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In Montparnasse: The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dali
In Montparnasse: The Emergence of Surrealism in Paris, from Duchamp to Dali
by Sue Roe
Penguin, 295pp., $28.50
A fish rides a bicycle into the Seine. The fish begins to drown and then remembers that it is a fish and starts to fly off into the pipe-smoke colony of clouds. The bicycle floats down the river. It sees things, cycling through a flurry of wonders and impressions. There is the torn yellow umbrella making rapacious love to an industrial sewing machine under a bridge. There are the kids tossing melted flattened clocks in a time-tested game of frisbee. There is the shop-worn mannequin hanging from a streetlamp, and the oily-mustached man drinking green liquid from the mannequin’s glass slipper. There are dreams collecting on the banks of the Seine like a glazed honeycomb of stemless maraschino cherries. The bicycle can’t believe everything its’s seen and absorbed during its long day’s journey down the river, and begins to wonder about its own name and purpose. Am I even a bicycle? Or am I, perhaps, a red balloon dreaming that it’s a bicycle? I mean, if fish can hijack bicycles and then fly off into the clouds, well then who’s to say what I am, what I am not, what I can become.
Questions, images and philosophical ponderances, rooted in and belonging to the “sur-real.” A term that may have been coined by the poet and luminary, Apollinaire, or if we are…
