Review of Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture

As Abigail Susik and Paul Buhle’s volume attests, Franklin Rosemont consistently defined and redefined Surrealism in terms drawn from his capacious knowledge of popular and nondominant culture, and vice versa. A co-founder of the Chicago Surrealist Group (1966–), he found this hybridized lexicon especially generative in expressing his own identity and activist orientation amid the rapidly shifting media landscape of the Sixties. In “Autobiographical Kaleidoscope” (1968), one of the earliest included texts but located towards the back of the anthology, Rosemont proclaimed his familial closeness with a motley crew including André Breton, Emily Brontë, the labor humorist T-Bone Slim, Emiliano Zapata, the blues guitarist Elmore James, and Marilyn Monroe. “I am irresistibly attracted to the Krazy Kat cartoons of George Herriman, the analogies of Malcolm de Chazal, and anything having to do with rabbits, Hegel, Black Hawk, Shays’ Rebellion, Nat Turner, the Ferris Wheel, Zoroaster, cocaine, and the Cthulhu Mythos elaborated by H. P. Lovecraft and his circle,” he continued. “In fantasies I often see myself as Bugs Bunny or a zebra. I play rhythm ‘n’ blues piano and harpsichord” (309).

Susik’s incisive introduction rightly identifies such an inclusive approach to cultural genealogy as rooted in the unique origins of Chicago Surrealism, and as one which certainly was not shared by all in their milieu. Born out of the collective ethos fostered by the International Workers of the World (IWW) union—to which many Chicago Surrealists belonged as card-carrying members and organizers—their solidaristic framework situated popular culture as a common vernacular that might be salvaged to cultivate revolutionary consciousness and reclaim cultural forms as sites of subversion. This outlook stood in direct conflict with those of Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and even the Chicago Surrealist interlocutor Herbert Marcuse, all of whom disdainfully regarded the “culture industry” as an instrument of social control, pacification, and atomization. In his dissent, Rosemont found a kindred soul in Buhle, who sought to mobilize contemporary media and popular culture within and in the aftermath of the New Left through his founding of the Students for a Democratic Society-affiliated publication Radical America (1967–1999) and the journal Cultural Correspondence (1975–1983), co-edited with David Wagner. Many of Rosemont’s texts in this anthology emerged from the same underground press network, appearing in his guest-edited special issues of Buhle’s journals and the Chicago Surrealist review Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion (1970–1989), as well as Living Blues magazine and various books authored or edited by Rosemont. While all the writings were previously printed, they were often difficult to access—particularly outside of the U.S.—and their republication here affirms the continuing historical and intellectual relevance of the Chicago Surrealists’ expansive cultural vision.

Rosemont’s strategy for reactivating popular culture’s latent subversive potential seems to have been two-pronged. Particularly in the 1960s, Rosemont’s earlier writings focused on reinterpreting, and reframing the reception of, mainstream icons such as the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, in the hope that their wide appeal might catalyze a generalized spirit of rebellion. In a similar vein, his analyses of Bugs Bunny and other comic characters exemplify a classic détournement: the famous rabbit trickster, for example, is portrayed by Rosemont as a dialectical agent who, in outwitting Elmer Fudd, satirizes bourgeois property relations and affirms a class-conscious resistance. Here, the very mechanisms of mass entertainment are flipped on their head; the apparatus of cultural production becomes, paradoxically, the medium through which it is undermined. His second technique was recuperative rather than refractive, resurrecting obscured figures and institutions—such as little-known IWW cartoonists, fellow Chicago artist Henry Darger, and the Bohemian Chicago Dill Pickle Club—as vital ancestors in an ongoing counter-hegemonic tradition. The aim was less to fix the past in place than to revive its radical potency by positioning these figures within a living continuum of cultural resistance, one which could instill contemporary revolutionary consciousness. Rosemont’s dual method—the hijacking of mass cultural products and resuscitation of forgotten histories—democratized cultural memory while simultaneously sharpening its revolutionary potential.

Nearly all the selected texts were written after Rosemont travelled with his comrade and wife, Penelope Rosemont, to Paris in 1965–1966. There, they befriended younger Surrealists such as Robert Benayoun and Toyen, who shared a fascination with popular entertainment and cinema as fertile grounds for Surrealist experimentalism and critique. This transatlantic encounter undoubtedly nurtured Rosemont’s view of mass culture as a privileged arena for ludic invention and subversive potential. He found, for instance, in Slim’s irreverent palindromes, puns, malapropisms, homonyms, and neologisms a liberated linguistic practice that echoed André Breton’s vision of words making love. Black humor in particular emerged for Rosemont as a powerful mode of cultural reclamation which could transform laughter from a source of diversion into a revolutionary weapon; this was how radical cartoonists subverted the caricature of the “bomb-toting anarchist,” and how Joe Hill’s satirical folk songs engendered class solidarity. Calling George Herriman’s Krazy Kat “one of the triumphs of pure psychic automatism,” he forged sweeping affinities between disparate cultural forms, uniting comic strips and the improvisatory energies of free jazz under the Surrealist banner of automatic writing (131). Accordingly, references to Breton surface in what might appear, at first glance, to be unlikely places—a short piece on Smokey Stover, or a meditation on the poetry of blues lyrics.

As Susik points out, Rosemont’s writings fit within Surrealism’s long-standing practice of carefully self-electing its lineage of dissident figures. Of course, this mode of critical affiliation, in which a roll call of allies (and sometimes enemies) is compiled, can be traced back to the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), where Breton advanced an alternative canon of forebears including Edgar Allan Poe, Victor Hugo, and the Marquis de Sade. Such a model was also notably epitomized by the collective document “Lisez/ne lisez pas” (Read/do not read) (1931), a prescriptive list of Surrealist-approved and disavowed writers. Although unpublished notes are beyond the scope of this anthology, researchers studying the Chicago Surrealist reception of popular culture may be interested to consult archival holdings documenting their own rehearsal of these exact Surrealist exercises, in which they appended to Surrealism’s family tree figures like Lovecraft (“surrealist in mythology”) and Bugs Bunny (“read”), and excluded others, such as Mickey Mouse (“don’t read”).1 The published material included here, however, more broadly constitutes what Joanna Pawlik has called Rosemont’s “revisionist cultural history,” a project which, she argued, aimed to “hystericize” American popular culture at a time when imagery and rhetoric associated with Surrealism were being co-opted by the U.S. entertainment industry.2 By offering Surrealism a revised roster of past and present ancestors, Rosemont was deploying Surrealist historiographical methods as a means of negotiating its place within contemporary cultural discourse.

The editors have adopted a primarily thematic organizing principle, with thirty-five texts spanning over four decades grouped into seven sections that reflect Rosemont’s wide-ranging interests: “Americana and Chicagoana,” “Comics, Animation, and Self-Taught Artists,” “Music, Cinema, and Dance,” “Labor History and Culture,” “Play and Humor,” a solitary “Ecology” text, and “Autobiography and Reminiscences.” Within each section, the texts appear to follow a roughly chronological order. While this structure is best suited to the diversity of topics represented, specialists may find value in paying close attention to the timeline to track shifts in Rosemont’s preoccupations over time. Many of the texts from the 1970s on different subjects, for instance, similarly expounded a distinctly Bretonian dialectic, reflecting Rosemont’s intensive engagement with Breton’s writings during his editorial work on two major anthologies published in 1978.3 In the following decades, Rosemont’s projects shifted increasingly toward IWW historiography, suggesting an evolution in his intellectual priorities.

Buhle’s brief afterword revisits his friend’s lifelong commitment to what might be called “popular culture from below,” highlighting the novelty of Rosemont’s integration of overlooked cultural forms into his approach to social history. The Chicago Surrealists’ weaponization of popular media represents a distinct chapter in Surrealism’s long and ambivalent relationship with mass culture which was coterminous with the rise of the new labor history.4 For Rosemont, refusing to forfeit our shared vernacular to the capitalist system was a theoretical and political imperative, rooted in the IWW’s principles of cultural reclamation and insurgent solidarity. This book opens new possibilities for Surrealist inquiry within the radical domain of popular culture, captured by his insistence that “the watchword for the next revolution remains: ‘What’s up, Doc?’” (290).