More on Surrealism: Priest's "Indoctrinaire" (1971, 1979)

 

Two paperback covers for Christopher Priest's first published novel Indoctrinaire (1970): on the right the 1971 New English Library paperback (art by Bruce Pennington), and on the left the Pan paperback edition from 1979, a cover by Welsh artist Terry Oakes.

The images inhabit the logic of surrealism, something I have talked about before on this blog: ‘André Breton's surrealism was predicated on the idea that art should relax conscious and rational control, access the dreamwork and conceptual punning of the unconscious, and portray illogical and dreamlike scenarios, to (in Breton’s phrase) ‘resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality, or surreality’. There are obvious parallels with science-fiction, which often departs from familiar or conventional ‘reality’, and which deals in strange, dreamlike juxtapositions: as when a bone thrown by an apeman abruptly becomes a futuristic spacecraft. At the same time, sf is more likely to base its fantastical storymaking upon science, technology, rational extrapolation. SF is a literature of the superego rather than the id, and—we might say—diametrically opposed to surrealism in that respect.’ But then again, perhaps not. Some surrealist artists (Max Ernst, say) worked with a variety of visual stylings; but others, like the peerless Magritte, painted in a straightforward, flatly realist style, like realist prose, simply representing the surreal subject matter. And SF, which often concerns strange, bizarre, other-worldly things, is very often written in a prose that is, in essence, as Realist as Zola or Tolstoy: Kim Stanley Robinson's books, for instance.

 Priest's novel is an interesting case, here. The NEL cover is a fairly straight representation of elements from the book: the table with the apparently-human hand emerging from it is a technical device, used for interrogation (the hand is actually mechanical). Behind it is a South American desert, a futuristic flying craft and a nuclear explosion, all of which feature in the story. The Pan paperback edition is less tied to the specifics of the novel. The mushroom-cloud in the distance is there, though rendered in a more stylised way, but the rest of the image has nothing specific to do with Priest's text: there are no floating eyeballs pierced by hypodermic needles in the story Oakes' art covers (shades of Luis Buñuel 1929 surrealist masterpiece, Un Chien Andalou), and there is no mannerist visual-punning by which a prison wall is somehow a stylised face, with miniature white-clad figures tumbling down its/his cheek like rice-grains. The wince-inducing violence of this image, representationally but also in terms of the compositionally aggressive jumble of its constituent elements, communicates a particular kind of vibe. This, the image is saying, will be a strange, dislocating, violent and upsetting novel. The out-plucked and needle-pierced eyeball, the other eye a literal barred prison-window, the reflex of agony in the nose and bared teeth: man is not only imprisoned but is a prison; not only inside a torture facility he is a torture facility. In this it does not, honestly, capture the tone of Priest's text, which is Kafkaesque and disorienting but never this explicitly violent or schlocky.

Surrealism and science-fiction do have something crucial in common: Pierre Reverdy's sense that Surrealism entails ‘a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities’ might also be describing the strategy of the science-fiction writer or artist, the combining of a real-world now and an imagined or extrapolated future-world then; or reality and alt-reality. It's a bone from pre-history, hurled into the air by an ape-man, that is also, somehow, a futuristic space-ship in orbit around the Earth.

If we wanted to be particular, we could distinguish a number of varieties of Surrealism: a Bretonian version, that drew equally on Dada and Freudianism that aimed to go (as outlined in Breton's 1924 Manifeste du surréalisme) ‘over’, ‘above’, that is sur (on, above, on top of), realism, and a version developed by Georges Bataille that linked the derangement of art to the base, the ground, to sexual and scatological realities. Bataille prioritising the big toe, as the part of the human body most firmly placed upon the ground. Here's Hal Foster:

In his Second Manifesto Breton recommitted the movement to the reconciliation of opposed states: “Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. Now, search as one may, one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point.”

Breton understood this dialectical resolution in explicitly Hegelian terms: the sur in Surrealism was dedicated to the above and the beyond, to a transcendence of the real which was also, for him, the desired effect of imagistic collage and film montage. Adamantly opposed to such idealism, Bataille argued for the sub in his Surrealism, which he framed as a subversion of the real from below: hence his concept of a ‘base materialism’ that undercuts traditional delusions about human nobility (all big toes are gross, even beautiful mouths are connected to awful anuses and so on). The conflict was in full force at the time of the Second Manifesto, in which Breton championed ‘sublimation’ and pinned ‘regression’ on Bataille. Yet Bataille was happy to take up the banner of desublimation: ‘I challenge any art lover,’ he wrote in 1930, ‘to love a painting as much as a fetishist loves a shoe.’ From our vantage point each man seems right about the other. With its ‘quest’ for mystical beloveds and magical objects there was a semi-risible courtliness in Bretonian Surrealism, while Bataille was often, as Breton remarked, an ‘excrement philosopher’.

Transcendence, not necessarily in a Hegelian sense, is a core SF strategy: known as sense of wonder, or am access to the sublime. Foster also notes how it was Bretonian Surrealism that migrated into the mainstream, via the popularity of artists such as Salvador Dalí, Magritte and Luis Buñuel. What started as transgressive became over-familiar, the idiom of cigarette adverts and album covers, Monty Python and video games. ‘Surrealism also persisted in literature,’ Foster notes, ‘clearly in magical realism and less obviously in other forms.’ He could have adduced science-fiction, especially during its New Wave, as the major mode of this, and indeed does touch on some key SF writers:

The French celebration of écriture in the 1960s recalled, in its assertion that language is its own motive force, the Surrealist experiment with automatic writing, whether the association was desired or not. And in the Anglophone world a connection might be made between the ‘paranoid-critical method’ of Dalí, defined as the ‘systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations’, and the crazy-enough-to-be-true projections of Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard (who wrote incisively about Surrealism).

Priest, who wrote incisively about Ballard, and other New Wave SF, is part of this tradition, and his novels resist a particular manoeuvre that blights some SF: the creation of beautiful, expressive, estranging surrealistic images only to rationalise and explain the context and nature of that image. In that sense Terry Oakes's Pan cover is closer to Priest's writing, not despite but because it does not rationally match the contents of the novel.

Jonathan Meades dislikes the way Breton's surrealisme has become a cliché, ‘a vogue word, lazy fancyspeak.’ Meades objects to the way ‘the surrealists and their wretched manifestoes hijacked the irrational tradition, gave it a name and the adjective from that name has now been frivolously hijacked by—well, just about everyone who''s too slothful to avoid linguistic degradation. What I'm talking about is the process of creating clichés.’ [Meades, Pedro and Ricky Come Again (Unbound 2021), 256] No shortage is clichés in science-fiction, of course; but what Meades wants to do is resurrect a precessive tradition:

Goya. Picasso Whoever it was that invented Medusa, the Minotaur, the Valkyries, the Annunciation, Christ's miracles, heaven and hell, whoever painted the inside of Albi cathedral ... Swift, Carroll, Poe, Lequeu, le Factor Cheval, l'Abbé Fouré. Huysmans, Jules Verne.

That's the tradition in which twentieth-century science-fiction follows through.