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Graphemic Gymnastics in Surrealist Literature

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SOURCE: "Graphemic Gymnastics in Surrealist Literature," in The Romanic Review, Vol. 81, No. 2, March, 1990, pp. 211-23.

[In the following excerpt, Metzidakis analyzes Breton's extraordinary use of language in Poisson soluble.]

Although the term "surrealist" has come to be applied to many different kinds of writing—from the bizarre to the fantastic—the term itself was first defined and used extensively by the founder and eventual "pope" of the Surrealist movement, André Breton. For him the word referred specifically to the type of texts that he and his cohorts were producing automatically, beginning in the period that directly followed World War I. While similar to contemporary dadaist works in their apparent semantic incoherence, early surrealist texts constituted a literature that was nevertheless intended to serve a specific societal purpose, unlike the more anarchic, nihilistic dadaist works. Specifically, automatic texts were from the start of the Surrealist movement meant to help both readers and writers become more attuned to the common archetypal source of all thought, even though they had no preconceived plot or design to them. It was hoped that the artistic tapping of this source would eventually lead to a more harmonious, if not happier, society for all.

By engaging in automatic writing, the Surrealists wanted to exploit language in a positive way. They believed that through the use of automatic techniques, they could express themselves better, in the sense of expressing themselves more completely. This is not to say that surrealist literature was not "avant-garde" or otherwise revolutionary to a large extent. To suggest that the surrealist project was in certain respects utilitarian and societal is not to deny the need that Breton and his fellow poets felt to destroy quite a few literary idols and conventions of one kind or another all along the way. I would, however, contend that because of the ambitious nature and scope of their total project, the literature these writers produced cannot help but exhibit various innovative stylistic features related to this project. The features I refer to result from the fundamental desire shared by Breton and his friends to enlarge or expand the semiotic potential of the language in and with which they were working.

In light of this desire to open up the French language to greater signifying possibilities, it might, therefore, be supposed that surrealist texts both express and embody entirely new ways of viewing and describing the world. No longer satisfied "merely" to discover novel poetic techniques or elaborate philosophical solutions to old existential problems—the recently finished war had disabused them of any optimism they might have otherwise harbored in this regard—the Surrealists set out to write in such a fashion that, through the particular concatenation of words they put on the page, Reality itself would be transformed into a larger surreality. Because it combined both the conscious and unconscious realms of experience, Surreality was from this perspective a much wider and promising domain in which to work, and indeed, to live. In the eyes of these writers, literature no longer consisted just of a poetic, stylized representation of various concepts or feelings, but was instead to become an authentic presentation of a new, more complete, and, in some regards, better world. The literature they proposed to write was to be, quite simply, a way of putting into words the New (Psychic) World announced by the recent discoveries in psychoanalysis.

Consequently, when dealing with a collection of so-called "automatic" texts, like those of Poisson soluble published in 1924 by André Breton, we must take into account both the meaning of the words, and the specific shapes and forms these words take on the page. Lest there be any misunderstanding, let me hasten to say that collections like Poisson soluble or Les champs magnétiques (the very first collection of automatic texts published in 1919 by Breton and Philippe Soupault) are hardly good examples of what critics nowadays call "concrete poetry." They are not, that is, works that immediately strike their readers as having a significant visual or pictorialist dimension. By "pictorialist" dimension, I mean a typographical positioning or signifiers whose relevance to a text's general significance is wellnigh impossible to ignore or to deny. While it is true that French poets did become increasingly aware of the visual or iconic value of the words they used in their poems, starting with the Parnassians and continuing with the Symbolists, one should not confuse automatic texts with works like Mallarmé's Coup de dés (1897) or Apollinaire's Calligrammes (1918), i.e. deliberate writing experiments that made obvious use of the visual side of a poetic text.

Instead, the practice of automatic writing seems most often to have led to innovations of a different order, an essentially semantic, or even, thematic order. Some of the most rewarding and convincing contemporary readings of such writing have centered precisely around various subliminal narratives and intertextual networks that have been successfully recovered from a careful analysis of the words and images found in automatic texts. At first glance, therefore, surrealist literature as a whole has not induced most readers to consider at length the potential visual impact of the individual graphemes of which it is composed, as in the case of modern concrete poetry.

Yet, a close reading of specific automatic works reveals that one can, in fact, describe and delineate a significant graphemic dimension within their stylistic fabric. Although the "graphemic gymnastics" in question are not deliberate attempts to portray visually a preconceived, pre-existing idea or object—as with Apollinaire's Calligrammes, for instance—they do nonetheless point to an undoubtedly unconscious impulse on the part of a surrealist writer to expand formally various semantic and/or thematic aspects of his texts. Even when the latter have already been rendered much more complex than in non-automatic narratives, one can discover still more plays with and upon parts of words and individual letters, if one chooses to look carefully enough.

Looking "carefully," moreover, does not mean that one has to imagine these features into existence. It merely suggests that, like all stylistic features in a text, the perception of the graphemic aspects we will study here presupposes both a certain competence (in the Chomskyean sense) and predisposition or willingness on the reader's part to examine a bit more closely than usual the details of the words in front of him/her. Failing this competence and willingness, the stylistic traits proposed, not unlike more conventional or recognized features of literary style, may very well not come to light. We need not worry, therefore, about the ultimate validity of graphemic stylistic features (as if one could ever know unfailingly what should or should not be noticed within a text). So long as we demonstrate the function of graphemic features within a work, we can say that they are valid. For the more we succeed in demonstrating the stylistic role of these features in particular works, the more we acquire the necessary competence to discover such phenomena elsewhere in literature.

Provided we take these stylistic possibilities seriously then, any consideration of the conscious or unconscious play of graphemes (or what we shall call "graphemic gymnastics") should bring to our reading of surrealist literary texts further semiotic evidence and support for the particular interpretations we give of such works. In no case should one assume that the analyses presented here could or should be performed at random on any other literary text that one chooses to study. I am not proposing that one play graphemic games for the sake of playing Critical Pursuit or Trivial Criticism. I do insist, however, that in interpreting certain surrealist imagery, one often feels obliged, because of particular textual signs or forms present (here, graphemes), to respond to and follow up an extra-ordinary logic dictated by the letter of the texts under scrutiny. The logic in question or "narrative grammar," if one prefers, derives from the automatic writing process itself. It results from a kind of secondary elaboration of what a text already expresses somewhere else within its own margins, or in some other fashion. The letters, letter clusters, and accent marks of the works examined presently will thus be shown to add something more, a supplementary semiotic depth, so to speak, to what the texts already say elsewhere.

The scope of the present essay prevents us from providing any more theoretical background for our analyses, or from showing how poems by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Saint-Pol Roux, and other 19th-century poets exhibit analogous graphemic gymnastics avant la lettre. Fortunately, others have already begun to explore the use of such gymnastics in pre-automatic texts. Here, we shall instead limit ourselves to the one work, Poisson soluble, that Anna Balakian calls the finest and most authentic example of automatic writing [in her book, André Breton, 1971]. Our goal is to show that the term "surrealist" underscores an automatic work's radical tendency to play off certain graphemic and, a forteriori, lexical sequences fixed within a given stylistic context. In underlining the word "radical," I wish to suggest the degree to which such works disturb or otherwise upset the usual expectations of an uninitiated reader.

My hope in examining Poisson soluble is to suggest how this exemplary collection does what all automatic texts do: it forces readers to abandon certain unquestioned reading habits and to take on new ones. Specifically, it makes us ask ourselves whether we have truly understood the narrative implications of particular words, as well as the potential visual value of their formal make-up or constitution. Let us take for instance text no. 4, at the start of which we are told that: "Les oiseaux perdent leur forme après leurs couleurs." As if to explain this initial curious statement about birds, Breton then writes: "Ils sont réduits à une existence arachnéenne si trompeuse que je jette mes gants au loin." Being reduced to an arachnidan existence is, to be sure, already sufficiently unexpected an image to accept as one compatible with the reality of birds. But to read next that the narrator throws his gloves far away, presumably because this new existence for birds is "so deceitful," is to flirt with total absurdity.

Perhaps the constraints of some subtle internal logic justify this ostensibly inexplicable narration. Let us try to locate clues that might allow us to recover this logic. One must first consider the fact that the act of throwing gloves off traditionally signifies an act of defiance, an act meant to provoke a duel. In this sense, the narrator seems to be casting himself in the role of protector or avenger of wronged birds. Since the birds have somehow (or by someone) been transformed into spider-like beings, one might assume that it is because of this injustice that the narrator takes so heroic a stance vis-à-vis their metamorphosis.

On the other hand, it may be that the narrator does not seek so much to avenge the birds as to protect himself from the potential deceitfulness of such strange creatures. The rest of the prose poem does not, after all, develop the notion of any implied duel. No warrior or otherwise bold character arrives to take up the challenge represented by these cast gloves. Yet, the narrator does cross his arms and waits vigilantly ("Je guette"), presumably waiting for something bad to happen. Concerned more with what his gloves look like, and with the laughter that is said to be coming out of the earth, he spends his time watching the night fall, disappearing thereafter from the rest of this one-page text. The narrative appears thus to drift further and further away from the one idea—a duel—that appeared most likely to help us reconstitute the logic of the initial statement.

What then should we make of this now doubly bizarre twist to the story? At first, in keeping with "normal" reading habits, we thought that the best way to explain the fantastical opening statement was to be patient, to wait for the text to reveal the connections between the birds and the wary narrator. But, just as we begin to learn more about the clothing and actions of the narrator, he suddenly gets pulled into the fabric of the rest of the story, and drops out of sight. Given the arachnidan context, one could even say that he becomes entangled or gets caught in the narrative web or cloth (literally, the text) that he himself begins o weave from the beginning of the story.

Was he not, however, already implicated in this tale of metamorphosis from the moment he removed his gloves? Let us note that the text specifies the color and form of his gloves ("leur forme et couleur") as soon as he throws them, as if to signal to the reader and writer an automatic parallel between the birds and the narrator. Thus, no sooner do we read how birds lose their form after their color than we learn that the narrator, narrator, too, throws away his, I daresay, bird-like yellow gloves, gloves that have black stichings, "gants jaunes à baguettes noires". It would, therefore, appear that the entire text is stuck in its own textuality or autotransformation, a victim of its own (narrative) spider web. Unlike a "normal" narrative, the automatic text makes statement which are then consumed, as it were, by later statements, instead of being developed. One image drifts into another, just as in the Surrealists' favorite game of "L'un dans l'autre."

One might ask, though, why this text in particular functions in that way. Here, we finally discover how graphemic gymnastics help to explain the flow of words in an automatic text. For if there is a specific textual catalyst for this narrative metamorphosis it is surely located in the meaning and shape of the adjective "arachnéenne." Recalling the myth of Arachné, we can see how the bird metamorphosis in the opening sentence could have provoked an unconscious memory in the author (or vice versa) of that earlier tale, in which the young maiden Arachné is turned into a spider by her enemy Minerva. Given that the girl's crime was to have weaved better than the goddess, after she first accepted the goddess' challenge, we might hazard the opinion that Arachné functions metaphorically (if also subliminally) as a kind of poet who, like our poem's narrator, dares to accept a duel.

In any case, once we have accepted one possible link between Breton's text and the thematic or semantic dimension of the adjective "arachnéenne," we cannot discount that word's supplementary importance as what we could call a "pure" signifier as well. For its graphemic nature and usage-frequency in French (in English, too, we might add) are so rare that it is hardly surprising to find its very shape generating words that are formally related to it in this "automatic" context. What I mean is this. Though we seem, to a large extent, to have already justified thematically the narrator's actions, on the basis of the myth of Arachné, a question remains about the simultaneous occurrence in the same environment of so many words containing double-letter clusters. If we consider, however, that the previously noted unusual term "arachnéenne" contains two double-letter clusters side by side, then suddenly we discover an additional formal reason, an over-determining graphemic factor, for the lexical makeup of the passage that immediately follows this objective:

… arachnéenne si trompeuse que je jette mes gants au loin. Mes gants jaunes á baguerttes noires tombent sur une plaine dominée par on clocher fragile. Je croise alors les bras et je guette. Je guette les rires qui sortent de la terre et fleurissent aussitôt, ombelles. La nuit est venue, pareille à un saut de carpe á la surface d'une eau violette …

The passage unfolds as if the graphemic form of the adjective, loomlike, generated figuratively and literally a narrative "thread" that runs throughout the beginning section of the poem. Other automatic texts have been shown to give rise to analogous phonemic parallelisms that have no narrative justification. We must then take seriously the possibility that a word's individual letters may often have as much to do with the imagery of an automatic narrative as does its mere meaning. Indeed, in some cases, I would contend that they could very well have more to do with it.

It is clear, therefore, that to read Surrealist prose one has to act differently than one does when reading most other prose. In a word, one must engage at some point or other in a type of reading activity normally associated with poetry, to wit, scanning. Scanning an automatic work for recurrent graphemic phenomena, either before, during, or after a more thematic consideration of it, turns up various stylistic features that might otherwise go unnoticed. Because these discoveries assist us in our retroactive recovery or understanding of other parts of the text, there is no reason not to avail ourselves of the hermeneutic tool, scanning, that makes them possible. To choose not to read such visual clues is tantamount to denying part of the apparent specificity of automatic writing.

With this in mind, let us now scan other prose poems from Poisson soluble. Our next examples of graphemic gymnastics are anagrammatic in nature. In these cases, a specific word that is either explicit in the text, or implicit in its words, has been spelled out more or less completely by different textual segments. In text no. 32, for instance, we find the following rather obvious play on the name of a northeastern suburb of Paris: "O propriétés mal fermées de Montfermeil" (my emphasis). What strikes us in this image is how the poet's pen has been pushed "automatically," so to speak, to describe the imagined properties of a real place on the sole basis of its name. That is, the sentence reads as though some type of material correspondence existed between the nature of this place and the shape of its name.

It may have been, however, the poet's initial evocation of a poorly enclosed estate that led him unconsciously, no doubt, to select that particular locale as the setting for his automatic story. In the opening section of the poem, the narrator claims that a fancy ball ended at five o'clock in the morning, and that at the ball, "les plus tendres robes se fussent égratignées à des ronces invisibles" (my emphasis). Is it because tender dresses of women were unduly scratched on brambles that should not have been present on an estate in Montfermeil (where, in this hypothesis, the ball took place) that Breton's pen singled out this name for its graphemic play? It is probably impossible to determine.

Whatever the case though, the fact remains that after a typical beginning to a story about an old love affair—"J'étais brun quand je connus Solange"—and a typical first encounter at a ball, the text suddenly escapes the trap of still greater narrative conventionality through its sudden and disruptive anagrammatic play with the name "Montfermeil." In this fashion, it underscores both the obvious formal automatism at its core and, at the same time, its presumption of surrealist creation. The reader can thereafter no longer justify his reading by reference to an already-known or even knowable place, a place like Montfermeil. He must instead re-direct his attention to the signifiers he sees on the page and attempt to re-create within his own imagination a surreal world. This world lies somewhere between the reality these words conjure up in his mind (mimesis), and the linguistic system to which they as "pure" words refer back (semiosis).

Our second example of an anagram related to an explicit textual model functions similarly. Although again we cannot determine whether the island of Cyprus was already on Breton's mind before he began writing text no. 6 (and thus, in the course of this extended metaphor of the world qua newspaper, generated the following segment about a pleasant holiday spot), or whether the textual production worked in the reverse order, we can observe an insistent alliteration and internal repetition of the letters in that island's name throughout the paragraph preceding its otherwise arbitrary appearance. To the reader who asks then why the narrator plans to go to Cyprus rather than to another, perhaps more agreeable, vacation spot, we need only emphasize the graphemic make-up of the words forming this lexical choice's immediate linguistic environment:

La plus grande partie de ce journal que je parcours à proprement parler est consacrée aux déplacements et villégiatures, dont la rubrique figure en bonne place au haut de la premiére place. Il y est dit, notamment, que je me rendrai demain á Chypre.

In the light of all these repeated "p"'s and "pr"'s, as well as of the syllabic pattern x + r, the final sentence's opening syntactic pattern (the infrequent "Il y est dit") constitutes the final catalyst for the automatic, and otherwise, narratively unjustified, selection of "Chypre" in this spot of the story. One gets the distinct impression, therefore, that for whatever conscious or unconscious reasons Breton used the expression "Il y est" (as opposed to the much less unusual "Il y a," for example) at that juncture, the close occurrence of the graphemic pattern capital letter + tall letter (e.g. "l" "h") + y was all that was needed to provoke in him the memory of "Chypre."

As invalid as this reading may seem according to any conventional sense of literary style, the fact is that in this context, no other narrative allusion or cause that we can find removes the utter arbitrariness of that particular sign in this context. Of course, one might argue that the arbitrariness of the sign was precisely what the Surrealists were most interested in exploiting. I would not disagree with this potential objection. At the same time Breton composed the texts of Poisson soluble (1924), he himself brought up the same point in his Manifeste. There he says that the strongest surrealist image for him is "celle qui présente le degré d'arbitraire le plus élevé." Yet, immediately after making this statement, he explains that the surrealist image is as strong as it is because of how long it takes "á traduire en langage pratique." In other words, the arbitrariness of surrealist writing, to Breton's mind, will sooner or later disappear, even though the best of it will take a great deal of time. This is due to the fact that, in certain cases, Breton says, the only thing justifying these images is their ability to draw out of themselves "une justification formelle dérisoire." What more "derisory" formal justification, indeed, than one based on the shape and relative positions of certain graphemes!

In addition, Breton admits that in some instances, surrealist writing produces characters—or what A. J. Greimas would more precisely call "actants"—who are nothing more than the result of specific graphemic traits made on the page:

… vous n'aurez qu'à mettre l'aiguille de "Beau fixe" sur "Action" et le tour sera joué. Voici des personnages [or places like, say, Cyprus] d'allure assez disparates; leurs noms dans votre écriture sont une question de majuscules… (my emphasis)

What this means then is that when we find people, places, and things described in a surrealist text we must realize that they are often the graphemic result of the automatic writing itself, rather than that of any genuine, i.e. preconceived, narrative intent or strategy. Though they conjure up images from the phenomenological world we all live in, these images are only illusions created by textual beings, "êtres qui en vérité vous doivent si peu."

Let us consider now a case of just such a being whose presence in text no. 15 is occasioned by the similarity between his name Hugues and an absent word that summarizes the entire fantasy represented. This is an example of anagrammatic gymnastics around a word that does not actually figure in the text, as in our previous examples. The word is instead implied by other phrases and narrative situations surrounding it. The prose poem in question concerns small children in a Catholic school. Inexplicably, the children find their classroom suddenly and magically transformed. In the first sentence, for instance, the chalk is said to contain a sewing machine. A little later on, the blackboard becomes the sky. In a word, the children appear to be daydreaming about the outside world. Little wonder then that the narrator, in wonderfully pun-like manner, cannot resist saying: "C'est l'école buissonnière dans toute son acception." The kids, in other words, are, as the stereotype would have it, far more concerned with getting out of school than in staying in.

Significantly enough, the apparent leader of this group, whom Breton calls "le prince des mares," is named Hugues. Seeing how the entire narrative revolves around the kids' dreams of skipping school, or, more precisely, of escaping it once they arrive there, we might legitimately advance the following idea: as leader of these kids, the boy Breton realistically names "Hugues" presumably embodies both their wishes and their dreams. Since, however, he is supposedly a "real" child in an imaginary classroom that has somehow gone crazy, through the fantasy of the poet, it is narratively appropriate that his name indicate simultaneously the reality of these French children and their fantasy (escape). No other boy's name in French than Hugues so resembles the one word signifying perfectly these longed-for infantile evasions: fugues.

Another instance of this kind of implicit anagrammatic derivation can be located in text no. 3, a tale of an enormous wasp found descending le boulevard Richard-Lenoir on its way to la place de la Bastille. The wasp is said to be singing loudly ("á tue-tête"). Not long after that, she asks the narrator how to get wherever it is she is going. After engaging the insect in conversation a bit more, the narrator then describes her buzzing as being "insupportable comme une congestion pulmonaire." At first glance, nothing is wrong or odd about this comparison. Congestion in one's lungs is, after all, difficult to endure. It could conceivably produce a respiness that might recall the buzzing of a wasp.

But if one looks carefully at the rest of the sentence in which the comparison is located, the reader would do well to reconsider his initial simple acceptance of it. According to the poet, the wasp's buzzing was so loud that it "couvrait à ce moment le bruit des tramways, dont le trolley était une libellule." Given that la place de la Bastille in 1924 was a major tramway intersection for trolley cars, one has no reason to doubt the aptness of Breton's comparison between the noise emitted by his huge fantastical creature and the real noise that trolleys must have actually produced at the time. To compare it in this case to a pulmonary congestion, however, appears retroactively to have been automatically generated, or textually inspired, if one prefers, by the word "Pullman." Pullman, of course, was the proper name par excellence in the code of trains, for Pullman cars were the most luxurious cars in passenger trains.

The pertinence of this detail must not go unnoticed. The wasp, after all, who is portrayed elsewhere in the text as a particularly attractive woman (amusingly, "á la taille de guêpe") is distinguished from another insect in the very sentence containing the now-problematic comparison. The "insect" we now have to consider is the trolley, who is called a dragonfly. The difference in insect code is thus reflected by an implied difference in train code (or possibly, the other way around). The latter is implied by the graphemic play between "pulmonaire" and the would-be adjective "Pullmanaire." The play is one between lung congestion and what would be an unsaid, though highly visible, train tie-up or train congestion. In this regard, it is important to remember that the American label "Pullman" was so well-known and widespread at the time that it passed into the French language without any graphemic transformation.

The last type of graphemic gymnastics we shall explore results from the narrative expansion of certain presuppositions of a word found in an automatic text. Since the word in question represents a part of a longer associative chain previously attached to that word—through native-speaker usage, dictionary entries, and other symbolic forms fixed in a particular culture—we shall call this kind of graphemic feature, metonymie. Our first example this time comes from… no. 7, the prose poem about the world as newspaper. In the course of the narrator's imagined peregrinations, he finds himself in command of what are essentially "aquatic ballons." Manipulating the different navigational devices, he states that the motive behind his various manoeuvrings is, paradoxically, to assure that all will be lost, "pour nous assurer que tout est perdu." Normally, one would expect such action by a commander to lead to a righting of a vessel's course, not a deliberate sabotaging of it.

Yet this phrase is emblematic of the nature of automatic writing. When given a (narrative) opportunity to produce something unexpected or ostensibly arbitrary, the surrealist writer usually will. In this example, the commander's intent to lose his way induces our poet to say the following about the ballon's compass:

cette boussole est enfin contrainte de prononcer le mot: Sud, et nous rions sous cape de la grande destruction immatérielle en marche.

What interests us here is how the mere mention of the direction "Sud" arbitrarily pronounced by the compass gives rise to an extraordinary phrasal expansion. This expansion is located within the expression, "nous rions sous cape." It is notable for two reasons. First, the expression "rire sous cape" continues the apparent absurdity implied by the narrator's wish to lose himself. It accomplishes this by indicating that the crew is literally laughing in its sleeve about the great immaterial destruction this sudden turn of events provokes. However, as we have come to expect by now of automatic texts, the destruction at hand is described as being immaterial, not material. That is, in actuality, it is a nondestruction, or, in other words, an actual improvement of their surreal nautical voyage. In going South, the sailors will thus stay clear of the stormy weather that might otherwise ship-wreck them. (Earlier, they are said to be "créatures d'épaves.") This makes the otherwise paradoxical action of laughing consistent, albeit in reverse fashion, with the previous absurd narrative situation of wanting to lose, not find, one's way.

The second reason why the above expression is significant lies in the specific words "sous cape." Therein we find a significant graphemic manipulation of two variants of these words that are highly pertinent to this strange itinerary. In the first place, the word "cape" used in a nautical context refers to a specific manoeuvre whose goal is precisely to prepare a ship for stormy weather, as in the expressions "être à la cape" or "se mettre à la cape." The whole notion of good vs. bad weather is thereby evoked by a simple association of the word. At the same time, however, "cape" is very similar both phonemically and graphemically to the absent word "Cap," or Cape, in English. In the light of the southern direction already established (first and foremost by "Sud," but then secondarily and graphemically reinforced by "sous"), the many different southern Cape(s) recalled by that word thus only emphasize the idea that this crew is headed towards less dangerous seas. Southern capes are traditionally known by sailors and tourists alike for their calm, peacefulness, even promise of "Good Hope." (In passing, let us not forget also that in the past, the French term for "Le cap de Bonne-Espérance" was, in fact, "Le cap des Tempêtes.") Thus, the graphemic constitution of the phrase "nous rions sous cape" makes it the perfect lexical selection for this passage. By means of a kind of double negation, it describes a positive and promising nautical situation in seemingly negative terms ("tout est perdu," "nous rions sous cape," "destruction," etc.).

Another surrealist text, no. 17 in Breton's collection, expands its narrative in similar fashion. Thanks to a model provided by the initial image—which presents two men chatting about love while they walk in a park—the entire text is dialectically composed of two-part constructions. In some cases, these constructions are syntactical in nature, with different types of subordinate clauses occurring in pairs. In other instances, the doubling is more lexical. When the narrator begins to describe brushes or cigars, for example, the varieties of brush or cigar always come in groups of two.

The particular detail of interest to us involves the impossibly long ashes these cigars produce. The first man's cigar has an ash that measures one meter ten, while the second man's ash measures one meter thirty five. As if to challenge the reader's sense of reason, the narrator says boldly, "Expliquez cela comme vous pourrez quand je vous aurai dit qu'ils les [the cigars] avaient allumés en même temps." Retroactively, we understand that these unusual lengths are most likely related to the height of two women whose images appear immediately thereafter in the narrative. In any event, the narrator then creates a pair of metaphors according to which the younger man's ash is a blond woman, while the older one's is a brunette. Since the men were talking all along about love, the semantic associations of the word "allumé" (lust, passion, etc.) represent the probable lexical origin that sparked, as it were, the text's sudden production of female imagery.

But, in addition to this, there is a secondary or extended graphemic gymnastic of note in the choice of hair-color for these woman. Cigars, like cigarettes, we remember, can be made out of two kinds of tobacco, light or dark. In French, this distinction just happens to be rendered by the adjectives "blond(e)" and "brun(e)." It is no doubt a minor point, consequently, to insist that out of several possibilities (blond, red, etc.) the hair colors chosen from the metaphorical woman in this passage are blond and brown. Yet, in keeping within the scheme of a preliminary examination of such subtle stylistic features in surrealist literature, it is a point surely worth making.

In conclusion, I should like to repeat that the present essay has not been intended to be exhaustive in any sense. What remains for us to do first is to analyze how all these and other graphemic traits in automatic texts relate to and affect each other. In a second stage of research, one can envisage an eventual application of these findings to nonautomatic works. The ultimate goal of such research would be to show how all literature exhibits similar graphemic gymnastics, though surely not in all of the same ways and not to the same degree. Yet, if the latter were true, then clearly a re-assessment of literary style would be at least partially in order.

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