nor yet entirely what is done.’ 65 Woolf is describing, and making us feel, what life is like in vast cosmopolitan cities of the modern world. This fragmentation, this dissolution of the familiar categories – psychological as well as physical – is just as much the result of World War I, she is saying, as the military/political/economic changes that have been wrought, and is arguably more fundamental.
The effect of Sigmund Freud’s psychological ideas on André Breton (1896–1966) was very direct. During World War I he stood duty as an hospital orderly at the Saint-Dizier psychiatric centre, treating victims of shell shock. And it was in Saint-Dizier that Breton first encountered the (psycho) analysis of dreams, in which – as he later put it – he did the ‘groundwork’ for surrealism. In particular, he remembered one patient who lived entirely in his own world. This man had been in the trenches but had become convinced he was invulnerable.He thought the whole world was ‘a sham,’ played by actors who used dummy bullets and stage props. So convinced was he of this vision that he would show himself during the fighting and gesture excitedly at the explosions. The miraculous inability of the enemy to kill him only reinforced his belief. 66
It was the ‘parallel world’ created by this man that had such an effect on Breton. For him the patient’s madness was in fact a rational response to a world that had gone mad, a view that was enormously influential for several decades in the middle of the century. Dreams, another parallel world, a route to the unconscious as Freud said, became for Breton the route to art. For him, art and the unconscious could form ‘a new alliance,’ realised through dreams, chance, coincidence, jokes – all the things Freud was investigating. This new reality Breton called sur-reality, a word he borrowed from Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1917 Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, and Léonide Massine had collaborated on a ballet,
Parade,
which the French poet had described as ‘une espèce de surréalisme.’ 67
Surrealism owed more to what its practitioners
thought
Freud meant than to what he actually wrote. Few French and Spanish surrealists could read Freud’s works, as they were still only available in German. (Psychoanalysis was not really popular in France until after World War II; in Britain the British Psychoanalytic Association was not formed until 1919.) Breton’s ideas about dreams, about neurosis as a sort of ‘ossified’ form of permanent dreaming, would almost certainly have failed to find favour with Freud, or the surrealists’ view that neurosis was ‘interesting,’ a sort of mystical, metaphysical state. It was in its way a twentieth-century form of romanticism, which subscribed to the argument that neurosis was a ‘dark side’ of the mind, the seat of dangerous new truths about ourselves. 68
Though surrealism started as a movement of poets, led by Breton, Paul Eluard (1895–1952), and Louis Aragon (1897–1982), it was the painters who were to achieve lasting international fame. Four painters became particularly well known, and for three of them the wasteland was a common image.
Max Ernst was the first artist to join the surrealists (in 1921). He claimed to have hallucinated often as a child, so was predisposed to this approach. 69 His landscapes or objects are oddly familiar but subtly changed. Trees and cliffs, for example, may actually have the texture of the insides of the body’s organs; or the backside of a beast is so vast, so out of scale, that it blocks the sun. Something dreadful has either just happened or seems about to. Ernst also painted apparently cheerful scenes but gave these works long and mysterious titles that suggest something sinister:
The Inquisitor: At 7:07 Justice Shall Be Made. 70
For example, on the surface
Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale
is cheerfully colourful. The picture consists of a bird, a clock that resembles a
The effect of Sigmund Freud’s psychological ideas on André Breton (1896–1966) was very direct. During World War I he stood duty as an hospital orderly at the Saint-Dizier psychiatric centre, treating victims of shell shock. And it was in Saint-Dizier that Breton first encountered the (psycho) analysis of dreams, in which – as he later put it – he did the ‘groundwork’ for surrealism. In particular, he remembered one patient who lived entirely in his own world. This man had been in the trenches but had become convinced he was invulnerable.He thought the whole world was ‘a sham,’ played by actors who used dummy bullets and stage props. So convinced was he of this vision that he would show himself during the fighting and gesture excitedly at the explosions. The miraculous inability of the enemy to kill him only reinforced his belief. 66
It was the ‘parallel world’ created by this man that had such an effect on Breton. For him the patient’s madness was in fact a rational response to a world that had gone mad, a view that was enormously influential for several decades in the middle of the century. Dreams, another parallel world, a route to the unconscious as Freud said, became for Breton the route to art. For him, art and the unconscious could form ‘a new alliance,’ realised through dreams, chance, coincidence, jokes – all the things Freud was investigating. This new reality Breton called sur-reality, a word he borrowed from Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1917 Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, and Léonide Massine had collaborated on a ballet,
Parade,
which the French poet had described as ‘une espèce de surréalisme.’ 67
Surrealism owed more to what its practitioners
thought
Freud meant than to what he actually wrote. Few French and Spanish surrealists could read Freud’s works, as they were still only available in German. (Psychoanalysis was not really popular in France until after World War II; in Britain the British Psychoanalytic Association was not formed until 1919.) Breton’s ideas about dreams, about neurosis as a sort of ‘ossified’ form of permanent dreaming, would almost certainly have failed to find favour with Freud, or the surrealists’ view that neurosis was ‘interesting,’ a sort of mystical, metaphysical state. It was in its way a twentieth-century form of romanticism, which subscribed to the argument that neurosis was a ‘dark side’ of the mind, the seat of dangerous new truths about ourselves. 68
Though surrealism started as a movement of poets, led by Breton, Paul Eluard (1895–1952), and Louis Aragon (1897–1982), it was the painters who were to achieve lasting international fame. Four painters became particularly well known, and for three of them the wasteland was a common image.
Max Ernst was the first artist to join the surrealists (in 1921). He claimed to have hallucinated often as a child, so was predisposed to this approach. 69 His landscapes or objects are oddly familiar but subtly changed. Trees and cliffs, for example, may actually have the texture of the insides of the body’s organs; or the backside of a beast is so vast, so out of scale, that it blocks the sun. Something dreadful has either just happened or seems about to. Ernst also painted apparently cheerful scenes but gave these works long and mysterious titles that suggest something sinister:
The Inquisitor: At 7:07 Justice Shall Be Made. 70
For example, on the surface
Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale
is cheerfully colourful. The picture consists of a bird, a clock that resembles a
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