reason the balloon should not be allowed to expand upward, over
the parts of the city it was already covering, into the ‘‘air space’’ to
be found there, I asked the engineers to see to it. This expansion
took place throughout the morning, soft imperceptible sighing of
gas through the valves. The balloon then covered forty-five blocks
north-south and an irregular area east-west, as many as six cross-
town blocks on either side of the Avenue in some places. That was
the situation, then.From ‘The Balloon’ (Barthelme 1993, p. 53)So how can you generate a surrealist image? Let us think about our origi-
nal diagram, which involved a person and a set of actions. A realistic action
might be ‘she crossed and uncrossed her arms at the table several times’. A
surrealistic action would have to work against physical possibility and so
could be ‘she watched her legs crossing and uncrossing at the other side of
the room’. This is impossible physically, but it is quite suggestive psycho-
logically, as we are all familiar with the sensation of watching ourselves
performing actions which don’t seem quite to belong to us. So let’s now
turn my passage into a surrealist text (Exercise 2a):
Example 2.10: Surrealist rewriting
As she looked vacantly at the fridge door it burst open. A dark
brown chocolate cake bounced on the floor and proceeded to
shuffle across it. It was followed by a large unopened carton of
cream. The cake waited in the middle of the room for the cream
carton, then they simultaneously leapt onto the table.The main strategy I am using here is one of inversion. I am making objects
active and people passive. I am also attributing impossible actions to
objects: chocolate cakes do not have a will of their own.
Although this passage is built on the premise of physical impossibility,
it does seem to inscribe a psychological reality. We all know the feeling that
food is acting of its own accord. But this way of conveying psychological
reality is very different from the kind of observation we find in realist
writing, where objects are usually subservient to human behaviour.
Another surreal scenario would be if the woman opened the fridge
and found a child sleeping in it. In that situation the woman would be
still acting, but she would be encountering a physically impossible situa-
tion. So the surreal often hinges on the unexpected and inconceivable
becoming real.
Genre as a moveable feast 35