by Rob Latham;
Mad love
Freud’s occlusion of the female body, as well as his denial of erotic pleasure, in relation to the “compulsion to repeat” is thrown into sharp relief in a strange anecdote in his essay “On the Uncanny” when he discusses an experience he had of unintentionally and repeatedly returning to the red-light district of a small Italian town that he was visiting, whose streets were unknown to him:
I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, only to arrive by another détour at the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short while before. . . . (237)
While Freud hints at the psychic origin of this “unintended reoccurrence of the same situation,” he quickly moves on, ignoring the erotic significance of the “painted women” in the compulsion that repeatedly brought him back into their company. To the extent that the “painted lady” is repressed (both in this anecdote and in Freud’s theorization of the uncanny) in order to stress the “death instinct” over the sexual drives, she will, however, return with a vengeance in the works of Surrealism, an artistic and cultural movement that came of age with psychoanalysis and that compulsively explored the link between Eros and Thanatos, often in the form of artificial women and imagery that invoked the disarticulations of hysteria. Indeed, Freud’s experience in the Italian town was virtually recreated in 1938 at the height of the movement at the International Exposition of Surrealism held in Paris, which featured a network of dimly lit streets populated by mannequins, each outfitted by a different artist (with objects ranging from a bird cage to a fisherman’s net), an uncanny red-light district through which visitors were initially asked to find their way in the dark with a flashlight (Belton 111).
Although Freud attempted to close a Pandora’s Box by diverting attention away from the mechanical body, whether automaton or hysteric, he opened another in his “discovery” of the automatic psychic processes behind the compulsion to repeat. Just as the body of the automaton/hysteric was losing her meaning—for she had been emptied of demonic intrigue by Charcot and visual intrigue by the practice of psychoanalysis—she was once again invested with an invisible force (the repressed unconscious), inspiring a generation of artists and writers to make her a site/sight of psychic and erotic exploration. André Breton, the founder of the Surrealist movement, famously called hysteria “the greatest poetic discovery of the nineteenth century” (Breton and Aragon 61), for in its manifestations of psychic automatism he saw not symptoms of pathology but liberation, a means of expressing an inner psychic reality that was superior to external reality. Breton was first exposed to hysteria and the techniques of dream interpretation and free association during World War I, as a medical student interning in a series of neuropsychiatric clinics (under two former assistants of Charcot, Raoul Leroy and Joseph Babinski) that offered treatment to soldiers who had returned from battle. In the same symptoms of “post-traumatic stress” that had inspired Freud’s theory of the death drive, Breton detected a psychic (sur)reality, and in those same techniques used to address the shock of war on the psyche and shepherd it back to normalcy, he intuited a system for shocking the mind out of its normative conditioning and tapping into its imaginative potential.20 While Breton’s poetic interpretation and creative use of psychoanalytic theory put Surrealism at odds with Freud, as well as the French School of Psychiatry as represented by Pierre Janet, Breton credited Freud with bringing back to light “the most important aspect of intellectual life” (“Exquisite Corpse” 66) and grounded Surrealist practice in the “psychic automatism” of Janet.21
The “official” definition of Surrealism offered by Breton in 1924, in the movement’s first manifesto, was as follows:
SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. (“Manifesto” 26)
The Surrealists experimented with psychic automatism through a variety of collaborative writing and drawing games whose goal was to bypass the mind and tap into the inner psyche, and the results of which were often nonsensical phrases or imagistic disarticulations that reproduced the illogic of dreams and the physical disjuncture of hysteria (viewed as analogues by the Surrealists). A favorite was called The Exquisite Corpse, played by a group of people on a piece of paper. The first person would compose part of a sentence or drawing, fold over the paper so that his contribution would be concealed from the next person, who would add onto it, until all were finished and the paper was unfolded. The resulting figures—disjointed hybrids that merged inanimate objects with parts of animals, as well as female and male body parts, conjoined or mutated beyond recognition—were extolled by Breton for their “total negation of the ridiculous activity of imitation of physical characteristics,” as well as for carrying “anthropomorphism to its climax” (“Exquisite Corpse” 95).
Reminiscent of the ASFRian “feminization of objects,” the anthropomorphism enacted by the Exquisite Corpse was one of a series of Surrealist interests—including dolls, mannequins, and the conjunction of the human and the mechanical—that dovetail with ASFRian proclivities, to which Breton gave the name “convulsive beauty.” At the end of Nadja (the last line of which is, “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all” [160]), Breton links convulsive beauty to the trauma of a railway accident—which (like war trauma) Freud discusses in relation to the compulsion to repeat in Beyond the Pleasure Principle—resulting in a jolt, shock, or “short circuit” that derails the rational mind. In L’Amour Fou (Mad Love, 1937), he elaborates on the concept (and the train analogy), suggesting that the perfect illustration would be “a photograph of a very handsome locomotive after it had been abandoned for many years to the delirium of a virgin forest,” for “there can be beauty—convulsive beauty—only at the price of the affirmation of the reciprocal relationship that joins an object in movement to the same object in repose” (“Mad Love” 162). Breton’s erotic and liberatory interpretation of the trauma associated with the railroad thus offers an alternative reading of the machine woman of modernism about which Huyssen writes.
The artist who took the disarticulated figure of convulsive beauty even further than the Surrealists, who was perhaps most responsible for the Surrealist fascination with mannequins, and whose work intersects most blatantly with ASFRian proclivities, is the German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975), best known for his photographed poupées or dolls.22 Bellmer drew an explicit connection between his dolls and the uncanny, stating that a large part of their inspiration was his attendance at Max Reinhardt’s 1932 production of the Offenbach opera “Tales of Hoffmann,” in which the story of Coppelia/Olympia from the “The Sandman” is recreated in the first act. He began work on his first doll shortly thereafter, building its frame from wood brooms and metal rods
jointed with nuts and bolts and filled out with flax fiber covered with plaster of paris. Throughout the doll’s construction, he took photographs, ten of which were included in a small book that he published with his own money called Die Puppe (The Doll, 1934), preceded by a short introductory text entitled “Memories of a Doll Theme.” In the winter of 1934-35, eighteen photographs appeared in a two-page spread in the Surrealist journal Minotaure under the title “Variations sur le montage d’un mineure articulée,” launching his relationship with the surrealist movement (see Figure 4). In the images from the book and journal, the doll appears like a mannequin-wannabe caught in an ongoing state of arres
ted development between wholeness and dissolution, adulthood and adolescence, her sad, partial figure splayed on a bed or leaning against a wall and often posed against a backdrop of chiffon or delicate lace. Bellmer had wanted to allude to the internal or psychic nature of the doll’s form through a kind of peep show embedded in her stomach. Activated by a button on the left nipple, it was to display in succession six miniature panoramas attached to a wooden disc, each of which made visible “suppressed girlish thoughts” (qtd. in Lichtenstein 174).
Although the peep-show was never implemented, Bellmer’s desire to produce a figure capable of articulating an inner psychic reality was more fully realized through a second doll, completed in 1935. Inspiration came in the form of a pair of sixteenth-century wooden figures, each about eight inches tall, that he and Lotte Pritzel discovered in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin.23 Used by artists as aids to study human proportions and movement (similar to the wooden figures that artists still use today), they could be manipulated to a high degree, since every body part, from limbs to neck and torso, was assembled around carefully crafted ball joints. Using them as a guide, Bellmer produced wooden ball joints around which he arranged a new set of interchangeable and multiplied limbs and breasts. Unlike the first doll, the second was less a construction than what Rosalind Krauss has called “construction as dismemberment” (86; emphasis in original), an endlessly transformable configuration of discombobulated body parts, which Bellmer photographed in more naturalistic settings. Some of the more provocative images involve two sets of legs attached to the same torso, from which the upper body and head are missing. The uncanny doubling of limbs that are often contorted or flailing conveys both the disarticulation and the convulsive visuality of hysteria, by which Bellmer, like many Surrealists, was fascinated.
Figure 4 Bellmer’s work in Minotaure 6 (Winter 1934-35).
Bellmer elaborates on the connection between these dolls and hysteria in his Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious, or The Anatomy of the Image (1957), which serves as a theoretical and poetic counterpart to his work. The book translates the Freudian interpretation of hysteria as the physical migration of displaced psychic trauma into a theory of desire, particularly as expressed and transformed through the kinds of physical distortions made possible by the image. In a lengthy passage worth quoting for the way in which it eroticizes the shock associated with the uncanny, Bellmer suggests that
desire takes its point of departure, when concerning the intensity of its images, not from a perceptive whole but from details. If a naked hand unexpectedly emerges from a pair of pants in place of a foot, it is provocative of quite another degree of reality and—like an embarrassing stain on the edge of one’s underwear—infinitely more powerful than an entirely visible woman; it hardly matters, for the moment, whether this efficacy can be attributed to the surprise of discovering a deceptive aspect of desire, anticipated souvenirs, or even some reference to dark knowledge. The main thing to retain from the monstrous dictionary of analogies/antagonisms, which constitute the dictionary of the image, is that any given detail, such as a leg, is perceptible, accessible to memory, and available (in short is REAL), only if desire does not fatally take it for a leg. The object identical to itself remains devoid of reality. (31; emphasis added)
The conception expressed by Bellmer of a “REAL” that is invoked by a surprising and embarrassing “stain” in the field of vision would be rearticulated as the Gaze by Jacques Lacan in his 1964 Seminar, in which he applies to psychoanalysis the insights of, among other surrealists, Breton in Mad Love. Lacan makes a critical distinction between the eye of conscious perception and the Gaze that lies outside of consciousness, the former associated with what he calls the automaton (“the insistence of signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle”) and the latter the tuché (the “encounter with the real,” repeated “as if by chance,” which lies beyond the automaton [Four 53-54]). While these terms, which Lacan deploys in order to articulate “the function of the real in repetition” (54), are elaborations of that which lies within and beyond the pleasure principle, unlike Freud, who steers us away from representational practices, Lacan is interested in tracing the tuché or Gaze within the visual field, which he, like Bellmer, aligns with “the stain”: “The function of the stain and of the gaze is both that which governs the gaze most secretly and that which always escapes from the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with itself in imagining itself as consciousness” (Four 74). The “stain” is thus that which visually undermines the automaton or Ideal-I constituted through what Lacan calls the “mirror stage,” a psychic turning point when the infant, who has yet to gain full mastery of its body, identifies its “self” within a mirror for the first time. The exteriorized double, through which the infant appears whole, integrated, and individual, will become the misplaced site of “self”-identification, whose Gestalt opposes the heterogeneous flux of the body, launching
the I’s mental permanence, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination. This gestalt is also replete with the correspondences that unite the I with the statue onto which man projects himself, the phantoms that dominate him, and the automaton with which the world of his own making tends to achieve fruition in an ambiguous relation. (“Mirror” 5)
Bellmer’s dolls reverse the process by which the automaton of the “mirror stage” is constructed by disturbing the image with surprising “details,” as well as through an uncanny doubling that invokes the “fragmented body”—retained after the “mirror phase,” according to Lacan, in dreams and “the lines of ‘fragilization’ that define the hysteric’s phantasmatic anatomy, which is manifested in schizoid and spasmodic symptoms” (6-7). This gesture of derealization is exemplified by one of Bellmer’s photographs (see Figure 5) in which the ball-jointed doll, appearing as two sets of legs inversed and attached to the same torso, each outfitted like a young girl in Mary Janes and bobby socks, lies sprawled in front of a mirror, one set of legs braced against the wall and mirror, the other seemingly in the midst of kicking as if in a temper tantrum or hysterical fit. Visible in the mirror against which the doll is leaning is an amorphous jumble of parts, which has no correspondence to the body it is reflecting. Played out within the conflicted doubling of the doll and its disjointed reflection is an attempt at acknowledging the split upon which the subject is constituted. Like the robotic interior that ruptures the human exterior within ASFRian fantasy, the mirrored or doubled image within Bellmerian anatomy does not serve as a reconstruction so much as an unmasking, a sign (experienced “as if by chance”) of the Real that lies beyond the automaton. It is for this reason that, as Rosalind Krauss suggests, Bellmer’s dolls complicate the Freudian model of fetishism, in which an artificial monument is erected in place of a natural absence:
Figure 5 “The Mirror Stage”.
Surrealist photography does not admit of the natural, as opposed to the cultural or made. And so all of what it looks at is seen as if already, and always, constructed, through a strange transposition of this thing into a different register. We see the object by means of an act of displacement, defined through a gesture of substitution. The object, “straight” or manipulated, is always manipulated, and thus always appears as a fetish. (69)
Hal Foster, on the other hand, suggests that Bellmer’s dolls appeal to something more than fetishism and beyond the pleasure principle. As he notes, unlike the Freudian fetish object, they do not disguise sexual difference but explore it obsessively, and they do not hide the effects of their own production, as in the Marxist account of fetishism, but flaunt it repetitively. “Moreover, the notion of a ‘dictionary of analogues-antagonisms’ does not imply a fixing of desire (as in the Freudian account of fetishism); rather its shifting drives the many recombinations of the dolls” (103).
Bellmer’s attempt to map the convolutions of the psyche and the rhizomatic workings of desire, free from outside control, complicates any understanding of the dolls as auto
nomous. Nevertheless, like Surrealism itself, Bellmer has been subject to a great deal of criticism for his blatant and seemingly sadistic manipulation of the female figure.24 To such critiques, Foster responds that a distinction should be made between sadism and the representation of sadism: Bellmer’s dolls “go beyond (or is it inside?) sadistic mastery to the point where the masculine subject confronts his greatest fear: his own fragmentation, disintegration, and dissolution. And yet this is also his greatest wish” (109). Moreover, both Foster and Therese Lichenstein insist that Bellmer’s dolls should be read through the sociopolitical context in which they were created. Bellmer’s first doll was constructed in 1933, the year that the Nazis came to power in Germany. At the time, Bellmer owned an advertising and design agency. He closed down shop, however, fearful of inadvertently creating work that would in some way benefit the government, and devoted himself entirely to art that, according to Lichtenstein, was produced, in large part, as a protest against the cult of the perfect body within fascism, as well as the more general appearance of a mechanized, spectacularized, and “feminized” mass culture (13). Against these idealized and stereotyped bodies, Bellmer pits a convulsively mutating figure that breaches the boundaries of physical beauty and unity policed by the Nazis, while also embodying the psychological tensions and displacements experienced under the social constraints of fascism. Bellmer suggests in his Little Anatomy that, as in hysteria, the greater the repression, the more convoluted the expression, and thus the dolls not only represent the promiscuity or “flow” of desire, but also the psychic distortions of a desire caught between inner longing and external forces. As he says elsewhere, “The origin of that part of my work that scandalizes is the fact that for me the world is a scandal” (qtd. in Jelenski n.p.). There is, then, both self-reflexivity and social critique at work in Bellmer’s dolls; indeed, he seems to pose an unflinching self-reflexivity as a form of social critique.
