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The Songs of Science

My thesis “The Songs of Science” explores how a fascination with the sciences informed the activities of the surrealist artists. This fascination had two sides: scientific sources were both attractive as an authoritative voice and rejected for their categorization of knowledge. Most readings of the surrealist movement consider its artistic and poetic activities as responses to historical events. Oddly, the prominence of scientific sources is seldom perceived as a substantial component of surrealist history. In this thesis, I aim to address this gap and to discuss science as an important influence. Before engaging in cultural activism, many of the surrealists, most of whom were male, undertook some form of scientific education. This proved to be a point of interest for the future conversion and “deconstruction” of scientific sources. The predominance of one gender as well as training in objective thinking informed many surrealist “experiments.” Using representations of women on operating tables or as hysterics was a surrealist technique of objectifjmg subjectivity. In a sense, this technique was an antidote to a limited and narrow scientific vantage point. The research for my thesis is organized along three points of reference: (1) precursors, (2) early and, therefore, formative surrealist examples and (3) mature exchanges with contemporary scientific thinking. Using works of art, journals and literary material as evidence, the first section examines the surrealist attitude toward classical or nineteenth-century science. Elements of this culture, e.g. scientific illustrations, methods, terminology and instruments, were converted into poetic and ambiguous documents of post-World War I France. The second section continues to explore the impact of classical science by considering certain surrealist influences, mostly from the nineteenth century, which also displayed an ambiguous relationship with scientific discourse. The final section moves back to the period in question and looks at surrealist parallels to contemporary physics, analogies to the writings of Gaston Bachelard and the direct link between Bachelard and Andre Breton, which substantiates these analogies.