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without it being possible to discover in them a previous deter
mination. These phrases, remarkably pictured and with a syn
tax perfectly correct, have appeared to me to be poetic elements
of the first order. At first I was content merely to hold them,
but later Soupault and I tried to create in ourselves the state in
which they could be produced.”
From the application of this discovery comes a curious book
by Breton and Soupault, “Les Champs Magnetiques.” Having
no right to choose some sentences rather than others, I quote at
random:—“We have been compelled to visit cheap factories of
dreams and shops filled with obscure dramas. There was a mag
nificent cinema where the roles were taken by old friends. We
lost sight of them and always found them again in the same
place. They gave us rotten dainties and we told them our vague
joys. Their eyes fixed upon us, they spoke; can one really re
member those ignoble words, their lulling songs? We have
given them our heart which was only a pale song.”
I am often tempted to speak of humanism, of knowledge of
others and of ourselves, a mania for which I ask pardon; truly
lines like these make us feel more, tell us more of certain person
alities than any novel, even the most advanced. Professor Freud
by the psychoanalytic method tries to uncover that which we
force back into our unconscious. Superrealism claims to open
wide the doors; and because it really does open them, there is no
constraint; these mysterious words arise without affected roman
ticism, without calculated pose. They have multiple reflections
and it is difficult not to be carried away by their spontaneous and
free current. I mean that superrealism, product of an absolute
intellectual emancipation, distinguishes whomsoever has the
courage of wishing to profit by it. This discipline (discipline,
I could remark, parodying Tzara, because the absence of disci
pline is but another discipline) is that of the superman whom
Nietzche in spite of his wish did not succeed in finding; its
grandeur can not be denied; far removed from grandiloquence,
it permits all the elements of the superreal individual to sing
each its own song. Philippe Soupault, for example, loves gay-
ety, wishes to amuse himself by the way—