Automatic writing was originally a psychic practice, traced to 19th-century Chinese “spirit writing,” wherein the writer attempted to channel or transcribe writing without the interference of conscious activity, so that the result was produced either by the subconscious self or external psychic forces or spirits. In this essay, Barthes refers to a similar but more specific practice, usually called automatism, associated with French surrealist writers, especially André Breton. Surrealist automatism aimed to evade the censorship of the conscious self. One technique involved collective writing done by multiple authors. Automatism was also carried out by surrealist visual artists, who emphasized random improvisation and chance occurrences.

Bouvard and Pecuchet is an unfinished novel by Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880). Flaubert intended the novel to be his masterwork. In it, two Parisian copy clerks befriend each other; when one inherits a substantial amount of money, they decide to quit their jobs and retire to the countryside. There they pass their time trying to make sense, mostly idiotically, of all the various branches of human knowledge. Time and again they fumble through ideas, buffoonishly following them to one confused and disappointing dead end after another, learning nothing. Part of what impedes them, besides their amateurish mediocrity, is a habit of confusing signs and symbols with the things they stand for.