ABSTRACT
As he was falling asleep one night, André Breton heard his first automatic sentence. The sentence was ‘There is a man cut in two by the window.’ He called it an automatic sentence because it came, he said, from nowhere, ‘like a knock on the windowpane of consciousness’. With it came a faint visual image-of a man with a window around his middle. Later, in 1919, he produced a book called Les Champs Magnétique. The first section was called ‘The Unsilvered Mirror’. This title-a mirror that can be seen through-seems to talk of staring through into a world beyond the surface, suggestive of looking beyond the everyday experience of visible reality, into an area present, but normally unseen. Some have seen this as an image of encountering the unconscious.
