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STEPHEN SPENDER
exaltation of violence, sexual relations, madness, drugs, through art
which is regarded by the artist as a transition towards the actual
experience of these states. Lawrence surely often regarded
his
writ–
ing not as an end but as a means of inducing in the reader a state of
feeling which would release in him the "dark forces" or "phallic
consciousness," or the approach to the mystic-physical sexual union
which were more important to him than the writing on the page.
The tendency here is to regard writing as hallucinatory: that
is to say as a literary technique for inducing non-literary sensations.
The poet, supposedly, has a peculiar insight into life-sensations which
he upholds as more "real" than the externals which are everyday
reality. The surrealists used poetry as a technique for inducing states
of mind supposedly super-real. It might be said that surrealist
writing is itself the super-reality, but if this were true, it would only
be in the way that incantation may itself be what is invoked: a
strangeness of feeling without language that lies beyond the threshold
of the words. However much one disapproves of non-literary aims
in literature, nevertheless there is importance for literature itself
in
the view of writing as provider of alternate life. For we live
in
a
time when material values are generally regarded as the most im–
portant ones, sometimes for selfish reasons, but sometimes
also
(as
in
the case of those who want to improve the material conditions
of the poor) for altruistic ones. Therefore the view that there are
"other" values of living becomes extremely important for art, even
if it accepts the subsidiary position of being only a means to attain
ends which lie outside art. The definition of surrealism, by Andre
Breton, which I quote from David Gascoyne's
Surrealism,
is relevant:
SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is in–
tended 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 real reason and outside all aesthetic or moral pre–
occupations.
ENCYCL.
Philos.
Surrealism rests in the belief
in
the superior
reality of certain forms of association neglected heretofore; in the
omnipotence of the dream and in the disinterested play of thought. It
tends definitely to do away with all other psychic mechanisms and to
substitute itself for them in the solution of the principal problem of life.
