Surrealism in Writing
Have you ever seen the painting Golconda by René Magritte? In the painting, it’s raining men, hundreds of welldressed men descending from above. How about The Persistence of Memory by Salvadore Dali? It’s the famous landscape painting that depicts otherwise ordinary clocks melting. Both paintings are bizarre and mix real things (like well-dressed men) with unreal things (rain is made out of water, not men). Both paintings are surrealist. When I took painting lessons, I learned that the purpose of surrealism is to challenge conventional thought and infuse the rational with subconscious expressions.
It’s the same with written art, too, with stories. Each sentence is rational just like a Dali clock is rational, but what the plot does is abnormal (the clocks melt). There may be time jumps or place jumps. A man may wake up as a giant bug, as in Kafka’s classic novella
