There’s a painting by Remedios Varo1 that I covet called “Mujer saliendo del psicoanalista.” In it, the id, the ego, the superego all converge and dissociate at once—the subject(s) holding her soul as one would casually hold a handbag. Or maybe better said— like a thing to be discarded into the cloudy void-portal beneath it.
At first glance, the conceit of surrealism is psychoanalytic. It’s dreaming, it is the sub and unconscious landscape as truest self. But I think surrealism is much less about straightforward psychoanalysis and instead about liminality. Surrealism is not the dream, but the moment between dreaming and waking. Lucidity, maybe. Maybe it’s the process of awakening, of moving from one world into the next— out of your psychoanalyst’s and into the street.
For Breton, writer of the surrealist manifesto, surrealism is the relinquishing of reason’s control over the psychic landscape. But it’s all very dialectic, isn’t it. Even if a transmutation— reality, dream-world, synthesis. It’s its own logic.
Conversely, Varo’s mujer is leaving— that liminal gerund of saliendo. That’s the true in-between and becoming. There is no synthesis at all, only ing, iendo.
I think people who are well acquainted with madness are also well acquainted with liminality and therefore more prone to the surreal.
One of the most delicate and perhaps unfortunate things about Sylvia Plath’s poetic legacy is that it has been subsumed and consumed by her personal one2. Her poem “Mad Girl’s Love Song” is an enlightening companion to Varo’s painting. She writes:
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The villanelle is formally hinged on repetition, but in a way that feels like rapidly trading partners on the dance floor. Just as you think you’ve got the pattern, it surprises you, and then returns with familiarity. This alone provides a dizzying quality quite akin to jolting awake from a dream. And of course, the speaker is bewitched by another, dreaming, unlatched from reality, insane. Further, the idea that the “you” is a mental invention of the speaker (a complex parenthetical aside— addressed to whom? a double “you”?) contributes to the distortion of reality.
For Breton it seems that one can trust their dreams. There lies the truth. For Varo and Plath, they’re finicky portals— impure, cloudy and almost.
Once, a past therapist of mine said on accident, I just want us to be okay. The us scared me. Isn’t it muddy like that.
Retrospectively, some art historians have attributed the term “irrealism” to Varo’s work. Not a transcendence of reality via dreams, but a soul-dissociation from reality. This resonates deeply, for me at least, with the feeling of having just emptied your emotional self to a kind woman who is ultimately a stranger, swiping your card for the co-pay, and walking out into the shocking brightness of summer.
Ultimately what I mean is that madness is surreal in a way that convinces one that reality is a trick, a bewitching. The distrust of reality is not a conscious opportunity toward lucidity and therefore artistic purity, but a constant anxiety about which world one is in and if they invented it or not.
Maybe people call Toni Morrison’s work magical realism when they mean magical irrealism. That the world estranges her characters from itself and each other and so they fly.
Ultimately what I mean is that surrealism for the mad is survival and not refuge. Or maybe it’s both. I guess what I mean to say is that in Varo’s painting the doors are closed but the windows are open, and if she wasn’t careful, or maybe if she was, her soul would float right out.
(Dalí this, Dalí that. I get it. My dreams have leaping tigers and pomegranate arils too. But google Varo, and you’ll have a wonderful addition to your surrealist pantheon.)
Have you tried to write a villanelle because I guarantee you you will throw your computer. That lady could write, okay.