FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 638 30 June 2015 - SURREALISM & TERRORISM

THE TOURIST MASSACRE IN TUNISIA: TERRORISM OR SURREALISM? OR BOTH?
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‘The most surrealist of acts would be to go down the street and shoot people at random’ wrote Andre Breton, the French Pope of the surrealist movement. Art and murder conjoined. So, was Seifeddine Rezgui, the Sousse terrorist, acting also in surrealist fashion when he murdered 30 tourists on a beach?

But Islamist ideology motivated Seifeddine (meaning ‘sword of faith’ in Arabic), not art! Sure but what ideology, precisely? That of the ISIS. Chaps who have proclaimed a Caliphate in the Levant. Consider: a polity that mergies civil and religious authority. An archaic project running counter to the whole direction of modernity. (Vatican excepted, perhaps.) Jihadis want to reverse the time arrow – a bit like getting a river to flow backwards. Thus they chop up prisoners’ heads, bring back female slavery and introduce Sharia’ punishments. Strange, weird and surreal endevours, methinks.

The priest was twice in Sousse himself. Pleasurable and friendly place and people. I visualise British tourists there. A placid, innocuous and sun-seeking lot. All they seek is to escape the perennial cold and dreariness of the English weather. An innocent, pink-faced bunch, of quintessentially relaxed, polite and harmless demeanour. Then shots ring out and death’s scythe senselessly strikes them down. What was their guilt? None. Yet Seifeddine butchered them. All too real but also very odd, surreal.

Surrealism attached great importance to play, fantasies and dreams. I bet the head-choppers are not merely playing their deadly game but the Caliphate project is in a sense a dream. A nightmare, perhaps, but so highly fantastic and implausible – for one thing, no way the thinking people of the Middle East would ever desire to live under ISIS’ rule. Like a bad dream, it is unreal.  Or, as I would prefer, surreal.

Jean Paul Sartre wrote a short story entitled ‘Erostratus’. The name of an obscure Greek citizen of Ephesus who set fire to the temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Haunted by his own nullity, Erostratus did his crime to achieve eternal fame, no matter how infamous. Sartre’s story updates Erostratus. The anti-hero is a nonentity OK but celebrity is not his aim. He kills like a surrealist. That is why one day he guns people down at random in the street. Seifeddine’s pleonasm, perhaps?

In 2003 a Turkish suicide bomber crashed a lorry loaded with explosives unto the British General Consulate in Istanbul, killing several people. The terrorist turned out to have been an avid reader of Sartre’s works. He spoke about them all the time. Everybody put his crime down to al-Qaeda but…was he intending instead to emulate ‘Erostratus’, I wonder?

‘Surrealism appears to me essentially as a sort of rage, a rage against the existing order of things’, affirmed George Bataille, another transgressing, syphilitic French intellectual. A certain type of terrorism seems to partake of that rage. Whatever the boasted, rational causes, a tremendous fury drives men, young and old, to fight, to blow themselves up, to kill and be killed. Is it the unjust, Western-dominated economy? The misery of unemployment? The search for Paradise? Hatred of the infidel? Sexual repression? Take your pick. Whatever, it is a phenomenal rage against existing order things. ‘I will do such things…I know not what but they will be the terrors of the earth’ cries out King Lear. Another proto-surrealist?

I read that when a sniper at last shot and killed Seifeddine, the mass-killer was praying. If true, that would be eminently surreal. Prayers are offered to the Creator. What kind of God would desire the slaying of thirty peaceful, relaxed British people vacationing on a beach? A Gnostic God of hatred and revenge? Or a surrealist Deity? One indifferent to his creatures but taking pleasure in pain, the irrational and the absurd?

Of course, Breton and other champions of surrealism, despite their extravagant exaltation of non-rational and unconscious categories, in their writings and examples veered towards the political left. ISIS and its votaries by contrast embrace the most reactionary and obscurantist practices. Maybe they take their cue from painter Salvador Dali. A somewhat deviant surrealist, Dali wrote in praise of Hitler. His fellow artists were outraged. A kind of tribunal was arranged to try the heretic. Dali however defended himself in ultra-surrealist fashion: ‘I cannot be blamed from the utterances of my unconscious’, he said. They had to acquit him. Don’t figure the shaggy Caliphate boys would dream to use that highbrow Freudian argument but...it has charm!

Lastly, if this kind of terrorism is surreal you still have to face up to it and stop it. How so? Certainly not with PM David Cameron’s pompous, pseudo-Churchillian, faux-tough pronouncements or similar rubbish from the authorities. A surreal problem needs a surreal solution. What might that be?

A caller to LBC Radio the other night came up with a splendidly surreal answer. ‘Nuke them. Nuke Raqqa. Nuke the Caliphate. Nuclear weapons, what use are they if we never use them? This is the time. Nuke the bastards!’

Insane, eh? Well…what do you expect? It is surrealism.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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