I've always loved surreal art. Or perhaps realistic-surrealist - where both the familiar and absurd are constructed photorealistically. It's a difficult stunt - most often, the meld between reality and unreality is difficult; there's a 'seam' in the art, a place where it's clear the concepts are changing.

It's less obvious with different styles. Vladimar Kush's work, for example, has a clear illustrative style, which helps blend the concepts, similar to the great Dali. But it's the realistic ones - the ones where I can believe the absurdity with just as much conviction as the mundane - that really get me. I saw one such artist several years ago in a local gallery - I wish I could remember his name. His paintings were 2m square, and therefore far too large for me to own, rich with vivid colours, and real enough to touch. The concepts were simple and clear - a caravan in the sky, a sunset being 'unzipped' into day, posts from a pier in the clouds (yes, the collection had a sky/clouds theme.) - but the execution was gorgeously realistic. I'm not entirely sure what draws me to surreal art so much. Perhaps the fantastic elements, or the juxtaposition of the impossible with the everyday. The promise of inspiration, or the intellectual oddity of something looking real but not making sense.

I never found the same enjoyment in surrealist literature, however. Maybe I've just been reading the wrong pieces, but the surrealist examples set before me back in university always struck me as self-indulgent nonsense hiding behind their precious "post-modernism" and other "isms".  They made no sense, gave no comfort to a reader struggling to understand - in fact, many seemed deliberately designed to make their reader feel inadequate and dense.

I think it's to do with the size of the building blocks. Surrealist art uses very large blocks - images we can recognise, can place and compare. Melting clocks, men made out of trees. We can step back and see the whole painting at once, get the whole effect at once. Literature, doesn't work like that. Its building blocks are the individual words - the equivilent of having to parse and understand each brush stroke. With literature, you have to look too closely, you can't step back and see it all at once, because understanding it is necessarily sequential. One word after another, one sentence after another, with the whole effect examined in memory, not in life. Given the very idea of surrealism is that parts of it don't make sense, that's a tough ask - it's far more difficult to ask someone to recall what they didn't understand, even moments after the experience.

If you're building a picture with smaller strokes, the absurdity has to be more subtle. Consider if Dali had decided to make each brush stroke, or even every tenth brush stroke 'absurd'. Blue where yellow should be, black instead of red. The result would be a mess, meaningless to anyone but him. But, instead he chose the themes, the ideas themselves. Surrealist literature could take a lesson from that. It's not clever to make sentences that don't make sense, to make a story that isn't. To make your reader struggle to understand what you said for the last paragraph or two, or forget the entire last two chapters because you're now talking about beans. Anyone can make something that doesn't make sense.

If you want to create surrealism, that wonderful sensation of reality twisting, your reader needs to be able to forget the words and live in the writing. Let them read the story as a whole, as they would a painting. Keep the nonsense at a higher level - concepts, characters and plots, not at a sentence-level. Have a grand image in mind; don't just make a mess.

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