Between chance and repetition: Lesson 7

Lesson 7.  The Unconscious Mind of Chance

From https://www.slideshare.net/emilyvalenza/surrealism-dada

A. Automatic Writing

In the early 20th century, artists and writers who came to be known as "Surrealists" invented 2 techniques that play with chance elements. These techniques are known as "Automatic Writing" and "Exquisite Corpse." (Trivia: If you are familiar with "memes" and "mash ups," the Surrealists invented those, too. See example above.)

From https://www.slideshare.net/ScottScholz/surrealism-in-paris-1539554

B. Exquisite Corpse

Wikipedia: "Exquisite corpse, also known as exquisite cadaver (from the original French term cadavre exquis) or rotating corpse, is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun", as in "The green duck sweetly sang the dreadful dirge") or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse).

From https://www.slideshare.net/wyncko/exquisite-corpse-8354646

C.  Class Adaptation.

Each student will be asked to write a word, a phrase, or a sentence starting from the letter of the alphabet assigned to him or her. The teacher then collects each item and assembles the pieces on the board to see what the class came up with. The class can also reflect on the intersection of this assembly technique with the Cut-up, the Permutation, and the Word Cloud approaches we have employed before. There is also the addition of a collective element in the composition, something that is known today as "Collaborative Art.''

D. Sample recent adaptation

Here is a recent adaptation of surrealist writing styles:

From https://www.pinterest.com/perkoo/poetry/

D. The principle of Free Union

Take a look at this excerpt from a piece by André Bréton and compare it with the piece above.

Free Union

by André Breton

My wife whose hair is a brush fire
Whose thoughts are summer lightning
Whose waist is an hourglass
Whose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tiger
Whose mouth is a bright cockade with the fragrance of a star of the first magnitude
Whose teeth leave prints like the tracks of white mice over snow
Whose tongue is made out of amber and polished glass
Whose tongue is a stabbed wafer
The tongue of a doll with eyes that open and shut
Whose tongue is an incredible stone
My wife whose eyelashes are strokes in the handwriting of a child
Whose eyebrows are nests of swallows
My wife whose temples are the slate of greenhouse roofs
With steam on the windows
My wife whose shoulders are champagne
Are fountains that curl from the heads of dolphins over the ice
My wife whose wrists are matches
Whose fingers are raffles holding the ace of hearts
Whose fingers are fresh cut hay
My wife with the armpits of martens and beech fruit
And Midsummer Night
That are hedges of privet and resting places for sea snails
Whose arms are of sea foam and a landlocked sea
And a fusion of wheat and a mill
Whose legs are spindles
In the delicate movements of watches and despair
My wife whose calves are sweet with the sap of elders
Whose feet are carved initials
Keyrings and the feet of steeplejacks
My wife whose neck is fine milled barley
Whose throat contains the Valley of God
And encounters in the bed of the maelstrom
My wife whose breasts are of night
And are undersea molehills

...
My wife with eyes that are the equal of water and air and earth and fire

--Translated from the French by David Antin. From The Poetry of Surrealism: An Anthology, ed. Michael Benedikt (Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1974).

E. Discussion points

1. How are the two poems similar? What similar patterns do you see?

2. How do they illustrate the bi-play of Chance and Determinism, open and closed structures?

3. How similar or different are they from your Chance Notebook?

4. Is the title Free Union an apt description of what's going on in Bréton's text?

5. What can you say about the description of the wife? Are these apt metaphors?  Why and why not? Why would Bréton use (or abuse) metaphors this way?