Manifest(o) Destiny

Art by Sam Sebren.

I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naïveté has no peer but my own. Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen. And note how this madness has taken shape, and endured.

It’s become something of a common expression to refer to anything peculiar or odd as “surreal”, but most people have no real clue what the people who originated the idea had in mind. André Breton and his cohorts conceived of themselves as part of a revolutionary movement, revolutionaries who sought to explode old and new myths of every stripe, puncturing the self-satisfied bourgeois bubble that had come to characterize society in post–WWI France. They were avant-gardists in the purest sense of that term, artists and poets who fervently believed in the capacity for—and necessity of—forging real social change through their artwork. A significant exhibition of Surrealist works on paper is now on view at Vassar’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center through March 14.

For Breton, the key to this revolution lay in the insights of Sigmund Freud. He’d become acquainted with the practice of psychoanalysis while working as an attendant in a French hospital that treated shell shock victims. (We’d probably call it post-traumatic stress nowadays.) The very idea that locked inside each of us is an inexhaustible well of libidinal desire, imagination, and dreams (what Freud called the id) gave rise to Breton’s inspiration that the path to liberation from bourgeois propriety lay in provoking the expression of the id, breaking through the straitjacket of social rules and regulations that we’re raised with.

But how to create that breakthrough? Taking another clue from Freud, whose first noteworthy book had been The Interpretation of Dreams, the Surrealists focused on the power of the image. While most people immediately recall Salvador Dali’s melting watches at the mention of the word “Surrealism”, it began at first in language, a language always devoted to delirious images, as in the opening to Benjamin Peret’s love poem “Wink”: “Parakeets fly through my head when I see you in profile / and the greasy sky streaks with blue flashes / tracing your name in all directions.”

The power of the dream image comes from its tendency to either condense two significant images into one (a great source of hybrid figures) or to displace an otherwise unmentionable idea or object with another (you dream of a seashell instead of your mother’s vagina). The genius of the Surrealists was to use these ideas communally, exchanging dreams and ideas, breaking out of the prison of individual complacency by actively disturbing the equilibrium of the status quo as a group.