Abstract
What do memories look like? In many ways, this question is the driving force behind some of the most well-known works of Surrealist art and literature. We need only think of Salvador Dali’s soft geography of dripping time-pieces, ‘The Persistence of Memory’ (1931), to recall how Surrealism seeks to give form to the fluid and discontinuous nature of memory: ‘The empty beach with its fused sand is a symbol of utter psychic alienation. Clock time here is no longer valid, the watches have begun to drip and melt. Even the embryo, symbol of secret growth and possibility, is drained and limp. These are the residues of a remembered moment of time’.1 J.G. Ballard’s brief evaluation of ‘The Persistence of Memory’ is useful for at least two reasons: firstly, it reminds us that Dalí’s visions of melting watches were part of Surrealism’s serious creative enquiries into the Theory of Relativity, quantum mechanics and developing theories of space-time in the 1920s and 1930s.2 Secondly, it gestures to Surrealism’s sustained engagement with neuroscience, one that actually stretches back to André Breton’s medical studies under the eminent neurologist, Joseph Babinski, and his first-hand experiences of treating patients in neuro-psychiatric centres during World War One.3 As Breton would go on to write almost half a century later, neuroscience was ‘from the beginning at the heart of Surrealism’,4 shaping creative and critical enquiry (neurological discourse features repeatedly in the ‘First Manifesto of Surrealism’), and informing poetic response to the question that so preoccupies the Surrealist imagination: ‘What is it to be human?’
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Notes
J.G. Ballard, ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’, reprinted in A User’s Guide to the Millennium (London: Flamingo, 1996), 87.
For more detailed discussions of Surrealism’s interest in Einsteinian physics, see Suzanne Nalbantian, Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience (London: Palgrave, 2003)
Gavin Parkinson, Surrealism, Art and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology (Yale: New Haven, 2008).
For a more detailed account of Breton’s work with Babinski, see Joost Haan, Peter J. Koehler and Julien Bogousslavsky, ‘Neurology and Surrealism: André Breton and Joseph Banbinski’, Brain: A Journal of Neurology 135 (2010), 3830–3838.
André Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism — Translation of Entretiens (1913–1952) (New York: Marlowe and Company, 1993), 65.
See Polizotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (Boston, MA: Black Widow Press, 2009), 196–197, 200–202, 207–209.
Cited in Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997; 1965), 54–55.
André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924) in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 11.
Steven Connor, ‘The Impossibility of the Present: or, From the Contemporary to the Contemporal’, in Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, ed. Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks (Harlow: Pearson, 1999), 15.
David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 10.
Salvador Dalí, cited in Dawn Ades, Dali (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 200.
André Masson from Le Rebelle du Sunéalisme (Paris: Hermann, 1976), 33, cited in Lomas, ‘Labyrinth and Vertigo’, 86.
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© 2016 Jeannette Baxter
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Baxter, J. (2016). The Persistence of Surrealism: Memory, Dreams and the Dead. In: Groes, S. (eds) Memory in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_5
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