Or My Idea of Fun
DEATH.- André Breton died on at least two occasions. The first time was in the late 1920s when a group of dissident surrealists, led by Bataille, announced Breton’s obituary in the polemical pamphlet, Cadavre. In part, this act of metaphorical parricide was revenge for the artistic death of Robert Desnos, whom Breton had denounced and expelled from the Surrealist Group. But Breton’s murder was also meant to insert distance, to separate idea from matter, light from dark, Eros from Thanatos, and to send Surrealism in opposing directions: the transformation of matter into metaphor in an ascending movement of sublimation or a descent into the dirt? In which direction did Surrealism travel? Both. Inevitably. For death does not insert difference; it disturbs. Surrealism resists reification, oscillating dizzyingly and uncompromisingly between: conscious/unconscious, sublimation/de-sublimation, life/death. Will Self’s writing elaborates the vertiginous trajectories of Surrealist enquiry: Death disturbs. The dead relocate to North London. They complain, potter, gorge on dead breakfasts only to regurgitate them immediately – and not always accurately – into buckets on the floor. The dead remember, desire, sing pops songs absorbed through folds. They watch and listen, but they never intervene. There is always business to be done: death generates paperwork. There are meetings to attend, waiting rooms to populate, examinations to be endured, cases for return journeys to be made.
‘D’jew know […] The living, foolishly, comfort themselves with the notion that in death at least things become clear-cut, as if death were a definable barrier, a wall or a line. But I was finding that death was far trickier, and as hard to locate as the exact edge of your own visual field’ (Self, How the Dead Live). Already dead, Robert Desnos went on to suffer a horrible metamorphosis: 185,443 entered the death camps of Europe: Auschwitz-Birkenau; Buchenwald; Flossenburg; Theresienstadt. Desnos laboured to fight death, and he drew on Surrealism to live, telling fortunes of prosperous futures, and interpreting dreams. When asked why his dream recitals were always so sexually charged, Desnos replied: ‘You can’t tell someone who dreams he’s hungry here that all he needs to do is eat more.’ ‘The Fat Controller’s voice sluiced me out of my wine haze. He was dissecting a gland-like mushroom as he spoke, clearly in order to illustrate his telepathy. “The only reason people are fat,” he went on, “is because they eat too much. After all,” he continued, deftly manipulating half a loaf of garlic bread to sop up the tomato juice on his platter, “you never saw anybody fat come out of Auschwitz” ’ (Self, My Idea of Fun).
METAMORPHOSIS.- ‘We are always in a state of change and flux, and it's really only received constraints in our language that try to block that from us and straightjacket us into definable states […] Every day seems to me a steady build-up of signifiers that are covertly intended to convey the message to you that nothing will ever change, that you're in a state of stasis. But lo and behold, come the end of the day you shut down, you have a kind of seeming death, and in the morning the whole system is booted up again, and that seems to me far more primary than this sort of con-trick that we try to perpetrate on ourselves during the day […] the fact of the matter is that we struggle every day to say 'I'm okay, I'm not dying, and therefore by implication I'm in a state of stasis, I'm denying the running down of this organic alarm clock we seem to be inhabiting’. (‘Will Self’)
‘Don’t go changing to try and please me/You never let me down before/ […] I took the good times/ I’ll take the bad times/I’ll take you just the way you are’. (Lithy the lithopedion)
UN/FOLD.- The un/fold is replete with tensions. Disparate elements clash, upsetting established modes of representation, and disturbing all notion of linear composition as new and unexpected words and images emerge out of the play of chance. The un/fold brings elements together, but these elements do not synthesise: they join and separate, couple and divide: ‘All of the tension and paradox necessary to the dynamics of juxtaposition are put in play by the un/fold, which strikes against the unity of the gestalt that it itself generates’ (Laxton). The fold produces and destroys. Surrealist corpses are exquisite: Lilly/Lithy/Rude Boy/Natty; Ursula/Richard/Bell; Audrey Death/Zack Busner/‘Will Self’. Bodies are not classical. They are not contained or closed. They un/fold: Carol sprouts a penis and John discovers a vagina behind his knee in a tale of Cock/and/Bull. Exquisite corpses also make return journeys, repeating within and across Self’s non/fictions, and forcing uncanny encounters with estranged selves: ‘I’ve no doubt that like the majority of shrinks he was a psycho-empathetic voyeur, who, to begin with, clutched the safety bar alongside me and screamed along for the ride. Could he also have foreseen the curious creative symbiosis that would grow up between us? For, just as I incorporated him – thinly veiled – into my novels and short stories, so he made use of me in numerous articles and case studies he published.’ (Ballard/Self/Kafka/Sebald/Self/Burroughs/Self)
IN/SANITY.- Surrealism started life in a madhouse. Working as a medical assistant in a neuropsychiatric clinic at Saint-Dizier during the First World War, André Breton treated soldiers who were convinced that the war was a hideous fiction, that the wounded were wearing make-up, and that the corpses were on loan from medical schools (Foster).
In 1917, André Masson lay wounded in a trench piled high with corpses. Unable to claw his way out, he spent the night in close encounter with death, watching the conflict of war unfold from a very unusual angle: ‘Never having seen artillery fire whilst facing up at the sky, I was seized by a boundless terror’ (Masson, Mémoire du monde). Barely alive and suffering from nervous exhaustion, Masson was interned for a short period in a psychiatric hospital and confined to a padded cell. Death visited him there, intruding into dreams, nightmares, hallucinations, memories. Death also returned across the artist’s paintings, drawings and sketches: faceless figures occupy claustrophobic spaces; soft, disembodied body parts clash with the hard geometry of partially opened tombs; repeating shapes and form – spirals, labyrinths – insist on the unbounded nature of life/death, in/sanity, dream/waking. Elsewhere in a German military psychiatric hospital, a decorated soldier-cum-artist sketched blueprints for a post-war order. Suffering from hysterical blindness, and working on an unprecedented scale, Adolf Hitler envisaged a clean and bounded world, one that differentiated sharply between sanity and insanity, dream and awakening in a discourse of intoxication. ‘Deutschland erwache!’ The sweet smell of psychosis.
PHOTOGRAPHY.- ‘[Surrealist] photography intervenes in a very strange way’ (Walter Benjamin).
The 64 black-and-white photographs reproduced in Walking to Hollywood are often out of focus and poorly lit, jostling quietly alongside anecdotes, memories, and biographical references. Nudging the viewer’s gaze off-centre to rest on unassuming details, these photographs install moments of critical reflection by bearing witness to that which threatens to pass unnoticed: the corner of a hotel bed; a jacket on a toilet cubicle floor; drinks cans, chip wrappers, and a white plastic spoon thrown into a suburban bush. Constantly on the move, the surrealist photographer-cum-flâneur re-presents the landscapes of the everyday in images that are never fixed or closed, but open, and in process. Folding into and out of one another, Self’s images force questions: what relationship exists between sheep in a field, a portable trolley stacked high with cheap designer handbags, and a homeless man lying prone on the streets of Los Angeles? What connections can be drawn between eroding cliff faces in Yorkshire, two masked crusaders fighting the ills of scientology, and the reflection of a naked male body cut off at the knees and torso by a high camera angle? Self’s photography sets in train lines of associative enquiry such as these. For, in moments of (re)reading/(re)viewing, the images mobilise unexpected and frequently unpalatable geometries of meaning, and they reveal to us an alternative, discontinuous, and living history.
Photography de-stabilises. Self’s photographs perform Surrealist (self-) portraiture, a form of visual autobiographical practice that parodies the portrait genre as a fixed, realist record by foregrounding slippages and contradictions in human identity. Employing disjunctive techniques – rotation, close-up, folding, unusual angles – the photographer manipulates images of himself in order to force moments of mis/recognition.
We might recall the awkward, high-angle photograph that ‘Will’ takes of his naked reflection: one arm, no legs, no shoulders, no neck, no head. What remains of ‘Will’? Who, precisely, are we looking at? Is this another version of the homeless man whom we last saw lying prone on the streets of L.A.? His legs are also cut off, severed at the knee by the photographic frame. His left arm – a ‘dead’ arm? – appears to end at a stump; his right hand and neck are indistinct. We presume they are there, holding the nameless man together. But we can’t be sure. Self’s (self-) portraits unsettle. ‘Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I “haunt” ’ (‘André Breton’, Nadja).
SCALE.- ‘Swift's notion of using the very large and very small as conceptual canopeners to open up the conundrums of the world is something that I think is inherent in our vision: that kind of scale vision …When you make things very large or very small you sacrifice the intelligible to liberate what is discoverable about
things at that point’
(Will Self).
JB, 2013