Your Surrealist Literature Starter Kit

My latest favorite writer Leonora Carrington was born 102 years ago this month. Once primarily known for her surrealist painting, in recent years Carrington has re-emerged in our collective consciousness as a fantastic (and fantastical) writer, thanks to cool-as-hell indie press Dorothy’s 2017 edition of her collected work. By the way, they describe Carrington this way:

She was born to a wealthy English family in 1917, expelled from two convents as a girl, and presented to the king’s court in 1933. Four years later, she ran off with Max Ernst and became a darling of the art world in Paris: serving guests hair omelets at one party, arriving naked to another. After Ernst was taken from their home to a Nazi internment camp in 1940, Carrington fled France. Nearly mad with grief and terror, she was thrown into a lunatic asylum in Spain, and, after escaping, married a Mexican diplomat, fleeing Europe for New York City then Mexico City, where she lived for the rest of her life.

Oh to have such a summation. Carrington saw Surrealism to the end and then some; when she died in 2011 she was described as one of the movement’s last surviving participants, and so to mark her birthday, I’ve been looking back at the literature of the movement. But this is not a history lesson, so while I will start with traditional, official Surrealism, I will also meander into less-official modern and contemporary surrealism—that is, literature that is surreal but not necessarily part of the Surrealist Movement. The poets.org listing for the movement describes the practitioners of post-WWII surrealism, now based all over the world, as being “held together by their use of personal juxtapositions, placing distant realities together, so that the interconnections between them were only apparent to the creator.” Which, if you ask me, is a pretty good working definition of surreality as it is currently understood, in literature and otherwise. So with that in mind, I present a starter kit for anyone in the market for some weird and wonderful reading material—absolutely non-exhaustive, of course, but covering some of the seminal texts as well as some of my own later favorites. Add on at will in the comments!

André Breton, Le Manifeste du Surréalisme (Manifesto of Surrealism), 1924

Unlike some literary movements, Surrealism was expressly defined as it began. “Those who might dispute our right to employ the term SURREALISM in the very special sense that we understand it are being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this word had no currency before we came along,” Breton writes in his Manifesto. “Therefore, I am defining it once and for all:

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.

He goes on to list a host of Officially Surrealist writers, and a few more who could pass for Surrealists, including Shakespeare, but only “in his finer moments.” True Surrealists would not claim any “talent” Breton writes, but instead consider themselves to be “simple receptacles of so many echoes, modest recording instruments.” This makes Surrealists hard to define, as an outsider, but of course the term has come to be more diffuse since then.

Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell ,1873

But despite his manifesto, it is not Breton who is considered the father of Surrealism, but Rimbaud—the famous poet and angsty lover of Verlaine, whose work has had centuries of influence despite the fact that he gave up writing at 21. In 1935, Breton explained that “all the technical effort of Surrealism from its origin to the present has consisted in multiplying the ways of penetrating the deepest layers of the mind. “I must say that one must be a seer, must make oneself a seer” [here Breton is slightly misquoting Rimbaud’s 1871 “Letter of a Seer”]: it was only a question for us of discovering the means of applying this password of Rimbaud.” A Season is Hell is good and oft-quoted, but any of his poetry would really do here.

André Breton, Nadja, 1928

Of course, a manifesto is a manifesto, but Nadja is a proper Surrealist novel (as well as, in parts, another meditation on Surrealism), and possibly the best one ever written. It is a photograph-studded dream-like romance and the most important book on this list to read if you’re just scratching the surface of surrealist literature.

Mary Ann Caws, ed., The Milk Bowl of Feathers, 2018

If you don’t want to mess around with too many books (who are you and why are you reading this website) or you’re just short of time, you could cut to the chase with this excellent anthology from New Directions, edited by noted Surrealist scholar Mary Ann Caws, which includes works by Breton and Carrington as well as George Bataille, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Mina Loy, and other noted literary Surrealists (with special emphasis on the oft-ignored women of the genre), and even some writings by more visual members of the movement, like Man Ray and Dali.

Leonora Carrington, The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, 2017

No one writes like Leonora Carrington. These stories are weird and jagged and enchanting, fragmented and strikingly visual, barely stories at all sometimes, but always oddly compulsive. How else to describe a collection that includes a woman winning the corpse of Joseph Stalin in the lottery and using it to cure whooping cough and syphilis?

Kobo Abe, Kangaroo Notebook, 1991

Abe is another of my favorite surrealists; this is the last book he completed before he died and is arguably his weirdest work. After all, it concerns a regular guy whose legs mysteriously turn into daikon radish sprouts, which is actually the most normal thing that happens in this novel, which quickly spirals into a oddly funny if definitely nightmarish literary spectacle.

Clarice Lispector, tr. Idra Novey, The Passion According to G. H., 1964

I read this novel only recently, though I have long been a fan of Lispector, and found myself oddly both bored and riveted; this is often my response to surrealism. It is nearly plotless: a woman walks into the maid’s room, accidentally kills a cockroach, and proceeds to have a surreal religious experience/mystic breakdown/existential crisis, before bringing herself back to quasi-reality with one horrifying gesture.

Álvaro Enrigue, Sudden Death, 2013

Sudden Death is a relatively recent example, a book that Tobias Carroll once called “historical surrealism,” and which centers around a 1599 tennis match between Francisco de Quevedo and Caravaggio, played with a ball stuffed with Anne Boleyn’s hair. Though less metaphysically stupendous than some of the others on this list, the patterning of anecdote, meta-narrative, and history certainly counts if we go back to our definition of a surrealist work as one that juxtaposes distant realities via unknown interconnections.