ritual before an audience from a hazing event at Lundsberg private school, an appointment with the hairdresser, or a wedding.
    /.../ don't believe in the rituals they perform. They are too nihilistic. They may claim they are trying to make a carpet fly. That's bullshit. I can claim I am struggling to make a relationship work, through rituals, That's not bullshit. They may claim they don't care whether they make the carpet rise or not. That it's the attempt and not the result that counts. But they don't try, and that matters to me. I regard it as impossible that the audience possibly during the performance may be struck by the hunch that there might be a small possibility, because this is beyond their suggestive power. Instead we may all unite in a nihilistic giggle about people performing real rituals, while missing their actual magical activity. /.../ I much prefer people trying to conjure up a 4D-printer, and it doesn't matter whether they succeed or not, than people who try to conjur up grants for themselves by ridiculing visionaries.

JB:
It is not just about imagining anything, it is specifically the connection between the real and the virtual that sparks an emotion. Not distinguishing between "make-believe" and "for real", as children do already when they start playing, means that you can confuse things that are in different categories, make a carpet fly, make a relationship work, or create a functional 4D-printer. /.../ Art is both real and make-believe at the same time. One does what one does, but it is also an image, an attempt, a vision to be conveyed and pondered or digested. It doesn't have to be a possibility, but gets the chance of pondering whether it is a possibility or not. I found Marcuse's The Aesthetic Dimension to describe that way of functioning very well at that time.
    /.../
    But I didn't give any particular significance to performance art being meaningless work? I don't believe in such things, and if so I have expressed myself unclearly. Art is a kind of work, and if it is meaningless it is not art, since the essence is a form of communication (conveying meaning). But then of course one might use meaningless work (of another kind) as an element in art if one so wishes.

NN:
Yes, I intended meaninglessness in a dialectic sense in my comment. /.../ The example with the carpet is significant for this rhetoric: since "everybody knows" that magic doesn't work, they make a meaningless magical effort confirming what we already know. Sartre compares this type of ritual with the fox who, after having reached for the grapes in vain, transforms them "by the power of thought" into "sour", and he calls the magical attitude that makes this transformation come about a flight behavior aiming to make the world more bearable which for good and bad characterises the condition of man. Thereby this performance appeared to me as existentialist lowbrow comedy for me, with all respect for that it may have appeared differently if one would have been there. If defining magic as "power that does not exist" one misses that it is about mental power. And it should preferrably be used for transforming peppercorns into a dragon than the other way around.

JB:
Sure. But I think it is a more precise terminology to refer to this power of the mind as imagination, like surrealists usually do. Calling it magic causes unnecessary misunderstandings, I think: it sounds like one is presupposing supernatural powers where no such powers have any explanatory power. Magical thinking and poetical thinking may in practice be the same processes, but they have different selfunderstandings, and this should not be neglected.

NN:
On the contrary, they have rather coinciding selfunderstandings, as surrealists repeatedly note. Magic according to the european tradition that surrealists usually acknowledge (Novalis, Levi, Paracelsus, Böhme, Swedenborg) stipulates a world image where we are in contact with everything, then, now and in the future, and where all manifestations are regarded as external forms hiding the unknown principles of nature, and where it depends on ourselves whether they world changes in accordance with our will or not. Poetic thinking is a recollection of the worldview of magic in that sense. Imagination on the other hand is a philosophical, psychological and aesthetical concept which may refer to almost anything relating to desire-driven production of mental images, thus a theoretically diverse concept, unproblematically used in everyday language but insufficient in a revolutionary vocabulary – "power to the imagination" and similar. Most of the surrealists that speak theoretically about magic tend to mean that imagination is an obvious element in human actions and being while magic actualises it in a specific connection, often connected with a tradition of naturale philosophy, or the child's wish-based perception of the world, or so-called primitive cultures etc; including Breton (L'Art magique), Bataille, Carrington, Colquhoun, Paz, Alleau, Chazal, etc.

Madder Love

In surrealism it has been relevant to talk quite a lot about sexuality, but many of these discussions has a lot to benefit from paying attention to discussions elsewhere about it in the past decades. For example, the concepts of "queer" are a bit of a revelation to the discussion about sexuality, which highlight certain things that are innate in the dynamics of desire and which are traditionally addressed but in a largely intuitive way in surrealism. Thus, I think the conjunction of surrealism and queer is crucial nowadays. Queer theory and the queer movement have made explicit several issues that were always essential to surrealism, sometimes in a way which clearly deviates from the more surrealist potential of the topic, sometimes in a way that has radical implications that surrealism might need to learn as new. Surely, surrealism and queer are natural allies in the struggle against neoconservative-christian core family ideology, sexual obscurantism and sexual hypocrisy, and in the exploration of the vast field of possibilities beyond normality, convention and fixed identities. Many concerns are shared or analogous, others divergent or simply irrelevant to each other. At the crossroad of these various concerns, I think that Peter Dubé's anthology Madder Love, about the conjunction of surrealism and male queer fiction, is highly interesting already from highlighting the conjunction it claims to explore.

 
Dubé himself is the only author in the book with anything like an active involvement in surrealism and a good knowledge about surrealism, and his introduction is the only text in the book which is not fictional. It is not a surprise then that this introduction provides the most useful clues to the sense of overlap between queer and surrealism, being one of the texts in the book that felt most original as well as most personal; bringing up all the basic motivations and concerns and complications, offering the example of himself as a case study along with certain necessary distinctions and reservations. There are definitely many questions which are still just breached upon ever so lightly, but it is more easy to identify them standing out between questions that have been discussed. Dubé emphasises the way in which surrealism and queer both are faithfully founded in and emphasising desire, both as a point of departure in itself and as the arena or watchword for the transformation of the self and the world alike, processes that go hand in hand, and not the least through the cultivation of heterogenity and nonconformism, beyond conventions and against family, religion, law and order.
    Rather too easily Dubé admits and echoes any criticism of prejudices on Breton's behalf, though, as a surrealist, only to get on to the point that the radical core of Breton's thought lies elsewhere and is what matters in the end (many of these issues of prejudice are real and should be recognised, but the superficial and categorical form in which the accusations are part of art history "general knowledge" today are very misleading, and anyway primarily used as arguments against surrealism or Breton on the whole, rather than as examples of contradictions with particular historical reasons within the manifestations of surrealism, which may have planted some obstacles but hardly affected the general direction of the inner dynamics of the movement).
    One thing which Dubé does not bring up, as he bases his comparison on his personal example, is the fundamental ground shared between surrealism and queer on the theoretical level, not just through the emphasis on heterogenity and transformation, but on the problematisation (or deconstruction, if you will) of normality: there is nothing naturally given and obvious about what is considered normal, the normal is always just a chosen narrow portion of the spectrum of possibilities, which always has its specific causal origins, its specific historic circumstances, and its ideological reasons for being emphasised. Concerning sexuality and love, on the theoretical level, it was definitely Sigmund Freud that provided concepts and explanations for much of how this occurs. After him, surrealism investigated one level of the consequences of this, while remarkable empirical studies cementing the foundations were provided by enquiries as diverse as that of Alfred Kinsey and that of Michel Foucault. Nowadays, the more philosophical formulations by writers like Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze are very popular.
    Then the stories. Interesting, with good and bad surprises. Taken all together, neither answering my questions nor all that convincing. But still unusually interesting for a literary anthology, of course... Indeed a lot of the included texts were very readable, fun and enjoyable, but very few I percieved as immediately moving for the spirit, and most added little or very little to highlighting particular possibilities of the conjunction of the two terms of the theme.
    The exceptional piece of the book was Stephen Beachy's, which succeeded in establishing a very strange atmosphere in a loosely coherent odd world of certain associative connections that seemed a bit random but obsessive; an un-pre-meditated poetry emerging from the weaving of the fantasies, in a way that I perceive as immediately surrealist and trust as undoubtedly productive. There were some elements that were recognisable as traditional gay fetishes, but they seemed to be mere associations that had been internalised as parts of the rules of the games in the personal mythology governing this strange world, rather than identity markers or (sub-)cultural markers. The way this personal mythology assembled all kinds of elements that seemed unexpected or random to the reader but absolutely necessary according to the unusual inner logic of the story, gave it a certain "suchness" of the special kind usually found in outsider art...
    I also much appreciated the ambitious experiments of Tom Cardamone and Craig Laurance Gidney, who determinedly set out to investigate certain particular regions of the imagination – much more convincing in the beautiful miniature by Cardamone (an instructive exercise in bachelardian material fantasy), less convincing but commendable and fun in Gidney.
    Of the remaining contributions, though different in terms of formal/stylistic genre, and in quality, I was very surprised to see so much convergence. It just seemed to me that most of the contributions in the book were based in a particular approach in terms of method: they were all built on a certain kind of exaltation of memory fragments of sexual encounters, disconnecting rather than connecting individual strong images of strong sensual/sensory details, mixed with scattered stream-of-consciousness associations and with a battery of usually unsurprising metaphors highlighting the erotic content, musing over these memory fragments with an obvious feeling of nostalghia (often combining tough attitude with sentimentality), and with a definitive collage aesthetic, sometimes very filmic and sometimes more literary-proustian.
    Of all the different stories that I roughly group as displaying these characteristics, Dubé's own was the one I liked best, and it had a bit of coherence-generating mechanism going in the metonymical pulsating between the photograph and the memory images around it, with some strong and/or unexpected images providing flaring beacons. Others like the manneristic porn of Sven Davisson (or the softer variety of Shaun Levin), or the pretentious rhetoric of Jeffery Beam, and others, I was completely unimpressed by.
    Ok, Boyer and Killian do not conform to this at all, and were really fun, but it's not obvious to me what they have to do with either of the terms of the theme (perhaps it's just something I miss...).
    Nevertheless, this particular angle that I find so many contributions coming from, seems very Beat to me, and, like Beat, in general very urban, American, masculine, posturing, verbose, self-conscious, rather deliric, underground, streetwise, dirt-containing, sex-focused, at best lyrical, associative, sensuous; ok I see how this can be one relevant idiom for writing gay fiction. But wherein would the opening towards surrealism lie? The general points made in the introduction are relevant. But based on these particular examples, I see less of such obvious surrealist aspects. Ok, there is something that makes you think of Bataille about it all too. The themes of transgression, of erotic overdetermination, of expenditure, of celebrating low materialism. Is this the connection with surrealism? Bataille is a rich and ambiguous writer whose approaches can be used from very different viewpoints; a surrealist Bataille is a particular Bataille. (Swedish radical-conservative gay catholic anarchist publicist Bo Cavefors – a hero in his publicist deed but quite confused theoretically and politically – once wrote about the "cock" in Bataille's writings, and I almost wondered whether he had read Bataille at all, I know of few writers with so little "cock" as Bataille, who keeps on his eternal celebration of the wound, the pain, the abyss, the existential exaltation of everything before this abyss, the masochist vertigo of letting everything go but in the sadean manner of staying at the edge and talking ceaselessly about it, and thus metonymically if you will then perhaps the ass, but hardly cock...) And what about Burroughs? Is he an important figure in these connections or not? I was personally into industrial music before I turned to surrealism so sure, I'm an old fan, and I do see surrealist aspects of Burroughs, but far more in his paranoia, especially the paranoic-critical image transformation series (often with a certain focus on sexual images) but probably also in his mindboggling metaphysical paranoia, than in his "low materialism" or his eroticism. Beat is clearly not surrealism, and very few (such as Ted Joans) have managed to bridge the gap, Bataille was a surrealist but most of the contemporary use of his theories and of his name is from clearly other viewpoints than the surrealist one, Burroughs was not at all a surrealist but is relevant to surrealism if we emphasise the surrealist aspects.
    And reading the authors presentations (indeed a small section of the book) feels, admittedly far more than reading the stories themselves, as the regular bundle of common misunderstandings of surrealism, gratefulness for spontaneity and weirdness to have released a productivity in purely literary terms. Is it only the uneducated general public who still equals surrealism with Salvador Dalí, while younger people who are into culture nowadays usually cannot distinguish it from collage aesthetics in general, William Burroughs, David Lynch, John Cage, psychedelic indie, sexual excess, odd Science Fiction? and so will not be able to distinguish surrealism from any pop-culture extremism, or twisted beat-style, or western mysticism, or industrial music/extreme-goth aesthetics, or retro-modernism, or whatever they are already doing? And by distinguish I'm not saying it is some specific boundaries of surrealism that need to be guarded, but a distinctness in overall aims and above all atmosphere that can't be compromised without missing the point, perhaps above all the trust in poetry to emerge from the unknown...
    But I really wonder, this particular pattern that I've been seeing in the stories, is it something significant of a common strain within the established field of "gay fiction" in general, or is it on the other hand specifically what writers in the gay fiction scene come to think of when they think about surrealism? Is it what they usually do, or is it a specific phantom that has emerged? Of course, I'm quite clueless here as I don't really have a notion of what is going within this gay fiction field; surely an established field, it surely has a bunch of conventions and a bunch of inner contradictions and a bunch of diverging or aberrant tendencies... It makes me really curious as to how the anthology was assembled: were the individual works themselves chosen, or a certain number of writers invited to contribute whatever they chose, or was an invitation circulated in a wider circle?
    On the other hand, much of my consternation with this material may have little to do with the particular context, and it may be various things that I feel baffled about merely since I read very little contemporary on-the-cultural-market prose whatsoever, and this is perhaps the only anthology of contemporary short stories outside the surrealist movement that I will read this decade... It is not just propaganda but probably very often true when the surrealists say that it is easier for "ordinary people" to grasp and practice surrealism than it is for people who come from cultural circles. Surrealism is dependent on that particular abandonment , that particular break with the concerns of the literary purpose. Otherwise it'll easily become mere exercise in style, perhaps focusing on nostalghia for a particular Paris interwar sense of urbanism and adventure, which easily becomes a facet of postwar American beat sensibility...
    Yet, in the restatement of the existence/potentiality/urgency of this particular field, and perhaps also in the unseen atmosphere ripe with fetishistic constellations of an opaque personal mythology in Beachy, and suggestions of certain particular movements of the imagination in Cardamone, or emerging from a distance after having read and reacted to all the text on the petty level of being texts... a reply of sorts, after all, to my questions, or kindred questions.

M Forshage

Remarkable richness of reality

Horror cinema and surrealism

Partial in favour of horror? To this crime I plead guilty. Friends of mine have noted that I will seek out and enjoy odd remarkable scenes and atmospheres even in such movies that are quite obviously poorly done, poorly held together, largely banal, or quite despicable. There is an important overall lesson hidden here, in that surrealist appropriation of cinema is shamelessly hedonistic in the sense that it focuses on anything that manifests and stimulates the poetic spirit, regardless of the quality of the craft, the smartness and brilliance, the cultural value, sociological interpretations, deconstructivist interpretations, deliberate populism, cult value or irony. On the other hand, the banalities I happily endure for the sake of these scattered moments and aspects are dependent on my selective affinity for this particular genre – confronted with the same level of banality in action or science fiction, or especially comedy or porn, it won't take me many minutes to give up the waiting for moments of poetic productivity, which are probably there in those genres too.

Nevertheless, I will argue that horror is one of the major forms of popular surrealism. It very often represents that necessary fundamental break with realist conventions, both in literature, film and other media, and in life experience. Indeed, in life experience such realist conventions are even more stifling than in fiction, by reducing everything to a banal version decided by the least common denominator, represented by the least ambitious or hopeful reconstruction of a normality, denying all deep ambiguity, the complex sum of possibilities and determinations, the entire sphere of the unknown... This entire sphere of unusual events, overdetermined and multilayered reality, significant chance, adventure and radical doubt, calling all conventional consensus views and all lazy dull habit into question, is typically labelled as "supernatural", and, wherever the contrast becomes acute with the conventional reductive interpretation of things and thus the strategy of habitual work-consumption-rest treadmill, as "horrifying". So all of this fiction, the popular representations of this entire sphere of events, the popular imagination about its implications, are typically grouped together under the heading of "horror".

It must be admitted that genre conventions abound in horror cinema too, and a glaring lack of imagination is often all too obvious, but there is also a remarkable breadth of subverting, ignoring and going beyond these conventions, both in low budget fan flicks and big hollywood productions. If fantasy and science fiction seem to have to a larger extent frozen in genre conventions than horror, those two genres have somewhat less surrealist potential in that they typically play in more static "other" worlds, which are very often mere allegories or mere displacements of highly conventional quasirealist-sentimentalist drama into exotic settings and exotic makeup. In contrast, horror typically focuses on the transitions-breakthroughs-ambiguities with the "normal" world of our everyday experience, therefore potentially pedagogic-subversive as to the real exploration of such breaks/portals in real life.

This is something which horror has in common with surrealism, which typically also focuses on such convergence points characterised by ambiguity and poetic productivity. It is this inclusive-integrative-dynamic sense of reality which is a fundament of surrealism, making up the simple etymological sense of its "over-reality" as well as remaining one of the several parts of its continuous identity as historically integrating its experiences and strategies.

But what about fear? Some films make me scared, some don't the least. I think that is an aspect which is usually irrelevant for the fundamental points of horror cinema.

I will not give an overview or history of horror cinema here, nor a list of recommendations, nor a delineation-comparison with horror in other genres such as literature and comics. I will discuss some central aspects of horror cinema from the surrealist viewpoint. In an objective manner – yet inevitably my constellation of emphases will be personal.

The real strangeness of things around us

The basic convergence of surrealism and horror has its growth medium in the weird goings-on in everyday life, in the paranoid-type vigilance triggered by them and enhancing them, the willful or resistant abandoning to the attention towards the unusual, weird and potentially strongly meaningful in the world. This is about all the unusual possibilities conventionally overlooked, all the uncanny atmospheres conventionally denied or rushed through. If some horror movies still tend to lean towards on one hand stark rationalisations (it was all just a scheme carefully orchestrated to scare someone) or to bland psychologisations (it was all just imagination), it is far more common to retreat to a kind of loose piecemeal extra-scientific ideology: ghosts, spirits, powers, the supernatural – but what is that? Just a class of interpretations, ranging from lame rationalisations to imaginative mythologisations, of manifestations of the unusual and unknown in everyday life.

It is one of the main points of surrealism to not deny the unusual phenomena and their dynamism, but still reject all these more or less religious poor explanations, avoid succumbing to premature rationalisations. In the movies, let them go on with their fairytale concepts, they're not fooling us, we know that the dynamism of weird happenings, chance and significant casual events is an aspect of life itself, and such a dynamism can be remarkably effectively simulated and savoured in the particular fiction of the horror movie. It contributes to teaching us to see. It orchestrates and emphasises those poetic atmospheres where everything is hanging in suspense and anything seems possible, the moments of the surreal. On the most simple level this is obvious in films of hauntings; all these haunted houses, the poltergeists, the insistent messages and the chaotic disturbances. It's partly very banal, still often very effective, sometimes orchestrating a liberation of the anti-utilitarian, fetishistic or just poetic surrealist sense of the object, sometimes luminous juxtapositions, constellations of things, true poetic images, classic surrealist assemblage. A literally convulsive beauty is sometimes achieved in the very "over-the-top" absurdness of many stories; where strange events and convergences, personal tragedies and emotions are so densely accumulated together with the unfettered expressionism of blood and gore (for this particular line, Re-animator (1985) remains a centerpiece). In a way this is the old formula of Walpolian Gothic, plausible human reactions to implausible courses of events, the mechanics of the mind encountering the world of inclusiveness where anything is possible, the so-called paranormal or maybe the surreal. Yes, on an aesthetical level, this is clearly a kind of expressionism, but since surrealism is not an aesthetic it doesn't mind employing other aesthetics for its purposes...

Another particular point is very strong in 70s horror movies, when theatrical conventions are long abandoned but conventions of realist cinema are still not adapted; the filmmakers have the means to tell a story realistically yet they refuse for the sake of the uncanny atmospheres. They just need to take the time to zoom in on the weird details, to allow extended moments of suspense between lines of dialogue, between action and reaction, between moments, to just skip some of rationalisations or uninteresting details. Neither the directing nor the acting achievements strive primarily to give us some illusion of reality (which is just conventional anyway), but primarily to create atmospheres. This is why the much denigrated Boogey-man (1980) is such a gem, and one of the several reasons why Dario Argento is the greatest horror director today is that he has retained much of this non-realistic storytelling since the 70s.

The notion of atmosphere is partly vague – we typically connect it with situations, we may connect it with persons and objects, we definitely connect it with place. As connected to place can also be a point of convergence between horror and surrealism. The sense of "soul" of place, a sort of intense significance which can be experienced at a particular geographically located nexus, is of course what is in horror quickly interpreted as hauntings.

But it is not just haunted houses, be they the classic mansions, ruins or hospitals, or modern office buildings, factories, garages, tunnels and basements; one can find explorations of such creepy or uncanny atmospheres also in forest glades, beaches, corn fields, old trees, mountains, lakes and bogs, boats, metro systems, open squares, etc – any such place which may be associated with such an atmosphere in real life. (But that old mansion does remain a privileged place; I can't say 60s classics like The Haunting (1963) and The Innocents (1961) have lost any of their direct appeal – and modern examples like, say, Darkness (2002), The Haunting in Connecticut (2009), House of Voices (2004), Saint-John's Wort (2001), The Orphanage (2007), remain so exciting regardless of the various particular deficiencies in the scripts.) What the specific historic factors are that make these places abandoned or obsolete yet charged with meaning and unresolved conflicts varies, and will contribute much to the interpretation and less to the experience.

There are many horror films which are "site-specific" in that they probably really are the product of someone having visited a creepy place, noting "geeze, this place is scary, someone ought to make a horror movie here", and actually having gone ahead and done it. Such films (two random examples picked from the pile: Death Tunnel (2005) of an American haunted sanatorium and Catacombs (2007) of the Parisian catacombs) can actually be seen as a neighboring subgenre of the surrealist documentary-style poetic exploration of atoposes and abandoned sites. They just wanted to convey the real atmosphere of the place, and chose to do it through the piece of fiction it inspired in them.

Those depths of the minds

What is called "psychological horror" is often effectively cultivated in cinema, and also often makes sense from a surrealist perspective. Again, we may not always consider it to be scary, and we may not consider it to be a deviation from a desirable normality, but instead we may see it as more or less admirable, inspiring and informative manifestations of the real ambiguity of things and the actual accessibility of the unknown. The very paranoid-type vigilance connected with the noticing of the unusual details or the atmosphere of place, typically sooner or later leads to some kind of questioning of the self, or rather of that self-righteous phantom which is the supposed monolithic detached integrative distinct individual person. To what extent does the creative mind participate in forming the reality we perceive as external? To what extent do others partipicate in the processes we regard as our own thinking? To what extent do parts represented within us have not just distinct interests from each other, but also different modes of perception and lines of reasoning, to what extent do they have secrets from each other?

Faced with unusual enough events, most people, in a horror film like in everyday life, will ask "Am I going mad?". But doesn't madness then just become a type of hastened rationalisation, just like it was to invoke "spirits", "ghosts" or "forces"? Is just losing control, losing illusion of control, which is the scary thing, or does it have to trigger a particular acute contradiction? And the often fairly obvious psychoanalytical interpretations we can cook up – just because we can point out patterns and mechanisms that will account for the type of phenomena manifested, they nevertheless remains toothless in accounting for the very dynamism of their phenomenology. (Freud just started breaching this didn't he?) But from a surrealist viewpoint it is arguably this phenomenology and its poetic productivity which is the starting point. The worlds they invite us to, how these are included in the field of possibilities. For philosophers, such basic questions are cerebral exercises; for children, madmen and poets they are undetermined and flesh-real: Are my parents actually evil monsters? Is it all a conspiracy? Is someone hiding under my bed? Are they all dead? Am I dead? Do we embody mythological forces and play out some grand drama we don't understand? Was it I who killed my friend? Is it I who am the monster?

The beyond

Parts of this, questioning the delimitation of the self and the mind, have already started looking out at more vast perspectives. And this is perhaps another aspect of horror, the "beyond" – that which far exceeds our understanding and our schemes, Lovecraftian horror, the overwhelming. Perhaps this is an element where it is not possible to do as I have done so far, to calmly claim that surrealism and horror are interested in all the same things, only surrealism wouldn't necessarily care if they are scary or not and may in fact possibly regard the fear as merely a simple reaction against losing control when faced with the unusual – be it pleasureable or not, be it childish for proving the existence of such thresholds or admirable for being a symptom of the seriousness of the contradiction. For if the overwhelming is calmly savoured or sprightly investigated, it seems like it maybe wasn't really overwhelming, but either just an aspect of poetic hedonism in general, or something we have categorised in advance. And indeed, this perhaps remains one of the fundamental differences between religion and poetry, whether one is happy with fitting those glimpses of the strongest psychic dynamism into a traditional and socially utilisable rationalisation, or letting them remain unexplained and dynamic. Sometimes just a bit too dynamic. Difficult to handle. The centrifugal force, the vertigo – the shards of everything broken in the process...

This can be things that are just far too big, too close or too rich, as in a fit of fever or a drug trip. It can also be those situations where it is simply not possible to understand the motives of everybody else, simply not possible to communicate with them. This is when the paranoia has become not just a method but a full framework which paradoxically creates a thick transparent film between oneself and the rest of the world; it has such a wealth of meaning that it isn't possible to grasp, it isn't possible to interact with in some way which makes sense to oneself. This may be cosmic schemes, alien elder races, or it may be, as in those settings which are maybe the most scary of all; those that are very close to the common alienated interactions of our everyday life, in the streets, in the shops, at work and at school, and especially at home. All the modern zombie films, no hope, no communication, and all the most horrifying family drama, with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) as the unsurmountable portal star. Such critique of the family is an example of the sometimes very sharp or profound social criticism in horror. That aspect might be interesting and enjoyable, but again, just like the manifold forms of black humour, and, I dare argue, fear itself, is probably not among the central points making up the attraction of the genre itself.

The body the monster

Finally, to return to another perhaps solidly surrealist point which is indifferent to fear and focuses on poetic phenomenology, there is the monster. The unusual creature, the physical exception, the individual whose being expresses its deviation and strangeness, the body turned image and image turned flesh; the central horror hero.

The transformations into these strange creatures, both physically and mentally, both the ontogenetic metamorphosis and the possession or the empathy, in whichever form, the transformation remains a fundamental trope of poetic phenomenology. (Bachelard's discussion of the animalness in Lautréamont is a classical discussion of this that makes much sense to horror cinema). The metamorphosis in itself; the unfolding of viscera and skin into strange new shapes, these fragments and suggestions of insects, of genitals, of larvae, of trees, of ferocious beasts, of dinosaurs, all the morphological gore.

Monsters are fantasies in physical shape, and they are mythology in its irreducible parts. Strange beings. In this the two categories of monster and superhero often overlap, at least with the classical "film monsters" and the Marvel comic book monsters of the 70s, or with many of the present-day antiheroes, paranormal investigators etc. I've been so impressed by the constellation of moving physical manifestations of weird fates in 13 Ghosts (2001) specifically as a superhero group, and film monsters like Freddie Krueger and Pinhead the Cenobite are commonly recognised as either superheroes or some kind of rockstars. Clearly, with classic literary monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein's monster, just like with modern comics mascots like Hulk and Hellboy, it is very existential, about monster-being; the phenomenology of the outsider. This has a sentimentalist aspect, where one is always at the risk of giving up the dynamics by suddenly becoming accepted into the fuzzy community of the normals, and then a fairly uninteresting destructive dynamics in the resentment in realising that one wasn't fully accepted after all. More importantly, monsterdom has a shamanistic-Rimbaudian aspect, this systematic disorder in the senses, the strange series of hardships and pains and pleasures, in order too see more clearly. The poet role. One we perhaps have to approach to the extent we want to make ourselves available to all these unusual phenomena, this wide range of possibilities, this abundance of meaning, which characterises horror, and even more poetry.

Again, the surrealist potential in horror appears to have little to do with to what extent it invokes horror. The most important part is that it is a relative free zone from many realistic rationalisations and constrictions, and therefore in fact will be able to show us more of that which is actually real, and be poetically productive in much the same way as reality itself is – if we only allow it.

Mattias Forshage

(published in Patricide #3 2011)