About four o'clock that same day a very tall man was crossing the bridge that joins the separate islands. The bells, or perhaps it was the trees, struck the hour. He thought he heard the voices of his friends speaking: "The office of lazy trips is to the right," they called to him, "and on Saturday the painter will write to you." The neighbors of solitude leaned forward and through the night was heard the whistling of streetlamps. The capricious house loses blood. Everybody loves a fire; when the color of the sky changes it's somebody dying. What can we hope for that would be better? Another man standing in front of a perfume shop was listening to the rolling of a distant drum. The night that was gliding over his head came to rest on his shoulders. Ordinary fans were for sale; they bore no more fruit. People were running without knowing why in the direction of the estuaries of the sea. Clocks, in despair, were fingering their rosaries. The cliques of the virtuous were being formed. No one went near the great avenues that are the strength of the city. A single storm was enough. From a distance or close at hand, the damp beauty of prisons was not recognized.

Basic Set-Up:

This is an excerpt from the Surrealist novel The Magnetic Fields.

This passage presents us with an alternate world, full of strange things. There's an "office of lazy trips," and trees strike "the hour." A house is losing blood. Clocks finger "their rosaries." Are we dreaming? Maybe. We don't know. The point is, like a lot of Surrealist literature, this passage evokes a dream or fantasy landscape.

We've mentioned that the Surrealists were really into dreams and fantasies. And we can see this preoccupation with dreams and fantasies at play in this excerpt… in an uber-irrational way.

Lots of crazy things are happening in this passage. The world that it depicts isn't the rational world—the world that we're used to—but is instead an irrational one. Clocks behave like people, trees behave like clocks, and houses lose blood.

This sort of irrational landscape is typical of Surrealist literature. Surrealist writers want to defamiliarize things for us readers. They want us to scratch our heads when we read their work, because the things they present to us are so weird. They don't try to explain to their readers why things happen the way they do, and they don't try to impose any logic on us. It's illogical, and we have to accept that.

Is this just to be sadistic? Well, yeah. It sort of is. But it's also to draw our attention to the illogical things that happen everyday in the Real World. Like dreams, for example. Or falling in love. Or war. Or eating ice cream for breakfast. Or running on a treadmill (it's not going anywhere!). Or… uh-oh. Or a whole lot of the things we do every day. We're essentially irrational beings.