2 - Surrealism: An Excommunicated Vessel?

Summary

Uncertain influence

When Charles Bernstein critiques expressiveness in his essay ‘Stray Straws and Straw Men’, Surrealism does feature, but only to illustrate the flawed ‘Modernist assumption’ that ‘consciousness existed prior to – aside from – language and had to be put into it’. Bernstein gives more attention to Surrealism in an interview with Tom Beckett, published in Bernstein's Content's Dream. He is most positive when he acknowledges Surrealist innovation at the formal and technical level (p. 392):

Surrealism is to be credited with opening up new possibilities for images and perhaps more crucially for the transition from image to image (unit to unit) within the total organization of the poem – opening up, that is, the domain within which we now work.

But this advance came about, in Bernstein's view, despite rather than because of ‘the underlying psychologism and the reliance on symbolic, allegoric, or “deep” images’ (p. 389). Indeed, Bernstein's desire to substitute the technical term ‘unit’ for the inherited term ‘image’ illustrates well Nicholls's contention that Surrealism was valuable to Language writing as a practice of writing rather than as a poetics of the inner life. In its parenthetic form, this substitution declares rather than rehearses the departure of one tradition from another.

A similar departure is announced during the course of Ron Silliman's essay ‘The New Sentence’. This text has been a touchstone for discussions of the poetics of Language writing, not least because it sets out quite categorically the formal distinctions that differentiate the new sentence from its superseded precursors.