Editing Thought: Writing as a Codification
A Critique of the Surrealist Principle in Written Work
“Automatic writing” was a fetish of the Surrealists.
In 1924, André Breton defined it.
Je le définis donc une fois pour toutes: SURRÉALISME, n. m. Automatisme psychique pur par lequel on se propose d’exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de toute autre manière, le fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l’absence de tout contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou morale. (Source.)
Therefore, I am defining it once and for all: SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. (The English translation may be found in Harrison & Woods, Oxford, 1992.):
In this view, thought is an unmodulated continuum of ideation to be delivered to a recipient – a reader, a film-goer, a music listener, the viewer of a painting – untouched and unaltered by the ratiocinatory faculty. Expression based upon the surrealist principle is thus held to be superior, because, unadulterated, it is “pure.” The surrealist rejects reason as a soiling, a defilement. One might also eat raw pork from the corpse of a freshly killed pig, but it is no more pure for being unprocessed and uncooked.
The Surrealist principle is a childish conception. It is inaesthetic, the anti-thesis of its claim to the artistic apex, if only because all expression is a translation through a medium to the mind of another. For a sculptor, it may be the medium of his fingers, chisel, hammer, bronze or clay. For a dancer, the body. For a writer, it is the written word.
Guess what I'm thinking now? No, that's not it. I had a vision of a monk's bare foot partially covered in the red cloth of his shemdap as he sits in the Drepung Monastery. Only through the words of that last sentence would you have known my thought.
The last paragraph did not adhere to surrealist principle, even though its odd juxtaposition seemed “surreal” in context, because I used my reasoning faculty to conjur up an example to prove my point – reason soiled the pure thought. But, in fact, the Surrealist principle can never be achieved in practice because thought is not covalent with meaning. Thought is the germ of meaningfulness. We have to discover the meaning in and through thought.
Many decades ago, I read I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (1930). His influential claim – if I recall it correctly -- was that there was no such substratum of thought: human language created meaning. Even at age 21, I knew this to be solipsistic – many ideas come into consciousness barely formed or vague or nebulous which one must find the language to express, and which a mastery of language, guided and shaped by the reasoning, helps to form. Writing is a self-clarification. It is the answer to the question the writer must ask: “What is it that I mean to say?”
This is why automatic writing is a failure, as is most work based upon the Surrealist principle. Without clarification, meaning is incomprehensible. Reasoning and the application of human language are the tools by which meaning can be attained. There is no point in written expression if its goal is to indulge unintelligibility in a fantasy of aesthetic valor.
Supposedly, poetry is inherently suited to automatic writing. I tried it in 2017, jotting down what came to mind, setting down tabs where moved to, etc.:
A DREAM OF THE AKKADIAN LIBRARY
BLACK
boxed in
blind corner
snakeshifting into
pinprick of light
opening, swelling
funnel of white
I popped out of and into
pa-no-vis-ta-ra-ma
twistblaringly dilating
phrenically scalding
white noiselight
punctiform colonies crawlspreading fast forward:
an undercranked school film!
!AWE AWE!There are another 20 lines to this “poem,'” a brief portion of which is more than enough to demonstrate the absolute failure of method. I did not intend it as a joke! The idea for it came from a dream which upon awakening I jotted down. I know what I refer to. But can you? Of course not. As a translation of my meaning, automatic writing wastes the reader's time.
My “poem” has no form, no rhyme scheme, no music when read aloud. It isn't even poetry. But we find thousands of exemplars of such nonsense: anti-poetry. Real poetry has been suppressed over the past century in favor of gibberish – because its writers are nihilists, many of whom, even the famous, are entirely untalented and unskilled poetically. To them, there is no meaning to existence, so that what they write is meaningless. Their readers agree. That's why they read them.
Yeats penned one of the most famous examples of automatic writing — The Second Coming — that is just as incomprehensible as mine, with big words and seemingly stunning imagery.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
Can a tide be dimmed by blood? What is a ceremony of innocence?
And then these lines:
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!
This last trio of lines is universally misunderstood to refer to Christ, and not, instead, to Yeats's occult fantasies — precisely because the writer was unclear. He was indulging in automatic writing.
The poet doesn't have to be understood, you say?
Compare Yeats with Swinburne (The Forsaken Garden): In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland, At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee, Walled round with rocks as an inland island, The ghost of a garden fronts the sea. A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses The steep square slope of the blossomless bed Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses Now lie dead.
50 years on, Yeats demonstrated conclusively that progressivism in the arts was regressive. The only medium perfectly suited to automatic writing is a diary – because only the writer will read it.
Expository writing requires de facto reasoning. The point is to persuade. The thought which originated this essay was not suitable for a reader. It was a germ about 10 words long. It has taken 4 hours and three drafts to get to this stage of presentation.
As I read internet writing, I am struck by the “thinking through” nature of much of the work. That is, the writer has not yet gotten to the point where he even knows what he wants to say. Editing – cutting, amending, shaping, thinking and re-thinking, polishing – is the stuff of real writing, because thought must pass through the medium of language and the tool we all have, in various degrees — ratiocination — before it arrives at its destination: the mind of the reader.
Write less. Edit more. Think it through in the draft(s). Have your nutshell in its most concise form ready for the reader to spare his time and effort. In this way, the writer may attain to real persuasiveness in his own writing.
(The writer took the photos that appear on this page.)