Line Let Loose by David Maclagan

Author:David Maclagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

5

Automatism, the Unconscious and Modern Art

Both the pathological cases of psychological automatism and the contemporary examples of mediumistic outpourings inspired the Surrealists. André Breton, Louis Aragon and Théodore Fraenkel all had backgrounds in medicine and psychiatry that gave them a close acquaintance with relevant psychiatric material. Breton’s first-hand experience of the power of delusion made an indelible impression on him.1 Hence when Surrealism is defined in the first Surrealist Manifesto, it is in these terms: ‘Pure psychic automatism by which it is proposed to express, either verbally, or by writing, or by any other means, the real functioning of thought.’2 Since thought could most readily be identified with its expression in language, the initial material on which this declaration was based consisted mainly of automatic writing, along with dream accounts, as well as the contagious group trance states that characterized what came to be called the Sleeping Era of the movement.

These early experiments in automatic writing were a mixture of self-induced trance, disinfected of its spiritualist connotations, and what was inspired by their (mis)understanding of the psychoanalytic technique of ‘free association’. They also bore a close resemblance to the techniques pioneered by Janet in his investigations of partial automatism, and Janet was certainly an important influence on the Surrealists. In the more private and less theatrical sessions that resulted in the jointly authored text Les Champs magnétiques (‘The Magnetic Fields’) of 1920, Breton and Philippe Soupault engaged in sustained periods of automatic writing. Interestingly, Breton later acknowledged that the speed of automatic dictation varied ‘from a fairly neat writing to one that was so rapid as to be barely legible and sometimes necessitated abbreviations.3

In fact, there are even occasional doodles, labelled gribouillis automatique (‘automatic scribble’), in the margins of the original manuscript, though they never received any attention.4 In addition, Breton’s account of early sessions with Robert Desnos mentions drawings as well as speech and writing.5 In fact, Desnos seems to have painted as well as drawn scenes that were ‘automatic’ in the sense that they came to him in a trance, some of which were like pictorial obituaries of his friends.6 Even more interesting are a couple of long, narrow drawings by Max Ernst, dated 1923, each entitled Leçon d’écriture automatique, which, with their figurative idiom and constant changes of perspective, look almost like extended doodles.7 But anything that could be recognized as automatic drawing was slower to emerge in early Surrealism.

One difficulty with the need to find a pictorial equivalent to automatic writing was that the Surrealist formula for a marvellous image depended on a recognizable distance between its figurative components (‘the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing-machine on a dissecting-table’). Whereas a word immediately conjures up its referent, a passage of drawing has to have a minimal degree of representation in order to do the same, and this requires at least a kind of graphic shorthand. There are obviously limits to the extent to which this is compatible with the spontaneity of execution associated with

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