The Lovers by Rene Magrette
The need for sincerity in literary expression, felt strongly in France during the first twenty years of the century, is really the belief that the conscious states of mans being are not sufficient to explain him to himself and to others. His subconscious contains a larger and especially a more authentic or accurate part of his being. It was found that our conscious speech and our daily actions are usually in contradiction with our true selves and our deeper desires. The neat patterns of Human behavior, set forth by the realists, and which our lives seem to follow, were found to be patterns formed by social forces rather than by our desires or temperaments or inner psychological selves. This discovery or conviction that we are more sincerely revealed in our dreams and in our purely instinctive actions than in our daily exterior habits of behavior (tea drinking or cocktailing etc) is of course basic to surrealism. It is admirably summarized in a sentence of Andre Gide’s autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt, when he speaks of the difficulty of our knowing the real motivation of any of our actions. ‘le motif secret de nos actes nous echappe’ pg 15 Age of Surrealism Wallace Fowle, Bloomington a London, Indiana University Press, fourth printing 1966
The powerful aura that today’s advanced technologies cast does not derive solely from their novelty or their mystifying complexity; it also derives from their literal realisation of the virtual projects willed by the wizards and alchemists of an earlier age. Magic is technology’s unconscious, its’ own arational spell. Our modern technological world is not nature, but augmented nature, super nature, and the more intently we probe it’s mutant edge of mind and matter, the more our disenchanted productions will find themselves wrestling with the rhetoric of the supernatural. Pg 48 TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information Erik Davis Serpent’s Tail; New edition edition (12 Nov 2004)
Art Brings about a reconciliation between the two principles in a peculiar way. An Artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes fulplay in the life of phantasy. 
‘Photographic images provide us with the proof of our existence without which we would find it difficult even to reconstruct a personal history, Bourguse families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sontag points out, posed for portraits in order to proclaim the families status, where as today the family album of photographs verifies the individuals existence; it’s documentary record of his record development from infancy onwards provides him with the only evidence of his life that he recognizes as altogether valid. Among the ‘many narcissistic uses’ that Sontag attributes to the camera ‘self servalence’ ranks among the most important, not only because it provides the technical means of ceaseless self scrutiny, but because it renders the sense of self hood dependant upon the consumption of images of the self, at the same time calling into question the reality of the external world’ 
‘Instead of the neurotic character with well structured conflicts centering around around forbidden sex, authority, or dependence and independence within a family setting, we see characters filled with uncertainty about what is real.’ This uncertainty now invades every form of art and crystallises in an imagery of the absurd that re-enters daily life and encourages a theatrical approach to existence , a kind of absurdist theatres of the self. ‘
