| Title | : | The Magnetic Fields |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0947757031 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780947757038 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 115 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1920 |
The Magnetic Fields Reviews
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If the eyes are the mirror of the soul then the language is the mirror of the mind… It’s enough to make a mirror a little bit concave or convex and then the reflections will be full of new wondrous meanings and colours.
The corridors of the big hotels are empty and the cigar smoke is hiding. A man comes down the stairway and notices that it's raining; the windows are white. We sense the presence of a dog lying near him. All possible obstacles are present. There is a pink cup; an order is given and without haste the servants respond. The great curtains of the sky draw open. A buzzing protests this hasty departure. Who can run so softly? The names lose their faces. The street becomes a deserted track.
About four o'clock that same day a very tall man was crossing the bridge that joins the separate islands. The bells, or perhaps it was the trees, struck the hour. He thought he heard the voices of his friends speaking: “The office of lazy trips is to the right,” they called to him, “and on Saturday the painter will write to you.” The neighbors of solitude leaned forward and through the night was heard the whistling of streetlamps.
This way the journey commences… Or probably continues… Or maybe we’re just going nowhere and all the world is locked inside our heads.The nocturnes of dead musicians lull the cities sunk in endless slumber. On the outdoor flight of steps of a hotel on Thirtieth Avenue a baby gambols with a puppy. No, you can form no idea of aquatic mores simply by looking through tears, that’s just not true. Space soft as a woman’s hand belongs to speed. Gradually one draws nearer to scrub-lands and markets. The depth of the Market-halls is less than that of the Pacific Ocean. The thick much-thumbed books become abandoned shells full of earth.
Surreality is impossible to prove but is unavoidable… -
The birth of surrealism. Which was, in terms of literature, like no other birth.
From the section titled 'Barriers' which was my favourite part of the book.
— No thanks, I know what time it is. Have you been shut up in this cage for long? What I need is the address of your tailor.
— He was yet another trouble-maker. Memoirs are full of such grim casualties returning from ancient civilizations and taking stealthy looks in the waters they had taken care not to disturb.
— The best memories are the shortest and, if you believe this, look at the hustled manias of those house-painters. The bride is running no one knows where and we have no more matches.
— I've often been the victim of nocturnal assaults. In order not to be detained, I turned pale and stammered little stars which satisfied people. Those who took part all through the winter in profitless expeditions didn't find the days as short as you say they did.
— Since childhood I have been recommended to a domestic animal and yet I have always preferred to the warmth of its tongue on my cheek a little tale of bygone times.
— Calm yourself. It is two steps or two kilometers from here to where fora few francs the still-born blind are operated on. Are you the surgeon?
— Are you joking? Ash Wednesday is a fine day for coachmen, but, if you insist, we will enter those moonless streets in which charming arbours are all the thing.
— I don't know where you want to hurry me off to. I rather distrust your pieces of orange peel that you have dropped like so many little rainbows on the paths. -
“The window carved in our flesh opens onto our heart. There can be seen an enormous lake on which at noon russet dragon-flies as fragrant as peony-finches come to settle. What is that big tree around which the animals go to look at one another? we’ve been pouring out drinking water for it for centuries. Its throat is drier than straw and there are huge deposits of ash in it. This is also considered laughable but one must not look too long with long-sight lenses. Everyone can pass through this bleeding corridor in which our sins are hung up, delightful pictures in which however grey predominates.”
So, yeah, pretty much boring linearity.
Honestly, this short manifesto (what else is it besides a revolution of conscious intellectual surrender?) is beyond reproach in its gorgeousness. Breton gives form to a new philosophy here, and it’s just all too beautiful. Open to any page and read a paragraph—the wash of words, the music in them, is the whole deal. Free of narrative, the frequency of pure, gushing prose provides something to find your own meaning within.
What a blessing to find a new Eternal Book at my age. I count stars, lucky. -
Andre Breton’s The Magnetic Fields, written in 1919, is a wonderful piece of writing; like a painting for the imagination made out of words, instead of lines and shapes. It is surreal; but it is not word salad, more like word magic. Wonderful images cascade upon wonderful images that I want to hold in my brain and try not to forget. Some of it is written in the form of poetry and some is prose. All of it is beautiful in its own way. I loved this and want it to be part of my permanent collection but it appears to be out of print, and used copies are a bit pricey. I was glad to be able to get a copy from the library. I will probably savor this one a little longer and I am sure I will check it out again at some point.
Some small examples of the writing style:
“ I have a sinister mark on the inner side of my arm, a blue M which threatens me. “
“ Street-singers, the world is wide and you will never succeed.”
“I swear to you that I am innocent. You mistake the burning tip of my cigarette for the pupil of my eye.”
I could quote the whole book. It has so many delightful turns of phrase. Highly recommended to those who enjoy this type of writing. 5 stars and best reads pile. -
More than nonsense, though it makes no sense, this automatically written surreal shot across the bows of literature holds together as a narrative almost magically. I don’t know how they did it, but I’m following them down the rabbit hole.
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I wanted to write something about Andre Breton's and Philippe Soupault's The Magnetic Fields, but I don't know if or how I can. It defies traditional categories, and is about as pristine an example of Breton's thesis of “pure psychic automatism” as one can imagine. I don't know how much of the text is Breton's, and how much is Soupault's, and I don't know how two people could possibly collaborate on something as reliant on the imagination as The Magnetic Fields, even if they use the exquisite-corpse technique. The imagery is stunning, which is the most I think one could hope for from something this purely surrealist, but is The Magnetic Fields valuable as a coherent whole? I don't know. I think that if I ask this, I'm probably asking the wrong questions.
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It will make you the prisoner of a drop of water.
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Some of the most fascinating writing I have ever read!!!This work is essentially witnessing someone else’s dreams, almost like a looking through a kaleidoscope. The writing itself is so profoundly gorgeous but isn’t strictly classifiable as poetry. I started Rimbaud’s Illuminations at the same time as this and the inspiration drawn is very noticeable. Also draws a lot from Baudelaire. Tbh Magnetic Fields is under-recognized in its significance to contemporary lit through its experimentation and the use of automatic writing. First true example of surrealism through lit. Both very personal and very nonsensical.
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words and sentences
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What do they mean? Who cares it beautiful and strange and carries you somewhere. These read like dreams. Not streams of consciousness but pools of unconsciousness. The sun is arrested and it pukes. Here are a few of my favorites:
There are wizards so destitute that they use their cauldrons to boil the clouds and that's not the end of the matter....
There were delightful displays of childish temper about those succulent plants that can never be applied to corns, they're were fleur de lys preserved in brandy when you fell over.....
We touch those tender stars which filled our dreams with our fingers....
All of us laugh all of us sing but nobody feels his heart beat any longer....
Our prison is built of well loved books but we can no longer escape because of all the passionate odors that send us to sleep.....
True stars of our eyes how long do you take to revolve around our heads?
The window carved in our flesh opens onto our heart..... -
Poetic, strange, rule breaking… this book is a work of art. I am very interested in automatic writing. I tried it many times. This book inspires me to keep on experimenting with it.
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solitary orgies
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Sometimes the actual act of writing a book is more important than the story being told. This is true of Joyce’s 'Ulysses', widely considered one of, if not the most important, novels ever written. 'Ulysses' is not pleasant to read for the most part. It is confusing and plunges depths of language and meaning most readers won’t be bothered to discover. Yet all can admire the genius of the writing. The amount of work put into the prose is evident. The reader is aware of the revolutionary nature of the work of art.
We can apply this doctrine to 'The Magnetic Fields' on a smaller scale. It is not exactly pleasant to read despite its poetic flow. There is no plot to follow, no development, no meaning. What Breton and Soupault set out to do with this work was to write and to write quickly without the use of any literary device or method. The fact this book was written is more important than any of its content.
Automatic writing, as the surrealists termed it, involves a quick and unedited outpouring of consciousness onto paper. Where Virginia Woolf also championed a stream-of-consciousness style, she thought before she wrote. Similarly, Elizabeth Smart in her marvellous work 'By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept' aimed to write poetically about the emotion of love rather than write any story. However, Smart’s book does have a plot, a logical up and down, which is exactly why it is so enjoyable to read. It blends pure emotion with structured plot. 'The Magnetic Fields' is pure emotion, pure thought, and is therefore quite difficult and even exacerbating to read.
Unfortunately, I found myself slipping in focus as I read this book. I entered what you could call “meditative skimming”, a state in which a part of my brain was reading the page while the other was thinking about clothes, books and to-do lists and had to be brought back to the page much as one brings back their thoughts to their breath during meditation. However, as an avid fan and even obsessive of French Surrealism and Dada, I would not feel complete without this book on my shelf.
While other surrealists nailed automatic writing in a more reader-friendly fashion (Robert Desnos in 'Liberty or Love', Rene Crevel in 'My Body and I', Louis Aragon in 'Treatise on Style') 'The Magnetic Fields' should be respected as the start of a revolutionary movement, a poetic and fierce act by two young men wanting to overturn post-war drollery. It is fitting the book was dedicated to Jacques Vache, himself the embodiment of this overturning.
Charlotte Mandell does an excellent job with the translation, which I imagine must have been extremely challenging. While it would have been nice to know which passages were written by Breton and which by Soupault, I am certain the translation of such illogical and free-flowing prose must have been tiresome enough. -
less plotty than i expected compared to nadja. but i really like breton's style. probably a lot better if i reread this a couple times.
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I’ve been fascinated with Breton and the Surrealist movement for a couple of years now, and I looked forward to reading this, the first work of Surrealist literature. But it’s long been out of print, meaning a copy cost a few hundred bucks until this new translation. Having read it, though, it’s clear that surrealist literature is a lot less interesting than surrealist film, painting or photography. Automatic writing, the process at the core of surrealist literature, involves just spewing out whatever comes to mind, sans editing. The idea is that you’re tapping into the subconscious; Freud was all the rage back then. So it’s pretty much word salad, written by 1920s hipsters. It’s like Naked Lunch, without all the sadomasochism.
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The Magnetic Fields is famous as the first sustained attempt at Surrealist automatic writing—a technique Breton derived from Freudian free association. The idea was to shut off the mind's internal critic and open a channel to the unconscious. The surrealist would function like an occult medium channeling messages from the deep caverns of the self:
"...let us not lose sight of the fact that the idea of surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory..."
Sounds interesting! Breton expressed great hopes for it. He called the Magnetic Fields:"...indisputably the first surrealist (and in no sense dada) work, since it is the fruit of the first systematic use of automatic writing... Our situation was that of anyone who has just excavated a vein of precious metal."
Interest is heightened by the brazen amorality of Breton's surrealism. A key requirement of surrealism was rejection of conscience, morality, the superego, etc. This is evident in Breton's definition of surrealism in the First Manifesto of Surrealism: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 thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
Amorality also shows up in Breton's reverence for
Les Chants de Maldoror, with its proto-serial-killer celebration of child rape, child murder, torture for pleasure, and so forth.
Likewise, we have Breton's famous (and surprisingly post-modern) characterization of surrealism from 1930: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. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level.
All in all, surrealist automatic writing sounds like a journey to the center of the id. Yet the Magnetic Fields is incredibly boring! Breton's effete upper-class French lifestyle is on display throughout: the beach, cafes, dance parties, mistresses, "the best hotels," books, museums. Nothing interesting happens, no taboos are violated—aside from some mildly amusing verbal juxtapositions. A sample:A perfect odour bathed the shadow and a thousand little scents ran up and down. They were thick circles, ravaged rags. Millimetres away, the endless adventures of microbes were perceptible. Style of cleansed cries and tamed visions. The brief puffs of smoke fell furiously and in disorder. Only the wind could absorb this living peat, these paralysed contrivances. The wild races, the bridge of delays, the instantaneous brutalizations were found to be joined together again and mixed with the blue sands of modernized pleasures, with sensational sacrifices, with the fleet flock of elect narcotics. There were the serious songs of sickly street alters, the prayers of merchants, the afflictions of swine, the eternal agonies of librarians.
It's literally all like that. "A perfect odour bathed the shadow and a thousand little scents ran up and down." Behold the seething cauldron of the unleashed subconscious mind, lol.
You wonder: What went wrong?
Theory 1: Breton's amoralism was phony, and he was incapable (like every other sane person) of shutting off his internal critic. The problem was compounded by Breton and Soupault writing together. Both were subconsciously worried about the other's judgment and self-censored as a result.
Theory 2: For reasons like those given in Theory 1, free association and automatic writing are a bad way to access the unconscious. Commercial activity is better. Consider the development of the pulps, or slasher films, or media like the Springer Show, or Pornhub. If the unconscious has a need, some niche market will spring up around it. This is why something like "I Spit on Your Grave" or "The Last House on the Left" is far more emblematic of surrealism, as Breton defines it, than the Magnetic Fields.
Theory 3: Breton's project was
épater la bourgeoisie. The trouble is that, to scandalize the bourgeoisie, you must be bourgeoisie. The middle and upper classes aren't scandalized by the vulgar antics of lower class proles, like Professional Wrestling or the Springer Show. You need a certain level of social status for the bourgeoisie to care what you think. Breton was only willing to go amoral within the constraint of preserving his own social capital. This was good business as well. Surrealism in Breton's time was a cottage industry. -
A short and quintessential text of surrealist poetry and prose. If you're reading this review please take it as a sign to read this. It'll take naught but an afternoon and your subconscious will be all the better off because of it.
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There’s a way to read this. Quickly and while walking. Even though Desnos does psychology better, all of the Soupalt is very funny and good.
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They said to me What do you have in place of a heart
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It's surprising how long it took until this book took was translated. Reading it is a bit like listening to white noise. It's a very interesting experience. I liked it.
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Yummy French nonsense !!!
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Bleak. Stunning. Visceral. Raw. Inspiring. Haunting. Mesmerizing.
The Magnetic Fields is a collection of prose and poetry written through the process of automatic writing, a style of flow writing that involves simply allowing the words to stream onto the page, no editing required. Andre Breton and Philippe Soupalt, two founding members of the school of Surrealism, were the first to attempt this technique, and this book is the result of their experiment. They wrote the entire manuscript in one week, writing daily, as fast as possible, refusing to edit as they go. This alone makes the experimental text special, but I found the content to be exceptional even without the historical significance. The imagery evoked from the writers' words is unlike anything I've experienced before, and I was taken on a wild ride from the first page to the last.
I also found the pieces exceptionally inspiring, and was frequently scribbling notes in the margins - responses to the lines, associated visions that popped into my head, and the beginnings of my own poems. I daresay the writers would approve of my reaction. Cheers to writing with a reckless spirit, free from any and all inhibitions! -
“The window carved in our flesh opens onto our heart. There can be seen an enormous lake on which at noon russet dragon-flies as fragrant as peony-finches come to settle.”
As an admirer of Surrealism, I must say reading one of the first surrealist works of literature was rather exciting. This book was undoubtedly beautifully written, which each sentence being carefully crafted by Breton to be as whimsical and magical as possible. Despite this, I chose to give it three stars as this is a book with no plot, characters, climax or any elements of a story whatsoever. It is a perfect example of “pure psychic automatism”, with miscellaneous sentences and pieces of dialogue with no correlation stringed together to form this Franken-book. I enjoyed it at times, especially the first half of the book.
Looking forward to reading more of Breton’s works in the future. -
This reminded me of a very old and dear book of Imagist poetry I read, all the usual suspects of the Zeitgeists were included in that.
The insights I saw in this book really touched me. A Lot of it was lets ramble and see what we get, a true free flowing creativity.
''The redness of dusks can frighten only mortals. I have preferred cruelty''.
''My eyes belong only to me and I pin them to my cheeks, so cool and so ravaged by the winds of your words''.
I'll remember these words fondly.
It was a gem of a find for me, it will be for you too. -
Would never read again but was super cool as a first real eye-opener for what Surrealism actually is.
It's not just 'weird, quirky ideas without logical causality' like I thought, but a merging of the dream state with your awakened state, which surrealists believe can be manifested by voicing / writing thoughts as they enter one's mind immediately, 'purely'... before rationality / 'social training' taints them.
That is what Magnetic Fields is - 96 pages of 2 dudes' immediate (random) thoughts as they encountered them over 8 days. -
“Prisoners of drops of water, we are nothing but perpetual animals. We run trough noiseless cities and the enchanted posters no longer touch us. (…) there’s nothing now but these cafés where we meet to drink these cold beverages, these mixed drinks, and the tables are stickier than these sidewalks where our dead shadows from the day before have fallen” -
tbh, I could have given it a 4. But knowing some of the more unbelievable heights of surrealism, I don't wanna be too generous just cuz it's up my alley. There were lines, sections, that I loved. The first section (The Unsilvered Glass) got me very excited... but certainly by the end, it was a lot of noise, & a lot of it felt inconsequential.
Oh & the introduction was great. -
this “book” is very interesting. the writing style is unique and confusing, but the wording and overall work is ver pretty and i did enjoy it. it’s a book that you can come back to and read a little bit, take a break, and jump back into.
