Surrealism and Science Fiction

"The weird, the uncanny, the epiphany: capturing the surreal"

The First Surrealist Manifesto

The essay-thing following was written as a response to both of these writings, considering my thesis and the genre of science fiction.

Science fiction, or at least modern science fiction, was fueled by the age of enlightenment and reason and the industrial revolution. Civilization was expanding, colonies were springing up in exotic locales around the world, and progress was achieved through new technological advances. The sciences in all its different and new forms sought to quantify and explain everything in our reality.

For all the emphasis on reason, the internal processes of the mind were left relatively untouched until Freud, Jung and the torrent of people who devised their own -isms from the concept of the unconscious mind. Surrealism, coined by Andre Breton, is defined by him as: “Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations”. With the First Surrealist Manifesto, surrealism is made as a release from all reason and logic; to fill a blank page to the brim with writing that is purely stream of consciousness.

Surrealist art works much in the same way. It is a mash of thoughts, symbols, shapes and colors arranged on the canvas to get some sort of response from the viewer. The messages and images in surrealist art is compelling and disturbing. The work makes no sense, but everything that is going on in the frame is meant to be happening for any reason including it is simply there.

The chapter excerpt The Weird, the Uncanny, the Epiphany: Capturing the Surreal exposes three important aspects, right out of the title, to surrealist art that makes it have such an impact. All of these I would say can just as easily be applied to science fiction as a genre. Even though the two have a very different sort of starting point, Surrealism and science fiction share these factors.

The weird, in its different meanings, from “the ambivalent potency of the archaic wyrd power that encompasses wonder, awe, miracle, predestination, or death reemerges again in the popular use of the adjective 'weird' to suggest any moment or occurrence that is extraordinary, strange, coincidental, or fateful”. Science fiction takes this idea of 'weirdness' to expose the unknown of our reality. Not through the free association of thought, but of natural mysteries yet to be explained. What is in outer space? What lies in the darkest parts of our oceans and in the hottest pits of our volcanoes? Speculation of every sort, from the absolute nothing, to fantastic beasts and planets with a consciousness bring out the 'weird' of the unknown and the want for a rational, growing civilization to know. Just as surrealism attempts to uncover “the true function of thought” through exploring thought, scientists try to uncover the true function of nature through exploring nature. Science fiction is to our new scientific advances as surrealism was to the words of Freud and the human psyche. Both try to explore territory unknown to man, either in our minds or in our environments.

The uncanny is a contradiction that brings emotional unease; the “tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar”. In surrealism, this effect of the uncanny comes from a strange use and combination of symbols. These symbols in surrealist art may not have a predetermined meaning when combined, but the simple act of placing two or more symbols in relation to each other creates a tension between them that we the viewers aren't aware of. A similar feeling of the uncanny can be achieved in science fiction to varying degrees. Stories like those of Robert Heinlein contain detail on the workings of any technological device that is important to the story. Other writers place the reader in their world with no frame of reference, with slang and terminology original to that world. These worlds can be very similar or far flung from our own, but the sensation of being in a place unknown to you, but that has a system of symbols that work within it's space that the piece understands. The pretty good example of this would be the phrase "the gostak distims the doshes" by Andrew Ingraham. The phrase has no meaning to us, but in another context with a different form of language and symbols, this phrase makes sense that doshes are distimmed by the gostak.

Try to think about how big space is, how big our universe or our reality is. Think of the distance from the Sun to the Earth, then our galaxy to the one closest to us. Imagine seeing a comet plow through a planet. Imagine a star being created over hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of years to live for billions more after. These images are events that actually happen – with some degree of error – in our universe, but are significantly larger than us. Science fiction writers take these images of things that are ordinary in that overall vastness of space, but extraordinary to our perception. This is the feeling of the sublime that is felt within astro science, despite reason and logic coming into play. This is the feeling that science fiction exploits. This feeling of epiphany, of the sublime, and in some ways, the surreal.