surrealist ghostliness
TRANSCRIPT
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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University of Nebraska - Lincoln
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University of Nebraska Press
4-1-2013
Surrealist GhostlinessKatharine Conley
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Surrealist Ghostliness
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S U R R E A L I S T
GHOSTLINESS
Katharine Conley
University of Nebraska Press
Lincoln and London
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copy 2013 by the Board o Regents o
the University o Nebraska
Acknowledgments or the use o
previously published material appear
on page xx which constitutes an
extension o the copyright page
All rights reserved
Manuactured in the United States o America
Publication o this volume was assistedby unds rom the Arts amp Humanities
Division or the Faculty o Arts amp
Sciences at Dartmouth College
Library o Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conley Katharine 1956ndash
Surrealist ghostliness Katharine Conley
pages cm Includes bibliographical
reerences and index
983113983123983106983118 978-0-8032-2659-3
(hardback alk paper)
1 Surrealismmdash Temes motives I itle
9831189831284565983123898310766 2013
70904063mdash dc23 2012049901
Set in Minion by Laura Wellington
Designed by Nathan Putens
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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For Marian who helped me see ghostliness
And for Richard always
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List o Illustrations viii
Preace xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1048625
1048625 Te Cinematic Whirl o Man
Rayrsquos Ghostly Objects 10486261048625
1048626 Claude Cahunrsquos Exploration o theAutobiographical Human 10486281048629
1048627 Te Ethnographic Automatism
o Brassaiuml and Daliacutersquos
Involuntary Sculptures 10486301048633
1048628 Te Ghostliness in Lee Millerrsquos
Egyptian Landscapes 10486331048625 1048629 Dorothea anningrsquos Gothic
Ghostliness 104862510486251048633
1048630 Francesca Woodmanrsquos
Ghostly Interior Maps 104862510486291048625
1048631 Pierre Alechinskyrsquos Ghostly
Palimpsests 104862510486311048633
1048632 Susan Hillerrsquos Freudian Ghosts 104862601048625
Conclusion 104862610486261048631
Notes 104862610486271048627
Bibliography 104862610486291048631
Index 104862610486311048629
Contents
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1048625 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors xiii
1048626 Marcel Duchamp Bottlerack 10486250
1048627 Man Ray Self-Portrait 10486261048626
1048628 Man Ray La Femme 10486261048627
1048629 Man Ray LrsquoHomme 10486261048627
1048630 Man Ray Champs deacutelicieux
(Rayogram) 10486261048628
1048631 Man Ray still rom
Retour agrave la raison 10486271048625
1048632 Man Ray Rrose Seacutelavy
(Marcel Duchamp) 10486281048630
1048633 Man Ray Hommage agrave
D A F de Sade 10486281048631
10486250 Claude Cahun Untitled 10486290
10486251048625 Claude Cahun Frontiegravere
humaine 10486291048632
10486251048626 Claude Cahun photomontage
rom Disavowals 10486291048633
10486251048627 Brassaiuml Sculptures involontaires 10486310
10486251048628 Lee Miller anja Ramm and theBelljar Variant on Hommage
agrave D A F de Sade 10486331048626
10486251048629 Lee Miller Under the Belljar 10486331048628
10486251048630 Lee Miller Exploding Hand 10486331048630
10486251048631 Lee Miller Nude Bent Forward 10486331048631
10486251048632 Lee Miller Domes of the Churchof the Virgin (al Adhra) Deir
el Soriano Monastery 104862501048625
Illustrations
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10486251048633 Lee Miller Te Procession (Bird
racks in the Sand) 104862501048627
10486260 Lee Miller Te Cloud Factory(Sacks of Cotton) 104862501048629
10486261048625 Lee Miller Portrait of Space 104862501048633
10486261048626 Lee Miller From the op of
the Great Pyramid 104862510486251048627
10486261048627 Dorothea anning Pelote drsquoeacutepingles
pouvant servir de feacutetiche 104862510486260 10486261048628 Dorothea anning
Childrenrsquos Games 104862510486261048628
10486261048629 Dorothea anning Eine
Kleine Nachtmusik 104862510486261048630
10486261048630 Dorothea anning Palaestra 104862510486261048632
10486261048631 Dorothea anning Birthday 104862510486261048633
10486261048632 Dorothea anning Premier peacuteril 104862510486271048628
10486261048633 Dorothea anning
Cinquiegraveme peacuteril 104862510486271048631
10486270 Dorothea anning Interior
with Sudden Joy 104862510486271048633
10486271048625 Dorothea anning Canapeacute
en temps de pluie 104862510486281048629
10486271048626 Dorothea anning Murmurs 104862510486281048631
10486271048627 Francesca Woodman House 3 104862510486291048628
10486271048628 Francesca Woodman
then at one point 104862510486291048631 10486271048629 Francesca Woodman
rom Space2 104862510486301048626
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10486271048630 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486301048630
10486271048631 Francesca Woodman Untitled 104862510486301048633
10486271048632 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486310
10486271048633 Francesca Woodman On
Being an Angel 104862510486311048626
10486280 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048627
10486281048625 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048628
10486281048626 Pierre Alechinsky Central Park 104862510486320
10486281048627 Pattern in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
painting Central Park 104862510486321048630
10486281048628 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (III) 104862510486331048627
10486281048629 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (VII) 104862510486331048629
10486281048630 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (X) 104862510486331048630
10486281048631 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862601048626
10486281048632 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486251048625
10486281048633 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486260
10486290 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486261048627
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xi
Preface
Surrealist Ghostliness began with the insight I had in 1048626000 that sur-realist perception was necessarily double and that anamorphosis
unctions well as a visual paradigm or this doubleness because o the
way surrealism purports to harness both our conscious and uncon-scious minds into a kind o idealized synthesis what Andreacute Bretonthe author o the 1047297rst two ldquoManiestoesrdquo o surrealism in 1048625104863310486261048628 and
1048625104863310486270 would call a resolution o old antinomies or a sublime point
As a result o this insight I wrote an exhibition catalogue essay on
surrealist love poetry called ldquoAnamorphic Loverdquo Tere or the 1047297rst
time I integrated ully an appreciation o surrealist visual art into my
more literary work paving the way or my ocus on art in SurrealistGhostliness As I was 1047297nishing my book on Robert Desnos in 1048626001048626
I realized that his tongue-twisting poetry produced in automatic
trances at the outset o the surrealist movement provided a textual
model or the double nature o surrealist perception Anamorphosison a visual level and Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo playul punning poemson an aural and textual level require an analogous two-step process
o comprehension what I called a double take involving a 1047297rst lookor hearing ollowed by a second retroactive look or hearing
My interest in anamorphosis began with the standard image we
know o the urn that on a second look resolves into the silhouette
o two human aces looking at one another or the duck that trans-
orms into a rabbit I then turned to the picture-poems o GuillaumeApollinaire the French poet who coined the word surrealism in 1048625104863310486251048631
and who created his handwritten ldquocalligramsrdquo when he was a soldierin World War I decades beore the concrete poets identi1047297ed these
poems as early twentieth-century precursors to their own Apollinaire
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xii Preace
arranged the words on the page to replicate playully the objects hedescribed such as a tie a ountain or a heart First we see the picturethe letters make and read the words and then retroactively through
a mental double take we see that the two sign systemsmdash visual andtextualmdash represent two versions o the same thing two intense im-
ages literal and metaphoric with the dominant version standing inor conscious reality and the secondary version hiding like a ghost
behind it standing in or unconscious dream reality that we know
exists but have trouble seeing simultaneously with the conscious
reality Each version looks like the thing described but in a different
way Neither replicates the other exactly the two coexist yet it isdifficult to apprehend them both at the same time
Tis train o thought led me to the most amous anamorphic
painting Hans Holbeinrsquos sixteenth-century Ambassadors (1048625104862910486271048627 see
1047297g 1048625) which was created to hang next to a door so that it could be
seen head on and then once again over onersquos shoulder at the instanto leaving the room at which point the skull lying at the ambassadorsrsquo
eet springs into ocus as the ambassadors themselves ade into ablur Tis over-the-shoulder retrospective glance unctions like thedouble take Apollinairersquos poems invite when we realize these two
perspectives constitute two aspects o the same reality
Surrealist perception is anamorphic in a way similar to the mo-
ment when a viewer perceives Holbeinrsquos Ambassadors sideways andbackward when or an instant both aspects o the painting become
apparent at once We suddenly understand that underlying the glori-ous achievements o the magni1047297cently dressed men in the paintinglies the mortality that awaits themmdash that awaits us all On second
glance the suppressed primitive truth o mortality is even more realthan the overt reality most o us live by which is actually more o a
dreamlike antasy or it deludes us into believing that we will live
orever protected rom the inevitable by prosperity Te repressed
truth is more real than the reality we live consciously Te distinc-tion between these realities like a membrane or elusive line that is
always moving away rom us just out o reach dissolves in such a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xiii
way as to make them almost indistinguishable rom each other For
the surrealists the sublime point resides at the instant when onereality bleeds into another so that or an instant both sides o the
duality may be understood simultaneously
I 1047297rst understood this anamorphic paradigm as ghostly in 1048626001048627when I began to study Lee Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs rom the
1048625104863310486270s starting with her Domes o the Church o the Virgin (al Adhra)
Deir el Soriano Monastery (ca 1048625104863310486271048630) (see 1047297g 10486251048632) Here I discovered
the ghost o a womanrsquos nude body looking down at hersel hiddenin a landscape photograph o a monastery that or centuries had
housed only men as though the ghosts o all the monks rom the
1 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors (1533) copy National Gallery London Art
Resource New York
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xiv Preace
past suddenly had succeeded in ul1047297lling a secret desire I was sure
this was not a mistake when I thought about Millerrsquos wry sense o
humor and then I began to 1047297nd ghost images in her other photo-
graphs it became clear to me that this anamorphic effect was at
once surrealist and ghostly Te ghostliness was con1047297rmed or me byher elegiac From the op of the Great Pyramid (ca 1048625104863310486271048631 see 1047297g 10486261048626)
shot when Miller knew she was soon to leave Egypt or Europe andan impending war which would provide the surrealists with new
ghosts beyond those o riends and amily rom the previous war
Te photograph hints at the ghostly presence o the photographer
hersel looking out at the landscape and also seems to invoke ghostsrom the distant past in dark anticipation o the upcoming war in
which Miller would enlist as an American photographer with the
US Army
Surrealist Ghostliness begins at the outset o the surrealist move-ment when the young surrealists listened entranced to Desnosrsquos
hypnotic utterings that sounded oracular and prophetic prooundly
ghostly and otherworldly and Desnosrsquos riend Man Raymdash the Ameri-can who recorded the movement photographically and later workedwith Millermdash began his experiments with 1047297lm I turn then to workscreated in dialogue with the movement rom the 1048625104863310486260s through the1048625104863310486330s including Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs Surrealist Ghostliness continues the exploration o surrealism I began in my 1047297rst book andpursues the sense my book on Desnos gave me o what it might eel
like to be haunted by someone by a ghost exhorting me to moveorward and complete a task that at times elt akin to conjuring notunlike the experience o all writers o critical biographies who openthemselves to a kind o willed haunting Tis book then allows meto see the movement as a whole in a historic sweep that allies it evenmore closely to the century into which I was born the century thatstill shapes our current era It also includes Americans such as Ray
Miller Dorothea anning Francesca Woodman and Susan Hillerwho like me were drawn to surrealism
My study o the artists presented here through the prism o ana-
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Preace xv
morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constantnegotiation with our own mortality in which our beings are dividedbetween dreams and everyday realities between the psychic and
the mundanely material the latent and the maniestmdash the maniestat times holding more secrets than the of-probed latent content
o personal experience In the preace to my 1047297rst book Automatic
Woman (1048625104863310486331048630) I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives ofenmirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had anautobiographical connection On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between maniestand latent realities in my own lie in my own amily story
mdash what
we tell others about our amily lie what others tell us and what weadmit only to ourselves More broadly with its ocus on the latent
and the visible the maniest and the ghostly this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literaturereveals the secret at the core o the human conditionmdash namely thatmortality implies a lie doubled by death a 1047297nitude within which
multiple baroque in1047297nitudes may be imagined Most o all I ound affirmation o a long-held belie that we live
experiences that are de1047297ned by what we intuit as much as by what wethink by what we eel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationallyinormed perceptions o perceive ully we must perceive doubly
at once peripherally and directly not unlike the way we look at Te
Ambassadors We need to remain open to what lies in between thewords or images in order to appreciate them Te surrealists under-stood this both those who worked in the movementrsquos mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins
1047297nding their centers elsewhere With this book I hope to show howthis rational surrealist quest or the knowledge o what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives which
we live in a state o perpetual and virtual reality have expanded toinclude what we do not ully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern possibly even post-Enlightenment world
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 240
Surrealist Ghostliness
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 340
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 440
S U R R E A L I S T
GHOSTLINESS
Katharine Conley
University of Nebraska Press
Lincoln and London
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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copy 2013 by the Board o Regents o
the University o Nebraska
Acknowledgments or the use o
previously published material appear
on page xx which constitutes an
extension o the copyright page
All rights reserved
Manuactured in the United States o America
Publication o this volume was assistedby unds rom the Arts amp Humanities
Division or the Faculty o Arts amp
Sciences at Dartmouth College
Library o Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conley Katharine 1956ndash
Surrealist ghostliness Katharine Conley
pages cm Includes bibliographical
reerences and index
983113983123983106983118 978-0-8032-2659-3
(hardback alk paper)
1 Surrealismmdash Temes motives I itle
9831189831284565983123898310766 2013
70904063mdash dc23 2012049901
Set in Minion by Laura Wellington
Designed by Nathan Putens
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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For Marian who helped me see ghostliness
And for Richard always
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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List o Illustrations viii
Preace xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1048625
1048625 Te Cinematic Whirl o Man
Rayrsquos Ghostly Objects 10486261048625
1048626 Claude Cahunrsquos Exploration o theAutobiographical Human 10486281048629
1048627 Te Ethnographic Automatism
o Brassaiuml and Daliacutersquos
Involuntary Sculptures 10486301048633
1048628 Te Ghostliness in Lee Millerrsquos
Egyptian Landscapes 10486331048625 1048629 Dorothea anningrsquos Gothic
Ghostliness 104862510486251048633
1048630 Francesca Woodmanrsquos
Ghostly Interior Maps 104862510486291048625
1048631 Pierre Alechinskyrsquos Ghostly
Palimpsests 104862510486311048633
1048632 Susan Hillerrsquos Freudian Ghosts 104862601048625
Conclusion 104862610486261048631
Notes 104862610486271048627
Bibliography 104862610486291048631
Index 104862610486311048629
Contents
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1048625 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors xiii
1048626 Marcel Duchamp Bottlerack 10486250
1048627 Man Ray Self-Portrait 10486261048626
1048628 Man Ray La Femme 10486261048627
1048629 Man Ray LrsquoHomme 10486261048627
1048630 Man Ray Champs deacutelicieux
(Rayogram) 10486261048628
1048631 Man Ray still rom
Retour agrave la raison 10486271048625
1048632 Man Ray Rrose Seacutelavy
(Marcel Duchamp) 10486281048630
1048633 Man Ray Hommage agrave
D A F de Sade 10486281048631
10486250 Claude Cahun Untitled 10486290
10486251048625 Claude Cahun Frontiegravere
humaine 10486291048632
10486251048626 Claude Cahun photomontage
rom Disavowals 10486291048633
10486251048627 Brassaiuml Sculptures involontaires 10486310
10486251048628 Lee Miller anja Ramm and theBelljar Variant on Hommage
agrave D A F de Sade 10486331048626
10486251048629 Lee Miller Under the Belljar 10486331048628
10486251048630 Lee Miller Exploding Hand 10486331048630
10486251048631 Lee Miller Nude Bent Forward 10486331048631
10486251048632 Lee Miller Domes of the Churchof the Virgin (al Adhra) Deir
el Soriano Monastery 104862501048625
Illustrations
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10486251048633 Lee Miller Te Procession (Bird
racks in the Sand) 104862501048627
10486260 Lee Miller Te Cloud Factory(Sacks of Cotton) 104862501048629
10486261048625 Lee Miller Portrait of Space 104862501048633
10486261048626 Lee Miller From the op of
the Great Pyramid 104862510486251048627
10486261048627 Dorothea anning Pelote drsquoeacutepingles
pouvant servir de feacutetiche 104862510486260 10486261048628 Dorothea anning
Childrenrsquos Games 104862510486261048628
10486261048629 Dorothea anning Eine
Kleine Nachtmusik 104862510486261048630
10486261048630 Dorothea anning Palaestra 104862510486261048632
10486261048631 Dorothea anning Birthday 104862510486261048633
10486261048632 Dorothea anning Premier peacuteril 104862510486271048628
10486261048633 Dorothea anning
Cinquiegraveme peacuteril 104862510486271048631
10486270 Dorothea anning Interior
with Sudden Joy 104862510486271048633
10486271048625 Dorothea anning Canapeacute
en temps de pluie 104862510486281048629
10486271048626 Dorothea anning Murmurs 104862510486281048631
10486271048627 Francesca Woodman House 3 104862510486291048628
10486271048628 Francesca Woodman
then at one point 104862510486291048631 10486271048629 Francesca Woodman
rom Space2 104862510486301048626
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10486271048630 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486301048630
10486271048631 Francesca Woodman Untitled 104862510486301048633
10486271048632 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486310
10486271048633 Francesca Woodman On
Being an Angel 104862510486311048626
10486280 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048627
10486281048625 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048628
10486281048626 Pierre Alechinsky Central Park 104862510486320
10486281048627 Pattern in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
painting Central Park 104862510486321048630
10486281048628 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (III) 104862510486331048627
10486281048629 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (VII) 104862510486331048629
10486281048630 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (X) 104862510486331048630
10486281048631 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862601048626
10486281048632 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486251048625
10486281048633 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486260
10486290 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486261048627
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xi
Preface
Surrealist Ghostliness began with the insight I had in 1048626000 that sur-realist perception was necessarily double and that anamorphosis
unctions well as a visual paradigm or this doubleness because o the
way surrealism purports to harness both our conscious and uncon-scious minds into a kind o idealized synthesis what Andreacute Bretonthe author o the 1047297rst two ldquoManiestoesrdquo o surrealism in 1048625104863310486261048628 and
1048625104863310486270 would call a resolution o old antinomies or a sublime point
As a result o this insight I wrote an exhibition catalogue essay on
surrealist love poetry called ldquoAnamorphic Loverdquo Tere or the 1047297rst
time I integrated ully an appreciation o surrealist visual art into my
more literary work paving the way or my ocus on art in SurrealistGhostliness As I was 1047297nishing my book on Robert Desnos in 1048626001048626
I realized that his tongue-twisting poetry produced in automatic
trances at the outset o the surrealist movement provided a textual
model or the double nature o surrealist perception Anamorphosison a visual level and Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo playul punning poemson an aural and textual level require an analogous two-step process
o comprehension what I called a double take involving a 1047297rst lookor hearing ollowed by a second retroactive look or hearing
My interest in anamorphosis began with the standard image we
know o the urn that on a second look resolves into the silhouette
o two human aces looking at one another or the duck that trans-
orms into a rabbit I then turned to the picture-poems o GuillaumeApollinaire the French poet who coined the word surrealism in 1048625104863310486251048631
and who created his handwritten ldquocalligramsrdquo when he was a soldierin World War I decades beore the concrete poets identi1047297ed these
poems as early twentieth-century precursors to their own Apollinaire
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xii Preace
arranged the words on the page to replicate playully the objects hedescribed such as a tie a ountain or a heart First we see the picturethe letters make and read the words and then retroactively through
a mental double take we see that the two sign systemsmdash visual andtextualmdash represent two versions o the same thing two intense im-
ages literal and metaphoric with the dominant version standing inor conscious reality and the secondary version hiding like a ghost
behind it standing in or unconscious dream reality that we know
exists but have trouble seeing simultaneously with the conscious
reality Each version looks like the thing described but in a different
way Neither replicates the other exactly the two coexist yet it isdifficult to apprehend them both at the same time
Tis train o thought led me to the most amous anamorphic
painting Hans Holbeinrsquos sixteenth-century Ambassadors (1048625104862910486271048627 see
1047297g 1048625) which was created to hang next to a door so that it could be
seen head on and then once again over onersquos shoulder at the instanto leaving the room at which point the skull lying at the ambassadorsrsquo
eet springs into ocus as the ambassadors themselves ade into ablur Tis over-the-shoulder retrospective glance unctions like thedouble take Apollinairersquos poems invite when we realize these two
perspectives constitute two aspects o the same reality
Surrealist perception is anamorphic in a way similar to the mo-
ment when a viewer perceives Holbeinrsquos Ambassadors sideways andbackward when or an instant both aspects o the painting become
apparent at once We suddenly understand that underlying the glori-ous achievements o the magni1047297cently dressed men in the paintinglies the mortality that awaits themmdash that awaits us all On second
glance the suppressed primitive truth o mortality is even more realthan the overt reality most o us live by which is actually more o a
dreamlike antasy or it deludes us into believing that we will live
orever protected rom the inevitable by prosperity Te repressed
truth is more real than the reality we live consciously Te distinc-tion between these realities like a membrane or elusive line that is
always moving away rom us just out o reach dissolves in such a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xiii
way as to make them almost indistinguishable rom each other For
the surrealists the sublime point resides at the instant when onereality bleeds into another so that or an instant both sides o the
duality may be understood simultaneously
I 1047297rst understood this anamorphic paradigm as ghostly in 1048626001048627when I began to study Lee Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs rom the
1048625104863310486270s starting with her Domes o the Church o the Virgin (al Adhra)
Deir el Soriano Monastery (ca 1048625104863310486271048630) (see 1047297g 10486251048632) Here I discovered
the ghost o a womanrsquos nude body looking down at hersel hiddenin a landscape photograph o a monastery that or centuries had
housed only men as though the ghosts o all the monks rom the
1 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors (1533) copy National Gallery London Art
Resource New York
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xiv Preace
past suddenly had succeeded in ul1047297lling a secret desire I was sure
this was not a mistake when I thought about Millerrsquos wry sense o
humor and then I began to 1047297nd ghost images in her other photo-
graphs it became clear to me that this anamorphic effect was at
once surrealist and ghostly Te ghostliness was con1047297rmed or me byher elegiac From the op of the Great Pyramid (ca 1048625104863310486271048631 see 1047297g 10486261048626)
shot when Miller knew she was soon to leave Egypt or Europe andan impending war which would provide the surrealists with new
ghosts beyond those o riends and amily rom the previous war
Te photograph hints at the ghostly presence o the photographer
hersel looking out at the landscape and also seems to invoke ghostsrom the distant past in dark anticipation o the upcoming war in
which Miller would enlist as an American photographer with the
US Army
Surrealist Ghostliness begins at the outset o the surrealist move-ment when the young surrealists listened entranced to Desnosrsquos
hypnotic utterings that sounded oracular and prophetic prooundly
ghostly and otherworldly and Desnosrsquos riend Man Raymdash the Ameri-can who recorded the movement photographically and later workedwith Millermdash began his experiments with 1047297lm I turn then to workscreated in dialogue with the movement rom the 1048625104863310486260s through the1048625104863310486330s including Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs Surrealist Ghostliness continues the exploration o surrealism I began in my 1047297rst book andpursues the sense my book on Desnos gave me o what it might eel
like to be haunted by someone by a ghost exhorting me to moveorward and complete a task that at times elt akin to conjuring notunlike the experience o all writers o critical biographies who openthemselves to a kind o willed haunting Tis book then allows meto see the movement as a whole in a historic sweep that allies it evenmore closely to the century into which I was born the century thatstill shapes our current era It also includes Americans such as Ray
Miller Dorothea anning Francesca Woodman and Susan Hillerwho like me were drawn to surrealism
My study o the artists presented here through the prism o ana-
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xv
morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constantnegotiation with our own mortality in which our beings are dividedbetween dreams and everyday realities between the psychic and
the mundanely material the latent and the maniestmdash the maniestat times holding more secrets than the of-probed latent content
o personal experience In the preace to my 1047297rst book Automatic
Woman (1048625104863310486331048630) I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives ofenmirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had anautobiographical connection On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between maniestand latent realities in my own lie in my own amily story
mdash what
we tell others about our amily lie what others tell us and what weadmit only to ourselves More broadly with its ocus on the latent
and the visible the maniest and the ghostly this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literaturereveals the secret at the core o the human conditionmdash namely thatmortality implies a lie doubled by death a 1047297nitude within which
multiple baroque in1047297nitudes may be imagined Most o all I ound affirmation o a long-held belie that we live
experiences that are de1047297ned by what we intuit as much as by what wethink by what we eel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationallyinormed perceptions o perceive ully we must perceive doubly
at once peripherally and directly not unlike the way we look at Te
Ambassadors We need to remain open to what lies in between thewords or images in order to appreciate them Te surrealists under-stood this both those who worked in the movementrsquos mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins
1047297nding their centers elsewhere With this book I hope to show howthis rational surrealist quest or the knowledge o what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives which
we live in a state o perpetual and virtual reality have expanded toinclude what we do not ully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern possibly even post-Enlightenment world
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 440
S U R R E A L I S T
GHOSTLINESS
Katharine Conley
University of Nebraska Press
Lincoln and London
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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copy 2013 by the Board o Regents o
the University o Nebraska
Acknowledgments or the use o
previously published material appear
on page xx which constitutes an
extension o the copyright page
All rights reserved
Manuactured in the United States o America
Publication o this volume was assistedby unds rom the Arts amp Humanities
Division or the Faculty o Arts amp
Sciences at Dartmouth College
Library o Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conley Katharine 1956ndash
Surrealist ghostliness Katharine Conley
pages cm Includes bibliographical
reerences and index
983113983123983106983118 978-0-8032-2659-3
(hardback alk paper)
1 Surrealismmdash Temes motives I itle
9831189831284565983123898310766 2013
70904063mdash dc23 2012049901
Set in Minion by Laura Wellington
Designed by Nathan Putens
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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For Marian who helped me see ghostliness
And for Richard always
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 740
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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List o Illustrations viii
Preace xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1048625
1048625 Te Cinematic Whirl o Man
Rayrsquos Ghostly Objects 10486261048625
1048626 Claude Cahunrsquos Exploration o theAutobiographical Human 10486281048629
1048627 Te Ethnographic Automatism
o Brassaiuml and Daliacutersquos
Involuntary Sculptures 10486301048633
1048628 Te Ghostliness in Lee Millerrsquos
Egyptian Landscapes 10486331048625 1048629 Dorothea anningrsquos Gothic
Ghostliness 104862510486251048633
1048630 Francesca Woodmanrsquos
Ghostly Interior Maps 104862510486291048625
1048631 Pierre Alechinskyrsquos Ghostly
Palimpsests 104862510486311048633
1048632 Susan Hillerrsquos Freudian Ghosts 104862601048625
Conclusion 104862610486261048631
Notes 104862610486271048627
Bibliography 104862610486291048631
Index 104862610486311048629
Contents
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1048625 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors xiii
1048626 Marcel Duchamp Bottlerack 10486250
1048627 Man Ray Self-Portrait 10486261048626
1048628 Man Ray La Femme 10486261048627
1048629 Man Ray LrsquoHomme 10486261048627
1048630 Man Ray Champs deacutelicieux
(Rayogram) 10486261048628
1048631 Man Ray still rom
Retour agrave la raison 10486271048625
1048632 Man Ray Rrose Seacutelavy
(Marcel Duchamp) 10486281048630
1048633 Man Ray Hommage agrave
D A F de Sade 10486281048631
10486250 Claude Cahun Untitled 10486290
10486251048625 Claude Cahun Frontiegravere
humaine 10486291048632
10486251048626 Claude Cahun photomontage
rom Disavowals 10486291048633
10486251048627 Brassaiuml Sculptures involontaires 10486310
10486251048628 Lee Miller anja Ramm and theBelljar Variant on Hommage
agrave D A F de Sade 10486331048626
10486251048629 Lee Miller Under the Belljar 10486331048628
10486251048630 Lee Miller Exploding Hand 10486331048630
10486251048631 Lee Miller Nude Bent Forward 10486331048631
10486251048632 Lee Miller Domes of the Churchof the Virgin (al Adhra) Deir
el Soriano Monastery 104862501048625
Illustrations
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10486251048633 Lee Miller Te Procession (Bird
racks in the Sand) 104862501048627
10486260 Lee Miller Te Cloud Factory(Sacks of Cotton) 104862501048629
10486261048625 Lee Miller Portrait of Space 104862501048633
10486261048626 Lee Miller From the op of
the Great Pyramid 104862510486251048627
10486261048627 Dorothea anning Pelote drsquoeacutepingles
pouvant servir de feacutetiche 104862510486260 10486261048628 Dorothea anning
Childrenrsquos Games 104862510486261048628
10486261048629 Dorothea anning Eine
Kleine Nachtmusik 104862510486261048630
10486261048630 Dorothea anning Palaestra 104862510486261048632
10486261048631 Dorothea anning Birthday 104862510486261048633
10486261048632 Dorothea anning Premier peacuteril 104862510486271048628
10486261048633 Dorothea anning
Cinquiegraveme peacuteril 104862510486271048631
10486270 Dorothea anning Interior
with Sudden Joy 104862510486271048633
10486271048625 Dorothea anning Canapeacute
en temps de pluie 104862510486281048629
10486271048626 Dorothea anning Murmurs 104862510486281048631
10486271048627 Francesca Woodman House 3 104862510486291048628
10486271048628 Francesca Woodman
then at one point 104862510486291048631 10486271048629 Francesca Woodman
rom Space2 104862510486301048626
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 1140
10486271048630 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486301048630
10486271048631 Francesca Woodman Untitled 104862510486301048633
10486271048632 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486310
10486271048633 Francesca Woodman On
Being an Angel 104862510486311048626
10486280 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048627
10486281048625 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048628
10486281048626 Pierre Alechinsky Central Park 104862510486320
10486281048627 Pattern in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
painting Central Park 104862510486321048630
10486281048628 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (III) 104862510486331048627
10486281048629 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (VII) 104862510486331048629
10486281048630 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (X) 104862510486331048630
10486281048631 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862601048626
10486281048632 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486251048625
10486281048633 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486260
10486290 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486261048627
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xi
Preface
Surrealist Ghostliness began with the insight I had in 1048626000 that sur-realist perception was necessarily double and that anamorphosis
unctions well as a visual paradigm or this doubleness because o the
way surrealism purports to harness both our conscious and uncon-scious minds into a kind o idealized synthesis what Andreacute Bretonthe author o the 1047297rst two ldquoManiestoesrdquo o surrealism in 1048625104863310486261048628 and
1048625104863310486270 would call a resolution o old antinomies or a sublime point
As a result o this insight I wrote an exhibition catalogue essay on
surrealist love poetry called ldquoAnamorphic Loverdquo Tere or the 1047297rst
time I integrated ully an appreciation o surrealist visual art into my
more literary work paving the way or my ocus on art in SurrealistGhostliness As I was 1047297nishing my book on Robert Desnos in 1048626001048626
I realized that his tongue-twisting poetry produced in automatic
trances at the outset o the surrealist movement provided a textual
model or the double nature o surrealist perception Anamorphosison a visual level and Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo playul punning poemson an aural and textual level require an analogous two-step process
o comprehension what I called a double take involving a 1047297rst lookor hearing ollowed by a second retroactive look or hearing
My interest in anamorphosis began with the standard image we
know o the urn that on a second look resolves into the silhouette
o two human aces looking at one another or the duck that trans-
orms into a rabbit I then turned to the picture-poems o GuillaumeApollinaire the French poet who coined the word surrealism in 1048625104863310486251048631
and who created his handwritten ldquocalligramsrdquo when he was a soldierin World War I decades beore the concrete poets identi1047297ed these
poems as early twentieth-century precursors to their own Apollinaire
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xii Preace
arranged the words on the page to replicate playully the objects hedescribed such as a tie a ountain or a heart First we see the picturethe letters make and read the words and then retroactively through
a mental double take we see that the two sign systemsmdash visual andtextualmdash represent two versions o the same thing two intense im-
ages literal and metaphoric with the dominant version standing inor conscious reality and the secondary version hiding like a ghost
behind it standing in or unconscious dream reality that we know
exists but have trouble seeing simultaneously with the conscious
reality Each version looks like the thing described but in a different
way Neither replicates the other exactly the two coexist yet it isdifficult to apprehend them both at the same time
Tis train o thought led me to the most amous anamorphic
painting Hans Holbeinrsquos sixteenth-century Ambassadors (1048625104862910486271048627 see
1047297g 1048625) which was created to hang next to a door so that it could be
seen head on and then once again over onersquos shoulder at the instanto leaving the room at which point the skull lying at the ambassadorsrsquo
eet springs into ocus as the ambassadors themselves ade into ablur Tis over-the-shoulder retrospective glance unctions like thedouble take Apollinairersquos poems invite when we realize these two
perspectives constitute two aspects o the same reality
Surrealist perception is anamorphic in a way similar to the mo-
ment when a viewer perceives Holbeinrsquos Ambassadors sideways andbackward when or an instant both aspects o the painting become
apparent at once We suddenly understand that underlying the glori-ous achievements o the magni1047297cently dressed men in the paintinglies the mortality that awaits themmdash that awaits us all On second
glance the suppressed primitive truth o mortality is even more realthan the overt reality most o us live by which is actually more o a
dreamlike antasy or it deludes us into believing that we will live
orever protected rom the inevitable by prosperity Te repressed
truth is more real than the reality we live consciously Te distinc-tion between these realities like a membrane or elusive line that is
always moving away rom us just out o reach dissolves in such a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xiii
way as to make them almost indistinguishable rom each other For
the surrealists the sublime point resides at the instant when onereality bleeds into another so that or an instant both sides o the
duality may be understood simultaneously
I 1047297rst understood this anamorphic paradigm as ghostly in 1048626001048627when I began to study Lee Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs rom the
1048625104863310486270s starting with her Domes o the Church o the Virgin (al Adhra)
Deir el Soriano Monastery (ca 1048625104863310486271048630) (see 1047297g 10486251048632) Here I discovered
the ghost o a womanrsquos nude body looking down at hersel hiddenin a landscape photograph o a monastery that or centuries had
housed only men as though the ghosts o all the monks rom the
1 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors (1533) copy National Gallery London Art
Resource New York
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xiv Preace
past suddenly had succeeded in ul1047297lling a secret desire I was sure
this was not a mistake when I thought about Millerrsquos wry sense o
humor and then I began to 1047297nd ghost images in her other photo-
graphs it became clear to me that this anamorphic effect was at
once surrealist and ghostly Te ghostliness was con1047297rmed or me byher elegiac From the op of the Great Pyramid (ca 1048625104863310486271048631 see 1047297g 10486261048626)
shot when Miller knew she was soon to leave Egypt or Europe andan impending war which would provide the surrealists with new
ghosts beyond those o riends and amily rom the previous war
Te photograph hints at the ghostly presence o the photographer
hersel looking out at the landscape and also seems to invoke ghostsrom the distant past in dark anticipation o the upcoming war in
which Miller would enlist as an American photographer with the
US Army
Surrealist Ghostliness begins at the outset o the surrealist move-ment when the young surrealists listened entranced to Desnosrsquos
hypnotic utterings that sounded oracular and prophetic prooundly
ghostly and otherworldly and Desnosrsquos riend Man Raymdash the Ameri-can who recorded the movement photographically and later workedwith Millermdash began his experiments with 1047297lm I turn then to workscreated in dialogue with the movement rom the 1048625104863310486260s through the1048625104863310486330s including Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs Surrealist Ghostliness continues the exploration o surrealism I began in my 1047297rst book andpursues the sense my book on Desnos gave me o what it might eel
like to be haunted by someone by a ghost exhorting me to moveorward and complete a task that at times elt akin to conjuring notunlike the experience o all writers o critical biographies who openthemselves to a kind o willed haunting Tis book then allows meto see the movement as a whole in a historic sweep that allies it evenmore closely to the century into which I was born the century thatstill shapes our current era It also includes Americans such as Ray
Miller Dorothea anning Francesca Woodman and Susan Hillerwho like me were drawn to surrealism
My study o the artists presented here through the prism o ana-
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Preace xv
morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constantnegotiation with our own mortality in which our beings are dividedbetween dreams and everyday realities between the psychic and
the mundanely material the latent and the maniestmdash the maniestat times holding more secrets than the of-probed latent content
o personal experience In the preace to my 1047297rst book Automatic
Woman (1048625104863310486331048630) I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives ofenmirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had anautobiographical connection On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between maniestand latent realities in my own lie in my own amily story
mdash what
we tell others about our amily lie what others tell us and what weadmit only to ourselves More broadly with its ocus on the latent
and the visible the maniest and the ghostly this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literaturereveals the secret at the core o the human conditionmdash namely thatmortality implies a lie doubled by death a 1047297nitude within which
multiple baroque in1047297nitudes may be imagined Most o all I ound affirmation o a long-held belie that we live
experiences that are de1047297ned by what we intuit as much as by what wethink by what we eel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationallyinormed perceptions o perceive ully we must perceive doubly
at once peripherally and directly not unlike the way we look at Te
Ambassadors We need to remain open to what lies in between thewords or images in order to appreciate them Te surrealists under-stood this both those who worked in the movementrsquos mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins
1047297nding their centers elsewhere With this book I hope to show howthis rational surrealist quest or the knowledge o what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives which
we live in a state o perpetual and virtual reality have expanded toinclude what we do not ully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern possibly even post-Enlightenment world
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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S U R R E A L I S T
GHOSTLINESS
Katharine Conley
University of Nebraska Press
Lincoln and London
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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copy 2013 by the Board o Regents o
the University o Nebraska
Acknowledgments or the use o
previously published material appear
on page xx which constitutes an
extension o the copyright page
All rights reserved
Manuactured in the United States o America
Publication o this volume was assistedby unds rom the Arts amp Humanities
Division or the Faculty o Arts amp
Sciences at Dartmouth College
Library o Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conley Katharine 1956ndash
Surrealist ghostliness Katharine Conley
pages cm Includes bibliographical
reerences and index
983113983123983106983118 978-0-8032-2659-3
(hardback alk paper)
1 Surrealismmdash Temes motives I itle
9831189831284565983123898310766 2013
70904063mdash dc23 2012049901
Set in Minion by Laura Wellington
Designed by Nathan Putens
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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For Marian who helped me see ghostliness
And for Richard always
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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List o Illustrations viii
Preace xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1048625
1048625 Te Cinematic Whirl o Man
Rayrsquos Ghostly Objects 10486261048625
1048626 Claude Cahunrsquos Exploration o theAutobiographical Human 10486281048629
1048627 Te Ethnographic Automatism
o Brassaiuml and Daliacutersquos
Involuntary Sculptures 10486301048633
1048628 Te Ghostliness in Lee Millerrsquos
Egyptian Landscapes 10486331048625 1048629 Dorothea anningrsquos Gothic
Ghostliness 104862510486251048633
1048630 Francesca Woodmanrsquos
Ghostly Interior Maps 104862510486291048625
1048631 Pierre Alechinskyrsquos Ghostly
Palimpsests 104862510486311048633
1048632 Susan Hillerrsquos Freudian Ghosts 104862601048625
Conclusion 104862610486261048631
Notes 104862610486271048627
Bibliography 104862610486291048631
Index 104862610486311048629
Contents
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1048625 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors xiii
1048626 Marcel Duchamp Bottlerack 10486250
1048627 Man Ray Self-Portrait 10486261048626
1048628 Man Ray La Femme 10486261048627
1048629 Man Ray LrsquoHomme 10486261048627
1048630 Man Ray Champs deacutelicieux
(Rayogram) 10486261048628
1048631 Man Ray still rom
Retour agrave la raison 10486271048625
1048632 Man Ray Rrose Seacutelavy
(Marcel Duchamp) 10486281048630
1048633 Man Ray Hommage agrave
D A F de Sade 10486281048631
10486250 Claude Cahun Untitled 10486290
10486251048625 Claude Cahun Frontiegravere
humaine 10486291048632
10486251048626 Claude Cahun photomontage
rom Disavowals 10486291048633
10486251048627 Brassaiuml Sculptures involontaires 10486310
10486251048628 Lee Miller anja Ramm and theBelljar Variant on Hommage
agrave D A F de Sade 10486331048626
10486251048629 Lee Miller Under the Belljar 10486331048628
10486251048630 Lee Miller Exploding Hand 10486331048630
10486251048631 Lee Miller Nude Bent Forward 10486331048631
10486251048632 Lee Miller Domes of the Churchof the Virgin (al Adhra) Deir
el Soriano Monastery 104862501048625
Illustrations
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10486251048633 Lee Miller Te Procession (Bird
racks in the Sand) 104862501048627
10486260 Lee Miller Te Cloud Factory(Sacks of Cotton) 104862501048629
10486261048625 Lee Miller Portrait of Space 104862501048633
10486261048626 Lee Miller From the op of
the Great Pyramid 104862510486251048627
10486261048627 Dorothea anning Pelote drsquoeacutepingles
pouvant servir de feacutetiche 104862510486260 10486261048628 Dorothea anning
Childrenrsquos Games 104862510486261048628
10486261048629 Dorothea anning Eine
Kleine Nachtmusik 104862510486261048630
10486261048630 Dorothea anning Palaestra 104862510486261048632
10486261048631 Dorothea anning Birthday 104862510486261048633
10486261048632 Dorothea anning Premier peacuteril 104862510486271048628
10486261048633 Dorothea anning
Cinquiegraveme peacuteril 104862510486271048631
10486270 Dorothea anning Interior
with Sudden Joy 104862510486271048633
10486271048625 Dorothea anning Canapeacute
en temps de pluie 104862510486281048629
10486271048626 Dorothea anning Murmurs 104862510486281048631
10486271048627 Francesca Woodman House 3 104862510486291048628
10486271048628 Francesca Woodman
then at one point 104862510486291048631 10486271048629 Francesca Woodman
rom Space2 104862510486301048626
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10486271048630 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486301048630
10486271048631 Francesca Woodman Untitled 104862510486301048633
10486271048632 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486310
10486271048633 Francesca Woodman On
Being an Angel 104862510486311048626
10486280 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048627
10486281048625 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048628
10486281048626 Pierre Alechinsky Central Park 104862510486320
10486281048627 Pattern in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
painting Central Park 104862510486321048630
10486281048628 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (III) 104862510486331048627
10486281048629 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (VII) 104862510486331048629
10486281048630 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (X) 104862510486331048630
10486281048631 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862601048626
10486281048632 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486251048625
10486281048633 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486260
10486290 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486261048627
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xi
Preface
Surrealist Ghostliness began with the insight I had in 1048626000 that sur-realist perception was necessarily double and that anamorphosis
unctions well as a visual paradigm or this doubleness because o the
way surrealism purports to harness both our conscious and uncon-scious minds into a kind o idealized synthesis what Andreacute Bretonthe author o the 1047297rst two ldquoManiestoesrdquo o surrealism in 1048625104863310486261048628 and
1048625104863310486270 would call a resolution o old antinomies or a sublime point
As a result o this insight I wrote an exhibition catalogue essay on
surrealist love poetry called ldquoAnamorphic Loverdquo Tere or the 1047297rst
time I integrated ully an appreciation o surrealist visual art into my
more literary work paving the way or my ocus on art in SurrealistGhostliness As I was 1047297nishing my book on Robert Desnos in 1048626001048626
I realized that his tongue-twisting poetry produced in automatic
trances at the outset o the surrealist movement provided a textual
model or the double nature o surrealist perception Anamorphosison a visual level and Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo playul punning poemson an aural and textual level require an analogous two-step process
o comprehension what I called a double take involving a 1047297rst lookor hearing ollowed by a second retroactive look or hearing
My interest in anamorphosis began with the standard image we
know o the urn that on a second look resolves into the silhouette
o two human aces looking at one another or the duck that trans-
orms into a rabbit I then turned to the picture-poems o GuillaumeApollinaire the French poet who coined the word surrealism in 1048625104863310486251048631
and who created his handwritten ldquocalligramsrdquo when he was a soldierin World War I decades beore the concrete poets identi1047297ed these
poems as early twentieth-century precursors to their own Apollinaire
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xii Preace
arranged the words on the page to replicate playully the objects hedescribed such as a tie a ountain or a heart First we see the picturethe letters make and read the words and then retroactively through
a mental double take we see that the two sign systemsmdash visual andtextualmdash represent two versions o the same thing two intense im-
ages literal and metaphoric with the dominant version standing inor conscious reality and the secondary version hiding like a ghost
behind it standing in or unconscious dream reality that we know
exists but have trouble seeing simultaneously with the conscious
reality Each version looks like the thing described but in a different
way Neither replicates the other exactly the two coexist yet it isdifficult to apprehend them both at the same time
Tis train o thought led me to the most amous anamorphic
painting Hans Holbeinrsquos sixteenth-century Ambassadors (1048625104862910486271048627 see
1047297g 1048625) which was created to hang next to a door so that it could be
seen head on and then once again over onersquos shoulder at the instanto leaving the room at which point the skull lying at the ambassadorsrsquo
eet springs into ocus as the ambassadors themselves ade into ablur Tis over-the-shoulder retrospective glance unctions like thedouble take Apollinairersquos poems invite when we realize these two
perspectives constitute two aspects o the same reality
Surrealist perception is anamorphic in a way similar to the mo-
ment when a viewer perceives Holbeinrsquos Ambassadors sideways andbackward when or an instant both aspects o the painting become
apparent at once We suddenly understand that underlying the glori-ous achievements o the magni1047297cently dressed men in the paintinglies the mortality that awaits themmdash that awaits us all On second
glance the suppressed primitive truth o mortality is even more realthan the overt reality most o us live by which is actually more o a
dreamlike antasy or it deludes us into believing that we will live
orever protected rom the inevitable by prosperity Te repressed
truth is more real than the reality we live consciously Te distinc-tion between these realities like a membrane or elusive line that is
always moving away rom us just out o reach dissolves in such a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xiii
way as to make them almost indistinguishable rom each other For
the surrealists the sublime point resides at the instant when onereality bleeds into another so that or an instant both sides o the
duality may be understood simultaneously
I 1047297rst understood this anamorphic paradigm as ghostly in 1048626001048627when I began to study Lee Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs rom the
1048625104863310486270s starting with her Domes o the Church o the Virgin (al Adhra)
Deir el Soriano Monastery (ca 1048625104863310486271048630) (see 1047297g 10486251048632) Here I discovered
the ghost o a womanrsquos nude body looking down at hersel hiddenin a landscape photograph o a monastery that or centuries had
housed only men as though the ghosts o all the monks rom the
1 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors (1533) copy National Gallery London Art
Resource New York
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xiv Preace
past suddenly had succeeded in ul1047297lling a secret desire I was sure
this was not a mistake when I thought about Millerrsquos wry sense o
humor and then I began to 1047297nd ghost images in her other photo-
graphs it became clear to me that this anamorphic effect was at
once surrealist and ghostly Te ghostliness was con1047297rmed or me byher elegiac From the op of the Great Pyramid (ca 1048625104863310486271048631 see 1047297g 10486261048626)
shot when Miller knew she was soon to leave Egypt or Europe andan impending war which would provide the surrealists with new
ghosts beyond those o riends and amily rom the previous war
Te photograph hints at the ghostly presence o the photographer
hersel looking out at the landscape and also seems to invoke ghostsrom the distant past in dark anticipation o the upcoming war in
which Miller would enlist as an American photographer with the
US Army
Surrealist Ghostliness begins at the outset o the surrealist move-ment when the young surrealists listened entranced to Desnosrsquos
hypnotic utterings that sounded oracular and prophetic prooundly
ghostly and otherworldly and Desnosrsquos riend Man Raymdash the Ameri-can who recorded the movement photographically and later workedwith Millermdash began his experiments with 1047297lm I turn then to workscreated in dialogue with the movement rom the 1048625104863310486260s through the1048625104863310486330s including Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs Surrealist Ghostliness continues the exploration o surrealism I began in my 1047297rst book andpursues the sense my book on Desnos gave me o what it might eel
like to be haunted by someone by a ghost exhorting me to moveorward and complete a task that at times elt akin to conjuring notunlike the experience o all writers o critical biographies who openthemselves to a kind o willed haunting Tis book then allows meto see the movement as a whole in a historic sweep that allies it evenmore closely to the century into which I was born the century thatstill shapes our current era It also includes Americans such as Ray
Miller Dorothea anning Francesca Woodman and Susan Hillerwho like me were drawn to surrealism
My study o the artists presented here through the prism o ana-
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xv
morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constantnegotiation with our own mortality in which our beings are dividedbetween dreams and everyday realities between the psychic and
the mundanely material the latent and the maniestmdash the maniestat times holding more secrets than the of-probed latent content
o personal experience In the preace to my 1047297rst book Automatic
Woman (1048625104863310486331048630) I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives ofenmirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had anautobiographical connection On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between maniestand latent realities in my own lie in my own amily story
mdash what
we tell others about our amily lie what others tell us and what weadmit only to ourselves More broadly with its ocus on the latent
and the visible the maniest and the ghostly this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literaturereveals the secret at the core o the human conditionmdash namely thatmortality implies a lie doubled by death a 1047297nitude within which
multiple baroque in1047297nitudes may be imagined Most o all I ound affirmation o a long-held belie that we live
experiences that are de1047297ned by what we intuit as much as by what wethink by what we eel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationallyinormed perceptions o perceive ully we must perceive doubly
at once peripherally and directly not unlike the way we look at Te
Ambassadors We need to remain open to what lies in between thewords or images in order to appreciate them Te surrealists under-stood this both those who worked in the movementrsquos mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins
1047297nding their centers elsewhere With this book I hope to show howthis rational surrealist quest or the knowledge o what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives which
we live in a state o perpetual and virtual reality have expanded toinclude what we do not ully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern possibly even post-Enlightenment world
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 540
copy 2013 by the Board o Regents o
the University o Nebraska
Acknowledgments or the use o
previously published material appear
on page xx which constitutes an
extension o the copyright page
All rights reserved
Manuactured in the United States o America
Publication o this volume was assistedby unds rom the Arts amp Humanities
Division or the Faculty o Arts amp
Sciences at Dartmouth College
Library o Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conley Katharine 1956ndash
Surrealist ghostliness Katharine Conley
pages cm Includes bibliographical
reerences and index
983113983123983106983118 978-0-8032-2659-3
(hardback alk paper)
1 Surrealismmdash Temes motives I itle
9831189831284565983123898310766 2013
70904063mdash dc23 2012049901
Set in Minion by Laura Wellington
Designed by Nathan Putens
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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For Marian who helped me see ghostliness
And for Richard always
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 740
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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List o Illustrations viii
Preace xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1048625
1048625 Te Cinematic Whirl o Man
Rayrsquos Ghostly Objects 10486261048625
1048626 Claude Cahunrsquos Exploration o theAutobiographical Human 10486281048629
1048627 Te Ethnographic Automatism
o Brassaiuml and Daliacutersquos
Involuntary Sculptures 10486301048633
1048628 Te Ghostliness in Lee Millerrsquos
Egyptian Landscapes 10486331048625 1048629 Dorothea anningrsquos Gothic
Ghostliness 104862510486251048633
1048630 Francesca Woodmanrsquos
Ghostly Interior Maps 104862510486291048625
1048631 Pierre Alechinskyrsquos Ghostly
Palimpsests 104862510486311048633
1048632 Susan Hillerrsquos Freudian Ghosts 104862601048625
Conclusion 104862610486261048631
Notes 104862610486271048627
Bibliography 104862610486291048631
Index 104862610486311048629
Contents
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1048625 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors xiii
1048626 Marcel Duchamp Bottlerack 10486250
1048627 Man Ray Self-Portrait 10486261048626
1048628 Man Ray La Femme 10486261048627
1048629 Man Ray LrsquoHomme 10486261048627
1048630 Man Ray Champs deacutelicieux
(Rayogram) 10486261048628
1048631 Man Ray still rom
Retour agrave la raison 10486271048625
1048632 Man Ray Rrose Seacutelavy
(Marcel Duchamp) 10486281048630
1048633 Man Ray Hommage agrave
D A F de Sade 10486281048631
10486250 Claude Cahun Untitled 10486290
10486251048625 Claude Cahun Frontiegravere
humaine 10486291048632
10486251048626 Claude Cahun photomontage
rom Disavowals 10486291048633
10486251048627 Brassaiuml Sculptures involontaires 10486310
10486251048628 Lee Miller anja Ramm and theBelljar Variant on Hommage
agrave D A F de Sade 10486331048626
10486251048629 Lee Miller Under the Belljar 10486331048628
10486251048630 Lee Miller Exploding Hand 10486331048630
10486251048631 Lee Miller Nude Bent Forward 10486331048631
10486251048632 Lee Miller Domes of the Churchof the Virgin (al Adhra) Deir
el Soriano Monastery 104862501048625
Illustrations
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10486251048633 Lee Miller Te Procession (Bird
racks in the Sand) 104862501048627
10486260 Lee Miller Te Cloud Factory(Sacks of Cotton) 104862501048629
10486261048625 Lee Miller Portrait of Space 104862501048633
10486261048626 Lee Miller From the op of
the Great Pyramid 104862510486251048627
10486261048627 Dorothea anning Pelote drsquoeacutepingles
pouvant servir de feacutetiche 104862510486260 10486261048628 Dorothea anning
Childrenrsquos Games 104862510486261048628
10486261048629 Dorothea anning Eine
Kleine Nachtmusik 104862510486261048630
10486261048630 Dorothea anning Palaestra 104862510486261048632
10486261048631 Dorothea anning Birthday 104862510486261048633
10486261048632 Dorothea anning Premier peacuteril 104862510486271048628
10486261048633 Dorothea anning
Cinquiegraveme peacuteril 104862510486271048631
10486270 Dorothea anning Interior
with Sudden Joy 104862510486271048633
10486271048625 Dorothea anning Canapeacute
en temps de pluie 104862510486281048629
10486271048626 Dorothea anning Murmurs 104862510486281048631
10486271048627 Francesca Woodman House 3 104862510486291048628
10486271048628 Francesca Woodman
then at one point 104862510486291048631 10486271048629 Francesca Woodman
rom Space2 104862510486301048626
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10486271048630 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486301048630
10486271048631 Francesca Woodman Untitled 104862510486301048633
10486271048632 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486310
10486271048633 Francesca Woodman On
Being an Angel 104862510486311048626
10486280 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048627
10486281048625 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048628
10486281048626 Pierre Alechinsky Central Park 104862510486320
10486281048627 Pattern in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
painting Central Park 104862510486321048630
10486281048628 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (III) 104862510486331048627
10486281048629 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (VII) 104862510486331048629
10486281048630 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (X) 104862510486331048630
10486281048631 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862601048626
10486281048632 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486251048625
10486281048633 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486260
10486290 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486261048627
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xi
Preface
Surrealist Ghostliness began with the insight I had in 1048626000 that sur-realist perception was necessarily double and that anamorphosis
unctions well as a visual paradigm or this doubleness because o the
way surrealism purports to harness both our conscious and uncon-scious minds into a kind o idealized synthesis what Andreacute Bretonthe author o the 1047297rst two ldquoManiestoesrdquo o surrealism in 1048625104863310486261048628 and
1048625104863310486270 would call a resolution o old antinomies or a sublime point
As a result o this insight I wrote an exhibition catalogue essay on
surrealist love poetry called ldquoAnamorphic Loverdquo Tere or the 1047297rst
time I integrated ully an appreciation o surrealist visual art into my
more literary work paving the way or my ocus on art in SurrealistGhostliness As I was 1047297nishing my book on Robert Desnos in 1048626001048626
I realized that his tongue-twisting poetry produced in automatic
trances at the outset o the surrealist movement provided a textual
model or the double nature o surrealist perception Anamorphosison a visual level and Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo playul punning poemson an aural and textual level require an analogous two-step process
o comprehension what I called a double take involving a 1047297rst lookor hearing ollowed by a second retroactive look or hearing
My interest in anamorphosis began with the standard image we
know o the urn that on a second look resolves into the silhouette
o two human aces looking at one another or the duck that trans-
orms into a rabbit I then turned to the picture-poems o GuillaumeApollinaire the French poet who coined the word surrealism in 1048625104863310486251048631
and who created his handwritten ldquocalligramsrdquo when he was a soldierin World War I decades beore the concrete poets identi1047297ed these
poems as early twentieth-century precursors to their own Apollinaire
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xii Preace
arranged the words on the page to replicate playully the objects hedescribed such as a tie a ountain or a heart First we see the picturethe letters make and read the words and then retroactively through
a mental double take we see that the two sign systemsmdash visual andtextualmdash represent two versions o the same thing two intense im-
ages literal and metaphoric with the dominant version standing inor conscious reality and the secondary version hiding like a ghost
behind it standing in or unconscious dream reality that we know
exists but have trouble seeing simultaneously with the conscious
reality Each version looks like the thing described but in a different
way Neither replicates the other exactly the two coexist yet it isdifficult to apprehend them both at the same time
Tis train o thought led me to the most amous anamorphic
painting Hans Holbeinrsquos sixteenth-century Ambassadors (1048625104862910486271048627 see
1047297g 1048625) which was created to hang next to a door so that it could be
seen head on and then once again over onersquos shoulder at the instanto leaving the room at which point the skull lying at the ambassadorsrsquo
eet springs into ocus as the ambassadors themselves ade into ablur Tis over-the-shoulder retrospective glance unctions like thedouble take Apollinairersquos poems invite when we realize these two
perspectives constitute two aspects o the same reality
Surrealist perception is anamorphic in a way similar to the mo-
ment when a viewer perceives Holbeinrsquos Ambassadors sideways andbackward when or an instant both aspects o the painting become
apparent at once We suddenly understand that underlying the glori-ous achievements o the magni1047297cently dressed men in the paintinglies the mortality that awaits themmdash that awaits us all On second
glance the suppressed primitive truth o mortality is even more realthan the overt reality most o us live by which is actually more o a
dreamlike antasy or it deludes us into believing that we will live
orever protected rom the inevitable by prosperity Te repressed
truth is more real than the reality we live consciously Te distinc-tion between these realities like a membrane or elusive line that is
always moving away rom us just out o reach dissolves in such a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xiii
way as to make them almost indistinguishable rom each other For
the surrealists the sublime point resides at the instant when onereality bleeds into another so that or an instant both sides o the
duality may be understood simultaneously
I 1047297rst understood this anamorphic paradigm as ghostly in 1048626001048627when I began to study Lee Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs rom the
1048625104863310486270s starting with her Domes o the Church o the Virgin (al Adhra)
Deir el Soriano Monastery (ca 1048625104863310486271048630) (see 1047297g 10486251048632) Here I discovered
the ghost o a womanrsquos nude body looking down at hersel hiddenin a landscape photograph o a monastery that or centuries had
housed only men as though the ghosts o all the monks rom the
1 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors (1533) copy National Gallery London Art
Resource New York
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xiv Preace
past suddenly had succeeded in ul1047297lling a secret desire I was sure
this was not a mistake when I thought about Millerrsquos wry sense o
humor and then I began to 1047297nd ghost images in her other photo-
graphs it became clear to me that this anamorphic effect was at
once surrealist and ghostly Te ghostliness was con1047297rmed or me byher elegiac From the op of the Great Pyramid (ca 1048625104863310486271048631 see 1047297g 10486261048626)
shot when Miller knew she was soon to leave Egypt or Europe andan impending war which would provide the surrealists with new
ghosts beyond those o riends and amily rom the previous war
Te photograph hints at the ghostly presence o the photographer
hersel looking out at the landscape and also seems to invoke ghostsrom the distant past in dark anticipation o the upcoming war in
which Miller would enlist as an American photographer with the
US Army
Surrealist Ghostliness begins at the outset o the surrealist move-ment when the young surrealists listened entranced to Desnosrsquos
hypnotic utterings that sounded oracular and prophetic prooundly
ghostly and otherworldly and Desnosrsquos riend Man Raymdash the Ameri-can who recorded the movement photographically and later workedwith Millermdash began his experiments with 1047297lm I turn then to workscreated in dialogue with the movement rom the 1048625104863310486260s through the1048625104863310486330s including Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs Surrealist Ghostliness continues the exploration o surrealism I began in my 1047297rst book andpursues the sense my book on Desnos gave me o what it might eel
like to be haunted by someone by a ghost exhorting me to moveorward and complete a task that at times elt akin to conjuring notunlike the experience o all writers o critical biographies who openthemselves to a kind o willed haunting Tis book then allows meto see the movement as a whole in a historic sweep that allies it evenmore closely to the century into which I was born the century thatstill shapes our current era It also includes Americans such as Ray
Miller Dorothea anning Francesca Woodman and Susan Hillerwho like me were drawn to surrealism
My study o the artists presented here through the prism o ana-
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xv
morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constantnegotiation with our own mortality in which our beings are dividedbetween dreams and everyday realities between the psychic and
the mundanely material the latent and the maniestmdash the maniestat times holding more secrets than the of-probed latent content
o personal experience In the preace to my 1047297rst book Automatic
Woman (1048625104863310486331048630) I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives ofenmirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had anautobiographical connection On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between maniestand latent realities in my own lie in my own amily story
mdash what
we tell others about our amily lie what others tell us and what weadmit only to ourselves More broadly with its ocus on the latent
and the visible the maniest and the ghostly this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literaturereveals the secret at the core o the human conditionmdash namely thatmortality implies a lie doubled by death a 1047297nitude within which
multiple baroque in1047297nitudes may be imagined Most o all I ound affirmation o a long-held belie that we live
experiences that are de1047297ned by what we intuit as much as by what wethink by what we eel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationallyinormed perceptions o perceive ully we must perceive doubly
at once peripherally and directly not unlike the way we look at Te
Ambassadors We need to remain open to what lies in between thewords or images in order to appreciate them Te surrealists under-stood this both those who worked in the movementrsquos mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins
1047297nding their centers elsewhere With this book I hope to show howthis rational surrealist quest or the knowledge o what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives which
we live in a state o perpetual and virtual reality have expanded toinclude what we do not ully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern possibly even post-Enlightenment world
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 640
For Marian who helped me see ghostliness
And for Richard always
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 740
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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List o Illustrations viii
Preace xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1048625
1048625 Te Cinematic Whirl o Man
Rayrsquos Ghostly Objects 10486261048625
1048626 Claude Cahunrsquos Exploration o theAutobiographical Human 10486281048629
1048627 Te Ethnographic Automatism
o Brassaiuml and Daliacutersquos
Involuntary Sculptures 10486301048633
1048628 Te Ghostliness in Lee Millerrsquos
Egyptian Landscapes 10486331048625 1048629 Dorothea anningrsquos Gothic
Ghostliness 104862510486251048633
1048630 Francesca Woodmanrsquos
Ghostly Interior Maps 104862510486291048625
1048631 Pierre Alechinskyrsquos Ghostly
Palimpsests 104862510486311048633
1048632 Susan Hillerrsquos Freudian Ghosts 104862601048625
Conclusion 104862610486261048631
Notes 104862610486271048627
Bibliography 104862610486291048631
Index 104862610486311048629
Contents
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1048625 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors xiii
1048626 Marcel Duchamp Bottlerack 10486250
1048627 Man Ray Self-Portrait 10486261048626
1048628 Man Ray La Femme 10486261048627
1048629 Man Ray LrsquoHomme 10486261048627
1048630 Man Ray Champs deacutelicieux
(Rayogram) 10486261048628
1048631 Man Ray still rom
Retour agrave la raison 10486271048625
1048632 Man Ray Rrose Seacutelavy
(Marcel Duchamp) 10486281048630
1048633 Man Ray Hommage agrave
D A F de Sade 10486281048631
10486250 Claude Cahun Untitled 10486290
10486251048625 Claude Cahun Frontiegravere
humaine 10486291048632
10486251048626 Claude Cahun photomontage
rom Disavowals 10486291048633
10486251048627 Brassaiuml Sculptures involontaires 10486310
10486251048628 Lee Miller anja Ramm and theBelljar Variant on Hommage
agrave D A F de Sade 10486331048626
10486251048629 Lee Miller Under the Belljar 10486331048628
10486251048630 Lee Miller Exploding Hand 10486331048630
10486251048631 Lee Miller Nude Bent Forward 10486331048631
10486251048632 Lee Miller Domes of the Churchof the Virgin (al Adhra) Deir
el Soriano Monastery 104862501048625
Illustrations
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10486251048633 Lee Miller Te Procession (Bird
racks in the Sand) 104862501048627
10486260 Lee Miller Te Cloud Factory(Sacks of Cotton) 104862501048629
10486261048625 Lee Miller Portrait of Space 104862501048633
10486261048626 Lee Miller From the op of
the Great Pyramid 104862510486251048627
10486261048627 Dorothea anning Pelote drsquoeacutepingles
pouvant servir de feacutetiche 104862510486260 10486261048628 Dorothea anning
Childrenrsquos Games 104862510486261048628
10486261048629 Dorothea anning Eine
Kleine Nachtmusik 104862510486261048630
10486261048630 Dorothea anning Palaestra 104862510486261048632
10486261048631 Dorothea anning Birthday 104862510486261048633
10486261048632 Dorothea anning Premier peacuteril 104862510486271048628
10486261048633 Dorothea anning
Cinquiegraveme peacuteril 104862510486271048631
10486270 Dorothea anning Interior
with Sudden Joy 104862510486271048633
10486271048625 Dorothea anning Canapeacute
en temps de pluie 104862510486281048629
10486271048626 Dorothea anning Murmurs 104862510486281048631
10486271048627 Francesca Woodman House 3 104862510486291048628
10486271048628 Francesca Woodman
then at one point 104862510486291048631 10486271048629 Francesca Woodman
rom Space2 104862510486301048626
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10486271048630 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486301048630
10486271048631 Francesca Woodman Untitled 104862510486301048633
10486271048632 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486310
10486271048633 Francesca Woodman On
Being an Angel 104862510486311048626
10486280 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048627
10486281048625 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048628
10486281048626 Pierre Alechinsky Central Park 104862510486320
10486281048627 Pattern in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
painting Central Park 104862510486321048630
10486281048628 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (III) 104862510486331048627
10486281048629 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (VII) 104862510486331048629
10486281048630 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (X) 104862510486331048630
10486281048631 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862601048626
10486281048632 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486251048625
10486281048633 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486260
10486290 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486261048627
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xi
Preface
Surrealist Ghostliness began with the insight I had in 1048626000 that sur-realist perception was necessarily double and that anamorphosis
unctions well as a visual paradigm or this doubleness because o the
way surrealism purports to harness both our conscious and uncon-scious minds into a kind o idealized synthesis what Andreacute Bretonthe author o the 1047297rst two ldquoManiestoesrdquo o surrealism in 1048625104863310486261048628 and
1048625104863310486270 would call a resolution o old antinomies or a sublime point
As a result o this insight I wrote an exhibition catalogue essay on
surrealist love poetry called ldquoAnamorphic Loverdquo Tere or the 1047297rst
time I integrated ully an appreciation o surrealist visual art into my
more literary work paving the way or my ocus on art in SurrealistGhostliness As I was 1047297nishing my book on Robert Desnos in 1048626001048626
I realized that his tongue-twisting poetry produced in automatic
trances at the outset o the surrealist movement provided a textual
model or the double nature o surrealist perception Anamorphosison a visual level and Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo playul punning poemson an aural and textual level require an analogous two-step process
o comprehension what I called a double take involving a 1047297rst lookor hearing ollowed by a second retroactive look or hearing
My interest in anamorphosis began with the standard image we
know o the urn that on a second look resolves into the silhouette
o two human aces looking at one another or the duck that trans-
orms into a rabbit I then turned to the picture-poems o GuillaumeApollinaire the French poet who coined the word surrealism in 1048625104863310486251048631
and who created his handwritten ldquocalligramsrdquo when he was a soldierin World War I decades beore the concrete poets identi1047297ed these
poems as early twentieth-century precursors to their own Apollinaire
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xii Preace
arranged the words on the page to replicate playully the objects hedescribed such as a tie a ountain or a heart First we see the picturethe letters make and read the words and then retroactively through
a mental double take we see that the two sign systemsmdash visual andtextualmdash represent two versions o the same thing two intense im-
ages literal and metaphoric with the dominant version standing inor conscious reality and the secondary version hiding like a ghost
behind it standing in or unconscious dream reality that we know
exists but have trouble seeing simultaneously with the conscious
reality Each version looks like the thing described but in a different
way Neither replicates the other exactly the two coexist yet it isdifficult to apprehend them both at the same time
Tis train o thought led me to the most amous anamorphic
painting Hans Holbeinrsquos sixteenth-century Ambassadors (1048625104862910486271048627 see
1047297g 1048625) which was created to hang next to a door so that it could be
seen head on and then once again over onersquos shoulder at the instanto leaving the room at which point the skull lying at the ambassadorsrsquo
eet springs into ocus as the ambassadors themselves ade into ablur Tis over-the-shoulder retrospective glance unctions like thedouble take Apollinairersquos poems invite when we realize these two
perspectives constitute two aspects o the same reality
Surrealist perception is anamorphic in a way similar to the mo-
ment when a viewer perceives Holbeinrsquos Ambassadors sideways andbackward when or an instant both aspects o the painting become
apparent at once We suddenly understand that underlying the glori-ous achievements o the magni1047297cently dressed men in the paintinglies the mortality that awaits themmdash that awaits us all On second
glance the suppressed primitive truth o mortality is even more realthan the overt reality most o us live by which is actually more o a
dreamlike antasy or it deludes us into believing that we will live
orever protected rom the inevitable by prosperity Te repressed
truth is more real than the reality we live consciously Te distinc-tion between these realities like a membrane or elusive line that is
always moving away rom us just out o reach dissolves in such a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xiii
way as to make them almost indistinguishable rom each other For
the surrealists the sublime point resides at the instant when onereality bleeds into another so that or an instant both sides o the
duality may be understood simultaneously
I 1047297rst understood this anamorphic paradigm as ghostly in 1048626001048627when I began to study Lee Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs rom the
1048625104863310486270s starting with her Domes o the Church o the Virgin (al Adhra)
Deir el Soriano Monastery (ca 1048625104863310486271048630) (see 1047297g 10486251048632) Here I discovered
the ghost o a womanrsquos nude body looking down at hersel hiddenin a landscape photograph o a monastery that or centuries had
housed only men as though the ghosts o all the monks rom the
1 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors (1533) copy National Gallery London Art
Resource New York
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xiv Preace
past suddenly had succeeded in ul1047297lling a secret desire I was sure
this was not a mistake when I thought about Millerrsquos wry sense o
humor and then I began to 1047297nd ghost images in her other photo-
graphs it became clear to me that this anamorphic effect was at
once surrealist and ghostly Te ghostliness was con1047297rmed or me byher elegiac From the op of the Great Pyramid (ca 1048625104863310486271048631 see 1047297g 10486261048626)
shot when Miller knew she was soon to leave Egypt or Europe andan impending war which would provide the surrealists with new
ghosts beyond those o riends and amily rom the previous war
Te photograph hints at the ghostly presence o the photographer
hersel looking out at the landscape and also seems to invoke ghostsrom the distant past in dark anticipation o the upcoming war in
which Miller would enlist as an American photographer with the
US Army
Surrealist Ghostliness begins at the outset o the surrealist move-ment when the young surrealists listened entranced to Desnosrsquos
hypnotic utterings that sounded oracular and prophetic prooundly
ghostly and otherworldly and Desnosrsquos riend Man Raymdash the Ameri-can who recorded the movement photographically and later workedwith Millermdash began his experiments with 1047297lm I turn then to workscreated in dialogue with the movement rom the 1048625104863310486260s through the1048625104863310486330s including Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs Surrealist Ghostliness continues the exploration o surrealism I began in my 1047297rst book andpursues the sense my book on Desnos gave me o what it might eel
like to be haunted by someone by a ghost exhorting me to moveorward and complete a task that at times elt akin to conjuring notunlike the experience o all writers o critical biographies who openthemselves to a kind o willed haunting Tis book then allows meto see the movement as a whole in a historic sweep that allies it evenmore closely to the century into which I was born the century thatstill shapes our current era It also includes Americans such as Ray
Miller Dorothea anning Francesca Woodman and Susan Hillerwho like me were drawn to surrealism
My study o the artists presented here through the prism o ana-
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xv
morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constantnegotiation with our own mortality in which our beings are dividedbetween dreams and everyday realities between the psychic and
the mundanely material the latent and the maniestmdash the maniestat times holding more secrets than the of-probed latent content
o personal experience In the preace to my 1047297rst book Automatic
Woman (1048625104863310486331048630) I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives ofenmirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had anautobiographical connection On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between maniestand latent realities in my own lie in my own amily story
mdash what
we tell others about our amily lie what others tell us and what weadmit only to ourselves More broadly with its ocus on the latent
and the visible the maniest and the ghostly this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literaturereveals the secret at the core o the human conditionmdash namely thatmortality implies a lie doubled by death a 1047297nitude within which
multiple baroque in1047297nitudes may be imagined Most o all I ound affirmation o a long-held belie that we live
experiences that are de1047297ned by what we intuit as much as by what wethink by what we eel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationallyinormed perceptions o perceive ully we must perceive doubly
at once peripherally and directly not unlike the way we look at Te
Ambassadors We need to remain open to what lies in between thewords or images in order to appreciate them Te surrealists under-stood this both those who worked in the movementrsquos mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins
1047297nding their centers elsewhere With this book I hope to show howthis rational surrealist quest or the knowledge o what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives which
we live in a state o perpetual and virtual reality have expanded toinclude what we do not ully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern possibly even post-Enlightenment world
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 740
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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List o Illustrations viii
Preace xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1048625
1048625 Te Cinematic Whirl o Man
Rayrsquos Ghostly Objects 10486261048625
1048626 Claude Cahunrsquos Exploration o theAutobiographical Human 10486281048629
1048627 Te Ethnographic Automatism
o Brassaiuml and Daliacutersquos
Involuntary Sculptures 10486301048633
1048628 Te Ghostliness in Lee Millerrsquos
Egyptian Landscapes 10486331048625 1048629 Dorothea anningrsquos Gothic
Ghostliness 104862510486251048633
1048630 Francesca Woodmanrsquos
Ghostly Interior Maps 104862510486291048625
1048631 Pierre Alechinskyrsquos Ghostly
Palimpsests 104862510486311048633
1048632 Susan Hillerrsquos Freudian Ghosts 104862601048625
Conclusion 104862610486261048631
Notes 104862610486271048627
Bibliography 104862610486291048631
Index 104862610486311048629
Contents
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1048625 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors xiii
1048626 Marcel Duchamp Bottlerack 10486250
1048627 Man Ray Self-Portrait 10486261048626
1048628 Man Ray La Femme 10486261048627
1048629 Man Ray LrsquoHomme 10486261048627
1048630 Man Ray Champs deacutelicieux
(Rayogram) 10486261048628
1048631 Man Ray still rom
Retour agrave la raison 10486271048625
1048632 Man Ray Rrose Seacutelavy
(Marcel Duchamp) 10486281048630
1048633 Man Ray Hommage agrave
D A F de Sade 10486281048631
10486250 Claude Cahun Untitled 10486290
10486251048625 Claude Cahun Frontiegravere
humaine 10486291048632
10486251048626 Claude Cahun photomontage
rom Disavowals 10486291048633
10486251048627 Brassaiuml Sculptures involontaires 10486310
10486251048628 Lee Miller anja Ramm and theBelljar Variant on Hommage
agrave D A F de Sade 10486331048626
10486251048629 Lee Miller Under the Belljar 10486331048628
10486251048630 Lee Miller Exploding Hand 10486331048630
10486251048631 Lee Miller Nude Bent Forward 10486331048631
10486251048632 Lee Miller Domes of the Churchof the Virgin (al Adhra) Deir
el Soriano Monastery 104862501048625
Illustrations
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10486251048633 Lee Miller Te Procession (Bird
racks in the Sand) 104862501048627
10486260 Lee Miller Te Cloud Factory(Sacks of Cotton) 104862501048629
10486261048625 Lee Miller Portrait of Space 104862501048633
10486261048626 Lee Miller From the op of
the Great Pyramid 104862510486251048627
10486261048627 Dorothea anning Pelote drsquoeacutepingles
pouvant servir de feacutetiche 104862510486260 10486261048628 Dorothea anning
Childrenrsquos Games 104862510486261048628
10486261048629 Dorothea anning Eine
Kleine Nachtmusik 104862510486261048630
10486261048630 Dorothea anning Palaestra 104862510486261048632
10486261048631 Dorothea anning Birthday 104862510486261048633
10486261048632 Dorothea anning Premier peacuteril 104862510486271048628
10486261048633 Dorothea anning
Cinquiegraveme peacuteril 104862510486271048631
10486270 Dorothea anning Interior
with Sudden Joy 104862510486271048633
10486271048625 Dorothea anning Canapeacute
en temps de pluie 104862510486281048629
10486271048626 Dorothea anning Murmurs 104862510486281048631
10486271048627 Francesca Woodman House 3 104862510486291048628
10486271048628 Francesca Woodman
then at one point 104862510486291048631 10486271048629 Francesca Woodman
rom Space2 104862510486301048626
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10486271048630 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486301048630
10486271048631 Francesca Woodman Untitled 104862510486301048633
10486271048632 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486310
10486271048633 Francesca Woodman On
Being an Angel 104862510486311048626
10486280 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048627
10486281048625 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048628
10486281048626 Pierre Alechinsky Central Park 104862510486320
10486281048627 Pattern in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
painting Central Park 104862510486321048630
10486281048628 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (III) 104862510486331048627
10486281048629 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (VII) 104862510486331048629
10486281048630 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (X) 104862510486331048630
10486281048631 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862601048626
10486281048632 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486251048625
10486281048633 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486260
10486290 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486261048627
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xi
Preface
Surrealist Ghostliness began with the insight I had in 1048626000 that sur-realist perception was necessarily double and that anamorphosis
unctions well as a visual paradigm or this doubleness because o the
way surrealism purports to harness both our conscious and uncon-scious minds into a kind o idealized synthesis what Andreacute Bretonthe author o the 1047297rst two ldquoManiestoesrdquo o surrealism in 1048625104863310486261048628 and
1048625104863310486270 would call a resolution o old antinomies or a sublime point
As a result o this insight I wrote an exhibition catalogue essay on
surrealist love poetry called ldquoAnamorphic Loverdquo Tere or the 1047297rst
time I integrated ully an appreciation o surrealist visual art into my
more literary work paving the way or my ocus on art in SurrealistGhostliness As I was 1047297nishing my book on Robert Desnos in 1048626001048626
I realized that his tongue-twisting poetry produced in automatic
trances at the outset o the surrealist movement provided a textual
model or the double nature o surrealist perception Anamorphosison a visual level and Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo playul punning poemson an aural and textual level require an analogous two-step process
o comprehension what I called a double take involving a 1047297rst lookor hearing ollowed by a second retroactive look or hearing
My interest in anamorphosis began with the standard image we
know o the urn that on a second look resolves into the silhouette
o two human aces looking at one another or the duck that trans-
orms into a rabbit I then turned to the picture-poems o GuillaumeApollinaire the French poet who coined the word surrealism in 1048625104863310486251048631
and who created his handwritten ldquocalligramsrdquo when he was a soldierin World War I decades beore the concrete poets identi1047297ed these
poems as early twentieth-century precursors to their own Apollinaire
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xii Preace
arranged the words on the page to replicate playully the objects hedescribed such as a tie a ountain or a heart First we see the picturethe letters make and read the words and then retroactively through
a mental double take we see that the two sign systemsmdash visual andtextualmdash represent two versions o the same thing two intense im-
ages literal and metaphoric with the dominant version standing inor conscious reality and the secondary version hiding like a ghost
behind it standing in or unconscious dream reality that we know
exists but have trouble seeing simultaneously with the conscious
reality Each version looks like the thing described but in a different
way Neither replicates the other exactly the two coexist yet it isdifficult to apprehend them both at the same time
Tis train o thought led me to the most amous anamorphic
painting Hans Holbeinrsquos sixteenth-century Ambassadors (1048625104862910486271048627 see
1047297g 1048625) which was created to hang next to a door so that it could be
seen head on and then once again over onersquos shoulder at the instanto leaving the room at which point the skull lying at the ambassadorsrsquo
eet springs into ocus as the ambassadors themselves ade into ablur Tis over-the-shoulder retrospective glance unctions like thedouble take Apollinairersquos poems invite when we realize these two
perspectives constitute two aspects o the same reality
Surrealist perception is anamorphic in a way similar to the mo-
ment when a viewer perceives Holbeinrsquos Ambassadors sideways andbackward when or an instant both aspects o the painting become
apparent at once We suddenly understand that underlying the glori-ous achievements o the magni1047297cently dressed men in the paintinglies the mortality that awaits themmdash that awaits us all On second
glance the suppressed primitive truth o mortality is even more realthan the overt reality most o us live by which is actually more o a
dreamlike antasy or it deludes us into believing that we will live
orever protected rom the inevitable by prosperity Te repressed
truth is more real than the reality we live consciously Te distinc-tion between these realities like a membrane or elusive line that is
always moving away rom us just out o reach dissolves in such a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xiii
way as to make them almost indistinguishable rom each other For
the surrealists the sublime point resides at the instant when onereality bleeds into another so that or an instant both sides o the
duality may be understood simultaneously
I 1047297rst understood this anamorphic paradigm as ghostly in 1048626001048627when I began to study Lee Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs rom the
1048625104863310486270s starting with her Domes o the Church o the Virgin (al Adhra)
Deir el Soriano Monastery (ca 1048625104863310486271048630) (see 1047297g 10486251048632) Here I discovered
the ghost o a womanrsquos nude body looking down at hersel hiddenin a landscape photograph o a monastery that or centuries had
housed only men as though the ghosts o all the monks rom the
1 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors (1533) copy National Gallery London Art
Resource New York
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xiv Preace
past suddenly had succeeded in ul1047297lling a secret desire I was sure
this was not a mistake when I thought about Millerrsquos wry sense o
humor and then I began to 1047297nd ghost images in her other photo-
graphs it became clear to me that this anamorphic effect was at
once surrealist and ghostly Te ghostliness was con1047297rmed or me byher elegiac From the op of the Great Pyramid (ca 1048625104863310486271048631 see 1047297g 10486261048626)
shot when Miller knew she was soon to leave Egypt or Europe andan impending war which would provide the surrealists with new
ghosts beyond those o riends and amily rom the previous war
Te photograph hints at the ghostly presence o the photographer
hersel looking out at the landscape and also seems to invoke ghostsrom the distant past in dark anticipation o the upcoming war in
which Miller would enlist as an American photographer with the
US Army
Surrealist Ghostliness begins at the outset o the surrealist move-ment when the young surrealists listened entranced to Desnosrsquos
hypnotic utterings that sounded oracular and prophetic prooundly
ghostly and otherworldly and Desnosrsquos riend Man Raymdash the Ameri-can who recorded the movement photographically and later workedwith Millermdash began his experiments with 1047297lm I turn then to workscreated in dialogue with the movement rom the 1048625104863310486260s through the1048625104863310486330s including Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs Surrealist Ghostliness continues the exploration o surrealism I began in my 1047297rst book andpursues the sense my book on Desnos gave me o what it might eel
like to be haunted by someone by a ghost exhorting me to moveorward and complete a task that at times elt akin to conjuring notunlike the experience o all writers o critical biographies who openthemselves to a kind o willed haunting Tis book then allows meto see the movement as a whole in a historic sweep that allies it evenmore closely to the century into which I was born the century thatstill shapes our current era It also includes Americans such as Ray
Miller Dorothea anning Francesca Woodman and Susan Hillerwho like me were drawn to surrealism
My study o the artists presented here through the prism o ana-
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xv
morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constantnegotiation with our own mortality in which our beings are dividedbetween dreams and everyday realities between the psychic and
the mundanely material the latent and the maniestmdash the maniestat times holding more secrets than the of-probed latent content
o personal experience In the preace to my 1047297rst book Automatic
Woman (1048625104863310486331048630) I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives ofenmirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had anautobiographical connection On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between maniestand latent realities in my own lie in my own amily story
mdash what
we tell others about our amily lie what others tell us and what weadmit only to ourselves More broadly with its ocus on the latent
and the visible the maniest and the ghostly this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literaturereveals the secret at the core o the human conditionmdash namely thatmortality implies a lie doubled by death a 1047297nitude within which
multiple baroque in1047297nitudes may be imagined Most o all I ound affirmation o a long-held belie that we live
experiences that are de1047297ned by what we intuit as much as by what wethink by what we eel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationallyinormed perceptions o perceive ully we must perceive doubly
at once peripherally and directly not unlike the way we look at Te
Ambassadors We need to remain open to what lies in between thewords or images in order to appreciate them Te surrealists under-stood this both those who worked in the movementrsquos mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins
1047297nding their centers elsewhere With this book I hope to show howthis rational surrealist quest or the knowledge o what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives which
we live in a state o perpetual and virtual reality have expanded toinclude what we do not ully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern possibly even post-Enlightenment world
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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List o Illustrations viii
Preace xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1048625
1048625 Te Cinematic Whirl o Man
Rayrsquos Ghostly Objects 10486261048625
1048626 Claude Cahunrsquos Exploration o theAutobiographical Human 10486281048629
1048627 Te Ethnographic Automatism
o Brassaiuml and Daliacutersquos
Involuntary Sculptures 10486301048633
1048628 Te Ghostliness in Lee Millerrsquos
Egyptian Landscapes 10486331048625 1048629 Dorothea anningrsquos Gothic
Ghostliness 104862510486251048633
1048630 Francesca Woodmanrsquos
Ghostly Interior Maps 104862510486291048625
1048631 Pierre Alechinskyrsquos Ghostly
Palimpsests 104862510486311048633
1048632 Susan Hillerrsquos Freudian Ghosts 104862601048625
Conclusion 104862610486261048631
Notes 104862610486271048627
Bibliography 104862610486291048631
Index 104862610486311048629
Contents
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1048625 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors xiii
1048626 Marcel Duchamp Bottlerack 10486250
1048627 Man Ray Self-Portrait 10486261048626
1048628 Man Ray La Femme 10486261048627
1048629 Man Ray LrsquoHomme 10486261048627
1048630 Man Ray Champs deacutelicieux
(Rayogram) 10486261048628
1048631 Man Ray still rom
Retour agrave la raison 10486271048625
1048632 Man Ray Rrose Seacutelavy
(Marcel Duchamp) 10486281048630
1048633 Man Ray Hommage agrave
D A F de Sade 10486281048631
10486250 Claude Cahun Untitled 10486290
10486251048625 Claude Cahun Frontiegravere
humaine 10486291048632
10486251048626 Claude Cahun photomontage
rom Disavowals 10486291048633
10486251048627 Brassaiuml Sculptures involontaires 10486310
10486251048628 Lee Miller anja Ramm and theBelljar Variant on Hommage
agrave D A F de Sade 10486331048626
10486251048629 Lee Miller Under the Belljar 10486331048628
10486251048630 Lee Miller Exploding Hand 10486331048630
10486251048631 Lee Miller Nude Bent Forward 10486331048631
10486251048632 Lee Miller Domes of the Churchof the Virgin (al Adhra) Deir
el Soriano Monastery 104862501048625
Illustrations
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10486251048633 Lee Miller Te Procession (Bird
racks in the Sand) 104862501048627
10486260 Lee Miller Te Cloud Factory(Sacks of Cotton) 104862501048629
10486261048625 Lee Miller Portrait of Space 104862501048633
10486261048626 Lee Miller From the op of
the Great Pyramid 104862510486251048627
10486261048627 Dorothea anning Pelote drsquoeacutepingles
pouvant servir de feacutetiche 104862510486260 10486261048628 Dorothea anning
Childrenrsquos Games 104862510486261048628
10486261048629 Dorothea anning Eine
Kleine Nachtmusik 104862510486261048630
10486261048630 Dorothea anning Palaestra 104862510486261048632
10486261048631 Dorothea anning Birthday 104862510486261048633
10486261048632 Dorothea anning Premier peacuteril 104862510486271048628
10486261048633 Dorothea anning
Cinquiegraveme peacuteril 104862510486271048631
10486270 Dorothea anning Interior
with Sudden Joy 104862510486271048633
10486271048625 Dorothea anning Canapeacute
en temps de pluie 104862510486281048629
10486271048626 Dorothea anning Murmurs 104862510486281048631
10486271048627 Francesca Woodman House 3 104862510486291048628
10486271048628 Francesca Woodman
then at one point 104862510486291048631 10486271048629 Francesca Woodman
rom Space2 104862510486301048626
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10486271048630 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486301048630
10486271048631 Francesca Woodman Untitled 104862510486301048633
10486271048632 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486310
10486271048633 Francesca Woodman On
Being an Angel 104862510486311048626
10486280 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048627
10486281048625 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048628
10486281048626 Pierre Alechinsky Central Park 104862510486320
10486281048627 Pattern in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
painting Central Park 104862510486321048630
10486281048628 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (III) 104862510486331048627
10486281048629 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (VII) 104862510486331048629
10486281048630 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (X) 104862510486331048630
10486281048631 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862601048626
10486281048632 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486251048625
10486281048633 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486260
10486290 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486261048627
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xi
Preface
Surrealist Ghostliness began with the insight I had in 1048626000 that sur-realist perception was necessarily double and that anamorphosis
unctions well as a visual paradigm or this doubleness because o the
way surrealism purports to harness both our conscious and uncon-scious minds into a kind o idealized synthesis what Andreacute Bretonthe author o the 1047297rst two ldquoManiestoesrdquo o surrealism in 1048625104863310486261048628 and
1048625104863310486270 would call a resolution o old antinomies or a sublime point
As a result o this insight I wrote an exhibition catalogue essay on
surrealist love poetry called ldquoAnamorphic Loverdquo Tere or the 1047297rst
time I integrated ully an appreciation o surrealist visual art into my
more literary work paving the way or my ocus on art in SurrealistGhostliness As I was 1047297nishing my book on Robert Desnos in 1048626001048626
I realized that his tongue-twisting poetry produced in automatic
trances at the outset o the surrealist movement provided a textual
model or the double nature o surrealist perception Anamorphosison a visual level and Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo playul punning poemson an aural and textual level require an analogous two-step process
o comprehension what I called a double take involving a 1047297rst lookor hearing ollowed by a second retroactive look or hearing
My interest in anamorphosis began with the standard image we
know o the urn that on a second look resolves into the silhouette
o two human aces looking at one another or the duck that trans-
orms into a rabbit I then turned to the picture-poems o GuillaumeApollinaire the French poet who coined the word surrealism in 1048625104863310486251048631
and who created his handwritten ldquocalligramsrdquo when he was a soldierin World War I decades beore the concrete poets identi1047297ed these
poems as early twentieth-century precursors to their own Apollinaire
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xii Preace
arranged the words on the page to replicate playully the objects hedescribed such as a tie a ountain or a heart First we see the picturethe letters make and read the words and then retroactively through
a mental double take we see that the two sign systemsmdash visual andtextualmdash represent two versions o the same thing two intense im-
ages literal and metaphoric with the dominant version standing inor conscious reality and the secondary version hiding like a ghost
behind it standing in or unconscious dream reality that we know
exists but have trouble seeing simultaneously with the conscious
reality Each version looks like the thing described but in a different
way Neither replicates the other exactly the two coexist yet it isdifficult to apprehend them both at the same time
Tis train o thought led me to the most amous anamorphic
painting Hans Holbeinrsquos sixteenth-century Ambassadors (1048625104862910486271048627 see
1047297g 1048625) which was created to hang next to a door so that it could be
seen head on and then once again over onersquos shoulder at the instanto leaving the room at which point the skull lying at the ambassadorsrsquo
eet springs into ocus as the ambassadors themselves ade into ablur Tis over-the-shoulder retrospective glance unctions like thedouble take Apollinairersquos poems invite when we realize these two
perspectives constitute two aspects o the same reality
Surrealist perception is anamorphic in a way similar to the mo-
ment when a viewer perceives Holbeinrsquos Ambassadors sideways andbackward when or an instant both aspects o the painting become
apparent at once We suddenly understand that underlying the glori-ous achievements o the magni1047297cently dressed men in the paintinglies the mortality that awaits themmdash that awaits us all On second
glance the suppressed primitive truth o mortality is even more realthan the overt reality most o us live by which is actually more o a
dreamlike antasy or it deludes us into believing that we will live
orever protected rom the inevitable by prosperity Te repressed
truth is more real than the reality we live consciously Te distinc-tion between these realities like a membrane or elusive line that is
always moving away rom us just out o reach dissolves in such a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xiii
way as to make them almost indistinguishable rom each other For
the surrealists the sublime point resides at the instant when onereality bleeds into another so that or an instant both sides o the
duality may be understood simultaneously
I 1047297rst understood this anamorphic paradigm as ghostly in 1048626001048627when I began to study Lee Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs rom the
1048625104863310486270s starting with her Domes o the Church o the Virgin (al Adhra)
Deir el Soriano Monastery (ca 1048625104863310486271048630) (see 1047297g 10486251048632) Here I discovered
the ghost o a womanrsquos nude body looking down at hersel hiddenin a landscape photograph o a monastery that or centuries had
housed only men as though the ghosts o all the monks rom the
1 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors (1533) copy National Gallery London Art
Resource New York
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xiv Preace
past suddenly had succeeded in ul1047297lling a secret desire I was sure
this was not a mistake when I thought about Millerrsquos wry sense o
humor and then I began to 1047297nd ghost images in her other photo-
graphs it became clear to me that this anamorphic effect was at
once surrealist and ghostly Te ghostliness was con1047297rmed or me byher elegiac From the op of the Great Pyramid (ca 1048625104863310486271048631 see 1047297g 10486261048626)
shot when Miller knew she was soon to leave Egypt or Europe andan impending war which would provide the surrealists with new
ghosts beyond those o riends and amily rom the previous war
Te photograph hints at the ghostly presence o the photographer
hersel looking out at the landscape and also seems to invoke ghostsrom the distant past in dark anticipation o the upcoming war in
which Miller would enlist as an American photographer with the
US Army
Surrealist Ghostliness begins at the outset o the surrealist move-ment when the young surrealists listened entranced to Desnosrsquos
hypnotic utterings that sounded oracular and prophetic prooundly
ghostly and otherworldly and Desnosrsquos riend Man Raymdash the Ameri-can who recorded the movement photographically and later workedwith Millermdash began his experiments with 1047297lm I turn then to workscreated in dialogue with the movement rom the 1048625104863310486260s through the1048625104863310486330s including Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs Surrealist Ghostliness continues the exploration o surrealism I began in my 1047297rst book andpursues the sense my book on Desnos gave me o what it might eel
like to be haunted by someone by a ghost exhorting me to moveorward and complete a task that at times elt akin to conjuring notunlike the experience o all writers o critical biographies who openthemselves to a kind o willed haunting Tis book then allows meto see the movement as a whole in a historic sweep that allies it evenmore closely to the century into which I was born the century thatstill shapes our current era It also includes Americans such as Ray
Miller Dorothea anning Francesca Woodman and Susan Hillerwho like me were drawn to surrealism
My study o the artists presented here through the prism o ana-
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xv
morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constantnegotiation with our own mortality in which our beings are dividedbetween dreams and everyday realities between the psychic and
the mundanely material the latent and the maniestmdash the maniestat times holding more secrets than the of-probed latent content
o personal experience In the preace to my 1047297rst book Automatic
Woman (1048625104863310486331048630) I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives ofenmirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had anautobiographical connection On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between maniestand latent realities in my own lie in my own amily story
mdash what
we tell others about our amily lie what others tell us and what weadmit only to ourselves More broadly with its ocus on the latent
and the visible the maniest and the ghostly this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literaturereveals the secret at the core o the human conditionmdash namely thatmortality implies a lie doubled by death a 1047297nitude within which
multiple baroque in1047297nitudes may be imagined Most o all I ound affirmation o a long-held belie that we live
experiences that are de1047297ned by what we intuit as much as by what wethink by what we eel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationallyinormed perceptions o perceive ully we must perceive doubly
at once peripherally and directly not unlike the way we look at Te
Ambassadors We need to remain open to what lies in between thewords or images in order to appreciate them Te surrealists under-stood this both those who worked in the movementrsquos mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins
1047297nding their centers elsewhere With this book I hope to show howthis rational surrealist quest or the knowledge o what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives which
we live in a state o perpetual and virtual reality have expanded toinclude what we do not ully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern possibly even post-Enlightenment world
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1048625 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors xiii
1048626 Marcel Duchamp Bottlerack 10486250
1048627 Man Ray Self-Portrait 10486261048626
1048628 Man Ray La Femme 10486261048627
1048629 Man Ray LrsquoHomme 10486261048627
1048630 Man Ray Champs deacutelicieux
(Rayogram) 10486261048628
1048631 Man Ray still rom
Retour agrave la raison 10486271048625
1048632 Man Ray Rrose Seacutelavy
(Marcel Duchamp) 10486281048630
1048633 Man Ray Hommage agrave
D A F de Sade 10486281048631
10486250 Claude Cahun Untitled 10486290
10486251048625 Claude Cahun Frontiegravere
humaine 10486291048632
10486251048626 Claude Cahun photomontage
rom Disavowals 10486291048633
10486251048627 Brassaiuml Sculptures involontaires 10486310
10486251048628 Lee Miller anja Ramm and theBelljar Variant on Hommage
agrave D A F de Sade 10486331048626
10486251048629 Lee Miller Under the Belljar 10486331048628
10486251048630 Lee Miller Exploding Hand 10486331048630
10486251048631 Lee Miller Nude Bent Forward 10486331048631
10486251048632 Lee Miller Domes of the Churchof the Virgin (al Adhra) Deir
el Soriano Monastery 104862501048625
Illustrations
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10486251048633 Lee Miller Te Procession (Bird
racks in the Sand) 104862501048627
10486260 Lee Miller Te Cloud Factory(Sacks of Cotton) 104862501048629
10486261048625 Lee Miller Portrait of Space 104862501048633
10486261048626 Lee Miller From the op of
the Great Pyramid 104862510486251048627
10486261048627 Dorothea anning Pelote drsquoeacutepingles
pouvant servir de feacutetiche 104862510486260 10486261048628 Dorothea anning
Childrenrsquos Games 104862510486261048628
10486261048629 Dorothea anning Eine
Kleine Nachtmusik 104862510486261048630
10486261048630 Dorothea anning Palaestra 104862510486261048632
10486261048631 Dorothea anning Birthday 104862510486261048633
10486261048632 Dorothea anning Premier peacuteril 104862510486271048628
10486261048633 Dorothea anning
Cinquiegraveme peacuteril 104862510486271048631
10486270 Dorothea anning Interior
with Sudden Joy 104862510486271048633
10486271048625 Dorothea anning Canapeacute
en temps de pluie 104862510486281048629
10486271048626 Dorothea anning Murmurs 104862510486281048631
10486271048627 Francesca Woodman House 3 104862510486291048628
10486271048628 Francesca Woodman
then at one point 104862510486291048631 10486271048629 Francesca Woodman
rom Space2 104862510486301048626
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10486271048630 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486301048630
10486271048631 Francesca Woodman Untitled 104862510486301048633
10486271048632 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486310
10486271048633 Francesca Woodman On
Being an Angel 104862510486311048626
10486280 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048627
10486281048625 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048628
10486281048626 Pierre Alechinsky Central Park 104862510486320
10486281048627 Pattern in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
painting Central Park 104862510486321048630
10486281048628 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (III) 104862510486331048627
10486281048629 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (VII) 104862510486331048629
10486281048630 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (X) 104862510486331048630
10486281048631 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862601048626
10486281048632 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486251048625
10486281048633 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486260
10486290 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486261048627
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xi
Preface
Surrealist Ghostliness began with the insight I had in 1048626000 that sur-realist perception was necessarily double and that anamorphosis
unctions well as a visual paradigm or this doubleness because o the
way surrealism purports to harness both our conscious and uncon-scious minds into a kind o idealized synthesis what Andreacute Bretonthe author o the 1047297rst two ldquoManiestoesrdquo o surrealism in 1048625104863310486261048628 and
1048625104863310486270 would call a resolution o old antinomies or a sublime point
As a result o this insight I wrote an exhibition catalogue essay on
surrealist love poetry called ldquoAnamorphic Loverdquo Tere or the 1047297rst
time I integrated ully an appreciation o surrealist visual art into my
more literary work paving the way or my ocus on art in SurrealistGhostliness As I was 1047297nishing my book on Robert Desnos in 1048626001048626
I realized that his tongue-twisting poetry produced in automatic
trances at the outset o the surrealist movement provided a textual
model or the double nature o surrealist perception Anamorphosison a visual level and Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo playul punning poemson an aural and textual level require an analogous two-step process
o comprehension what I called a double take involving a 1047297rst lookor hearing ollowed by a second retroactive look or hearing
My interest in anamorphosis began with the standard image we
know o the urn that on a second look resolves into the silhouette
o two human aces looking at one another or the duck that trans-
orms into a rabbit I then turned to the picture-poems o GuillaumeApollinaire the French poet who coined the word surrealism in 1048625104863310486251048631
and who created his handwritten ldquocalligramsrdquo when he was a soldierin World War I decades beore the concrete poets identi1047297ed these
poems as early twentieth-century precursors to their own Apollinaire
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xii Preace
arranged the words on the page to replicate playully the objects hedescribed such as a tie a ountain or a heart First we see the picturethe letters make and read the words and then retroactively through
a mental double take we see that the two sign systemsmdash visual andtextualmdash represent two versions o the same thing two intense im-
ages literal and metaphoric with the dominant version standing inor conscious reality and the secondary version hiding like a ghost
behind it standing in or unconscious dream reality that we know
exists but have trouble seeing simultaneously with the conscious
reality Each version looks like the thing described but in a different
way Neither replicates the other exactly the two coexist yet it isdifficult to apprehend them both at the same time
Tis train o thought led me to the most amous anamorphic
painting Hans Holbeinrsquos sixteenth-century Ambassadors (1048625104862910486271048627 see
1047297g 1048625) which was created to hang next to a door so that it could be
seen head on and then once again over onersquos shoulder at the instanto leaving the room at which point the skull lying at the ambassadorsrsquo
eet springs into ocus as the ambassadors themselves ade into ablur Tis over-the-shoulder retrospective glance unctions like thedouble take Apollinairersquos poems invite when we realize these two
perspectives constitute two aspects o the same reality
Surrealist perception is anamorphic in a way similar to the mo-
ment when a viewer perceives Holbeinrsquos Ambassadors sideways andbackward when or an instant both aspects o the painting become
apparent at once We suddenly understand that underlying the glori-ous achievements o the magni1047297cently dressed men in the paintinglies the mortality that awaits themmdash that awaits us all On second
glance the suppressed primitive truth o mortality is even more realthan the overt reality most o us live by which is actually more o a
dreamlike antasy or it deludes us into believing that we will live
orever protected rom the inevitable by prosperity Te repressed
truth is more real than the reality we live consciously Te distinc-tion between these realities like a membrane or elusive line that is
always moving away rom us just out o reach dissolves in such a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xiii
way as to make them almost indistinguishable rom each other For
the surrealists the sublime point resides at the instant when onereality bleeds into another so that or an instant both sides o the
duality may be understood simultaneously
I 1047297rst understood this anamorphic paradigm as ghostly in 1048626001048627when I began to study Lee Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs rom the
1048625104863310486270s starting with her Domes o the Church o the Virgin (al Adhra)
Deir el Soriano Monastery (ca 1048625104863310486271048630) (see 1047297g 10486251048632) Here I discovered
the ghost o a womanrsquos nude body looking down at hersel hiddenin a landscape photograph o a monastery that or centuries had
housed only men as though the ghosts o all the monks rom the
1 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors (1533) copy National Gallery London Art
Resource New York
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xiv Preace
past suddenly had succeeded in ul1047297lling a secret desire I was sure
this was not a mistake when I thought about Millerrsquos wry sense o
humor and then I began to 1047297nd ghost images in her other photo-
graphs it became clear to me that this anamorphic effect was at
once surrealist and ghostly Te ghostliness was con1047297rmed or me byher elegiac From the op of the Great Pyramid (ca 1048625104863310486271048631 see 1047297g 10486261048626)
shot when Miller knew she was soon to leave Egypt or Europe andan impending war which would provide the surrealists with new
ghosts beyond those o riends and amily rom the previous war
Te photograph hints at the ghostly presence o the photographer
hersel looking out at the landscape and also seems to invoke ghostsrom the distant past in dark anticipation o the upcoming war in
which Miller would enlist as an American photographer with the
US Army
Surrealist Ghostliness begins at the outset o the surrealist move-ment when the young surrealists listened entranced to Desnosrsquos
hypnotic utterings that sounded oracular and prophetic prooundly
ghostly and otherworldly and Desnosrsquos riend Man Raymdash the Ameri-can who recorded the movement photographically and later workedwith Millermdash began his experiments with 1047297lm I turn then to workscreated in dialogue with the movement rom the 1048625104863310486260s through the1048625104863310486330s including Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs Surrealist Ghostliness continues the exploration o surrealism I began in my 1047297rst book andpursues the sense my book on Desnos gave me o what it might eel
like to be haunted by someone by a ghost exhorting me to moveorward and complete a task that at times elt akin to conjuring notunlike the experience o all writers o critical biographies who openthemselves to a kind o willed haunting Tis book then allows meto see the movement as a whole in a historic sweep that allies it evenmore closely to the century into which I was born the century thatstill shapes our current era It also includes Americans such as Ray
Miller Dorothea anning Francesca Woodman and Susan Hillerwho like me were drawn to surrealism
My study o the artists presented here through the prism o ana-
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Preace xv
morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constantnegotiation with our own mortality in which our beings are dividedbetween dreams and everyday realities between the psychic and
the mundanely material the latent and the maniestmdash the maniestat times holding more secrets than the of-probed latent content
o personal experience In the preace to my 1047297rst book Automatic
Woman (1048625104863310486331048630) I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives ofenmirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had anautobiographical connection On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between maniestand latent realities in my own lie in my own amily story
mdash what
we tell others about our amily lie what others tell us and what weadmit only to ourselves More broadly with its ocus on the latent
and the visible the maniest and the ghostly this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literaturereveals the secret at the core o the human conditionmdash namely thatmortality implies a lie doubled by death a 1047297nitude within which
multiple baroque in1047297nitudes may be imagined Most o all I ound affirmation o a long-held belie that we live
experiences that are de1047297ned by what we intuit as much as by what wethink by what we eel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationallyinormed perceptions o perceive ully we must perceive doubly
at once peripherally and directly not unlike the way we look at Te
Ambassadors We need to remain open to what lies in between thewords or images in order to appreciate them Te surrealists under-stood this both those who worked in the movementrsquos mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins
1047297nding their centers elsewhere With this book I hope to show howthis rational surrealist quest or the knowledge o what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives which
we live in a state o perpetual and virtual reality have expanded toinclude what we do not ully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern possibly even post-Enlightenment world
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 1040
10486251048633 Lee Miller Te Procession (Bird
racks in the Sand) 104862501048627
10486260 Lee Miller Te Cloud Factory(Sacks of Cotton) 104862501048629
10486261048625 Lee Miller Portrait of Space 104862501048633
10486261048626 Lee Miller From the op of
the Great Pyramid 104862510486251048627
10486261048627 Dorothea anning Pelote drsquoeacutepingles
pouvant servir de feacutetiche 104862510486260 10486261048628 Dorothea anning
Childrenrsquos Games 104862510486261048628
10486261048629 Dorothea anning Eine
Kleine Nachtmusik 104862510486261048630
10486261048630 Dorothea anning Palaestra 104862510486261048632
10486261048631 Dorothea anning Birthday 104862510486261048633
10486261048632 Dorothea anning Premier peacuteril 104862510486271048628
10486261048633 Dorothea anning
Cinquiegraveme peacuteril 104862510486271048631
10486270 Dorothea anning Interior
with Sudden Joy 104862510486271048633
10486271048625 Dorothea anning Canapeacute
en temps de pluie 104862510486281048629
10486271048626 Dorothea anning Murmurs 104862510486281048631
10486271048627 Francesca Woodman House 3 104862510486291048628
10486271048628 Francesca Woodman
then at one point 104862510486291048631 10486271048629 Francesca Woodman
rom Space2 104862510486301048626
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10486271048630 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486301048630
10486271048631 Francesca Woodman Untitled 104862510486301048633
10486271048632 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486310
10486271048633 Francesca Woodman On
Being an Angel 104862510486311048626
10486280 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048627
10486281048625 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048628
10486281048626 Pierre Alechinsky Central Park 104862510486320
10486281048627 Pattern in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
painting Central Park 104862510486321048630
10486281048628 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (III) 104862510486331048627
10486281048629 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (VII) 104862510486331048629
10486281048630 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (X) 104862510486331048630
10486281048631 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862601048626
10486281048632 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486251048625
10486281048633 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486260
10486290 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486261048627
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xi
Preface
Surrealist Ghostliness began with the insight I had in 1048626000 that sur-realist perception was necessarily double and that anamorphosis
unctions well as a visual paradigm or this doubleness because o the
way surrealism purports to harness both our conscious and uncon-scious minds into a kind o idealized synthesis what Andreacute Bretonthe author o the 1047297rst two ldquoManiestoesrdquo o surrealism in 1048625104863310486261048628 and
1048625104863310486270 would call a resolution o old antinomies or a sublime point
As a result o this insight I wrote an exhibition catalogue essay on
surrealist love poetry called ldquoAnamorphic Loverdquo Tere or the 1047297rst
time I integrated ully an appreciation o surrealist visual art into my
more literary work paving the way or my ocus on art in SurrealistGhostliness As I was 1047297nishing my book on Robert Desnos in 1048626001048626
I realized that his tongue-twisting poetry produced in automatic
trances at the outset o the surrealist movement provided a textual
model or the double nature o surrealist perception Anamorphosison a visual level and Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo playul punning poemson an aural and textual level require an analogous two-step process
o comprehension what I called a double take involving a 1047297rst lookor hearing ollowed by a second retroactive look or hearing
My interest in anamorphosis began with the standard image we
know o the urn that on a second look resolves into the silhouette
o two human aces looking at one another or the duck that trans-
orms into a rabbit I then turned to the picture-poems o GuillaumeApollinaire the French poet who coined the word surrealism in 1048625104863310486251048631
and who created his handwritten ldquocalligramsrdquo when he was a soldierin World War I decades beore the concrete poets identi1047297ed these
poems as early twentieth-century precursors to their own Apollinaire
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xii Preace
arranged the words on the page to replicate playully the objects hedescribed such as a tie a ountain or a heart First we see the picturethe letters make and read the words and then retroactively through
a mental double take we see that the two sign systemsmdash visual andtextualmdash represent two versions o the same thing two intense im-
ages literal and metaphoric with the dominant version standing inor conscious reality and the secondary version hiding like a ghost
behind it standing in or unconscious dream reality that we know
exists but have trouble seeing simultaneously with the conscious
reality Each version looks like the thing described but in a different
way Neither replicates the other exactly the two coexist yet it isdifficult to apprehend them both at the same time
Tis train o thought led me to the most amous anamorphic
painting Hans Holbeinrsquos sixteenth-century Ambassadors (1048625104862910486271048627 see
1047297g 1048625) which was created to hang next to a door so that it could be
seen head on and then once again over onersquos shoulder at the instanto leaving the room at which point the skull lying at the ambassadorsrsquo
eet springs into ocus as the ambassadors themselves ade into ablur Tis over-the-shoulder retrospective glance unctions like thedouble take Apollinairersquos poems invite when we realize these two
perspectives constitute two aspects o the same reality
Surrealist perception is anamorphic in a way similar to the mo-
ment when a viewer perceives Holbeinrsquos Ambassadors sideways andbackward when or an instant both aspects o the painting become
apparent at once We suddenly understand that underlying the glori-ous achievements o the magni1047297cently dressed men in the paintinglies the mortality that awaits themmdash that awaits us all On second
glance the suppressed primitive truth o mortality is even more realthan the overt reality most o us live by which is actually more o a
dreamlike antasy or it deludes us into believing that we will live
orever protected rom the inevitable by prosperity Te repressed
truth is more real than the reality we live consciously Te distinc-tion between these realities like a membrane or elusive line that is
always moving away rom us just out o reach dissolves in such a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xiii
way as to make them almost indistinguishable rom each other For
the surrealists the sublime point resides at the instant when onereality bleeds into another so that or an instant both sides o the
duality may be understood simultaneously
I 1047297rst understood this anamorphic paradigm as ghostly in 1048626001048627when I began to study Lee Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs rom the
1048625104863310486270s starting with her Domes o the Church o the Virgin (al Adhra)
Deir el Soriano Monastery (ca 1048625104863310486271048630) (see 1047297g 10486251048632) Here I discovered
the ghost o a womanrsquos nude body looking down at hersel hiddenin a landscape photograph o a monastery that or centuries had
housed only men as though the ghosts o all the monks rom the
1 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors (1533) copy National Gallery London Art
Resource New York
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xiv Preace
past suddenly had succeeded in ul1047297lling a secret desire I was sure
this was not a mistake when I thought about Millerrsquos wry sense o
humor and then I began to 1047297nd ghost images in her other photo-
graphs it became clear to me that this anamorphic effect was at
once surrealist and ghostly Te ghostliness was con1047297rmed or me byher elegiac From the op of the Great Pyramid (ca 1048625104863310486271048631 see 1047297g 10486261048626)
shot when Miller knew she was soon to leave Egypt or Europe andan impending war which would provide the surrealists with new
ghosts beyond those o riends and amily rom the previous war
Te photograph hints at the ghostly presence o the photographer
hersel looking out at the landscape and also seems to invoke ghostsrom the distant past in dark anticipation o the upcoming war in
which Miller would enlist as an American photographer with the
US Army
Surrealist Ghostliness begins at the outset o the surrealist move-ment when the young surrealists listened entranced to Desnosrsquos
hypnotic utterings that sounded oracular and prophetic prooundly
ghostly and otherworldly and Desnosrsquos riend Man Raymdash the Ameri-can who recorded the movement photographically and later workedwith Millermdash began his experiments with 1047297lm I turn then to workscreated in dialogue with the movement rom the 1048625104863310486260s through the1048625104863310486330s including Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs Surrealist Ghostliness continues the exploration o surrealism I began in my 1047297rst book andpursues the sense my book on Desnos gave me o what it might eel
like to be haunted by someone by a ghost exhorting me to moveorward and complete a task that at times elt akin to conjuring notunlike the experience o all writers o critical biographies who openthemselves to a kind o willed haunting Tis book then allows meto see the movement as a whole in a historic sweep that allies it evenmore closely to the century into which I was born the century thatstill shapes our current era It also includes Americans such as Ray
Miller Dorothea anning Francesca Woodman and Susan Hillerwho like me were drawn to surrealism
My study o the artists presented here through the prism o ana-
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xv
morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constantnegotiation with our own mortality in which our beings are dividedbetween dreams and everyday realities between the psychic and
the mundanely material the latent and the maniestmdash the maniestat times holding more secrets than the of-probed latent content
o personal experience In the preace to my 1047297rst book Automatic
Woman (1048625104863310486331048630) I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives ofenmirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had anautobiographical connection On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between maniestand latent realities in my own lie in my own amily story
mdash what
we tell others about our amily lie what others tell us and what weadmit only to ourselves More broadly with its ocus on the latent
and the visible the maniest and the ghostly this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literaturereveals the secret at the core o the human conditionmdash namely thatmortality implies a lie doubled by death a 1047297nitude within which
multiple baroque in1047297nitudes may be imagined Most o all I ound affirmation o a long-held belie that we live
experiences that are de1047297ned by what we intuit as much as by what wethink by what we eel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationallyinormed perceptions o perceive ully we must perceive doubly
at once peripherally and directly not unlike the way we look at Te
Ambassadors We need to remain open to what lies in between thewords or images in order to appreciate them Te surrealists under-stood this both those who worked in the movementrsquos mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins
1047297nding their centers elsewhere With this book I hope to show howthis rational surrealist quest or the knowledge o what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives which
we live in a state o perpetual and virtual reality have expanded toinclude what we do not ully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern possibly even post-Enlightenment world
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 1140
10486271048630 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486301048630
10486271048631 Francesca Woodman Untitled 104862510486301048633
10486271048632 Francesca Woodman Space2 104862510486310
10486271048633 Francesca Woodman On
Being an Angel 104862510486311048626
10486280 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048627
10486281048625 Francesca Woodman
rom Angel series 104862510486311048628
10486281048626 Pierre Alechinsky Central Park 104862510486320
10486281048627 Pattern in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
painting Central Park 104862510486321048630
10486281048628 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (III) 104862510486331048627
10486281048629 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (VII) 104862510486331048629
10486281048630 Pierre Alechinsky Page
drsquoatlas universel (X) 104862510486331048630
10486281048631 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862601048626
10486281048632 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486251048625
10486281048633 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486260
10486290 Susan Hiller From the
Freud Museum 104862610486261048627
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xi
Preface
Surrealist Ghostliness began with the insight I had in 1048626000 that sur-realist perception was necessarily double and that anamorphosis
unctions well as a visual paradigm or this doubleness because o the
way surrealism purports to harness both our conscious and uncon-scious minds into a kind o idealized synthesis what Andreacute Bretonthe author o the 1047297rst two ldquoManiestoesrdquo o surrealism in 1048625104863310486261048628 and
1048625104863310486270 would call a resolution o old antinomies or a sublime point
As a result o this insight I wrote an exhibition catalogue essay on
surrealist love poetry called ldquoAnamorphic Loverdquo Tere or the 1047297rst
time I integrated ully an appreciation o surrealist visual art into my
more literary work paving the way or my ocus on art in SurrealistGhostliness As I was 1047297nishing my book on Robert Desnos in 1048626001048626
I realized that his tongue-twisting poetry produced in automatic
trances at the outset o the surrealist movement provided a textual
model or the double nature o surrealist perception Anamorphosison a visual level and Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo playul punning poemson an aural and textual level require an analogous two-step process
o comprehension what I called a double take involving a 1047297rst lookor hearing ollowed by a second retroactive look or hearing
My interest in anamorphosis began with the standard image we
know o the urn that on a second look resolves into the silhouette
o two human aces looking at one another or the duck that trans-
orms into a rabbit I then turned to the picture-poems o GuillaumeApollinaire the French poet who coined the word surrealism in 1048625104863310486251048631
and who created his handwritten ldquocalligramsrdquo when he was a soldierin World War I decades beore the concrete poets identi1047297ed these
poems as early twentieth-century precursors to their own Apollinaire
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xii Preace
arranged the words on the page to replicate playully the objects hedescribed such as a tie a ountain or a heart First we see the picturethe letters make and read the words and then retroactively through
a mental double take we see that the two sign systemsmdash visual andtextualmdash represent two versions o the same thing two intense im-
ages literal and metaphoric with the dominant version standing inor conscious reality and the secondary version hiding like a ghost
behind it standing in or unconscious dream reality that we know
exists but have trouble seeing simultaneously with the conscious
reality Each version looks like the thing described but in a different
way Neither replicates the other exactly the two coexist yet it isdifficult to apprehend them both at the same time
Tis train o thought led me to the most amous anamorphic
painting Hans Holbeinrsquos sixteenth-century Ambassadors (1048625104862910486271048627 see
1047297g 1048625) which was created to hang next to a door so that it could be
seen head on and then once again over onersquos shoulder at the instanto leaving the room at which point the skull lying at the ambassadorsrsquo
eet springs into ocus as the ambassadors themselves ade into ablur Tis over-the-shoulder retrospective glance unctions like thedouble take Apollinairersquos poems invite when we realize these two
perspectives constitute two aspects o the same reality
Surrealist perception is anamorphic in a way similar to the mo-
ment when a viewer perceives Holbeinrsquos Ambassadors sideways andbackward when or an instant both aspects o the painting become
apparent at once We suddenly understand that underlying the glori-ous achievements o the magni1047297cently dressed men in the paintinglies the mortality that awaits themmdash that awaits us all On second
glance the suppressed primitive truth o mortality is even more realthan the overt reality most o us live by which is actually more o a
dreamlike antasy or it deludes us into believing that we will live
orever protected rom the inevitable by prosperity Te repressed
truth is more real than the reality we live consciously Te distinc-tion between these realities like a membrane or elusive line that is
always moving away rom us just out o reach dissolves in such a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xiii
way as to make them almost indistinguishable rom each other For
the surrealists the sublime point resides at the instant when onereality bleeds into another so that or an instant both sides o the
duality may be understood simultaneously
I 1047297rst understood this anamorphic paradigm as ghostly in 1048626001048627when I began to study Lee Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs rom the
1048625104863310486270s starting with her Domes o the Church o the Virgin (al Adhra)
Deir el Soriano Monastery (ca 1048625104863310486271048630) (see 1047297g 10486251048632) Here I discovered
the ghost o a womanrsquos nude body looking down at hersel hiddenin a landscape photograph o a monastery that or centuries had
housed only men as though the ghosts o all the monks rom the
1 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors (1533) copy National Gallery London Art
Resource New York
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xiv Preace
past suddenly had succeeded in ul1047297lling a secret desire I was sure
this was not a mistake when I thought about Millerrsquos wry sense o
humor and then I began to 1047297nd ghost images in her other photo-
graphs it became clear to me that this anamorphic effect was at
once surrealist and ghostly Te ghostliness was con1047297rmed or me byher elegiac From the op of the Great Pyramid (ca 1048625104863310486271048631 see 1047297g 10486261048626)
shot when Miller knew she was soon to leave Egypt or Europe andan impending war which would provide the surrealists with new
ghosts beyond those o riends and amily rom the previous war
Te photograph hints at the ghostly presence o the photographer
hersel looking out at the landscape and also seems to invoke ghostsrom the distant past in dark anticipation o the upcoming war in
which Miller would enlist as an American photographer with the
US Army
Surrealist Ghostliness begins at the outset o the surrealist move-ment when the young surrealists listened entranced to Desnosrsquos
hypnotic utterings that sounded oracular and prophetic prooundly
ghostly and otherworldly and Desnosrsquos riend Man Raymdash the Ameri-can who recorded the movement photographically and later workedwith Millermdash began his experiments with 1047297lm I turn then to workscreated in dialogue with the movement rom the 1048625104863310486260s through the1048625104863310486330s including Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs Surrealist Ghostliness continues the exploration o surrealism I began in my 1047297rst book andpursues the sense my book on Desnos gave me o what it might eel
like to be haunted by someone by a ghost exhorting me to moveorward and complete a task that at times elt akin to conjuring notunlike the experience o all writers o critical biographies who openthemselves to a kind o willed haunting Tis book then allows meto see the movement as a whole in a historic sweep that allies it evenmore closely to the century into which I was born the century thatstill shapes our current era It also includes Americans such as Ray
Miller Dorothea anning Francesca Woodman and Susan Hillerwho like me were drawn to surrealism
My study o the artists presented here through the prism o ana-
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xv
morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constantnegotiation with our own mortality in which our beings are dividedbetween dreams and everyday realities between the psychic and
the mundanely material the latent and the maniestmdash the maniestat times holding more secrets than the of-probed latent content
o personal experience In the preace to my 1047297rst book Automatic
Woman (1048625104863310486331048630) I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives ofenmirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had anautobiographical connection On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between maniestand latent realities in my own lie in my own amily story
mdash what
we tell others about our amily lie what others tell us and what weadmit only to ourselves More broadly with its ocus on the latent
and the visible the maniest and the ghostly this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literaturereveals the secret at the core o the human conditionmdash namely thatmortality implies a lie doubled by death a 1047297nitude within which
multiple baroque in1047297nitudes may be imagined Most o all I ound affirmation o a long-held belie that we live
experiences that are de1047297ned by what we intuit as much as by what wethink by what we eel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationallyinormed perceptions o perceive ully we must perceive doubly
at once peripherally and directly not unlike the way we look at Te
Ambassadors We need to remain open to what lies in between thewords or images in order to appreciate them Te surrealists under-stood this both those who worked in the movementrsquos mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins
1047297nding their centers elsewhere With this book I hope to show howthis rational surrealist quest or the knowledge o what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives which
we live in a state o perpetual and virtual reality have expanded toinclude what we do not ully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern possibly even post-Enlightenment world
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xi
Preface
Surrealist Ghostliness began with the insight I had in 1048626000 that sur-realist perception was necessarily double and that anamorphosis
unctions well as a visual paradigm or this doubleness because o the
way surrealism purports to harness both our conscious and uncon-scious minds into a kind o idealized synthesis what Andreacute Bretonthe author o the 1047297rst two ldquoManiestoesrdquo o surrealism in 1048625104863310486261048628 and
1048625104863310486270 would call a resolution o old antinomies or a sublime point
As a result o this insight I wrote an exhibition catalogue essay on
surrealist love poetry called ldquoAnamorphic Loverdquo Tere or the 1047297rst
time I integrated ully an appreciation o surrealist visual art into my
more literary work paving the way or my ocus on art in SurrealistGhostliness As I was 1047297nishing my book on Robert Desnos in 1048626001048626
I realized that his tongue-twisting poetry produced in automatic
trances at the outset o the surrealist movement provided a textual
model or the double nature o surrealist perception Anamorphosison a visual level and Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo playul punning poemson an aural and textual level require an analogous two-step process
o comprehension what I called a double take involving a 1047297rst lookor hearing ollowed by a second retroactive look or hearing
My interest in anamorphosis began with the standard image we
know o the urn that on a second look resolves into the silhouette
o two human aces looking at one another or the duck that trans-
orms into a rabbit I then turned to the picture-poems o GuillaumeApollinaire the French poet who coined the word surrealism in 1048625104863310486251048631
and who created his handwritten ldquocalligramsrdquo when he was a soldierin World War I decades beore the concrete poets identi1047297ed these
poems as early twentieth-century precursors to their own Apollinaire
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xii Preace
arranged the words on the page to replicate playully the objects hedescribed such as a tie a ountain or a heart First we see the picturethe letters make and read the words and then retroactively through
a mental double take we see that the two sign systemsmdash visual andtextualmdash represent two versions o the same thing two intense im-
ages literal and metaphoric with the dominant version standing inor conscious reality and the secondary version hiding like a ghost
behind it standing in or unconscious dream reality that we know
exists but have trouble seeing simultaneously with the conscious
reality Each version looks like the thing described but in a different
way Neither replicates the other exactly the two coexist yet it isdifficult to apprehend them both at the same time
Tis train o thought led me to the most amous anamorphic
painting Hans Holbeinrsquos sixteenth-century Ambassadors (1048625104862910486271048627 see
1047297g 1048625) which was created to hang next to a door so that it could be
seen head on and then once again over onersquos shoulder at the instanto leaving the room at which point the skull lying at the ambassadorsrsquo
eet springs into ocus as the ambassadors themselves ade into ablur Tis over-the-shoulder retrospective glance unctions like thedouble take Apollinairersquos poems invite when we realize these two
perspectives constitute two aspects o the same reality
Surrealist perception is anamorphic in a way similar to the mo-
ment when a viewer perceives Holbeinrsquos Ambassadors sideways andbackward when or an instant both aspects o the painting become
apparent at once We suddenly understand that underlying the glori-ous achievements o the magni1047297cently dressed men in the paintinglies the mortality that awaits themmdash that awaits us all On second
glance the suppressed primitive truth o mortality is even more realthan the overt reality most o us live by which is actually more o a
dreamlike antasy or it deludes us into believing that we will live
orever protected rom the inevitable by prosperity Te repressed
truth is more real than the reality we live consciously Te distinc-tion between these realities like a membrane or elusive line that is
always moving away rom us just out o reach dissolves in such a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xiii
way as to make them almost indistinguishable rom each other For
the surrealists the sublime point resides at the instant when onereality bleeds into another so that or an instant both sides o the
duality may be understood simultaneously
I 1047297rst understood this anamorphic paradigm as ghostly in 1048626001048627when I began to study Lee Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs rom the
1048625104863310486270s starting with her Domes o the Church o the Virgin (al Adhra)
Deir el Soriano Monastery (ca 1048625104863310486271048630) (see 1047297g 10486251048632) Here I discovered
the ghost o a womanrsquos nude body looking down at hersel hiddenin a landscape photograph o a monastery that or centuries had
housed only men as though the ghosts o all the monks rom the
1 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors (1533) copy National Gallery London Art
Resource New York
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xiv Preace
past suddenly had succeeded in ul1047297lling a secret desire I was sure
this was not a mistake when I thought about Millerrsquos wry sense o
humor and then I began to 1047297nd ghost images in her other photo-
graphs it became clear to me that this anamorphic effect was at
once surrealist and ghostly Te ghostliness was con1047297rmed or me byher elegiac From the op of the Great Pyramid (ca 1048625104863310486271048631 see 1047297g 10486261048626)
shot when Miller knew she was soon to leave Egypt or Europe andan impending war which would provide the surrealists with new
ghosts beyond those o riends and amily rom the previous war
Te photograph hints at the ghostly presence o the photographer
hersel looking out at the landscape and also seems to invoke ghostsrom the distant past in dark anticipation o the upcoming war in
which Miller would enlist as an American photographer with the
US Army
Surrealist Ghostliness begins at the outset o the surrealist move-ment when the young surrealists listened entranced to Desnosrsquos
hypnotic utterings that sounded oracular and prophetic prooundly
ghostly and otherworldly and Desnosrsquos riend Man Raymdash the Ameri-can who recorded the movement photographically and later workedwith Millermdash began his experiments with 1047297lm I turn then to workscreated in dialogue with the movement rom the 1048625104863310486260s through the1048625104863310486330s including Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs Surrealist Ghostliness continues the exploration o surrealism I began in my 1047297rst book andpursues the sense my book on Desnos gave me o what it might eel
like to be haunted by someone by a ghost exhorting me to moveorward and complete a task that at times elt akin to conjuring notunlike the experience o all writers o critical biographies who openthemselves to a kind o willed haunting Tis book then allows meto see the movement as a whole in a historic sweep that allies it evenmore closely to the century into which I was born the century thatstill shapes our current era It also includes Americans such as Ray
Miller Dorothea anning Francesca Woodman and Susan Hillerwho like me were drawn to surrealism
My study o the artists presented here through the prism o ana-
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Preace xv
morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constantnegotiation with our own mortality in which our beings are dividedbetween dreams and everyday realities between the psychic and
the mundanely material the latent and the maniestmdash the maniestat times holding more secrets than the of-probed latent content
o personal experience In the preace to my 1047297rst book Automatic
Woman (1048625104863310486331048630) I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives ofenmirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had anautobiographical connection On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between maniestand latent realities in my own lie in my own amily story
mdash what
we tell others about our amily lie what others tell us and what weadmit only to ourselves More broadly with its ocus on the latent
and the visible the maniest and the ghostly this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literaturereveals the secret at the core o the human conditionmdash namely thatmortality implies a lie doubled by death a 1047297nitude within which
multiple baroque in1047297nitudes may be imagined Most o all I ound affirmation o a long-held belie that we live
experiences that are de1047297ned by what we intuit as much as by what wethink by what we eel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationallyinormed perceptions o perceive ully we must perceive doubly
at once peripherally and directly not unlike the way we look at Te
Ambassadors We need to remain open to what lies in between thewords or images in order to appreciate them Te surrealists under-stood this both those who worked in the movementrsquos mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins
1047297nding their centers elsewhere With this book I hope to show howthis rational surrealist quest or the knowledge o what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives which
we live in a state o perpetual and virtual reality have expanded toinclude what we do not ully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern possibly even post-Enlightenment world
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xii Preace
arranged the words on the page to replicate playully the objects hedescribed such as a tie a ountain or a heart First we see the picturethe letters make and read the words and then retroactively through
a mental double take we see that the two sign systemsmdash visual andtextualmdash represent two versions o the same thing two intense im-
ages literal and metaphoric with the dominant version standing inor conscious reality and the secondary version hiding like a ghost
behind it standing in or unconscious dream reality that we know
exists but have trouble seeing simultaneously with the conscious
reality Each version looks like the thing described but in a different
way Neither replicates the other exactly the two coexist yet it isdifficult to apprehend them both at the same time
Tis train o thought led me to the most amous anamorphic
painting Hans Holbeinrsquos sixteenth-century Ambassadors (1048625104862910486271048627 see
1047297g 1048625) which was created to hang next to a door so that it could be
seen head on and then once again over onersquos shoulder at the instanto leaving the room at which point the skull lying at the ambassadorsrsquo
eet springs into ocus as the ambassadors themselves ade into ablur Tis over-the-shoulder retrospective glance unctions like thedouble take Apollinairersquos poems invite when we realize these two
perspectives constitute two aspects o the same reality
Surrealist perception is anamorphic in a way similar to the mo-
ment when a viewer perceives Holbeinrsquos Ambassadors sideways andbackward when or an instant both aspects o the painting become
apparent at once We suddenly understand that underlying the glori-ous achievements o the magni1047297cently dressed men in the paintinglies the mortality that awaits themmdash that awaits us all On second
glance the suppressed primitive truth o mortality is even more realthan the overt reality most o us live by which is actually more o a
dreamlike antasy or it deludes us into believing that we will live
orever protected rom the inevitable by prosperity Te repressed
truth is more real than the reality we live consciously Te distinc-tion between these realities like a membrane or elusive line that is
always moving away rom us just out o reach dissolves in such a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xiii
way as to make them almost indistinguishable rom each other For
the surrealists the sublime point resides at the instant when onereality bleeds into another so that or an instant both sides o the
duality may be understood simultaneously
I 1047297rst understood this anamorphic paradigm as ghostly in 1048626001048627when I began to study Lee Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs rom the
1048625104863310486270s starting with her Domes o the Church o the Virgin (al Adhra)
Deir el Soriano Monastery (ca 1048625104863310486271048630) (see 1047297g 10486251048632) Here I discovered
the ghost o a womanrsquos nude body looking down at hersel hiddenin a landscape photograph o a monastery that or centuries had
housed only men as though the ghosts o all the monks rom the
1 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors (1533) copy National Gallery London Art
Resource New York
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xiv Preace
past suddenly had succeeded in ul1047297lling a secret desire I was sure
this was not a mistake when I thought about Millerrsquos wry sense o
humor and then I began to 1047297nd ghost images in her other photo-
graphs it became clear to me that this anamorphic effect was at
once surrealist and ghostly Te ghostliness was con1047297rmed or me byher elegiac From the op of the Great Pyramid (ca 1048625104863310486271048631 see 1047297g 10486261048626)
shot when Miller knew she was soon to leave Egypt or Europe andan impending war which would provide the surrealists with new
ghosts beyond those o riends and amily rom the previous war
Te photograph hints at the ghostly presence o the photographer
hersel looking out at the landscape and also seems to invoke ghostsrom the distant past in dark anticipation o the upcoming war in
which Miller would enlist as an American photographer with the
US Army
Surrealist Ghostliness begins at the outset o the surrealist move-ment when the young surrealists listened entranced to Desnosrsquos
hypnotic utterings that sounded oracular and prophetic prooundly
ghostly and otherworldly and Desnosrsquos riend Man Raymdash the Ameri-can who recorded the movement photographically and later workedwith Millermdash began his experiments with 1047297lm I turn then to workscreated in dialogue with the movement rom the 1048625104863310486260s through the1048625104863310486330s including Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs Surrealist Ghostliness continues the exploration o surrealism I began in my 1047297rst book andpursues the sense my book on Desnos gave me o what it might eel
like to be haunted by someone by a ghost exhorting me to moveorward and complete a task that at times elt akin to conjuring notunlike the experience o all writers o critical biographies who openthemselves to a kind o willed haunting Tis book then allows meto see the movement as a whole in a historic sweep that allies it evenmore closely to the century into which I was born the century thatstill shapes our current era It also includes Americans such as Ray
Miller Dorothea anning Francesca Woodman and Susan Hillerwho like me were drawn to surrealism
My study o the artists presented here through the prism o ana-
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xv
morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constantnegotiation with our own mortality in which our beings are dividedbetween dreams and everyday realities between the psychic and
the mundanely material the latent and the maniestmdash the maniestat times holding more secrets than the of-probed latent content
o personal experience In the preace to my 1047297rst book Automatic
Woman (1048625104863310486331048630) I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives ofenmirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had anautobiographical connection On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between maniestand latent realities in my own lie in my own amily story
mdash what
we tell others about our amily lie what others tell us and what weadmit only to ourselves More broadly with its ocus on the latent
and the visible the maniest and the ghostly this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literaturereveals the secret at the core o the human conditionmdash namely thatmortality implies a lie doubled by death a 1047297nitude within which
multiple baroque in1047297nitudes may be imagined Most o all I ound affirmation o a long-held belie that we live
experiences that are de1047297ned by what we intuit as much as by what wethink by what we eel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationallyinormed perceptions o perceive ully we must perceive doubly
at once peripherally and directly not unlike the way we look at Te
Ambassadors We need to remain open to what lies in between thewords or images in order to appreciate them Te surrealists under-stood this both those who worked in the movementrsquos mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins
1047297nding their centers elsewhere With this book I hope to show howthis rational surrealist quest or the knowledge o what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives which
we live in a state o perpetual and virtual reality have expanded toinclude what we do not ully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern possibly even post-Enlightenment world
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
Buy the Book
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xiii
way as to make them almost indistinguishable rom each other For
the surrealists the sublime point resides at the instant when onereality bleeds into another so that or an instant both sides o the
duality may be understood simultaneously
I 1047297rst understood this anamorphic paradigm as ghostly in 1048626001048627when I began to study Lee Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs rom the
1048625104863310486270s starting with her Domes o the Church o the Virgin (al Adhra)
Deir el Soriano Monastery (ca 1048625104863310486271048630) (see 1047297g 10486251048632) Here I discovered
the ghost o a womanrsquos nude body looking down at hersel hiddenin a landscape photograph o a monastery that or centuries had
housed only men as though the ghosts o all the monks rom the
1 Hans Holbein Te Ambassadors (1533) copy National Gallery London Art
Resource New York
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xiv Preace
past suddenly had succeeded in ul1047297lling a secret desire I was sure
this was not a mistake when I thought about Millerrsquos wry sense o
humor and then I began to 1047297nd ghost images in her other photo-
graphs it became clear to me that this anamorphic effect was at
once surrealist and ghostly Te ghostliness was con1047297rmed or me byher elegiac From the op of the Great Pyramid (ca 1048625104863310486271048631 see 1047297g 10486261048626)
shot when Miller knew she was soon to leave Egypt or Europe andan impending war which would provide the surrealists with new
ghosts beyond those o riends and amily rom the previous war
Te photograph hints at the ghostly presence o the photographer
hersel looking out at the landscape and also seems to invoke ghostsrom the distant past in dark anticipation o the upcoming war in
which Miller would enlist as an American photographer with the
US Army
Surrealist Ghostliness begins at the outset o the surrealist move-ment when the young surrealists listened entranced to Desnosrsquos
hypnotic utterings that sounded oracular and prophetic prooundly
ghostly and otherworldly and Desnosrsquos riend Man Raymdash the Ameri-can who recorded the movement photographically and later workedwith Millermdash began his experiments with 1047297lm I turn then to workscreated in dialogue with the movement rom the 1048625104863310486260s through the1048625104863310486330s including Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs Surrealist Ghostliness continues the exploration o surrealism I began in my 1047297rst book andpursues the sense my book on Desnos gave me o what it might eel
like to be haunted by someone by a ghost exhorting me to moveorward and complete a task that at times elt akin to conjuring notunlike the experience o all writers o critical biographies who openthemselves to a kind o willed haunting Tis book then allows meto see the movement as a whole in a historic sweep that allies it evenmore closely to the century into which I was born the century thatstill shapes our current era It also includes Americans such as Ray
Miller Dorothea anning Francesca Woodman and Susan Hillerwho like me were drawn to surrealism
My study o the artists presented here through the prism o ana-
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xv
morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constantnegotiation with our own mortality in which our beings are dividedbetween dreams and everyday realities between the psychic and
the mundanely material the latent and the maniestmdash the maniestat times holding more secrets than the of-probed latent content
o personal experience In the preace to my 1047297rst book Automatic
Woman (1048625104863310486331048630) I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives ofenmirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had anautobiographical connection On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between maniestand latent realities in my own lie in my own amily story
mdash what
we tell others about our amily lie what others tell us and what weadmit only to ourselves More broadly with its ocus on the latent
and the visible the maniest and the ghostly this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literaturereveals the secret at the core o the human conditionmdash namely thatmortality implies a lie doubled by death a 1047297nitude within which
multiple baroque in1047297nitudes may be imagined Most o all I ound affirmation o a long-held belie that we live
experiences that are de1047297ned by what we intuit as much as by what wethink by what we eel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationallyinormed perceptions o perceive ully we must perceive doubly
at once peripherally and directly not unlike the way we look at Te
Ambassadors We need to remain open to what lies in between thewords or images in order to appreciate them Te surrealists under-stood this both those who worked in the movementrsquos mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins
1047297nding their centers elsewhere With this book I hope to show howthis rational surrealist quest or the knowledge o what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives which
we live in a state o perpetual and virtual reality have expanded toinclude what we do not ully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern possibly even post-Enlightenment world
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xiv Preace
past suddenly had succeeded in ul1047297lling a secret desire I was sure
this was not a mistake when I thought about Millerrsquos wry sense o
humor and then I began to 1047297nd ghost images in her other photo-
graphs it became clear to me that this anamorphic effect was at
once surrealist and ghostly Te ghostliness was con1047297rmed or me byher elegiac From the op of the Great Pyramid (ca 1048625104863310486271048631 see 1047297g 10486261048626)
shot when Miller knew she was soon to leave Egypt or Europe andan impending war which would provide the surrealists with new
ghosts beyond those o riends and amily rom the previous war
Te photograph hints at the ghostly presence o the photographer
hersel looking out at the landscape and also seems to invoke ghostsrom the distant past in dark anticipation o the upcoming war in
which Miller would enlist as an American photographer with the
US Army
Surrealist Ghostliness begins at the outset o the surrealist move-ment when the young surrealists listened entranced to Desnosrsquos
hypnotic utterings that sounded oracular and prophetic prooundly
ghostly and otherworldly and Desnosrsquos riend Man Raymdash the Ameri-can who recorded the movement photographically and later workedwith Millermdash began his experiments with 1047297lm I turn then to workscreated in dialogue with the movement rom the 1048625104863310486260s through the1048625104863310486330s including Millerrsquos Egyptian photographs Surrealist Ghostliness continues the exploration o surrealism I began in my 1047297rst book andpursues the sense my book on Desnos gave me o what it might eel
like to be haunted by someone by a ghost exhorting me to moveorward and complete a task that at times elt akin to conjuring notunlike the experience o all writers o critical biographies who openthemselves to a kind o willed haunting Tis book then allows meto see the movement as a whole in a historic sweep that allies it evenmore closely to the century into which I was born the century thatstill shapes our current era It also includes Americans such as Ray
Miller Dorothea anning Francesca Woodman and Susan Hillerwho like me were drawn to surrealism
My study o the artists presented here through the prism o ana-
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xv
morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constantnegotiation with our own mortality in which our beings are dividedbetween dreams and everyday realities between the psychic and
the mundanely material the latent and the maniestmdash the maniestat times holding more secrets than the of-probed latent content
o personal experience In the preace to my 1047297rst book Automatic
Woman (1048625104863310486331048630) I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives ofenmirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had anautobiographical connection On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between maniestand latent realities in my own lie in my own amily story
mdash what
we tell others about our amily lie what others tell us and what weadmit only to ourselves More broadly with its ocus on the latent
and the visible the maniest and the ghostly this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literaturereveals the secret at the core o the human conditionmdash namely thatmortality implies a lie doubled by death a 1047297nitude within which
multiple baroque in1047297nitudes may be imagined Most o all I ound affirmation o a long-held belie that we live
experiences that are de1047297ned by what we intuit as much as by what wethink by what we eel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationallyinormed perceptions o perceive ully we must perceive doubly
at once peripherally and directly not unlike the way we look at Te
Ambassadors We need to remain open to what lies in between thewords or images in order to appreciate them Te surrealists under-stood this both those who worked in the movementrsquos mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins
1047297nding their centers elsewhere With this book I hope to show howthis rational surrealist quest or the knowledge o what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives which
we live in a state o perpetual and virtual reality have expanded toinclude what we do not ully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern possibly even post-Enlightenment world
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Preace xv
morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constantnegotiation with our own mortality in which our beings are dividedbetween dreams and everyday realities between the psychic and
the mundanely material the latent and the maniestmdash the maniestat times holding more secrets than the of-probed latent content
o personal experience In the preace to my 1047297rst book Automatic
Woman (1048625104863310486331048630) I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives ofenmirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had anautobiographical connection On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between maniestand latent realities in my own lie in my own amily story
mdash what
we tell others about our amily lie what others tell us and what weadmit only to ourselves More broadly with its ocus on the latent
and the visible the maniest and the ghostly this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literaturereveals the secret at the core o the human conditionmdash namely thatmortality implies a lie doubled by death a 1047297nitude within which
multiple baroque in1047297nitudes may be imagined Most o all I ound affirmation o a long-held belie that we live
experiences that are de1047297ned by what we intuit as much as by what wethink by what we eel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationallyinormed perceptions o perceive ully we must perceive doubly
at once peripherally and directly not unlike the way we look at Te
Ambassadors We need to remain open to what lies in between thewords or images in order to appreciate them Te surrealists under-stood this both those who worked in the movementrsquos mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins
1047297nding their centers elsewhere With this book I hope to show howthis rational surrealist quest or the knowledge o what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives which
we live in a state o perpetual and virtual reality have expanded toinclude what we do not ully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern possibly even post-Enlightenment world
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 1740
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 1840
xvii
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming myquestions and theories as I approached their own work or that o
members o their amily most particularly Dorothea anning Pierre
Alechinsky Susan Hiller and ony and Roz Penrose I would nothave had the courage to do this work without your support I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive who gave me advice about
1047297nding the house o Claude Cahun Pam Johnson o the Dorothea
anning Foundation and Archive and Katarina Jerinic o the Franc-esca Woodman Studio and Archive or their helpul encouragement I thank Dartmouth College or supporting me throughout the
composition and completion o this book in particular the 1047297nan-cial support I have received rom the Dean o the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 1048626001048627ndash01048628 at an
early critical moment I thank my colleagues in the Department o
French and Italian most notably Mary Jean Green Lynn Higgins
Roxana Verona Graziella Parati Virginia Swain J Kathleen Wine
Ioana Chitoran Andrea arnowski and David LaGuardia or their
sustained interest in my work Keith Walker or his suggestions andthe Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund or help with permissionsand illustrations
I thank Jennier Mundy at the ate Modern or giving me the op-portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealismor the 1047297rst time in 1048626000ndash1048626001048625 I thank also the graduate students
rom the Department o Romance Languages at the University o
Pennsylvania who invited me to present this topic in its early stagesand Dalia Judovitz Catherine Dana and Candace Lang rom the De-partment o French at Emory University who invited me to present a
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xviii Acknowledgments
version o the introduction as I was 1047297nishing it I also thank MarianEide and Richard J Golsan rom the Departments o English Frenchand Comparative Literature at exas 983137983078983149 University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves rom Florida State Universityrsquos Depart-ment o Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-KingInstitute or their invitations to present early versions o chapters
1048628 and 1048631 I thank Maireacutead Hanrahan at University College London
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University and Michael Sheringham atOxord University or their invitations to present chapters rom theproject and or the valuable eedback I received
I thank my colleagues in the Dean o the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth or their collegiality humor and support during the years I
was writing the book most particularly Janet erp Chris Strenta
Amanda Bushor Kate Soule Erin Bennett Lindsay Whaley Rob
McClung Dave Kotz Nancy Marion Margaret McWilliams-PirainoJune Solsaa Craig Kauman Carissa Dowd Sherry Finnemore andKim Wind For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans o aculty Carol Folt Michael Mastanduno and Le-onore Grenoble in particular or help with the illustrations I thankormer associate dean and provost Barry Scherr or always believingin my work And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement Irsquove
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex particularly rom Dawn Ades Roger (and Agnegraves) CardinalAlyce Mahon Elza Adamowicz and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki at the
annual 10486260th- and 10486261048625st-century French and Francophone Studies In-ternational colloquia the Modernist Studies Association meetingsand the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature
I thank my mentor and riend Gerry Prince I also wish to thankriends who have questioned advised and encouraged me includingKatherine Hart Kathleen Hart Laurie Monahan Jonathan EburneGeorgiana Colvile Dominique Carlat Olivier Bara Adam Jolles
Celeste Goodridge Benjamin Andreacuteo Jorge Pedraza Geacuterard Gas-arian Van Kelly Ronald M Green Donald Pease Gayle ZachmanJuliette Bianco Jim Jordan Joy Kenseth Martine Antle Annabel
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Acknowledgments xix
Martiacuten John Kopper Riley OrsquoConnor Amy Allen Mary Childers
David Getsy Barbara Kreiger Brian Kennedy Kristina Van Dyke
Melinda OrsquoNeal Mary Ann Caws Eric Santner Wendy Pelton HallNancy Forsythe Doreen Schweitzer Julie Tom and Shelby MorseI also thank ormer students who have helped to shape my thinkingespecially Jeannine Murray-Romaacuten Nomi Stone Susan Doheny
Silvia Ferreira Diana Jih Naari Ha Stephanie Nguyen Monique
Seguy and Kate Goldsborough I thank Kathryn Mammel or send-ing me photographs o the sites in Greece rom which Susan Hiller
collected some o her objects I thank Mostaa Heddaya who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summerrsquos workas a James O Freedman Presidential Fellow I thank Hakan ell or
etymological advice (any error is my own) And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan or her help with the bibliography duringthe manuscriptrsquos 1047297nal stages
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center o Dartmouth College in particular to Susan
Bibeau Tomas Garbelotti and Otmar Foelsche I want to thankthe staff at the Hanover Inn and the Dartmouth pool in particular
Barbara and Adrian at the Inn and Andy and Steve at the pool
At the University o Nebraska Press I wish to thank my editors
Ladette Randolph and Kristen Elias Rowley my able copyeditor
Judith Hoover and my production editor Sara Springsteen At Wil-liam and Mary I thank Caroline Hasenyager or her help with the
index and all the colleagues who inspire and support me every day I could not have completed this book without the kind hospital-ity o riends in France and the United Kingdom most particularlyClaude and Heacutelegravene Garache Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas andespecially Jacques Polge and his sons Denis and Olivier and their
amilies as well as ony and Roz Penrose
I thank those members o my amily who helped me understand
the personal dimension o my scholarly interest in ghostliness mymother Jane Harris Conley and my sister and her husband Grace
and David Gumlock as well as the Stamelmans Walshes and Sun-
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 2140
xx Acknowledgments
shines especially our granddaughters Julia Eliza and Sophie Tis
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-liness in my own amily story which gave me the answer to the
question o why I wrote this book my riend Marian Eide and my
husband Richard Stamelman I couldnrsquot have done it without you
Earlier versions o parts o the introduction and chapters 1048625 1048626 1048627 1048629 1048630and 1048632 appeared in the ollowing publications I thank the publishersor granting me permission to use this material
ldquoSurrealismrsquos Ghostly Automatic Bodyrdquo Sites Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 104862510486291048627 (June 1048626010486251048625) 104862610486331048631ndash104862701048628 Reprinted by
permission o the publisher aylor amp Francis Ltd wwwtaylorand-ranciscom
ldquoLes objets-corps tournants de Man Rayrdquo in Arts litteacuterature et
langage du corps III Plaisir souffrance et sublimation ed Jean-MichelDevesa (Bordeaux Pleine Page Editeur 1048626001048631) 104862710486301048625ndash10486310
ldquoClaude Cahunrsquos Iconic Heads From lsquoTe Sadistic Judithrsquo to Hu-
man Frontier rdquo Papers of Surrealism 1048626 (Summer 1048626001048628) httpwwwsurrealismcentreacukpapersosurrealismjournal1048626indexhtm
ldquoModernist Primitivism in 1048625104863310486271048627 Brassaiumlrsquos Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaurerdquo ModernismModernity 104862501048625 (1048626001048627) 104862510486261048631ndash10486280 copy 1048626001048627
by the Johns Hopkins University Press Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press
ldquoLes reacutevolutions de Dorothea anningrdquo Pleine Marge 10486271048630 (Decem-
ber 1048626001048628) 104862510486281048630ndash10486311048629 ldquoA Swimmer between wo Worlds Francesca Woodmanrsquos Maps
o Interior Spacerdquo Journal o Surrealism and the Americas 10486261048626 (1048626001048632) jsaasueduindexphpjsa
ldquoNous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud Susan Hiller chez
Freud agrave Londresrdquo Gradiva 104862510486251048625 (1048626001048632) 10486291048625ndash10486301048628
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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1
Introduction
Surrealism was a haunted movement rom the beginning It began
not quite our years afer the end o World War I with the responseo Andreacute Breton to Reneacute Crevelrsquos story about what he did over his
summer vacation Walking on a beach in 1048625104863310486261048626 Crevel met a mediumwho invited him to a seacuteance because she had ldquodiscerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualitiesrdquo in him resulting in what Breton called
Crevelrsquos ldquoldquospiritualistrsquo initiationrdquo (Lost 10486331048626) Breton and his riends
most o whom were involved with dada then decided to practice
on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned hop-ing to reveal buried secrets within themselves because o what they
knew about Freudrsquos theory o the unconscious while at the sametime reusing ldquothe spiritualist viewpointrdquo and the possibility o any
ldquocommunication between the living and the deadrdquo (10486331048626) In his
essay ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo a curious title given his categorical re-
jection o spiritualism Breton identi1047297ed this practice or the 1047297rst
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
ldquoa certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream staterdquo (10486330)983089 He thus claimed the legacy o spiritualism or thisnew Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneouslyrepressing and transorming it into a ghost thus creating what I callsurrealist ghostliness983090
Spiritualism was launched in 1048625104863210486281048632 when the Fox sisters o Hydes- ville New York claimed to communicate with the dead through
knocking sounds in their house It spread quickly to Europe and
led to a rise in popularity o mediums and magnetic somnambu-lism otherwise known as hypnosis which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie983091
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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2 Introduction
It had originated with the French craze or Franz Anton Mesmerrsquos
theory o animal magnetism during the political upheaval o the
late eighteenth century a theory that destabilized the ascendency oEnlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England o gothic 1047297ction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis
Mesmerrsquos ldquodiscoveryrdquo o ldquoa primeval lsquoagent o naturersquordquo a ldquosuper1047297ne
1047298uid that penetrated and surrounded all bodiesrdquo that he claimed
could be used to ldquosupply Parisians with heat light electricity and
magnetismrdquo captivated his contemporaries as Robert Darnton
explains because like Newtonrsquos gravity and Franklinrsquos electricity
Mesmerrsquos 1047298uid con1047297rmed that human beings were ldquosurrounded by
wonderul invisible orcesrdquo (1048627ndash1048628 10486250) Subsequently despite Mesmerrsquosabhorrence o ldquosuperstitious and occult practices o all kindsrdquo his
theories paved the way or both nineteenth-century spiritualism
which also explored invisible orces and twentieth-century theorieso psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 104862510486311048625)983092
983124983144983141 983111983151983156983144983145983139 983113983149983137983143983145983150983137983156983145983151983150
Surrealismrsquos historical link to the late eighteenth-centuryrsquos gothic
imagination suraces in Bretonrsquos 1048625104863310486261048628 ldquoManiesto o Surrealismrdquo in
his high praise o Lewisrsquos gothic novel Te Monk (1048625104863110486331048630) Breton makesit provocatively clear that he preers Lewisrsquos ghosts to Dostoyevskyrsquosrealism and holds up airy tales as exemplars o literary 1047297ction In
paying homage to Freud in the ldquoManiestordquomdash stating that he practiced
Freudrsquos methods while working as a medical auxiliary during WorldWar Imdash Breton embraces the creative practice o automatism signal-ing surrealismrsquos attachment to both o Mesmerrsquos legacies intentionaland unintentional the scienti1047297c and the spiritualist the Freudian
and the occult ( Manifestoes 10486261048627) When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito ldquoI think thereore I amrdquo in the second sentence o
the ldquoManiestordquo with the suggestion ldquoI dream thereore I amrdquo and
with the characterization o ldquoManrdquo as ldquothat inveterate dreamerrdquo heestablished surrealismrsquos dedication to exploring all the ways in which
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 3
nonrational psychic and paranormal phenomena may inorm the
understanding o human experience (1048627)
Although partly motivated by the ghosts o lost riends and theirown experiences in World War I with their appropriation o spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transormed the ghosts
that practitioners o spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
orces within the unconscious mind Te psychic orces they soughtto understand were like metaphorical versions o the ghosts o spiri-tualism which looked like bodiesmdash particularly those captured on
1047297lm by spirit photographymdash but were in act only traces o bodies
matter lef over afer death yet retaining psychic awareness an abilityto communicate and the double knowledge o lie and the aferlieo lie beore and afer death Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules o behavior spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-ing and inspiring in their reedom symbols o rebellion against ateand the constraints o mortality While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts o spiritualism they retained the subversive ghostliness o the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts Teir embrace oautomatism signaled a desire to explore the undamentally ghostly
experience o opening onesel up to whatever might be hidden withinthe psyche intentionally putting onesel into a trance state in orderto access otherwise repressed thoughts words and images buried
in the unconscious mind
By 1048625104863310486271048627 however although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
in1047298ected titles Te Magnetic Fields (1048625104863310486260) and ldquoTe Mediums Enterrdquo(1048625104863310486261048626) Bretonrsquos use o mediumistic art to illustrate ldquoTe Automatic
Messagerdquo contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ismrsquos goal o accessing outside spirits in avor o the surrealistsrsquo goalo accessing ghostly voices within the sel He thus once again a-
1047297rms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
o spiritualism eleven years afer his negation o it in ldquoTe Medi-
ums Enterrdquo while the plentiul illustrations present spiritualism asa signi1047297cant orebear Roger Cardinal con1047297rms that these ldquoimages
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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4 Introduction
directly lifed rom Spiritualist publications create an impact in
their own right oregrounding the complementary discussion o visual automatism and mediumistic creativityrdquo (ldquoBretonrdquo 10486261048628ndash10486261048629) By1048625104863310486281048633 however when he coounded the Compagnie de lrsquoArt Brut withJean Dubuffet Breton 1047297nally explored openly the correspondencesbetween surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which hehad only hinted in 1048625104863310486271048627 (see Cardinal Outsider ) By the 1048625104863310486290s sur-
realism was well established and spiritualist automatism no longerthreatened surrealismrsquos Freudian appropriation o it Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art rom
the 1048625104863310486290s in the book version o Surrealism and Painting (1048625104863310486301048630)983093 Teghost o spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was 1047297nally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy o spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness o
surrealist psychic experimentation More broadly the prooundly
ghostly aspect o all human psychic experience could be attributedto Bretonian surrealism according to Foucault who in an interviewgiven shortly afer Bretonrsquos death in 1048625104863310486301048630 credited Breton with havingwiped out ldquoboundaries o provinces that were once well establishedrdquoFoucault attributed a new ldquounity o our culturerdquo in the ldquodomains
o ethnology art history the history o religions linguistics and
psychoanalysisrdquo to ldquothe person and the work o Andreacute Breton He
was both the spreader and gatherer o all this agitation in modernexperiencerdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048628)
Foucaultrsquos use o the word agitation appropriately identi1047297es the
unknown within the sel to which Breton 1047297ercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement Tis constitutes surrealist automatismrsquos most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction o Arthur Rimbaud a
surrealist orebear to 1047297nd the other within the sel and let it speak
ldquoI is someone elserdquo Rimbaud wrote in May 1048625104863210486311048625 (ldquo Je est un autrerdquo)ldquoI am present at this birth o my thoughtrdquo (Complete 104862701048629) For the
surrealists as or Freud inner voices have the potential to shed light
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 5
on the human condition divided as it is between conscious and un-conscious perception In ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo Breton describesthe inner voices that surace during the automatic experience as
communicating a ldquosubliminal messagerdquo that speaks in a language
ldquowhich has nothing supernatural about itrdquo while at the same time
insisting that that language remains ldquoor each and every one o us
the vehicle o revelationrdquo using religious terminology to describea psychological phenomenon (Break 104862510486271048632) Te gothic the ascina-
tion with magnetism the rise o spiritualism the establishment o
psychoanalysis and the exploration in literature and art o psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends rom the eighteenth cen-tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism
983124983144983141 983120983155983161983139983144983145983139 983111983141983151983143983154983137983152983144983161 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Te psychic geography o surrealist ghostliness extends rom Europeto North America as the twentieth century progresses I study hereeight examples o works or bodies o work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness rom mainstream surrealism to its distantperiphery rom 1048625104863310486261048627 to the 1048625104863310486330s Tese artists and writers all usedautomatic experience as a point o departure or examining the
ghostly in their work In chapter 1048625 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
o inanimate objects in Man Rayrsquos early 1047297lms Emak Bakia (1048625104863310486261048627)
LrsquoEtoile de mer (1048625104863310486261048632) and Les Mystegraveres du chacircteau du deacute (1048625104863310486261048633) In
chapter 1048626 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous sel-portraits rom the 1048625104863310486260s and speci1047297cally in Frontiegraverehumaine (Human Frontier ) rom 1048625104863310486270 which highlights the ghostlytruth o human mortality In chapter 1048627 I look at Brassaiumlrsquos and SalvadorDaliacutersquos irreverent examinations o the sacred in modern European
society through Daliacutersquos essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaiumlrsquosphotographs o ound objects rom 1048625104863310486271048627 that like Rayrsquos inanimate
objects resonate with a ghostly inner lie Chapter 1048628 completes the
study o surrealist ghostliness in the 1048625104863310486270s with an analysis o theempty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playully reveals
ghostly human orms
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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6 Introduction
In chapter 1048629 I investigate Dorothea anningrsquos disturbingly ghostlyanimation o domestic space in her turn rom painting to sculpturein the mid-twentieth century Chapter 1048630 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodmaninvested in her studies o the permeable parameters o time and spacecharacteristic o the baroque in her series o sel-portraits rom the1048625104863310486310s Chapter 1048631 1047297nds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinskyrsquos
1048625104863310486320s paintings on nineteenth-century maps in which he reenvi-
sions European history as a ghost within the present while blend-
ing intensely personal and political concerns Chapter 1048632 concludes
this study o surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hillerrsquos mimicking oFreudrsquos personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1048625104863310486331048625ndash10486331048631)
Tis work incorporates her eminist and postmodern experience
haunted by the ghosts o Freud the Holocaust and the cold war
Whether or not they identi1047297ed themselves as surrealist all o theseartists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealismTey respond to Bretonrsquos recipe or making surrealism in the ldquoMani-
estordquo and to the implicit invitation to participate ully in what I havecalled the ldquosurrealist conversationrdquo as surrealists like Louis AragonRobert Desnos and Max Ernst did983094 Tis conversation also includeswomen who had a place at the surrealist ldquobanquetrdquo as anning putit thanks to the open invitation or everyone to participate in the
ldquoManiestordquo and later in ldquoTe Automatic Messagerdquo where Breton
declared ldquoEvery man and every woman deserves to be convinced
o their ability to tap into this language at will which has nothingsupernatural about itrdquo (anning Birthday 10486251048625 Breton Break 104862510486271048632) In
the nature o most collectives there was a dominant voice that o
Breton but there was room or other voices too a space or dialoguethat Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1048625104863310486301048630
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now in the
twenty-1047297rst century like a lost photographic negative emerging outo developing 1047298uid Is it tied to a global response to the turn o the
century or example the events o September 1048626001048625 which produced
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 7
a heightened sense o vulnerability in the West or to a desire to
believe we might overcome mortality and never lose ourselves or
our loved ones despite the truth about mortality that we all know
the truth unveiled in Te Ambassadors (see 1047297g 1048625) Could it be con-nected to related cultural phenomena such as a renewed interest inthe supernatural maniest in 1047297lms like Te Sixth Sense (1048625104863310486331048633) Te
Blair Witch Project (1048625104863310486331048633) Te Others (1048626001048625) wilight (1048626001048632) or
Paranormal Activity (1048626001048633) television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1048625104863310486331048631) Charmed (1048625104863310486331048632) or Te Ghost Whisperer (1048626001048629) or
novels like oni Morrisonrsquos Beloved (1048625104863310486321048631) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice Stephenie Meyer or J K Rowling and
more recently art exhibitions like Te Perfect Medium (1048626001048628ndash01048629)
curated by Cleacutement Cheacuteroux and Andreas Fischer about the link
between photography and spiritualism
Interest in the ghostly has also been maniest in academic cul-
ture such as Derridarsquos Spectres of Marx (1048625104863310486331048628) in which he re1047298ects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners ldquoto learn to live
with ghostsrdquo because ldquotime is out o jointrdquo (xviii 10486251048633) or his ArchiveFever (1048625104863310486331048630) in which he shows how Freudrsquos theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts Marina Warner in herencyclopedic Phantasmagoria (1048626001048630) theorizes ldquoa new model o sub-
jectivityrdquo linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet(104862710486311048632) and Avery Gordon in her sociological study Ghostly Matters (1048625104863310486331048631) argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way o knowing and
being in the world In Te Unconcept (1048626010486251048625) Anneleen Masscheleinidenti1047297es the Freudian uncanny the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness as ldquoa late-twentieth-century theoretical concept rdquoor similar reasons (1048628) ldquoIn various disciplinesrdquo she argues ldquothe con-cept o the uncanny 1047297ts within a larger research program that ocuseson haunting the spectral ghosts and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and societyrdquo (104862510486281048628) Te current ascination with
the paranormal the supernatural and the psychic is the result o thenormalization o the phantasmatic o acts o psychic doubling thatoccurred throughout the twentieth century beginning with Freud it
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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8 Introduction
makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linkedto the arts like surrealism was invested in the phantasmatic
983110983151983157983154 983107983144983137983154983137983139983156983141983154983145983155983156983145983139983155 983151983142 983123983157983154983154983141983137983148983145983155983156 983111983144983151983155983156983148983145983150983141983155983155
Surrealist ghostliness may be identi1047297ed by a series o our primary
characteristics all o which will be explored in this book Te 1047297rst
o these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism
namely its trace as the repressed ghost o surrealism and as a ghostthat has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning o the
twenty-1047297rst century
Te second characteristic o surrealist ghostliness consists in therhythm o automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-ments o suspension and moments o 1047298ow Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction o thought toward pure
receptivity at the outset o automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one alls into a trance Flow on the other hand
describes the rush o automatic words images and voices that 1047298ood
consciousness in sensual ways Flow is another way to character-ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as ldquoa
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered beore himrdquo ( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627)
Te oscillating doubleness o the automatic rhythm o suspensionand 1047298ow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminatesmdash that o the impulse to create archives
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect visible in Bretonrsquos extensive personal collection re1047298ects ldquothe sus-
pensive unction o the archiverdquo because o the way such a collectionserves as ldquoa means or distinguishing and dislodging epistemologicalcertaintyrdquo and simultaneously appeals to and de1047297es ldquothe tendency
or knowledge to systematize itsel rdquo (ldquoBretonrsquos Wallrdquo 10486261048625 10486281048626) Indeedthe surrealists explicitly rejected the modes o categorization that
typiy state-sanctioned archives983095 John Roberts identi1047297es surreal-ismrsquos propensity or the ldquocounter-archiverdquo with the surrealistsrsquo taste
or photographs that document aspects o human existence that
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3140
10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3240
Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3340
12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3440
Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3640
Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3840
Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
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7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
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beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3040
Introduction 9
would rarely 1047297nd their way into a municipal archive such as Cahunrsquosintimate portraits o hersel in multiple disguises which constitute
an almost archival study o alternative identities or a European
woman o her generation (104862501048630) Tese doubles or hersel ghostly
presences captured on 1047297lm emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts o previous times traces o something lost that speak to thepresent and uture out o the past
In thinking about the papers objects and thought stored in
Freudrsquos house in London Derrida ascribes a ldquoshifingrdquo quality to
the notion o the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythmo suspension and 1047298ow o surrealist automatism In the case o the
archive this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire or archiviza-tion stimulates between the death drivemdash triggering a retrospectiveinstinct to memorializemdash and the lie orce which aces the uture
Tis oscillating ldquoshifing 1047297gurerdquo o a notion thus yokes together theimpulse to stop time with the impulse to rush orward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm o automatism (Derrida
Archive 10486261048633) Te third characteristic o surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-sual aspects o surrealist experience Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor o swimming thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential ldquoraw and naked actrdquo
( Aesthetics 104862510486311048627) Although surrealism had a consistently strong visualcomponent the surrealists were also attracted to the creation o
works that depended on touch beginning with collage which wasadopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealistssuch as Ernst983096 Janine Milea even ascribes ldquoa orm o embodied or
tactile knowingrdquo to the surrealistsrsquo courting o ldquodisturbancerdquo (Please 10486251048631)983097 ouch was a key actor in the dada and surrealist ascination
with objects beginning with Marcel Duchamprsquos invention o the
readymade a ound object turned away rom its original unction
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in caeacutes renamed Bottlerack (1048625104863310486251048628 see 1047297g 1048626) and displayed in a gallery By the 1048625104863310486260s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades such as his Cadeau (Gif 1048625104863310486261048625)
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3140
10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3240
Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3340
12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3440
Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3540
14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3640
Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3740
16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3840
Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3940
18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 4040
beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3140
10 Introduction
an iron impractically studded with nails adding an emotional andsurrealistically psychological aspect that re1047298ects Rayrsquos eelings aboutwork in the garment industry which could have been his ate
Linked to a political rejection o ldquohighrdquo art in avor o art that
could be made by anyone the pursuit o art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay afer Rosalind Krauss
has identi1047297ed as a ldquocrisis o visual primacyrdquo in France during this
period (104862610486251048626) Later this crisis would maniest itsel in the dissidentsurrealist Georges Bataillersquos embrace o ldquobaserdquo materialism ldquoderivedrom the bodily experience o materialityrdquo and in the surrealist crazeor making objects (Jay 104862610486261048632) Such a ldquohaptic aestheticrdquo has been
identi1047297ed broadly by Adam Jolles as a ldquotactile turnrdquo in surrealism
tied to ristan zararsquos essays on Arican art In 1048625104863310486271048627 in ldquoConcerninga Certain Automatism o asterdquo zara identi1047297es the attraction to
Arican art as ldquobound to an intrauterine account o the world thatoriginated with tactile representationrdquo (in Jolles 10486271048630) He links tactil-ity to ldquoour most powerul desires those that are latent and eternalrdquo
2 Marcel Duchamp
Bottlerack (1961 replica
o 1914 original) copy 2011
Artists Rights Society
(983137983154983155) New York 983137983140983137983143983152
Paris Succession MarcelDuchamp Philadelphia
Museum o Art Gif o
Jacqueline Paul and
Peter Matisse in memory
o their mother Alexina
Duchamp 1998
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3240
Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3340
12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3440
Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3540
14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3640
Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3740
16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3840
Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3940
18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 4040
beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3240
Introduction 11
because they are ldquoprenatalrdquo tied to memory and ldquothe satisactions
offered by substances that can be touchedrdquo (ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048627 104862601048633)Te patina on Arican objects that makes them ldquopreciousrdquo stands asldquoproo that the object has already answered the intrauterine desireso a whole series o individualsrdquo desires that in Western culture havebeen submitted to a transerence to visual experience (104862610486250)
zararsquos claim that objects we touch daily such as buttons eggcupsand childrenrsquos toys can acquire ldquototemicrdquo status akin to the patina
that makes an Arican statue ldquopreciousrdquo anticipates and supplementsthe argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in ldquoTe
Work o Art in the Age o Reproductionrdquo (zara ldquoConcerningrdquo 104862610486251048626)983089983088zararsquos patina which comes rom generations o handling that in-
volves an erosion o the original material out o which a golden glowemerges parallels Benjaminrsquos understanding o aura as irrevocably
tied to withering even shriveling For Benjamin aura is linked to
uniqueness and history reproductions substitute what he views
avorably (because they are nonelitist) as ldquoa plurality o copies or a
unique existencerdquo Mechanical reproduction ldquowithersrdquo ldquothe aura othe work o artrdquo which is linked ldquoto the history which it has experi-
encedrdquo (Benjamin Illuminations 104862610486261048625) What Benjamin leaves out ohis argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image) through the acquisition o ldquohistoryrdquo by handling (zararsquos
patina) might be reinvested with ldquoaurardquo because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic unction Te reactivated ldquocult valuerdquo thenconorms to the occult meaning o aura as a luminous substance sur-rounding a person or a thing possibly blurring boundaries betweenperson and thing (104862610486261048628)
Although it was precisely this occult meaning o aura rom whichBenjamin wished to distance himsel as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues he remained ambivalent about the aura (104862710486271048631ndash10486271048632) Hansen
ascribes Benjaminrsquos insistence on the aura as ldquoa phenomenon indeclinerdquo to the political climate o the time It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3340
12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3440
Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3540
14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3640
Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3740
16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3840
Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3940
18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 4040
beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3340
12 Introduction
while also seeking ldquoto counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation o technology that 1047297rst exploded in World War One andwas leading to the ascist conquest o Europerdquo (104862710486271048632) She views in hisoverall mode o theorizing the concept o aura dialectically as ldquoopento the uturerdquo despite his emphasis on the aurarsquos decline on ldquoa past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the presentrdquo (104862710486281048633 104862710486281048625)
One o the multiple de1047297nitions o aura Hansen 1047297nds in Benjaminrsquoswork rom the 1048625104863310486270s echoes the link between a person and an objectzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patinaon Arican objects and childhood toys (Hansen 104862710486271048633) ldquoo perceive the
aura o an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to lookat us in returnrdquo Benjamin states in ldquoOn Some Motis in Baudelairerdquo(104862510486321048632) For zara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense o aura)is inevitably linked to touch We experience an objectrsquos totemic valuewhen we touch it Tis activation o a latent orce within a maniestlyordinary thing an irrational yet powerul and intense desire buried
in an industrially manuactured object rendered precious by touchconorms to the paradigm o surrealist ghostliness as a nonrationalexperience and as double having latent and maniest aspects that
orceully and visibly coexist983089983089
As well as touching touch also maniests itsel as the sense o
being touched the experience o envelopment o the risson linkedto ghostliness that Foucault identi1047297ed as characteristic o Bretonian
surrealism Ernst a pioneer in dada collage described this eeling oenvelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1048625104863310486271048628 One o
these had the subtitle Effect o a ouch suggesting the eeling at oncephysical sexual and emotional o being touched by someone Simi-larly when he wrote in ldquoBeyond Paintingrdquo (1048625104863310486271048630) ldquoBlind swimmer Ihave made mysel a seerrdquo he was reerring to the kind o inner visionand insight stimulated by the experience o sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any o the other senses (104862510486261048626) Te ourth and most dominant characteristic o surrealist ghost-liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms or doubling and
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3440
Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3540
14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3640
Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3740
16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3840
Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3940
18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 4040
beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3440
Introduction 13
creating ghosts within surrealismmdash textual visual and corporealmdash allo which have their origin in surrealist automatism 1047297rst explored
through automatic trances at the outset o the movement Te 1047297rst
o these textual puns were typical o the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealistsrsquo 1047297rst experiments withldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo that served to launch the movement in 1048625104863310486261048626 Tatall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poemsin the proto-surrealist journal Litteacuterature under the signature o hispunning alter ego Rrose Seacutelavy (eacuteros crsquoest la vie see 1047297g 1048632) On one
o the 1047297rst nights o ldquoautomatic sleepsrdquo conducted in Bretonrsquos apart-ment Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Seacutelavyndashtype poem while in a hypnotic trance Desnos complied andbegan to produce one-line tongue-twisting punning poems in seriesHe later published 104862510486290 o them in Corps et biens using Duchamprsquos
pseudonym Rrose Seacutelavy as the title
With Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another ofen more logical ghost Te
nonsense poem ldquoime is an agile eagle in a templerdquo (ldquoLe temps est unaigle agile dans un templerdquo) or example is doubled by a series o tru-isms all based on rational realities time 1047298ies (like an eagle) an eagleis noble nobility is admired as i it were (in) a temple time governsus as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple and surrealist
timemdash dreamtimemdash is agile in the sense that it does not ollow strictchronology Surrealist time 1047298ies the way a bird does with swoops
and halts soaring and gliding speedily in 1047297ts and starts it does notollow the intervals typical o a Western clock Te reader-listener othis poem makes all o these associations unconsciously because othe resemblances between the way the words look and soundmdash the
way they ldquomake loverdquo to produce meaning as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time temple agile eagle temps temple aigle agileBreton Lost 104862501048626 translation modi1047297ed)983089983090 A nonsense poem makes
sense partly in the way the puns create ghostly doubles that intercon-nect all the words and meanings to emphasize the ghostliness that
typi1047297ed those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3540
14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3640
Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3740
16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3840
Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3940
18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 4040
beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3540
14 Introduction
because o the mysterious at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants Furthermore as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues his puns help to ldquorender more visible the physical existenceo wordsrdquo they show that words lead a double lie (104862501048630 my transla-tion) Desnosrsquos punning poems with double meanings maniest andlatent content set the stage paradigmatically or the ghostly objectsthat would become characteristic o the movement
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms or surrealist ghostliness havetheir origin in the exquisite corpse game invented in 1048625104863310486261048629 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to asentence without seeing any o the other words Te 1047297rst sentence
produced by the game gave it its name ldquoTe exquisite corpse will
drink the young winerdquo Te game quickly evolved rom a verbal to
a visual ormat each person added a body part rom head to toe or vice versa without being able to see what others had drawn Tese
games yielded antastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a singleghostly double the body o a real human being or possibly even
a corpse Te body deormed by the game nonetheless makes onethink o a nondeormed body that can still be identi1047297ed by the headthe torso the legs the eet As with Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poemsit is the more rationally recognizable orm that serves as the ldquoghostrdquoto the surrealist nonsense pun
Te double image o the exquisite corpse whereby we see one
thing and imagine another may best be characterized as anamorphic
In the same way we almost hear another poem when we hear or reada ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poem since as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts these
poems old back on themselves saying the same thing twice (104862710486250)983089983091Anamorphosis rom the Greek or ldquoormrdquo morph seen ldquobackwardrdquoana or understood retrospectively identi1047297es a process o percep-
tion that requires a double takemdash a 1047297rst look ollowed by a second
retrospective glance As described in the preace Holbeinrsquos painting
Te Ambassadors stands as the most amous visual example o ana-morphosis983089983092 In LrsquoArt Magique (1048625104863310486291048631) Breton recognized this paintingas an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3640
Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3740
16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3840
Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3940
18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 4040
beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3640
Introduction 15
offers a ldquodouble reading o the universerdquo to the viewer (104862610486251048627 my trans-lation)983089983093 At the eet o two magni1047297cently dressed men standing in
ront o a beautiully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge travel and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into ocus as an elongated human skullonly when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance madepossible by the door on the paintingrsquos right Tis skull points to the
underlying reality o mortality that subtends the main image like anunwanted ghost under any record o human achievement despite allaccomplishment possible within a human lie each and every one
one o us will die will become a corpse a thing Te painting as a
whole works something like Desnosrsquos ldquoRrose Seacutelavyrdquo poems and likeexquisite corpse drawings in that 1047297rst we see one reality and then wesee another Within the phenomenon o surrealist ghostliness two
aspects o the same human experience coexist
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal rom actual anamor-phic paintings by Daliacute in which two concurrent images overlap to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints o a doubleimage embedded in the work such as in Millerrsquos Egyptian landscapesAnamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents thestrongest evidence o surrealist ghostliness as a uniying phenomenonthroughout the movement In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities o the works I analyze and in each case these anamorphosesunderscore the presence o surrealist ghostliness I believe that the
anamorphic qualities o surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historicand cultural moment because o the recent revolution in technologylinked to the normalization o the Internet and its widespread use
which has also generated a prolieration o subjectivities in the virtualworld (e-mail Facebook and witter) and because o the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen transorm-ing it rom a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space
Te third and last paradigmatic mechanism or doubling andrevealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human bodymdash what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness o Bretonrsquos analogy
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3740
16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3840
Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3940
18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 4040
beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3740
16 Introduction
between a surrealist body and a recording machine which makes
it more o a pun than a metaphor Te surrealist interchangeability
o a body with a machine began with Bretonrsquos contention in the
ldquoManiestordquo that true surrealists are human beings able to transormthemselves into receptacles ldquoo so many echoesrdquo into ldquomodest record-
ing instrumentsrdquo at once inanimate and sentient passively receptiveand insightully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprintthemselves on the unconscious beore emerging into consciousness( Maniestoes 10486261048631ndash10486261048632) Human beings and recording instruments sharea propensity or receptivity In the automatic trance the surrealist
surrenders all control over mind and body in order to capture as
many voices words and images as possible as they bubble up romthe unconscious Te recording machine is not only like the body
it is the same as the bodymdash a corporeal pun Body and machine arealike in their most salient eature o receptivity
Te body as machine has a deadly corollary as well a machine
is a thing and the body will become a thing when it dies when it
becomes reduced to the skull hidden as a blob in Holbeinrsquos Ambas-sadors Tis is the uture that arrests our attention as though it werean eye looking back at us which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1048625104863310486270s describes the ldquo1047298ying ormrdquo o Holbeinrsquos skull (Four 10486330)Tat skull that looks back at us with the truth o our own mortalityldquoopens up the abyss o the search or a meaningmdash nothing is what it
seems to berdquo explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacanrsquos reading o Holbein(10486331048625) Tis sudden knowledge o what we repress every daymdash the
knowable unknowable uture that levels human experiencemdash this
conrontation with the reality o ghostliness is captured by Breton
in his metaphor o the human being as a recording instrument
wo other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance and these objects are also receptacles ldquoo so many
echoesrdquo like Bretonrsquos recording instrument Desnosrsquos body-bottlerom ldquoI You Knewrdquo and Paul Eluardrsquos body-house rom ldquoTe Wordrdquo(both published in 1048625104863310486261048630) describe the automatic experience as ghostly
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3840
Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3940
18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 4040
beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3840
Introduction 17
because o the reduction o the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner o a pun and because o
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles In
ldquoI You Knewrdquo Desnos imagines his body as ldquothe night bottle o thepoetrdquo transormed into a baroque space o contained in1047297nity capableo capturing a alling star Ten in a suspended moment o separa-tion rom the immediacy o the experience he detaches himsel
corks the bottle that is himsel and watches rom the outside ldquothe
star enclosed within the glass the constellations that come to lie
against the sidesrdquo (Essential 104862510486291048631 translation modi1047297ed) In Eluardrsquos
ldquoTe Wordrdquo the sensation o space takes place outside o the body
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows or eyesthat shut slowly at the moment o sunset as a shadow alls across
the accedilade Te ldquowordrdquo comes rom outside and ldquoslidesrdquo over the
roo animating the house Although it ldquono longer know[s] whorsquos
in chargerdquo in a manner typical o the trance the word slipping intothe body-house can ldquonakedly loverdquo like a living being and express
pride ldquoI am old but here Irsquom beautiulrdquo (Capital 10486261048627) In each case apoetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voicesburied within
All o these body-objects whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun or a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity or the sake o therevelations the 1047298ow o automatic practice brings have their corollary
in the 1048625104863310486270s with the development o the surrealist object out o thedada readymade Te surrealists imbued objects ound or made witha psychoanalytic unction leading the person who 1047297nds or makes
them to striking insights ldquoTe ound object seems to me suddenly tobalance two levels o every different re1047298ectionrdquo explains Breton ldquolikethose sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out o regions that were not beore producing 1047298ashes o lightningrdquo
( Mad 10486271048627) Te ound object can ldquoenlarge the universe causing it torelinquish some o its opacityrdquo since we live in a ldquo forest of symbolsrdquo
that can provoke ldquosudden earrdquo (10486251048629)
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3940
18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 4040
beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 3940
18 Introduction
Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies suggesting a sentient animate quality to undamen-tally inanimate things He did this in 1048625104863310486271048630 three years afer Freudrsquos
essay ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo was published in French translation or the
1047297rst time In ldquoTe Uncannyrdquo Freud identi1047297es in psychoanalytic termsthe constellation o phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that o mistaking a doll or
a living human being Te attribution o psychological latencies to
objects was codi1047297ed by Breton in ldquoCrisis o the Objectrdquo where he
identi1047297es the latent orces ound in the surrealist object (ldquoCriserdquo
10486261048628)983089983094 Tese orces while made up o psychological eelings rom
desire to anger are impenetrable because they arise rom the clash-ing conjunction o con1047298icting realities rom the utilitarian unctiono Duchamprsquos Bottlerack or instance with its modernist elegance
which paradoxically makes sense o this practical toolrsquos place in an
art gallery Tis clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the ldquoManiestordquo or the surrealist image as a collision
o ldquodistant realitiesrdquo Tis ldquo juxtaposition of two more or less distantrealitiesrdquo generates energy and orces which Breton compares to anelectric spark generative o shock a ldquoluminous phenomenonrdquo akinto an instant o insight or revelation ( Manifestoes 10486260 10486271048631)983089983095
Having been ound collected turned away rom its original unc-tion and displayed by a surrealist the object represses its ldquomaniestlierdquo its transormation generates a veritable orce 1047297eld (champs de
orce) whereby what was ormerly maniest becomes latent revealingghostly energies inherent in the objectrsquos ormer maniest lie983089983096 In a
short article Breton published about the 1048625104863310486271048630 surrealist exhibition oobjects he describes objects as capable o releasing surplus ldquopoetic
energy ound almost everywhere in a latent staterdquo983089983097 Using lan-
guage reminiscent o surrealismrsquos spiritualist origins Breton suggeststhat objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release o this ldquolatent energyrdquo a release that creates what I call ghost-liness Objects o the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inorm humans about themselves as i they were thoughtul sentient
Buy the Book
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 4040
beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century
7232019 Surrealist Ghostliness
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullsurrealist-ghostliness 4040
beings in other words just as surrealist human beings still them-
selves like objects in order to attune themselves more thoroughly
to the world around them Tis is because Bretonian ldquosubjective
realityrdquo as Michael Sheringham explains ldquois not hidden deep insideus so much as scattered around the perceptual world where we canpiece it together rom our sensory reactionsrdquo (10486311048625)983090983088 Tese points oreerence outside o ourselves such as objects help us to make senseo what emerges in a ghostly way out o the unconscious through
attuned receptivity
Te prism o ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism
that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challengesto Cartesian rationalism a period that the art historian J Clark
locates at the beginning o modernism983090983089 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically ex-
perientially and poetically remained imprinted on the movementrsquosworks throughout its history Ghostliness as a keystone idea uni1047297es
a movement with disparate artistic practices it concentrates on thecommon thread the ghostly legacy o automatism weaves through
the movementrsquos thought and works its punning texts and anamor-
phic images its vision o the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death its tacit way o accepting
mortality Trough surrealist ghostliness surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know more than we can see in
ront o us and that human beings are capable o a wisdom that isat least as intuitive emotional and instinctive as it is rational Tis
book shows how the surrealists and those who were in dialogue withthem explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeul
thus creating a solid basis or urther exploration o psychic realitiesin the twenty-1047297rst century