Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1937

Letter ID: 1848

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

February 12, 1937

About my new poetry which you call “surrealist”, many expressions creep in, having hardly any meaning. Some- times a poem becomes a “great success”, at other times it is a misfire.

When one develops a new kind of poetry or a new technique, one must not mind having to find one’s way.

... At times I have to make a foolish face before people when I can’t understand my own expression, and they’ll think I’m writing rubbish...

Why foolish? Make a mystic face and say “It means too much for owls.” The difficulty is that you all want exact intellectual meanings for these things. A meaning there is, but it can’t always be fitted with a tight and neat intellectual cap.

Your cryptic smiles and magnificent silence, don’t lend themselves to any interpretation. You have a very easy way of escape, by saying “Surrealist”.

My “surrealist” is a joke but not a depreciatory one.

D also said “If this is surrealistic, I have nothing to say” – which, at times, is tantamount to saying that under that heading one can write anything blessed or non-blessed.

If you are going to listen to D’s criticisms or be influenced by them, you can’t go on writing these things. His standpoint is an entirely different one. What his mind can’t understand, is for him nonsense. He is for the orthodox style of poetry with as much colour as possible, but not transgressing by its images the boundary of the orthodox. This poetry is a modern “heresy” and heretics must have the courage of their non-conformity.

Now, what the deuce is this Surrealism? I gather that Baudelaire is its father, and Mallarmé its son.

Surrealism is a new phrase invented only the other day and I am not really sure what it conveys. According to some it is a dream poetry reaching a deeper truth, a deeper reality than the surface reality. I don’t know if this is the whole theory or only one side or phase of the practice. Baudelaire as a surrealist is a novel idea, nobody ever called him that before. Mallarmé, Verlaine and others used to be classed as impressionist poets, sometimes as symbolists. But now the surrealists seem to claim descent from these poets.

Does surrealism indicate that the meaning should be always unintelligible, if any? That there may be many expressions which have hardly any significance, coherence, etc.? If it has, so much the better; if none, well, it doesn’t, in any way, affect the beauty of the poem?

This is the gibe of the orthodox school of critics or readers – certainly the surrealists would not agree with it – they would claim they have got at a deeper line of truth and meaning than the intellectual.

Yesterday, you used the term “surrealistic transitions”. What did you mean?

Transitions that are not there of a mental logic.

Transitions that are hardly palpable on the surface?

Not palpable on the surface, but palpable to a deeper vision.

Or do they have no link or reason at all, and come in just as vital dreams come in?

How do you say that vital dreams have no link or reason? They have their own coherence, only the physical mind cannot always get at the clue by following which the coherence would unroll itself. For that matter the sequences of physical existence are coherent to us only because we are accustomed to it and our reason has made up a meaning out of it. But subject it to the view of a different consciousness and it becomes an incoherent phantasmagoria. That’s how the Mayavadins or Schopenhauer would speak of it; the former say deliberately that dream-sequences and life-sequences stand on the same footing, only they have another structure. Each is real and consequent to itself – though neither, they would say, is real or consequent in very truth.

I request you to give a brief discourse on Surrealism. D says, “I feel there is something in your poem, but I can’t catch it.”

D has asked practically for the same, but I would have to study the subject before I could do so.