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The Automatic Message: The Magnetic Fields / The Immaculate Conception
This book collects together the two most vital "automatic" texts of Surrealism -- The Magnetic Fields (1919) and The Immaculate Conception (1930) -- with Breton's prefatory essay "The Automatic Message" which relates this technique to the underlying concepts and aesthetic of the Surrealist movement.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
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About the author
André Breton
281 books775 followersAfter World War I, French poet and literary theorist André Breton began to link at first with Dadaism but broke with that movement to write the first manifesto of surrealism in 1924.
People best know this theorist as the principal founder. His writings include the Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme), in which he defined this "pure psychic automatism."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3...
People best know this theorist as the principal founder. His writings include the Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme), in which he defined this "pure psychic automatism."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3...
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 2, 2012
I give this work five not on its specific content but for the ideas behind it. It's of course a historic set of works, it shows off the automatic and collaborative writing of the surrealists. It puts into action the ideas Breton wanted to see happen in writing.
Now is it gibberish? Yes a lot of it seems to be. Funny though that it always kept my interest for the most part. I didn't know exactly what would be said next most of the time. The most interesting part to me was the introductions to the texts that explained how they'd been constructed and what the desired effects were. They simulate madness. They patch together texts. They write without thinking. They attack rationality and religion in offhanded ways.
The beats weren't the first spontaneous poets/prosers and in a sense Breton was following Rimbaud and Lautreamont, although he and Soupault and Eluard took it the next step and you don't see many writers going that wild and all over the page like this. Maybe the closest is Burrough's Naked Lunch although I think that book's crap in comparison to this one because Burroughs didn't have any cohesion or idea behind the mad prose. Which perhaps Breton would say is better for its authentic automatism, but I'd say Burroughs was a wacked out junkie who wrote better books after he was off junk.
Could Joyce and Donald Barthelme be in the same automatic writing category with their rants and wordplay and nonsense? I've been trying to read more contemporary fiction and so far a lot of what I read is very conventional and boring, more innovation is needed it seems or I'm not finding the new authors who're doing such. Not that I want to read poetic prose like The Automatic Message all day, that would be too incoherent, but taking some of the wordplay, musicality, surreal sentences and phrases that are usually reserved to poetry and putting them in fiction. Fuck all this sparse clean prose, that's old hat, it's time for another dismantled organizing of the language of fiction but please let's not make it text messages and emails as if we didn't read enough of those. (Rant for more interesting stylistic changes to contemporary fiction concluded).
Now is it gibberish? Yes a lot of it seems to be. Funny though that it always kept my interest for the most part. I didn't know exactly what would be said next most of the time. The most interesting part to me was the introductions to the texts that explained how they'd been constructed and what the desired effects were. They simulate madness. They patch together texts. They write without thinking. They attack rationality and religion in offhanded ways.
The beats weren't the first spontaneous poets/prosers and in a sense Breton was following Rimbaud and Lautreamont, although he and Soupault and Eluard took it the next step and you don't see many writers going that wild and all over the page like this. Maybe the closest is Burrough's Naked Lunch although I think that book's crap in comparison to this one because Burroughs didn't have any cohesion or idea behind the mad prose. Which perhaps Breton would say is better for its authentic automatism, but I'd say Burroughs was a wacked out junkie who wrote better books after he was off junk.
Could Joyce and Donald Barthelme be in the same automatic writing category with their rants and wordplay and nonsense? I've been trying to read more contemporary fiction and so far a lot of what I read is very conventional and boring, more innovation is needed it seems or I'm not finding the new authors who're doing such. Not that I want to read poetic prose like The Automatic Message all day, that would be too incoherent, but taking some of the wordplay, musicality, surreal sentences and phrases that are usually reserved to poetry and putting them in fiction. Fuck all this sparse clean prose, that's old hat, it's time for another dismantled organizing of the language of fiction but please let's not make it text messages and emails as if we didn't read enough of those. (Rant for more interesting stylistic changes to contemporary fiction concluded).
April 8, 2023
read a few excerpts, this was great! ill have to read nadja
July 4, 2022
Historic, epic in scope and classic surrealism. Glad I am finished. At several points I had difficulty continuing. It is not an easy read. I’m looking forward to reading something with even a trace amount of narrative in it.
June 22, 2024
Surrealist essentials. I'm glad I could find a copy of this for a reasonable price.
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October 21, 2007AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH!!!!
August 22, 2008
Like most all of the Atlas Press titles, The Automatic Message / the Magnetic Fields is of lasting historical and literary relevance.
February 16, 2009
Classic Surrealist literature--or Automatic Writing as it was coined. Nonsense as poetry... Intriguing, but the novelty wears off after awhile.
December 6, 2009
A classic. It remains one of my all time favourite books!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews