The Surrealists [antikvár]

1 ORIGINS AND PARALLELS It was the Surrealist achievement in the early twentieth century to give a new impetus and direction to the imaginative faculty. A revolutionary mood, opposing the established order in its various forms, including the conception of 'art', found both literary and visual expression. The urge to be free of rule and restraint and to escape from what was felt to be the deadening influence of everyday reality encouraged not only an attitude of social and political defiance but a quest for the marvellous. The poets and visual artists of the movement that had its centre in Paris between the twentieth century's two world wars delighted in the unusual or impossible, fantastic and macabre effects, dream-like situations and the revelations of that source of marvel they considered the subconscious mind to be. The words surréalisme and surréaliste were the coinage of Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet-ally of the Cubists, the genius ofthe avant-garde, prolific in the creation of new categories and classifications of the arts. In 1917 when the ballet Parade was produced for the first time in Paris, combining the ideas of Jean Cocteau, the music of Erik Satie, the choreography of Massine and the designs of Picasso for curtain and costumes, Apollinaire contributed notes to the programme in which he described the production as 'a kind o{sur-réalisme'. By this he seems to have wished to give a further stress to Cocteau's description of Parade as a ballet réaliste, rather than to contradict it. Apollinaire implied an ability to convey a heightened sense of reality. Though he only in a vague way presaged a new spirit in the work, the contrast between the giant robot figures devised by Picasso and the normal proportions of the dancers from the Russian Ballet already had a novel feeling of fantasy. A little later in the same year Apolhnaire attached the description drame surréaliste to the title of his own stylized extravaganza, Les Mamelles de Tirésias. A word such as surréaliste could be loosely associated with the 'supernatural' in the special sense that Coleridge had given it in describing his part in Lyrical Ballads ; ' to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of the imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith'. Victor Hugo had spoken ofthe surnaturel not as something different from reality but as the reality normally hidden from view. But a precise definition of Surrealism was not forthcoming until André Breton produced the famous version with its ring of authority that appeared in the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924. SURREALISM, noun, masc., pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations. ENCYCL. Philos. Surreahsm is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the