Eudora Welty and Surrealism

1. Surrealism and Welty’s Early Years in New York

3 1 SURREALISM AND WELTY’S EARLY YEARS IN NEW YORK1 1. Toward the Mysterious Threshold When [surrealism] broke over its founders as an inspiring dream wave, it seemed the most integral, conclusive, absolute of movements. Everything with which it came into contact was integrated. Life seemed worth living only where the threshold between waking and sleeping was worn away in everyone as by the steps of multitudinous images flooding back and forth. . . . –Walter Benjamin,“Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” Benjamin’s lavish recollection of surrealism’s founding moment foregrounds the energy, innocence, and plenitude of the epoch. As the driving force behind the movement’s dynamism and innovation, surrealism’s dream wave repeatedly steepened, broke, and withdrew, exposing through its coruscating imagery the seepage of the unconscious. This international movement produced legions of followers, whose artistic provocations forever cracked the edifice of the arts establishment, redefining the contours of twentieth-century culture and leaving an indelible mark on Eudora Welty, a sharp-eyed observer of the newest cultural trends. The following extract from her 1937 story, “A Memory,” plainly illuminates the flood of images that typically swell to form Benjamin’s dream wave in her fiction, breaking over her unsuspecting reader: She was unnaturally white and fatly aware, in a bathing suit which had no relation to the shape of her body. Fat hung upon her upper arms like an arrested earthslide on a hill. With the first motion she might make, I 4 surrealism and welty’s early years in new york was afraid that she would slide down upon herself into a terrifying heap. Her breasts hung heavy and widening like pears into her bathing suit. Her legs lay prone one on the other like shadowed bulwarks, uneven and deserted, upon which, from the man’s hand, the sand piled higher like the teasing threat of oblivion.A slow, repetitious sound I had been hearing for a long time unconsciously, I identified as a continuous laugh which came through the motionless open pouched mouth of the woman. (Stories 95) This densely figurative passage shows some fundamental characteristics that typify Welty’s fictional perspective. Part observation, part recollection, and part dream, the spectacle emerges in fine and lucid detail. The whiteness , the fat body, the bathing suit, the arms, the breasts, the legs, the head, and the mouth anchor these concrete figments in the mind’s eye, which holds and stabilizes the elements—readily visualized, fully formed, and boldly evoked. However, the expressions that contribute to the graphic presentation of these details tend toward abstraction, creating a reverie of actuality by tincturing the vision’s naturalism with the plasticity of a dream to establish a set of material impossibilities. Before the reader’s eyes, the fat liquefies into earthslides that risk heaping, the breasts form swollen pears, the legs metamorphose into bulwarks threatening annihilation, and the laugh issues from a transfigured mouth, turned into a pouch slung open and ugly.2 The strength of this kind of narrative resonated particularly with Katherine Anne Porter, whose introduction to A Curtain of Green alludes to her preference for“A Memory”because it reveals the“mysterious threshold between dream and waking” life, and the “waking faculty of daylight reason recollecting and recording the crazy logic of the dream” (969–70). Consideration of Porter’s famous recommendation for Welty’s stories leads naturally to contemplating the relationship between Welty and surrealism, the European avant-garde’s foremost organization for the theoretical and practical investigation of the unconscious.Welty’s signature certainly never endorsed a surrealist manifesto, and she never championed the surrealist revolution, announced herself a surrealist, promoted her work as surrealist inspired, contributed to surrealist periodicals, or consorted with surrealist artists. While this series of seemingly weighty objections may appear to defeat at the outset an enterprise that insists on emphasizing the surreal in Welty’s oeuvre, an analysis of her literary production reveals a fundamental , pervasive, and enduring quality in her art that establishes more than surrealism and welty’s early years in new york 5 a fragile affinity. Surrealism profoundly influenced Welty’s artistic corpus, which shows the imprint of one of the twentieth century’s most subversive and influential cultural formations. For decades,Welty commentators have located her work broadly in the modernist tradition. Names frequently identified as influences on her work include...