Surrealism and Exegesis, part II

Exegesis and surrealism seem opposed on the surface. One draws meaning out of a pre-existing text through disciplined method; and the other ruptures the conditions under which meaning is produced at all. But the contrast, pressed hard enough, reveals deep philosophical kinship.

The basic opposition

Exegesis assumes: there is a meaning to be found. The text precedes the interpreter; interpretation is, at minimum, responsive to something given. Even Gadamer, who radically loosens the grip of authorial intention, still speaks of the text “speaking,” of understanding as an “event” in which something addresses us.

Surrealism assumes: meaning is a symptom of repression. The rational, waking order of signs (that is, the world as it appears to common sense, to bourgeois consciousness, to discursive reason) is a crust over something deeper, wilder, more real. The surrealist project is not to interpret the crust but to crack it open. Not exegesis but irruption.

And yet: both share a profound commitment to the idea that what appears on the surface is not all there is. Both are hermeneutics of depth. The difference is in what lies below, and how you reach it.

If a Scholar of the Great Arts (also probably for an Adept of the Invisible Arts) is trying to deal with meaning they probably won’t stay at any of those extremes. In occultism you can’t go fully rational, and in the Secret Histories you wouldn’t reach the Wood if you don’t allow your meanings to be driven by Passion. Even so Reason is still important in the Mansus.

Surrealism’s philosophical roots

Breton’s wager

André Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto (1924) defines surrealism as “pure psychic automatism”. It is writing, drawing, speaking without the intervention of rational control. The wager is Freudian: beneath the censored surface of waking thought lies the primary process, governed not by logic but by condensation, displacement, and wish-fulfillment. Dreams are the royal road to this deeper layer. To write automatically is to be exegeted by the unconscious rather than to exegete a text.

This is the first crucial inversion: in classical exegesis, the interpreter is the subject and the text the object. In surrealism, the unconscious speaks through the practitioner. The artist becomes a medium, and we could say almost in the spiritualist sense. Breton was drawn to mediums, to hypnotic states, to the séance as model. The surrealist artwork does not encode a meaning to be decoded; instead, it enacts a passage through which what is ordinarily repressed comes to the surface.

The philosophical question: is this deeper layer more true? Breton says yes (like a Moth) “the marvellous is always beautiful, everything marvellous is beautiful.” This is a claim about the ontological priority of desire over rationality. It echoes Freud’s reality principle / pleasure principle distinction, but Breton inverts the value: the reality principle is impoverishment.

The hermeneutic unconscious: Freud and the question of depth

Ricoeur’s reading of Freud in Freud and Philosophy (1965) is the pivot here. He argues that psychoanalysis is a hermeneutics — a mode of interpretation that reads symptoms, dreams, jokes, and parapraxes as texts with latent meaning beneath manifest content. Freudian interpretation is exegesis of the self.

But Ricoeur also places Freud among the “masters of suspicion”: Freud teaches us that the subject does not know what it is saying. Manifest meaning is systematically misleading. This creates a permanently agonistic relationship between surface and depth. This conflict which is structurally identical to the surrealist relationship between waking consciousness and the dream. We could even play in our minds that Freud had not just too much Grail in his head but lots of Edge.

The difference, then, is that Freud wants to recover the hidden meaning and restore the ego’s sovereignty through analysis. Breton wants to sustain the disruption, to live in the crack, to make the eruption of the unconscious a permanent condition of artistic production. Freud was famously cool toward surrealism. He thought Breton and his circle had misread him. Breton wanted to abolish the distinction between dream and waking; Freud thought therapy should clarify it.

Dada: the zero-degree case

Dada (Zürich, 1916 — Tzara, Ball, Arp) is philosophically more extreme than surrealism, and worth pausing on. Where surrealism still believes in a deeper truth… the marvelous, desire, the surreal… Dada has no such faith. Pure Moth and Grail, no Rose or Sky. Its gestures are nihilistic: rational meaning is not concealing something richer; rational meaning is simply empty. Language is arbitrary noise. Art is bourgeois mystification. The answer is nonsense, not as gateway to the unconscious, but as terminal statement.

Hugo Ball’s Karawane (1916), a poem composed entirely of invented syllables (“Jolifanto bambla ô falli bambla”), is not automatism aimed at recovering unconscious content. It is the destruction of the sign itself. This is more radical, philosophically speaking, than surrealism. Dada stands at the point where hermeneutics becomes impossible — not because meaning is too deep, but because there is nothing to interpret.

The contrast with exegesis could not be sharper: exegesis assumes the sacred adequacy of the sign (the biblical word means something, definitively). Dada assumes the utter inadequacy, the arbitrariness, the violence of the sign. And yet; and yet… and this is the irony… Dada’s meaninglessness means something. You cannot escape the hermeneutic circle even by destroying it.

Automatism: bypassing the interpreter

Automatic writing as practiced by Breton and Philippe Soupault in Les Champs Magnétiques (1920), and in visual art by André Masson, Max Ernst’s frottage and decalcomania, tries to eliminate the intentional, deliberate activity of the artist’s conscious ego. The hand moves; the mind does not supervise.

What we see here is that, philosophically, Surrealism is a direct assault on the Renaissance and Romantic conception of artistic genius as intentional creativity. And it is also an assault on the Schleiermacherian model of exegesis, which requires recovering intentional meaning. An automatic text has no author in the traditional sense. Rather, it is produced by a process, not a person.

But notice the paradox: automatic writing still produces texts. And those texts get interpreted, assembled into collections, published, read. The surrealists were obsessive editors… Breton curated, controlled, excommunicated. The suppression of intention at the moment of production was followed by intense intentional work at the level of selection and framing. The author returns at the editorial level. This reveals that automatic production cannot escape the economy of interpretation.

Magical realism: myth as exegesis, Macondo as Brancrug

Magical realism (García Márquez, Borges, Rulfo, Carpentier, Angela Carter) is adjacent to surrealism but philosophically distinct in a crucial way. Where surrealism erupts the marvelous into a realist surface to destabilize it, magical realism treats the marvelous as already native to its world. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, it does not surprise the characters that Remedios the Beauty ascends to heaven with the laundry. This is simply how the world works in Macondo. And that’s maybe how it works in Brancrug. After all everyone there is used to ‘the supernatural’ not as something banal but as daily life.

The philosophical difference we see is that magical realism does not share surrealism’s Freudian-Marxist framework. It draws instead on myth, on indigenous and syncretic cosmologies, on the sense that pre-modern ways of being in the world encode truths that modernity has occluded. It is, in a sense, a counter-exegesis — reading the world through a mythic hermeneutic rather than a rationalist one.

Borges is the most philosophically sophisticated practitioner. His labyrinths, libraries, and encyclopedias are hermeneutic machines. Those thematize the impossibility of complete interpretation, the regress of texts commenting on texts, the uncanny vertigo of infinite reference. The Library of Babel is literally an image of the exegetical situation: a universe composed entirely of texts, none of which anyone can fully interpret. Instead of surrealism what we have here is almost Borges reading Wittgenstein reading Hume.

Does that mean we can draw on Borges when getting lost in Hush House’s rooms and Garcia Márquez when chatting with people down at the Sweet Bones? Yes and no and the answer is on the player. But myth is really important for Secret Histories, and we should never forget that. We should never forget, also, how confusing and enigmatic the real world can feels like. Grab that feeling and latch it onto your Librarian to give them more life. Even if it’s a magical realist life.

Allow yourself to read stuff like https://secret-histories.fandom.com/wiki/Hush_House and bring old events back as if they were just prefiguring events in your Librarian’s daily life…

Situationism: the Society of the Spectacle as misreading machine

Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967) inherits the surrealist impulse but turns it fully political. The spectacle is not the unconscious — it is capitalist image-production as total environment. Everyday life under capital is a surreality… not a dreamlike freedom but a dream of subjection, a seamless screen of commodified images that forecloses genuine desire.

Situationist techniques like détournement (hijacking existing images and texts by altering their context) and dérive (drifting through urban space without destination) are practices of counter-exegesis. Détournement re-reads a text against itself, extracting from it a meaning opposed to its original function. Debord détourning a John Ford western into a Marxist analysis of cinema is a hermeneutic act, but one that explicitly denies its target the dignity of having a fixed, recoverable meaning.

This is where situationism meets deconstruction: both Derrida and Debord treat meaning as unstable, context-dependent, always available for re-appropriation. But Debord has a teleology; a teleology of liberation that Derrida refuses. For Debord, the right reading is the one that produces revolutionary consciousness. For Derrida, there is no right reading, only more or less rigorous encounters with undecidability.

The Heart Principle can be allowed to pump in situationist-inspired moments during an Emergent Narrative run of a Secret Histories game. Specifically we can calll upon the Pine-Knight and enact his quests for the Cinnabar Cup; the Pine-Knight (or Thunderskin, or Parsifal) underwent a journey that in many ways could be compared to a dérive. Let your Librarian navigate the psychogeografic features of Book of Hours’ interface, catch glimpses of inordinate meaning from its spatial proportions and relations. Do not be afraid to sacrifice previous assumptions you have.

The uncanny: where hermeneutics and surrealism share ground

Freud’s Das Unheimliche (1919), the uncanny, is the philosophical concept that most directly bridges exegesis and surrealism. The uncanny names the experience of something familiar that has become strange. To be more precise, something that was meant to remain hidden that suddenly appears. The German word heimlich means both “familiar, homelike” and “concealed, secret.” The uncanny (unheimlich) is not simply the unfamiliar — it is the return of what should have stayed repressed.

Heidegger, in Being and Time, uses Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness, literally “not-at-homeness”) to describe the existential mood that discloses Dasein’s fundamental groundlessness. It is being thrown into existence without a fixed essence or home. This is structurally identical to the surrealist shock: the moment when ordinary reality cracks and reveals its contingency.

For hermeneutics: the uncanny happens when a text you thought you understood suddenly reads differently, reveals a meaning you had repressed. Gadamer’s fusion of horizons has this quality — genuine understanding involves a kind of productive disorientation.

For surrealism: the uncanny is not a byproduct but the goal. De Chirico’s metaphysical paintings… empty piazzas at wrong angles, unexpected shadows, juxtaposed statues… deliberately produce uncanny shock as a mode of revelation. The surrealist object (objet trouvé, the found object) works by uncanny displacement: a shoe filled with sand is recognizable and completely wrong.

For Book of Hours: everytime you get back to the game, you risk getting lost in so many stuff left from last time. So many Skills and rooms and stuff lying all over those rooms… I’m not saying leave stuff disorganized but let your mind feel the uncanny and get yourself ungrounded. Put stuff together along strange logic. Maybe those weird, hard-to-craft dolls deserve a place next to Solomon’s face in the wall. Oracles are a powerful tool in Emergent Narratives, we are not throwing dice like in TTRPGs here, we are using not only the game’s rules as oracles but its very textures and visual features.

A deeper dialogue: the image

Both traditions are obsessed with the image. But they understand it oppositely.

For hermeneutics, particularly in Ricoeur’s later work, the image (metaphor, symbol, narrative) is a surplus of meaning. A symbol “gives rise to thought” (as Ricoeur’s famous phrase has it). The image is richer than any single interpretation; it calls for and sustains ongoing exegetical labor. There is always more to think. Heart and Lantern.

For surrealism, following Reverdy’s definition that Breton adopted, “the image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.” The strength of a surrealist image is measured by its strangeness, by the distance between the two realities brought together. “A pebble encircled by a woman” (Éluard)… this image is not symbolic in Ricoeur’s sense; it does not give rise to interpretive labor. It short-circuits interpretation. It shocks rather than invites.

This is the deepest formal difference: hermeneutics is patient, dialectical, committed to a labor of understanding that never completes but progressively deepens. Surrealism is impatient, anti-dialectical (in practice, whatever its Hegelian self-understanding), committed to the violent, sudden, unrepeatable flash of the marvelous.

If you commit to writing pieces of fiction about your Librarian character, sometimes you’ll get immersed by the symbols they work inside the setting and those will open up vistas that didn’t look obvious before. It does not matter if those are rants, part of the character’s actual Journal in the game, recorded logs of conversations/dialogues with Visitors and villagers and people you hire, Kennedian storylets, marginalia doodles or high-polished digital art.

You will probably feel better revisiting what you produce and sometimes analysing, why did you wrote/drawn that in the first place? No one knows their own motivations at once, so you can enact exagesis on your own work. Or on your character’s work, because all of this is flowing through their voice.

House of Secrets

There is a way in which surrealism is secretly exegetical and hermeneutics is secretly surrealist.

Surrealism claims to bypass interpretation — to produce images that short-circuit rational meaning-making. But the surrealist artwork demands a reader. The shock of the uncanny is not immediate; it requires the shock to be felt as shock, recognized as a displacement. You need to know what a shoe normally means in order to be disturbed by the shoe filled with sand. The surrealist image lands only for someone who already inhabits the interpretive horizon it disrupts. Surrealism is exegesis that lies about being exegesis.

Hermeneutics, meanwhile, repeatedly discovers that genuine understanding requires passing through something like the surrealist shock. Heidegger’s Unheimlichkeit, Gadamer’s disorienting encounter with the great artwork, Ricoeur’s second naiveté after the hermeneutics of suspicion; all of those involve a moment of defamiliarization that looks remarkably like what the surrealists were engineering. The difference is not in the experience of disruption, but in what you do with it afterward: hermeneutics wants to integrate the shock into a deeper, more patient understanding; surrealism wants to live in the flash permanently.

Whether that permanent installation in rupture is liberation or a new kind of aestheticism is perhaps the key political and philosophical question their encounter leaves open.

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Next article on this series, we’ll tackle Bataille. And other articles will concern, among other things, Biblical exegesis and poetic space. I am also planning something about the Pine-Knight and situationism.