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Les Champs Magnetiques (The Magnetic Fields) is a famous novel by Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault. It is famous because it was the first work created in the field of literary surrealism. It was published in 1920 using the surrealist technique known as automatic writing.
The book is considered surrealist and not dadaist because it attempts to create something new rather than simply react to an existing work.
To the uninitiated, Les Champs Magnetiques is characterised by rich textured language that often seems bordering 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 typical paragraph in (an English-language version of) Les Champs Magnetiques is:
`The marvellous railway-stations never afford us shelter anymore: the long passages terrify us. So in order to go on living these monotonous minutes must still be stifled, these scraps of centuries. Once we loved the year's last sunny days, the narrow plains where our eyes' gaze flowed like those impetuous rives of our childhood. There remain nothing but reflections now in the woods repopulated with absurd animals, with well-known plants.'
Breton gave many interviews about the creation of the book. The division between chapters was the point where the writers stopped writing at the end of the day. The next chapter would be started the following morning.
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(sources: The Magnetic Fields by Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault, translated and introduced by David Gascoyne: Atlas Press, London, 1985)
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