AUTOMATIC THEOLOGIESyears earlier, he had already collaborated with Soupault onThe Magnetic Fields, the first
set of texts that would explicitly be classified as ‘‘Surrealist(and in no sense Dada) since
it is the fruit of the first systematic use of automatic writing,’’ as he told Andre ́Parinaud
in 1952.^30 The Magnetic Fieldswas, in a sense, the systematized expression of surrealist
automatism par excellence, a collaborative collection of texts composed entirely of ‘‘spon-
taneously irrupting autonomous phrases,’’ suggestive of a state of waking dream, a halluci-
nation, or even a revelation—words and phrases that were culled together without
forethought or examination, whose collective meaning became clear only in retrospect.^31
Before the surrealists came to understand the true weight of what they had discovered,
Breton had already begun to set forth what was to be a basic method for achieving autom-
atism in his now famous ‘‘Secrets of the Magical Surrealist Art’’:
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 crying out to be heard.^32Automatic writing, which Breton describes in this passage and which is an explicit exam-
ple of how to catalyze objective chance in a productive manner, requires a fair amount of
discipline. It is neither an exercise in absurdity nor a free-form literary genre. If one
engages in the practice of automatic writing, then one is charged with the difficulty of
vigilantly resisting the temptation to interrupt the flow of words by reading, examining,
or altering what has been set down upon the page. This is not to say that the products of
automatic writing resist interpretation; however, interpretation, illumination, or learning
from what is produced and from what has taken place comes only afterward, almost as
an afterthought. The automatic method requires the participant to make a leap of faith
in opening up completely to the unfettered flow of thoughts, having absolute faith in the
process about to be undertaken. What is of importance is, as always, the actualexperience
one has during the process of automatism,notwhat one produces, for the products of
truly automatic writing arise randomly rather than in the form of reflections upon a
preselected topic. Just as the early surrealists could never anticipate which objects might
suddenly emerge as catalysts for a chance encounter with the Marvelous while they
ambled along the streets and through the arcades of 1920s Paris, the topics that arise
during the process of automatic writing can never be specifically anticipated.
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