Mark Polizzotti's Why Surrealism Matters
It's still their world, we're just wearing bowler hats in it...
This letter reviews Why Surrealism Matters by Mark Polizzotti. Your host was given a review copy last year courtesy of Yale University Press.
Mark Polizzotti: Why Surrealism Matters. New Haven, Yale UP, 2024.
Mark Polizzotti has translated a range of French literature stretching from Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet to the output of Patrick Modiano and Marguerite Duras. He has also spent decades researching, writing, and editing volumes on Andre Breton and the Surrealists.
Considering this extensive engagement with French modernist and avant-garde aesthetics, I felt tempted to view a new short book by Polizzotti, Why Surrealism Matters, as a capstone to a long career presenting French art and literature to English language readers. It is actually an engaging short book that offers new takes on a venerated tradition, and is genuinely reflective on how Surrealism’s significance for us today, if any, may take shape.
The book comes to us as part of the “Why X Matters” series from Yale University Press, that tasks authors to deliver tight, clear, and concise arguments for the relevance of certain fields in our contemporary world. The case for Surrealism’s relevance seems to be an easy one, given its ubiquity in visual media, but Polizzotti is not interested in touting the influence of the well-known personalities of the Surrealist movement that is now a century old, so much as presenting how that movement reflected the overlapping social and political crises of the interwar period: the French colonial question, imperialist war and militarism, as well as the “frankness with which they addressed sexuality.”
These themes are so many socio-political “echoes” of our contemporary forms of the issues of racism, women’s emancipation, and environmental justice, that are more fundamental to how Polizzotti thinks about Surrealism, than the formal techniques they pioneered. “The avant-garde pushes the boundaries of aesthetics toward ever renewed expressive forms; Surrealism tends instead to use forms, new or traditional, as tools with which to express a particular spirit.”
The nature of this particular spirit is of “dissidence and defiance, subtended by a belief in the inexhaustible capacity for wonder that resides in each of us, here and now.” One can trace the origins of this thought of refreshing our perceptive capacities to the modernist imperative to “defamiliarize” or estrange our habitual ways of experiencing reality, as theorized by the Russian Formalists after 1917.
But Polizzotti also locates within this defiance a direct condemnation of “the deadening effects of consumer society,” facilitated by modern industrial technology. This oppositional attitude toward capitalism and imperialism is the more principal aspect of Polizzotti’s way of thinking about Surrealism than its artistic means of fusing unconscious experiences with waking ones in literature, painting, and film.
It was chiefly through this dimension of dissent that the Surrealist program transmitted itself to writers and artists of the diasporic and colonial world, as seen in figures like Pierre Yoyotte, Jules Monnerot, Léon-Gontran Damas, and the acclaimed poet Aimé Césaire. Surrealism “is an international language that needs no translation, for those who are able to hear it.”
Along with internationalism, Polizzotti devotes many pages to the debates on the position of women in the movement. It’s clear that conditions have been ripe to re-examine Surrealism’s history through its many female practitioners, by no means limited to Meret Oppenheim, Penelope Rosemont, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, and Unica Zürn.
Polizzotti also highlights the contribution of a certain kind of Surrealist critical prose, developed by Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Rene Crevel, Michel Leiris, and more. “Containing a heady mix of personal reminiscence, flight of fancy, scattershot association, delirium, and shrewd analogy, much Surrealist criticism demands to be experienced rather than described, and puts instinct and feeling before the rational exposition of most discursive writing, even at the expense of intelligibility.”
Polizzotti's observations seem to extend the literary influence of Surrealism beyond the phantasmagoric fiction and poetry that emerged after World War 2. This eclectic form of prose has arguably lent inspiration to modern and contemporary novelists with an essayistic register, from Doris Lessing to Rachel Cusk, and imaginative types of memoir and “autotheory.” Polizzotti’s renewed attention to the movement’s verbal practice is welcome for casting a new light on the types of literature that are emerging in the twenty-first century.
The politics of the Surrealists, and the movement's ill-fated relationship with international Communism, take on a new salience for Polizzotti given the modern trends contesting the drudgery and despotism of work culture. “The Surrealists denied the value of work, which takes on particular resonance in the vast reevaluation of labor dynamics following the lockdowns and closures of 2020-22 and such trends as the Great Resignation and quiet quitting.” They were “in love with the idea of revolution and the elimination of bourgeois morals, but unable to abide the bureaucratic nature of orthodox Communism.”
The practical result of this attitude was that the Surrealist's behavior struck the Marxists as that of “petty-bourgeois dilettantes,” a description of the Surrealists I confess I am partial to. However, Polizzotti writes, “there is a lesson to be drawn from their integrity..., and from their unwavering devotion to an honorable set of ideals.” The political and aesthetic competencies of the Surrealists were entangled with their class conditions, as newspaper stringers, tutors, radio broadcasters — the intellectual servants of a French economy that had only recently become primarily industrial.
Polizzotti's compelling short book makes clear that if the Surrealist movement, with its “cataclysmic” impulse to distort our common views of reality, is still relevant, then it is in large part because we are still living in their political world, a world dominated by the administrations of finance capital, and an imperialist system that brings war and starvation on masses of people, while constraining democracy.
“Is it coincidence that the movement is now experiencing a resurgence of interest,” Polizzotti asks, “as evidenced by the stream of recent publications and exhibitions highlighting it as both a historical and contemporary phenomenon?” While living examples of the struggle for socialism have faded for the time being, there may still be artistic lessons from the historical Surrealists, in their solidarity with oppressed peoples, and their weaponization of “irrationality” to combat the “rational” dominance of capital.