The Sursymamericubealism of Gertrude Stein

Abstract

In evanescence and palpability surrealism is a very Nabokov of subject, lepidopteral, a butterfly its proper emblem. For surrealism so ingeniously mimes modernism that one is often taken for other, quite as dada for example, echoed in Nabokov's Ada, is name given to twin principles of negation and creation, principles which intertwine like incestuous lovers in Nabokov's novel. At once a new theme and an old one, it was an entrenched motif of art when Tzara in 1918 and Breton in 1924, Cox and Box of modernism, issued those manifestoes which scholars today declare both terminal and germinal in history of ideas. How can a non-Nabokovian cohort of critics codify, trammel in time and consciousness, a movement given over to untrammeling of a timeless unconscious? Besides, every speaker thinks he has key to break surrealist code, whereas in fact sounds and letters he partly deciphers instantly rearrange in combinations no less arcane. For it's not just an exhalation of unconsciousness, of irrationalism, which distinguishes surrealist enterprise from other manifestations of modern art. Nor indeed is it a ceremony of Word, of language unmediated by conscious controls, a voltage of words, says Anna Balakian, which alone serves as the key to surrealist poetry. Nor is etymology, though once it was thought to be, a device fit to unsnarl swirl and swivel of speech. A resort to etymology, both in making and unmaking of a work, cannot sustain surrealist zeal to leaven world with yeast of liberty. Liberty? Well, yes and no--so symposiasts say. For if liberation is key, then Breton's first source of inspiration, Freud, is locked out. Was not Freud at bottom a high priest of reason, of rationality? And does not his religion theologize repression into a dogma of culture, for good or ill? Well, perhaps it's Freud and Marx in constellation, liberty and law in tandem-together these harmonize