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Néstor Perlongher and Surrealism: Opposites and the Individual Self.
Ben Bollig
Ben Bollig completed his MA in Spanish American Studies at King's College, London. He is currently studying towards a PhD on the poetry of Néstor Perlongher
The history of Surrealism in Argentina begins in 1928; in that year Aldo Pellegrini founded the magazine Que. As Stefan Baciu declares in his Antología de la poesía Surrealista latinoamericana “[e]l Surrealismo ha cambiado el aspecto de la poesía en la Argentina”. The work of Surrealist poets Carlos Latorre, Julio Llinos, Enrique Molina, Aldo Pellegrini and Antonio Porcha has indeed exercised a considerable influence in that country, as have the theories of Surrealist founder André Breton. The aim of this paper is to assess the influence of Surrealism on Néstor Perlongher, the poet, essayist, sociologist and key member of the so-called neobarroco movement that emerged in the late 1970’s and 1980’s in the River Plate region.
I also hope to identify certain tensions and inconsistencies within Surrealism, both its European and Argentine variations, as revealed by the modern appropriation of some of its techniques. Perlongher himself saw Surrealism as vitally important to his poetic formation: “los que me nutrieron – la poesía es un elixir – fueron los Surrealistas” (Perlongher, 1997b: 14) His views, amongst those of others, are testament to the lasting influence and independence of the movement in Latin America.
Surrealism may be defined by two key traits, both found within Breton’s first Manifesto (1924). “The first promotes the practice of psychic automatism to manifest orally, in written form (‘automatic writing’), or by other means the repressed activities of the mind…The second definition, called ‘encyclopedic’ by Breton, casts Surrealism as an awareness of certain forms of associations previously neglected, but particularly immanent in the dream state, in sexual attractions, and in the free play of thought, creating heightened sensory perceptions that could open new vistas for the arts and help ‘solve the principal problems of life’” (Preminger and Brogan 1993:1234).
The relationship of Surrealism to the arts, literary and visual, is particularly keen: witness the importance of manifestoes to the movement and the close relationship between organized Surrealist groups and the publication of magazines and journals. Other forms of revolutionary movement, the Castrist revolution in Cuba as an example, have seen change within the arts as following on from radical socio-political changes to society1 but for Surrealism, however,
“language is an essential vehicle for the creation of the Surrealist state because of its capacity to suggest the dream and to express the irrational by effecting a synthesis out of opposite meanings, by freeing the signifiers congealed in stereotyped relationships with signifieds, by searching for ‘words without wrinkles’” (Ibid.).
In practice, Surrealism had a number of implications for the practice of literary creation, particularly with regard to the amount of control exercised by the writer over what they produced:
“the hypnotically evocative power of words and the capacity for representation were independent of the rules of versification or rhetoric; inner resonances rather than rhythms, psychic priorities rather than practical necessities of logical communication dictated the structure of the poem […]. Automatism is the primary feature that has been associated with Surrealism, but there is another ingredient just as important: the need for vigilance in the organization of the psychic data culled through dreams, automatic writing, and self-induced hallucination. 2 (Ibid.: 1236)
The influence of Freud, whose pioneering psychoanalyses had opened up the subconscious and stressed the importance of non-rational, libidinous impulses in human behavior, is key here, as is the three stage relationship between individual and the world (id, ego, superego, in Freud, or unconscious, conscious, world, in Surrealism). Freud examined of the unconscious through dreams and free association, with the aim of discovering psychic problems. The technique of the Surrealists meanwhile attempted to reconcile the oppositions that they felt modern society to be based upon, aiming, as Breton stated in the Second Manifesto (1929), for a state where “life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low cease to be perceived as contradictory”
One intriguing omission from Breton’s pairs of opposites is that of self and other. Notable also is the passive verb (“perceived”) an indication of doubt over who is doing the perceiving, but seemingly no doubt that this is an individual (perception implying a subjectivity observing the world through the senses).
While the Surrealists sought liberty, love and poetry, there is no obvious sense that this poses problems for the image of human beings as individual subjectivities. Similarly, balanced Freudian adults represent clearly distinct units, even if many of the drives responsible for behavior are not immediately known. Even in the case of sexual intercourse, the individual is not challenged: “Surrealism respected the human form and expressed a sacred element in the physical union, prohibitive of the contempt and fragmentation evidenced in pornographic eroticism” (Preminger and Brogan, 1993: 1236). (For the human form, read the individual.)
One may assess the influence and development of Surrealism in Latin America through an analysis of the introduction to a key anthology, Stefan Baciu’s Antología de la poesía Surrealista latinoamericana. Intriguingly, Baciu opens his introduction with a quote from Octavio Paz’s Corriente alterna: “estoy seguro de que la corriente que va del romanticismo alemán y de Blake al Surrealismo no desaparecerá. Vivirá al margen, será la otra voz” (in Baciu 1974:10). Of what this corriente consists is not quite explained, although the implication seems to be of marginal, rebellious thinkers and artists, perhaps even perceived as mad by society 3. Paz calls specifically to Blake, an autodidact with a phenomenally detailed world-philosophy. His poem “London” offers more insight into Paz’s formulation:
“I wander through each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And marks in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.” (in Hayward 1973:242)
There is something of the nomad about Blake’s wandering philosopher; within his moral judgements is the implication of an observer singularly detached from the scene observed.
Paz’s reference to romanticism may remind us of the efforts of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1995:45), in particular his Rimas: “Yo sé un himno gigangte y extraño”, where the subjectivity, constrained by the limits of language (within the rational world), aims to encompass the irrational world (the “himno”), but fails. There is something solitary, individual about this project. As Deleuze and Guattari (1999:340) write “Romanticism […] had a genius for experiencing the natal territory not as deserted but as ‘solitary’”. Thus the current identified by Paz has a strong individualist bent.
Latin American Surrealism, according to Baciu, is not a franchise of European Surrealism, and in fact possesses considerable dynamism and independence. For his definition of the movement, Baciu nevertheless goes to Breton: “automatismo psíquico puro del cual se desea expresar […] el funcionamiento real del pensamiento […] en ausencia de cualquier control ejercido por la razón, fuera de cualquier preocupación estética o moral” (Breton, Manifesto, translated in Baciu 1974:11). Baciu also stresses the reconciliation of pairs of opposites vital to the Surrealist project, again through a quotation from Breton’s first manifesto, but again not including the key opposition of self and other upon which individualization is based.
Baciu and Breton’s insistence on a form of expression freed from aesthetic and moral concerns offers an intriguing tension when compared to Perlongher’s pronouncements on his own writings. Perhaps indebted to the techniques of the beats, those of Jack Kerouac in particular (who spliced together sheets of paper so he could type non-stop), 4 Perlongher comments:
“Siempre escribo a máquina […] Voy por tiradas, dejo fluir, velocidad en el frenesí. Un ‘método’ (?) un tanto antológico: después leo y releo infinitas veces para ver qué sobrevive a las innúmeras a las innúmeras pasadas pesimistas o escépticas. Poco es lo que queda […] No tengo problemas en desechar lo que, aún por lo más mínimo, ‘no me suena’. Y todo tiene que brillar, iridiscencia.” (Perlongher 1997b:16)
The notion of writing por tiradas suggests a similar lack of aesthetic and moral concerns as that implied in Surrealist writing. To illustrate, observe the following extract form Surrealist poet Enrique Molina:
“Mi patria es de langostas una océanica choza entre las
islas que no he visto nunca
Un hogar flagelo espléndido donde cada cosa contiene otra
cosa cada mono otro mono cada boca otra boca hasta
quedar tan sólo un punto en el horizonte una migaja única
del fósforo de los mendigos” (in Baciu (ed.) 1974:164-5)
The product is a collection of shocking juxtapositions, linked strongly by sound. As well as the unexpected juxtapositions, vital here is the almost spasmodic beat of repetition, turned frantic and breathless by the absence of punctuation: a poem as a Dionisian dancer, driven by the frantic energy of the subconscious. Something of a similar flow in Perlongher’s writing can be seen if we look at line length in some of his poems, for example one of the shorter stanzas in “Alabanza y exaltación del Padre Mario” reads:
“Oh Padre
resplandece de nuevo la extaordinaria vuelta de la luz y su baño so-
bre todas las cosas de colores es us baño de luz la luz del baño don-
de me refugié a llorar desesperado de esperanza y emocionado de
ilusion y todo desilusionado del dolor sin querer” (Perlongher 1997a: 338 5)
The verse has no punctuation, and only two capital letters, seemingly as a mark of respect for Padre Mario. Repetition, reversal and recombination of sounds seem to dominate the composition, together with a strong illumination, a collection of bright lights, performing what Pound has called “PHANOPOEIA, which is the casting of images upon the visual imagination” (Pound 1954:25).
Thus to automatism, Perlongher adds a second process, that of revision, clearly with aesthetic concerns. Perlongher’s aesthetic concerns appear sonic (“suena”) and visual (“brillar”); moral and semantic concerns are not mentioned. The flow of the poem, never wholly regulated or controlled by the writer, is closely related to “energiá: aché (la fuerza en el paganismo afro)” (Perlongher 1997b:16). We are moving here towards a strong relationship between the poem, the body, and “energy”.
The energy in Perlongher’s poetry seems to move between two polar concepts: the flow of writing (or drift, or wandering) and the care of revision and rejection. This is problematised by Perlongher’s attitude to the individual, an attitude perpetually informed by the possibility that “no hay un ‘yo’” (Perlongher 1997b:20).
The process of revision mentioned above seems to attack the notion of a unified self, perhaps suggesting instead a multiplicity in the different gazes involved. This is radically different from the Freudian process of using free association to discover psychic problems, or Surrealism’s use of automatic writing to discover deep truths within the individual. Roland Barthes’ assessment of the Surrealists comes close to suggesting that which Perlongher suggests about his own writing. Barthes (1977: 142) pointed to the “Surrealists’ efforts” (in particular their use of group compositions, passing round a piece of paper and writing a line each without reading the previous line), after he announced that “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin”. Barthes essay of course is entitled “The Death of the Author”, and offers a welcome attack on biographical criticism. But while Barthes cuts away any before/after stages from the poetic process (i.e. writing and reading), his faith in a reader in whom “all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost” (Ibid.:148) seems to replace the all-powerful unity of the author with the all-powerful unity of an infinitely inventive and informed reader. Thus the Surrealist’s group writing practices, while attacking the bourgeois principle of interpretation of the text cannot be wholly divorced from the individual romantic poet. Perlongher however makes the difference clear, with his statement “somos un pastiche de ecos y voces” (1997b:14). “Pastiche” suggests a deliberation absent from Surrealism, while “ecos” seems to imply a problematisation of any notions of authorship.
Returning to Breton’s, and later Baciu’s, insistence on a free form of expression, the relationship between Surrealism and politics may be complicated if we take politics in the broad sense of the Greek polis, the city, therefore the form of organizing human relations, as opposed to the more common modern sense of organized political parties and elections. Paul Éluard, later to become a Stalinist, said that:
“El Surrealismo, que es un instrumento de conocimiento y, por esto mismo, un instrumento de conquista como también de defensa, trabaja para revelar la profunda conciencia del hombre, para reducir las diferencias que existen entre los hombres” (in Baciu (ed.) 1974:12)
Éluard’s words have widespread implications. In Freudian terms one might discuss the attempt to free the subconscious from repression, or follow Gramsci in seeing this project as an attack on hegemony and false collective consciousness. 6 Above all, it is impossible to read words such as “conquista” and “defensa” without the implication of Surrealism as a form of war-machine, and thus wholly tied up with politics. This is reinforced by the idea of “reducing differences” between persons. The implication here is that through an exploration of “super-reality”, human beings will become more aware of our similarities and common needs and interests. This reduction of distances and potential creation of alliances has a clear political edge, perhaps suggesting the Surrealist as a “citizen of the world”. It is hard therefore to avoid an innate contradiction in the Latin American interpretation of Surrealism, a contradiction between Paz’s view of Surrealism as an “enfermedad sagrada […] independiente […] de los sistemas politicos” (Ibid.:13) and Breton’s original proclamation of the “rebelión Surrealista” (Ibid.).
Paz’s extreme aversion to politics is matched and perhaps surpassed by Enrique Gómez-Correa: “Para nosotros el Surrealismo es lo que para Baudelaire fue el romanticismo: la expresión más reciente de la belleza” (Ibid.:14). New terminology for the same process: a hidden object (beauty), discovered through a process (romanticism, Surrealism) and expressed (in the art work), implicitly through the writer. Still, however, there are some innate paradoxes. Baciu is firm in stressing that Neruda cannot be a Surrealist because of his political activities (standing as a presidential candidate, for example), so thus his “surrealizante” poems such as “Galope Muerto” must be discounted. However, if Surrealism is divorced from political concerns, what difference does the political activity of an author make? Baciu talks of the “posiciones revolucionarias” (Ibid.:21) of the Surrealist movement, surely a political preoccupation. There is a rather tragic irony when Baciu writes – in 1974 – of Surrealism as “una manera de vivir y una posibilidad de expresarse en libertad” (Ibid.) while discounting politics and thus ignoring the real absence of liberty suffered by so many contemporary Latin Americans. There is something in Baciu’s tone that suggests elitism: his emphasis on pure expressions, and his stated distaste for politics. He writes:
“[The Surrealists] han defendido todo aquello que la politiquería y el oportunismo ha amenazado tantas veces: si tod esto llegó intacto y limpio hasta las nuevas generaciones, gran parte del mérito se debe, inegablemente, a los Surrealistas.” (Ibid.:23)
The use of “esto” and “aquello” characterizes a distinct vagueness over what is being defended; an uncertainty typical of the liberal humanist believing that literature is in some way good for us. Strange, also, for a movement that believed in the existence of a beyond, hidden by modern social organization, is the way that these pronouns talk around a vacuum. Highlighted here is the risk run by all literature aiming for independence from politics: by relegating politics to something only important to other people (i.e. not artists), the artist may slip into a form of torremarfilista individualism bordering on reactionary conservatism. Indeed Baciu is scathing about social poetry. Discussing the short lived nature of Surrealism in Brazil, he notes that in the fifties “la literatura brasileña de vanguardia se orientó de un lado hacia el concretismo y por otro lado, hacia una poesía de militancia social, la cual acabó entrando en el callejón sin salida de la cursilería ‘socialista’ y populachera” (Baciu 1974:28). Concretismo clearly warrants no comment, while social/ist poetry receives rather ironic quotation marks and popular poetry a pejorative suffix; no attempt is made to identify cultural factors for the Brazilian situation.
If we trace a line from some of the precursors, through Enrique Molina, to Perlongher’s work, a comparison can be made between those elements Baciu claims characteristic of Surrealism and Perlongher’s poetics. Baciu offers Vicente Huidobro as one of the key innovators prior to the movement. His title Horizon Carré (“Square Horizon”) sums up his creacionista approach: using poetry to create the new: “Un hecho nuevo inventado por mí, creado por mí, que no podría existir sin mí” (cited in Baciu 1974:63). While this may seem close to the Surrealist project, Huidobro and the Surrealists engaged in frequent arguments and disagreements. Huidobro in particular denied the usefulness of automatism: “no porque desconozca la existencia de actos humanos ajenos a la voluntad sino por estimar que tales actos son los más vulgares del hombre, los más vecinos a su vida instintiva” (Ibid.:65-6). This obviously represents one of the moral concerns discarded by Paz earlier. Thus Huidobro is motivated by aesthetic and moral concerns: his exhortation to poets to create, to be a “pequeño dios” (in Jiménez 2000:139), is a return to the Greek poiesis and differs from the Surrealist project in one key respect: Huidobro’s poet creates from nothing, whereas the Surrealist discovers. Thus Huidobro, strictly speaking, can exercise more control over artistic production than the Surrealist. Hence the ability to impose moral concerns. Similarly, with the exercise of artistic control comes the possibility of creating tropes, as opposed to the juxtapositions found in Surrealism. In the same poem, Huidobro wrote “Estamos en el ciclo de los nervios”. Taken as a metonym, we have here a reference to electricity, a recent phenomenon in Huidobro’s world. Later in his work, particularly in the famous long poem “Altazor”, we witness the use of portmanteau nonsense words that question the formation of language and the rules of grammar: “Al horitaña de la montazonte / La violondrina y el goloncelo” (Ibid.:148). This chiasmus of word fragments questions the familiarity of the everyday use of language and demands that we examine the degree to which language can be mimetic in poetry. These crossings, characteristic of the final section of “Altazor” are perhaps the poetry in which Huidobro closest approaches the Surrealists’ work.
The use of similar literary tropes is found in other precursors to Surrealism, including the Peruvian José María Eguren. In his “La ronda de espadas” he writes:
“Por las avenidas,
de miedo cercadas,
brilla en noche de azules oscuros,
la ronda de espadas.
Duermen los postigos,
las viejas aldabas;
y se escuchan borrosas de canes
las músicas bravas.” (in Baciu (ed.) 1974:133)
Eguren combines a shorter, almost romance-style six syllable line with a more solemn ten syllables on the third line of the verse, thus adding a serious tone with a line characteristic of romanticism (Quilis 1969:57). The long line also delays the “tale”, a sure method of creating suspense. Most notable, however, is the trope used in the second verse: the stillness and quiet of night is portrayed in saying that the houses' shutters and knockers sleep. This trope mixes personification (inanimate objects sleeping like people at night), metonym (the objects are near sleeping people) and perhaps a rather slanted metaphor, the objects standing in for the people. Eguren’s tropes experiment radically with the creation of an environment, mixing the familiar with the significantly strange. He foreshadows the Surrealists in his use of combinations that make us reconsider the everyday portrayal of the world; however, his strict adherence to metrical form and rhyme divorce him from the Surrealists, just as the Surrealists’ adherence to syntax divorces them from Dada.
In the work of the Argentine Enrique Molina we can detect the break with representation and the experimentation with juxtaposition so typical of Surrealism:
“Si te desnudas que no sea
De las piedras de tu equipaje
El África negra es azul
Por el destello de su sangre
¿Quién habla de cuerdas vocales?
La tierra se enciende de hormigas
¡Hay un sol enterrado vivo
Con los bisontes de Altamira!” (in Baciu (ed.) 1974:162)
This extract seems to work at the tension between the expectations created by a familiar grammatical structure (i.e. following the established rules of syntax) and the jolt created by combining nouns, verbs and qualifiers infrequently found together, and thus not complying with the complex rules associated with normal language.
One might tentatively talk of a discrepancy between form and content. Michael Riffaterre in his Semiotics of Poetry offers brilliant analyses of various Surrealist texts, in which he talks of the “triumph of literariness…to derive a poem from a zero matrix, to make the text the transform not of a world but of a trope” (Riffaterre 1978:63). He sees much of Surrealist poetry as the movement from abstract to figurative to abstract signs, where expansions turn the abstract into images. Typical of this might be lines three and four: Africa is only black in language (“The dark continent”), so thus that trope can be contradicted in language, because neither is tied to any real world referent. For Riffaterre literary language, and particular the language of the avant-gardes, refers only to a web of quotations and set phrases. Thus we return to Perlongher who, as we have seen above, insisted on the importance of pastiche and quotation in the literary work. 7 Perlongher’s work often dazzles with the multiple crossings and intertexts; in just the title of “Tema del cisne hundido (1)” we hear echoes of Borges (“Tema del traidor y el héroe”), classical mythology, W.B.Yeats, Delmira Agustini, Rubén Darío, Enrique González Martínez (the swan) and the neobarroque poet Eduardo Milán (“Versión de Ezra Pound”/ “Versión de Ezra Pound II”; “Juarez Machado (1)” / “Juarez Machado (2)”) amongst others.
Perlongher’s portmanteau words and not-sense owe much to the Surrealists.8 As the Surrealists united words that did not make sense when compared to the everyday depiction of the world – Aldo Pelegrini’s “Mujer transparente”, (in Baciu (ed.) 1974:168) for example – so Perlongher frequently inserts neologisms and portmanteaus, for example “espinafre” (Perlongher 1997a:105) or “pezcuello” (Ibid.: 297). The latter in particular forces the reader to rehear a familiar word (“pescuezo”, neck) as the combination of disparate elements (“pez”, fish, and “cuello”, neck), thus questioning the unity of the concept implied by a noun and creating a number of shuttle effects, between the original word and the neologism and between the elements of the neologism. The flow of Perlongher not-sense is closely linked to physical sensation, as in “El circo”, where breathy sounds prevail over sense.
animales doradas
a los aros
atados a los haros
halos
aros” (Perlongher, 1997a: 76)
The importance of experimentation with sound takes us back to Huidobro’s “Altazor”; here now, however, the gaps between text and repeated sounds give the reader physical points of reference that act on the body. Meanwhile, the similarity between the words used (“aros” and “haros” are indistinguishable in speech) questions the importance of meaning and the difference between words that dictionary definition relies upon. The Surrealist project of reducing the differences between human beings is echoed here in a poem that reduces the differences between words. Two concepts are thus implied here: alliances and between-ness. Perlongher’s attitude to the “yo” brings to certain Surrealist practices an added complication. Not only is reality as portrayed everyday questioned, but the very process of representation or expression in art is questioned: the romantic outsider, and its heir, the Surrealist poet, collapses as an unproblematic subjectivity, replaced by a network of quotations, echoes and pastiches
References
Baciu, Stefan, (ed.), Antología de la poesía surrealista latinoamericana, (Mexico D.F.: Editorial Joaquín Mortiz S.A., 1974)
Barthes, Roland, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath, (London: Faber & Faber, 1977)
Baudelaire, Charles, Baudelaire, ed. Scarfe, Francis, (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1972)
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (London: Athlone Press, 1988)
Hayward, John (ed.), The Penguin Book of English Verse, (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1973)
Jarry, Alfred, The Ubu Plays, trans. Connolly, Cyril and Watson Taylor, Simon, (London: Methuen, 1993)
Kerouac, Jack, On the Road, (London: Penguin, 2000)
Jiménez, José Olivio (ed.), Antología de la poesía hispanoamericana contemporánea 1914-1987, (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2000)
Olson, Charles, Selected Writings, (New York: New Directions Book, 1966)
Perlongher, Néstor, Poemas completas 1980-1992, (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1997a)
—, Prosa plebeya, (Buenos Aires: Colihue, 1997b)
Preminger, Alex, and Brogan, T.V.F. (eds.), The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, (Princeton University Press, 1993)
—, Literary Essays, (London: Faber and Faber, 1954)
Quilis, Antonio, Métrica Española, (Madrid: Ediciones Alcalá, 1969)
Riffaterre, Michael, Semiotics of Poetry, (Indiana University Press, 1978)
Rowe, William, Contemporary Poets of Latin America: History and the Inner Life, (Oxford University Press: 2000)
Notes
1. The example of the poetry workshops founded by the post-Revolutionary government in Nicaragua offers an interesting contrast. Here workshops were set up as an aid to literacy, but also as a method of counseling those who had experienced violence on both sides of the conflict. Under the guidance of poet and revolutionary Ernesto Cardenal, the workshops sought to achieve revolutionary aims, in particular breaking down the divide between work and leisure seen by many Marxists as key to the capitalist process of alienation. The workshops, though, followed the revolutionary process. See Rowe, 2000, chapter 2 for specific details of Cardenal’s involvement in the workshops.
2. For example, Salvador Dalí placed a spoon in his mouth with an egg on the end; if he fell asleep the noise of the egg cracking would awake him. Thus he forced himself into a half-waking, half-dreaming state conducive to Surrealist visions.
3. Blake, for example, was cruelly nicknamed the “Cockney Madman” for his eccentricities and dialectical rhymes.
4. Of Kerouac’s frenetic writing pace, Truman Capote scornfully said, “that’s not writing. That’s typing.” (in “Introduction” by Ann Charters, On the Road, (Kerouac, 2000: xix)
5. This is one of Perlongher’s last poems, written in 1992 as he was dying of AIDS and published posthumously in the collection El chorreo de las iluminaciones.
6. A wave of recent Hollywood films – Total Recall, The Matrix, Existenz, Strange Days, The Truman Show – have postulated characters or indeed a whole civilization based on the principle of virtual reality: everything as we see it is false, the concept in Berkeley’s thinking referred to as the “Evil Daemon” theory. The trend comes out of science fiction – Phillip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon’s work in particular – but also out of a strong concern over the possibilities for “creating” reality afforded by the mass media, in particular technology deterritorialized onto the body’s organs of perception
7. There are of course other, more ephemeral similarities between Perlongher and the Surrealists. Just as Breton and his followers condemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Cuba’s support for it, so Perlongher questioned supporters of the Cuban revolution given the abuses committed against certain minority groups, including homosexuals, political opponents and recalcitrant artists. Breton’s lifelong opposition to Stalinism may perhaps be compared to Perlongher’s lifelong struggle against authoritarianism. See “Cuba. El sexo y el puente de plata” in Perlongher 1997b:pp119-126.
8. And also to Alfred Jarry. Perlongher includes Ubu as one of his favourite literary characters (Perlongher 1997b:15), and it is hard to avoid the influence of Jarry’s neologous on-stage obscenities (for example “merdre”, sonorously translated as “pschitt” by Simon Watson Taylor, or “cornegidouille” (“hornstrumpot”?), “cornephynance”, “bouffresque” and so forth.
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