#surrealist literature

[bookquotesfrombooks]

“The n… th day God regretted having created Heaven and Earth.

He wanted to destroy his work. But it had fallen into the public domain.

So he descended in himself, divided himself into three to diminish his responsibility, invented the Serpent – and changed pseudonyms.”

Claude Cahun

Disavowals

#claude cahun #disavowals #religion #god #regret #surrealist writing #surrealist literature #surrealism #quotes #books #book quotes #bookblr

[thechimerasdiary]

reviews | literature | novels | play of form

𝐓𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

Lisa Samuels’ complex coming-of-age story dances the surrealist dialogue

.·:*¨༺ __________________

Les Chants de Maldoror with an illustration by René Magritte, 1948.

Sink your teeth into the soil and hold onto it. Figuratively speaking, this is exactly what Lisa Samuels’ unnamed main character does at the beginning of Tender Girl (2015). Like evolution, the novel’s story begins in the water and ends on land. And an evolution it certainly is – the evolution of a girl who is new to the sweet achings of the human world. Samuel’s thirteenth work is a coming-of-age story of the unusual kind: with a strange protagonist and stranger prose.

Tender Girl opens by washing up its leading figure on the shore of humankind. Girl, as she is simply called throughout the story, is a peculiar hybrid being – half human and half shark. For the first time, she steps out of the ocean and carefully makes her way into a strange new world. Drinking up the unfamiliar encounters with a wondrous soul, she learns to navigate the complexity of human existence and what it means to be a woman. As she grows up, Girl experiences love, and violence, and art, and grief, and motherhood, and loneliness – and the language of herself. Lisa Samuels approaches this exploration in a complex linguistic way. One which often eludes the rules of syntax and grammar, instead radically striving for a stormy stream of consciousness.

"That untranslatability being the half-slipped land-slide kind of 'person-hood' she's noticing in the other body eyes and talk she hears conveyed. How do they keep from fundamental loneliness?"

- Tender Girl (2015)

Although not expressively labeled as surrealist, Tender Girl certainly is evocative of the style: the work embodies the idea of a metamorphosis of being. Through its themes and its form – both of subversive nature – Samuels’ novel conducts a conversation with the past movement. 

(Tender) Girl is the child of a well-known father: the work takes direct inspiration from Les Chants de Maldoror, a poetic novel written by the French author Comte de Lautréamont in 1869. Lautréamont’s piece approaches transgressive topics such as violence, evil, and absurdity through the actions of its misanthropic main character Maldoror. In one scene, a bizarre sequence of events climaxes when he violently mates with a shark. In the diegesis Samuel has created, her protagonist is the offspring of this brutish encounter, and Tender Girl an informal follow-up of the 19th-century tale. 

Decades after its initial publication, Les Chants de Maldoror was embraced by the Surrealist movement, being hailed as a ‘proto-surrealist’ masterpiece for its subversive themes and absurd contents. Lisa Samuels expands on Lautréamont, plucking Girl from the tree of his fictional sphere and giving her a unique voice. Through this continuation, the author places her protagonist in direct relation to the avant-garde movement: both Les Chants de Maldoror and Tender Girl are explorations of transformations. Just as the source material which Girl is given birth from utilizes surrealist concepts, so, too, does Samuel’s work absorb and reform them. 

"She licks her tears away from her lower face, her pink tongue on the blue of her skin. The strawberries and the tentacles are softer than anemones."

- Tender Girl (2015)

The novel’s linguistic style is an ungraspable creature, an ever-changing chimera of words. The author thrusts away any coherency of sentence structure or syntax or grammar, freeing language from the shackles of coherence. Seldomly can the reader guess how a sentence will end. Samuels’ prose is an immediate representation of the protagonist’s fluctuating feelings. While Girl shifts and changes and grows in the world she explores, the narration responds. Through this, Tender Girl holds the theme of metamorphosis in its very form.

Lisa Samuel’s novel has glistering sharp teeth, and they have sunken deeply into the soil of Surrealism. Tender Girl is an anamorphic absurdity in contemporary shape, its complex form speaking the same language as the concepts that have conceived it.

__________________ ༻¨*:·.

#surrealism #surrealist art #surrealist literature #literature #novels #prose #formalism #review #book review #tender girl #lisa samuels #les chants de maldoror #comte de lautréamont #thechimerasreviews

[pensivegladiola]

Assassin of Reality by Marina Dyachenko

#books #literature #book recommendations #quotes #literature quotes #female authors #women authors #ukrainian literature #surrealism #surrealist literature #vita nostra #assassin of reality #marina dyachenko #novels #book series #booklbr

[agirlnamedbone]

Kim Kyung Ju, tr. Jake Levine (I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World, 2015)

#poetry #poem #op #Kim kyung ju #Korean poetry #Jake levine #surrealist literature

[onlinesweetheart]

<3

#instagram #pinterest #art #clock #surrealist #retro #home decor #home #home inspo #decor #books #literature #sally rooney #donna tartt

[mabith]

Riddle me this. Disability benefits review mental status appointment. WHY do they ask if you drink caffeine, then if you have ever had a drug or alcohol problem and nothing else on that theme. Usually they'd ask if you drink alcohol at all. If they're leaving that out (which they should probably, it's all fucking stupid), why are they still asking if you drink ANY caffeine. How is this useful information!

#now I'm home I can put all my rainbow shit back on and replace this normie sweater and 'nice' shirt with a hoodie #SHOULD any of that matter? obvi No #DOES it matter? impossible to predict but you know for sure they write what you're wearing because that's the hellscape we live in #Had to sit there Too Hot because I knew wearing flipflops when it's 40 out would be written up as Unusual Dress #even though it's very much related to heat regulation issues caused by my nerve disease #also the waiting room had Christian literature everywhere (again Hellscape) but also very surrealist art on the walls #at least the waiting room TV was on Bewitched (the original show not the remake movie)

[1-d-a]

Suddenly he was in my cabin, naked, with butterfly wings between his shoulder blades, his penis erect, powerful and golden, his dog tags on a silver chain around his neck. I clung to him and everything became luminous, fabulously colored, as though we had entered the mystical aura of a chakra with dozens of petals. When he broke my seal, he inserted in the center of my abdomen not only an ivory liquid, but also complete knowledge, as though his cannula of supple flesh had become a cord of communication between our two minds, through which, in a flash, we said everything to each other, we knew everything about each other, from the chemistry of our metabolisms to our complexes, preferences, experiences, and fantasies. (...) We both rose and fell, and neither of us had memories or a life of our own. We had come into the world (but which one?) only for the moment of our coupling, like two insects, in a halo of concentric circles of light. And that was how we would always be: standing, stuck together, united above in our gazes and below by that seminal cable, through which I felt millions of bits of information invading me. Mircea Cărtărescu Blinding (1996)

#mircea cartarescu #books #mircea cărtărescu #blinding #book quotes #lit #literature #books & libraries #books and literature #quotes #couple #romantic #lovers #fantasy #insects #butterflies #butterfly #wings #surrealist #fiction #surrealism

[scumgristle]

Hey bb... wanna see some hot action?

Search Google for “Midnight Climax”

have a piece titled |}|_€^|&lt; ^^[=@+ in Kenji Siratori’s HYPER-ANNOTATION #001

and a piece titled "Synodic Ganglia" in this one, also from Kenji Siratori.

read I ONLY WANTED TO MAKE YOU NERVOUS at Coprolaliac Press

supplied video / voice for this short film by Zak Ferguson

available NOW from SWEAT DRENCHED PRESS.

A****n link

FREE EXCERPTS

meanwhile:

CRINGE MYTHOS TONE REELS

and the piece FLOATING STAIN appears in issue 0 of AGON Journal, available for FREE in PDF form.

you’ll see i’m listed as part of the “Male Choir” (N. Casio Poe).

i’m the one that does the big “yeaaaaaaaagh” part.

other music i’ve done (just vocals/lyrics)

here

here too

LIVING ROOM - Corrugated Asshole - got some vocals on this one.

close as you’ll get to a “biography” of my time in music, which i guess is over, but who knows.

same podcast as above, except we all being chucklefucks about trash horror

MUBI page

Goodreads profile

#transgressive literature #lost media #extreme horror #mutants #cultural critique #underground #apocalypse #long island #cult cinema #deathmatches #outlaw comics #surrealist writing #cutups

[wowwwokay]

Excerpt from Dear Hazel of Squirrelnut by André Breton

Translated by Mary Ann Caws

#prose #prose writing #poetic prose #surrealist writing #surrealism #french #french writer #literature #literary letters #hot girls love literature #love #letters of love #love letters

[bookquotesfrombooks]

“Children today fear only one thing: That their dreams will come true.”

Claude Cahun

Disavowals

#claude cahun #disavowals #children #dreams #surrealist literature #surrealism #quotes #books #book quotes #bookblr

[en-elysium]

seeking community here to share my craft & to find new artists and their works to fall in love with 🌹follow if you’d like to see collage art, sculpture, poetry, paintings, etc inspired by mythology, religion, spirituality, literature, and the acute feeling of belonging to another time..place. and do be sure to scroll my page if you’d like or find me on instagram: @en_elysium

#me #artist #artists on tumblr #collage artist #painter #surrealist #history #literature #art historian #books & libraries #museums #gothic #gothic art #mythology and folklore #religious art #elysian fields #sculptor #mutton sleeves #victorian #analog art

[virtuouslibertines69]

"I’ll introduce you to my demons by their first names so you can know them as well as I do." — Kristen Costello

Art by Diana Dihaze

#literature #quote #reading #writing #author #writer #poetry #poem #books #kristen costello #demon #name #know #art #artist #photography #surrealist photography #diana dihaze

[desdasiwrites]

– Drew Magary, The Hike

#book quote of the day #Drew Magary #The Hike #reality bending #fantasy #surrealistic books #humorous literature #book quotes

[storyofthenauseouseye]

A Guide to the Father of Surrealism: Andre Breton

Philippe Jean (1931-1987) — “Elle était subjuguée par Le Monde” [oil on canvas, 1967]

Considering the topics in my last post, The Two Basic Pillars of French Literature, it'd be best to start this excursion with Andre Breton, the man widely considered to be the father of surrealism. The idea of surrealism is pretty straightforward, but it gets tricky the longer you think about it. Ironically, that's the point.

Surrealism is acquired when one pushes away the rational thoughts and everyday logic that goes into making traditional art. Surrealism is dreamlike, bizarre, and often challenging to understand. Sometimes, it's even difficult to look at. By accessing the subconscious, Breton and his peers could create art that had never been seen before (other than the similar dadaist movement, but that was based more on goofy arrangements of rational imagery).

Breton used his ideas on surrealism and put them into two pivotal works of literature that defined his career: The Manifesto of Surrealism and Nadja.

Left: Fernand Aubrey, MASKS, 1950. Right: Georges Spiro, "Composition Surréaliste" 1960

Le Manifeste de Surrealisme

The Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) is Breton's most famous and widely renowned work. In it, he goes on to explain what exactly surrealism is. Breton was one of many to publish a manifesto on the subject matter. Many of his peers and rivals tried to coin the term and define the movement for themselves, but in 1924, Breton's manifesto became the generally more beloved guide. It would travel the world and be used by artists, writers, filmmakers, poets, and visionaries everywhere. Breton's words would even be included in works he inspired, such as being stamped in braille in Leon Ferrari's famous "Union Libre" pictured below.

Leon Ferrari, "Union Libre", 2004

Breton's definition of the movement would shortly become famous.

"Pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express—either verbally, in writing or in any other manner— the true functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by reason, excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation" (Academy of American Poets).

Discard all logic, and throw away the mindfulness you pay to your work. Surrealism is the logic of dreams, the strangeness in the human subconscious. A twentieth-century American surrealist writer would later simplify the idea to four words: Exterminate all rational thought. I'll let you guess the author.

Antonin Artaud, La projection du véritable corps, 1948

Nadja

Breton would eventually take this philosophical art theory and apply it himself through literature. In 1928, he published Nadja, a strange novel about a girl. The protagonist rambles on about surrealism, gives a description of a ten-day love affair with a girl named Nadja, and realizes she's insane and that he cannot continue the relationship. Then he gives a detailed monologue lasting a quarter of the length of the novel on how her absence destroys and inspires him.

Left: Cover of the 1928 Gallimard edition of Nadja, collaged cover by Marcel Mariën. Right: 1964 Le Livre de poche edition of Nadja, interior.

Nadja is a bizarre text. It's non-linear, borders as a sequel to his 1924 manifesto, and the density of the strangeness makes it a difficult read for most people; that means it did what Breton intended.

Breton can take the reader through his surreality through this dreamy, irrational writing pace. Surreality was considered the world where surrealism took place, eventually helping make surrealism into an ideology, not just an idea. Nadja was the first surrealist fictional work to be published. With it, forty-four images were added to the book to help create another layer of dreamy imagery.

And with that, I will end this post the same way Breton ended Nadja.

"Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all"(162).

Works Cited

Academy of American Poets. “About André Breton | Academy of American Poets.” Poets.org, https://poets.org/poet/andre-breton. Accessed 7 December 2023.

Breton, André. Nadja. Grove Press, 1988. Accessed 7 December 2023.

Further Reading

#surrealism #English major #french #french literature #andre breton #nadja #surrealist manifesto #existentialism #absurdism #writeblogging #dark academia #academia aesthetic #academic writing #academic aesthetic

[thewarmestplacetohide]

#John Dies at the End #David Wong #American #literature #surrealist horror #cosmic horror #cover art #make queue vile

[taxi-davis]

Gürbüz Doğan Ekşioğlu

#books #art #surrealism #surrealist painting #oil painting #oil on canvas #bookcase #book shelves #surreal #reading #literature #painting