Surrealist Ideal “Modern people do not know our time when brave means boldness.� -- Louis Aragon, a surrealist writer
Editor’s Note
Many people find it difficult to understand surrealism, especially when they have no idea about the historical background. This genre came from literature and influenced many areas such as painting, music and so on. Just like the violent running tribe in Japan, a group of people may seem “abnormal”, but that does not mean they are evildoer.
contents
Brief introduction to surrealism Influence of Dadaism towards poem Chinese surrealism in literature
Brief introduction to surrealism
Those young people who were indulged in their own dreams violently felt the disillusion towards reality because of the First World War. They were not content with reality so that they reject the value of tradition and destroy the existing rules. Surrealism is one important part of this cultural rebel movement.
Surrealism came from Dadaism at the beginning of the 20th century. Its principle is to destroy those outdated policy, changeless plan and stereotype routine. Guillaume Apollinaire, the French poet, created the word “surrealism� exploring the truth movement of human, nature, society and spiritual phenomena.
Influence of Dadaism towards poem It seems that Dadaism has an effect on poem. As one of the surrealist founder, AndrĂŠ Breton began to create new poem totally different from the traditional one. He cut the words and sentences from a bra advertisement in a newspaper and pieced them together into a poem named mysterious bra with poem montage. The fragments made the content incoherent and ironical.
The poem coincided with the mosaic created by Pablo Picasso in 1912 to 1913. AndrĂŠ Breton may get the idea from this kind of painting.
Guitar, March 31st, 1913 newspaper, wall paper and chalk This work is a fashion one without using any pigments. It reveals the principle of cubism: paste one thing on the top of another. This guitar does not relate to reality. It is an attempt to find the truth.
Guitar statue made of paperboard, 1912
This work of Picasso also reflects the artistic questions from cubism: What is truth? Why some “truths� are better than the other? What is high-level art and what is low-level one? What decides one object to be art? These questions, principle and works arouse the inspirations for poems. Arts are interlinked.
Chinese surrealism in literature In fact, one part of Chinese classical literature also reflects the features of surrealism. A Happy Excursion ( 逍遥游 ) is a prose created by Zhuang Zhou. It creates a surrealist image of a really big bird called Peng. When this bird flies, its wings obscure the sky like clouds.
The Classic of Mountains and Rivers is an oldest geography book with fairy tales in China. It contains geography, products, fairy tales, witchcraft, religion, history, medicine, customs and nations in ancient time. The bizarre animals in the book are surrealist although they do not come from dreams.
异兽讙（ huān ） 翼望之山，有兽焉，其状如狸，一目而三尾，名曰讙， 其音如夺百声，是可以御凶，服之已瘅。 Bizarre beast Huan There is a wild beast in Yi Wang Mountain. It looks like a wild cat with one eye and three tails. People call it Huan. Its sound is really unique. People can exorcise evil spirits by breeding it; and they can cure of yellow jaundice by eating its meat.
异兽狰 章莪之山，无草木，多瑶、碧。所为甚怪。有兽焉 ，其状如赤豹，五尾一角，其音如击石，其名曰狰 。 Bizarre beast Zheng There are a lot of precious jades on Zhang E Mountain without plants and trees. Strange things always happen in it. The beast named Zheng looks like a leopard with five tails and a horn. Its sound likes the sound when people hit a stone.
Conclusion Surrealism not only appears in painting but also in literature. They interlink with each other. The fact is that those poets and painters who involved themselves into politics, wars, secrets and incidents both live for their own ideals and spare no effort to achieve them no matter how unrealistic it seems to be.
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