Abstract: For Gracq, the aesthetics of Breton’s Les Champs Magnétiques (1920) rest on a fundamental image rooted in the intersection of animal magnetism and electromagnetic induction. This hybrid image, which blends cognition and the physical sciences, structures the Surrealist exploration of the unpredictable through his favourite themes of shock, contamination, transmutation, and, more generally, invisible energies. Gracq demonstrates that the originality of Surrealism’s ‘volatile’ imagination depended on several (electro)magnetic discoveries.
