For the Jean-Michel Jarre album "Les Chants Magnétiques", see Magnetic Fields (album)

Magnetic Fields (album)

Magnetic Fields is the third mainstream album by Jean Michel Jarre , released on Disques Dreyfus in 1981...

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For the American band led by Stephin Merritt, see The Magnetic Fields

The Magnetic Fields

The Magnetic Fields is the principal creative outlet of singer-songwriter Stephin Merritt...

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Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields) is a book by André Breton

André Breton

André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....

 and Philippe Soupault

Philippe Soupault

Philippe Soupault was a French writer and poet, novelist, critic, and political activist. He was active in Dadaism and later founded the Surrealist movement with André Breton...

. It is famed as the first work of literary Surrealism

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

. Published in 1920, the authors used a surrealist automatic writing

Surrealist automatism

Automatism has taken on many forms: the automatic writing and drawing initially practiced by surrealists can be compared to similar, or perhaps parallel phenomena, such as the non-idiomatic improvisation of free jazz....

 technique.

The book is considered Surrealist, rather than Dada

Dada

Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...

ist, because it attempts to create something new rather than react to an existing work.

Les Champs Magnetiques is characterised by rich textured language that often seems to border 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

Exquisite corpse

Exquisite corpse, also known as exquisite cadaver 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 Exquisite corpse, also known as exquisite cadaver (from the original...

" (a method whereby each of a group of collaborators, in sequence, adds words or images to a composition).

A typical paragraph in (an English-language version of) Les Champs Magnetiques is:

It was the end of sorrow lies. The rail stations were dead, flowing like bees stung from honeysuckle. The people hung back and watched the ocean, animals flew in and out of focus. The time had come. Yet king dogs never grow old – they stay young and fit, and someday they might come to the beach and have a few drinks, a few laughs, and get on with it. But not now. The time had come; we all knew it. But who would go first?

The division between chapters was the point where the writers stopped writing at the end of the day. The next chapter was started the following morning.

Breton gave many interviews about the creation of the book.