Lautreamonts Sewing Machine and Umbrella - Essay Example

Lautreamont’s Sewing Machine and Umbrella As is true with any particular art movement, the roots of the art form now known as surrealism had its start in the rapidly changing world of the 19th century. With the rise of the metropolis as industry and urbanization took control, subjective society as known in the rural districts increasingly became supplanted by the objective society imposed by the nature of such large collective societies. Through the use of factories and other time-ordered activities, the physical experience of the individual changed to be one of outer, rather than inner, organization. Because of this enforced rhythm to life in the city, explorations of art, literature and science into this mechanized realm produced the idea of the phantasmagorical. Phantasmagorical is characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtapositions. J.C. Powys defines it as the “incongruous imagery in surreal art and literature” (Phantasmagorical, 2005). It was through this imagery of the avant-garde artists and intellectuals immersed in the Dada, Surrealism and Letterism movements that the Situationists Movement arose, giving us “their critique of modern culture, their celebration of creativity, and their stress on the immediate transformation of everyday life” (Marshall, 2000). It is ‘everyday’ life, they maintain, that deadens the mind into a numb acceptance of being just part of the crowd, while it is exploration into this surreal realm that provides the only release and/or escape from this experience and allows one to remain subjective. When one thinks of the typical modern painter emblematic of this type of art, one of the first names that come to mind is that of Salvador Dali, a man who made a name for himself through such surrealistic images as “Persistence of Memory,” by combining his dream images with his waking thoughts. “Surrealism attempts to further our understanding of the human condition by seeking ways of fusing together our perceived conscious reality with our unconscious dream state” (Nik, 2006). The Spanish painter became well-known in his lifetime for his unusual way of looking at things and his willingness to share these visions with the greater world population. “Dalis importance for Surrealism was that he invented his own ‘psycho technique’, a method he called ‘critical paranoia’. He deliberately cultivated delusions similar to those of paranoiacs in the cause of wresting hallucinatory images from his conscious mind. Dali’s images - his bent watches, his figures, halfhuman, half chest of drawers – have made him the most famous of all Surrealist painters” (Harden, 2006). Typically painting images he saw in dreams or nightmares and consistently pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter, Dali had a wide range of interests that became reflected in his artwork, such as the work of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud or the mathematical genius of Albert Einstein. However, it can be argued that the ideas brought forward by Dali were first uttered in the daring works of Comte de Lautreamont, particularly in his work The Songs of Maldoror. Descriptions of Lautreamont’s work echo the same type of influences identified in Dali’s work nearly a century after Lautreamont’s death. Working with literature rather than paint, Lautreamont painted pictures in the mind of his readers that were vividly graphic and altogether disturbing in their character. “One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of surrealist writing, Lautreamont’s fantasy unveils a world – half vision, half-nightmare – of angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites and pederasts, lunatics and strange children. The writing is drenched with an unrestrained savagery and menace, and the grandiose by turns – possesses a remarkable hallucinatory quality” (Siquiera, n.d.). Lautreamont’s effectiveness is translated particularly in his ability to accurately present a vivid description of an everyday object or creature with such attention to detail and such precise selection of language that his images leap off the pages to become real before the eyes of the reader, such as in his various uses of animals to more fully represent his intentions. “These creatures are presented with the sharp eye of the biologist. By likening humanity to animals, Lautreamont achieves a double effect: man comes off as debased and at the same time, elevated: to be like an animal man must be rid of all his pretensions and vanities. It is this pretense to culture and civilized behavior that sicken Lautreamont/Maldoror” (Errickson, 2000). His phrases also invoke a startled, thoughtful reaction, such as his comment on this new mode of thought as being “as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of sewing machine and an umbrella.” It is from this simple seeming statement that the entire world of surrealism is recognized to have been sprung. The image it raises is itself one to ponder as none of these items seem to come together in any type of congruous order, making the descriptive ‘beautiful’ seem somehow out of place. It serves to shock the reader into paying attention. Coming across this line, one first does not normally view the dissecting table as something beautiful. Nor does one consider a sewing machine and an umbrella as being normal equipment for a room that would also contain a dissecting table. Finally, neither the sewing machine nor the umbrella is typically considered an item of especial beauty, but rather both are utilitarian household items designed for work or for inclement weather. The shock of finding them combined in such a way almost demands the reader sit up and pay attention, examining the sentence to first be sure it was read correctly and then to ponder what the author could have possible meant by bringing such common items together in such a strange manner. By creating such an absurd situation, Lautreamont was able to find a way of bringing the dream world, or the automatic, true world of the spirit, into the waking world in the days before Sigmund Freud ever coined the term subconscious. Examining the statement from this context, it becomes possible to see how it could lead to the thought processes that developed into surrealism. For the statement is the very essence of surreal. Only in a dream world would these items come together in any form of cohesive unit. This is because it is understood that in the dream world, these items could be symbolic of almost anything or anyone. The sewing machine could represent a mother while the umbrella could represent a father traveling to and from work everyday. The dissecting table could indicate anything from something sexual to something dangerous. At the same time, any or all of these things could symbolize a myriad of other possibilities greater or lesser than those mentioned here in any kind of wild combination of human, machine, animal or vegetable. By bringing together these disparate items in such a way as to make them beautiful forces new thought into their construction, purpose and function. It calls into question what the definition of beautiful is and whether this word is being applied to the mental image of these objects being combined or whether the beauty is in the thought process necessary to make sense of the situation. In addition, once the term beautiful is defined, given its context of involvement with Maldoror, it becomes necessary to question whether this image is something beautiful to someone like Maldoror or to someone with more mainstream tastes, introducing the concept of subjectivity on a grand scale. This forces new connections to be made both regarding the physical things as well as the connections made in association with those things, how they are drawn together and what each represents to the greater public. It is in the act of making these types of connections that Lautreamont was able to associate the nature of mankind to being something more in keeping with the nature of these other objects named, thus reducing the status of man to a more animalistic or instinctive reactionary force than the intellectual set would accept in their contemplation of art and literature. This practice, in turn, leads to the development of new visions to be seen in other such connections or misconnections, leading to the development of yet further thought into the nature of the world around us as well as the world within us. This is further expressed in Lautreamont’s statement above through the use of his objects. Beauty is achieved, he essentially says, by bringing together several seemingly incompatible objects. By being willing to dissect old ideas and old forms of expression, one is able to find new meanings and new associations. Taking these new association and meanings and sewing them together into new shapes provides new methods of expression and investigation while the umbrella is functional to hold everything together and yet still allow them to remain separate or joined, however the author sees fit to present them. Through all these modes of thought, Lautreamont can be considered one of the first true surrealists, having a profound impact on future writers and artists to come. It was in this sentence that Andre Breton found his imaginative voice in defining his own direction in art. “Upon reading Lautreamont’s Songs of Maldoror, surrealist king pin Andre Breton took over the author’s famous words ‘beautiful as the unexpected meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella’, thus coining the Surrealist aesthetic of jarring juxtapositions” (Arns, 2002). Breton had been interested in the communication of dreams and what they meant. He had noticed that dreams often defied any kind of logical reason and usually lacked any degree of common sense, but, unlike his contemporaries, felt that this placed them in an area of certain importance rather than making them a triviality to be ignored. “Breton was convinced that this was, in effect, throwing away something of inestimable value, and in the Manifesto he described a method of writing that makes the dream accessible to our waking consciousness. This, in effect, is a kind of automatic writing – writing that as far as possible is uncontrolled by our critical faculties” (Danto, 2002). Through the words of Lautreamont, Breton was able to define the movement that he envisioned to bring the words of the dream world to the core of literary thought. In his First Manifesto, he defines surrealism to be “pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought’s dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by the reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.” (Breton, 1924). With this definition, time became an important element in the expression of surrealist thought. If the process of creation couldn’t be achieved without the undue intervention of the thoughtful or waking mind, then it couldn’t be considered Surrealist. Through this definition, painting masters such as Salvador Dali would not be considered as Surrealist expressionists. This is because the painting method, by definition, requires forethought and careful planning, especially the type of art in which Dali participated. “Dali painted like an old master, using perspective and chiaroscuro, building up glazes, creating illusions. There is no way it could have been done automatically, or without rational control. … It would be like transcribing a dream in rhymed verse” (Danto, 2002). In a speech given in 1934, however, Breton acknowledged that Dali had, in fact, made a significant contribution to Surrealist thought despite the methods he employed because of his ability to capture images that accomplished the type of dreamlike thought that the Surrealist movement embraced. “Dali has endowed surrealism with an instrument of primary importance, in particular the paranoiac-critical method, which has immediately shown itself capable of being applied with equal success to painting, poetry, the cinema, to the construction of typical surrealist objects, to fashions, to sculpture and even, if necessary, to all manner of exegesis” (Breton, 1934). From a rather ridiculous-seeming statement contained in a masterful collection of similar absurdities and complicated, convoluted thought, Comte de Lautreamont was able to give expression to a mode of thought, namely those thoughts and ideas that strike in dreams, which had previously been merely shrugged off as inconsequential to waking life. Through the development of this mode of thought by Andre Breton, initially inspired by the work of Lautreamont, Surrealism came to represent a higher kind of thinking through the paradoxical method of allowing conscious thought to cease. In the face of the rapidly technological, urbanized world that was emerging during the 19th century, a retreat into the unconscious mind seemed the only method by which mankind could both identify with and distinguish itself from the machines that were being developed. Surrealism became a method by which man could discover himself in a deeper and more complete, or perhaps more honest, means of understanding the universal truths of human existence free of the pretensions and civilizing behaviors of the Victorian age. It wasn’t until several years later that Freud and Jung would discover the importance of the subconscious mind, yet Lautreamont and those who shared his vision saw a means of accessing a deeper truth through the investigation of shocking combinations “as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of sewing machine and an umbrella.” References Arns, Inke. (July 27, 2002). “Metonymical Movies.” Art Margins. Retrieved September 29, 2006 from < http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/2002/07/27-Arns/index.htm> Breton, Andre. (1924). The Manifesto of Surrealism. Retrieved September 29, 2006 from < http://www.geocities.com/lmc2124/breton.html#manifesto> Breton, Andre. (1934). “What is Surrealism?” Lecture given before the Belgian Surrealists: Brussels. Retrieved September 29, 2006 from < http://pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/whatsurr.html> Danto, Arthur C. (February 21, 2002). “Seeking ‘Convulsive Beauty.’” The Nation. Retrieved September 29, 2006 from < http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020311/danto> Errickson, William. (May 29, 2000). “Maldoror.” Book Reviews. Retrieved September 29, 2006 from Hardin, Mark. (2006). “Dada and Surrealism.” The Archive. Retrieved September 29, 2006 from < http://www.artchive.com/artchive/surrealism.html> Marshall, Peter. (2000). “Guy Debord and the Situationists.” Demanding the Impossible. Nothingness. Retrieved September 29, 2006 from < http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/73> Nik. (2006). “About Surrealism.” Surrealism [online]. Retrieved September 29, 2006 from < http://www.surrealism.co.uk/> Phantasmagorical. (2005). The Free Dictionary. Retrieved September 29, 2006 from Siquiera, Rodrigo A. (n.d.) “Comte de Lautreamont (Isidore Ducasse): Complete Works.” Delirium. Retrieved September 29, 2006 from < http://www.insite.com.br/rodrigo/rod.html> Read More