The Persistence of Surrealism: Memory, Dreams and the Dead

What do memories look like? In many ways, this question is the driving force behind some of the most well-known works of Surrealist art and literature. We need only think of Salvador Dali’s soft geography of dripping time-pieces, ‘The Persistence of Memory’ (1931), to recall how Surrealism seeks to give form to the fluid and discontinuous nature of memory: ‘The empty beach with its fused sand is a symbol of utter psychic alienation. Clock time here is no longer valid, the watches have begun to drip and melt. Even the embryo, symbol of secret growth and possibility, is drained and limp. These are the residues of a remembered moment of time’.1 J.G. Ballard’s brief evaluation of ‘The Persistence of Memory’ is useful for at least two reasons: firstly, it reminds us that Dalí’s visions of melting watches were part of Surrealism’s serious creative enquiries into the Theory of Relativity, quantum mechanics and developing theories of space-time in the 1920s and 1930s.2 Secondly, it gestures to Surrealism’s sustained engagement with neuroscience, one that actually stretches back to André Breton’s medical studies under the eminent neurologist, Joseph Babinski, and his first-hand experiences of treating patients in neuro-psychiatric centres during World War One.3 As Breton would go on to write almost half a century later, neuroscience was ‘from the beginning at the heart of Surrealism’,4 shaping creative and critical enquiry (neurological discourse features repeatedly in the ‘First Manifesto of Surrealism’), and informing poetic response to the question that so preoccupies the Surrealist imagination: ‘What is it to be human?’