The Craft of Surrealism: On Accessing the Unconscious in Our Fiction

I found literary surrealism as a young teenager by way of Anaïs Nin. I’d become obsessed, fascinated with her Cities of the Interior , which felt heightened, using surrealist imagery in the context of the erotic and the forbidden. I quickly found an identification with thoughts she expressed in The Diary of Anaïs Nin , 1931–1934: Vol. 1. In Diary 1, she wrote about surrealism as a way to believe in the “the cult of mystery, the evasion of false logic. The cult of the unconscious as proclaimed by Rimbaud.” She explained, “It is not madness. It is an effort to transcend the rigidities and the patterns made by the rational mind.” Part of me disagreed with Nin—surrealism did depend on a willingness to allow for what seemed mad or eccentric, the dreamlife, to sit side by side with the mundane, as coequal forms of understanding, and not as ways of transcending reality, but as ways of getting deeper into what being in the world feels like. No sooner did I read that than I picked up Rimbaud from the library, and then Breton and somewhere along the way, Baudelaire. Surrealist painters Yves Tanguy, Rene Magritte, Salvador Dalí and Leonora Carrington—and Odilon Redon, a symbolist—became interesting not long after. What all of these writers and artists were tapping into that interested me was the unconscious—how to manifest that into literature and the arts what was accessed in a space nobody else could see struck me as a kind of lifeline to self. Most of living as a brown immigrant kid seemed like an illusion; many people I met were not what they seemed, their words didn’t always match what was happening, and keeping sorted my different cultures with their different logics, different languages, took a labor that made me feel like none of those systems could be considered fundamental or more crucial than inner life about which little was spoken. The irrational and disjointed and dreamy take up more room in our inner geographies than the part of consciousness that squarely meets logic or any external systems. On the […]

Click here to view original page at The Craft of Surrealism: On Accessing the Unconscious in Our Fiction

© 2024, wcadmin. All rights reserved, Writers Critique, LLC Unless otherwise noted, all posts remain copyright of their respective authors.