Automatic writing

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The French expression Écriture automatique (Eng .: automatic writing , automatic text ) describes a method of writing in which images, feelings and expressions are to be reproduced (if possible) uncensored and without the intervention of the critical ego. Typically, writing takes place as manual writing with a writing instrument . Sentences, parts of sentences, word chains and individual words may be written without using intentionality and meaning control. What is otherwise considered to be incorrect in terms of spelling , grammar or punctuation can be desirable and expedient under these conditions. The only important thing is the authenticity of the idea.

The Surrealists propagated this literary form of free association as a new form of poetry and experimental literature .

origin

The origins of the Écriture automatique go back to psychology . The term was coined around 1889 by the French psychotherapist Pierre Janet as part of therapeutic experiments, whereby the patient was made to write while half asleep, in trance or under hypnosis in order to bring the unconscious into consciousness . Janet introduced this writing technique as a psychological treatment. Through the unconsciously controlled flow of writing, the patient receives new ideas or new combinations of ideas or associations , and so unconscious impressions and experiences can be processed. The method is also used to make it easier to start writing or to reduce writer's block .

surrealism

In literature, the method of the Écriture automatique was adapted by the group of surrealists around André Breton and Philippe Soupault in Paris in the 1920s. The best-known work created in this way are Les Champs magnétiques ( The Magnetic Fields ).

What was automatically written down, which opposes a systematic structure as well as a subsequent censoring correction, was not used here to heal illnesses, to create psychograms or to overcome personality divisions , but postulated the unconscious , dreamlike and spontaneous elements of human inspiration as the basis for one new kind of creativity .

literature

André Breton described the écriture automatique as a “dictation of thought without any control of reason”, as a process in which writing follows thinking uncensored, as it were chasing after it. The best way to do this is to sit down at the desk after waking up, still half asleep, and immediately write down the sentences formulated in the twilight state, so to speak “unconsciously” or “on the threshold of the dream”. Breton reported that he used this technique after having visual and acoustic phenomena while falling asleep :

“Very busy with Freud , as I was then, and familiar with his methods of investigation, which I had occasionally been able to use on sick people during the war, I decided to get from myself what one was trying to get from them: namely one Monologue flowing as quickly as possible, about which the critical mind of the subject does not pass judgment, which consequently does not impose any concealment and is just like spoken thinking. "

- André Breton

The first work of the Écriture automatique was Les Champs magnétiques ( The Magnetic Fields ) by Breton and Philippe Soupault in 1919 . Breton's further literary work was strongly influenced by the method. He used this method both in prose texts such as Poisson solluble ( Soluble Fish ) in 1924 and in poems such as Tournesol (1923) or Le revolver à cheveux blancs ( The white-haired revolver , 1932). With the novel Nadja (1928) he expanded this process by describing real experiences in a more associative way.

In the first surrealist manifesto (1924), Breton gave instructions for imitating the Écriture automatique:

“After you have made yourself comfortable somewhere where you can focus your mind on yourself as much as possible, get something made to write you. Put yourself in the most passive or receptive state you are capable of. Disregard your genius, your talents and those of everyone else. Realize that writing is one of the most pathetic roads that leads to anything and everything. Write quickly, with no preconceived topic, fast enough to keep nothing or to be tempted to think. The first sentence will come by itself, because it is really true that at every moment there is an unknown sentence in our consciousness that is just waiting to be spoken. (...) Continue as long as you like. Rely on the inexhaustibility of whispers. If you are about to go silent because you have made even the smallest mistake: a mistake, one could say, which consists in neglecting your inattentiveness - stop at a line that makes sense without hesitation. Put any letter after the word that seems suspicious to you, the letter l for example, always the letter l, and restore the arbitrariness by making this letter the first letter of the following word. "

Cadavre Exquis

In the Cadavre Exquis , the surrealists developed a kind of visual counterpart to the Écriture automatique. In this sequel game with folded paper, a sentence or a drawing is created by several people one after the other without their knowledge of the previous stage. Breton explained that by doing so one had an infallible means of shutting down critical thinking and giving free rein to the metaphorical faculty of the mind. The example that gave the game its name forms the first part of a sentence obtained in this way: Le cadavre-exquis-boira-le-vin-nouveau ("The delicious-corpse-drinks-the-fresh-wine") .

In addition to their automatic writing method, the surrealists also tied directly to Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis in their dream and hypnosis experiments , who used free association as a “verbal magic ladder” to the sources of the unconscious . The Surrealists' dream protocols appeared regularly in the magazine Littérature , for example that of a séance in which René Crevel , Robert Desnos and Benjamin Péret “ speak, write and draw like real automatons , driven by prophetic frenzy, frenzied, in trance”.

Frottage

In the fine arts , the process of frottage (rubbing through) founded by Max Ernst is related to the Écriture automatique. Here, too, any conscious influence was excluded, so that it can be regarded as the pictorial equivalent of automatic writing.

anagram

The surrealist artist Unica Zürn developed a modified version of the Écriture automatique in her anagram method.

Forerunner in literature

The automatic spelling in literature, however, was not an invention of the Surrealists. Experimental “automatic” writing was already carried out by the Zurich Dadaists who, in their conversations and discussions, accidentally took the form of “a more or less associative way of speaking, in which […] sounds and form connections helped to jumps that seemingly disconnected suddenly light up in context let “be assigned a role. In 1917 a number of automatically co-authored random texts by Tristan Tzara , Walter Serner and Hans Arp , so-called " simultaneous poems ", were written about which Arp reports:

"Tzara, Serner and I wrote a cycle of poems in the Café de la Terrasse in Zurich:" The hyperbola of the crocodile hairdresser and the walking stick ". This type of poetry was later christened 'Automatic Poetry' by the Surrealists. Automatic poetry arises directly from the intestines or other organs of the poet, which have stored up useful reserves. Neither Lonjumeau's postilion nor the hexameter, neither grammar nor aesthetics, neither Buddha nor the Sixth Commandment should prevent him. The poet crows, curses, sighs, stutters, yodels as it suits him. His poems resemble nature. Nothingness, which people call so void, is as precious to him as sublime rhetoric; because in nature a particle is as beautiful and important as a star, and only humans presume to determine what is beautiful and what is ugly. "

Arp has carried out such collaborative work both in the visual arts and in literature with Sophie Taeuber , Kurt Schwitters , Max Ernst , Marcel Duchamp , Paul Éluard and others. He has repeatedly declared the impersonal as his intention.

With the Écriture automatique, Breton systematized a writing technique that was already practiced by shamans , valued by Goethe in poetry and truth as "nightwalking poetry" and used by Achim von Arnim to escape the pressure of reflection.

The French poet Lautréamont with his chants of Maldoror is often mentioned as a forerunner of the Écriture automatique .

Attempts at automatic writing are also documented for Gertrude Stein and are accessible in an essay Normal Motor Automatism written by her and Leon M. Solomon in 1896 .

In the history of literature there have been a wide variety of attempts to oppose linguistic and aesthetic control with an expression of internal processes that is as free and uncensored as possible. A similar spelling is already reported by the Jewish-Greek philosopher Philo of Alexandria , who was a contemporary of Jesus . He describes ecstasy as a process in which the mind ("nous") gives way to the divine "pneuma".

Other uses

The method is also used in Magical Realism and New Objectivity .

Jack Kerouac , co-founder of the American subculture of beat poetry, developed the automatic writing of the surrealists and thus created his novels Unterwegs (1957) and Gammler, Zen und Höhe Berge (1958). He described writing as a state of spontaneous concentration of perception, which he promoted with the help of Zen meditation . Freewriting still holds an important place in the American writing movement .

Also, the clustering continues the idea of automatic writing.

Another form of automatic writing is the production of literature using computer programs . Since the 1960s there have been programs that “compose by themselves”, that is, write automatically.

See also

bibliography

  • André Breton , Philippe Soupault : Les Champs magnétiques / The magnetic fields (text in French and German), translated and with an afterword by Ré Soupault, Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 1990 ISBN 3-88423-045-X
  • Walter Benjamin , Surrealism. The last snapshot of European intelligence, in: Ders., Angelus Novus, Selected Writings 2 , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / Main 1961
  • André Breton: Manifesto des Surrealismus (1924), in: Der Surrealismus , translated by Ruth Henry, Ed. Patrick Waldberg, Dumont, Cologne 1965
  • André Breton: Surrealism and painting (1928 and 1945), in: Der Surrealismus , Ed. Patrick Waldberg, Cologne 1965
  • André Breton: Das Manifest des Surrealismus , in: Ders., The Manifeste des Surrealismus , translated by Ruth Henry, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1967
  • André Breton: Was der Surrealismus wants (1953), in: Ders., Die Manifeste des Surrealismus, translated by Ruth Henry, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1976,
  • André Breton and Paul Éluard : Comments on poetry , (first published: La Révolution surréaliste No. 12 , December 1929), in: When the Surrealists were still right. Texts and documents, edited by Günter Metken, 1st edition Stuttgart 1976, 3rd edition Hofheim 1983
  • André Breton, The Automatic Message (1933). In: The Message. Art and Occultism , ed. v. Claudia Dichter, Hans Günter Golinski, Michael Krajewski, Susanne Zander. Walther König: Cologne 2007, pp. 33–55 ISBN 978-3-86560-342-5 . (with illustrations)
  • Erich Köhler: The literary chance, the possible and the necessity, Munich 1973
  • Xaviére Gauthier, Surrealism and Sexuality. Staging of Femininity, Vienna / Berlin 2nd edition 1980 (Paris 1971)
  • Tristan Tzara : An attempt on the situation of poetry , in: When the surrealists were still right. Texts and documents, edited by Günter Metken, 1st edition Stuttgart 1976, 3rd edition Hofheim 1983
  • The Surrealists Look At Art, Eluard , Louis Aragon , Soupault , Breton , Tzara , eds. Pontus Hulten, Venice / Ca. (The Lapsis Press) 1991
  • Friedrich Kittler , Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900, Munich (Fink) 1985, 3rd, completely revised new edition 1995
  • Regina Mundel, image trail of madness. Surrealism and Postmodernism, eva, Hamburg 1997
  • Unda Hörner , The Real Women of the Surrealists. Simone Breton, Gala Eluard , Elsa Triolet , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 2002 ISBN 3-518-39316-2
  • Manfred Hilke: L'écriture automatique - The relationship between surrealism and parapsychology in poetry by André Breton , Peter Lang, Frankfurt / Main 2002 ISBN 3631397976
  • Peter Gorsen , The Entry of Mediumism into Art History . In: The Message. Art and Occultism , ed. v. Claudia Dichter, Hans Günter Golinski, Michael Krajewski, Susanne Zander. Walther König: Cologne 2007, pp. 17–32. ISBN 978-3-86560-342-5 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mark Polizzotti : Revolution of the Mind. The life of André Breton. Munich, Vienna 1996
  2. ^ André Breton: The manifestos of surrealism ("Manifestes du surréalisme"). Rowohlt, Reinbek 2004, ISBN 3-4995-5434-8
  3. ↑ Manfred Hilke: L'écriture automatique - The relationship between surrealism and parapsychology in poetry by André Breton , Peter Lang, Frankfurt / Main 2002 ISBN 3631397976
  4. ↑ Reprint LITTERATURE, Paris 1978
  5. ↑ DADA Zurich. Seals, pictures, texts . Arche-Verlag, Zurich 1957, 1998, ISBN 3-7160-2249-7
  6. ↑ Michael Mach: Philo of Alexandria. In: Theological Real Encyclopedia. Volume 26, 1996

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