From Text to Action: A Surrealist Essay

Abstract

The essay, a genre “born” in 1580 with the publication of the first collection of texts by Michel de Montaigne, has always been generically based on a hybrid terra incognita between philosophy and literature, or science and art. As some of the most important theorists of the genre (G. Lukács, T. Adorno, M. Bense, M. Epstein, etc.) point out, the core features of the essay are the interest in knowledge and the pursuit of truth, and then the style of thinking and expression – as the pleasure of style is inseparable from the search for truth. An essay is always written about something – it is determined by its a priori afterwardsness [Nachträglichkeit] and therefore usually takes the form of a commentary. However, speaking of something already existing as formed, the essayist rearranges it. At the same time, the process of writing and essayistic arguing is more important than the end result, the problem more important than its solution, and the question itself more important than the answer, resulting in a nonlinear and associative structure of the essay. Since it emerged within the lineage of humanism and renaissance, which puts individual strivings ahead of subordination to the normativeness of the collective, the essay contributed to the disintegration of the prevailing mythological discourse, but regained its integrative social function during the 20th century — as it spoke in a “natural” language more directly to a wider audience, not using the metalanguage of the profession. Bearing in mind that it is located between life itself, literature and philosophy, the essayistic ideal would involve a reconciliation of writing and living. The main goal of avant-garde movements, on the other hand, was to problematize and undermine the social institution of literature as an autonomous field of “pure” aestheticist practice. The avant-garde represents the (first) attempt of radical self-criticism of the art institution within the civil society, and as a result of this, the avant-garde work rests on montage as a fundamental principle, fragmentation as antitotality, privileging the inorganic and constructive at the expense of the organic and mimetic. To that extent, both the avant-garde and the essay as a genre imply common characteristics, such as implicit criticism and polemicism, fragmentarity, processuality, nonlinearity, dehierarchisation, performativity of statements, theatricalisation of experience, etc. Both the practice of essay writing and the artistic and life practice of avant-garde revalue amateurism and secularism, implying a fundamental critique of specialisation and partialisation of knowledge and experience, outlining the aspiration to integrate social life in its entirety. Surrealist essays, besides being characterized by infantilistic play with inherited cultural facts, stand as a sign of radical democracy and the impulse of enlightenment, fulfilling the ambivalent function of the critical public. Surrealist essays should be understood as evidence of the radical ethical turn of this avant-garde movement, interpreted in the light of Foucault’s theses on the care of the self and Sloterdijk’s ideas on askesis and anthropotechnics. The proliferation of essays in the surrealist textual corpus led to the stabilization of the genre in the system of Yugoslav literature and the establishment of a kind of Yugoslav essay culture, whose purpose is to enlarge the self by learning new ways of human existence, as well as to attempt the creative utopian montage (re)shaping the world.