Greener Journal of Art and Humanities Vol. 1 (1), pp. 021-022, December 2011.

Review Article

Surrealist Movement
Dr. S. K. Singh
R. D. Foundation Group of Institutions, Near Kadrabad Police check post,
Modinagar (Ghaziabad) – 201201, U.P.

Email: shail.krs@gmail.com, Mobile: 9410116933

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the definition, its sources, merits and demerits. The French poet and critic Andre
Breton founded Surrealism, a literary and artistic movement. It was a movement in painting, sculpture and
literature. In this way, surrealism is a modern psychological concept that regards the subconscious the
state of dream. Being much chaotic in subject matter it failed. Moreover, it did not match the common
English taste. The rank and file could not comprehend it.

Key words: Surrealism, Freudian, consciousness, poetry and psychology

The poetry of the 20th century was characterized by traditional as well as experimental poetry.
Traditional poetry roughly includes the Edwardian, Georgian, W ar poetry and so on. It was based on
pastoral or homespun themes and followed a combined trend of the romantics and neo-classicists.
Experimental poetry includes Imagist poetry; Neo-Metaphysical Poetry, Surrealist Movement and Neo-
Romanticism.

Surrealism is a literary and artistic movement founded by the French poet and critic Andre
Breton. Breton published his Surrealist Manifesto in Paris in 1924 and held the view that
the irrational is the best mode of perceiving and representing reality. Surrealism
emphasized the role of the unconscious in creative activity and employed the psychic
unconscious in a more orderly and more serious manner. It was a movement in painting,
sculpture and literature. Surrealists stressed hallucination, psychotic utterance, automatic
writing and free associations. 1

Surrealism, as defined by Breton, is dedicated to revising our definition of reality. It includes

automating writing, accounts of dreams, trance, narration, poems and paintings created as a result of
random influences, art which pictured images of paradox and dream, were all devised to serve the same
fundamental purpose to change our perception of the world and hence to change the world itself. By dint
of automation they were to write whatever words came into their conscious mind. These words were
regarded as inviolable. It was believed that this free flow of thought would establish a rapport with the
subconscious mind of the readers.
The surrealist fascination with eroticism was largely a product of Freudian influence. After all,
Freud’s assertion of the central role of sexuality in human affairs could itself be seen as a direct
challenge to the rationalist assumption of the previous centuries. Firmly rooted in the subconscious,
sexuality acquired a validation which made it a major weapon in the surrealist armoury. The surrealists
make effort to express whatever passes in the subconscious, or even the unconscious, without any
control or selection by the conscious; for the surrealists, the conditions of life can and must be changed.
But this transformation must never be limited to the details of sociological and psychological reality. The
word ‘Surrealism’ was defined as a kind of automatism, by which it is intended to express verbally, in
writing or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought is dictation in the absence of all the
control exercised by the reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupation. In the Poetry of Dylan

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Greener Journal of Art and Humanities Vol. 1 (1), pp. 021-022, December 2011.

Thomas, there is surrealist influence. So his verse has always been mainly related to direct and indirect
sex-influences in love, growth and religion.

For the surrealist, art is not a simple social co-relative or a strategy for evading an insistent
reality. It is the means of provoking a fundamental revolution of the consciousness. As Aragox explains:

The vice named surrealism is the immoderate and impassioned use of stupefying image,
or rather of the uncontrolled provocation of the image for its own sake and for the element
of unpredictable perturbation and of metamorphosis which it introduces into the domain of
representation, for each image on each occasion forces you to revise the entire universe. 2

“Surrealism tries to express what is hidden in the mind by showing objects and events as seen in
dreams etc.” 3 In this way, surrealism is a modern psychological concept that regards the subconscious
the state of dream. This delirium or even madness is more real than the conscious. The declared aim of
the surrealist poets was a revolution against all restraints on the free functioning of the human mind
including the logical reason, standard morality, social and artistic conventions and the control of artistic
creation by fore thought and intention. Surrealism is not simply the striking image, the irrational phrase or
the dream like texture. It is concerned with liberating the imagination and with expanding the definition of
reality. It is not concerned with presenting the coherent rationality of irrationality which is found in Kafka.
Surrealism has the use of fantastic jokes, chance events as illumination, repudiation of rational
processes, insistence on the inwardness of truth, concern with fundamental problems of existence, use of
humour as a dialectical statement of truth.
In English literature, influence of surrealism can be found in Dylan Thomas, Henry Miller and
Thomas Pynchon. M.H. Abrams also says:

The influence, direct or indirect, of surrealist innovation can be found in many modern
writers in prose and verse who have broken with conventional modes of artistic
organization to experiment with free association, violated syntax, non-logical and non-
chronological order, dreamlike and nightmarish sequences and juxtaposition of bizarre,
shocking, or seemingly unrelated images. 4

The main fault of surrealism was that it banished from poetry all elements of mind but the one
least capable of communication. In deriving against the intellectual privacy of the poets of the school of
wit, it substituted an emotional privacy of even more enigmatical nature. Purely psychic automatism was
with flaw. It was modified later by the conscious use of symbols derived from Freudian psychology. The
meaning of surrealist art is often a secret known only to the artist’s psychiatrist. The surrealist movement
failed to make any progress as it was too chaotic in subject matter and far from the common English
taste.

REFERENCE
1
Literary Terms in Poetry ed. A.J. Sebastian and N.D.R. Chandra (Delhi : Authorspress, 2001) 216.
2
Realism: The Critical Idiom ed., John D. Jump Rapt (London: Methuen Co. Ltd., 1974) 77.
3
Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English ed. Jonathan Crowther (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997) 1203.
4
A Glossary of Literary Terms ed. M.H. Abrams (Madras: Macmillan India Ltd., 1989) 167-168.

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