Were the Surrealists working within the French literary/artistic tradition of heterodoxy, mysticism, and revolution? What is it about surrealism that is original, unique?

The Surrealists rejected all tradition, but used heterodox streams of thought to attack Catholicism and the bourgeois mentality. As much talk as there is of Surrealism’s rejection of logic, I think that André Breton attempted to justify Surrealism through citing the occult sciences or mysticism, such as the tarot, Tibetan Buddhism, and parapsychology. The Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes and its publication, La Révolution surréaliste used a pseudo-scientific format to send up empiricism. The magazine demonstrates Breton’s need to develop a “rationale” for surrealism. He was more of a theorist, a demagogue, than an artist. The Manifestoes of Surrealism ultimately are characterized by a subversive ideology — and hampered by a high seriousness — that is a trap that the best of the art avoids.

In the image, poetic associations, and music’s harmonic structures we apprehend simultaneously the contradictions of emotion and sensation; it is the only understanding of completion that we can experience beyond mysticism or intimacy with another.

Surrealism’s originality arises from its art, not its political arguments between artists or writers that continue to this day. Imagination and intuition, in visual art and in poetry, give us alternatives to retinal vision and logic in a way that a sequential argument never can. In the image, poetic associations, and music’s harmonic structures we apprehend simultaneously the contradictions of emotion and sensation; it is the only understanding of completion that we can experience beyond mysticism or intimacy with another.

Perhaps the traditions of Western esotericism are marginalized because they understand the world through matter — transformed in alchemy, employed in ritual, developed in herbalism, and manifested in nature. For the same reason the dominant cultures of the west have rejected the body — to deny we are matter is to deny death. The alternative, poetic view of the world comes from our physical experience of matter. The imagination creates metaphor from matter, while reason denies it connection to feeling, except for its functional use. The Surrealists embodied their metaphors through matter — bone, fur, sand, flesh. What is Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined tea-cup without the creepy sensation of drinking from it?