Subvirtualism: The Surrealists’ love child, immaculately conceived
By Marianne Apostolides

Hey, whatever happened to surrealism? Bookninjette, Marianne Apostolides takes a look at surrealism, asking the questions: “Is it dead? Has it been entirely co-opted by advertising?” then applying a new template for a current surrealism to the work of George Saunders and Victor Pelevin. Enjoy!

It’s so surreal! In this virtual age, ‘surrealism’ seems to be everywhere — on laptop screens and digital billboards, on the lips of art students and suburban suits alike.

The Surrealist movement, founded in Paris in the interwar period, was a radical affront to the bourgeois conception of politics, art, and self. Through the guidance of dream, the Surrealists rudely awoke the art world from its sweet slumber. The movement gathered its force from various developments in politics, science/philosophy, and culture, including: the carnage of the First World War; Freud’s theories about the subconscious; the philosophy of Henri Bergson regarding time, duration, and the unceasing flux of subjective experience; the stultifying stateliness of the sanctioned artistic community; and the rage of the Dadaists with whom the Surrealists overlapped.

In the Surrealist Manifesto (1924), André Breton defined the movement as “Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express… the true functioning of thought.” Surrealism’s signature techniques included:

• Odd juxtapositions of images and/or words. Through the proximity of unlike objects and words, Surrealist art confounds common perception — perception which attempts to lock truth into a logical order. In doing so, Surrealism shatters the pretty surface of the ‘real,’ exposing the illogical truth beneath. One well-known example is René Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images, in which a sleek pipe floats above the declaration ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe.’
• Automatic writing, in which poems are produced in a rapid, unedited, free-flowing moment; through this technique, the artists attempted to separate creation from naturalistic reproduction, and to directly express essential “mental matter.” Often, this technique establishes a wide field in which words and images ping off each other, creating meaning through the unexpected associations and connections thereby produced. The Immaculate Conception, written by Breton and Paul Eluard in 1930, is a seminal Surrealist text: “To be nothing. Of all the ways the sunflower has of loving the light, regret is the most beautiful shadow on the sundial. Crossbones, crossword puzzles, volumes and volumes of ignorance and knowledge. Where is one to begin?”
• A suspicion of expertise and refined technique, resulting in the democratic embrace of those who were not previously considered artists (especially people classified as mentally ill). This is a direct response to the established arts community with its hierarchies and academies, and to the discredited belief that sanity could be neatly defined.
• Collaborative creations, giving rise to the game the ‘Exquisite Corpse.’ In this game, a piece of writing or drawing was assembled, bit by bit, when each artist contributed a single segment of the phrase or image. The resulting work revealed the vision of a collective moment. Eluard described this process: “Several of us would often meet to string words together or to draw a figure fragment by fragment…. It was up to every player to find more charm, more unity, more daring in this collectively determined poetry…. We gambled with images, and there were no losers.”

As you may note, these techniques no longer affront common conceptions of reality. In fact, they’ve become reality — the currency of our culture, the shared vocabulary of our consumer society:

• Odd juxtapositions and subconscious drives? Advertisers have long mastered such techniques and moods, employing them to sell a whole array of consumer products — everything from bottled water to toilet water to toilet paper.
• Automatic, unedited writing? The embrace of democratic possibilities in art, regardless of expertise? Try a blog. Try ten-thousand, if you like.
• The spread of associations across a wide field of play? That essentially describes the dynamics of the web.
• Collaborative creations? Well, the Wiki has become the new Exquisite Corpse. Unfortunately, most Wikis feel more like diddling with the dead than daring to risk through language.

Yes, it’s so surreal!: the Surrealists’ urgent response to accepted reality has become terribly staid — dangerously stupid. The surreal has become the framework for our mediated lives. But surrealist inscriptions bear little relation to the original Surrealist impulse. The Surrealist revolution has been castrated.

Despite the violence done to the form of Surrealism, the deeper thrust remains within a new group of contemporary writers. Like the Surrealists, these writers are driven by the need to crack open the fissures in accepted reality, thereby making us see the dynamics of self and society; the need — not to shout or rail or talk incessantly — but to growl from the landscape of the true, as they perceive it. These contemporary writers are responding to the political, scientific, and cultural tone of their time. Now, however, that tone resounds within and from the virtual nature of our society.

Our world has become increasingly removed from direct sensory input; form and matter are less a product of flesh and fuck than pixel-click. We must process more information — delivered through ceaseless waves of word and image — yet we are not present at the occurrence which gives rise to this information. News about Kenyan riots or Israeli attacks or polar bears drifting away from their cubs: this information arrives in constant streams yet we do not experience the ‘happening’ with our own bodies and senses. We receive the information immediately, but it is rarely un-mediated.

In a reverse of this process, we emit a semblance of self to others. This semblance, then, becomes. With the web 2.0 — particularly social networking sites like Facebook and video sharing sites like YouTube, in which our lives are updated for a decentered, unknown public of all — we assemble our notion of self through videos, photographs, and affiliations with groups. In this reality, the world isn’t a stage; instead, the person is a performance on some screen, some where.

So, as we constantly process information and perform our identities, we are losing the ability to carve a non-stimulated space for quiet contemplation. This trend is unfortunate, since this space is the origin of the erotic — the stirring of the drive toward self-stimulation. Increasingly, the family is becoming the only preserve of eros.

Surrounding these changes is our general jitteriness, an uncertainty caused, in part, by the loss of our unifying narrative: the belief that human beings are privileged by God to move toward progress within His domain. We cannot hold onto this belief as individuals whom science can alter with implants and pills that change our biochemistry, in a society which is multi-cultural and secular, in a world whose basic biology is shifting due to climate change and wide-scale extinction of species.*

George Saunders, the award-winning author of six books and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius grant’ in 2006, looks on American consumer society with utter clarity — a clarity that is needed to carry his readers so effortlessly through the complex intellectual underpinnings of his stories. In his most recent short story collection, In Persuasion Nation (Riverhead, 2006), the fictive worlds are recognizable because the cues are common: Doritos and Ding-Dongs, teenaged celebrities, reality TV shows, etc. Here, however, the rhythms and rules of society are removed. We’re left in the all-too-familiar unfamiliar; we’re dropped into the evil of banality — the horror of our comfortable, high-tech, predatory consumer society.

In “Brad Carrigan, American,” the characters participate in a reality TV show which extends into the fantastical. Most writers would be content to depict the overlapping nature of the characters’ ‘real’ personalities versus those they display on ‘reality TV.’ Not Saunders: he’s pursuing a larger question. In this piece, laugh tracks abut sexual infidelities, the famine victim knocking at the door, several snappy commercial breaks, and sentient Bosnian corpses half-buried in the muck of a suburban backyard. Here, in Brad Carrigan’s America, there’s no real versus virtual to separate. Instead, there’s the maw underneath, the flesh of TV images — the pornographically explicit news depicting horrors from around the globe — allowed to enter our homes and our selves; the characters eat the filth that supports our contemporary, two-dimensional, vicarious virtual life.

Saunders does not need the zap of the virtual to sustain his writing, however. He complements this style in stories that depict the familial orb as the only remaining realm of eros — the exclusive arena for physical, human-as-animal connection. Desire and death are housed in the family in such stories as “Jon” and “The Red Bow,” in which the death of a child demands a response of visceral nature; and in “My Flamboyant Grandson,” in which a grandfather’s basic love — a love that is uncomplicated and uncomplicatable — conveys the eternal, human sadness within the passage of time and life. Despite his insistence on making us see, Saunders’ prose reads rather gently. He does not intend to shock or anger; his intention seems, rather, to slow his reader into a space for serious contemplation.

The Russian writer Victor Pelevin, a product of the other Cold War power, speaks from a post-Soviet society — its infant capitalism born as some grotesque, decaying creature from the womb of Soviet secrecy and bureaucratic corruption. His novels and short stories directly engage with philosophical questions about mediated reality, post-God eternity, and reconstructed history, yet his prose never feels like a muddy slog through the Great Eternal Questions. Instead, these questions sear his humourous narrative, discussed by characters who are surprisingly sympathetic despite the fact that they may metamorphose into insects, or become mere animated projections on a television screen. Here is one character speaking in the novel Homo Zapiens (Viking, 1999, translated by Andrew Bromfield):

‘when you watch advertisements for Pampers on television, what you have in your head is not wet human piss, but the concept of piss. The idea of piss comes into contact with the concept of skin.’

The fact that the speaker is supposedly a politician negotiating a secret deal regarding the Chechen crisis, but is ‘really’ a two-dimensional animated image rendered for the television news, gives a sense of Pelevin’s idiosyncratic style. Pelevin is young and prolific, having written over a dozen books. His production — its pace and intellectual insistence — seems like a challenge.

Like Surrealism, this new mode of experimental writing exemplified by Saunders and Pelevin seeks to get beneath language into those awful, appetitive drives of involuntary muscle. The contemporary techniques for doing so, however, are quite different:

Instead of odd juxtapositions that create a mood, the juxtapositions form a meticulously-structured landscape/setting in which the meaning then unfolds. In other words, the absurdity is not the point, but the starting point of the particular work.

Instead of unedited automatic writing, the scenarios are elaborately constructed, allowing the narrative to proceed in an almost terrifying inevitability.

Instead of that horizontal motion in which meaning is derived by skidding across a vast field of words and images, the motion is vertical, producing meaning through a steady examination that bores its hole deeply and relentlessly.

Instead of collaborations and suspicion of expertise, the writing is frequently based in theory. The fact that this writing is often rompingly funny attests to the skill of these writers and the irrepressible joy in writing from a place of rupture.

As Saunders writes in his essay collection The Braindead Megaphone (Riverhead, 2007), the media-driven push toward benumbing stupidity can only be countered by “small drops of specificity and aplomb and correct logic, delivered titrationally, by many of us all at once.” Before this drop hits the ground, I’d like to propose a name intended to facilitate future discussion about contemporary experimental writing, bringing it into a flexible framework for further examination. This name reflects the fact that the Surrealists moved beyond the naturalistic reality that dominated art and discourse, while these writers are entering beneath the two-dimensional surface of the virtual realm.My suggestion: Subvirtualism.

My computer tells me this is not a word.

*These ideas are explored at length in philosophical discourse, specifically through theories about performativity, posthumanism, simulation, spectacle, and narcissism. Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Julia Kristeva (among others) have contributed to our understanding of self and society within their theoretical frameworks.

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Marianne Apostolides is a writer and critic based in Toronto. Her creative work plays in the contact zone between fiction and non-fiction; her criticism has appeared in The Walrus, The Literary Review of Canada, and The Globe & Mail. Her forthcoming novel, Swim, explores the eroticism of family, food, and language.