Katharine Conley

Surrealism's Ghostly Automatic Body

When André Breton described the experience of surrealist automatism in the first ‘‘Manifesto of Surrealism’’ in 1924, he resorted to comparing the automatist’s body to a sentient technological object: ‘‘we [. . .] have made ourselves into simple receptacles of so many echoes, modest recording instruments’’ (Manifestoes 27–28). He imagines the body as a kind of a material pun, at once a living being and an object endowed with enough discerning subjectivity to pass the test for the true surrealist, which was whether or not he or she had ‘‘heard the Surrealist voice’’ (27). This advocacy of receptive attunement to the unknown within the self, to voices bubbling up from within the unconscious mind, constitutes surrealist automatism’s most ghostly aspect and extends the injunction of surrealist forebear Arthur Rimbaud to find the other within the self and let it speak. ‘‘Je est un autre,’’ Rimbaud wrote in May 1871, ‘‘I is someone else,’’ using irregular grammar to distinguish between self and other; ‘‘I am present at this birth of my thought’’ (Complete Works 305). For the surrealists, as for Sigmund Freud, inner voices have the potential to shed light on the human condition, divided as it is between conscious and unconscious realities. Nine years after the ‘‘Manifesto’’ Breton describes the inner voices that surface during the automatic experience as communicating a ‘‘subliminal message’’ that speaks in a language ‘‘which has nothing supernatural about it and which, for each and every one of us, is the vehicle of revelation’’ (Break of Day 138). In this essay I will present parallel models for the automatic experience dating from the 1920s to the 1980s showing how these experiences were consistently described as ghostly and arguing for surrealist ghostliness as a paradigm for understanding the movement as a whole. Breton’s rejection of the supernatural in ‘‘The Automatic Message’’ from 1933 confirmed his stance in ‘‘The Mediums Enter’’ from 1922, when he insisted that at no point had he or his fellow surrealists adopted ‘‘the spiritualist

Modernist Primitivism in 1933: Brassai's "Involuntary Sculptures" in Minotaure

Brassaïs photographs of Involuntary Sculptures in number 3-4 of Minotaure from December 1933 emblematize the journals focus on ethnographic modernism. His magnification of everyday Western ephemera transforms them into mysterious aesthetic objects comparable in their strangeness to the exotic tribal art brought back from ethnographic expeditions and presented in the pages of the same luxurious journal. Through this implicit comparison, Brassaï problematizes the Western primitivist notion of the tribal fetish and concurrently asks whether there might not be something sacred buried in our most ordinary and familiar everyday objects.

Surrealism, Ethnography, and the Animal-Human

In the first “Manifesto of Surrealism” from 1924, André Breton described himself and his companions in the newly formed group as having transformed themselves, “dans nos œuvres les sourds réceptacles de tant d’échos, les modestes appareils enregistreurs” (Œuvres complètes 1: 330). In this way, he established a significant equivalence between human beings and things based on the shared property of receptivity, and he began an ongoing examination of what makes humans human and whether objects could have sentience. Could objects truly have sentience—the ability to communicate with intention? Were human beings at times like technological objects? Breton pursued these questions extensively in the 1930s with his essays on objects and continued in the 1940s and 1950s with his studies of objects in his collection, specifically his transformation masks from the American Pacific Northwest Coast. Surrealism began a line of questioning about the limits and possibilities of human sentience and identity that was in line with the broader trend in twentieth-century philosophical thought that questioned the centrality of the Western Cartesian subject, leading to the innovations of the “nouveau roman” and its successors in literature; to poststructuralism in critical theory; and to the present-day focus on animal studies, launched in France by Jacques Derrida’s influential essay, “L’animal que donc je suis (à suivre)” (2004), originally delivered as a lecture at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1999. Animal studies or posthumanism was clearly established as an influential philosophical field and had an impact on literary studies with the devotion of a cluster of articles in PMLA to the question in 2009, ten years after Derrida delivered his seminal lecture, with articles by Neel Ahuja, Kimberly Benston, Rosi Braidotti, and Cary Wolfe, among others, and a guest column by Marianne DeKoven. Indeed, surrealism was one of the sources for post-World War II critical theory, along with the thought of Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand Saussure, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. The surrealists persisted in oscillating between humanistic and nonhumanistic perspectives, from the idealization of the unconscious mind as a repository for truth implicit in the first experiments with automatism, to the recognition that unconscious drives often include violent and other nonrational tendencies impossible to contain. In this way, surrealism was at once modernist and postmodernist—and therefore humanistic—in the surrealists’ desire to understand the human condition; it was posthumanistic as well in the surrealists’ tolerance of violence as a strategy embedded in their support of revolution. Posthumanism, including animal studies, could learn from surrealism’s persistent dynamism that is inherent in the structure of reversibility evident in the equivalence Breton explored through his comparison of a human being to recording instruments as early as the “Manifesto.” Surrealism evolved with the twentieth century and survived longer than most other avant-garde movements. As a result, it has had an impact on culture that is

Sleeping Gods in Surrealist Collections

When Antonin Artaud wrote about “the gods that sleep in museums,” he could have been describing André Bretons personal collection, which included the kinds of non-Western works Artaud admired in what were then museums of ethnography. Such objects were plentiful in Bretons study and included shape-shifting animals such as the Haida transformation mask Breton wrote about in 1950, whose features move back and forth from human to animal, recognizing the common spiritual connection between the two in a material representation of the concept of the totem animal embraced by several surrealists—the fish for Breton, the bird for Max Ernst, the horse for Leonora Carrington, the dog for Dorothea Tanning. This article examines how the surrealists’ talismanic animal totems, reflected in their love of non-Western spiritually infused objects, anticipated the current trend in animal studies to expand the human understanding of consciousness in light of animal–human commonalities.

The allegorical impulse in the works of Julien Gracq : history as rhetorical enactment in Le rivage des Syrtes and Un balcon en forêt

This text focuses on the role of history in Julien Gracqs novels, Le Rivage Des Syrtes and Un Balcon En Foret, and in his critical essays. It draws on theories of allegory, textuality and history in its analysis of the interplay of fictional and factual history in Gracqs writings.