Surrealism

Although mostly associated with paintings, surrealism applied to writing as well as explained by one of the major spokespeople of the Surrealist movement, Andre Breton According to Breton, himself a writer who published "The Surrealist Manifesto" in 1924, surrealism is a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality" (Breton, cited by surrealist.com). Building on the theories of Sigmund Freud, Brewton viewed the unconscious as the source of the imagination and he associated genius with the ability of either painters or writers to tap this realm. Therefore, a written essay can definitely meet the criteria for surrealistic art under certain conditions, most notably by meeting the condition of automatic writing.

Breton discusses that automatic writing does not come from the conscious thoughts of the writer, rather it is a work of chance where the writer writes randomly without any specific intention Breton acknowledges that it is difficult for writing to become a picture of the subconscious mind and can have a tendency to lead to the production of mere cliches. To avert this problem, Breton recommended what he referred to a "dedoublement," the detachment of the mind from the body. This concept is a conscious intervention of the will while writing to avoid the mind becoming a slave of the body. Also during automatic writing, language itself must become autonomous; writing escapes narration and calculation tasks and become an experience within language and the texts are an embodiment of the thought.

Bibliography

History of Surrealism, Surreal Art, and the Artists Involved in the Surrealist Art Movement. A Definitive History of the Surrealist Movement." http://www.surrealist.com/

The Role of Automatic Writing in the Surrealist Movement." http://galton.uchicago.edu/~wit/automatic_writing.htm