On the very next turn, the Exquisite Corpse was born—under the pen of Prévert, precisely, for it was he who wrote down the first words: “The Exquisite Corpse”, so well completed by “will drink the new wine.” Once the imagination of these fellows was set loose, there was no stopping it. André shouted with joy, immediately recognizing in this game one of those natural wellsprings or waterfalls of inspiration that he loved so much to discover. It was an ‘unfettering.’ Even more so than with automatic writing, we were sure of getting an astonishing amalgam. Violent surprise provoked our admiration and sparked an insatiable passion for new images: images unimaginable by one brain alone—images born of the involuntary, unconscious, and unpredictable combination of three or four heterogeneous minds. Some sentences assumed an aggressively subversive character. Others lapsed into excessive absurdity. And don't forget—the wastebasket had a role in all this. Nonetheless, the suggestive power of those arbitrary meetings of words was so astounding, so dazzling, and verified surrealism’s theses and outlook so strikingly, that the game became a system, a method of research, a means of exaltation as well as stimulation, and even, perhaps, a kind of drug.
Simone Kahn Breton, Surrealist Women: An International Anthology
