Meaning and Textuality: A Surrealist Example

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to attempt, by a kind of dialectical indirection, to point to some of the possible procedures of reading a poem, a surrealist poem in particular. Surrealist verse, based as it is on the principles of automatism, dream-imagery, irrationality-first defined in Andre Breton's Premier Manifeste du Surrealisme and since vastly modified and qualified-presents some special problems. These problems arise out of the fact that the surrealist poet, ideally, sets forth a dream, or something analogous to a dream; not the description or rendition or re-creation of a previously experienced dream, but the dream-as-it-is-being-dreamt. This of course presents the ideal case; few surrealist poems approach it, for the problems of pure psychic automatism have been found to be all but insuperable. Nonetheless, this tilting toward the unconscious origins of poetic imagery, regardless of degree or success, poses some interesting questions for the reader of surrealist verse: How is one to read it? How does one pursue meaning in a surrealist poem? And, perhaps most important and most difficult to answer, Is meaning really what one is after in a surrealist poem? Or, differently put, What kind of reality is represented by a language that is produced automatically? In other words, does the language of a surrealist poem retain its representative function and transparency? I intend in this essay to approach the topic by examining not only a surrealist poem, but a surrealist poem together with a commentary on it in the traditional manner. By this I mean an analytic approach that answers the last question in the affirmative; that is, it presupposes that there is a recoverable meaning which lies somewhere behind the text, and that its purpose is to push the text aside to reveal that meaning.