Weekly Dose of Literature: #2
And today, Automatic Writing: from channeling spirits to the Surrealist technic par excellence
My fellow Babylonians, Hello again to you all.
Your numbers are growing (slowly but surely) each day I see. How fun and exciting!
This is the second installment of Weekly Dose of Literature. Today I want to talk about a special writing technic known as Automatic Writing.
Let’s get to it.
The surrealist did not invent automatic writing. They merely transform it into a new and exciting way of creating great art. They first met it in occult settings: at gathering dedicated to channeling spirits, where a spirit would allegedly enter a person who would then write down or speak without stop the messages from beyond.
To the Surrealists this technic was like a gold mine for entering a trance like states and invoking ideas, thoughts, and feeling from within one’s own subconscious. The first surrealist book ever written was composed using automatic writing.
André Breton and Philippe Soupault, two of the three founders of the Surrealist movement wrote The Magnetic Fields during nine hectic days, working twelve or more hours from dawn till after dusk. The result is astonishing.
The first line of the book was composed by Soupault, in a mental state he described as between sleep and wakefulness, a kind of voluntary hypnosis. The line was: “The drops of waters cage us, again we are nothing but eternal animals”. Breton answered his friend with: “The story comes back to the stipend money guide, and the brilliant actors are preparing to enter the stage”.
The Magnetic Fields was published in 1920, three years before the founding of the Surrealist movement. When it was time for the young surrealists to leave the Dada and establish a new course for themselves, they saw automatic writing as the per excellence surrealist technic. Breton gave clear instructions on how to use it.
In the Second Surrealist Manifesto he advises that:
After you have settled yourself in a place as favorable as possible to the concentration of your mind upon itself, have writing materials brought to you. Put yourself in as passive, or receptive a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything. Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you're writing and be tempted to reread what you have written. The first sentence will come spontaneously, so compelling is the truth that with every passing second there is a sentence unknown to our consciousness which is only crying to be heard Go on as long as you like. Put your trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur.
When visual artists joined the movement, they invent automatic painting and automatic collaging. A wonderous example is André Masson’s automatic drawing from 1924.
After a few years using the not so new technic became less and less exciting and Breton and others moved to other ways of connecting to the subconscious. But other, younger artists and writers continued to use automatic writing in new ways. “On the Road” by the bitnik writer Jack Kerouac was written using Kerouac own iteration of this technic. He first outlined the book in his mind and only when he felt ready - wrote it all down in one sitting. Writing on a long scroll so as not to distract himself and waste time with flipping pages.
But probably the most famous example of automatic writing is the morning pages. An exercise in enhancing creativity invented by Julia Cameron and popularized in her best selling book, “The Artist’s Way”.
This was my first introduction to this technic, back when I was 14 or 15… I remember it felt like magic, pouring your thoughts and feeling on the page and discovering new ways of thinking. I still have some of my notebooks from back then and while now most of what I wrote seem trivial or unintelligible - It was part of what got me here, right?