On Automatic Writing

and Other Surrealisms

Is Surrealism still alive? Is it still dangerous?

I’ve been thinking about these questions, and of using automatic writing as a working method, and whether that’s still a viable thing.

There are two reasons for this preoccupation.

First, I’ve been invited to go on next week’s edition of Radio 4’s The Verb. And my mini-commission is to do something spinning off from the 200th anniversary of André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto.

Second, I’ll be welcoming the poet, academic, novelist and musician Anthony Joseph to the University where I work on October 22nd. He’ll be giving this year’s FT Prince Lecture, and he’s chosen to speak about Black Surrealism under the title ‘Frequencies of Magic’.

In this dual context, I’ve been worrying over this great quote from an interview with Deborah Levy. She was asked, ‘What one thing would you advise to all aspiring writers?’

Same thing as J.G. Ballard always advised – follow your obsessions. Write something you don’t fully understand and then spend the next few years writing your way to a better understanding of your intentions and literary purpose. And here’s something unfashionable to keep in mind: what’s wrong with attempting to create a work of art of the highest order? If a nasty voice in your head tells you that you are getting above yourself, ask it how low it wants you to stoop to please it? And then stop pleasing it and start the work.

I’ve shared this before, as a wonderful piece of advice, but the past week it’s been preoccupying me. I’m finding it hard to see round it.

Is this what I should be doing, now that novel-Q is finished and about to go out on submission?

Yesterday, sitting in the local greasy spoon with Leigh, we talked it over — this idea that it’s now dangerous to Write something you don’t fully understand.

By which I mean, writers are held accountable for their every sentence as if it came from the most them them. Even if a sentiment is attributed, within a novel, to a despicable character, it can be quoted as something that passed through this person’s head — something they said.

That’s been my hang-up.

Leigh — coming at it a different way — observed that writing incoherently, irrationally, was no longer a powerful subversive resource because all you need do is look at below-the-line comments. That language is pervasive.

Maybe it’s irrationality as a powerful progressive resource we should have been talking about, over poached eggs on toast. The notion that épater les bourgeois is still something worth doing, when the bourgeoisie are in a perpetual state of shock. Aren’t you just worsening their already established PTSD.

And neither of us could avoid mentioning the perpetual incoherence of the Republican candidate for President of the United States. His weaponised language of non sequitur and ragespeak we’re all forced to hear.

There’s a relationship, surely, between Surrealism and those verbals, just as there was between Cubism and camouflage.

André Breton wrote, in the second of his manifestoes —

The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.

The Republican candidate famously said —

I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?

What does all this mean?

Genuine question.

Does it mean that Surrealism, like other products of Modernism — like Futurism, like Vorticism — has a tendency towards Fascism?

Does it mean that we should cling to whatever threads of rationality we can save? That we should reinstate some kind of neo-classical ideal of writing as being the purest expression of the best and most noble stuff our collective mind has come up with.

Alexander Pope’s —

What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.

Is that our safety net?

Or are we to stick with E.M. Forster’s —

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

At least in my Draft Zero.