“The surrealists thought that true language and true reality were censored and relegated by the rationalist and bourgeois structure of the Western world. They were right, as any poet knows, but that was just a moment in the complicated peel in of the banana. Result, more than one of them ate it with the skin still on. The surrealists hung from words instead of brutally disengaged themselves from, as I would like to do from the word itself. Fanatics of the verbum in a pure state, frantic wizards, they accepted anything as long as it didn’t seem excessively grammatical…language means residence in a reality, living in a reality. Even if it’s true that the language we use betrays us, wanting to free it from its taboos isn’t enough. We have to relieve it, not reanimate it.”
- Étienne from Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (1958)
