‘War Is Surrealism without Art'

In his prose poem ‘War Stories’ Charles Bernstein writes: ‘War is surrealism without art.’ ¹ This line is particularly powerful as an epigrammatic reflection of—and on—the crisis of representing the Lebanese War, specifically the 1982 Siege of Beirut, whereby the ‘surreal’ emerges as either the enabling or disrupting narrative of the 1982 siege in literature, journalism, and art. In his 1987 memoir Thakira lil Nisyan, translated later as Memory for Forgetfulness, Mahmoud Darwish exposes the death of language, image, and representation as they are besieged by what he describes as the surreal terror of the summer months of 1982. Similarly, in his 2006 debut novel De Niro's Game, Rawi Hage reconfigures the raw everyday reality of the Lebanese War, including the siege and massacres of Sabra and Shatila, with surrealist stylistic energy while indirectly questioning the ethics of the representation of this war in several print and audiovisual mediums that have been frequently disoriented into a spectacular realism without life.