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A Few Rambling Notes on «A Voice», or Breton, Williams, Kerouac & Automatic Writing
In its original, unpublished Italian version, «A Voice (texte automatique)» was followed by a brief commentary.
«Only at an invitation I wrote what was dictated by a sort of an outer voice, speaking first to others then to me. The only possibile form was that of a fitful voice continually revealing itself as new and different. Subsequent corrections were very slight: it was question to abolish what had been reasonably added. And a short time after the death of Charles Mingus, automatic firearms rattled at Radio Città Futura, and cries answered from Iran.»
Besides, a note was appended to the text.
«Not only a voice, but some news felt deeply inside. In a misty winter day, on the sickle of hills around Bologna, a friend told me that owing to a sickness Charles Mingus was unable to play, as I had read some time before of Thelonius Monk. Then I got the news of Mingus’ death in Mexico—announced only after cremation, if my memory serves. Around the same time, fascists exploding bursts of machine-gun fire invaded Radio Città Futura’s studio, and women were wounded—there were protests, and pain, and rage. This is mainly remembered here, in these verses—this pain, together with the thrill of the bebop music of the Forties from the stereo. In one glided note the blues voice happiness and sorrow.»
«Le correzioni in seguito sono state minime, si è trattato di abolire ciò che era stato ragionevolmente aggiunto.» Revised écriture automatique, therefore. A fruitful contradiction.
Though écriture automatique does not precludes rearrangement and rewriting—«il n’importe nullement que le texte ait subi des retouches», wrote Marquerite Bonnet in her «Notice» to Les Champs Magnetiques, documenting and analyzing the writing of this work, and of Poisson Soluble, too (Breton, Oeuvres, I, p. 1146; see pp. 1365 ff.)—correction was, to André Breton, house of correction. «La rature odieuse», he did write in Le Message Automatique, «afflige de plus en plus la page écrite, comme elle barre d’un trait de rouille la vie. Tous ces “sonnets” qui s’écrivent encore, toute cette horreur sénile de la spontanéité, tout ce raffinement rationaliste, toute cette morgue de moniteurs, toute cette impuissance d’aimer tendent à nous convaincre de l’impossibilité de fuir la vielle maison de correction… Corriger, se corriger, polir, reprendre, trouver à redire et non puiser aveuglément dans le trésor subjectif pour la seule tentation de jeter de-ci de-là sur la sable une poignée d’algues écumeuses et d’émeraudes, tel est l’ordre auquel une rigueur mal comprise et une prudence esclave, dans l’art comme ailleurs, nous engagent à obtempérer depuis des siècles. Tel est aussi l’ordre qui, historiquement, s’est trouvé enfreint dans des circonstances exceptionnelles, fondamentales. Le surréalisme part de là.» (Breton, op. cit., II, pp. 375-376).
As to literary technique, it is fair to assume that Jack Kerouac—whose counterpart of the «coulée verbale» (Breton, op. cit., II, p. 380) of écriture automatique was the «undisturbed flow» of spontaneous bop prosody—would have been very attuned to surrealist poetic practice. «If possible», he urged, «write “without consciousness” in semi-trance (as Yeats’ later “trance writing”), allowing subconscious to admit in own uninhibited interesting necessary and so “modern” language what conscious art would censor, and write excitedly, swiftly, with writing-or-typing-cramps, in accordance (as from center to periphery) with laws of orgasm, Reich's “beclouding of consciousness”» (Kerouac, «Essentials of Spontaneous Prose»). Indeed, he exhorted to do «no revisions (except obvious rational mistakes, such as names or calculated insertions in act of not writing but inserting)» (Kerouac, ibid.), as William S. Burroughs confirms in his essay «Hemingway»: «Kerouac had the idea that the first draft was always the best. You should just let the mind flow and type away, and never change it» (Burroughs, The Adding Machine, p. 67).
The entries of which Kora in Hell is composed were called by William Carlos Williams «Improvisations»: «For a year I used to come home and no matter how late it was before I went to bed I would write “something”» he said to Edith Heal. «And I kept writing, writing, even if it were only a few words, and at the end of the year there were 365 entries. Even if I had nothing in my mind at all I put something down, and as may be expected, some of the entries were pure nonsense […] Some were unintelligible to a stranger and I knew that I would have to interpret them» (Williams, I Wanted To Write a Poem, pp. 38-39).
More explicitly, Dr. Williams described this technique commenting A Novelette and Other Prose: «I wrote for personal satisfaction. This was automatic writing. I sat and faced the paper and wrote. The same method as in the IMPROVISATIONS but the material has advanced; it is more sophisticated» (Williams, op. cit., p. 60). And speaking of Life Along the Passaic River, he added: «The best stories were written at white heat. I would come home from my practice and sit down and write until the story was finished, ten to twelve pages. I seldom revised at all» (Williams, op. cit., p. 73).
In one of his essays on Samuel Beckett, inquiring into the relation between meaning and language, Riccardo Campi opposes the «faticoso farsi» to the spontaneous flow of writing: «Per Beckett tuttavia screditare il linguaggio della letteratura non significa mostrarne semplicemente il rovescio, sottraendo la scrittura al senso, ossia, detto altrimenti, giocando con il non-senso, abbandonandosi alla deriva di un’improbabile écriture automatique o di una folle tiritera dadaista, bensì consiste nel fare implodere la teologia del significato che pare avere sempre dominato ogni atto di scrittura» (Campi, Favole per dialettici, p. 93).
Elsewhere, however, Campi shows how «l’immagine ossessiva […] ritma la scrittura beckettiana», underlining «l’insistenza e l’ostinazione con cui una certa immagine (che, in definitiva, non è altro che una situazione irrigidita, priva di sviluppo narrativo o drammatico) ricorre incessantemente e passa da un testo di Beckett all’altro, mutando magari di funzione e di significato (si tratterebbe allora di definire, di volta in volta, in che modo), ma conservando sempre la stessa forza espressiva e, per così dire, iconica. Si potrebbe quindi considerare la fine di Company come la sintesi di una vasta trama di immagini ossessive, che Beckett non derivava direttamente dal suo inconscio, bensì dalla propria memoria letteraria» (Campi, Invenzione e oblio, pp. 105-106). On the other hand, Campi recognizes, «resta pur sempre da spiegare il motivo per cui Beckett fosse ossessionato proprio da quell’immagine piuttosto che da altre» (Campi, ibid., p. 106).
Automatic writing belongs to the unconscious, the imagination, the underworld with its haunting images—a black void packed with words, sounds and voices—or «les zones obscures où ne s’exercent plus les controles divers de la raison», as Marguerite Bonnet noticed (Breton, op. cit., I, p. 1126)—the source from which speech itself springs forth, as well as conditions, production and formation of language and poetry, and their very possibilities (Breton, loc. cit.).
Even in écriture automatique, however, underworld materials outcrop through «memoria letteraria», as Marguerirte Bonnet has documented in his analysis of Poisson soluble (see Breton, op. cit., I, pp. 1376, 1378 ss.): «engendrement du texte par lui-meme» (Breton, loc. cit.), or, in Kerouac’s words, writing «outwards swimming in sea of language», «following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement» (Kerouac, «Essentials»). Besides, as W.S. Burroughs stated in «Heart Beat», writing consists usually in transmuting or trying to solve some problem or essential obsession (Burroughs, Scrittura Creativa, p. 66).
Otherwise stated, writing comes about from obsessions, haunting images—underworld materials—used by the writer as bits of pipe by a plumber, as Beckett once set forth in a famous letter to James Knowlson (Knowlson, «Beckett’s “Bits of Pipe”», p. 16).
Everybody has his own bits of pipe—images, words, phrases, which return and resurface as poetic materials in the process of writing, to be variously rearranged and reworked later—waifs of wrecks—besetting words, constructions and rethorical figures… And automatic writing—«dont le procès naturel est la relance du langage par lui-meme» (Breton, op. cit., II, p. 1315)—pulls them all out from the deeps of the underworld waters to the surface of the blank sheet, bringing to light every sort of fault in style and form, too, and letting raw materials—obsessing figures and shapes included—transpire through the building, carving and moulding of literary composition.
For this reason, as well as for the bewitching effects it stirs up, and because «pratiquée avec quelque ferveur, mène tout droit à l’hallucination visuelle» (Breton, op. cit., II, p. 390; cfr. I, p. 1128), as Breton acknowledges, pure automatism is dangerous. With no automatism at all, however, no writing is generated. Thought, images, forms, arise from and flow in the material act of writing—«no form until the dice are cast».
Often, as writing experience shows, writing writes itself, or imposes itself as enigmatic, though with the certainty of an ungrasped meaning. It makes itself in a continuous tension between spontaneity and construction, awareness and unconscious, conscious design and hazardous chance—as in divination, where the conditions allowing images and forms to be casually and spontaneously produced, are meticolously arranged beforehand—processes of the same type as those brought about by John Cage, for example…
REFERENCES
Breton, André, Oeuvres Complètes, I, èdition ètablie par Marguerite Bonnet, avec, pour ce volume, la collaboration de Philippe Bernier, Etienne-Alain Hubert et José Pierre, Paris, Gallimard, 1988.
Breton, André, Oeuvres Complètes, II, èdition ètablie par Marguerite Bonnet, avec, pour ce volume, la collaboration de Philippe Bernier, Etienne-Alain Hubert et José Pierre, Paris, Gallimard, 1992.
Burroughs, William S., «Heart Beat», in La scrittura creativa, Milano, SugarCo., 1981, pp. 59-71.
Burroughs, William S., «Hemingway», in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, New York, Seaver Books, pp. 66-70.
Campi, Riccardo, «“Al confine del silenzio e della notte”: Scrittura e oscurità in Samuel Beckett», in Favole per dialettici: Allegoria e modernità, Milano, Mimesis, 2005, pp. 79-108.
Campi, Riccardo, «La tradizione come ossessione. Presenze di Chamfort nell’opera di Samuel Beckett», in Invenzione e oblio: Indagini sulla tradizione letteraria, Milano, Medusa, 2005, pp. 95-108.
Kerouac, Jack, «Essentials of Spontaneous Prose», <http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/kerouac-spontaneous.html>
Knowlson, James, «Beckett’s “Bits of pipe”», in Samuel Beckett. Humanistic Perspectives, edited by Morris Beja, S.E. Gontarski e Pierre Astier, Columbus (Ohio), Ohio State University Press, 1982, pp. 16-25.
Williams, William Carlos, I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet, reported and edited by Edith Heal, London, Jonathan Cape, 1967.