This chapter details and expands current research on Messiaen’s response to, engagement with, and inculcation of Surrealism in his music. In particular it examines the poetic and ethnological context of Messiaen’s work, and also introduces a discussion of the occult and psychoanalytical trauma as Surrealist contexts for Messiaen’s work in the late 1940s.

Scholars have canonically understood Surrealism as having arrived in the Americas in two principal waves: the first involved the interwar discovery of a largely French avant-garde movement by poets, little magazines, and art-world figures in the US and Latin America; the second describes the influx of European “exiles” who crossed the Atlantic as war refugees during World War II. Surrealism was not, however, a solely Parisian or European movement that washed up on American shores. This chapter proposes instead that “Surrealism” designates a multifarious set of poetic and artistic practices invented by and within the Americas, in exchange with European and non-European arts and ideas. The chapter traces some of the refractions and reverberations of Surrealism throughout the Americas, offering a survey of American surrealisms – from Buenos Aires to Fort de France, from Mexico City to Chicago, from Lima to New York City – that disclose a complex set of intercultural reflections and negotiations among modernist poets, artists, and thinkers.

This essay traces the anti-Bildungsroman tradition under the influence of surrealism, in Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928) and Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations (1982). While Acker inherits Bataille’s fascination with violence and transgression, these themes are formally developed through the prism of punk and feminist conceptual art and performance. The recent resurgence of critical interest in Acker’s work prompts us to further consider her relationship to surrealism and the modernist avant-garde. While Acker’s homage to Bataille in the early novels signals a brazen ’theft’ of the male avant-garde tradition for feminist subversive ends, Great Expectations experiments with form and language in order to evacuate the Bildungsroman of its bourgeois (gendered) claims to moral authority and insight. While extreme experience in Bataille’s literary work holds out the promise of an affirmation of sorts, the excoriating emotional masochism of Acker’s characters tilts towards nihilism. And yet both Bataille and Acker draw on the Bildungsroman even as they decondition the humanist subject that lies at its very core, straining at the limits of language to represent the vertiginous intensity of affective life and the dissolution of desire into abjection.

Unica Zürn’s narratives exemplify the post-1945 afterlife of surrealist narrative forms, which persist as mutations ruptured by historical trauma, marked by and constitutive of the fractured, damaged temporalities of subjective and historical experience. Joao Ribas has commented on how Zürn’s drawings exploit a ’repertoire of surrealist techniques’ (Dark Spring, 21); her writings similarly adapt many familiar surrealist narrative-aesthetic traits and practices to explore specific German post-war and post-Shoah contexts, deploying strategies of automatism, prolepsis, cryptographic and other phantasmagorical techniques, fairytale, literary, cinematic and other allusions, alongside formally experimental, densely polysemic, and allegorically autobiographical structures. Adapting the extensive archival resources provided by surrealist techniques enabled Zürn to produce narratives focused on representing and navigating the damaged durational temporalities of traumatic experience, encountered as simultaneously subjective (and thus rooted in problematically autobiographical narratives) and social (and thus grounded in shattering historical events and their disastrous psychological impacts). The essay examines key works to explore her insistent linguistic registering of trauma through a poetics of the fragment – a remnant of shattered language, and a preoccupation she inherited from her involvement with Alexander Camaro and the post-war Berlin surrealist group Der Badewanne and its aesthetics of constrained recycling as a response to the post-war scarcity of art materials – in which meaning is encrypted, demanding decoding by the reader.

This essay explores attitudes towards childhood in the surrealist novel but does so not via the familiar lens of psychoanalysis but via the concept of ’nostalgia’ as theorized by Svetlana Boym in her book The Future of Nostalgia (2001). Taking two contrasting examples of surrealist writing on childhood – Giorgio de Chirico’s seminal Hebdomeros (1929) on the one hand and Michel Leiris’s autobiographical novels Manhood (1939) and Scratches (1948) on the other – it is argued that, in both cases, Boym’s concept of ’reflective nostalgia’ (as opposed to ’restorative nostalgia’) provides a useful tool of analysis. However, the melancholic tone of de Chirico’s writing – with its stylistic debts to Lautréamont and Nietzsche – has a regressive dimension, and lacks the self-reflexivity specified in Boym’s account of a critically incisive ’reflective’ nostalgia. By contrast, Leiris’s more robust exploration of his male sexuality, along with the ’anthropological’ tenor of his analysis of the linguistic and material universe of childhood, fits more productively with Boym’s conception of a positive role for nostalgia within modernism.

This chapter focuses on the role of the surrealists and their friends in the reception of Anglo-American SF in France. It gives special attention to the opinions of the Parisian surrealists Gérard Legrand and Robert Benayoun, both of whom took a selective approach to the new writing by authors such as Raymond Bradbury, Fredric Brown, and Lewis Padgett. Two important novels, The Dreaming Jewels (1950) by Theodore Sturgeon and I Am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson, illustrate the themes and issues explored by SF that held the attention of the surrealists. In the latter part of the chapter, I turn around the enquiry to look less at the surrealists’ interest in SF and more that held by SF writers in surrealism. J.G. Ballard’s fascination with surrealism from the 1960s has long been recognized and was acknowledged by the author himself. Ballard’s stories of that decade serve as a further case study to explore the survival or broadening of surrealist themes into SF and asks why a movement frequently associated with a Benjaminian notion of the ’outmoded’ could play such a significant role in a genre that pitched its content so emphatically in the future.

This chapter presents a reading of René Daumal’s novel Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing (1952) in the context of its relations with Alfred Jarry’s ’pataphysical or ’neo-scientific novel’ Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician (1911). Like that of many surrealists, Daumal’s humour was nurtured in adolescence on Jarry’s idiosyncratic, absurdist, and blackly comic Umour. Mount Analogue is Daumal’s most sustained expression of such humour. The novel, unfinished at the time of the author’s death in 1944, tells of the narrator Theodore’s encounter with Père Sogol, an expert climber and non-Euclidean navigator (i.e. spiritual guide), who leads a small group of novices on a quest to scale an unclimbable mountain. With much intertextual wit, Daumal weaves together his own peculiar mixture of Jarryesque scientific satire, the spiritual mythos of René Guénon, and the Gurdjieffean teachings of Alexandre de Salzmann into an ecological morality tale and Rabelasian adventure story. The chapter situates Mount Analogue within Daumal’s concern with what he and the other members of the Grand Jeu called “experimental metaphysics” – a lived, experiential foray into situations which pushed the limits of rational and conventionally scientific understanding of life.

Guillaume Apollinaire is without doubt the most prolific French poet of the Great War. In addition to his major poetry collection, Calligrammes (1918), he wrote and published plays, stories, journalism, and criticism during the conflict. His writing is nothing if not wide ranging.He considered poetry a spiritual activity and an escape from the traditional classification of genre. He also believed there was no boundary between art and life – the two are inextricably linked – and, further, that art and life transform one another.This porous nature, not without its ambivalences and paradoxes, constitutes a major key to the interpretation of his work. The diversity and originality of his oeuvre, the trajectory of the author and the importance of his legacy help to explain how and why he became a poet of war in France, a country that ignored the tradition of 'war poets' that had developed in Great Britain.

Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives is a narrative reenactment of a poetic reenactment of the historical avant-gardes: a novel from the 1990s that combines modernist and avant-garde narrative techniques to revisit an experimental poetic group from the 1970s as they reprise and research and recover practices and figures from the 1920s to their present. At the same time that its protagonists investigate forgotten works from the past, they also form a community that generates work in the present tense (“poetry producing poets producing poems producing poetry”, as Bolaño put it in a 1976 manifesto), that aims to interrupt the generation of what they see as unproductive forms and practices (incarnated in Octavio Paz and the peasant poets), and that reaches out to a broader international horizon of experimental poetics, primarily Peru and France but also alluding to North American, Argentinean, and Chilean experiments. This article elucidates and unpacks the novel’s handling of these various legacies and affiliations, while also underlining how it points, elliptically but continuously, to what is left out of the record of even the most encompassing histories of the avant-gardes: their female artists, whose legacy here flares up before flowing into the expanded monologue of Amulet.

This essay looks at the intertextual presence of French literature in Bolaño’s writings, which are famously global in their intersecting plots and cosmopolitan characters. With a focus on the contemporary urban experience, Bolaño elevates the Baudelairean flâneur motif to a global scale, and inherits the Surrealist topos of the city as a place of chance encounters. The quest for a missing or forgotten writer, a structuring device used over and over in Bolaño’s fictions, can be traced back to Surrealist aesthetics, and it also provides a serviceable image of a quest for the validation of narrative. We look at what Bolaño’s novels, in which“visceral realism” defeats the grand 19th-century principle of the well-constructed plot in favor of a loose stringing together of episodic lives, owe to the tradition of Marcel Schwob’s imaginary lives, to Georges Perec’s aesthetics of the collection, the list, and the “infra-ordinary,” and to more contemporary poets of documentary everydayness and small lives such as Pierre Michon and François Bon.

This chapter focuses on the movement known as Deep Image poetry and traces the origins of this tendency and explores its key characteristics. The chapter discusses Deep Image poetry’s debts to Spanish and Latin American surrealism and other sources and focuses on the work of Robert Bly and, especially, James Wright, in order to sketch out the major features of Deep Image poetics, including its use of images drawn from the unconscious and moments of sudden epiphany.

This chapter focuses on the New York School of poetry and traces its origins, its history, and its legacy. It discusses the importance of the avant-garde tradition and visual art, especially Abstract Expressionism, to the poets of the New York School, and examines the most important formal innovations and thematic concerns of the poets at its heart. The chapter focuses on the work of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest, along with poets of the movement’s second generation, including Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Bernadette Mayer.

This chapter comparatively probes the distinct trajectories of avant-garde poetics in Spanish America and Brazil from the postwar to the 1980s. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the rise of the Spanish American Vanguardias and Brazilian Modernismo, which adapted European experimental vocabularies to local contexts. Subsequently, a revival of the utopian avant-garde impulse developed into singular and divergent poetic forms of expression. This divergence can be clearly seen in, among other things, the preference in Brazil for synthetic forms and in Spanish America for the long poem. In other cases, the traditions converged in the adoption of an anti-lyrical stance, constructivist concerns, the use of long forms, and politically engaged poetry. From the 1970s on, the neo-baroque aesthetic also brought together figures from the entire region. This chapter looks at these divergences as well as points of confluence, seeking to understand how, in general, the reception of Surrealism and other poetic traditions led to a more “discursive,” personal poetry, and how the foregrounding of the materiality of language fueled synthetic, non-discursive forms.

This chapter comparatively probes the distinct trajectories of avant-garde poetics in Spanish America and Brazil from the postwar to the 1980s. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the rise of the Spanish American Vanguardias and Brazilian Modernismo, which adapted European experimental vocabularies to local contexts. Subsequently, a revival of the utopian avant-garde impulse developed into singular and divergent poetic forms of expression. This divergence can be clearly seen in, among other things, the preference in Brazil for synthetic forms and in Spanish America for the long poem. In other cases, the traditions converged in the adoption of an anti-lyrical stance, constructivist concerns, the use of long forms, and politically engaged poetry. From the 1970s on, the neo-baroque aesthetic also brought together figures from the entire region. This chapter looks at these divergences as well as points of confluence, seeking to understand how, in general, the reception of Surrealism and other poetic traditions led to a more “discursive,” personal poetry, and how the foregrounding of the materiality of language fueled synthetic, non-discursive forms.

In this chapter I offer a reorientation of Thomas Adès’s relationship to surrealism by positioning his music in the context of automatism, wherein surrealism's famed incongruities become legitimate, logical manifestations of our unconscious. This perspective allows us to incorporate works that have not often been understood as surreal, like the Mazurkas studied here. Second, automatisms link Adèsian surrealism to the compositional logic that theorists have uncovered in the past twenty years. And finally, Adès’s automatism suggests a way of composing genuinely surreal music. André Breton, surrealism's founder, thought music was ‘confusing’, and much literature on Adès’s music has established such a connection only by suggesting the music's surreal qualities are found in its painterly traits. I, on the other hand, suggest that through automatism we are able to imagine those marvellous sounds that emerge from logical processes of structured time as themselves fundamentally surreal.

Dreams provided Bishop with a creative resource, a motif, a model, and a literary device in her work, exceeding the contexts of surrealism, psychoanalysis and autobiography in which they have been discussed. While the word “dream” and its variants turn up repeatedly in Bishop’s work, her usage and attitude vary. I argue that dreams in Bishop might best be understood within a literary/aesthetic or cognitive/phenomenological lens. Furthermore, symbolist practices are as pertinent to Bishop’s dream poetry as surrealist practices. This essay explores the nature of “dreaming” in Bishop as a poetic resource, a phenomenal experience and paradigm of imaginative activity. And, quite differently, I acknowledge Bishop’s ambivalence about dreams as a literary device and, more broadly, as a general pursuit of illusions with often precarious personal and social implications.

Although best known as a clear-eyed, realist poet of vivid, precise description, Elizabeth Bishop was powerfully drawn to surrealism, the avant-garde movement devoted to the unconscious, the irrational, and the power of dreams. This apparent contradiction is just one of the many paradoxes that make Bishop’s work and life so fascinating, but it is also one of the most significant and generative. This chapter argues that Bishop’s interest in surrealism is not merely a youthful enthusiasm that she definitively leaves behind. Surrealism struck a deep chord within her and remained a significant element of her poetic toolkit from beginning to end. Bishop’s poems are also not just influenced by surrealism, but in some ways are about it, thematically. She carries on a lifelong debate with surrealism and its implications, composing poems that probe fraught tensions between the unconscious and the conscious mind, between dream and waking, freedom and control.