‘Surreal’ is a promiscuous word. It is used to describe the occurrence of things which are unusual or apparently impossible, it identifies that which is fantastic and seemingly irrational, it points to the uncanny or otherwise strange or dreamlike, and it is domesticated in off-the-wall fashion and furniture. Salvador Dalí’s moustache and René Magritte’s pipe (which is not one) are held up as embodiments of surrealism. In the case of Yale University Press’s Why X Matters series, the appearance of surrealism alongside such subjects as baseball, food and the US constitution seems in itself on some level surreal. The frequent slippage of the word into everyday use and popular culture shows the extent to which, as Mark Polizzotti argues, surrealism matters. Unconsciously or otherwise, we continue to be alive to phenomena (not necessarily supernatural) that interrupt the everyday and signal something disobedient, anti-rational, even marvellous about the world we live in and our desire to change it.

That said, the promiscuous use of the term appears at first to make Polizzotti’s argument improbable. Bastardised to the point of near meaninglessness in everyday conversation, ‘surrealism’ is misleadingly tied to an art movement of which the most popular faces are Dalí (of lobster telephone and melting clock fame) and Magritte, whose The Son of Man, showing a grey-suited bureaucrat with his face obscured by an apple, forms the basis for the book’s cover. Equally erroneous is the labelling as surrealist of Frida Kahlo, who resisted identification with the term, and Leonora Carrington, who was only sometimes a surrealist. This is not to say that surrealism did not play out in a magnificent riot across paintings, photographs, films, sculptures and ready-mades, or that the artists earmarked as surrealist, whether willingly or otherwise, were not deeply significant in the movement’s subversion of the everyday. However, to limit surrealism to an art movement is to miss the point.

Surrealism is best seen as a world view or a state of mind. It was first developed by André Breton, the French ex-medical auxiliary and poet who wrote its manifesto and chose its name, and those who joined his group. Born from the horrors of the trenches and the anarchy