surréalisme

Guillaume Apollinaire coined surréalisme in the program notes for his 1917 ballet 'Parade,' collaborating with Erik Satie, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau. He described the work as 'a kind of sur-réalisme' — above realism, a heightened or super-reality. He built the term from sur (above, over, beyond, from Latin super) and réalisme (realism, from Latin res, thing or reality). The prefix sur is also present in 'surpass,' 'surplus,' 'surtax,' 'surmount,' and 'surname' — all things above or beyond their base. Réalisme had been a French art movement since the 1840s, associated with Gustave Courbet and the depiction of ordinary life. Surréalisme proposed to go above and beyond that ordinary life, into the territory of dreams, the unconscious, and unmediated desire.

André Breton adopted and radicalized the term, issuing the first 'Surrealist Manifesto' in 1924 and defining Surrealism as 'pure psychic automatism' — the dictation of thought in the absence of reason's control, outside aesthetic or moral preoccupation. The Surrealists were heavily influenced by Freud's 'The Interpretation of Dreams' (1899), which proposed that the unconscious mind spoke in images, symbols, and condensations that rational waking life suppressed. Automatic writing, free association, dream journals, and the deliberate cultivation of the irrational were Surrealist methods. Salvador Dalí's melting clocks, René Magritte's pipe that is not a pipe, Max Ernst's forest-creatures: all were attempts to paint the mind's logic, not the eye's.

English borrowed surrealism intact from French, initially as a proper noun — the Surrealist movement — and gradually as a common adjective: surreal, meaning having the disorienting, illogical quality of a dream or a Surrealist work. The transition from proper to common noun is the key linguistic event. When someone says 'it was surreal' to describe a bewildering experience — a car crash in slow motion, a dreamlike bureaucratic encounter, an absurdist conversation — they are using the Surrealists' term for their artistic program as a descriptor for lived experience. The movement has been absorbed into common language so thoroughly that most uses of 'surreal' are made without any knowledge of Breton's manifesto.

The Surrealist impulse is traceable in film — David Lynch is the clearest contemporary heir — in fashion (Elsa Schiaparelli's collaborations with Dalí in the 1930s remain the paradigm), in advertising (which learned from Surrealism that irrational juxtaposition commands attention), and in the logic of the internet, where the random, the dreamlike, and the absurd circulate at the same speed as the factual. When the internet is described as 'surreal,' the description is more accurate than it appears: the medium's fundamental operation — the non-hierarchical, associative linking of heterogeneous material — resembles nothing so much as Breton's definition of a Surrealist image: two distant realities whose juxtaposition produces a spark.