The Exquisite Corpse was one the favourite games of the surrealist artists. It involves a number of participants successively adding to an initial collage or drawing without being able to see the previous contribution(s). Often this involved folding a paper to hide what was already there.
As such it is a supremely democratic art form; an example of the notion that the artists are the people and that the expression of their subconscious through automaticity is further enhanced when the manifestations of those expressions are combined in themselves in a chaotic manner. Although doubtless the surrealists would consider that to be objective chance.
That term 'manifestation' (or manif in the book) is critical for the purposes of this profoundly disturbing and very timely book by China Mieville which considers a version of the 1940s in which surrealist artworks are coming to life following the 'S-Blast" (classically this explosion occurs in Les Deux Magots) in occupied Paris and the Nazis are desperately trying to raise demons from hell (or at least from some of their revolting national socialist art works of the 1930s).
As is remarked in the book, we land heavily on the 'surrealist side of the street' where the manifs are living art - the expression of the people's subconscious and the free association of their ideas. They may be strange (because we are strange) but they are peculiarly devoted to defending the interests of the city.
In contrast their enemies rely on the 'made demon' - the crafted, tooled and smooth representation of hell which will, given the chance, eat the manifs as they literally and metaphorically devour all other flowerings of art.
There are many spectacular passages: "In the post blast miasma, all Parisians grew invisible organs that flex in the presence of the marvellous."
A bastardised version of Leonora Carrington's 'Amateur of Velocipedes' appears riding through the city "tires singing, the cycle-presence wove between the shattered buildings of the Cite de Trevise, into ruins and shadows and out of sight".
The finale of the book is one in which neither the manifs nor the demons hold sway. It is far more troubling than that in its Augustan calm.
As an allegory of contemporary times and a tour de force in its own right this takes some beating. Surreal art feels increasingly important as the darkness seems to be closing in all around and the intemperate beat of demands for backward looking conformity in all senses becomes ever louder. The beauty of the surreal is that it is genuinely of 'us'; a direct reflection of our very human hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares. It is a 'realer' version of reality than the smooth representation of normality in which the unhelpfully fecund nature of humans can be controlled and tamped down.
Sadly, those who are not on the surrealist side of the street probably neither want nor care to read it. They're too busy raising demons.
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