ABSTRACT
Walter Benjamin's clear unease at surrealism's venturing into the murky gloom of the seance hall, a space shared with down-at-heel dowagers, retired majors and emigre profiteers, is perhaps understandable. While Fantomas could be claimed to provide the avant-garde with a model of writing distinct from the early modernist tradition, insofar as it radically breaks with the conventional unitary author function and in its place provides a fragmented, plural voice immersed in the popular culture of everyday life, surrealist automatism takes this to another level, developing writing as a collective, incoherent flow of consciousness that attempts to tap directly into both the personal and the collective unconscious. Breton returns to the question of automatic writing in his landmark essay The Automatic Message, first published in Minotaure in 1933, where he once again invokes automatism as a source of inspiration, a means of short-circuiting the usual cliches of writing.
