The automatic image

a ridiculous formal justication, or because it is of a hallucinatory kind, or because it very naturally gives to the abstract the mask of the concrete, or the opposite or because it implies the negation of some elementary physical property, or because it provokes laughter.44

Breton gives an example. While falling asleep one evening, he notes a strange phrase which came to me that had nothing to do with anything which he was conscious of. He does not remember it exactly, but the phrase was something like there is a man cut in two by the window. This phrase insinuated itself, he says, accompanied by a faint visual image of a man walking cut halfway up by a window perpendicular to the axis of his body.45 Breton produces an image which he is not able to reveal the origin of:
Beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt, what I saw was the simple reconstruction in space of a man leaning out a window. But this window having shifted with the man, I realized that I was dealing with an image of a fairly rare sort, and all I could think of was to incorporate it into my material for poetic construction. No sooner had I granted it this capacity than it was in fact succeeded by a whole series of phrases, with only brief pauses between them, which surprised me with the impression of their being so gratuitous that the control I had then exercised upon myself seemed to me illusory and all I could think of was putting an end to the interminable quarrel raging within me.46

There are at least four points to be drawn from this example. First, its form: as Breton notes, the image itself takes the form of a phrase as a set of words. The visual image produced is constructed through linguistic signs. In a footnote to his example, Breton comments on the relative strengths of auditory and visual types of phenomena, stating that it was his prior predisposition to auditory phenomena that gave them the emphasis over the visual. Were I a painter, he wrote, this visual depiction would doubtless have become more important for me than the other.47 Second, the image produced is cryptic, a laconic picture. The scene depicted is a kind of rebus or hieroglyph, a model of writing irreducible to

Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. , note.

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