drama

Surrealism

When man resolved to imitate walking, he invented the wheel, which does not look like a leg. in doing this he was practicing surrealism without knowing it.' So wrote Guillaume Apollinaire in the preface to his 1917 play, The Breasts of Tiresias. However, it was not until after the First World War that Surrealism as a self- conscious artistic movement was established. it aimed to address man ' s 'destiny' through subjective fantasy: it argued that 'classical standards' are imposed by a cultural/ economic elite, and it upheld the value of personal experience, the life of the subconscious, childishness, savagery, the capricious and the unpredictable.

                                                                           Surrealist poetry therefore often seemed nonsensical, though sometimes it achieved a haunting beauty, as in Andre Breton's Hotel of Sparks, with its opening lines;

             

                   The philosophic butterfly

                    Rests on the rose star

                    And that makes a window of hell

                    The masked man is always standing in front  of the nude 

                          woman

                     Whose hair glides as light does in the morning on a street

                          lamp they have forgotten to put out

                                                             

                                                                         (Wallace Fowler (ed.), Mid-Century French poets, 

                                                                                       New York; Grove press, 1955, p. 155)

      

H.M.L.P.Herath

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