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In his 1935 A Short Survey of Surrealism, David Gascoyne (2000) denies that there is a “recipe” for surrealist output. Even though Breton (1969: 29–32) appears to set out

“Secrets of the Magical Surrealist Art,” Gascoyne (2000: 59) points out that both the tone of this sub-heading and the instructions that follow it are somewhat tongue-in-cheek and “should not be taken too seriously.” Nevertheless, surrealism is as accessible to stylistic analysis as any sort of literary text; in the rest of this chapter I will outline the main techniques of surrealist writing, even though such an approach would be condemned by the surrealists as “academicism” (Richter 1964: 194).

The first method that Breton (1969: 29) describes is the first method of both Dada and surrealism: automatism. In early experiments, the author tries to empty his or her mind of any preconceptions or conscious images or ideas, in order to allow as direct a passage to unconscious intuition as possible. The object was then to write down this stream of images and propositions as fast and unthinkingly as possible. Pure automa-tism should not involve any editing, redrafting or even semi-conscious shaping of the material as it pours from the pen. The idea is that the writer should be as surprised by the output as anyone else.

This free association is what distinguishes psychic automatism from the “stream-of-consciousness” technique in contemporary modernist writers like James Joyce, accord-ing to Breton (1969: 298–9). The difference lies in the presence of a sense of wilful imitation (on the part of the artist) as opposed to the absence of any wilful inten-tionality (on the part of the surrealist experimental researcher). Gascoyne (2000: 94) characterises these early experiments as belonging to the “passive or subjective” phase of research, in which he includes psychic “automatism, spontaneous and ‘pure’ poetry, and the idea of the synonymity of poetry and dream.”

It quickly became obvious, however, that such absolutely free association was almost impossible to sustain. Marcel Duchamp aimed at a similar effacement of intention in his “readymades” – accidentally found objects that were then placed into exhibitions and galleries (his 1917 upturned urinal, entitled Fountain, is the most famous of many such recontextualisations that persist as installations in art to the present day). This literal self-effacement aimed at the evasion of aesthetics:

A point that I want very much to establish is that the choice of these “ready-mades” was never dictated by aesthetic selection. The choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste . . . in fact a complete anaesthesia.

(Marcel Duchamp quoted in Young 1981: 26) However, Duchamp abandoned the attempt at automatism when he realised that one part of his mind was surreptitiously shaping what he was writing and making. In 1962 he wrote to Hans Richter, “When I discovered ready-mades I thought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada [New Realism and Pop Art] they have taken my ready-mades and found aesthetic beauty in them” (Richter 1964: 207–8).

THE SURREALIST EXPERIMENTS WITH LANGUAGE

Other methods for the effacement of intention were inherited from the Dada tradi-tion: clipping words at random from newspapers, picking words at random from a hat, nominating page numbers from a dictionary, and other means were used to bypass the wilful, artistic shaping of the text in order for it to be a genuine surreal object. Later in surrealism, the practice of chainpoems became the principal method of authorial eva-sion. Here, different lines were written by different writers, often without sight of the previous contributions. Alternatively, lines were written separately and then randomly assembled and published. Or a line was written a word at a time, with the syntactic cat-egory (article, adjective, noun, verb, article, adjective, noun) specified, such as “The winged vapour seduces the locked bird,” “A corset in July is worth a horde of rats,”

“Faithful as a boneless cat” (reported by Gascoyne 2000: 66). Issues 9 and 10 of La Révolution Surréaliste in October 1927 introduced these techniques with many exam-ples of its product. One of the first such poetic lines (“Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau”: The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine) gave its name to the activity.

Further “Exquisite corpse” chainpoems involved writers who were disparate geo-graphically as well: the American Charles Henri Ford returned to New York from Paris on the outbreak of the war and established (with Breton’s approval) the literary magazine View, which was initially surrealist. His “international chainpoems” include the following Anglo-American Chainpoem:

The leaf knows sorrow in this time of thorns, Red-gold the country’s treasure cropped by sword, A gale of bristles blown across the land.

On days when playing for safety spits out blood and stone, And evenings when white revolver, exhalation of the trees, Smokes mist across the mouth, men take the signposts down, Frozen to the north of the time-cropped town.

Sucking the berry’s map, they curse the fired seed No noose can amnesty nor eyelid truncheon, For they have crossed their rubicons of blood.

The terrible thunder crushes autumn’s insects!

The twisting eyes on the stalks of rue and reed Show Europe’s laugh! Europe’s pearl rope of death Her kings dangle to the masses from imperial fingers.

(assembled by Charles Henri Ford 1945) The first stanza here is by British poets: Scottish academic James Findlay Hendry, English painter Conroy Maddox, art critic Robert Melville, editor Nicholas Moore, editor John Bayliss, poet Mary Woodman and her husband the novelist Henry Treece, several of whom were members of the Birmingham Surrealist group. The second stanza features American poets: line by line, View’s co-editor Parker Tyler, John Hastings, Troy Garrison, H.R. Hays, Robert Friend, Harry Roskolenko and Elgar Houghton.

PETER STOCKWELL

Where early surrealist chainpoems were assembled “blind” by writers composing a line in isolation or half-blind by only seeing the previous line on a folded-up piece of paper, this example from the war years was passed on in its entirety so that each writer had a cumulatively longer prior text to work with. This can be seen in the relative consistency of the apocalyptic theme in the subject-matter, by lexical choices from coherent semantic fields of autumn, countryside and violent death, and by some of the textual cohesion (such as the echoing of “cropped,” the semantic connections between “noose” and “dangle,” and the rhymes “down”/“town,” “seed”/“reed”). It is perhaps also striking, given the historical context and geography, that the British stanza has a resigned and calm, stoical tone, while the American one is more violent and exclamatory.

Such assembled works represent the later, more actively participatory phase of sur-realism. This was to make a virtue out of the necessity recognised by Duchamp (above) and others that intention – even unconscious wilfulness – was impossible to evade.

Instead, the surrealists shifted the workings of intention to a sort of transcendental quality of the actual world: phenomena that you perceive as pointedly co-incidental, serendipitous, ironically juxtaposed or poignantly, comically or tragically accidental were in fact evidence of the objective chance by which you were seeing the genuine workings of the world untrammelled by your bourgeois rationalist delusions. Just as Freudian “slips of the tongue” afforded access to unconscious desires, so the objective chance of the world of experience presented the viewer with access to the world’s heightened realism.

Automatic writing is no more than the re-introduction of objective chance into language, whereas objective chance is the automatic writing of fate in seemingly raw facts.

(Carrouges 1968: 272) The early readymades and anti-art objects gradually gave way to these more consid-ered and crafted forms. The technique of collage can be seen as a prototypical surrealist method in that it brings together separate elements by objective chance. Chainpoems are examples of the collage technique, and in a related way so are the clippings of newspapers, posters and flyers assembled by artists like Kurt Schwitters, whose objects stand as a blend of literary text and art object. Unusual collocations of words, phrases, registers or textual layout were all examples of the collage technique in the service of objective chance.

The surrealists’ commitment to the literal in their conception of objective chance encompassed both their stylistic experiments and their perception of reality. In 1938, the Spanish surrealist Oscar Dominguez threw a glass and blinded fellow artist Victor Brauner. However, seven years earlier, Brauner had painted a self-portrait in which he is shown blinded by an object with a letter “D” on it. Such connections were grasped by the surrealists as empirical evidence of underlying patterns in the mechanics of reality.

THE SURREALIST EXPERIMENTS WITH LANGUAGE

In order actively to participate in and record such experiences and events, the paranoic-critical method was developed, largely in the hands of Salvador Dali. That which the rational world calls “paranoia” is actually an unconscious linkage of aspects of life that are not rationally connected but which are surreally connected. Dali’s method, enthusiastically endorsed by Breton, was to place two or more objects in deliberate dissonance with each other. His most famous surreal object is perhaps the lobster telephone, which demonstrates one outcome of the method. In this surreal object, a standard black working 1930s bakelite telephone has a realistic plaster lobster in place of the handset.

It is clear that the dissonant collocation is an extension of the collage technique.

Gascoyne (2000: 59) describes this method as “the fusion of two mutually distinct realities.” The lobster telephone is an example of a semantic anomaly in our rational world, which would be expressed linguistically as a xenonym (the opposite of a syno-nym); in a surreal perception, the synonymy and naturalness of the object would be understood in a sudden, shocking moment, which Breton (1991) termed “convulsive beauty.” The final line of his 1928 novel Nadja reads: “Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all” (Breton 1928). It is clear from this formulation not only that sur-realism has an aesthetics and an ethics, but that they are collapsed together. Further-more, the moment of surreal consciousness is a one-off moment of shock: it cannot be repeated with the same surreal object or image. The lobster telephone, the dissonant xenonymy of accidents in a chainpoem, the urinal in the art gallery and the sound poem at a literary evening are all only singularly convulsive. Just as with Duchamp’s realisation (above) that his objects could only convulse the viewer once, Hans Richter (1964: 208) records a talk given by Roger Shattuck in which he points out that a work of art (a Picasso or a Cézanne) can be appreciated repeatedly, indeed it gains in the process of appreciation. Dada and surrealist objects, however, become only ordinary objects once they have been beheld; “the (anti-) artistic value they used to possess has gone back to zero.”

I am not entirely sure that this is absolutely true. It may be the case that surrealist objects – such as poems and novels – cease to be ideologically surrealist after their initial moment of convulsive beauty, and thereafter become art objects (contrary to surrealist intentions). However, I do not think their value even as instruments of cog-nitive dissonance and disturbance returns altogether to zero. Not only do the activities of re-reading and systematic analysis increase the sense of richness of those objects, but in the process new, more subtle and ever more surprising effects are brought above the level of consciousness. I have seen Dali’s lobster telephone several times, and it retains its oddity – it does not become less odd on reflection. It increases its humorous effect every time I think of it, and the fact that Dali set the lobster’s penis in the mouthpiece position does not become less disturbing the more you think about using the telephone as an actual telephone.

Similarly, the following lines from Hugh Sykes Davies do not become ordinary, easier to resolve or thematically simpler even on a multiple re-reading.

PETER STOCKWELL

It doesn’t look like a finger it looks like a feather of broken glass It doesn’t look like something to eat it looks like something eaten

It doesn’t look like an empty chair it looks like an old woman searching in a heap of stones [. . .]

It doesn’t look like a finger it looks like a feather with broken teeth

(Sykes Davies 1938) Indeed an analysis in which the semantics of plesionymy (near but peculiar synonymy) can be traced through the text (see Stockwell 2000) serves only to increase the appre-ciation of the poetic mechanics of paranoia and disturbance in the text. This is a good example of a dissonant clash between a syntactic form that looks like someone striving for clarity and a semantic content that resists coherence. Surrealism is the depiction of thought rather than the communication of thoughts, but readers find it almost impossible not to treat the language we encounter as communicative. It is the read-erly attempt to resolve this mismatch between appearance and content that generates the convulsive moment, and I think that ever closer attention simply re-iterates and renews that sensation. I have argued elsewhere (Stockwell 2009) that literary emotion is not fake emotion nor fictional emotion, but real emotion that is simply understood to have a literary motivation, and the argument applies to the re-enactments that are real surreal experiences.

Such deliberate category-mixing is a characteristic of surrealist writing. The cat-egories might be from different linguistic levels or features, such as between syntax and semantics in the Sykes Davies example; or the clash might be between differ-ent collaged registers, as here where journalistic report is interspersed with idiomatic exclamations:

Nobody said Apples for nearly a minute – I thought I should die.

Finally, though, the second sardine From the end, on the left,

Converted a try.

(It brought down the house) [. . .]

People agreed not to notice.

The band played a little bit louder.

It was all very British.

(Smith 1936) The effect is firstly a sense of confusion, as almost any reader would naturally try to resolve for themselves a coherent image of a speaker of these lines, only to find that absolute consistency is not easily resolvable. My main impression of readers’ responses to this text is one of wry amusement as the disparate sources of idioms and phrases are half-recognised just as they are subverted by anomalies.

THE SURREALIST EXPERIMENTS WITH LANGUAGE

The ultimate effect, I think, is not primarily confusion but one of a rich sense of the multiplication of meaning. This incremental loading of perceptual activity is apparent most clearly in David Gascoyne’s The Very Image, which begins:

An image of my grandmother

Her head appearing upside-down upon a cloud The cloud transfixed on the steeple

Of a deserted railway-station Far away

(Gascoyne 1936a) Each subsequent stanza adds further images, and then the final stanza rolls “all these images/and many others” together and places them “in model birdcages/about six-inches high.” In a brief analysis, Germain (1978) describes the effect:

Faced with the irrefutable incongruities, the unexpected telescoping and astonishing vividness of the images in the poem, the reader may find his mind filled with a sense of wonder, or perhaps an irritating amusement which sug-gests the images are somehow significant, even though they are obviously products of mental activities with which normal consciousness is typically unfamiliar.

(Germain 1978: 33–4) This overloading technique achieves richness by the simultaneous amplification of different levels, features and aspects of language (see an analysis of a Picasso poem that works in a similar way, in Stockwell 2003). The surrealist effect depends very largely, however, on the reader taking the surreal object seriously and literally, however devi-ant the discourse in which it is articulated. For this reason, surrealist writing tends to feature a high volume of visual, concrete, sensual and tactile evocations. For a quick illustration of several surrealist techniques, here is a complete poem by David Gas-coyne, of the London Surrealist Group.

The Cage

In the waking night

The forests have stopped growing The shells are listening

The shadows in the pools turn grey The pearls dissolve in the shadow And I return to you

Your face is marked upon the clockface My hands are beneath your hair

And if the time you mark sets free the birds

PETER STOCKWELL

And if they fly away towards the forest The hour will no longer be ours Ours is the ornate birdcage The brimming cup of water The preface to the book And all the clocks are ticking All the dark rooms are moving All the air’s nerves are bare Once flown

The feathered hour will not return And I shall have gone away

(Gascoyne 1936b) In spite of its counter-Enlightenment ideology, there is a high occurrence of Romantic and conventional high art motifs generally in surrealism. In The Cage, the pearls and birds, the forests and pools, and the brimming cup could have been found in Malory or the Gawain-poet, in Keats or Tennyson, the ornate birdcage and the air’s nerves in T.S. Eliot, but “the shells are listening” and “the feathered hour” are surreal objects.

As in much surrealist writing, there is cosmetic coherence: in this poem it is mani-fest in cohesive repetition, a consistent semantic connection between nature on the one hand and domesticity on the other, and a simple assertive unmodalised clausal syntax. However, like the surrealist examples throughout this chapter, this naturalism and ordinariness is populated by vagueness and disturbing juxtapositions. There is a

“brimming” profusion of sound, noise (“all the clocks”) and shadows, and a lack of coherence between referents in succeeding sentences.

There is an underlying and highly conventional metaphor through the poem, famil-iarly expressed as “time flies,” but in this as in surrealism generally, metaphor is to be taken seriously and literally: time is feathered. Similarly, a clockface and a human face are identical, “ours” and “hours” are the same, if you wake in the night it is the night that wakes, if you listen to the sea in shells, it is they that listen. In our rational world, the two sides of a metaphor are conceptually separate; in the surreal consciousness, they are identical and can be exchanged. Such ambiguities and ambivalences, acci-dents of sense in the rational world, are merely evidence of the workings of objective chance for the surrealists. “My hands are beneath your hair” would be a gentle and erotic line in a different sort of love poem, but embedded in this anxious and paranoid context it is more literally violent and sinister.