This obliqueness of vision is different in its origin on both planes and the difference is a matter of consciousness: The blues possess unconscious elements of surrealism and Dalí’s canvasses are highly conscious and intentional, and both elements are distant from the habits of thought and feeling of the man who lives his life in terms of bread-and-butter. Here, I think, we have the answer to the question about why Stravinsky is attracted to jazz music; he should be, for there is a definite kinship.

Negro jazz music has been called time and again by many critics the greatest surrealistic music ever heard in human history. Of course, I doubt if Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, or Count Basie ever talk of surrealism in terms of Freud’s theory of the dream structure and function. But, as many critics have pointed out, jazz music proceeds on the basis of a steady beat in the bass and then there is an endless series of improvised, tone-colored melodies carried on in terms of rhythm—sometimes as many as five—intense, moving to and fro between the keys, guided not by musical theory, but by the urge to express something deeply felt. Much of this music is created by men and women who do not even know how to read musical notes.

If one does not want to call this process surrealism, one need not do so; I see no particular advantage in arguing about names if the fundamental process is well understood. What I’m striving to do is drive home a function of a certain phase of the creative process, that is, the ability to take seemingly unrelated images and symbols and link them together into a meaningful whole. You have seen examples of surrealistic painting; you’ve heard examples of surrealism in jazz music; and you’ve read examples of surrealism in, say, the tales of Poe. Over and above the element of distance, another outstanding trait of surrealism is its great intensity, its sustained dynamics. The most conspicuous example of this is to be found in jazz music with its continuous beat in the bass and the profuse improvisation of tense tonal-melody-rhythms.

Still another experience threads its way through The Man Who Lived Underground and, too, this new experience—or, I might say, the new ideas I came across which eventually became linked in my memory with my grandmother’s religious disposition—was also linked with surrealism. In fact, I encountered the surrealistic theory of art at about the time I encountered the theory of psychoanalysis. Though I’m no exponent of the so-called Freudian view of personality, I do want to indicate the seeming relationship between the blues and jazz and swing, my grandmother’s world view, surrealism, and Freud’s description of the dream process.

At this late date I don’t think that one need elaborate Freud’s theory of the dream process; even high school students speak of displacement, condensation, inversion, substitution, over-determination, transference, and so forth. In varying degrees these same processes occur in many blues songs, in jazz music, and in much folk verse; if you should read the words to Bessie Smith’s “Empty Bed Blues,” you would find no logic or progression between the verses; they are merely a series of incidents of domestic discord and defeated love thrown seemingly carelessly together. But they have a relationship stitched through their inner structure, a testimony to reality seen through Negro eyes that look at life from a position of enforced severance. What takes place, therefore, is a seeming and relative confusing of values; there is displacement, intensity, transference, inversion, condensation, over-determination, and all of the other processes that go to make up the strangely familiar reality of a dream. All the details in blues songs have poured into them through sheer emotional intensity of the participants a degree of that overemphasis that lifts them out of their everyday context and exalts them to a plane of vividness that strikes one with wonderment.