Who speaks in the automatic text, in the poem of the Surrealists? Who speaks in the most profound magnetic fields which open themselves to the automatic poet (each of us, any of us)?
One evening, just before André Breton falls asleep, he perceives a phrase which was something like: ‘there is a man cut in two by the window’; this is accompanied by ‘the faint visual image […]of a man walking cut half way up by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body’. A strange image, which Breton wants at once to use as for a poem. But as he does so, it was succeeded by a whole series of phrases which, he writes, ‘surprised me only slightly less and left me with the impression of their being so gratuitous that the control I had then exercised upon myself seemed to me illusory and all I could think of was putting an end to the interminable quarrel raging within me’.
Breton confides in his fellow surrealist Phillippe Soupault; they decide to practice the technique. A single day yields fifty pages; comparing their work, Breton and Soupault find it to be similar; the difference of the texts, Breton decides, lies in the different tempers of the men. Who speaks? Something which would say itself through any of us, were we able to open ourselves to automatism. Which would allow each of us to become a poet and liberate poetry itself from the poetic field (from the preserve of literature, of literary culture). For it is now a question of the surreal, which is to say, of existence, of life in its totality, of the total human being.
Who speaks? Guard against the interpretation that automatism excludes premeditation and conscious control; that it would be the simple flowing of a verbal tide. The Surrealist does not simply allow the pen to wander across sheets of paper; it is not a matter of mental relaxation, as if one would merely have to passively wait for the treasures of the unconscious to reveal themselves. Active consciousness has a role; great effort is required to clear the way to experience the claim of the magnetic fields. It is necessary to keep watch over the desire to create a literary work; the Surrealist experimenter must not reread what she has written – must not fall victim to the images that are conjured by the words on the page, but must remain at the edge of the writing as it pushes forward into the unknown.
Then automatism requires a new mode of interrelation between consciousness and the unconsciousness – passivity is required, but so too is activity; if the unconscious holds the initiative, consciousness is required such that its message can be transcribed. The spontaneous dynamism of the unconscious must be rendered explicit; it is not merely sleeping philosophers that we must become, but thinkers who can make a synthesis between our dreams and waking life.
But what role does consciousness have? One has to allow oneself to be brought into a state of receptivity. But vigilance is also required against the temptations which befall the automatic writer. Automatism is never simply unilinear; it takes effort to maintain an attunement to the unconscious. There is the risk that attunement will tempt the writer to a kind of branching – that two or more thoughts will present themselves simultaneously such that recording becomes impossible. There is a danger in the very visibility of the poetic images which risk distracting the experimenter by their imaginative charm. Most broadly, the researcher has to resist the conditioned reflex which allows the uncontrolled élan to be brought exclusively under conscious control.
A kind of vigilance is required, then, to maintain the play of consciousness and the unconscious. To watch over their interplay. But to watch over what? Not the dialectic, but its undoing – not the overcoming of the immediate, but a tearing which opens across the surface in language. What arises? The immediate. The power to speak – yours’, mine – falls back into an origin without form, without determination. I do not speak, and nor do you.
What speaks? What is it the locus of that vigilance which keeps watch over speech? The answer to both questions is the same: that magnetic fields which quivers through our depths. Our depths? But it is as though, speaking, it turns each of us inside out, delivering us into that speech which requires that its speaker disappears as a determinate entity. Then the ‘who?’ of ‘who speaks?’ finds no answer; automatism resounds when the no one who speaks and watches is brought into contact with the human power to speak, to act.
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