New flash piece published.

Just a quick update.  I've just had a flash piece accepted by Horror Sleaze Trash.  Don't even ask me where this one came from, it just sort of bubbled up fully formed (or fully malformed?).  It was probably just me thinking about a load of experiments that I thought would be interesting to do but which "the liberal pinkos" would probably think were "unethical" or something..... ;)  Anyway, no real point to this story as such - just a disturbing, and hopefully funny, scene in time with one of my favourite recurring characters, Dr Kokoschka, a man whose circumstances are now so reduced that he is performing his quackery and insane research in a former industrial unit in Tipton.

Go visit Horror Sleaze Trash - I really like the aesthetics of their site.  Fits the name well.....

"Parasitic Endeavours"

Only a short film, but I really the atmosphere of this. Parasitic Endeavours (2017).

The Frankenstein's Monster of Realism, Surrealism and Irrealism

Sometimes, such as when getting your latest script rejection from the BBC, it’s easy to say, “These idiots are just realism-loving idiots! They’ve never moved beyond the Kitchen Sink dramas of the 50s so you won’t get anything accepted by them unless it is set in 1) a Council estate; 2) a Welsh ex-mining village; or 3) somewhere “post-colonial” – it doesn’t matter where; Africa is good but the Indian sub-continent is better.” And while this is undoubtedly true (as it also is for some of the more established literary journals such as Granta), sometimes it is worth examining what realism actually is rather than just concluding, “I write surrealistic/irrealistic fiction so must therefore concentrate on slipstream and Bizarro publishers or the more adventurous genre publishers."  After all, doesn’t a lot of genre fiction actually take advantage of a lot of realist styles and tropes? So, when I am ranting at the BBC, what exactly do I mean by “realist?”

To try and make sense of it, let’s go back to one of the earliest examples of genre fiction (as at least we can then differentiate between what is realist or not and what is just weird whilst still retaining realist features). Frankenstein is often regarded as the first Science Fiction novel. However, when considering how realist this tale of reanimated dead flesh is, it is first important to discuss what the realist novel is, and then settle on a definition. Duranty, who edited a journal called Realisme, defined realism as a type of writing based on the everyday experiences of ordinary men and women, using the simplest possible language. Clara Reeves agreed, and wrote that the realist novel should describe events:

"...such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves....so (as) to make them appear so probable (that we can believe)....that it is all real." (Reeves cited in Allcot, 1965, p.47)

This definition of realism has much in common with that of Ian Watt, who agreed that realist texts should individualise the characters and give full accounts of the times and places of their actions. These definitions are limited however, as much of J.G. Ballard's, and Philip.K. Dick's work adhere to these rules, despite being overtly surreal, as is, for example Kafka's Metamorphosis .

George Eliot admitted that any attempt at direct mirroring of reality was impossible because of the author's subjective perceptions distorting what could be "mirrored", an idea similar to Magritte's painting of a pipe (La Trahison des images), with the words "This is not a pipe", written below it. He is, like Eliot, right. It is not a pipe but an oil painting representing a pipe, in the same way that any novel isn't reality, but a list of ordered symbols representing the author's reality, a view proposed by the Structuralist, Roland Barthes.

Kettle regarded the realist novel as intimately linked with society, and thus a reflection and result of social upheaval, a view supported by George Levine's assertion that the moral unsettledness of Nineteenth Century England resulted in novelists trying to recreate and rediscover a moral reality through their works. This "hidden agenda" of the realist novelist was described by Marxists like Lukacs and Kettle, who argued that realism was not a passive reflection of what is.

Thus, a useful definition of realism would be that of Clara Reeves, with the addition that many realist texts should deal with controversial issues, and should possess original plots based on "real life" not fable. As Watt said, realism isn't inverted Romance (i.e. focusing on poor, immoral degenerates), but "all human experience". (Although again, there are many exceptions to this argument and as Dickens' work proves, such a loose term can be expanded on, because dreaming, and other altered states of consciousness, are subjectively valid experiences).

Kettle defined the Romance novel as being a non-realistic (presenting idealised, mediaevally chivalrous worlds), escapist genre that emphasized aristocratic and socially unchallenging attitudes, whilst diverting, entertaining and titillating the reader. Its characters also tended to be Good vs Evil stereotypes rather than "real". The Gothic Novel however, tried to combine the real and the fantastic, often containing supernatural elements and melodramatic or heightened language. Eva Kosofsky Sedgewick also described several features of the Gothic novel including: "tyrannical older men"; "sensitive heroines and their impetuous lovers"; "wild, ruined, feudal, (usually) European landscapes"; "a discontinuous involuted form in the novel"; "common topics such as doubles of characters, death-like states, dreams, and obscure family ties"; "unintellible writings", and "the possibility of incest, and the effects of guilt and shame" (Kosofsky Sedgewick, 1986).

This may seem like a lot of detail, but it is important to understand the meanings of these terms when describing how a text like Frankenstein adheres to or differs from standard realism. Is it, as The Gothic Novel attempted, indeed possible to combine the real and the fantastic?

The idea of Frankenstein being regarded as the first Science Fiction novel, is based on the idea of "picture (it) without the science, and.....no story!" (Stanley Schmidt in Analog Science Fiction, 1991). Unfortunately, on closer examination, this view is quite simplistic. The science is far from central - had Frankenstein used magic to create the monster the effect of the novel would have been much the same i.e. the main themes would still be that of Creator/Created, Moral Responsibility, Revolution of Order, and so on. Even Shelley herself does not describe "the Science" in detail.

Shelley uses Realist techniques to describe scene, to develop the characters, and the narrative is generally structured by these character's actions. However, she also draws on techniques more familiar to the Gothic novel, melodrama, and (unsurprisingly) Romanticism. For example, Frankenstein, unlike most realist texts, constantly reminds the reader that it is a piece of fiction. Its structure is similar to many Gothic novels in having "stories within stories" told by one character to another. It consciously refers to other literary works, both in the novel (the Milton, Goethe etc that the creature reads), throughout the novel (the parallels between Frankenstein and the monster to Milton's God and Satan (and also God and Man, and Eve and Sin); between Clerval and the hero of Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey; between Frankenstein and Prometheus (both positive and negative aspects of the myth); and also outside the narrative, by subtitling the novel "The Modern Prometheus".

This referral to "what has gone before" is a contradiction of what we usually think of as realism. Similarly, like a modern myth, it has a definite beginning and end, unlike Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations, with their more "realistic" open-endings.

Also, Shelley uses melodramatic "Romance" techniques - many of the settings are not forges or towns, but Arctic Wastes, mountainous ice-floes, and turbulent seas. Similarly, her descriptions of the Joys of Nature and their relation to Man (as well as their ability to torment) is a very Romantic notion. (Importantly she also quotes many Romantic poets including Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, p41), Byron's Childe Harolde's Pilgrimage (Ibid. p54-55), P.B. Shelley's On Mutability (Ibid. p75-76), and Wordsorth's Tintern Abbey (Ibid p130) amongst others).

The Gothic elements of the novel are also seen in various scenes including the death of Elizabeth (pp165-166); the destruction of the monster's mate and his reactions, (pp139-141), and much of Volume II, Chapter 2 where the Gothically menacing mountains are climbed with supernatural speed by the creature. The settings and the use of elevated, emotional language are thus highly reminiscent of the Gothic novel.

The first appearance of the Creature (p38-39) is especially interesting as it mixes the Gothic (the famous description of the Creature, and Frankenstein's dream of Elizabeth's lips "...becoming livid with the hue of death....I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms.....I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel (of her shroud)"), with the Romantic i.e. the view that proportionate limbs, each beautiful in themselves, should result in a total beauty (all p39).

However, despite this, Frankenstein can still be regarded as realist because it reflects the many issues of the times. For example, Revolution, as had occurred in France, was regarded as a "monstrosity", and an affront to natural Order, in much the same way as Frankenstein's creation of the creature can be seen in attempting to usurp God, but also the creature could himself represent the revolutionary proletariat (ie from one point of view an uncontrollable destructive force, or on the other, a force that could be educated and Good, is in fact created "innocent", but is corrupted by social forces), as well as representing English attitudes to 'the foreign', the creature's narrative echoing that of a then-popular idea of "the noble savage". (He reflected the fears of the rulers if their physically powerful, but ignorant, ignoble savage was to be 'released' among polite (Western) society - the manner of his supposed death is reminiscent of the Indian custom of sati (the wife's jumping on the husband's funeral pyre), which was also regarded as either primitive or noble depending on the observer's point of view). In much the same way the monster could be seen to represent political radicalism, and working-class activity (as many sources at the time show with their own comparisons).

The responsibility of Science towards the people is still valid today, but was specially poignant to the Romantic Imagination (compare with Keat's fear that Science's explanation of the rainbow had robbed it of its natural beauty). In addition, the lack of any natural birth, the twisted creation of the monster, and the parallels between Frankenstein and the Eve myth (Gilbert and Gubar, 2000), which in turn links back to Paradise Lost, (Frankenstein creates the creature from parts of bodies, while Satan creates Sin "by his left side opening wide" (Paradise Lost, Book II,ll. 755ff), and God creates Woman by removing Adam's rib), emphasises Shelley's own unique view as a woman writer reacting against stereotyped ideas of femininity and motherhood (Moers in Walden 1995).

Thus, whilst Frankenstein can be seen very firmly as a realist text (it uses realist techniques, it addresses the above-mentioned, then-contemporary controversial issues, and its characters are 'original' and develop through the story), its use of Gothic and Romantic imagery and style, its multi-layered structure and conscious references to known Myth and Literature, stretches the boundaries of the realist novel as being about "ordinary people".

However, if we approach this issue from another angle, is there really anything as a purely “realist” novel? Let’s look at another nineteenth century novel, something that was written generations before Eliot and Joyce and Pound. Let’s look at something that has almost come to define the realist-loving BBC, Dickens’ Great Expectations. The novel does in fact show many examples of Gothicism, notably the appearance of Miss Havisham and Satis house (Dickens, Great Expectations, Penguin, p87-94), the first and second appearance of Magwitch (p36-39, and pp332-338), and the description of Wemmick's Gothic "castle" (p229), as well as convoluted plot 'coincidences' common in melodrama and Romances. However, these Gothic excesses are toned down by the unusual point of view (the adult Pip describes the thoughts of the child Pip), thus giving the reader an element of ironic distancing.

Even the burning of Miss Havisham at Satis (I've already referred to the Indian ritual "sati"), which could be seen as spontaneous combustion (believed to be caused by depression, guilt or Sin), is carefully left as possibly realistic by her sitting too close to the fire (easier than explaining the scientific plausibility of the phenomenon as Dickens did after Bleak House).

Thus while Dickens undoubtedly worked within a realist framework, he did make use of other genres such as Gothicism, exaggeration and melodrama to reinforce his realities. He disliked the realist tendency of being "frightfully literal and catalogue-like" (Dickens in Walder, 1995), and his multi-genre approach means that it can have as many meanings as his readers mean to infer on it.

The names of the characters are realistic, but not strictly realist, as they are symbolic. Pip is like a bud ready to grow; Estella is cold and beautiful like a star; Miss Havisham does indeed have a lot, but her life is a sham; and the resonance of evil in Magwitch should be obvious. Only dependable Joe and Biddy have perfectly natural names.

Elements of Great Expectations are also heavily symbolic. Parts of the body, especially the hands (Pip's coarse hands, His burning of his hands when saving Miss Havisham, his "fake" mother, Magwitch's clasping of Pip's hands at several important times including his death etc) take on symbolic meanings. (However, a point not before mentioned is Magwitch's threatening to cut out Pip's liver (the symbol of purification and regeneration), as opposed to Miss Havisham's frequent pointing to her heart (she lacks one and tries to break his)). This heavy use of symbolism, irony and heavy exaggeration, makes Great Expectations break many realist conventions. Indeed Leavis wrote that Dickens found "a freer form of dealing with experience" that enabled readers to move....from the "real" world of everyday experience into the non-rational life of....spiritual experience" (Leavis, 1970, p289), a point reinforced by Wilson, who claimed that Dicken's work touched on repressed areas of the personality, Pip thus standing, like Dickens, both inside and outside Victorian society, an idea revealed through Pip's relationships with the other characters.

Thus, it can be seen that in some ways, an over-eagerness, either on my part or on publishers and broadcasters, to too readily categorise my work as “surreal” or “irreal” or “bizarre” should be avoided as even old stalwarts like Great Expectations or early genre fiction like Frankenstein do, to both lesser or greater extents, seem to break many of the realist "rules" by using techniques stolen from other genres, they enlarge the meaning of the realist novel through this cross-fertilisation. This creates multi-layered works, that while they are good examples of "real" people developing because of their actions, their use of allegory, symbolism, and Gothic techniques such as the "doubling" of characters, create a deeper emotional response through wider points of reference. Indeed, this could explain my own reticence to identify my own work as Bizarro, as much later Bizarro now seems to have become mired in its own tropes, clichés and stereotypes and are, for want of a better expression, “weird for the sake of being weird.” I rarely write material like that, instead using surreal or irreal elements to highlight or magnify issues that the protagonists are feeling, using those weird elements to make their emotional states manifest in physical reality.

Still, I doubt such insight will help when it comes to submitting radio drama to the BBC. So perhaps I may just write my next play about a menopausal Indian woman who lives in a Welsh ex-mining town now that her children have left the nest. That sounds like the BBC all over.




BIBLIOGRAPHY.



Allen, R, (1995), "Reading Frankenstein", in Walder, D. (ed) The Realist Novel (Approaching Literature), London, Routledge in association with the Open University.



Barthes, R. (1986), "The Reality Effect" from The Rustle of Language Blackwell, pp141-8.



Dickens, C (1965), Great Expectations, London, Penguin.


Gilbert, S. and Gubar, S. (2000) The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination, Yale University Press.


Kettle, A. (1977), "Realism and Romance" from An Introduction to the English Novel - Volume One: Defoe to George Eliot: 1, pp28-36.


Kosofsky Sedgewick, E. (1986) Coherence of Gothic Conventions, Methuen & Co.


Levine, G. (1981), "The realistic imagination" from The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterly: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley, University of Chicago Press, pp5, 6, 8, 15-22.



Regan, S (1996). "The Language of Realism", in The Language of Realism, A210 The Open University Audio Cassette 1, Side 1, Bands 1 & 2, The Open University.



Said, E. (1994), "Culture and Imperialism" from Culture And Imperialism Vintage, ppxiv-xvii, 73-5, 77-8.



Shelley, M (1818), Frankenstein, Oxford, Oxford World's Classics Edition.



Tomlinson, N (1995) Study Guide 1, Shaftesbury, Dorset, Blackmore, Longmead, The Open University.



van Ghent, D. (1961), "On Great Expectations" from The English Novel, Form and Function, Harper & Row, pp128-38.



Walder, D. (1995), "Reading Great Expectations", in Walder, D. (ed) The Realist Novel (Approaching Literature), London, Routledge in association with the Open University.



Watt, I. (1972), "Realism and the novel form" from The Rise Of The Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, pp9-23, 33-36.

A LINEAL HISTORY OF THE SURREALIST IMPULSE IN LITERATURE (1919 - 1998).

     
The Oxford English Dictionary defines literary "surrealism" as "a Twentieth Century movement in...literature purporting to express the subconscious mind by phenomena of dreams etc", and many would agree with this view. However, I would like to present a history of surrealism in Literature, and demonstrate that it was more than a short-lived pre-War movement, but instead it adapted and changed to become an intrinsic part of many contemporary novels by merging with many realist techniques, and indeed, is now more widely-read than any of the original movement's founders could have hoped. While the similarity of some of the works to which I will refer with the works of Breton and Bataille is minimal, few would argue that the contemporary novel is not fundamentally realist in form even though they have little in common with the likes of say, Fielding or Stevenson.

While the surrealist impulse has been present in Literature from Hesiod (who claimed to be instructed by the Muses), and the poet-priestess of the oracle at Delphi, through England's first poet Caedmon (who wrote when possessed by the spirit of God), to the dream literature of Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan", Byron's "Fatal Man", and the descriptions of madness and irrationality in Shakespeare and Milton, the word was first coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917, and the first truly surrealist work was Andre Breton and Phillipe Soupalt's automatic text The Magnetic Fields, published in 1919.

These early surrealists thought that automatism was the way to express the subconscious, expressing in Breton's words, "properties and facts no less objective" than those in the external world. Breton described how to write automatically in his Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), and thought its seemingly nonsensical phrases used the "grammar of dreams", a process very similar to what Freud called "condensation". In the Manifesto Breton said "Is it not possible that my dream of last night follows the one before, that dreams give every sign of being continuous?", a questioning of "objective" reality similar to that of two writers I will later discuss - Philip.K. Dick and William Burroughs (who once responded to the question of whether he believed in life after death by asking, "How do you know you're not dead already?").

The function of automatism was "to reveal, verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other surrealist qualities. A narcotics agent absorbs junkies like amoeba; a homosexual's rectum stretches from his body searching the town for young men; and telepathic creatures called Mugwumps sodomise young men before killing them.

However, it is his later work which is even more overtly surreal. In his three books, The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964), he made extensive use of "cut-up" and "fold-in" techniques which he claimed "placed at the disposal of a writer the collage (technique) used in painting for fifty years", and described the concept behind it as being that "....any narrative passage or any passage, say, of poetic images is subject to any number of variations, all of which may be interesting and valid in their own right. A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images - real Rimbaud images - but new ones....cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one's range of vision consequently expands."

These techniques while not expressing the subconscious mind, pushes the concept of automatism one stage further, the re-arranged words and phrases falling in a truly random order (that is if one can accept the idea that the author's subconscious can be truly removed from the process, which is open to debate).

There are many similarities between the kinds of sentences and phrases produced using the cut-up technique and those produced by automatism. For example, compare "Sad young image dripping stagnant flower smell of sickness to a dusty window... I'll tell you story called the Street of Chance" and "from his mouth floated coal gas and violets...on the boy's breath a flesh" with the phrases written by some members of the Surrealist group - "The face of the precipice is black with lovers; the sun above them is a bag of nails" and "In a glass filled with a garnet-red liquid, an intense boiling created white rockets that fell in hazy curtains."

However, the pushing of surrealism more into the mainstream by the Beat writers, was undoubtedly helped by the explosion of marijuana use amongst their readership - the "Beatnik" youth of the Fifties, their freedom-loving attitude to life (or aspirations towards it), and their drug use no doubt going some way towards creating a greater interest in altered states of consciousness and a greater questioning of "dream vs reality".

Of course, when considering the use of "consciousness-expanding" drugs by the general public, one must discuss the 1960's. For several years Allen Ginsberg had been investing a great deal of time and energy in helping to found the "Flower-power" hippy movement, and it was amongst the turmoil of this decade, (the Vietnam War, the Black Panthers, radical feminism, and the hippy movement), that the literary style known as "The New Wave of Science Fiction" flowered.

Prior to this development science fiction (henceforth called SF), whilst being used by the likes of Burroughs as a representation of popular culture, had been rather dull and overwhelmingly realist in approach. (Although the heavy use of symbolism and allegory was remarkable in such pulp hack-work. The number of stories which used the "invading aliens/Martians/robots" theme as an allegory for Communism, or McCarthyism (depending on the writer's point of view), or the terror of the Atomic Age is impressive, and its popularity amongst Servicemen traumatised by the effects of mechanical war is understandable). However, these stories and novels are of little interest in the current discussion.

Christopher Priest gave a definition of New Wave" style writing as:

"...obscure to one degree or another. There would be experiments with the actual prose: with grammar, with viewpoint, with typography. There would be reference to all sorts of eclectic sources: philosophy, rock music, newspaper articles, medicine, politics, automobile specifications, etc. There would frequently be explicit descriptions of sexual activity, and obscenities were freely used."

The surrealistic elements in such work are clear. Indeed, Donald.A. Wollheim wrote in his introduction to The The 1974 Annual Worlds Best SF, that it "...amounted to little more than a dreary rechauffe of surrealist work of the 1920's and 1930's which had largely petered out in the mainstream."

Wollheim meant this to be a criticism of the New Wave, but for my purposes it is extremely useful, for that is the whole point! Surrealism, despite what many critics and literary historians believe, didn't "peter out" in the mainstream, but evolved, changed, and became more popularly accepted (and certainly more commercially successful) within the literary sub-genre of SF. Surrealism hadn't disappeared; one just needed where to know where to look for it.

The British magazine New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock promoted many of the New Wave writers including Brian Aldiss, and J.G. Ballard. Indeed, the first Moorcock issue contained a story by Aldiss, the first part of a Ballard serial (later published as The Crystal World), and interestingly an article by Ballard on William Burroughs.

As the New Wave, rich in surrealistic elements, grew in popularity, magazines like Amazing Stories, edited by Cele Goldsmith, began publishing more New Wave material, including work by Aldiss and Ballard (again), and Ursula Le Guin, Thomas Disch, and Philip.K. Dick (whose work I will come back to later).

By 1968 Judith Merrill had assembled the anthology called England Swings SF, which was littered with experimental typography, quotes and jottings of the time, and lyrics from Sergeant Pepper (echoing Burroughs' cut-up technique), and Brian Aldiss had managed to get an Arts Council grant for the financially-troubled New Worlds on the basis of its literary merits. It was at this time that New Worlds was publishing such work as Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration (1968) (a symbolic novel about the enhancement of human intelligence by use of the syphilis virus (more shades of Burroughs' work)), and much of J.G. Ballard's more overtly surreal work. He was writing books such as Crash (1973), and Concrete Island (1974) (a take on the Robinson Crusoe story about a motorist who crashes on a traffic island in the centre of a huge highway network and is unable to escape). New Worlds also published many of his "condensed novels" that were later to be assembled in The Atrocity Exhibition (1969).

Using tight compressed prose, and lists produced by free-association, Ballard openly referred to Surrealist writers and artists, and their works (for example, Oscar Dominguez, Roberto Matta, Paul Eluard, Ernst's "The Eye of Silence", "The Robing of the Bride", and "Europe After The Rain", and Dali's The Persistence of Memory" are all referred to).

The Atrocity Exhibition, contains such passages as "Undisturbed, the universe would continue on its round, the unrequited ghosts of Malcolm X, Lee Harvey Oswald and Claude Eatherly raised on the shoulders of the galaxy", and "At the conclusion of the film he would go out into the crowded streets. The noisy traffic mediated an exquisite and undying eroticism" and some of its chapters included "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As A Downhill Motor Race", (which did indeed consider Kennedy's assassination as a motor-race, with Oswald's shot acting as the starter pistol), "The Generations of America", (a list of names taken from various magazines - "Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert.F. Kennedy. And Ethel.M. Kennedy shot Judith Birnbaum. And Judith Birnbaum shot Elizabeth Bochnak. And Elizabeth Bochnak shot..... (for six pages), and "Princess Margaret's Facelift", and "Mae West's Reduction Mammoplasty", in which he replaced the word "patient" in a medical text with the aforementioned celebrities, with the intention of highlighting the closeness of such texts to pornography by adding the element of fame.

However, the writer who was most obsessed with the nature of reality, unreality, and surreality was Philip.K. Dick. While much of his work in the Fifties was interesting but conventional allegory, his work in the Sixties and Seventies became notably more surreal, more than likely the result of an incredibly high intake of drugs, and bouts of mental illness. He experimented with cut-ups for fun, but his published work is notable for its obsessive reworking of the theme, "What is real?"

In Ubik (1969), an accident causes five people to waken in a reality other than our own, a reality that is the construct of one of the protagonists, the rest of the text describing their search as to whose reality it is, and their attempts to regain access to true reality.

In A Scanner Darkly (1977), the main character, an undercover drugs officer who has to take identity splitting drugs to fit in with those he observes, loses touch with who he is, and doesn't realise that the latest drug-user he has to track and observe is actually himself.

Some could argue that while such works are surreal in the everyday use of the term, they do not conform to Breton's aim of expressing subconscious thoughts and drives. However, the narrative viewpoint of these novels (indeed Dick's personal view of the world in his everyday life) is very similar to the paranoiac-critical method espoused by Dali, although utilised in a traditionally realist narrative form.

Similarly, Breton himself said in What is Surrealism? (1934), "Surrealism must cease being content with....automatic texts, the recital of dreams, improvising speech, spontaneous poems, drawing and actions", and I would argue that this is precisely what these writers were doing - utilising the surrealist impulse in new ways.

In Dick's novel Valis (1981), (written after he believed he had been personally contacted by God in 1974), two of the main characters are Horselover Fat who we are immediately told is insane, ("Philip" in Greek means "lover of horses", and "Dick" is German for "Fat"), and Philip.K. Dick himself, who also narrates the story. These two characters search for God (called Valis) in all manner of everyday items such as records and books, before meeting Sophia (the Fifth Saviour) who dispels Dick's need to project a "Fat" personality, before being accidentally killed. This results in the reappearance of the Horselover Fat personality who decides to scan T.V. channels and search the world for further signs of Valis.

The strange narrative viewpoints (who is the narrator, indeed, who exactly is the author?), and the continued questioning of objective reality, makes this a highly surrealist work. The conventional prose style may have little in common with The Magnetic Fields, but I would remind readers of Breton's urging writers to "move away from automatism" and to consider the differences between "realist" writers such as Ben Okri, and Emil Zola.

Finally, in Time Out Of Joint (1959), Dick writes a novel based on a similar premise to that of Magritte's "La Trahison des Images", in which Magritte reminds the viewer that his work is indeed not a pipe but an oil painting representing a pipe. In the same way Dick writes a novel in which a man sees objects disappear only to be replaced by pieces of paper bearing their names, the most notable being when he tries to buy a drink, and the vendor disappears leaving only a small note with the words "SOFT DRINK STAND" written on it.

Dick, like the Surrealists before him, saw his work as dealing "with hallucinated worlds, intoxicating and deluding drugs and psychosis....It's like Eye In The Sky (a novel similar to Ubik in theme) "when actual rescue is right at hand but they can't wake up. Yes, we are asleep like they are in "Eye" and we must wake up and see past (through) the dream - the spurious world with its own time."

The work of many of the New Wave writers can thus be seen to be highly surrealist - explorations and expressions of the subconscious and altered states of consciousness. However, by the mid-1970's, the New Wave had become too obscure for many, and SF again became less experimental. So, we must therefore look elsewhere for the existence of surrealism into the Nineties, and with this in mind I would guide the reader towards many of the so-called "Post-modernist" writers.

For example, in Time's Arrow (1991), Martin Amis writes a novel in which time flows backwards from the nineties to the twenties, a classic New Wave device, used by Aldiss (Cryptozoic), Ballard ("Time of Passage"(1967) in The Venus Hunters (1980)), and Dick (Counter-Clock World (1967)) before him. The purpose of this novel is essentially to redeem War (drug-addled psychotics "return" from Vietnam as clean-cut, fresh-faced teenagers), but especially the Holocaust (smoke and ashes flow into the incinerators from which the Jews are reborn), but the concept is notably surreal. Even conversations run in reverse, requiring careful reading.

Similarly, in his novellas Cock and Bull (1992), Will Self tells the story, using a traditional realist narrative, of a woman who grows a penis and then rapes her alcoholic husband (Cock), and a young rugby player who discovers a vagina behind his knee, has sex (using his knee-vagina bizarrely enough) with his Doctor, and then gives birth to a son (Bull).

These stories, primarily intended as a humourous comment on sexual and gender relations are however, noticeably non-realist in their subject matter, if not their approach.

Thus, the continued existence of surrealism as a powerful literary force has hopefully been amply demonstrated, but, a linear direct influence can also be demonstrated by the various relations between the writers themselves. Martin Amis is an admirer of Ballard's work, even citing him as an influence for one of the stories in his collection Einstein's Monsters. Will Self has written articles for "The Guardian" on Burroughs, and "The Sunday Times" described Cock and Bull as like "a film of Kafka's Metamorphosis, scripted by William Burroughs, and shot by David Cronenberg" (who has himself filmed adaptations of Burrough's Naked Lunch and Ballard's Crash). Ballard has referred to Breton, Ernst, Dali, Bataille and other Surrealists in his works, as well as writing the introduction to the 1993 edition of Burrough's Naked Lunch, a favour returned by Burroughs in writing the introduction to Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition.

Thus, it can be seen how the Surrealist impulse has been an important element in literary output since before the time of Hesiod, and it is this impulse, this need to question external reality and explore the internal reality through which it is mediated, which marks a work as Surreal, rather than the narrative style that the work adopts. Thus, while the works of the Surrealist group in the first half of this century can indeed be seen to "run out of steam", repeatedly ploughing the same automatic furrow, the impulse, by its very nature refusing to conform to rigid rules of "what Surrealism was", changed and adapted, surfacing in different literary genres and utilising different narrative techniques. Indeed, when one considers the growing popularity of these works as the century has progressed, from the largely obscure works of Breton and Bataille, through the countercultural cultishness of Burroughs and Dick, to the bestseller, Booker-prize-winning success of Amis and Ballard, one can only wonder if the Surrealist impulse is evolving over time to a point where it is pure enough to be relevant to the masses, or if Society itself, overloaded with information from dozens of sources, has somehow gotten close enough to its own hidden paranoias and anxieties to be able to feel an importance in this work.

Reference List

Ballard, J.G. (1993) The Atrocity Exhibition, London, HarperCollins

Breton, A, and Soupalt,P. (1985) The Magnetic Fields, London, Atlas

Burroughs, W.S. (1995) The Soft Machine, London, HarperCollins

Carter, P.A. (1977) The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction, U.S.A, Columbia University Press

Gascoyne, D. "Salvador Dali" in Germain, E.B.(ed) Surrealist Poetry in English, (1978) London, Penguin Twentieth Century Classics

Germain, E.B. (1978) "Introduction" in Germain, E.B.(ed) Surrealist Poetry in English, London, Penguin Twentieth Century Classics

Miles, B. (1992) William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, London, Virgin Books

Priest, C. (1978) "The New Wave" in Holdstock, R,(ed) Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, London, Cathay

Sutin, L. (1994) Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (GOLLANCZ S.F.), London, HarperCollins


THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE UCL (UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON) MAGAZINE "PANOPTICON" IN 1998.