In Our Time - Surrealism

Episode Date: November 15, 2001

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss surrealism. ‘Si vous aimez L’amour, vous aimerez Surrealisme!’. If you like Love, you’ll love Surrealism! Thus was the launch of the surrealist manifesto publicised in Paris in 1924. In that document the formerly Dadaist poet André Breton defined his new movement, “Surrealism is pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express…the real process of thought. It is the dictation of thought, free from any control by reason and of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation”.Surrealism is about sex, the unconscious, repression and desire and seems to carry more than a distant echo of the Doctor from Vienna. How much was their notion of ‘pure thought’ influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud and the new technique of psychoanalysis being developed at the time? Did the surrealists manage to release the secrets and wonders of the human psyche, or was their wild foray into melting clocks, floating euphoniums and automatic writing simply a wasted journey into nonsense?With Dawn Adiss, Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex; Malcolm Bowie, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at Oxford University and a fellow of All Souls College; the psychoanalyst Darian Leader

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. If you like love, you love surrealism. If you like love surrealism. Thus was the launch of the Surrealist manifesto

published in Paris in 1924. In that document, the formerly Dada expert André Breton defined his new movement. Surrealism, he said, is pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express the real process of thought. It's the dictation of thought, free from any control by reason and of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation. Surialism claimed to be about sex, about the unconscious, repression and desire, and seems to carry more than a distant echo of the doctor from Vienna. How much was their notion of pure thought influenced by the writing of Sigmund Freud and the new technique of science, psychoanalysis being developed at the time. Did the surrealists manage to release the secrets and wonders of the human psyche,

or was there wild foray into melting watches, floating euphoniums, and automatic writing, simply a blind alley. With me to discuss surrealism and psychoanalysis is Dawn Addis, Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex, and consultant on the exhibition Surrealism, Desire Unbound, currently on show at the Tate Modern. Also here Malcolm Bowie, Marshall Foch, Professor of French Literature at Oxford University, and a fellow of All Souls College,

and the psychoanalyst, Darien leader, author of a forthcoming book, Stealing the Mona Lisa, what art stops us from seeing. Malcolm Bowie, let's start with a basic platform. Whom did the early surrealists consist of, who worked on the manifesto with Breton in the early 20s, who were they?

It's important to go back a stage from the early surrealists to the middle period duddists, if I can put it in those terms, and to see an extraordinary convergence and conflagration of talents. From Zurich came Tristan Tsara towards the 1900s.

From New York, dropping in occasionally came the enigmatic Marcel Duchamp. Eagerly awaited both of them every time they visited Paris. The people they found there towards 1920 were entre Breton and Louis Aragon, themselves, d'ardists at the time, publishing a magazine sarcastically called Literature,

Artur, essentially a form of anti-literature or calling into question of literary values. And the largely destructive, and some people would say neolithic energies of Dada, let's to say let's bring the whole art establishment down because art has been complicit with all the terrible geopolitical things that have been going on, all the international power relations that have produced the destruction and misery of the trenches and so forth. Art has been complicit with all that. Let's have no art. abandon art and start from zero.

What the surrealist did was turn that mood of despair and aggression in a much more creative direction. How influential was that mood of nihilistic aggression? I mean, it sounds a very tidy mix, doesn't it? First World War, Great destruction, World War, trenches, sense of despair, therefore, what is there for art to do? I mean, was that a neat fit that was very influential, or were the dais just a few chaps on the sort of way out on the left or right wing?

I think it was a neat fit in that they were, in some sense, mimicking various things in a playful and sort of cabaret format, certain of the things that were going on in the public sphere. They were mimicking extreme forms of violence. But what they didn't know, and what I suppose looking back one might have guessed, was that if you put very creative personalities like Douchon, Tsarra into situations of that kind. They come up with something positive, something forward-looking.

And what you have in the case of Tsarha in Zurich, before he comes to Paris, is an extraordinary, what we would now call an experiment in performance art. As I say, multimedia artistic genre converging on one performance situation. So there's a huge inventiveness, even about Dada and its most neelistic sense. sounding mood. So we've got that. Now let's move to surrealism. In what sense did serialism come out of that, was conjoined by that, was influenced by that, propelled by that. Can you give us the link and we move on to surrealism? Well, I think the link is simply that the Dadaists put themselves, whatever their surface agenda was, they put themselves in contact with

the unconscious, with hidden wellsprings of creativity. But why did they do that out of Dada? They, because they didn't do it deliberately. They did, it was a side of effect, if you like, of their protest. They were destroying ordinary conscious forms of artistic practice and they were touching on energies and the kind of spontaneity, kind of overspill of images and unusual sounds and combinations of images and sounds. And that sense of being in touch with something that was creative just beneath the surface was what carried over into

surrealism and surrealism began to modify that, turn it in a much in a much more explicitly positive and some would say idealizing direction and say, look, underneath the surface of daily life, under the surface of public affairs, there's something just waiting to be released, a new kind of creativity. All right, thank you. Donat is.

Malgams talked about the way it came from Dada and a sense of matching destructiveness on the first of all. But Breton seems to be flying, Andre Breton, seems to flying the Freud banner very high in the surrealist manifesto. How important was Freud, very bluntly to the early surrealists. He was hugely important to Breton himself,

but opinions about Freud and about psychoanalysis in general were actually much more varied than that might suggest. Zara, who we've already discussed briefly, actually had rather a low opinion of psychoanalysis, which he felt, as it were, restored the status quo and held the bourgeoisie in their place. And I think that there were others like Aragon who were more sustainable.

suspicious of psychoanalysis than was Breton. But I think one has to understand what it was that Breton was seeking in Freud's writing. And I think that it was obviously not the same kind of thing that the medical world was seeking. Breton himself, of course, had been trained as a medical student and had experienced some of the horrors of treating shell-shocked patients during the war. He wasn't the only surrealist who was a former medical student. Aragon was as well, and Teodor Frankel. And I think that is quite an important part of his, at least his ability to understand what Freud was on about

and what psychoanalysis was intending to do and to take his distance from it where necessary. Yeah, but what I want to know is what did the surrealist go for? with all their limitations, Breton couldn't read German, Freud was not translated into French, they didn't take the things that might have been most important, but what did they take from psychoanalysis, what did they go for? That's what I'd like to know. Yes, well, in the first manifesto, if we start there, because of course the way the psychanalysis was attended to change through the movement, which was never static, But in the first manifesto, what is basically of huge importance to Breton

was the idea that there was a part of the human psyche that was constantly influenced in the way we feel and think, but to which we didn't have access. This was Breton's idea of the unconscious. And if psychoanalysis and surrealism have anything in common, it's the unconscious, but of course how they think of it is very different. As far as Breton was concerned, this was an area of the human psyche that needed to be explored. He thought of it as probably, you know, the source of the imagination, source of dreams,

the source of true kinds of poetry. And so much of the manifesto is dedicated to exploring ways in which one might actually try to reach this strange area. Dariennida, do you think that Breton's idea of psychoanalysis bore more than, how related was it to Freud's idea? How did it share Freud's rigor, did it share Freud's intentions even? What was it compared to what Freud's view of? I think that the question of intention is something that separates Freud from Breton. Breton wasn't very interested in the therapeutic aspects of psych analysis. A point he makes in the first Surinist manifesto is that, well,

Although he praises Freud for having discovered the realm of the unconscious, he's very careful to say that this doesn't mean that psychoanalysis has got a monopoly on it, and one of the projects of surrealism is to explore the different forms of expression of the unconscious, of which psychoanalysis is only one. Freud said that the surrealist wanted to identify, words the effect, the serialists wanted to identify with him, but he couldn't see much in what they were up to. That's right. When he first met Breton in 1921, he was a bit nonplussed. He wasn't too impressed. I think really probably the fundamental problem for Freud was when the great French writer Anatol France died. There was a pamphlet published by the surrealists in 1924 called A Cardardardra, a corpse, which was a series of really quite devastating attacks on the reputation of France. France was, of course, one of Freud's most cherished authors. So I think Freud was very upset to see this battery of surrealist insults on Anatol France.

He changed his opinion, it seems, when he met Dali in the late 30s. After Dali's visit, he said that until then he thought that the surrealists had been 95% mad, in the way that alcohol, it would be 95% pure. But after meeting Dali, his opinion had changed, and that there actually was something in surrealism worth exploring. So let's just try to bring this towards some sort of. What is surrealism getting out of psychoanalysis than Darren? I think that, as Dawn pointed out,

there's the general idea that the dream, the unconscious, is something that's worth exploring, that it's there, it's a hidden reality behind the order of things. But at the same time, I think that the surrealist engagement with psychoanalysis is very divided, and it divides into basically two different currents. One current thinks that you can access unconscious desire and unconscious currents, that they can actually be released and expressed.

The other current, which Breton articulated at certain times, was the idea that you actually can't access that, but what you can access is the collision of unconscious desire with consciousness, which will produce contradictions, condensations, bizarre objects and ideas. And that, it seems to me, is something very, very important and central to surrealism. Malcolm Bow, do you think there was a deliberate, what could be called, generously called a creative misunderstanding of Freud, or there was just a misunderstanding of Freud on the part of the surrealists?

I think they had different agendas. Freud was essentially a therapist, somebody who spent a lot of time characterising himself very old-fashionedly as a healer, and he was also a scientist and somebody who wanted to preserve his existing scientific credentials and establish new ones for himself as his theory developed. And in both these guises, I think the surrealists are likely to have seemed wild and irresponsible children, making a mess of formal clinical practice and making a mess of the usual notions of scientific explanation. Something very slow and patient about Freud. And there's also something very highly organized about his account of the unconscious, as Darien was suggesting.

Now, that condensation displacement of the two fundamental mechanisms of unconscious mental functioning, Freud says, an interpretation of dreams, and he comes back to this essential contrast in a variety of forms. I think the Surreal said very impatient with thinking of that kind. They want to go down into the world of the unconscious in order to get what they came to call effects of the marvelous, effects of wonderment, of strangeness. So the unconscious was a spanner in the works rather than, a mechanism for achieving new kinds of scientific result or therapeutic benefit. Oh, and about this effect, the effects of the marvellous,

is that what you find when you look along among the works of surrealists? That's what one of the principal motives in their search? Yes, I think it certainly is. The Marvelous and the notion of convulsive beauty was at the core of a surrealist aesthetic. But I also think that perhaps we should remember at this point that surrealism, was not primarily an art movement, nor really was it primarily a literary movement, that it had ambitions, if you like, on every sphere of human activity. And so the fact that it's become really identified so completely with the visual arts

is something I think we have to, to an extent, try to counter and to give a greater sense of surrealism's total scope. In its attempt, I think, to restore a wide, a sense of the real to mankind. Can you develop that? Yes, going back to the first manifesto, Breton there, talks about the diminished sense of reality that a totally rational and totally pragmatic view of the world has produced.

And this is again where we come back to Freud, I suppose, because he saw Freud's scientific discoveries as being proof, if you like, that a very, you know, a narrow sense of the rational, and a very sense of consciousness is actually not adequate. It's not going to... It's not really going to allow this sort of broader notion of possible human psychic action to take its place.

Darien Lidde, so much surrealist art, particularly dull, it seemed to consist of dream imagery. Can you just tell us what they made of Freud's... I know it's a massive one, but there you go. Theory of dreams. Can you just, for a simplicity sake, talk about the idea of manifest and latent dreams and how they coped with, dealt with, approach that?

I think that the surrealists had very different attitudes to Freud's dream book, and Breton was at times a careful reader of Freud. Other surrealists weren't. The key confusion when it comes to the surrealist appropriation of the dream book is that Freud makes a distinction between the wish present in a dream, the desire present in a dream, and the manifest dream, the dream that will remember.

So let's say you have a wish, you want to pass an exam, or you're hungry or thirsty. You then have a dream, let's say you're hungry and thirsty in a faraway place, there's no access to food, you fall to sleep, you have a dream that you're dining on a meal of kangaroo steaks with vodka cranberry. Now, what makes the initial wish for food and drink, turn into the particularity of the kangaroo steaks, the vodka cranberry, that's where desire fits in. Desire's like a kind of hitchhiker

that takes the perhaps conscious or pre-conscious wish, hitches a ride in order to express itself. And one of the confusions about Freud's theory is to equate the wish of the dream, which can be quite conscious, food and drink, and the desire in the dream, which is simply equivalent to the distortion between the initial wish and the manifest dream. Okay, now how did the surrealist cope with that? They cope with it by taking seriously the idea

that if desire was something that was always in between the lines, in between an initial wish and the manifest dream, it could only manifest itself in contradictory terms. And that's something which is, I think, you know, very... Can you give us some example of this? An example, let's take one from surrealism, the famous definition of beauty, by L'Otremont that was really used as a slogan by the Surrealist.

Someone is as beautiful as the chance encounter on a dissection table of an umbrella and a sewing machine. It brings into the same poetic simile to entirely incompatible terms, to entirely incompatible concepts, in the same way that the surrealist objects built by Dali or by Man Ray would juxtapose in the same medium

to contradictions, spatial temporal contradictions. that's something which comes directly out of a theory of condensation. Where the condensation takes place is where desire has difficulty in being expressed or articulated in a dream. I want to camera away at this a bit because I don't think it's... I don't mean getting there yet to tell you the truth. Can I just now?

I want to ask you. There's manifest and latent idea. Can you just be clear about what these are in Freud and which the serialists took and why they took what they took? I think the manifest is the... Obviously, you're swimming, you're swimming. If you dream about your swimming, you're swimming. That's manifest.

Latent is, why you're swimming, what's the interpretation, streaming, turning the visual into the verbal and solving it and therefore revealing the wish. That's the idea, isn't it? I think a crucial difference between Freud and Cyrillus on the question of dreams is to do with decipherment. Freud in the dream book and in various of his accounts of therapeutic practice is very interested indeed in due course,

after thought and study and conversation in coming up with meanings for dreams. Whereas surrealism is interested in getting down there to where dreams happen and producing senses of strangeness, senses of impossible meanings. What don't call them marvelous. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And that means that there's something kind of slow, long drawn out about psychoanalysis and something tending towards the instantaneous about surrealism, but you might call surrealism a way of deciphering the dream material.

making sure that it keeps hold of its latent content, that it doesn't yield to easy interpretation or even to difficult interpretation. And that, I think, is a difference of temperament or of intellectual style between the two movements that make them very awkward bedfellows for a lot of the time. Don, can you talk a bit about the way that the serialists in their works, give us some examples if you can't, use dreams,

how they take, and it kind of, there's a, there's a, a slight worry about it, isn't it? Because are they really dreams, have they made them up, are they just exotic pictures? There's that element too that one can't fudge. It seems a good wees to do a painting of X, Y and Z, and oh, I'll call it a dream. I know this is very crude in Agnes Saxon. I do forgive me. I hope you forgive me. But, I mean, there's something in that.

Yes, I think so. And I think they were very aware of it themselves. At the very beginning of the Surillist movement, a certain kind of, painting like DeKirico where there's a very clear but mysterious image on a canvas. Well, let's describe one. Okay. The man with a must... Yes, well, there's a painting called the child's brain.

That's right. It's a naked bloke, naked down the waist with a big moustache, and training in the background, away we go. Yes, train in the background, classical column at the side, naked rather flabby figure, large black moustache, man identified probably by the surrealist's... as a father figure because they give the painting the title the child's brain. Now, that painting you might say could be in an image from a dream or just something produced in some other more random way. But they were very concerned at the outset of the movement

in the problem of deformation. Can we just go on about it? I'm sorry to be so into theory. I'm not quite clear about it. If it is the image of a dream, just to say, does that make it more significant because it is the image of a dream in the sense that we may have a sort of common dream unconsciousness? And so therefore that gives it more resonance. So let's start with that. If this is the image of a child's dream of a naked father, and we know he may be, there's extrapolations on this which we can't go into on morning programmers that man might be doing under the table and so on and so forth.

But if it is the image of a dream, what significance did that have for the surrealists? And why did they call it a child's brain? I think the significance it would have had for the surrealists was that, again, rather crudely speaking, one of the values of the dream was what they thought they had taken from Freud, that the dreaming mind at work is somehow analogous to the unconscious mind at work. And so they thought that in the dream, whatever was produced by the dream, the dream image, fascinating, strange, possibly interpretable, very often with a kind of nugget of the uninterpretable, was to be seized. I mean, they first of all, I think, wanted to be able to record the dream and then to do something with it.

But it's a hell of a title, The Child's Brain, isn't it? It's a massive, wonderful title. Now, what about a naked man with a moustache? What is the... Is it a deflecting title like the bride strip by her bachelor's even, or this is not a pipe, a sort of title to stop you looking at a thing, or make you look at it another way, or it's actually a description there,

because the title, the word, is part of the image, so, isn't it? I think it's absolutely... So what makes it the Charles Brown, then? What makes it Charles Brown then? Well, I think their idea was that it takes you straight to the kind of Edipal Centre of Freud's ideas. Well, did it take you to the Edipal Centre? Well, I don't know.

I mean, I've accepted it in a sense when I'm so familiar with surrealist imagery of fathers. Yeah, but I mean you've got accepted it because you believed in it. Yes, I think it does actually, I think it represents. a terrifying figure, a sort of figure that you could imagine emerging in a child. They looked like a sort of flabby fairground strong man. It didn't look terrifying in a slider.

Some people seem to see it as an erotic figure. Really? Yes. Others see it as a threatening father figure. But it's certainly, I mean, it produced a whole series of father figures. Max Ernst Piettau Revolution by night with this rather grim face father holding Anst, the boy in his arms. I can't stop Daryon getting in for much longer, don't you need to get in about this.

The key point here is. in terms of the relation of psychoanalysis to the kind of surrealist image that we're talking about with DeHirico is the fact that they didn't choose to paint the complexes that Freud had described. You don't have manifest representations of the story of Oedipus, for example.

Rather, you have distortions, you have paintings that combine contradictory elements, you have impossible scenarios. And that's exactly what Freud discusses in the dream book, where he says, when a desire can't pass into consciousness, it takes on a distorted form, some impossible, absurd or bizarre image.

That's the work of censorship. And we could say that all these surrealist paintings that seem to be showing us the world of the unconscious, rather than liberating the unconscious as such, it's an arts of censorship. It's showing us how censorship has an effect on unconscious desire to produce impossibilities, absurdities.

There's a question of not so much credibility, and you're probably going to think me very crude here, but, you know, there you go. It's accountability, isn't it? This is produced, this is my dream, they say, and this is significance because it is a dream. A dream has, because of Freud, frankly, and also because of the, excuse me,

a lot of the history of Western poetry and thinking and so on, the dream has a sort of deeper significance than, as it were, just a thought. And yet, you think, well, how is that, how do I know that that really is? What's the validity of that? Where is that, you're all accepting it as if these are just, I think, well, you know,

and making it up some of the time, and what's wrong with that? But why keep clutching at the dream thing? Isn't the idea that where Freud took supposedly marginal and irrational elements of everyday life, the dream, the slip of the tongue, bungled actions, and showed that we had to find a meaning there that each time we have an incomprehensible dream, we ought to ask what does it mean?

You have a translation of that with the surrealists into poetry and art, so that when we're confronted with the surrealist work, the first question is, what does it mean? And then we can give our Oedipan interpretations, our interpretations in terms of different kinds of psychotic theory. But it always makes the aesthetic aside, makes the interpretive paramount rather than the aesthetic, doesn't it? Mark and back. We are spending too much time, I think, talking about dreams to the exclusion of what surrealists did

with other dimensions of human experience, including notably the modern city. They were very self-conscious and adventurous city dwellers in a book like Le Paisant de Paris, Paris peasant by Aragon or in Najat by Breton. They take you on exemplary walks around the city looking for strangeness and the marvellous, looking for improbability in the ordinary textures of experience without reference to dreams and the dream work particularly. I'm thinking of an example from the Paris arcades explored with great relish by Aragon in Le Paisant de Paris. at about the same time that Valtabiniamin was exploring the same arcades, suddenly he comes across a barber shop, notices a hairdresser rather than a barber,

working away at a wonderful head of female hair, and says to himself, what has propelled this young man into this particular activity? He spent his whole day looking, feeling, the most diaphanous elements of the woman's body. he spends the whole day feeling cheveau-vapeur, he says, vaporous hair. But cheveau-vapeur is a pun on chevo-vapeur, that's to say, horsepower. So suddenly, prompted by the punning capacities of the French language,

we're moving from hair to heavy machinery of one kind or another. Now, surrealism would want to set about exploring the city in order to expose opportunities, new connections, new vistas, new poetic imagery, being born from the ordinary textures of things as often as possible and as richly as possible. Now this is really a way of manipulating consciousness rather than the unconscious. What do you think there's a new metaphor?

Do you think similar metaphors were not being described in the previous centuries by previous writers? I think previous writers and previous centuries did very much the same thing. What surrealism is doing is setting up a programme of exploration saying that

reality is, there's more reality, it's stranger than you think. let's go out in quest of new sensation, new excitement, and new insolite, unwontedness, strangeness. Dawn. I think there's something else we're leaving out of the story of surrealism, and that is the interest in automatism, which, of course, we refer to at the very beginning in relation to the manifestive.

Automatic writing which bypasses thought. Writing that bypasses thought, or attempts to bypass thought. Automatic drawing in the hands of André Massen, and other forms of automatic procedures. which were, I think, seen as in some ways, a sort of safer route for the surrealists than the dream, which, as we've seen, does, you know, beg a number of questions. And so automatism, which was very difficult to practice,

it's very difficult, in fact, it seems, to get yourself in that sort of state of in-between consciousness which was necessary to produce writing. But the writing had to be grammatical. It had to be complete words. It wasn't just scribbles. for the thrillists, whereas the drawings,

I think the Mason drawings are extraordinarily powerful kind of hub of lines out of which, you know, objects that may be the object of desire emerge. Well, let's talk about this automatic writing for a few minutes

because I think it is, you're quite right, it is something good. Would you like to say anything about this time? I'd like just simply explain what it is. So people who might not know

what automatic writing is. Automatic writing is when someone takes a bit of paper and a pen and just starts writing, after they've tried to clear their head of any conscious form of thought activity, they start with a sentence, which usually comes easily. The big problem is moving on to the second sentence.

The idea is that once you've removed conscious subjectivity, you've cleared a space in which to produce something that many surrealist thought comes from the unconscious, and then you can set about interpreting it. Do you think this is neurologically possible? It's not neurologically possible to get rid of all critical faculties, the moral and aesthetic judgments that Breton refers to in the manifesto? Is it possible to get rid of the activity by which we turn something into something else?

You may call it automatic writing, but presumably the processes are still going on. Something starts somewhere inside the brain and ends up at the end of the fingers, you're wielding a pen or tapping it outright, has turned into something else. So in a sense you could say maybe it's a different form of writing, but why should it be called automatic and distinguish it to such a degree from other forms of writing? And the idea of automatic writing in that sense

has been described by, let's say, poets for many, many hundreds of years and shamans and all sorts of people. I am inhabited by, I am a medium for, we haven't talked about spiritualism either, which one of the things that came. So what's, I just like to get at it. Is this a claim?

Another of these great claims which when you look at it doesn't necessarily adapt to a great deal. It's only automatic, in the sense that it aims to bypass conscious reflection. And it's something which ultimately the surrealists failed in, and Bretton acknowledged that later on, but it's not possible to produce an entirely automatic form

of artistic or literary production. And certainly there's a debt to 19th century spiritualism. One difference would be that they wasn't the claim that the voices or text or images were coming from another world, rather there was the claim that it's coming from the unconscious, although later in his life, Breton got more and more interested in a kind of pantheistic view of the world to unite the self and the world with the idea that the psyche extends beyond the limits of the body. And in a way he moved towards hermetic and occult ideas and further and further away from Freud.

Arrhen, about automatic writing. Aragon said, I think I'm getting this quote right, if using a surrealist method you come up with sad imbecilities, what you have are sad imbecilities. That's to say, the unconscious too, may be a rather tedious place to be. It may come up with expected rather than unexpected meanings. And you can see, looking at the works of the leading surrealists, we haven't mentioned Elouar, for example,

who's a major figure both in Dada and in surrealism, that there is an extraordinary difference between what we old-fashionedly might call literary styles between the leading practitioners, and certain of them, including Aragans, are virtuosi of the written word. Now, when you look at the textures of Aragans' writing in the 1920s, the only way of coming up with any psychologizing explanation for what's going on is that he's working on a number of different mental keyboards at once.

That's the, hey, he is dipping down into the unconscious, if one can put it in those terms. He's using the resources of the unconscious, but he's also a stylist and a rhetorician, and an artificer, somebody who likes the sound of word, arranges them in convincing patterns, and generally is looking for a transitional sort of artifact that allows him to bridge between different mental levels

rather than simply put all his eggs in the basket of the unconscious. How important, Don, do you think, Don Anderson, do you think that sexuality is? The answer to everything seems to be sex, doesn't it? This is a representative, oh, this is sex, this is sex. I mean, how big was this a liberation of what they saw as a repressed sexuality, as important to surrealists as in a different way was to Freud? There's no doubt that the liberation desire was a central concern of the surrealists.

If we look at the two final issues of the first of the great surrealist reviews, La Revolution Surrealist, in the penultimate one, there is a record of an extraordinary set of conversations about sexuality. I mean, they're extremely frank. They're like a piece of sociological exploration. Can you give us some details, of you? Well, yes. Perhaps I shouldn't over the radio.

There's a waste to say this, which will pass the permitted limit. Yes. It began, I think, as a simple conversation, people inquiring about their friends' sexual preferences and sexual habits. Andre Breton always held to the notion of a total reciprocity in a sexual encounter which he saw as indistinguishable from love. Others talked about homosexuality

and other forms of sexual activity. But it was all conducted in an extremely... Are you holding back from talking about perversity and scatology? That's what's worrying you. Well, yes, I suppose I am. that they addressed perversity. I'm partly holding back because it becomes quite complicated as they held different views about this.

Of course, Freud in a sense, already begun to question the notion of normative sexuality. And the surrealists were certainly, on the whole, opposed to a normative heterosexuality, with the exception, perhaps, of Breton himself, who got extremely agitated when the conversation tended to turn upon same sexuality. sex, well, yes, same sex preferences.

And he said, I refuse to continue this conversation if you go on talking this way. Whereas my contrast, Louis Aragon in the succeeding conversation, said, I really can't see that these conversations can have any validity unless we have women present. So, again, you can see that there's no sort of set view of the surrealists about sexuality and sexual preferences. What I wanted to say was, those conversations are, in a way, they're very materialist. They're very deliberately geared towards, you know, as frank as possible a discussion of sort of specific sexual acts. The succeeding issue of La Releus-Seurealist is dedicated to a questionnaire on love. And it's as though love has, in a sense, has been replaced again within surrealism as the key,

is the kind of heart of the surrealist idea. Darren Leda, from a, what do you think these surrealists, as it were, explorations of sex, which have been tentatively and outlined by, what do you think that they brought, did they bring something new, did they bring something different? Was it a, what was it? Was it a sort of salacious dabbling? Was it a sort of just a, I know I'm being reductive,

but I'm trying to provoke you a bit. I mean, what do you bring? Two things. On the one hand, I think it's not so much the actual sexual content that's so important, but rather the idea that there were hidden meanings in the world, that if you looked at literary, artistic, social productions, you had to try and interpret them to find a hidden meaning,

and that hidden meaning could be sexual, but the key point was they held a mystery which had to be interpreted, and that's something that surrealism and psychoanalysis definitely had in common. On the other hand, one of the things which the survey and the questionnaires and discussions that Dawn's just talked about focused on was the way in which all of our everyday reality is structured by desire and love.

And many of those questionnaires and discussions are about, you know, what do you think about when you're getting the bus, what do you think about when you're walking down the street, what parts of a city are important for you? And it turned out that as people spoke about those things, they were linked to love affairs, desires. When you read Breton, whatever he's talking about,

he always comes back to the idea of some kind of chance encounter with a woman, as if the whole fabric of reality ultimately was based on a love or a sexual relation. Malcolm, what's your comment on there? I want to come back for a moment to your point about reduction. It seems to me that much criticism of psychoanalysis and of surrealism has been along the lines of, oh, it's all about sex for them, isn't it? Therefore, they answer questions in huge numbers, don't pose interesting questions anymore

because they have the answers in advance. And I don't know that that's right. I was just thinking, as Darien was talking about the extraordinary Max Allen's painting called The Roving of the Bride. Why, she turns into a bird of prey. Yes, that's right. Or she is robed as a bird of prey. Seems to be helplessly looking out from inside her wedding attire.

Now, if you look at that painting in one sense, it's all about sex clearly, different forms of perverse and cruel sex as well as fairly straightforward heterosexual kinds. But if you look at the image all at once and as it were rotated in your mind's eye, you can see very many different kinds of meaning, all of them with some sexual content, no doubt. But they're kept in play simultaneous. They become a kind of manifold or an amalgam. It's very difficult to sort out. I, for example, am haunted by the strange figure on the left of the painting, who's got sort of rather sort of centre-forward-looking hairy legs,

but ends up at the top as some sort of metallic heron or crane. He seems to be part of the ceremonial. Now, what's he doing there? It's a perfectly inscrutable set of relationships. One of the young women, the naked young women in the picture, has a neck that looks like a U-Bend in a lavatory. so forth. Now, sexual content is coming from all over the place and it's being held in suspension and not reduced. I think lots of surrealist writing and lots of surrealist art

seems to have that quality. Yes, but it does actually, I think that when I was saying reductive, I thought about me being reductive, not to try to get the thing. But you're one of many. Yes, I want, me being reductive in terms of this conversation. I'm not having that. In terms of conversation. What sort of legacy do you think, briefly, do you think psychoanalysis will, sort of surrealism has dawn? I think it has had a huge impact on a number of the most important thinkers of the last 20 or 30 years. One could say that Jacques Lacan, you know, as it were, the successor to Freud, grew out of surrealism. The same is true, Michel Foucault, Levi-Strauss.

I think it really was the most kind of critical intellectual movement between the wars. I think it's resistance to things like racism and chauvinism. How do we say that? When did that? I mean, can you give us some example of where it did resist? Well, yes, for example, there was an exhibition in 1931. They put on together with the Communist Party, which is called The Truth on the Colonies.

And the surrealists were always, you know, extremely challenging to the colonial mentality. So I think they've also had an impact on post-colonial. ideas. Malcolm Brickland. Surrealism has got into popular culture. I'm haunted by a memory from 20 or 30 years ago of an advertisement for Andrew's liver salts, the efficacy of which was demonstrated by reference to flowers growing in the former indigestion sufferer's

stomach. It seems to me that surrealism had gone back to street level to the underground hoardings and so. Back to the belly of the beast. tremendously important as an endeavor to go against established forms of aesthetics and morals, which is one of the keys to surrealism. Also in the sense that it supplied us with imagery and a vocabulary to talk about dreams, we say we had a surrealist dream, a dream that was like a darling painting, when actually it's very unlikely that the dreams like that provides a kind of vocabulary to talk about that.

And also, of course, the surrealists allowed people to start reading forward. Freud, Sard, Loutrement, the authors that they revived. Thank you very much, Mark and Bowie, Darren Lina. And Dawn Aldous, and thank you for listening. Dawn Adis, I'm obviously sorry, Dawn. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk, forward slash radio 4.