The Magnetic Fields

André Breton, Philippe Soupault, Philippe Soupault, Charlotte Mandell

Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields) is a book by André Breton and Philippe Soupault. It is famed as the first work of literary Surrealism. Published in 1920, the authors used a surrealist automatic writing technique. The book is considered Surrealist, rather than Dadaist, because it attempts to create something new rather than react to an existing work. Les Champs magnetiques is characterised by rich textured language that often seems to border on the nonsensical. This is considered a "normal" result of automatic writing and is considerably more logical than the output from other Surrealist techniques, such as "exquisite corpse" (a method whereby each of a group of collaborators, in sequence, adds words or images to a composition). The division between chapters was the point where the writers stopped writing at the end of the day. The next chapter was started the...