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Surrealist Ghostliness
Katharine Conley

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Surrealist Ghostliness

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SURREALIST
GHOSTLINESS

Katharine Conley

University of Nebraska Press

Lincoln and London

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© 2013 by the Board of Regents of
the University of Nebraska

Acknowledgments for the use of

previously published material appear
on page xx, which constitutes an
extension of the copyright page.

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Publication of this volume was assisted

by funds from the Arts & Humanities
Division for the Faculty of Arts &
Sciences at Dartmouth College.

Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conley, Katharine, 1956–
Surrealist ghostliness / Katharine Conley.
pages cm Includes bibliographical
references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8032-2659-3
(hardback : alk. paper)
1. Surrealism — Themes, motives. I. Title.
NX456.5.S8C66 2013
709.04'063 — dc23 2012049901

Set in Minion by Laura Wellington.

Designed by Nathan Putens.

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For Marian, who helped me see ghostliness
And for Richard, always

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Buy the Book
 List of Illustrations viii
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1
Contents 1 The Cinematic Whirl of Man
Ray’s Ghostly Objects 21
2 Claude Cahun’s Exploration of the
Autobiographical Human 45
3 The Ethnographic Automatism
of Brassaï and Dalí’s
Involuntary Sculptures 69
4 The Ghostliness in Lee Miller’s
Egyptian Landscapes 91
5 Dorothea Tanning’s Gothic
Ghostliness 119
6 Francesca Woodman’s
Ghostly Interior Maps 151
7 Pierre Alechinsky’s Ghostly
Palimpsests 179
8 Susan Hiller’s Freudian Ghosts 201
Conclusion 227
Notes 233
Bibliography 257
Index 275

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 1 Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors xiii
2 Marcel Duchamp, Bottlerack 10
3 Man Ray, Self-Portrait 22
4 Man Ray, La Femme 23
5 Man Ray, L’Homme 23

Illustrations 6 Man Ray, Champs délicieux

(Rayogram) 24
7 Man Ray, still from
Retour à la raison 31
8 Man Ray, Rrose Sélavy
(Marcel Duchamp) 46
9 Man Ray, Hommage à
D. A. F. de Sade 47
10 Claude Cahun, Untitled 50
11 Claude Cahun, Frontière
humaine 58
12 Claude Cahun, photomontage
from Disavowals 59
13 Brassaï, Sculptures involontaires 70
14 Lee Miller, Tanja Ramm and the
Belljar, Variant on Hommage
à D. A. F. de Sade 92
15 Lee Miller, Under the Belljar 94
16 Lee Miller, Exploding Hand 96
17 Lee Miller, Nude Bent Forward 97
18 Lee Miller, Domes of the Church
of the Virgin (al Adhra), Deir
el Soriano Monastery 101

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19 Lee Miller, The Procession (Bird
Tracks in the Sand) 103
20 Lee Miller, The Cloud Factory
(Sacks of Cotton) 105
21 Lee Miller, Portrait of Space 109
22 Lee Miller, From the Top of
the Great Pyramid 113
23 Dorothea Tanning, Pelote d’épingles
pouvant servir de fétiche 120
24 Dorothea Tanning,
Children’s Games 124
25 Dorothea Tanning, Eine
Kleine Nachtmusik 126
26 Dorothea Tanning, Palaestra 128
27 Dorothea Tanning, Birthday 129
28 Dorothea Tanning, Premier péril 134
29 Dorothea Tanning,
Cinquième péril 137
30 Dorothea Tanning, Interior
with Sudden Joy 139
31 Dorothea Tanning, Canapé
en temps de pluie 145
32 Dorothea Tanning, Murmurs 147
33 Francesca Woodman, House #3 154
34 Francesca Woodman,
then at one point 157
35 Francesca Woodman,
from Space2 162

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36 Francesca Woodman, Space2 166
37 Francesca Woodman, Untitled 169
38 Francesca Woodman, Space2 170
39 Francesca Woodman, On
Being an Angel 172
40 Francesca Woodman,
from Angel series 173
41 Francesca Woodman,
from Angel series 174
42 Pierre Alechinsky, Central Park 180
43 Pattern in Pierre Alechinsky’s
painting Central Park 186
44 Pierre Alechinsky, Page
d’atlas universel (III) 193
45 Pierre Alechinsky, Page
d’atlas universel (VII) 195
46 Pierre Alechinsky, Page
d’atlas universel (X) 196
47 Susan Hiller, From the
Freud Museum 202
48 Susan Hiller, From the
Freud Museum 211
49 Susan Hiller, From the
Freud Museum 220
50 Susan Hiller, From the
Freud Museum 223

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Preface

Surrealist Ghostliness began with the insight I had in 2000 that sur-
realist perception was necessarily double and that anamorphosis
functions well as a visual paradigm for this doubleness because of the
way surrealism purports to harness both our conscious and uncon-
scious minds into a kind of idealized synthesis, what André Breton,
the author of the first two “Manifestoes” of surrealism in 1924 and
1930, would call a resolution of old antinomies or a sublime point.
As a result of this insight, I wrote an exhibition catalogue essay on
surrealist love poetry called “Anamorphic Love.” There for the first
time I integrated fully an appreciation of surrealist visual art into my
more literary work, paving the way for my focus on art in Surrealist
Ghostliness. As I was finishing my book on Robert Desnos in 2002,
I realized that his tongue-twisting poetry produced in automatic
trances at the outset of the surrealist movement provided a textual
model for the double nature of surrealist perception. Anamorphosis
on a visual level and Desnos’s “Rrose Sélavy” playful punning poems
on an aural and textual level require an analogous two-step process
of comprehension, what I called a double take, involving a first look
or hearing, followed by a second, retroactive look or hearing.
My interest in anamorphosis began with the standard image we
know of the urn that, on a second look, resolves into the silhouette
of two human faces looking at one another or the duck that trans-
forms into a rabbit. I then turned to the picture-poems of Guillaume
Apollinaire, the French poet who coined the word surrealism in 1917
and who created his handwritten “calligrams” when he was a soldier
in World War I, decades before the concrete poets identified these
poems as early twentieth-century precursors to their own. Apollinaire

xi

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arranged the words on the page to replicate playfully the objects he
described, such as a tie, a fountain, or a heart. First we see the picture
the letters make and read the words, and then, retroactively, through
a mental double take, we see that the two sign systems — visual and
textual — represent two versions of the same thing, two intense im-
ages, literal and metaphoric, with the dominant version standing in
for conscious reality and the secondary version hiding like a ghost
behind it, standing in for 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 is
difficult to apprehend them both at the same time.
This train of thought led me to the most famous anamorphic
painting, Hans Holbein’s sixteenth-century Ambassadors (1533; see
fig. 1), which was created to hang next to a door so that it could be
seen head on, and then once again over one’s shoulder at the instant
of leaving the room, at which point the skull lying at the ambassadors’
feet springs into focus as the ambassadors themselves fade into a
blur. This over-the-shoulder, retrospective glance functions like the
double take Apollinaire’s poems invite when we realize these two
perspectives constitute two aspects of the same reality.
Surrealist perception is anamorphic in a way similar to the mo-
ment when a viewer perceives Holbein’s Ambassadors sideways and
backward, when, for an instant, both aspects of the painting become
apparent at once. We suddenly understand that underlying the glori-
ous achievements of the magnificently dressed men in the painting
lies the mortality that awaits them — that awaits us all. On second
glance, the suppressed, primitive truth of mortality is even more real
than the overt reality most of us live by, which is actually more of a
dreamlike fantasy, for it deludes us into believing that we will live
forever, protected from the inevitable by prosperity. The repressed
truth is more real than the reality we live consciously. The distinc-
tion between these realities, like a membrane or elusive line that is
always moving away from us, just out of reach, dissolves, in such a

xii Preface

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1. Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors (1533). © National Gallery, London / Art
Resource, New York.

way as to make them almost indistinguishable from each other. For

the surrealists, the sublime point resides at the instant when one
reality bleeds into another so that, for an instant, both sides of the
duality may be understood simultaneously.
I first understood this anamorphic paradigm as ghostly in 2003,
when I began to study Lee Miller’s Egyptian photographs from the
1930s, starting with her Domes of the Church of the Virgin (al Adhra),
Deir el Soriano Monastery (ca. 1936) (see fig. 18). Here I discovered
the ghost of a woman’s nude body looking down at herself, hidden
in a landscape photograph of a monastery that for centuries had
housed only men, as though the ghosts of all the monks from the

Preface xiii

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past suddenly had succeeded in fulfilling a secret desire. I was sure
this was not a mistake when I thought about Miller’s wry sense of
humor, and then I began to find ghost images in her other photo-
graphs; it became clear to me that this anamorphic effect was at
once surrealist and ghostly. The ghostliness was confirmed for me by
her elegiac From the Top of the Great Pyramid (ca. 1937; see fig. 22),
shot when Miller knew she was soon to leave Egypt for Europe and
an impending war, which would provide the surrealists with new
ghosts, beyond those of friends and family from the previous war.
The photograph hints at the ghostly presence of the photographer
herself looking out at the landscape and also seems to invoke ghosts
from the distant past in dark anticipation of the upcoming war, in
which Miller would enlist as an American photographer with the
U.S. Army.
Surrealist Ghostliness begins at the outset of the surrealist move-
ment, when the young surrealists listened, entranced, to Desnos’s
hypnotic utterings that sounded oracular and prophetic, profoundly
ghostly and otherworldly, and Desnos’s friend Man Ray — the Ameri-
can who recorded the movement photographically and later worked
with Miller — began his experiments with film. I turn then to works
created in dialogue with the movement, from the 1920s through the
1990s, including Miller’s Egyptian photographs. Surrealist Ghostliness
continues the exploration of surrealism I began in my first book and
pursues the sense my book on Desnos gave me of what it might feel
like to be haunted by someone: by a ghost exhorting me to move
forward and complete a task that at times felt akin to conjuring, not
unlike the experience of all writers of critical biographies who open
themselves to a kind of willed haunting. This book, then, allows me
to see the movement as a whole in a historic sweep that allies it even
more closely to the century into which I was born, the century that
still shapes our current era. It also includes Americans such as Ray,
Miller, Dorothea Tanning, Francesca Woodman, and Susan Hiller,
who, like me, were drawn to surrealism.
My study of the artists presented here through the prism of ana-

xiv Preface

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morphosis has taught me about the human condition as a constant
negotiation with our own mortality, in which our beings are divided
between dreams and everyday realities, between the psychic and
the mundanely material, the latent and the manifest — the manifest
at times holding more secrets than the oft-probed latent content
of personal experience. In the preface to my first book, Automatic
Woman (1996), I wrote about my discovery that scholarly lives often
mirror personal histories and that my own academic writing had an
autobiographical connection. On a personal level Surrealist Ghostli-
ness has helped me to explore the interrelationship between manifest
and latent realities in my own life, in my own family story — what
we tell others about our family life, what others tell us, and what we
admit only to ourselves. More broadly, with its focus on the latent
and the visible, the manifest and the ghostly, this book points to
the ways surrealism activates the mechanism by which all literature
reveals the secret at the core of the human condition — namely, that
mortality implies a life doubled by death, a finitude within which
multiple, baroque infinitudes may be imagined.
Most of all I found affirmation of a long-held belief: that we live
experiences that are defined by what we intuit as much as by what we
think, by what we feel to be the case as much as by what we believe
we know, by our nonrational impulses as much as by our rationally
informed perceptions. To perceive fully we must perceive doubly,
at once peripherally and directly, not unlike the way we look at The
Ambassadors. We need to remain open to what lies in between the
words or images in order to appreciate them. The surrealists under-
stood this, both those who worked in the movement’s mainstream
and the several artists I present here who thrived at its margins,
finding their centers elsewhere. With this book I hope to show how
this rational surrealist quest for the knowledge of what lies beyond
the rational anticipated the ways our contemporary lives, which
we live in a state of perpetual and virtual reality, have expanded to
include what we do not fully understand in this increasingly post-
postmodern, possibly even post-Enlightenment world.

Preface xv

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank those who have been generous about welcoming my

questions and theories as I approached their own work or that of
members of their family, most particularly Dorothea Tanning, Pierre
Alechinsky, Susan Hiller, and Tony and Roz Penrose. I would not
have had the courage to do this work without your support. I also
thank Val Nelson at the Jersey Archive, who gave me advice about
finding the house of Claude Cahun, Pam Johnson of the Dorothea
Tanning Foundation and Archive, and Katarina Jerinic of the Franc-
esca Woodman Studio and Archive for their helpful encouragement.
I thank Dartmouth College for supporting me throughout the
composition and completion of this book, in particular the finan-
cial support I have received from the Dean of the Faculty Office
and the Senior Faculty Fellowship I was awarded in 2003–04, at an
early critical moment. I thank my colleagues in the Department of
French and Italian, most notably Mary Jean Green, Lynn Higgins,
Roxana Verona, Graziella Parati, Virginia Swain, J. Kathleen Wine,
Ioana Chitoran, Andrea Tarnowski, and David LaGuardia, for their
sustained interest in my work, Keith Walker for his suggestions, and
the Ramon and Marguerite Guthrie Fund for help with permissions
and illustrations.
I thank Jennifer Mundy at the Tate Modern for giving me the op-
portunity to write about anamorphosis in relationship to surrealism
for the first time in 2000–2001. I thank also the graduate students
from the Department of Romance Languages at the University of
Pennsylvania, who invited me to present this topic in its early stages,
and Dalia Judovitz, Catherine Dana, and Candace Lang from the De-
partment of French at Emory University, who invited me to present a

xvii

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version of the introduction as I was finishing it. I also thank Marian
Eide and Richard J. Golsan from the Departments of English, French,
and Comparative Literature at Texas a&m University and William
Cloonan and Alec Hargreaves from Florida State University’s Depart-
ment of Modern Languages and Linguistics and the Winthrop-King
Institute for their invitations to present early versions of chapters
4 and 7. I thank Mairéad Hanrahan at University College London,
Alyce Mahon at Cambridge University, and Michael Sheringham at
Oxford University for their invitations to present chapters from the
project and for the valuable feedback I received.
I thank my colleagues in the Dean of the Faculty Office at Dart-
mouth for their collegiality, humor, and support during the years I
was writing the book, most particularly Janet Terp, Chris Strenta,
Amanda Bushor, Kate Soule, Erin Bennett, Lindsay Whaley, Rob
McClung, Dave Kotz, Nancy Marion, Margaret McWilliams-Piraino,
June Solsaa, Craig Kaufman, Carissa Dowd, Sherry Finnemore, and
Kim Wind. For material support I owe a debt to the deans and as-
sociate deans of faculty, Carol Folt, Michael Mastanduno, and Le-
onore Grenoble, in particular for help with the illustrations. I thank
former associate dean and provost Barry Scherr for always believing
in my work. And I thank the lively intellectual encouragement I’ve
received at the colloquia organized at West Dean College in West
Sussex, particularly from Dawn Ades, Roger (and Agnès) Cardinal,
Alyce Mahon, Elza Adamowicz, and Sharon-Michi Kusunoki, at the
annual 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone Studies In-
ternational colloquia, the Modernist Studies Association meetings,
and the Gradiva Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Literature.
I thank my mentor and friend Gerry Prince. I also wish to thank
friends who have questioned, advised, and encouraged me, including
Katherine Hart, Kathleen Hart, Laurie Monahan, Jonathan Eburne,
Georgiana Colvile, Dominique Carlat, Olivier Bara, Adam Jolles,
Celeste Goodridge, Benjamin Andréo, Jorge Pedraza, Gérard Gas-
arian, Van Kelly, Ronald M. Green, Donald Pease, Gayle Zachman,
Juliette Bianco, Jim Jordan, Joy Kenseth, Martine Antle, Annabel

xviii Acknowledgments

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Martín, John Kopper, Riley O’Connor, Amy Allen, Mary Childers,
David Getsy, Barbara Kreiger, Brian Kennedy, Kristina Van Dyke,
Melinda O’Neal, Mary Ann Caws, Eric Santner, Wendy Pelton Hall,
Nancy Forsythe, Doreen Schweitzer, Julie Thom, and Shelby Morse.
I also thank former students who have helped to shape my thinking,
especially Jeannine Murray-Román, Nomi Stone, Susan Doheny,
Silvia Ferreira, Diana Jih, Naari Ha, Stephanie Nguyen, Monique
Seguy, and Kate Goldsborough. I thank Kathryn Mammel for send-
ing me photographs of the sites in Greece from which Susan Hiller
collected some of her objects. I thank Mostafa Heddaya, who helped
me untangle the illustrations during one invaluable summer’s work
as a James O. Freedman Presidential Fellow. I thank Hakan Tell for
etymological advice (any error is my own). And I owe a special
thanks to Maureen Ragan for her help with the bibliography during
the manuscript’s final stages.
For technical support I am indebted to the Arts and Humani-
ties Resource Center of Dartmouth College, in particular to Susan
Bibeau, Thomas Garbelotti, and Otmar Foelsche. I want to thank
the 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 of 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 for 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 of friends in France and the United Kingdom, most particularly
Claude and Hélène Garache, Marie-Claire and Maurice Dumas, and
especially Jacques Polge and his sons, Denis and Olivier, and their
families, as well as Tony and Roz Penrose.
I thank those members of my family who helped me understand
the personal dimension of my scholarly interest in ghostliness: my
mother, Jane Harris Conley, and my sister and her husband, Grace
and David Gumlock, as well as the Stamelmans, Walshes, and Sun-

Acknowledgments xix

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shines, especially our granddaughters Julia, Eliza, and Sophie. This
book is dedicated to those who most helped me uncover the ghost-
liness in my own family story, which gave me the answer to the
question of why I wrote this book: my friend Marian Eide and my
husband, Richard Stamelman. I couldn’t have done it without you.

Earlier versions of parts of the introduction and chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, 6,

and 8 appeared in the following publications. I thank the publishers
for granting me permission to use this material:
“Surrealism’s Ghostly Automatic Body,” Sites: Contemporary French
and Francophone Studies 15.3 (June 2011): 297–304. Reprinted by
permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis Ltd., www.taylorand-
francis.com.
“Les objets-corps tournants de Man Ray,” in Arts, littérature et
langage du corps III: Plaisir, souffrance et sublimation, ed. Jean-Michel
Devesa (Bordeaux: Pleine Page Editeur, 2007), 361–70.
“Claude Cahun’s Iconic Heads: From ‘The Sadistic Judith’ to Hu-
man Frontier,” Papers of Surrealism 2 (Summer 2004), http://www.
surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal2/index.htm.
“Modernist Primitivism in 1933: Brassaï’s Involuntary Sculptures
in Minotaure,” Modernism/Modernity 10.1 (2003): 127–40. © 2003
by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission
by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
“Les révolutions de Dorothea Tanning,” Pleine Marge 36 (Decem-
ber 2004): 146–75.
“A Swimmer between Two Worlds: Francesca Woodman’s Maps
of Interior Space,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 2.2 (2008),
jsa.asu.edu/index.php/jsa.
“Nous habitons tous dans la maison de Freud: Susan Hiller chez
Freud à Londres,” Gradiva 1.11 (2008): 51–64.

xx Acknowledgments

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Introduction

Surrealism was a haunted movement from the beginning. It began

not quite four years after the end of World War I, with the response
of André Breton to René Crevel’s story about what he did over his
summer vacation. Walking on a beach in 1922, Crevel met a medium
who invited him to a séance because she had “discerned particu-
lar mediumistic qualities” in him, resulting in what Breton called
Crevel’s ““spiritualist’ initiation” (Lost 92). Breton and his friends,
most of 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 of what they
knew about Freud’s theory of the unconscious, while at the same
time refusing “the spiritualist viewpoint” and the possibility of any
“communication . . . between the living and the dead” (92). In his
essay “The Mediums Enter,” a curious title given his categorical re-
jection of spiritualism, Breton identified this practice for the first
time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as
“a certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the
dream state” (90).1 He thus claimed the legacy of spiritualism for this
new, Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneously
repressing and transforming it into a ghost, thus creating what I call
surrealist ghostliness.2
Spiritualism was launched in 1848 when the Fox sisters of 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 of mediums and magnetic somnambu-
lism, otherwise known as hypnosis, which was taken seriously by
scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie.3

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It had originated with the French craze for Franz Anton Mesmer’s
theory of animal magnetism during the political upheaval of the
late eighteenth century, a theory that destabilized the ascendency of
Enlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity
in England of gothic fiction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis.
Mesmer’s “discovery” of “a primeval ‘agent of nature,’” a “superfine
fluid that penetrated and surrounded all bodies” that he claimed
could be used to “supply Parisians with heat, light, electricity, and
magnetism,” captivated his contemporaries, as Robert Darnton
explains, because, like Newton’s gravity and Franklin’s electricity,
Mesmer’s fluid confirmed that human beings were “surrounded by
wonderful, invisible forces” (3–4, 10). Subsequently, despite Mesmer’s
abhorrence of “superstitious and occult practices of all kinds,” his
theories paved the way for both nineteenth-century spiritualism,
which also explored invisible forces, and twentieth-century theories
of psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 171).4

The Gothic Imagination

Surrealism’s historical link to the late eighteenth-century’s gothic
imagination surfaces in Breton’s 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism,” in
his high praise of Lewis’s gothic novel The Monk (1796). Breton makes
it provocatively clear that he prefers Lewis’s ghosts to Dostoyevsky’s
realism and holds up fairy tales as exemplars of literary fiction. In
paying homage to Freud in the “Manifesto” — stating that he practiced
Freud’s methods while working as a medical auxiliary during World
War I — Breton embraces the creative practice of automatism, signal-
ing surrealism’s attachment to both of Mesmer’s legacies, intentional
and unintentional: the scientific and the spiritualist, the Freudian
and the occult (Manifestoes 23). When Breton effectively recast the
Cartesian cogito “I think, therefore I am” in the second sentence of
the “Manifesto” with the suggestion “I dream, therefore I am” and
with the characterization of “Man” as “that inveterate dreamer,” he
established surrealism’s dedication to exploring all the ways in which

2 Introduction

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nonrational, psychic, and paranormal phenomena may inform the
understanding of human experience (3).
Although partly motivated by the ghosts of lost friends and their
own experiences in World War I, with their appropriation of spiri-
tualist automatism the young surrealists transformed the ghosts
that practitioners of spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral
forces within the unconscious mind. The psychic forces they sought
to understand were like metaphorical versions of the ghosts of spiri-
tualism, which looked like bodies — particularly those captured on
film by spirit photography — but were in fact only traces of bodies,
matter left over after death yet retaining psychic awareness, an ability
to communicate, and the double knowledge of life and the afterlife,
of life before and after death. Unconstrained by mortal chronology
or rules of behavior, spiritualist ghosts are simultaneously threaten-
ing and inspiring in their freedom, symbols of rebellion against fate
and the constraints of mortality. While the surrealists rejected the
ghosts of spiritualism, they retained the subversive ghostliness of the
gothic imagination that had spawned those ghosts. Their embrace of
automatism signaled a desire to explore the fundamentally ghostly
experience of opening oneself up to whatever might be hidden within
the psyche, intentionally putting oneself into a trance state in order
to access otherwise repressed thoughts, words, and images buried
in the unconscious mind.
By 1933, however, although in keeping with his early spiritualist-
inflected titles, The Magnetic Fields (1920) and “The Mediums Enter”
(1922), Breton’s use of mediumistic art to illustrate “The Automatic
Message” contradicts his argument in the essay against spiritual-
ism’s goal of accessing outside spirits in favor of the surrealists’ goal
of accessing ghostly voices within the self. He thus once again af-
firms the link between spiritualism and surrealism in his negation
of spiritualism, eleven years after his negation of it in “The Medi-
ums Enter,” while the plentiful illustrations present spiritualism as
a significant forebear. Roger Cardinal confirms that these “images

Introduction 3

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directly lifted from Spiritualist publications . . . create an impact in
their own right . . . foregrounding the complementary discussion of
visual automatism and mediumistic creativity” (“Breton” 24–25). By
1949, however, when he cofounded the Compagnie de l’Art Brut with
Jean Dubuffet, Breton finally explored openly the correspondences
between surrealist and mediumistic and spiritualist art at which he
had only hinted in 1933 (see Cardinal, Outsider). By the 1950s sur-
realism was well established, and spiritualist automatism no longer
threatened surrealism’s Freudian appropriation of it. Breton even
included admiring essays on mediumistic and spiritualist art from
the 1950s in the book version of Surrealism and Painting (1966).5 The
ghost of spiritualism could cease to be repressed and denied and
was finally allowed to coexist with the movement that had sought
to replace it.
Surrealist ghostliness as a concept names both the repressed
historical legacy of spiritualist automatism and the ghostliness of
surrealist psychic experimentation. More broadly the profoundly
ghostly aspect of all human psychic experience could be attributed
to Bretonian surrealism, according to Foucault, who, in an interview
given shortly after Breton’s death in 1966, credited Breton with having
wiped out “boundaries of provinces that were once well established.”
Foucault attributed a new “unity of our culture” in the “domains
of ethnology, art history, the history of religions, linguistics, and
psychoanalysis” to “the person and the work of André Breton. He
was both the spreader and gatherer of all this agitation in modern
experience” (Aesthetics 174).
Foucault’s use of the word agitation appropriately identifies the
unknown within the self to which Breton fiercely advocated re-
ceptive attunement. This constitutes surrealist automatism’s most
ghostly aspect and extends the injunction of Arthur Rimbaud, a
surrealist forebear, to find the other within the self and let it speak.
“I is someone else,” Rimbaud wrote in May 1871 (“Je est un autre”).
“I am present at this birth of my thought” (Complete 305). For the
surrealists, as for Freud, inner voices have the potential to shed light

4 Introduction

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on the human condition, divided as it is between conscious and un-
conscious perception. In “The Automatic Message” Breton describes
the inner voices that surface during the automatic experience as
communicating a “subliminal message” that speaks in a language
“which has nothing supernatural about it,” while at the same time
insisting that that language remains “for each and every one of us
. . . the vehicle of revelation,” using religious terminology to describe
a psychological phenomenon (Break 138). The gothic, the fascina-
tion with magnetism, the rise of spiritualism, the establishment of
psychoanalysis, and the exploration in literature and art of psychic
phenomena trace a trajectory that extends from the eighteenth cen-
tury to the twentieth and joins spiritualism to surrealism.

The Psychic Geography of Surrealist Ghostliness

The psychic geography of surrealist ghostliness extends from Europe
to North America as the twentieth century progresses. I study here
eight examples of works or bodies of work by artists and writers
who explore ghostliness from mainstream surrealism to its distant
periphery, from 1923 to the 1990s. These artists and writers all used
automatic experience as a point of departure for examining the
ghostly in their work. In chapter 1 I discuss the ghostly liveliness
of inanimate objects in Man Ray’s early films Emak Bakia (1923),
L’Etoile de mer (1928), and Les Mystères du château du dé (1929). In
chapter 2 I examine how Claude Cahun questions the human in her
ambiguous self-portraits from the 1920s and specifically in Frontière
humaine (Human Frontier) from 1930, which highlights the ghostly
truth of human mortality. In chapter 3 I look at Brassaï’s and Salvador
Dalí’s irreverent examinations of the sacred in modern European
society through Dalí’s essay on Art Nouveau architecture and Brassaï’s
photographs of found objects from 1933 that, like Ray’s inanimate
objects, resonate with a ghostly inner life. Chapter 4 completes the
study of surrealist ghostliness in the 1930s with an analysis of the
empty landscapes shot by Lee Miller in which she playfully reveals
ghostly human forms.

Introduction 5

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 In chapter 5 I investigate Dorothea Tanning’s disturbingly ghostly
animation of domestic space in her turn from painting to sculpture
in the mid-twentieth century. Chapter 6 illuminates the surrealist
ghostliness the young American photographer Francesca Woodman
invested in her studies of the permeable parameters of time and space
characteristic of the baroque in her series of self-portraits from the
1970s. Chapter 7 finds surrealist ghostliness in Pierre Alechinsky’s
1980s 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 8 concludes
this study of surrealist ghostliness with Susan Hiller’s mimicking of
Freud’s personal collection in From the Freud Museum (1991–97).
This work incorporates her feminist and postmodern experience,
haunted by the ghosts of Freud, the Holocaust, and the cold war.
Whether or not they identified themselves as surrealist, all of these
artists and writers enter into dialogue with mainstream surrealism.
They respond to Breton’s recipe for making surrealism in the “Mani-
festo” and to the implicit invitation to participate fully in what I have
called the “surrealist conversation,” as surrealists like Louis Aragon,
Robert Desnos, and Max Ernst did.6 This conversation also includes
women, who had a place at the surrealist “banquet,” as Tanning put
it, thanks to the open invitation for everyone to participate in the
“Manifesto” and later in “The Automatic Message,” where Breton
declared, “Every man and every woman deserves to be convinced
of their ability to tap into this language at will, which has nothing
supernatural about it” (Tanning, Birthday 11; Breton, Break 138). In
the nature of most collectives there was a dominant voice, that of
Breton, but there was room for other voices too: a space for dialogue
that Breton tried to guarantee in the literary art journals he edited
until his death in 1966.
Why does surrealist ghostliness become apparent now, in the
twenty-first century, like a lost photographic negative emerging out
of developing fluid? Is it tied to a global response to the turn of the
century, for example, the events of September 2001, which produced

6 Introduction

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a heightened sense of 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 The Ambassadors (see fig. 1)? Could it be con-
nected to related cultural phenomena, such as a renewed interest in
the supernatural manifest in films like The Sixth Sense (1999), The
Blair Witch Project (1999), The Others (2001), Twilight (2008), or
Paranormal Activity (2009), television shows like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer (1997), Charmed (1998), or The Ghost Whisperer (2005), or
novels like Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) or books by best-selling
authors such as Anne Rice, Stephenie Meyer, or J. K. Rowling, and,
more recently, art exhibitions like The Perfect Medium (2004–05),
curated by Clément Chéroux and Andreas Fischer, about the link
between photography and spiritualism?
Interest in the ghostly has also been manifest in academic cul-
ture, such as Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994), in which he reflects
on Marx and Shakespeare and exhorts his listeners “to learn to live
with ghosts” because “time is out of joint” (xviii, 19), or his Archive
Fever (1996), in which he shows how Freud’s theories about the
unconscious necessarily incorporate ghosts. Marina Warner, in her
encyclopedic Phantasmagoria (2006), theorizes “a new model of sub-
jectivity” linked to the virtual realities available through the Internet
(378), and Avery Gordon, in her sociological study Ghostly Matters
(1997), argues eloquently that ghostliness is a way of knowing and
being in the world. In The Unconcept (2011), Anneleen Masschelein
identifies the Freudian uncanny, the psychoanalytical corollary to
surrealist ghostliness, as “a late-twentieth-century theoretical concept”
for similar reasons (4). “In various disciplines,” she argues, “the con-
cept of the uncanny fits within a larger research program that focuses
on haunting, the spectral, ghosts, and telepathy as a material phe-
nomena in culture and society” (144). The current fascination with
the paranormal, the supernatural, and the psychic is the result of the
normalization of the phantasmatic, of acts of psychic doubling, that
occurred throughout the twentieth century, beginning with Freud; it

Introduction 7

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makes visible the degree to which an avant-garde movement linked
to the arts, like surrealism, was invested in the phantasmatic.

Four Characteristics of Surrealist Ghostliness

Surrealist ghostliness may be identified by a series of four primary
characteristics, all of which will be explored in this book. The first
of these characteristics reveals a recognizable link to spiritualism:
namely, its trace as the repressed ghost of surrealism and as a ghost
that has sprung back into popular culture at the beginning of the
twenty-first century.
The second characteristic of surrealist ghostliness consists in the
rhythm of automatism as characterized by alternations between mo-
ments of suspension and moments of flow. Suspension here means
the conscious and concentrated direction of thought toward pure
receptivity; at the outset of automatic practice all conscious activ-
ity is suspended as one falls into a trance. Flow, on the other hand,
describes the rush of automatic words, images, and voices that flood
consciousness in sensual ways. Flow is another way to character-
ize the sensation Foucault evoked when he described Breton as “a
swimmer between two words [who] traverses an imaginary space
that had never been discovered before him” (Aesthetics 173).
The oscillating doubleness of the automatic rhythm of suspension
and flow also characterizes another surrealist practice that surreal-
ist ghostliness illuminates — that of the impulse to create archives.
Jonathan Eburne has argued that the surrealist desire to collect,
visible in Breton’s extensive personal collection, reflects “the sus-
pensive function of the archive” because of the way such a collection
serves as “a means for distinguishing and dislodging epistemological
certainty” and simultaneously appeals to and defies “the tendency
for knowledge to systematize itself ” (“Breton’s Wall” 21, 42). Indeed
the surrealists explicitly rejected the modes of categorization that
typify state-sanctioned archives.7 John Roberts identifies surreal-
ism’s propensity for the “counter-archive” with the surrealists’ taste
for photographs that document aspects of human existence that

8 Introduction

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would rarely find their way into a municipal archive, such as Cahun’s
intimate portraits of herself in multiple disguises, which constitute
an almost archival study of alternative identities for a European
woman of her generation (106). These doubles for herself, ghostly
presences captured on film, emblematize the way all archives are
ghosts of previous times, traces of something lost, that speak to the
present and future out of the past.
In thinking about the papers, objects, and thought stored in
Freud’s house in London, Derrida ascribes a “shifting” quality to
the notion of the archive in Archive Fever that resembles the rhythm
of suspension and flow of surrealist automatism. In the case of the
archive, this rhythm is linked to the tension the desire for archiviza-
tion stimulates between the death drive — triggering a retrospective
instinct to memorialize — and the life force, which faces the future.
This oscillating “shifting figure” of a notion thus yokes together the
impulse to stop time with the impulse to rush forward and thereby
mimics the equally alternating rhythm of automatism (Derrida,
Archive 29).
The third characteristic of surrealist ghostliness involves the sen-
sual aspects of surrealist experience. Foucault evokes this charac-
teristic with his metaphor of swimming, thus describing surrealist
automatic writing as an intensely experiential “raw and naked act”
(Aesthetics 173). Although surrealism had a consistently strong visual
component, the surrealists were also attracted to the creation of
works that depended on touch, beginning with collage, which was
adopted as a technique by dada artists who later became surrealists,
such as Ernst.8 Janine Mileaf even ascribes “a form of embodied or
tactile knowing” to the surrealists’ courting of “disturbance” (Please
17).9 Touch was a key factor in the dada and surrealist fascination
with objects, beginning with Marcel Duchamp’s invention of the
readymade, a found object turned away from its original function,
such as an industrial bottle dryer used in cafés, renamed Bottlerack
(1914; see fig. 2) and displayed in a gallery. By the 1920s Ray had
begun to create assisted readymades, such as his Cadeau (Gift; 1921),

Introduction 9

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 2. Marcel Duchamp,
Bottlerack (1961; replica
of 1914 original). © 2011
Artists Rights Society
(ars ), New York / adagp ,
Paris / Succession Marcel
Duchamp. Philadelphia
Museum of Art: Gift of
Jacqueline, Paul, and
Peter Matisse in memory
of their mother, Alexina
Duchamp, 1998.

an iron impractically studded with nails, adding an emotional and

surrealistically psychological aspect that reflects Ray’s feelings about
work in the garment industry, which could have been his fate.
Linked to a political rejection of “high” art in favor of art that
could be made by anyone, the pursuit of art that involved touch
allied the surrealists with what Martin Jay, after Rosalind Krauss,
has identified as a “crisis of visual primacy” in France during this
period (212). Later this crisis would manifest itself in the dissident
surrealist Georges Bataille’s embrace of “base” materialism, “derived
from the bodily experience of materiality,” and in the surrealist craze
for making objects (Jay 228). Such a “haptic aesthetic” has been
identified broadly by Adam Jolles as a “tactile turn” in surrealism
tied to Tristan Tzara’s essays on African art. In 1933, in “Concerning
a Certain Automatism of Taste,” Tzara identifies the attraction to
African art as “bound to an intrauterine account of the world that
originated with tactile representation” (in Jolles 36). He links tactil-
ity to “our most powerful desires, those that are latent and eternal”

10 Introduction

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because they are “prenatal,” tied to memory and “the satisfactions
offered by substances that can be touched” (“Concerning” 213, 209).
The patina on African objects that makes them “precious” stands as
“proof that the object has already answered the intrauterine desires
of a whole series of individuals,” desires that in Western culture have
been submitted to a transference to visual experience (210).
Tzara’s claim that objects we touch daily, such as buttons, eggcups,
and children’s toys, can acquire “totemic” status akin to the patina
that makes an African statue “precious” anticipates and supplements
the argument made three years later by Walter Benjamin in “The
Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction” (Tzara, “Concerning” 212).10
Tzara’s patina, which comes from generations of handling that in-
volves an erosion of the original material out of which a golden glow
emerges, parallels Benjamin’s understanding of aura as irrevocably
tied to withering, even shriveling. For Benjamin, aura is linked to
uniqueness and history; reproductions substitute what he views
favorably (because they are nonelitist) as “a plurality of copies for a
unique existence.” Mechanical reproduction “withers” “the aura of
the work of art,” which is linked “to the history which it has experi-
enced” (Benjamin, Illuminations 221). What Benjamin leaves out of
his argument is the possibility that a mechanically produced object
such as a toy (a material corollary to a mechanically reproduced
image), through the acquisition of “history” by handling (Tzara’s
patina), might be reinvested with “aura” because the desire it awakens
reactivates a ritualistic function. The reactivated “cult value” then
conforms to the occult meaning of aura as a luminous substance sur-
rounding a person or a thing, possibly blurring boundaries between
person and thing (224).
Although it was precisely this occult meaning of aura from which
Benjamin wished to distance himself, as Miriam Bratu Hansen ar-
gues, he remained ambivalent about the aura (337–38). Hansen
ascribes Benjamin’s insistence on the aura as “a phenomenon in
decline” to the political climate of the time. It expediently allowed
him to introduce a term with occult associations into Marxist debates

Introduction 11

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while also seeking “to counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation of technology that first exploded in World War One and
was leading to the fascist conquest of Europe” (338). She views in his
overall mode of theorizing the concept of aura dialectically as “open
to the future” despite his emphasis on the aura’s decline, on “a past
whose ghostly apparition projects into the present” (349, 341).
One of the multiple definitions of aura Hansen finds in Benjamin’s
work from the 1930s echoes the link between a person and an object
Tzara suggests through the parallelism he draws between the patina
on African objects and childhood toys (Hansen 339). “To perceive the
aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look
at us in return,” Benjamin states in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”
(188). For Tzara the auratic connection that blurs the boundaries
between person and thing (going back to the occultist sense of aura)
is inevitably linked to touch. We experience an object’s totemic value
when we touch it. This activation of a latent force within a manifestly
ordinary thing, an irrational yet powerful and intense desire buried
in an industrially manufactured object rendered precious by touch,
conforms to the paradigm of surrealist ghostliness as a nonrational
experience and as double: having latent and manifest aspects that
forcefully and visibly coexist.11
As well as touching, touch also manifests itself as the sense of
being touched, the experience of envelopment, of the frisson linked
to ghostliness that Foucault identified as characteristic of Bretonian
surrealism. Ernst, a pioneer in dada collage, described this feeling of
envelopment linked to touch in paintings he made in 1934. One of
these had the subtitle Effect of a Touch, suggesting the feeling at once
physical, sexual, and emotional of being touched by someone. Simi-
larly when he wrote in “Beyond Painting” (1936), “Blind swimmer, I
have made myself a seer,” he was referring to the kind of inner vision
and insight stimulated by the experience of sensual envelopment that
is more connected to touch than to any of the other senses (122).
The fourth and most dominant characteristic of surrealist ghost-
liness involves three paradigmatic mechanisms for doubling and

12 Introduction

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creating ghosts within surrealism — textual, visual, and corporeal — all
of which have their origin in surrealist automatism, first explored
through automatic trances at the outset of the movement. The first
of these, textual puns, were typical of the automatic nonsense po-
ems spoken by Desnos during the surrealists’ first experiments with
“automatic sleeps” that served to launch the movement in 1922. That
fall Duchamp had been publishing tongue-twisting nonsense poems
in the proto-surrealist journal Littérature under the signature of his
punning alter ego, Rrose Sélavy (éros, c’est la vie; see fig. 8). On one
of the first nights of “automatic sleeps” conducted in Breton’s apart-
ment, Desnos was challenged by Francis Picabia to speak an Rrose
Sélavy–type poem while in a hypnotic trance. Desnos complied and
began to produce one-line tongue-twisting, punning poems in series.
He later published 150 of them in Corps et biens using Duchamp’s
pseudonym, Rrose Sélavy, as the title.
With Desnos’s “Rrose Sélavy” poems, the version on the page
and in the ear is doubled by another, often more logical ghost. The
nonsense poem “Time is an agile eagle in a temple” (“Le temps est un
aigle agile dans un temple”), for example, is doubled by a series of tru-
isms all based on rational realities: time flies (like an eagle); an eagle
is noble; nobility is admired as if it were (in) a temple; time governs
us as assuredly as a noble eagle symbol in a temple; and surrealist
time — dreamtime — is agile in the sense that it does not follow strict
chronology. Surrealist time flies the way a bird does: with swoops
and halts, soaring and gliding speedily in fits and starts; it does not
follow the intervals typical of a Western clock. The reader-listener of
this poem makes all of these associations unconsciously because of
the resemblances between the way the words look and sound — the
way they “make love” to produce meaning, as Breton wrote in an
admiring essay (time, temple, agile, eagle, temps, temple, aigle, agile;
Breton, Lost 102, translation modified).12 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
typified those early surrealist experiments with automatic trances

Introduction 13

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because of the mysterious, at times oracular pronouncements ut-
tered by the participants. Furthermore, as Marie-Paule Berranger
argues, his puns help to “render more visible the physical existence
of words”; they show that words lead a double life (106, my transla-
tion). Desnos’s punning poems, with double meanings, manifest and
latent content, set the stage paradigmatically for the ghostly objects
that would become characteristic of the movement.
Visual doubles or puns as paradigms for surrealist ghostliness have
their origin in the exquisite corpse game, invented in 1925 initially
as a group word-play game whereby each person added a word to a
sentence without seeing any of the other words. The first sentence
produced by the game gave it its name: “The exquisite corpse will
drink the young wine!” The game quickly evolved from a verbal to
a visual format: each person added a body part from head to toe or
vice versa, without being able to see what others had drawn. These
games yielded fantastically unrealistic bodies tied together by a single,
ghostly double: the body of a real human being, or possibly even
a corpse. The body deformed by the game nonetheless makes one
think of a nondeformed body that can still be identified by the head,
the torso, the legs, the feet. As with Desnos’s “Rrose Sélavy” poems,
it is the more rationally recognizable form that serves as the “ghost”
to the surrealist nonsense pun.
The double image of 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 read
a “Rrose Sélavy” poem, since, as Marie-Claire Dumas asserts, these
poems fold back on themselves, saying the same thing twice (310).13
Anamorphosis, from the Greek for “form,” morph, seen “backward,”
ana, or understood retrospectively, identifies a process of percep-
tion that requires a double take — a first look, followed by a second,
retrospective glance. As described in the preface, Holbein’s painting
The Ambassadors stands as the most famous visual example of ana-
morphosis.14 In L’Art Magique (1957), Breton recognized this painting
as an important precedent to surrealism because its anamorphosis

14 Introduction

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offers a “double reading of the universe” to the viewer (213, my trans-
lation).15 At the feet of two magnificently dressed men standing in
front of a beautifully rendered table with objects on it representing
human achievements in knowledge, travel, and commerce lies an
indiscernible blob that comes into focus as an elongated human skull
only when looked at sideways with the lateral backward glance made
possible by the door on the painting’s right. This skull points to the
underlying reality of mortality that subtends the main image like an
unwanted ghost under any record of human achievement: despite all
accomplishment possible within a human life, each and every one
one of us will die, will become a corpse, a thing. The painting as a
whole works something like Desnos’s “Rrose Sélavy” poems and like
exquisite corpse drawings in that first we see one reality, and then we
see another. Within the phenomenon of surrealist ghostliness two
aspects of the same human experience coexist.
Surrealist anamorphosis varies a great deal, from actual anamor-
phic paintings by Dalí, in which two concurrent images overlap, to
much more subtle examples where there are only hints of a double
image embedded in the work, such as in Miller’s Egyptian landscapes.
Anamorphosis is widely prevalent in surrealist art and represents the
strongest evidence of surrealist ghostliness as a unifying phenomenon
throughout the movement. In this book I consider the anamorphic
qualities of the works I analyze, and in each case these anamorphoses
underscore the presence of surrealist ghostliness. I believe that the
anamorphic qualities of surrealist ghostliness resonate at this historic
and cultural moment because of the recent revolution in technology
linked to the normalization of the Internet and its widespread use,
which has also generated a proliferation of subjectivities in the virtual
world (e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter), and because of the layering
effect and depth that computers have given to the screen, transform-
ing it from a two-dimensional into a three-dimensional space.
The third and last paradigmatic mechanism for doubling and
revealing surrealist ghostliness involves the human body — what I
call the corporeal pun based on the literalness of Breton’s analogy

Introduction 15

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between a surrealist body and a recording machine, which makes
it more of a pun than a metaphor. The surrealist interchangeability
of a body with a machine began with Breton’s contention in the
“Manifesto” that true surrealists are human beings able to transform
themselves into receptacles “of so many echoes,” into “modest record-
ing instruments,” at once inanimate and sentient, passively receptive
and insightfully able to interpret the sounds and echoes that imprint
themselves on the unconscious before emerging into consciousness
(Manifestoes 27–28). Human beings and recording instruments share
a propensity for 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 from
the unconscious. The recording machine is not only like the body;
it is the same as the body — a corporeal pun. Body and machine are
alike in their most salient feature of receptivity.
The 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 Holbein’s Ambas-
sadors. This is the future that arrests our attention as though it were
an eye looking back at us, which is exactly how the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan, who was closely allied with the surrealists in the
early 1930s, describes the “flying form” of Holbein’s skull (Four 90).
That skull that looks back at us with the truth of our own mortality
“opens up the abyss of the search for a meaning — nothing is what it
seems to be,” explains Slavoj Žižek about Lacan’s reading of Holbein
(91). This sudden knowledge of what we repress every day — the
knowable unknowable future that levels human experience — this
confrontation with the reality of ghostliness, is captured by Breton
in his metaphor of the human being as a recording instrument.
Two other surrealists use objects to describe the body in an au-
tomatic trance, and these objects are also receptacles “of so many
echoes,” like Breton’s recording instrument. Desnos’s body-bottle
from “If You Knew” and Paul Eluard’s body-house from “The Word”
(both published in 1926) describe the automatic experience as ghostly

16 Introduction

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because of the reduction of the body to a thing that looks like and
sounds like a human being in the manner of a pun and because of
the images and sensations that pass through these receptacles. In
“If You Knew,” Desnos imagines his body as “the night bottle of the
poet” transformed into a baroque space of contained infinity capable
of capturing a falling star. Then, in a suspended moment of separa-
tion from the immediacy of the experience, he detaches himself,
corks the bottle that is himself, and watches from the outside “the
star enclosed within the glass, the constellations that come to life
against the sides” (Essential 157, translation modified). In Eluard’s
“The Word,” the sensation of space takes place outside of the body,
which in this poem is represented as a house with windows for eyes
that shut slowly at the moment of sunset, as a shadow falls across
the façade. The “word” comes from outside and “slides” over the
roof, animating the house. Although it “no longer know[s] who’s
in charge,” in a manner typical of the trance, the word slipping into
the body-house can “nakedly love” like a living being and express
pride: “I am old but here I’m beautiful” (Capital 23). In each case a
poetic trance allows the poet to discover previously unknown voices
buried within.
All of these body-objects, whereby an inanimate thing stands in
as a metaphor or corporeal pun for a human being who has mo-
mentarily suspended all willed conscious activity for the sake of the
revelations the flow of automatic practice brings, have their corollary
in the 1930s with the development of the surrealist object out of the
dada readymade. The surrealists imbued objects found or made with
a psychoanalytic function, leading the person who finds or makes
them to striking insights. “The found object seems to me suddenly to
balance two levels of every different reflection,” explains Breton, “like
those sudden atmospheric condensations which make conductors
out of regions that were not before, producing flashes of lightning”
(Mad 33). The found object can “enlarge the universe, causing it to
relinquish some of its opacity” since we live in a “forest of symbols”
that can provoke “sudden fear” (15).

Introduction 17

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 Breton uses the words latencies and forces to compare objects to
human bodies, suggesting a sentient, animate quality to fundamen-
tally inanimate things. He did this in 1936, three years after Freud’s
essay “The Uncanny” was published in French translation for the
first time. In “The Uncanny” Freud identifies in psychoanalytic terms
the constellation of phenomena I call surrealist ghostliness; these
are uncanny or ghostly experiences like that of mistaking a doll for
a living human being. The attribution of psychological latencies to
objects was codified by Breton in “Crisis of the Object,” where he
identifies the latent forces found in the surrealist object (“Crise”
24).16 These forces, while made up of psychological feelings, from
desire to anger, are impenetrable because they arise from the clash-
ing conjunction of conflicting realities, from the utilitarian function
of Duchamp’s Bottlerack, for instance, with its modernist elegance,
which paradoxically makes sense of this practical tool’s place in an
art gallery. This clash operates according to the paradigm Breton
established in the “Manifesto” for the surrealist image as a collision
of “distant realities.” This “juxtaposition of two more or less distant
realities” generates energy and forces, which Breton compares to an
electric spark generative of shock, a “luminous phenomenon,” akin
to an instant of insight or revelation (Manifestoes 20, 37).17
Having been found, collected, turned away from its original func-
tion, and displayed by a surrealist, the object represses its “manifest
life”; its transformation generates a veritable force field (champs de
force), whereby what was formerly manifest becomes latent, revealing
ghostly energies inherent in the object’s former manifest life.18 In a
short article Breton published about the 1936 surrealist exhibition of
objects, he describes objects as capable of releasing surplus “poetic
energy . . . found almost everywhere in a latent state.”19 Using lan-
guage reminiscent of surrealism’s spiritualist origins, Breton suggests
that objects provide access to psychological revelation through the
release of this “latent energy,” a release that creates what I call ghost-
liness. Objects of the sort explored in this book have the ability to
inform humans about themselves as if they were thoughtful sentient

18 Introduction

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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. This is because Bretonian “subjective
reality,” as Michael Sheringham explains, “is not hidden deep inside
us so much as scattered around the perceptual world, where we can
piece it together from our sensory reactions” (71).20 These points of
reference outside of ourselves, such as objects, help us to make sense
of what emerges in a ghostly way out of the unconscious through
attuned receptivity.

The prism of ghostliness allows a retrospective look at surrealism

that continues all the way back to late eighteenth-century challenges
to Cartesian rationalism, a period that the art historian T. J. Clark
locates at the beginning of modernism.21 I argue in Surrealist Ghostli-
ness that the ghostliness that haunted automatism historically, ex-
perientially, and poetically remained imprinted on the movement’s
works throughout its history. Ghostliness as a keystone idea unifies
a movement with disparate artistic practices; it concentrates on the
common thread the ghostly legacy of automatism weaves through
the movement’s thought and works: its punning texts and anamor-
phic images, its vision of the human body as uncannily like and
not like the thing it will become in death, its tacit way of accepting
mortality. Through surrealist ghostliness, surrealism insisted that
we know more than we think we know, more than we can see in
front of us, and that human beings are capable of a wisdom that is
at least as intuitive, emotional, and instinctive as it is rational. This
book shows how the surrealists, and those who were in dialogue with
them, explored that wisdom in a way that was ultimately hopeful,
thus creating a solid basis for further exploration of psychic realities
in the twenty-first century.

Introduction 19

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