KATE KHATIBThis last point is of crucial importance. Automatic writing, in the surrealist sense of
the term, was not, is not, and was never intended to be a literary (or artistic) mode of
expression. Breton and Soupault may have derived some inspiration from Rimbaud’s
Alchimie du Verbeand Lautre ́amont’sLes Chants du Maldoror, but the project they under-
took in the spring of 1919 was unparalleled. Automatism is nothing less than an entirely
new way of looking at the world. While its products might serve as so many expressions
and as works of art in their own right, it is the lived experience of the process that is of
critical importance. This focus differentiates surrealist automatic practice from more liter-
ary processes such as stream of consciousness writing: the stream of consciousness
method, loosely derived from the psychological writings of William James on the flow of
the inner consciousness and adapted to literary practice by E ́douard Dujardin, James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, among others, depends upon a radical leap
outside of conventional narrative sequence and logical argumentation, and is intended to
fully reflect the multiple forces—both internal and external—that might influence a char-
acter at any given time.^33 On the surface, automatism and stream of consciousness bear
some resemblances; upon a deeper investigation, however, one notices that stream of
consciousness proceeds from exactly the type of external reflection that automatism pre-
cludes. At base, the stream of consciousness method depends upon a mental movement
that is best described as ‘‘thinking through something,’’ and its ultimate aim is the unfet-
tered expression of thoughts; surrealist automatism, by contrast, aims at a total revolution
of the mind.
As with most unorthodox theories of praxis, surrealist automatism cannot be ap-
proached from a single direction or point of view. In one sense, automatism is wholly
individualistic (even solipsistic) in character and intrinsically related to certain categories
of experience that fit within a largely mystical rhetoric: the surrealist experience of the
world is magical and revelatory, an unbridled state of joy, free from intention, and flowing
through it is something formerly unknown that is manifestly, unquestionably true. At the
same time, in its other, more practical sense, automatism has an explicitly political and
universal goal: the surrealist experience of the world provides a creative framework that
allows one to gain some measure of control over the language that shapes our knowledge
of, and thus our experience of and interaction with, the everyday world and the objects
within it. Surrealism in this second sense—which is intimately bound up with its other,
more metaphysical aims—has the power to ‘‘liberate language from its utilitarian and
prosaic regimentation’’ and in so doing ‘‘to assist in creating the revolutionary situation,
which, as Marx put it, ‘makes all turning back impossible.’ ’’^34 Two moments are at work
in Surrealism’s critical practice, one joyous and the other revolutionary, yet both share a
common goal and a common character. The Marvelous, that great surrealist watchword,
is, in fact, what is always at stake in automatism. More than a by-product of a psychic
experiment, more than a beautiful object, the Marvelous is an active mode of experiencing
the world. In its own way, every surrealist experience is what we might callself-revelatory,
PAGE 628628.................16224$ CH31 10-13-06 12:37:23 PS