A Brief Exploration of Surrealism

 by Isaac Mead

Earlier this year during lockdown, more than ever before, people were forced to confront their realities; thinking about this and what ‘reality’ meant led me to look into surrealism and its surrounding concepts.

I will provide a quick overview of the terms ‘surreal’, ‘surrealism’ and ‘surrealistic’ as they are quite interchangeable and easy to mix up. The word ‘surrealism’, suggesting beyond reality, focused on rejecting a rational perception of the world around oneself and instead revolved around the unconscious and dreams. To be ‘surreal’, something must be simply ‘strange’ or ‘dreamlike’ This can be distinguished from typical Surrealist artwork that makes use of the dreamlike imagery along with fantastical imagery and incongruous juxtapositions. Surrealism is a cultural/artistic movement grounded in the 20th century that essentially ended when Andre Breton, the French writer and poet who coined the term, died in 1966. If something is ‘surrealistic’ it shares qualities of work of the art movement, but could have been painted last year, unlike if something is ‘surrealist’ where it is a work from the time surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early 20s up until Breton died .

Recently I read Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart and thought it shared many surreal elements where reality appears ambiguous. Boundaries are blurred within the story between what is and isn’t real as the narration shifts through fantasies and dreamscapes; the narrator Miu, who lusts for Sumire steps into some form of alternate being at the end of the novel, but as a reader it is your task to project where he lies - is he dead, or is it some form of purgatory? Does the place he has stepped into simply parallel the universe we inhabit, and has he really shifted to an alternate reality at all? This ambiguity lends the book to interpretation as Murakami employs subtle elements of ‘magic’ within reality, so much so that it seems natural to read about various planes of temporal and spatial existence. Murakami’s writing is not over-complicated and often focuses on the seemingly banal aspects of life, yet the ambiguity and beauty within such writing reveals a reality beyond where it is unclear what life means. Lunar imagery is also heavily utilized to emphasise some kind of universal change and alludes to wider forces that control our actions (perhaps this has a subtle link to automatism of the surrealist art movement that I will explain later). In many ways, through employing various elements of the surreal in ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’, Murakami grounds the book within the randomness of our own reality. This notion can be summed up by my favourite line from the book: ‘Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings.’

I thought I’d provide an example of art from the time of the surrealist movement, so I chose this dream-like Rothko painting. It is an example of automatism mentioned earlier, which aimed to unlock ideas and images from the unconscious minds of artists and reveal hidden psychological tensions. With this specific painting, it is said that Rothko was trying to express the ‘brutal anxieties of a world at war’ as his painting style transitions into the ambiguous forms and muted colour palette evocative of some kind of blurred fantasy. When describing these amoebic forms, he wrote: ‘every shape becomes an organic entity, inviting the multiplicity of associations inherent in all living things’. Similar to ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’, through exhibiting the unconscious, a deeper truth about the world around us is revealed. 

Finally I thought I’d explore the surreal elements of one of my all-time favourite films, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ directed by Michel Gondry. Personally I’m not a big fan of romance films myself but something about this one is a bit different; the film is composed of continuous transitions between real-time to vivid memories that leave the viewer having to figure which is which.I know that I will muddle my words trying to explain what really goes on in the movie so I will provide a general overview of it and it’s surreal components - Two parallel realities of past memories and the protagonists’ present selves chasing said memories exist within the film, which creates a fragmented narrative typical of surrealist cinema. Further elements of the surreal are depicted as memories from childhood for the main characters Joel and Clementine are experienced within his adult body. As these moments of the past are experienced they start to abstract; blurred identities and colour shifts of objects create a surreal environment of ‘incongruous juxtapositions’ that could quite literally be translated into a surrealist painter like Dali’s work at points. The way both characters perceive their surroundings and reality on various temporal scales reveals more about their relationship in the present than any typically structured film.

Through examining these works of art, literature and film they have all revealed to me that reality is often most accurately portrayed when it is not grounded within a tangible existence. When the boundaries between the real and not-real and the past and the present are blurred, one is shown an accurate depiction of the fleeting moment they are in now.