KATE KHATIBamong them, human time is fallen time. Man inhabits the profane realm and is charged
with the task of rediscovering the sacred in the everyday and, in some way, restoring or
recreating theanalogia entisbetween the divine and earthly realms. For the surrealists, by
contrast, the sacred is not lost, but inaccessible. Entirely bound up with the restrictive
structures of authority and used as an ontological velvet rope to keep certain objects and
ideas out of the reach of everyday individuals, the sacred becomes, for the surrealists, little
more than a tool of repression. Because it is indicative of a hierarchy that makes true
human freedom unattainable, the sacred is transformed into exactly that which must be
overcome in pursuit of true spirit, which is perhaps best known in surrealist parlance as
the Marvelous.
The experience of the Marvelous is best described as the experience of a world sud-
denly brought into balance by a chance encounter. And the surrealists were, as Benjamin
was quick to point out, not always up to the challenge of recognizing the moment in
which the Marvelous flashed before them.^28 Benjamin illuminated an interesting and even
crucial point: surrealism itself, if we define it not as a confluence of thinkers but solely as
the experience of the Marvelous in the everyday world, becomes an object in the game of
chance, an unlikely revelation, entirely profane in nature, which Breton enigmatically
defines as a quasi-divine ‘‘state of grace.’’^29 Surrealism, then, is something thathappens,
that takes one by surprise, although, to be sure, one must already be open to the idea and
believein its possibility. The concept of the automatic—automation, automated, automa-
ton—becomes far more complex and, if one dare say so, dialectical than it seems at first
glance.Auto, derived from the Greek reflexive pronoun that roughly translates as ‘‘self,’’
carries in our modern tongue the dual connotation of self and other, in the sense of both
an internal and an external influence; more problematically, the entire wordautomatic
has, in English at least, the double weight of indicating both something spontaneous,
which happens without forethought, and an occurrence so mundane, so carefully studied
and planned, that it is, for lack of a better phrase, entirely internalized by a droning
system of rhythmic, repetitive actions.
This complexity is not usually grasped in the manifold literature on the subject; even
within the literature produced by the Surrealist Movement itself, automatism and its
associated concepts are used in such myriad ways, and in so many divergent contexts,
both theoretical and pragmatical, that a comprehensive historical treatment of its artistic,
political, and literary usage is becoming more and more difficult, even as it becomes more
and more urgent. Such a history lies outside the scope of this text, but in focusing in on
specifically surrealist adventures in automatism, one may at least begin to illuminate this
intriguing concept. Conveniently, surrealism preserves the double connotation of the au-
tomatic, making it an ideal manifestation on which to focus.
That automatism is invoked as the central concept in what one might call surrealism’s
critical practice should come as no surprise. Breton himself links the ‘‘discovery’’ of au-
tomatism with the birth of surrealism in the first ‘‘Manifesto of Surrealism’’ in 1924. Five
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