Reconciling image and ideology in british surrealist writing of the 1930s

Abstract

This study offers a critical analysis of the complex relationship between image and ideology, that is, between aesthetic form and ideological significance, in British Surrealist Writing of the 1930s, an often neglected area in literary studies and in the profuse criticism that exists on Modernist and thirties literature in Britain. It recovers texts never republished since the 1930s, as well as unpublished texts and other archive material, in order to analyse the different Surrealist techniques deployed by the core group of British writers associated with the Surrealist movement to reconcile image and ideology in their texts. These are writers who, although they are virtually unknown today, played a central role in the development of Avant-Garde poetic experimentation and political activism in 1930s Britain: Hugh Sykes Davies, David Gascoyne, George Barker, Roland Penrose, Roger Roughton, Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge were part of a movement whose principles and aims were the liberation of desire (liberation from logic and from rational, moral and aesthetic constraints) and the expansion of awareness of reality (of the mechanisms of repression and ideological control inherent in modern societies). Surrealism in Britain in the 1930s opened the path to new forms of consciousness and for these writers this was an essential step towards social transformation.

To begin with, this study proposes a theory of the Surrealist image from a variety of perspectives, which demonstrate that, in British Surrealist writing, the image is not only a poetic trope, a sort of extreme metaphor where two distant realities collide, but a mechanism of cognitive and ideological disruption: by breaking the conventions imposed by rational thought, the Surrealist image opens a fissure in the ideological continuum fostered by official discourses of power and allows for a deeper apprehension of reality. Drawing on Marxist theories, this study then continues with an analysis of the concept of ideology as false consciousness and with an overview of the changes and evolution of the ideological stance of the British Surrealist Group, the socio-political events that shaped this development and the ways in which Surrealist writers reacted to these. Special attention is paid to the Spanish Civil War, which became the ideological axis of the movement, providing these authors with a context and a cause for their poetic and political experimentation.

This is followed by an exhaustive examination of these writers works and the different Surrealist techniques and procedures of which they make use, and which contribute to the creation of automatic images, in accord with André Bretons definition of automatism. It is through these techniques (which include the use of recurrent patterns, resort to self-induced trance states, unconscious associations, objective chance, myth, code, parody, humour, linguistic games, collective writing, discourse appropriation and textual collage) that these writers manage to reconcile image an ideology in their texts: these texts' resistance to unifying readings and univocal interpretation also reflects their resistance to accommodation to normalised views of reality, to assimilation into the authoritative discourse of power and to appropriation by established ideological systems. The reconciliation of image and ideology in British Surrealist writing lies in the disruptive nature of both, in their capacity to unveil the gaps in the false continuities of dominant ideologies, and to incorporate change and contradiction into their own configuration. In this way, this study does not only contribute to furthering Avant-Garde and Modernism studies, but it also serves as a springboard for the analysis of more recent forms of conjunction of image and ideology, such as the disruptive discourse of Postmodern fiction, or the ideological ruptures which underlie social movements nowadays.