BELGRADE SURREALISM AND FREUD-MARXISM

par Jelena Novaković

May 9, 2019

References to Freud and Psychoanalysis

Serbian surrealism, which developed in Belgrade, parallel to French surrealism and whose representatives maintained close relations with Breton and the surrealist group in Paris, is also marked by references to Freudian psychoanalysis 1. In 1923, in its first issue, the journal Putevi [Paths], directed by Marko Ristić, publishes information on Freud and psychoanalysis and in the second the article "[On Freud's Psychoanalysis]" by Dušan Matić which highlights the importance of Freudian discoveries and examines the possibility of using them in surrealist creation that contests the data of reason and the entire reigning system of thought. In 1925 issue 6 of the journal Svedočanstva [Testimonies] publishes poems, drawings, letters and various texts chosen from the archives of insane asylums, among which stands out the picture novel The Vampire, written by a mythomaniac, and which will be reproduced, in a translation by Monny de Boully, in issue 5 of La Révolution surréaliste. In 1929, Koča Popović, who is studying philosophy in Paris, pays particular attention to leftist thought in Europe and the propagation of Freud's psychoanalysis in Parisian intellectual circles. He writes a study on psychoanalytic research entitled "[Notes from an Insane Asylum]," which is the result of his visits to an insane asylum in Paris, but which is lost 2. The same year appears Marko Ristić's text "[Revolutionary Thought]" 3, where psychoanalysis is presented as a light that illuminates the dark corners of life and which produces changes in the conception of morality. In the "[Introduction to the Metaphysics of the Spirit]," published in the almanac of Serbian surrealists Nemoguće – L'Impossible 1930, Vane Bor pays tribute to Freud for having discovered unconscious actions and shown the repressive character of culture, and in his text "[Psychoanalysis or Individual Psychology (concerning an article by Mr. August Cesarec)]," published in issue 2 of the journal of Belgrade surrealists Nadrealizam danas i ovde [Surrealism Today and Here] 1932, he opts for Freud as opposed to Adler, noting "that a truly materialist psychology cannot be founded without taking from psychoanalysis its fundamental inventions" 4. Freud's psychoanalysis presents itself as a capital event in the history of humanity.

Application of Freudian Theories

Surrealist creation, whether verbal or visual, presents itself either in the form of concrete applications of Freudian theories (automatic texts and paintings, dream narratives, oneiric paintings), or in the form of theoretical elaborations (theory of desire, theory of humor).

The Belgrade surrealists glorify desire about which they launch an investigation in 1932 in [Surrealism Today and Here], and in which Parisian surrealists also take part (André Breton, Salvador Dali, Paul Éluard, René Crevel). As early as 1930, Vane Bor sketches a theory of desire in the "[Introduction to the Metaphysics of the Spirit]" and in 1934 he deals with this subject in his text "[Talent and Culture]." In his theoretical elaboration, he takes as his starting point Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud represents the development of man as a process of repression of instincts, finding in education and social organization the sources of nervous affections. The repression of desires has broken "the spontaneous relationship of man to the external world" 5 and man has become "a miserable and weak being, an ant capable of living his little daily routine," but "profoundly unhappy" 6.

The only domains where this spontaneous relationship of man to the world is preserved are those of poetry and art. In the Sketch of a Phenomenology of the Irrational 1931, Koča Popović and Marko Ristić note that the value of artistic products lies in their capacity to make possible the expression of the unconscious. For, if, on the one hand, "the faculty of linking words, of making them mutually call and respond to each other, belongs to this direct participation of consciousness," on the other hand, "it depends on the question of whether and to what extent these words, in their mutual relationships, correspond to the relationships of the unconscious, to the highs and lows, to the living pulsation and mobility of the unconscious, to the inequalities of the structure of the unconscious, to the roughness of its disharmonious and perpetually changing relief 7." From this point of view surrealist creation has a revelatory function.

Within the framework of verbal creation, this function is accorded to automatic writing, which discovers "the real functioning of thought." The Belgrade surrealists began to practice it quite early, before knowing what was happening in Paris. Speaking of social games where each had to recite a poem by heart and in which he himself participated when he was twelve or thirteen years old, Vane Bor says that, instead of doing what was asked of him, he would start speaking French automatically, especially appreciating the sentence: "The rivers descend into the boats" which obsessed him and which was anterior and no less beautiful than the sentence "There is a man cut in two by the window," which Breton mentions as one of his first automatic products 8. According to Oskar Davičo's word, at the time of his early youth, he heard a "voice" which had presented itself to him in the form of words that came from marine depths 9 and with which he began to play, associating them in an unusual and scarcely logical manner. His automatic texts will be inserted in his book [Anatomy] 1930. Among the Belgrade surrealists, it is Marko Ristić who publishes in 1924 the first automatic text under the title "Example," in the third issue of the journal Svedočanstva [Testimonies], qualifying it as an "example of surrealist writing without any pretense to beauty, to comprehensibility" and as a "pure document of the current of non-applied thought" 10. A variant of non-directed writing is his "anti-novel" Without Measure 1928, where his thought automatically follows his pen and where description gives way to "radiography" and "deep reflections" where the secrets buried in the unconscious are outlined.

The unconscious is also the main object of the visual creation of Belgrade surrealists, who always have in view the inner world and who consider external reality only as a symbolization of repressed desires, which is often the product of chance. Vane Bor's oil on canvas, Balls with Algae at the Apparent Horizon 1928, preserved today in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, is, as the author himself says, an image that presented itself to him, one morning, in a half-sleep, and which he painted without being conscious of its theoretical implications, given that, in reality, algae do not float in the wind, but in water and that the painted horizon is only apparent 11. It is a kind of automatic painting that highlights the painter's inner landscape, that is to say his unconscious. One of the privileged methods for making this unconscious visible is "critical paranoia" which K. Popović and M. Ristić define, referring to Salvador Dali, as "a mechanism of subversion, of which the unconscious actively makes use in order to introduce, by its own forces, a fundamental confusion into the constructions of consciousness and into the relationships of these with reality" 12. Vane Bor applies this method in his painting Oedipus in Space, reproduced in 1930 in the almanac L'Impossible and whose original is lost. It is a "double vision painting" 13 which represents the Freudian trio. The mother and her son occupy the foreground, while the father is pushed to the background. This painting could also be seen in a completely different way if it is turned over, but this other vision is hidden, "as in the subconscious" and it is not "realized by means of an optical illusion," as with Dali, as Vane Bor will write later, noting that this painting had been painted "before Dali's 'paranoia'" 14. It is said that this other part was not reproduced because of censorship. The same Oedipal connotation appears in the red ink Mother and Son 1929, preserved in Marko Ristić's legacy.

In the 1960s, Vane Bor, who left Yugoslavia clandestinely in 1944 to settle in London and who remained faithful to surrealism until the end of his life, makes a series of paintings that glorify eroticism, suggesting the irruption of all-powerful desire that violates the laws of "dogmatic" morality 15. He paints symbolic objects, including the bird which presents itself as the double of the woman, seen in her double aspect, both maternal and erotic (The Egg-Woman in the Landscape, The Egg-Woman with Dogs) (Breasted Bird in the Landscape), benevolent, but also threatening, this side being suggested by the position of the breast wings which are often turned inward (The Introverted Bird, Two Birds Contemplate the Fire). These paintings are not without recalling the bird-woman of Breton's "[Reversed Dream]" 16, published in Serbian translation in issue 2 of [Surrealism Today and Here], as well as a series of surrealist paintings where parts of the woman's or man's body identify with elements of nature (Vane Bor's Bird-Man, Radojica Živanović-Noe's Tree of Eyes, reproduced in issue 3 of [Surrealism Today and Here]).

These paintings demand a psychoanalytic interpretation that we find in the article "Bor, Painter of Nostalgia" by art historian Dejan Sretenović, who refers to Rosalind Krauss's theses on surrealist representation: "The psychoanalytic reading of Bor's bird-women as surrealist symbols would reveal the following: birds are fetishes – substitutes that attenuate the anxiety that appeared from childhood during separation from the maternal breast and the body as the primary erotic projection object (hence the insistence on fruit and breast-wings: the artist becomes again the child who experiences in complete tranquility the warmth of the maternal body disguised as a bird) but also symbols of the castration complex which seems to be attenuated by the transformation of the woman into a phallic fetish (the form of the bird recalls male genital organs) 17."

Freudian psychoanalysis also influenced the surrealist conception of humor, which is put at the service of the negation of accepted reality in favor of a reality subject to the pleasure principle. In 1930, Ristić publishes in the newspaper Politika an article under the title "Humor and Poetry" (whose French translation will be published in issue XXX of Mélusine). In 1932, the Belgrade surrealists organize an investigation on humor ("Is humor a moral attitude?") in [Surrealism Today and Here]. The responses are published in issues 1 and 2 of this journal. That of Marko Ristić, which is the most elaborate, will also appear, in a different version and under the title "Humor, Moral Attitude," in issue 6 of Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution, while his original version will appear in French, under the title "Humor 1932" in issue XX of Mélusine 1988.

In his first article on humor, Ristić already refers to Freud who considers humor as a defense against the pressure of external conditions of existence and as a negation of the reality principle and he defines humor as "a procedure by which the threatened 'ego' protects itself against external offenses [...] by considering them as motives for its humorous pleasure, thus proving its grandiose predominance over the real situation, by defying it" 18. Humor presents itself as "an instinctive and authentic critique of the conventional mental and emotional order" 19, therefore as a refusal of existing life conditions. Ristić expresses the same position in his response to the humor investigation: "The ego refuses to let itself be affected, to let suffering be imposed on it by external realities, it refuses to admit that the traumas of the external world can touch it; moreover, it shows that they can even become occasions of pleasure for it (Freud)" 20. The journal [Surrealism Today and Here] also expresses the orientation of Belgrade surrealism toward concrete action, so that the question that arises concerning humor is whether it is a moral attitude. Ristić's response, as well as those of other surrealists (Radojica Živanović-Noe, Koča Popović, Ðorđe Kostić, Ðorđe Jovanović) are negative: if, as a questioning of unsatisfactory reality, humor has a moral aspect, as an attitude toward this reality, which demands concrete engagement, it is outside practical morality. The Belgrade surrealists' reflections on humor move away from Freudian psychoanalysis to orient themselves toward Marxism.