TY - JOUR
AU1 - GERMAIN, EDWARD B.
AB - Mankind is given language to make surrealist use of it, Breton has writ- ten.1 But what is surrealist use? And what of the unspecified giver? This paper suggests that one use is the generation of a state of perception, one that can usefully examine even "non-surrealist" material. It finds "the giver" to be a process — undoubtedly mysterious, but not completely in- scrutable. It is a process that speaks, that can foretell death as easily as it can recapitulate the forming of the first word. This essay assumes that "pure psychic automatism", as set forth in Andre1 Breton's First Manifesto of Surrealism, is probably impossible to isolate, even in surrealist poems. Breton allows for this while explaining how to do automatic writing: "The first sentence will come spontaneously," he writes, but it "is somewhat of a problem to form an opinion about the next sentence; it doubtless partakes both of our conscious activity and of the other".* Automatism is a concentrated or extended form of inspiration long known to artists, but given special prominence in surrealism. Thus Keats' comments about "negative capability" — an abnegation of the ego so that a poem springs from forces seemingly beyond the poet's 
TI - AUTOMATISM AND THE BIRTH OF LANGUAGE
JF - Forum for Modern Language Studies
DO - 10.1093/fmls/XVIII.2.172
DA - 1982-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/automatism-and-the-birth-of-language-AzIPaUCY00
SP - 172
EP - 182
VL - XVIII
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -