SOURCE: "Graphemic Gymnastics in Surrealist Literature," in The Romanic Review, Vol. 81, No. 2, March, 1990, pp. 211-23.

In the following excerpt, Metzidakis analyzes Breton's extraordinary use of language in Poisson soluble.

Although the term "surrealist" has come to be applied to many different kinds of writing—from the bizarre to the fantastic—the term itself was first defined and used extensively by the founder and eventual "pope" of the Surrealist movement, André Breton. For him the word referred specifically to the type of texts that he and his cohorts were producing automatically, beginning in the period that directly followed World War I. While similar to contemporary dadaist works in their apparent semantic incoherence, early surrealist texts constituted a literature that was nevertheless intended to serve a specific societal purpose, unlike the more anarchic, nihilistic dadaist works. Specifically, automatic texts were from the start of the Surrealist movement meant to help...