Illustrated Rekhapat': Morphological Significance and Surrealism of Uppalakumar Bose's Poems/ ‘চিত্রার্পিত রেখাপাত’ : উৎপলকুমার বসুর কবিতার আঙ্গিকগত তাৎপর্য ও সুররিয়ালিজম

Abstract

Surrealism is one of the most important literary and artistic movements of Early 20^th Century. The term ‘Surrealism’ was coined by French Poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917. After the First World War, poets and artists in Europe were trying to counter and cure the ‘madness of the age’ through their art and literature. Their first attempt to revolutionise the cultural expression was Dadaism, which incorporated the anarchy in outer world into literature and produced ‘babble and incantations’. Influenced by Dadaism, French poet and critic Andre Breton, who was trained in Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis, tried to bring unconscious renderings into writing—thus developing ‘Automatic Writing’. In 1924, he published Surrealist Manifesto, where he defined Surrealism as a ‘Pure Automatism’ where a writer or an artist would try to express the ‘true functioning of thought’, ‘excluding any aesthetic or moral preoccupation’. ‘Freedom of thought’ was one of the most important themes of Surrealism, and Surrealist writers tried to bring that into their writings by cancelling any hindrance imposed by the conscious mind on the writing process itself. They tried to bring dream-like sequences into their writings, cancel the order of syntax and literal meaning of words or objects to incorporate an ambiguity. Creating disturbing Images via ‘juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities’ was one of their focal objectives. Through these methods, they tried to create a higher or super (‘sur’ in French) reality in their art. The Bengali Poet Utpal Kumar Basu, one of the major poets from fifties (1951-60), tried to incorporate some literary tools used in Surrealist Movement in his poems. Though he himself never claimed to be a ‘Surrealist Poet’, if compared to the Surrealist literary traditions, there can be found many similarities in the usage of disturbing and irrational Images, ‘automatism-esque’ writing patterns, ambiguous usage of words etc.