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The point of departure in this chapter is the fundamental question of the possibility of a revolutionary art. What can writers and artists contribute to the cause of a Communist proletarian revolution? Though this may seem a very general, pragmatic, and perhaps ambitious place to start, it serves to establish the parameters of the debate in terms of Marxist cultural theory. The chapter sets out a brief account of André Breton's theory of the surrealist revolution, and sketches its possible positions in relation to the Communist revolution itself. The chapter's intention in doing this is not to rehearse a set of well-established surrealist tenets, and certainly not to retrace the movement's involvement with the Communist Party, but rather to establish the limitations of an approach based on individual or collective political engagement.

The object is central to this book's argument, and it focuses on surrealist reactions to, and production of, objects; on the way various surrealists respond to and intervene in the material world through text, painting, and particularly through the invention of the objet surréaliste. Part of the reason for such an approach is a response to the problematic relationship between theory and practice. Focusing on the object is a way of engaging with surrealist products as political in themselves, and moving beyond the political alignment of the surrealists as individuals and as a group. It allows us to test various surrealist products against the political claims made on their behalf. It is possible to read it as a crossroads of political and psychoanalytic theories, as a point on which Marxist and Freudian preoccupations, the political insight of ‘profane illumination’ and the psychological fascination of ‘le merveilleux’, converge.

This chapter deals with the complex affinities between Louis Aragon's fantastical, autobiographical, surrealist philosophical work flânerie, Le Paysan de Paris, and the unfinished Arcades Project of Walter Benjamin. It analyses the possibilities of the uncanny as a way of understanding historical as well as psychical phenomena. Le Paysan de Paris is in many ways the archetypal surrealist text. Combining autobiography and polemic in the form of a sometimes fantastical stroll through Paris's more obscure and insalubrious locations, it is the literary record of surrealism as a lifestyle. Aragon himself was already aware of the appeal of such a form. Towards the end of the text, he reproduces an ironical letter of his own to Philippe Soupault, then editor of the Revue européene in which Le Paysan de Paris was being serialised, describing his intention to present his philosophical views in this form so as not to frighten the reader off.

Surrealist theory and practice in the 1920s and 1930s was caught between two poles. In the early days of the movement, much of its activity centred on the pursuit of automatism in various forms, including the automatic writing at which Robert Desnos so dangerously excelled, as well as non-verbal forms such as the game of ‘cadavre exquis’ in which each participant added a new body part to a creature without seeing what previous players had drawn. The early issues of La Révolution surrealiste contained many accounts of actual dreams, and the general emphasis was on the completest possible elimination of all traces of rational construction from the resulting products of the creative process. The various writings of André Breton and others on the question of the object have much to reveal about the surrealists' ambivalence towards the principle of revolutionary action.

The continual play of presence and absence in surrealist objects is a function of repetition and representation, and it is in their relationship to mimesis that the multiple disavowals of those objects unfold. The starting point in this chapter is one particular, uniquely fascinating surrealist object, namely Salvador Dalí's 1933 Buste de femme rétrospectif, a work to which this chapter often returns in its analysis. The chapter proposes the fetish as a more useful critical alternative, tracing some of the many domains in which it can signify. While it would be wrong to suggest that any one theoretical notion can account for all the many, heterogeneous manifestations of surrealist activity, an extended analysis of Dalí's rétrospectif demonstrates how very helpful concepts of fetishism can be as ways of approaching surrealist uses of the object.

This chapter addresses what happens when language is introduced into the picture-quite literally-in the form of the poème-objet, which combines text with three-dimensional collage. André Breton's own practice in the domain of object creation diverges from that of Salvador Dalí and others in one crucial respect: the incorporation of language into the surrealist object. The chapter considers how Breton's own involvement with visual forms of surrealist activity is motivated by particular aims, notably that of including language in the category of phenomena to be reappraised and inscribed in a dialectic of subjective and objective forces. For in seeking to prove the materialist credentials on which surrealism's political engagement relied, Breton created a class of poème-objet in which a power struggle takes place between word and image, between concealment and display, between fetishism and sublimation.

This chapter presents the text of a lecture on the legacies of surrealism in Latin America given at the 2009 British Academy Lecture Series. This text discusses the tensions between surrealist internationalism and local cultural nationalisms, the contested relationship between surrealism and Magic Realism, and the enduring surrealist fascination with Pre-Columbian art and architecture. It analyzes the works of Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Gunther Gerzso and works of contemporary Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles. It contents that art from Latin America has flourished in recent years without claiming surrealism as an exclusive source.

Figurative sculpture had a special status within the visual universe of Surrealism. Iconographically, statues are a prominent element in the dreamlike spaces of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings of 1913–14 that so enchanted André Breton and friends after the end of the war and became among the first and most paradigmatic images associated with the movement. Statues appear in many other Surrealist paintings, including those of Salvador Dalí, where, although they might stand on plinths or pedestals, they equivocate between the appearance of inanimate and living bodies, through the impression of liquidity and putrefaction that infects all his visions. In Surrealist collages, too, bodies are often rendered equivocally sculptural through fragmentation, for instance in photographic or printed images of the female nude rendered headless or otherwise dismembered to resemble antiques, in the works of Max Ernst and others. René Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Man Ray, Pierre Boucher, Picasso, and Jean Cocteau, among others associated with Surrealism, also incorporated statuary into their paintings, drawings, and photographs.

This chapter focuses on the antecedents to the absurd. It first traces the antecedents of the absurd to the older stages of Greek theatre, and reveals that the absurd can be found in Greek tragedy, which returned to the European consciousness during the Italian Renaissance. The chapter then studies absurdity as seen in medieval drama, which featured a dramatised allegory of morality, and the works of Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift. It describes Sterne's work as ‘nonsense prose’ and reveals that Swift's ‘gloomy world’ in prose and poetry came from medieval forebears, and even had an affinity with the danse macabre tradition. The final part of the chapter examines the adoption of the ‘Romantic grotesque’ and pre-Surrealist nonsense by several popular authors, including Charles Dickens, Lewis Caroll, Nikolai Gogol and Ugo Foscolo.

This chapter examines the relationship between Verne and Surrealism. Specifically, it discusses the influence of Vern's work on the writing of Raymond Roussel; the writers and artists generally associated with the French and Belgian Surrealist movements; and the writings of the Greek Surrealists, particularly those of Andreas Embirikos.

This chapter reviews Carey's novels and stresses various aspects in the political concerns of his fiction. It identifies the main trends in Carey criticism, especially the views of Carey as a surrealist or fabulist. It notes that there has been diverse criticism in examining the post-modern playfulness and self-conscious fictionality of Carey's work. Finally, this chapter discusses the overlap between post-colonialism and post-modernism in Carey and draws conclusions about his work.

This chapter considers Guy Debord's Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade, 1952). Hurlements is a sound film without images: when someone speaks, the screen is white and filled with light; when no one speaks, the screen remains dark. Of its total running time—seventy-five minutes—only twenty minutes contain light and speech. Hurlements's original script demonstrates its indebtedness to a Lettrist film aesthetic. The mixing of original shots with pre-existing footage, as well as the painted filmstrip and sequences of pure color, explicitly recall the visual aspects of Isou's and Lemaître's films. The film's sound track traces a poetic of refusal from the Dadaists to the Surrealists and was interspersed with Lettrist sounds.

This chapter presents a highly energetic and dramatic showpiece by Joseph Schwantner. The two substantial settings of poems by the Colombian-American surrealist poet Agueda Pizarro were written for the versatile gifts of Lucy Shelton. The score also bears a message from the poet, expressing her delight at the result. Even though Schwantner has chosen to set the English translations, the music’s sparkling fluidity and elan evoke the colour and spirit of the Spanish language. There is no doubt that a high standard of musicianship is required to negotiate pitches and rhythms with seeming effortlessness. Furthermore, the musical language has an immediate appeal, with a perceptible tonal basis underlying even the most heavily embellished lines.

This chapter details events in Roland Penrose's life from 1935 to 1936. In Paris, in June 1935, Roland and Paul Éluard chanced upon precocious, intense nineteen-year-old David Gascoyne, who had recently completed his Short Survey of Surrealism. Éluard introduced the two Englishmen, who ‘got talking’ about the fact that in London, little is known about the excitement going on in Paris [in contemporary art, especially surrealism]. They then decided to organise the International Surrealist Exhibition, which marked a decisive turn in Roland's life, in that he began to allow his role as an apostle of modernism to overshadow his career as an artist. For the remainder of his life, these two sides would struggle to co-exist.

This chapter details events in Roland Penrose's life from 1936 to 1938. In July 1936, Paul Éluard pressed Roland and Valentine to join him at Mougins on the Riviera. Many other surrealists would be there, he promised, including Picasso. Roland accepted the invitation, and he and Valentine motored south at the beginning of August. Picasso was fifty-four — nineteen years older than Roland — when they met. He was already considered one of the greatest artists of the century, having produced central modernist works during his Blue Period (1901–4), Rose Period (1905–7), an African-inspired Period (1908–9), Analytic Cubist Period (1909–12), Synthetic Cubist Period 1912–19) and Classical Period (1919–30). Whether or not Picasso could be labelled a surrealist, Roland admired no other artist — living or dead — more than the Spaniard.