by ABBIGAIL BALDYS, Editorial Assistant
HOW do our inherited landscapes shape the way we perceive the natural?
Alejo Carpentier’s conception of lo real maravilloso proposes a surreal inherent quality of nature; the marvelous, the surreal, is an amplification of preexisting magic. As Carpentier asserts, “the marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality…perceived with particular intensity…that leads it to a kind of extreme state [estado limite].”[1]
If we consider Carpentier's description of an inherent marvelous reality of nature, then each surrealist observes a metamorphosis of nature into an intensified version of itself: its estado limite. The surrealist’s gaze imparts a “particular intensity” with each perceptive, imagistic exploration of the always-already real maravilloso.
Perhaps this is one of the impulses at work in Breton’s “The Forest in the Axe” when he writes:
“Hey, lawn! Hey, rain! I’m the unreal breath of this garden.”[2]
In this same poem, Breton illustrates what occurs “when indifference exposes its voracious methods”:
“the dried leaves move under the glass; they’re not as red as one would think.”[2]
If we read Breton’s lines as a commentary on indifferent looking, then the opposite of indifference—an intense attention—is what would intensify color to its estado limite.
BUT when attending to the natural in this intense way—Carpentier’s estado limite, Breton’s “rosemary of my extreme pallor”—WHAT does it mean for the surrealist's perception to be marked by extremes?
Elasticity of thought and experience require a space in which they can be pulled, torqued. Extremity, it seems, stretches the relation of those poetic associations. Ideally, to be marked by extremity is to experience all gradations between extremity’s multifaceted poles. Breton’s “Free Union,” for example, explores this kind of gradation; the poem’s associative and fluid image system insists on multiplicity. Breton describes his wife’s physical nature:
Whose tongue is made out of amber and polished glass
Whose tongue is a stabbed wafer
The tongue of a doll with eyes that open and shut
Whose tongue is an incredible stone [3]
The singular tongue is stretched through varying planes of visceral metaphor. (Well, we would call it metaphor. But surrealism, I’m convinced, is a metonymic process that reaches beyond metaphor’s forceful reliance on categorical separation). This stretching allows the tongue to become itself in its estado limite—in this space, it can exist simultaneously as multiple contrasting objects/images: a “stabbed wafer” AND an “incredible stone.”
When surrealists look out . . .
toward the stone, the leaves, or a fog’s bright shoulders, its gray miles . . .
perhaps we are looking within the already occurring. It is the project of our looking to INTERROGATE what lies there, and its limitations, in order to allow the elasticity of association to both EXALT the inherent magic of the pond and the lake and PULL each further into Nature’s marvelous open mouth.
Abbigail Baldys
Editorial Assistant
Interact with Abbigail on Twitter: @SP_AbbigailB
NOTES:
[1] Carpentier, Alejo. “De lo real maravilloses Americano.” Tientos y Diferencias. Montevideo: Arca, 1967. pp 96-112.
[2] Breton, Andre, and Mark Polizzotti. “The Forest in the Axe.” Andre Breton: Selections. Translated by Zack Rogow and Bill Zavatsky. Berkeley: U of California, 2003. 83-84.
[3] Breton, Andre, and Mark Polizzotti. “Free Union.” Andre Breton: Selections. Translated by Zack Rogow and Bill Zavatsky. Berkeley: U of California, 2003. 89-91.
[1] Carpentier, Alejo. “De lo real maravilloses Americano.” Tientos y Diferencias. Montevideo: Arca, 1967. pp 96-112.
[2] Breton, Andre, and Mark Polizzotti. “The Forest in the Axe.” Andre Breton: Selections. Translated by Zack Rogow and Bill Zavatsky. Berkeley: U of California, 2003. 83-84.
[3] Breton, Andre, and Mark Polizzotti. “Free Union.” Andre Breton: Selections. Translated by Zack Rogow and Bill Zavatsky. Berkeley: U of California, 2003. 89-91.
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