Surrealism heavily influenced the later psychedelic movement.
The psychedelic movement of the 1960s and '70s drew heavily on the ideas and work of the early 20th century Dada and Surrealist artists. These avant-garde pioneers' insistence on the supremacy of subjective, unconscious reality, rejection of linear, rational thought and their subversive, anti-institutional humor would later become hallmarks of psychedelia. Dada and Surrealist artists recommended a number of prescriptive writing techniques. Foremost among them are the Dada poem, automatic writing, exquisite corpse and the cut-up.
Dada Poems
In his 1924 "Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love," movement leader, anti-poet and all around prankster Tristan Tzara gives the following "recipe" for a Dada poem:
"Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article. Next, carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag. Shake gently. Next take out each cutting one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag."
Tzara assures the reader that "the poem will resemble you."
Such an approach, utilizing pure chance within a given field selected by the author (the newspaper article), subverts any sense of rational meaning while creating startling, humorous and sometimes revealing images and juxtapositions.
Automatic Writing
The most direct and quintessential Surrealistic writing technique, automatic writing aims at bypassing linear, rational thought and tapping directly into the author's subconscious. The author accomplishes this by sitting before a sheet of paper in a "receptive" state of mind and writing as quickly and thoughtlessly as possible without stopping. The effect is similar to Freudian free association used in psychoanalysis. Authors Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault produced the 1920 novel "The Magnetic Fields" entirely by automatic writing.
Exquisite Corpse
"The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine" reads the first phrase produced through this collaborative Surrealist writing game. There are many variations of exquisite corpse. In the simplest version, one author writes the complete subject of a sentence, and another author writes the complete predicate without knowing what the first author has written. The resulting sentence is often surprising and absurd. In a longer exquisite corpse, one player writes a paragraph, then the next player reads only the last line and continues with the next paragraph, and so on. Exquisite corpse also works to produce psychedelic drawings, paintings and collages.
Cut-Ups
Inspired by Tristan Tzara's dada poetry, American writers Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs first experimented with cut-ups in the 1950s. A cut-up involves taking a complete, linear, narrative text and cutting the pages in to chunks of varying length, and then rearranging them to form a new text. The cut-up can then be edited and rewritten to form the basis of a new narrative, or left "raw" and unedited. Burroughs made extensive use of cut-ups in his influential 1959 novel "Naked Lunch."
