Art and Narrative

Chapter 1 ◆ Surrealism

Through reading Walter Benjamin’s critical essay, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, I would like to trace the key point of Surrealist aesthetics, particularly the juxtapositions of visual objects in the city of London. Richard Aldington’s two poems, London (May 1915) and Eros and Psyche, come to depict Surrealist image spheres, as their visual representations in words would show. The dialectical optic of the poet comes to reveal an allegorical synthesis, giving birth to new meanings. The city of London shows the irrational fusion of the opposites, in a way which a Surrealist reading of these two poems is able to construct a critical virtue.

│Introduction│

The aim of this research is not to claim that Richard Aldington should be catagorised as a Surrealist poet; nor his poems are specifically Surrealist. Rather, I want to show the possibilities of reading two of Aldington’s poems: London (May 1915) and Eros and Psyche through a Surrealist perspective. Focusing on visual objects, love and allegory, Aldington’s two poems can be read in terms of the way in which images and colours come to form a dream-like cityscape of London.

│Object│

A city is a dialectic representation of love. In London, love can be understood as ‘a dream-like image’, as in ‘a surreal illusion of love, which stays in the viewer’s mind as a poem of colours, representing eternity’ (Lin 1). In Walter Benjamin’s ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, the reader can see that this representation of love comes in several forms, in the Surrealist montage: dream, mémoire involontaire, desire, and visual objects. All elements in a city, no matter the subjective one or the objective one, the inner aspect or the outer aspect, under the form of Surrealist aesthetics, for Benjamin, come to show a collective ‘humanistic concept of freedom’ (Benjamin 177).
Nevertheless, as J. H. Matthews has pointed out that the English Surrealists ‘show their close alliance with surrealism in France’ (Matthews 59), just as Breton keeps his admiration to M G Lewis and the English ‘Gothic novels’ (Matthews 57). In writing, Surrealism can be defined as such, representing ‘psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express - verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner - the actual functioning of thought’, as the reader can see in the Manifesto of Surrealism, when André Breton published it in Paris, in 1924 (Woodruff 191, and Matthews, ‘Fifty Years Later’ 1).
The free association of visual objects - no matter how striking the visual or the verbal images would be - the Surrealist perspective somehow comes to show the readers a method of artistic and literary creation, in a way which the visible objects can be twisted, juxtaposed, and re-represented, in order to construct an imaginary world of fancy. In poetry, specifically, as Nicholas Calas has observed that this imaginary world of fancy can be revealed, as the poet’s ‘disorderly passion’ comes to give a ‘greater freedom’ (Glicksberg 303) to poetic writings. The disorderly passion is inspired by love, indicating an unconscious desire, in a way which deep emotions are aroused. The visual and the verbal representations of this ‘bizarre imaginative effect’ (Baldick 324) - in a surreal sense - come to depict a romantic transition between the present and ‘a remote, primordial past’ (Glicksberg 303), as the readers can see in Aldington’s two poems.
Indeed, the psychological and intuitive motifs of Surrealism come to show the readers a way in which the oppressed can be released, as Surrealist aesthetics can be understood as a form of representing ‘an absolute reality’ - ‘a surreality’ (Wolin 97). The juxtaposition of visual objects is the key for the dialectical moment to happen, embracing each visual object even when it is out of its own original cultural context, as the new meaning emerges. In this respect, in semiotic terms, a visual object contents not only its ‘informational’ (Barthes, ‘The Third Meaning’ 52) meaning - on the first level. Rather, the very visual object serves as a symbol, on the second level, as ‘the signifier’ (Barthes, ‘The Third Meaning’ 53). It should have a new meaning to be read, in a way which it is not what it is signified, as Barthes called it, ‘a poetical grasp’ - on the third level (Barthes, ‘The Third Meaning’ 53).

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│Conclusion│

In the London poem, the viewer’s ‘allegorical gaze’ (Gilloch 137) sees meanings out of the white pyramid in the garden, and a pregnant woman walking in the night. In Eros and Psyche also, the ‘I’ has a view, looking out from a London bus, which frames the moment of the visual. As the aesthetics of Surrealism would suggest, the juxtaposition of different visual objects, such as the ‘tall stone statue’ of the national hero on the street of London, together with shops and the Tube, comes to show the subversive meaning of the out-of-context statue: Psyche and her lover, Eros.
The statue of Eros and Psyche in Eros and Psyche, together with the white pyramid in London, come to represent the punctum, in Roland Barthes’s term, in a way which they both deconstruct the existing cityscape of London - ‘dingy’, ‘clamour’, ‘filth’, and ‘lust’. The viewer, with his allegorical optic, perceives the dialectical moment, as in a snapshot, which comes to synthesize the opposites in the world of visual objects.

Chapter 1 ◆ Surrealism

Through reading Walter Benjamin’s critical essay, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, I would like to trace the key point of Surrealist aesthetics, particularly the juxtapositions of visual objects in the city of London. Richard Aldington’s two poems, London (May 1915) and Eros and Psyche, come to depict Surrealist image spheres, as their visual representations in words would show. The dialectical optic of the poet comes to reveal an all...

【Acknowledgements】

I would like to thank Mr Michael Song, the President of Showwe Publisher, Taipei. Without his encouragement and strong support, it would be impossible to have this book published. I also want to thank Cecilia Hsu. As the Chief Editor, Ms Hsu gave many important and professional suggestions during the process of my writing.
This book aims to be a guidance, showing a way of reading a literary text not only verbally but also visually. Through artistic terms and movements, the readers can see that a literary text can be enjoyed not only through the black words on the white papers. A solid and profound understanding of the visual arts can especially remind us how different and also, how difficult, when it comes to read a verbal painting.
For scholars, students, and also for people who are interested in the mutual development of visual and verbal narrative forms, this book is also innovative. Through crossing the boundry, I sincerely hope that this research can make the readers to think about some fundamental questions such as ‘what is art’, and ‘what is literature’, as these questions can always inspire, and yet, challenge us.

Allison Lin
Faculty of Education
Gaziantep University
2019

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【Preface】

John Keats’s famous poem, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, published in 1820, explores the suspension of ordinary time. It does this in two ways in particular. On the one hand, the scenes depicted on the ancient vessel, and described in the poem, remain paused at the same points in the narratives that they suggest. Youthful desire is not fulfilled (but at the same time it is never thwarted, and it is never over). On the other hand, the vase itself remains as a real representative of an aesthetically prized culture from long ago. It is a solid object; it stands for ancient Greece. It always has done, and it always will.
Allison Lin’s engaging and delicately detailed little book is also preoccupied with doubled images: especially those that, like Keats’s poem, play on contrasts of loss and desire, of timelessness and temporal movement. In a certain way, Keats’s poem—which lies outside Lin’s book—could be said to form a template from which some later representations appear to take their different bearings; these differences then show up features that seem to be lacking, or at least not present, in the earlier work. I am thinking in particular of one of the poems that Lin cites in full, with a subsequent commentary: Richard Aldington’s ‘Eros and Psyche’. In this poem there are two statues seen in the suburb of Camden Town. One is of ‘Cobden’, in commemoration of a nineteenth-century political figure, and the other, ‘Eros and Psyche’, alludes to ancient Greek culture in the same way as Keats’s urn. The Greek statue is already relativised by its sharing of place with the representative of a particular moment in public history (but a moment that by now—by the time of the poem—has been more or less forgotten, since the speaker can’t remember who Cobden was). Both are statues; neither has priority, is seen alone. This then draws attention to an artificial isolation of the urn in Keats. Although in reality urns like the one the poem describes were carefully preserved and displayed in museums—inclouding London’s British Museum, in the same city as the statues of Aldington’s poem—that present-day situation, distant from its historical and geographical origins, is not a part of the ‘Ode’.
In other ways too, Aldington draws attention to a different type of contrast from those that are shown by Keats. The statue of Eros and Psyche has suffered from the disfiguring effects of real time and real-world exposure. It is dirty, ‘grimy’, and so is the surrounding atmosphere. In Camden Town the pair of gods is out of place. The poem describes the tranquil, mythical setting which should be theirs instead. That is to say, it depicts a scene which is shown as positive in value (this is where the lovers ought to be, not here on this ugly street) but is also, in the negative, a picture of what is not, is absent from the scene that the spectator observes.
The sense of disjunction in ‘Eros and Psyche’ is also explored through the situation of the speaker. Keats’s poet, addressing a ‘thou’ with familiarity, is not situated in any specific place or time. But Aldington’s is sitting on top of a double-decker bus; it is from this elevated but realistic vantage point, passing through the present day, that he sees the two artworks—and the other components of the local sights, its ‘square of ugly sordid’ shops’ and its underground station.
Aldington might seem at first sight, in a Victorian way, to be making a conventional kind of contrast between the beauties of classical civilisation and the sordid realities of the modern world; but that is not the case. Near the end of the poem, having drawn at length the picture of the perfect mythical place from which the present Eros and Psyche are separated, the speaker turns to one more world, this time the real conditions in which the statue would have been created. In this description, it is ‘the limbs that a Greek slave cut / In some old Italian town’.
Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, another of the texts that Lin dissects, was published a few years before Keats’s ‘Ode’. It comes from the same country, and the same period, but generically it lays out somewhat different markers of its literary world. Lin is interested in the novel’s analysis of different perceptions of reality—beginning, in many senses of that word, with the novel’s opening sentence which ironically sets up a ‘truth’ that is ‘universally acknowledged’. In its questionable determinacy, this has something in common, thematically too, with the enigmatically categorical declaration at the end of Keats’s poem, that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
Lin’s own preferred version of realism leads her to focus on the portrait of Mr Darcy that hangs in Pemberley, his ancestral home. When Elizabeth Bennet is shown this image by an affectionate housekeeper, her previously negative judgement of the man is seriously modified for the better: from now on she starts to see him, like his lovely home, as a possible object of love. And indeed this more benign picture—this picture— is what the novel’s narrator, along with Elizabeth herself, will endorse as correct, as distinct from the more negative images of Darcy that have been visible up to this point. It’s a nice example of realism for Lin to choose, given the pathway of her own book, which moves through the largely visual modes of imagism (or surrealism) and impressionism, and ends with symbolism. Lin’s realism, in this instance, is not reality but a painting—a painting, that is, which is represented in a novel’s description of it in words. It is through such pictures, such artistic representations, that real lives are lived—in all their poignant divisions and rapprochements: between a here and an elsewhere, or between here and then and always. Art and Narrative offers many literary occasions for thinking about the challenging and ever changing connections and disconnections of truth and beauty in their times and in their texts.

16 May, 2019
Rachel Bowlby
Professor of Comparative Literature,
University College London
Author, most recently,
of Talking Walking and Everyday Stories

【Acknowledgements】

I would like to thank Mr Michael Song, the President of Showwe Publisher, Taipei. Without his encouragement and strong support, it would be impossible to have this book published. I also want to thank Cecilia Hsu. As the Chief Editor, Ms Hsu gave many important and professional suggestions during the process of my writing.
This book aims to be a guidance, showing a way of reading a literary text not only verbally but also visually. Through artistic terms and movements, t...

Acknowledgements
Preface
Chapter 1 ◆ Surrealism
Chapter 2 ◆ Impressionism
Chapter 3 ◆ Realism
Chapter 4 ◆ Symbolism
Appendix

Acknowledgements
Preface
Chapter 1 ◆ Surrealism
Chapter 2 ◆ Impressionism
Chapter 3 ◆ Realism
Chapter 4 ◆ Symbolism
Appendix