Loving Freud Madly: Surrealism Between Hysterical and Paranoid Modernism Author(S): Jean-Michel Rabaté Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol

Loving Freud Madly: Surrealism between Hysterical and Paranoid Modernism Author(s): Jean-Michel Rabaté Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 25, No. 3/4, Global Freud: Psychoanalytic Cultures and Classic Modernism (Summer, 2002), pp. 58-74 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831854 . Accessed: 10/09/2014 23:13

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This content downloaded from 158.135.1.176 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 23:13:58 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Loving Freud Madly: Surrealism between Hysterical and Paranoid Modernism

Jean-Michel Rabaté Universityof Pennsylvania

T Ahe questionof whether Surrealism played a positiveor a negativerole in thedissemination of Freudianideas sounds rather blunt or normative,but it is a questionI wouldlike to pose less to judgeSurrealism by trying to catch it in its distortions and blind spots than to test the validity and relevanceof the "compromise formations" that have been produced in quantity during the process ofglobalization through which Freud's theories have gone in more than a century.This domain is huge,but happily the axis linking Freud to Breton has been explored,1 while excellent essays have beenrecently devoted to the Lacan-Dali2 connection. Popular culture seems to have adopted Sur- realismand Freudianism with similarly warping hyperboles. If thejocular "This is hysterical!" maybe blamedmore on Charcotthan on Freud,the phrase "This is Surrealistic"often rings as quasi-equivalentto"This is Freudian."Beyond a surprisingor shockingfaçade, one expects some readability,plus if notimmediately heavy-handed sexual symbols, at leastthe suggestion that a carefullyarranged thematic disorder will be recomposedformally so as to suggestthe hidden logicof dream images. In a tellingfashion, the 1998 exhibition on "Freud,Conflict and Culture"3 mountedby the Library of Congress, after intense controversy, made much of its display of audio- visualdocuments; beyond illegible manuscripts in Gothicscript and disappointing realia - such as a fewrings or Freud's couch floating in theair - thesewell chosen film excerpts mostly from Hollywoodclassics made the strong point that Freudianism, although contested, survives thanks to a popularculture which it has literallyshaped and permeated.Perhaps, then, the same may

1.See above all David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity (YaleUniversity Press, 2000). 2. Oneof the most comprehensive is Hanjo Berressem, "Dalí and Lacan: Painting the Imaginary Landscapes" in Lacan:Politics, Aesthetics , ed.Willy Apollon and Richard Feldstein (State University ofNew York Press, 1996) pp. 263-93.See also Soraya Tlatli, Le Psychiatre etses poètes: Essai sur le jeune Lacan (Paris: Tchou, 2000) and the issue of Revuedes Sciences Humaines CCLII (2001), Lire Dali, ed. Frédérique Joseph-Lowery. 3. SeeMichael S.Roth, ed., Freud, Conflict andCulture: Essays on His Life, Work and Legacy (Knopf, 1998).

Jean-MichelRabaté, "Loving Freud Madly: Surrealism between Hysterical andParanoid Modernism," Journal ofModern Literature,XXV, 3/4 (Summer 2002), pp. 58-74. ©Indiana University Press, 2003.

This content downloaded from 158.135.1.176 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 23:13:58 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Rabaté:Loving Freud Madly 59 holdtrue of Surrealism.It seemsthat its last public flowering on a largescale was linkedto the counter-cultureofthe 1960s. In France,particularly with May 1968,Surrealism colored a juvenile rebellioncreatively in morethan one way.Perhaps the hindsight afforded once we havestepped moreboldly into this still new century will show that these cultural phenomena converge without completelymeeting or that they follow a minimallycurving parallax. Bretonand Freud were from the start engaged in a waltzof avoidance and a tangoof misunder- standings.These missteps nevertheless disclose a deeperharmony, while Lacan andDalí, appar- entlythe best of friends until quite late, flaunted ideological overlappings so as toconceal a deeper rift.The firstmissed encounter between Freudianism and Surrealism was linked to the promotion ofconcepts such as psychicautomatism, unconscious dictation, the "overdetermination" ofdream images(Freuďs crucial Ueberdeterminierung) andalso, perhaps more importantly, hysteria taken as a creativemanifestation. The secondencounter promoting the concept of paranoiaseems to havebeen a moresuccessful endeavor. By narrowingthe historical focus on the1920s and early 1930s,one can observe how suddenly the surrealist theory of Hysteria was transformed into a Sur- realisttheory of Paranoia. It looksas ifthe links between Breton and Freud had been marked from the start by a series ofattempts at seductionfollowed by rejection and absurd bickering, in short,by a movementthat mightcall up thevery logic of hysteria. Breton, as is well-known,began by studying psychiatry and it was in thisfunction that he servedas a medicalintern during the First World War. We knowhow closely Breton had read Freud at a timewhen most French schools of psychiatry totally ignoredhim. Having started his medical studies in the fall of 1913,Breton after the declaration of warwas sentto theneuro-psychiatric ward of Saint-Dizier in August1916. In a wardsupervised bya formerassistant of Charcot, Breton read voraciously the psychiatric literature available, which includeda summaryof Freud's ideas thanks to a compendiumprovided by Doctor Régis ( Précis de Psychiatrie)and to La Psychanalyse, written by Doctors Régis and Hesnard. Breton copied entire pagesfrom these volumes for his friend Fraenkel, among which one finds a veryaccurate synthesis ofthe Freudian system, along with very competent definitions of conceptssuch as resistance (Widerstand ), repression ( Verdrängung ), and sublimation (,Sublimierung ).4Even if Freud was not theonly thinker discovered by Breton at thetime, he feltthat it was hisduty to defendFreudian ideasagainst his friend's skepticism. All thistestifies to a momentof glorious discovery, as when Bretonexclaims: "I am gettingenthusiastic over psychiatry."5 He also dutifullynoted the nonsen- sicaltirades which he wouldhear from certain delirious or psychotic patients. Thus, even though Bretonsoon after joined the service of Doctor Babinski in 1917and changed his focus to address hysteria,one can believehis accountwhen he referredto Freudrather than to Myersor Janet in thefirst manifesto of Surrealism. At least this is theconclusion suggested by Marguerite Bonnet's closestudy of Breton's manuscripts, a study that contradicts an earlierthesis developed by Staro- binskiand that had been accepted until recently. On thewhole, with a wealthof detailsculled from the psychiatric literature of thetimes, Starobinskihad triedto showthat the concept of "mentalautomatism" promoted by Surreal- ismhad very little to do withFreud's theories and is derivedmore or less directlyfrom Janet or

4. QuotedinMarguerite Bonnet, "La Rencontre d'André Breton avec la Folie: Saint Dizier, août-novembre 1916,"in Folieet Psychanalyse dansl'expérience surréaliste ,ed. Fabienne Hulak, (Nice: Z'éditions, 1992), pp. 126-27. 5. Bonnet,p.121.

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Myers.6However, even if Breton's debt to Babinski and his adherence to Babinskian refutations of Charcot'sthesis regarding the reality of hysteria has beenabundantly demonstrated, the perusal ofBreton's notebooks proves that it was Freud'simpact that very early led himto trustthe spon- taneousproduction of language as a keyto the unconscious. True, Starobinski is perfectly correct whenhe notesthat Freud always limits the "fundamental rule" of psychoanalysis (taking the unin- hibitedflow of language proffered by the patient to theanalyst as materialfor analysis) to a very preliminarystage and refuses to grantit more than a heuristicvalue. Nevertheless, itis clearthat Bretondecided to takethis preliminary moment seriously and to endow it with a truth-valuein a spontaneousillumination due to Freud, recalling the latter's discovery of the unconscious after lis- teningto hysterics and his own dreams: in both cases, it looks as ifa majorbreakthrough had been producedby something like beginner's luck. Thus, even if the terms used by Breton and his friends referto French classical (that is pre-or anti-Freudian) psychiatry as represented by Charcot, Janet, orBabinski, a fundamentalinsight - thatthese spontaneous utterances disclose material leading to a graspof actual psychic production - derivesfrom Freud, and Breton always pays this initial debt.Breton's narrative in the First Manifesto of Surrealism can on thewhole be trusted:

Quitebusy as I wasthen with Freud at that time, and having been familiarized with his examinationmethods that I hadsomehow used with patients during the war, I decided toobtain from myself what one tries seeks to obtain from them, that is a monologue flowingas fastas possibleand upon which the critical mind of the subject makes no judgmentwhatever, letting itbe unhamperedbyany reticence so thatit may render as exactlyas possiblespoken thought J

If thename of Freuddominates the manifesto written in 1924,Breton's theoretical foundation in psychoanalytic(not psychological) knowledge does notpreclude an awarenessof all that separatespsychoanalysis understood as a clinicalpractice and rigorous therapy from Surrealist experimentsaiming not only at abolishingthe borders between sleep and wakinglife but also betweenart and life. Like theTel Quel members- thesepractitioners ofthe Parisian avant-garde who decided to visitChina in 1974so as to confronttheir Maoist utopia with reality, a fateful mistake that led to a subsequentrecantation and wholesaleabjuration of theirradical Marxism - Bretontook the initiativeto visitFreud in October1921. As onecould have expected, Breton was severelydisap- pointedby the meeting. Under the title of "Interview with Professor Freud" (1922), he published a curtaccount of themeeting in Littérature, later reprinted without modifications in Les Pas Perdus(1924). Not wishing to attackFreud's reputation, Breton betrays his bitterness by sticking to a purelyexterior description: Freud's appearance is thatof "an old manwithout elegance who receivesin thepoor consulting room one wouldexpect from a local doctor."The Frenchpoet is unableto engagethis shabby Viennese MD in anymeaningful dialogue; conversely, Freud, no doubtat a loss withthis young enthusiast, hides behind polite generalities; throwing a last shaft,

6. I amalluding tothe groundbreaking essayby Jean Starobinski, "Freud, Breton, Myers", inL'Arc: Freud (Aix-en- Provence:Editions L'ARC, 1968) pp. 87-96. 7. AndréBreton, "Manifeste duSurréalisme" inOeuvres Complètes I,edited M. Bonnet, P.Bernier, E-A. Hubert and J.Pierre (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1988), p. 326.Translation mine.

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Bretonconcludes the short article tongue-in-cheek byquoting Freud's tepid endorsement: "Hap- pily,we do counta lotupon the young."8 Thispainful sense of a discrepancybetween Freud the man and Freudian ideas, or more pre- ciselybetween the inventor of psychoanalysis caught in all of his humanand sociallimitations andthe empowering invention of psychoanalysis itself, will mark Breton's attitude in thefollow- ingyears. The secondinteraction between them became accordingly more critical and started evenless happily, due to Breton'ssuspicions when he discussesthe Interpretation ofDreams and launchesinto meaner accusations: according to him, Freud had plagiarized or stolen from a previ- oustheoretician ofdreams. In theSummer of 1931,as hewas preparing a draft of Communicating Vessels, Breton had re-readthe French translation of Freud'sInterpretation ofDreams , taking twentypages of dense notes in a schoolboy'sexercise book. The right-hand pages are made up of quotes,while the left hand pages are his personal remarks or associations. It is fascinatingto see thaton thethird of these left-hand pages, Breton jots down, in a seriesof references tobooks deal- ingwith dream symbolism, his own equations or different conclusions based on Freud'scriticism ofthe current literature on dreams.For instance, when Freud criticizes Delboeuf in the first pages ofthe section devoted to "Theoriesof dreaming" for the idea thateverything in dreamsderives fromthe thoughts of theprevious day, Breton is attentiveto a boldconnection between dream activityand paranoia. One readson theright hand side page:

Theoriesof dreams. 1."The whole psychical activity ofthe waking state continues indreams." (Delboeuf) (Veryinsufficient) Dream = Paranoia.

Bretonwrites on theleft-hand side, among his own remarks:

Theories.Delboeuf. Dream-paranoia. Valéry: "The dream goes on. . . ."

Thisis followedby the names of Robert and Burdach.9 These notes follow what is nowsection E of theInterpretation ofDreams,10 where Freud makes a connectionbetween dream and paranoia: "If I mayventure on a similefrom the sphere of psychiatry, the first group of theories construct dreams onthe model of paranoia, while the second group makes them resemble mental deficiency orconfu- sionalstates."11 This insight must have struck Breton, for he writesit a secondtime, then cancels it beforerewriting on theleft hand side. The words "Dreams-paranoia" are inserted and then crossed out,having been added by mistake to thetheories developed by the second group of writers. One can see thatBreton does not merely follow Freud's text, but goes to theend, checks various refer- encesto thesesame authors, and of course, verifies the bibliography. On thesame page on which onefinds the three notations equating dreams and paranoia, one sees soon after: "Volkelt's remark- able sexualsymbolism" and on the left-hand side: "Volkelt, quoted by Freud without references ."12

8. Lespas Perdus, Oeuvres Complètes I,p. 256. Translation mine. 9. Facsimilereproduction ofBreton's notes inFolie et Psychanalyse dansl'expérience surréaliste ,ed. Fabienne Hulak (Nice:Z'éditions, 1992), n.p., p. 155, in fact. 10.See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation ofDreams, trans. James Strachey (Science Editions, 1961), pp. 75-78. 11.Freud, Interpretation ofDreams, p.76. 12.Facsimile reproduction inFolie et Psychanalyse dansl'expérience surréaliste, p 154.

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Thiswas the basis for the remark that wounded Freud so muchwhen Breton suggested in writ- ingthat Freud has omitted Volkelťs book on symbolismfrom his bibliography onpurpose because he takenfrom it much more than what the rapid remarks of the Traumdeutung imply, namely that Volkelthad inspired the whole theory of sexuality in dreams. Breton writes thus:

Freudhimself, who seems, when it concerns the symbolic interpretation ofthe dream, justto have taken over for himself Volkelťs ideas - Volkelt,an author about whom the definitivebibliography atthe end of the book remains significantly mute - Freud,for whomthe whole substance of the dream is neverthelesstaken from real life, cannot resistthe temptation ofdeclaring that "the intimate nature of the subconscious (the essentialpsychical reality) is as unknowntous as thereality of the exterior world," givingthereby some support tothose whom his method had almost routed.13

Breton'sattack is double:first Freud stole the idea of sexuality in dreamsfrom an obscurewriter who,according to Freud,merely generalized as a "philosopher"the insights of Schemer, a good practionerwho has thedefect of writingin a turgidstyle14; more damning is thereproach that Freudhas forgottenhis own monismand falleninto the trap of traditionalidealism when he opposesdreams and realityas belongingto radicallydifferent realms. Here, Breton not only relieson Leninwhom he quotesfrequently; he also alludesa contrarioto Schopenhauer, who had assumedthat dreams could be propheticin viewof the gift of "second sight," although this theory wouldpostulate a divisionbetween reality and appearances. For Breton, indeed, reality is oneand thiscontinuum allows for prophecy: "Freud is againquite surely mistaken in concludingthat the propheticdream does not exist - I meanthe dream involving the immediate future - sinceto hold thatthe dream is exclusivelyrevelatory of the past is to denythe value of motion."15 To providea counter-model,Breton offers his own interpretation ofa dream:this is thevery frank account of theDream of 26 August,1931. No doubt,the dream, in which a tiecalled "Nosferatu" plays a great role,is all aboutSurrealism and fellow Surrealists. Against Freud's idea of an "umbilicus"or dark coreof unknowability in dreams, Breton wishes to provethat he has "exhausted"the content of thedream by his thoroughexamination of all theimages and associations.16 He rewritesFreud's principleof condensation and "overdetermination" in a materialistic language inflected by Marx andLenin. Freudimmediately replied in orderto defendhimself from insinuations of plagiarism:he pointedout that the omission of Volkelťs name from his book was a mistakein theFrench trans- lationof 1926and thatthe name appeared in theGerman text. A hastilydrafted second letter explainedthe origin of the mistake: Volkelťs name was dropped for no clearreason after the third originalprinting and the French version was madefrom one ofthe subsequent versions.17 Freud also putto restBreton's thesis that he hadbeen prudish on mattersof sexualityand that Volkelt hadbeen more explicit about the sexual symbolism of dreams. He addedthat he refrainedfrom

13.André Breton, Communicating Vessels, translated byMary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris (University of NebraskaPress, 1990), p. 11.See also Les vases Communicants I, inAndré Breton, Oeuvres Complètes II,edited M. Bonnet,P.Bernier, E-A Hubert and J. Pierre. (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1992), p. 109. 14.Freud, Interpretation ofDreams, pp. 83-84. 15.Breton, Comunicating Vessels, p.13. 16.Breton, Communicating Vessels, p.45. 17.See the Appendix with Freud's letters and Breton's response inCommunicating Vessels, pp. 149-55.

This content downloaded from 158.135.1.176 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 23:13:58 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Rabaté:Loving Freud Madly 63 mentioninghis father,who has justdied, but otherwise did notcensor himself. The thirdletter acknowledgingBreton's reply ends with a littlebarb, since Freud pretends not to understand what Surrealismis about,and above all "whatit wants": "Although I have received many testimonies of theinterest that you and your friend show for my research, I am not able to clarify for myself what Surrealismis andwhat it wants. Perhaps I am notdestined to understandit, I whoam so distant fromart."18 Freud is clearlytrying to reduce Breton's paranoid criticism to hysteria ("What do you wantfrom me?") while echoing his current preoccupation about the riddle of femininity; parading hisincomprehension, hispetty bourgeois philistinism and lack of esthetic sense, Freud sends back to Surrealisma feminized version of itself, a sortof Gallic version of Was will das Weib?On the otherend, Breton wishes to keepsthe clash at thelevel of a maleconfrontation, ofrival theories andconflicting power games. He notesgleefully Freud's obvious agitation, his contradictionsin theflurry of successive letters, and finally his desire to pay back in kind by denying any valid aim toSurrealism. He quotesFritz Wittels' book on Freud's pugnacious and jealous style in a footnote: "I knockedhim to theground because he knockedme to theground."19 Breton may have indeed "touchedon a rathersensitive point."20 Thus one mightsay thatafter the failure of hystericalseduction, Communicating Vessels engagesFreud in a paranoidlogic hinging around annotations, bibliographies, appropriations, issuesof literaryownership and intellectualpropriety, male domination games, not to mention accusationsof dissimulationand squeamishness.This time,it seems,Breton's strategy works: whereasFreud could say to Jung (in referenceto the Schreber case) thathe hadsucceeded where theparanoiac failed, Breton proves that the paranoiac succeeds where Freud fails. When the earlier hystericalseduction attempt had failed, Freud is nowcaught up in thenet, writes apologetically, fightsback and explains. No doubtthat when Salvador Dali methim in London in 1938,Freud was morereceptive to "theyoung". Dalí hadbeen named in CommunicatingVessels, a textwritten in 1932,which, even when it returns to issues of dreams, the unconscious and automatism, does so in mannertotally different from the texts published in 1924.And so wemay wonder how Surrealism canhave moved so abruptlyfrom a strategythat promoted hysteria to a strategythat took paranoia as itsmain weapon and mode of vision. * * * *

Ifone takes a goodlook at the issues of La RévolutionSurréaliste from the late 1920s, a solu- tionmay emerge. In the1927 issue, Freud's text on layanalysis is publishedin a translationby MarieBonaparte. As theonly text by Freud directly published in the review, it plays an important rolein theglobal strategy of de-medicalizationof psychoanalysis,which the Surrealists could onlyapplaud. Ironically, Freud seems to anticipatethe forthcoming debate with Breton when he imaginesan opponentwho thinks that he has toucheda sensitivepoint because Freud becomes aggressive:"And if I lookaggressive, this is onlyto defendmyself. But when I thinkof the fuss certainanalysts have made about the interpretation of dreams, I coulddespair and agreewith Nestroy'spessimistic outcry: 'Progress is onlyhalf as greatas itseems.'"21 It is ratheramusing to findthis rather conservative extract (in view of the more radical theses on educationand medicine

18.Breton, Communicating Vessels, p.152. 19.Breton, Communicating Vessels, p.154, n. 7. 20.Breton, Communicating Vessels, p.155. 21.La Révolution Surréaliste, IX-X (Octobre 1927), p.26.

This content downloaded from 158.135.1.176 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 23:13:58 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 64 Journalof Modem Literature thatfollow in thecomplete text on layanalysis) followed on thenext page by "Corps à Corps,"a prosepoem by Benjamin Peret beginning: "To wakeup atthe bottom of a carafe,haggard like a fly,here's an adventurethat will incite you to kill your mother five minutes after you escape from thecarafe."22 AndréBreton's and Louis Aragon'sjoint manifesto praising the "Invention of Hysteria" was publishedin La RévolutionSurréaliste (XI [March1928]) to celebrate the "fiftieth anniversary of theinvention of hysteria", an inventionwhich they thus date from 1878, and so sendsus backto Charcot.They call hysteria"the greatest poetic discovery of the latter part of the century, and we do thisat a timewhen the dismemberment ofthe concept of hysteria appears to be complete."23 In thislyrical homage to hysteria Breton and Aragon take some distance from Babinski who had reducedhysteria to suggestion, believing that Charcot was a masterhypnotizér (by implication, he hadhypnotized Freud as well)as wellas fromFreud in so faras he remainsa doctorwho claims thathe will"cure" hysterical patients. Although he is called"the most intelligent man who has engagedthis issue," Babinski is criticizedand his negation of hysteria violently rejected. Charcot is praisedless for the fact that the amphitheatre ofLa Salpêtrièrewas a theatricalscene in which he exhibitedfemale patients in front of a fashionablecrowd than for having created the conditions forits disclosure and propagation. As forFreud, he is notspared: Breton and Aragon oppose his conservatismto whatthey find truly admirable, the fact that La Salpêtrière'sinterns would regu- larlysleep with their beautiful hysterical patients. "Does Freud,who owes so muchto Charcot, rememberthe time when, according to the survivors' account, the interns of La Salpetrièrerefused to separatetheir professional duty and their taste for love, and when night fell, the patients would eithervisit them outside or they would meet the patients in theirbeds?"24 No doubt,Freud would havebeen horrified by the insinuation that he toomight have belonged to thatunruly crowd. The livingpoetry invented by the sick women and the doctors when sleeping together culminates in these"passionate attitudes" photographed by Charcot, in whichone sees stunninghalf-undressed womenin curious poses that express a convulsivebut otherworldly ecstasy. Afteralluding more positively to the Nancy school, Breton and Aragon provide their own defi- nitionof a statewhich had so fareluded medical categorization:

Hysteriais a moreor less irreducible mental state characterized bya subversionofthe relationsbetween the subject and the ethical universe by which the subject feels deter- minedin practice, outside any system of delirium. This mental state is basedon the needfor a reciprocalseduction, which explains the hastily accepted miracles ofmedical suggestion(orcounter-suggestion). Hysteria is not a pathologicalphenomenon andcan inevery respect be considered a supreme vehicle of expression.25

Whatis crucialfor our discussion is thatin 1928,Breton and Aragon insist upon the quasi-nor- malcyof a statewhich is seenas a limit-experience,since for them hysteria rules out any "system

22.La Révolution Surréaliste, p.33. 23.André Breton, Oeuvres Complète I,p. 948. Note that the text iswritten insmall capitals throughout. Onefinds a good Englishtranslation ofparts of this manifesto inElisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co:A History ofPsychoanalysis inFrance, 1925-1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (University ofChicago Press, 1990), pp. 6-7. 24.Breton, Oeuvres Complètes I,p. 949. 25.Breton, Oeuvres Complètes I,p. 950. My translation modifies slightly thatof Mehlman.

This content downloaded from 158.135.1.176 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 23:13:58 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Rabaté:Loving Freud Madly 65 ofdelirium" (en dehors de toutsystème délirant). When they praise the four phases of the classical hystericalcrisis, Aragon and Breton describe the way in whichthe initial emission of a "superb aura"leads to a magnificenttheatralization before finally subsiding and finding a "simple resolu- tionin everydaylife."26 In a clearforeshadowing ofLacan's notion of feminine jouissance of the 1970s,hysteria is hereidentified with mystical and erotic ecstasy. It appears also as theradicaliza- tionof a movementthat merges poetry with everyday life. In thisprovocative commendation ofhysteria, Breton and Aragon bid farewell to their former masterBabinski, without fully endorsing Charcot's attempts at medicallocalization: for Babinski, hysteriawas a purelyimaginary or mimetic disease, and it could be eradicatedby strong counter- suggestion.His harshtreatment ofmale hysterics during the First World War had led to medical abuse,including gruesome electrical therapy. Yet theidea of simulation,although leading to a positivemode of expression, looms large in thetext written by Breton with Eluard in 1930,The ImmaculateConception. There one finds a sectionentitled "Possessions," in whichthe two poets successivelyattempt to reproducethe discourses of debility,of mania,of generalparalysis, of interpretivedelirium, and of precocious dementia.27 The ironical Introduction tothis section, writ- tenby Breton only, alludes to the technical meaning of "simulation" inpsychiatry, especially in the psychiatryofwar neuroses, and concludes with a critiqueof traditional poetic forms, which could easilybe replacedby imitations of the various types of psychotic speech: "This is to saythat we offerthe generalization ofthis device and that in our eyes, the 'attempts at simulation'of diseases thatland you in a jail mightadvantageously replace the ballad, the sonnet, the epic, the nonsense rhymeand other genres now totally obsolete."28 Thiswas writtenin 1930,just after the first great divide in theSurrealist group that has been analyzedin Breton's Second Manifesto of Surrealism (dated 15 December 1929). A newname has beenadded to the list of prestigious painters whose works regularly adorn the pages of the review, amongthem Ernst, De Chirico,Miro, Picasso, Arp, Picabia, Masson, Ray, Tanguy: it is a young Catalanpainter and poet who will have an importantimpact on thegroup, Salvador Dalí. One maysay that Dalí startsreplacing de Chiricoin 1929(the Second Manifesto is followedby two paintings,a de Chiricoand a Dali). In 1929,de Chiricois denouncedas havinggone astray and condemnedby Breton, anticipating what will take place with Dali a fewyears later when the same patternof seduction, disappointment, andrejection is reenacted.The Second Manifesto still quotes Freudbut rather distantly and with critical asides about the term of "sublimation," - while reas- sertinga materialistphilosophy, but the political reference has shiftedto Trostky this time. Freud is suspectedof lending some arguments to GeorgesBataille's non-dialectical materialism. Itis inthe context of the struggle between Breton and Bataille that Dalí makeshis entrance into theSurrealist whirlpool. As somecritics have noted, Dalí shouldlogically have joined Bataille's camp,given his insistence on imagesof bodily decomposition, his perverse eroticism linked with deathand animals, his provocative way of flaunting masturbation. As is well-known,Dalí chose Bretoninstead, perhaps because he was in questof legitimacy within what he saw as a powerful movement.It was Bataillewho initially took to Dalí andwrote a verypassionate piece of criti- cismof the "Lugubrious Game," a paintingdone in 1929for his first Paris exhibition, as Camille

26.Breton» Oeuvres Complètes I,p. 949. 27.See Breton, Oeuvres Complètes I,pp. 848-63. 28.Breton, Oeuvres Complètes I,p. 849.

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Goermanswas devotinga showto Dali's work.But in hiscatalogue essay written for the exhibition,Breton praised the "hallucinatory" quality of the painting while settling his accounts with the deluded"materialists" who had tried to corner Dali.29 Bataille had indeed expressed some interest in Dalí, and theDecember 1929 issue of Documentspublished Bataille's essay entitled simply, "The LugubriousGame." In thisbrilliant reading, Bataille insisted upon the idea of castration, emasculationbeing presented according to himas a parody,with the shocking figure of a man withshitty breeches. Dalí, perhapsto makea showof his allegianceto Breton,refused to allow Batailleto reproducethe painting and then attacked Bataille directly in "The RottingDonkey" (July1930). There,Bataille's ideas are called "cretinous" and "senile"; their main mistake derives from a wronginterpretation ofFreud, a "gratuitoususe ofmodern psychology."30 Again, one can witness thatBataille, Breton and Dalí reproachedone anotherfor having badly assimilated or applied Freudianideas. All thisis a footnotein whatappears as Dali's mainobject, the definition of his paranoid-criticalmethod. The Freudiansource of these ideas is moreobvious in thefirst text in whichDalí exposesthis discovery, "The Moral Position of Surrealism" (22 March1930). Align- inghimself with Breton's program as outlinedin the Second Manifesto , Dalí explainsthat next to goinginto the street with a revolverin handand shooting people at random(as Bretonsaid, the purestSurrealist act), his proselytizing activity aimed at propagatingthe "violently paranoid will to systematizeconfusion."31 Dalí addsthat since Freudian ideas had been watered down he meant togive them back their "rabid and dazzling clarity." He providesa fewcases of neurotic behavior and mentionsthat he had writtenunder a paintingof theSacré-Coeur, "I spaton mymother", explainingthat this was nota mereprivate provocation but came from a systematicattempt at demoralizationclose to that of Sade. He thenlaunches into a descriptionof the method he devised to see realitydifferently, a method that took its bearings in paranoia:

Aboveall, the birth of these new Surrealist images must be consideredas the birth of imagesof demoralization. Theparticular perspicacity ofattention inthe paranoiac state mustbe insistedupon; paranoia being recognized, moreover, byall psychologistsas a formof mental illness which consists in organizing reality in such a wayas toutilize it tocontrol an imaginative construction. Theparanoiac who believes himself to be poi- soneddiscovers ineverything thatsurrounds him, right up to the most imperceptible and subtledetails, preparations forhis own death. Recently, through a decidedly paranoiac process,I obtained an imageof a womanwhose position, shadow and morphology, withoutaltering or deforming anything ofher real appearance, are also, at the same time,those of a horse.32

We needto considerthis passage carefully because it containsa redoubtableambiguity: if the expositionof paranoidmechanisms in thecase of theman who imagines himself poisoned is

29.Breton, Oeuvres Complètes II,pp. 308-09. 30.Salvador Dalí, "The Rotting Donkey", inOui : TheParanoid-Critical Revolution: Writings 1927-1933, ed.Robert Descharnes,trans. Yvonne Shafir 117.For all seethe excellent (ExactChange," 1998), p. this, essayby Félix Fanés, "Une toileà destination secrete: LeJeu lugubre inRevue des Sciences Humaines: Lire Dali, pp. 163-85. 31.Oui, p. 110. 32.Oui, p. 112.

This content downloaded from 158.135.1.176 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 23:13:58 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Rabaté:Loving Freud Madly 67 rigorousenough, one may wonder what the practice of guided hallucination has to do withit. This seemsto recall Rimbaud's program of a "systematicderegulating ofall senses"leading to the habit of spontaneoushallucination. Even if Dalí addsthat the process can becomemore "violent" or "intense"and yield three, four, or why not thirty different images, it seems very revealing that he is stilltalking about the production of images, still anchored in reality while unleashing his images fromconventional systems of representation. In "TheRotting Donkey," Dalí, no doubtstung by Bataille's admiring but nevertheless critical accountof his work in terms of castration anxiety, pushes his thesis further by radically collapsing conventionalsystems of representation and paranoid delirium. He goesback to his exampleof a womanwho is atthe same time a horse,and possibly a lion'shead, to explain:

I challengematerialists toexamine the kind of mental crisis that such an imagemay provoke,I challenge them to examine the even more complex problem ofknowing which oneof these images has a greaternumber ofpossibilities forexistence ifthe intervention ofdesire is takeninto consideration, andalso to investigate themore serious and more generalproblem ofknowing whether the series of representations hasa limit or whether, as wehave every reason to believe, such a limitdoes not exist, or rather, exists solely as a functionofeach individual's paranoid capacity [0]urimages of reality themselves dependupon the degree of our paranoid faculty.33

The reversalof perspectiveis obvious:whereas paranoia seemed first to open a doorinto anotherkind of visual perception, itnow turns into a regulatingprinciple that replaces completely anyidea of a "materialworld." The materialworld is justone speciesof simulacrum, and this is whyBataille's materialism is refuted: "The paranoid mechanism, through which the image with multiplefigurations is born, supplies the understanding with the key to the birth and origin of the natureof simulacra, whose fury dominates the horizon beneath which the multiple aspects of the concreteare hidden."34 One can graspwhy Dalí hadchosen Breton's rather than Bataille's camp: both sides criticize Freud'sdualism while rewriting his insights in a monistdiscourse. But the first camp (Bataille's) stressesthe materiality ofthe body leading to notionsof excess, waste, and excrement, while the secondcamp (Breton's and Dali's) sees realityas a seriesof simulacra underpinned by a univer- sallyproductive Desire. We know how influential this debate was for Lacan, who came in contact withit just as he wascompleting his doctoral dissertation on paranoia. As Roudinescoshows con- vincinglyin her historical and biographical accounts, it was the impact of Dali's "RottingDonkey" thatallowed Lacan to break with classical psychiatric theories of personality and constitution and torevisit Freudian meta-psychology with a vengeance.35For at that time Lacan was busy translat- ingFreud's 1922 article on "Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexual- ity"into French, a textin whichFreud restates the main thesis that had underlain his analysis of theSchreber case, namely that the root of paranoia is thereturn of repressed homosexuality. Even

33.Oui, pp. 116-17. 34.Oui ,p. 117. 35.See Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co:A History ofPsychoanalysis inFrance, 1925-1985 , pp. 110-12, foran account oftheir meeting, which had been instigated byLacan, and Jacques Lacan trans. Barbara Bray (Columbia UniversityPress, 1997), pp. 31-32, for a more general assesment.

This content downloaded from 158.135.1.176 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 23:13:58 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 68 Journalof Modem Literature in a case ofa jealousdelirium observed in a heterosexualpatient, delusional attacks would follow successfulsexual rapports between the man and his wife: by inventing imaginary male lovers and creatingdelirious recriminations, thehusband facilitated the projection of his own desires facing thesemen. It is also atthat time that Lacan contributed toa collectiveessay on "Inspired Writings" of 1931:there, with two other authors, he analyzesclosely the psychotic ramblings of a young teacherwho had been hospitalized at Sainte-Anne;the description of the formal components of a grammarof mad utterance is marked by a deepawareness of Surrealism. Symptomatically, intheir analysisof a real-lifecase, the authors quote Breton's first Manifesto of Surrealism and look for a modelof interpretation in Breton's and Eluard's imitations of individual styles of typical delirium in TheImmaculate Conception (it had had beenpublished only one yearearlier, in 1930,thus showinghow rapid the exchange of ideas and texts has been).36 This was beforeLacan had treatedthe young woman whom he was to call "Aimée"and whobecame the focus of the thesis which he completedin 1932.When "Aimée" was broughtto Lacan in April1931, he immediatelydiagnosed a paranoidpsychosis, with delusions leading to theattempted murder on a famousParisian actress who had become a dangerousdouble. Even if Lacan'sthesis has receivedsome critical attention,37 one mayregret that it has not yet been translatedinto English. By a neatreciprocity, the Surrealists were the first to greetLacan's thesis with exuberantpraise: Crevel's 1933 "Notes toward a psycho-dialectic"38express the hope that Lacan will providea newfoundation of psychoanalysisat a timewhen Freud appears definitively too reactionaryor atleast pusillanimous. It is notonly that Lacan dares to treat psychosis directly but also thathis work is morefirmly grounded in thesocial world and therefore seems to allowfor a Marxistapproach. In spiteof himself, Lacan was thus enlisted in the cause of a SurrealistFreudo- Marxism.As Dalí alwaysinsisted,39 Crevel's suicide in 1935,partly brought about by his inability toreconcile Surrealism and Communism, was oneof the bad omensthat announced the untimely demiseof the movement. Itmay not have helped that Dali wasinvesting more and more paranoiac activityinto fantasies about Hitler on theone hand, high fashion on theother. Conversely, Lacan hadalready taken some distance with the avant-garde and its political factions. He onlyelaborated hisown version of Freudo-Marxism in the late 1960s. It wouldtake too long to demonstratethat Lacan'stheory of paranoiahas verylittle to do withDali's conceptof a beautifuland stunning hallucination.40What can be stressedis thatin 1932,Lacan does not have at his disposal the critical vocabularyneeded to go beyondFreud's homosexual thesis, even if his inroads into the mirror stagecomplex and itsattendant release of aggressionsoon provide a firstbridge leading to the constructionofthe alter-ego as a dangerousrival and the discovery of the symbolic caught in the fabricationofdelirious paternity systems. * * * *

36.See Jacques Lacan (with J.Lévy-Valensi andP. Migault) "Ecrits 'Inspirés': Schizographie" inJacques Lacan, De la psychoseparanoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité suivide Premiers écrits sur la paranoïa (Paris: Seuil, 1975), pp.379-80. 37.See above all Jean Allouch's thorough examination inMarguerite oul'Aimée deLacan (Paris: EPEL, 1990). 38.René Crevel, "Notes en vue d'une psycho-dialectique," inLe Surréalisme auService de la RévolutionV (15 May 1933),pp. 48-52. 39.See for instance Dali's Foreword toRené Crevel, Difficult Death, trans. David Rattray (North Point Press, 1986), pp. vii-xiv. 40.See Berressem's article, "Dalí and Lacan: Painting theImaginary Landscapes," pp.275-90.

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Whatremains indisputable is that, thanks to the convergence ofinterests among Bataille, Dalí, Breton,Lacan, Crevel, and a fewothers, the second decade of Surrealism was dominatedby the conceptof paranoia, much as thefirst had been by automatism and hysteria. And this was nota passingfashion: Breton's most comprehensive prose synthesis, his 1937Mad Lovestill affirms his beliefin desireas themainspring of all ourdreams and actions while making an importantplace forparanoia. Desire is nolonger structured byhysteria but follows the lead of paranoia. In thefifth section,Breton reopens Freud's A ChildhoodMemory of Leonardo da Vincibefore expounding theprinciple of paranoiac criticism or critical paranoia. The vulturehidden in theVirgin's dress mayhave been Pfister's hallucination more than the product of Freud's meditations;41 once an inter- pretationproduces another image in a previousone, it remains there, hovering between objectivity andsubjectivity, as Breton shrewdly notes.42 Breton refrains from claiming Leonardo as oneof the precursors,ifnot the real inventor of Surrealism - itis neverthelesstrue that he had recommended thesystematic practice of imagining shapes in old walls, clouds or landscapes. What Leonardo had stumbledupon is theprinciple of "objective chance" following which any artist, any man will learn toread the half-erased letters of a textwritten by desire. Breton continues his musings:

Thepurely visual exercise of this faculty which has at times been called "paranoiac" has ledto conclude that if a singlespot on a wallor elsewhere will almost always be inter- preteddifferently bydifferent individuals acted upon by distinct desires, this does not implythat one will not manage to make the other see what he has perceived. One does notsee a prioriwhat would prevent this illusion to go round the earth.43

Evenif Polonius is merelyhumoring Hamlet's real or feignedmadness when he agreesto see a whalein theclouds, this calculated acceptance suggests a basiccommunicability ofthe hallucination.Visual hallucinations can be shared,whatever one's opinions about the divide between madnessand sanity may be. Butwhereas hysteria counts upon mutual seduction in orderto reach thetruth of desire, paranoia articulates a system of signs whose pseudo-objectivity soon discloses dangerouslyflimsy foundations. Then the force of desire appears as thesource of what had been shared,even momentarily. In more banal terms, the extravagant gestures that were enacted by hysteriaas patheticattempts at aestheticexpression are staged by paranoia as a violentlyasserted discoursethat aims at beingshared not by a desiredmaster but by a dialogicalcommunity, in a movementthat lends itself more fully to political confrontation. Hysteriawould be embodiedby Nadja, the beautiful but lost soul who wanders in thestreets untilshe findsher poet and "master";typically, this master (Breton) misreads her pathological statein orderto transformher into an animainspiratrix until the symptoms become so worrying thathe has to abandon her to her forced institutionalization. In the process, she has turned into the Hegelian"beautiful soul" and has transformedthe master into a salaud (bastard),to use Sartre's term.Or precisely, the hidden truth that neither Nadja or Breton could see wasthe latent psychosis thaterupted soon afterwards and engulfed the young woman. In itsdelirious creations, paranoia flirtsmore radically with psychosis and thus cannot be turnedso easilyinto allegory, unless one

41.I havetried toanalyze the performative powerof such an error ofinterpretation inThe Ghosts ofModernity (Univer- sityof Florida Press, 1996), pp. 27-41. 42.L'Amour Fou in Oeuvres Complètes II,p. 753. 43.L'Amour Fou in Oeuvres Complètes II,p. 754.

This content downloaded from 158.135.1.176 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 23:13:58 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 70 Journalof Modem Literature looksat historicalfigures such as Hitler(as Elias Canettidoes, in thenotorious conclusion of Crowdsand Power.; when he forciblypoints out the connection between Schreber and Hitler). But thismove looks a littlecheap today, at leastopens a limitedpoint of view on paranoia,one that has beenpartly disqualified by David Trotter (besides, without the help of Dali' s insights)in his excellentParanoid Modernism ,44 Bretonaccordingly refuses to allegorizeparanoia in Mad Love,but his narrativeprovides a good exampleof thepositive use of guidedand experimentalparanoia. He describeshow one summerday of 1936,he andhis young wife, Jacqueline, were taking an afternoonwalk along the sea inBrittany, not far from Lorient, more precisely close to Fort-Bloqué. The weatherbeing gray andsultry, the tide at low ebb, they had nothing to do butfollow the shore and gaze atdull debris leftby the sea. Bretonand his wife felt more and more ill atease; a senseof separation seemed to pushthem apart; and when they saw a littlefort they ended up choosingdifferent paths and walk- ingfar from one another. Breton was evenwishing that he wouldgo backimmediately or simply leavehis wife in orderto relievethe tension. Back in Lorient,when he describedtheir excursion to hisfamily, everyone asked whether they had seen the "Villa of the Loch." The placethey had passedwhen they felt most oppressed was a housein which a fewyears earlier a manhad savagely killedhis wife for sordid calculations. The garden along which they had walked when they had felt theirlove wither was the place where the murderer had raised silver foxes. Breton calls up several paintingsdescribing scenes of murders and then concludes that something of the place's bad aura musthave influenced their strange behavior. A fewother coincidences are adduced:he and his wifewere precisely reading books with "foxes" in theirtitles. The worstfeeling of despondency occurredwhen they were closest to thewall where the foxes' cages had been; Breton adds that it wasas ifthe wall had been transparent! What had been experienced as a "livingnightmare" ofone afternooncould not be due to chance:"Everything happened as ifone hadbeen the victim of a mostcunning machination from powers that remain until now quite obscure."45 The formulation is mostvague, and Breton despairs of convincing a skeptical reader. On thesurface, his point is not todemonstrate the workings of paranoia but to elaborate a theoryof love and its contingencies. It seemsthat Breton believed his own theory. Whether one acceptsthe idea that the scene of a murderwill affect innocent tourists two years after the fact is immaterial.Breton's suggestion thathe has beenthe plaything of occult forces for a fewhours follows the structure of paranoia morethan that of superstition. In such a pattern,nothing is leftto chance: sudden mood swings can be explainedby rays, ghosts, emanations, the most archaic contaminations implying dead people and evenanimals. It is a worldfull of magicalmeaning, precisely because in it everythinghas to be meaningful.The mainissue is notreality and surrealitybut rationality and surrationality. Paranoiamaintains strong echoes of its association with the nous. A moredispassionate approach, suchas thatof Freud himself - whohated any suggestion of occultism (although he believedin telepathy46)- might limit itself to observingthat the curious incident took place on 20 July1936 andthat on 6 September1936, Jacqueline suddenly left Breton after a violentmarital crisis. Jac- quelinewent away for a wholemonth, leaving him to care for their young daughter without giving

44.David Trotter, Paranoid Modernism : Literary Experiment, Psychosis andthe Professionalization ofEnglish Society (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2001). 45.Oeuvres Complètes II,pp. 776-77. 46.See John Forrester, "Psychoanalysis: Gossip,Telepathy and/or Science," inThe Seductions ofPsychoanalysis (Cam- bridge:Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 243-59.

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anynews of her whereabouts. Breton wrote the account of their walk and momentary estrangement thatseems to announcepotential rifts between 28 Augustand 1 September,which was also the timewhen he put together various pieces to make up the book he called Mad Love.In a veryFreud- ianmanner, the account of the doomed walk functioned as a symptomof a deeper"disturbance of love"rather than of memory. It was necessaryfor a recapitulationthat wished to makesense of a strangeevent and may even have functioned as a performativeaction precipitating another crisis, if notone more outspoken, atleast acted out this time. The composition of the whole book was also a wayof probing the madness of his love and perhaps the madness of mourning it(in case Jacqueline haddecided not to come back). From the basic facts of life - andit is obviousthat Breton did not inventthese incidents - whatemerges is lessa totallyirrational belief in auras or vibrations linked to certainplaces than the idea that all ofthese facts and factors can be organizedin a productive paranoiaby the act of writing. Throughthe transformation ofSurrealist doctrine and practice from a praiseof hysteria dis- closingthe irresistible of universalDesire based on seductionto a practiceof guidedparanoia makingsense of the world but differently, we return to whatDavid Trotter has called"paranoid modernism."We touchhere one of the most powerful mainsprings ofthe evolution of Modernism as a whole.Trotter has a verygood chapter on paranoia in Wyndham Lewis,47 but he does not stress thatthis is a themedeveloped relatively late, and that Tarr (a novelhe doesnot examine, in con- formitywith his thesis) is aboveall dedicatedto exploiting the subversive forces of hysteria to the full.In itsrevisions between the 1918 and the 1928 versions, the novel systematically takes stock of themodes of hysteria available to the artists and déclassés who interact so curiouslyand violently inthe pre-war Paris called up by Lewis. The fact that it is a German,Kreissler, who rapes another German,a womannamed Bertha, before shooting a RussianJew in a grotesquelyclimactic duel, showshow far hysteria can go beforeleading one almost logically to the murderous logic of exclu- sionand persecution often disclosed in paranoia. Tarr' s complextextual evolution announces the profoundshift in valuesthat marks the end of the 1920s and confirms that the evolution analyzed inFrench surrealism had a counterpartinAnglo-Saxon high modernism. * * * *

As we haveseen, through the issue of seduction, the hysterical style of Modernism poses the questionof woman, or rather of femininity and masculinity, an issuewhich can generate panic for menand women alike. Hysteria's main question according to Lacan ("Am I a manor a woman?") leadsto a troublingand productive doubt - since,indeed, it took two sides, the seduced interns andthe enraptured hysterics, to producethe ecstasies so muchadmired by the Surrealists. This has had importantconsequences for what is commonlycalled "high" Modernism, a Modernism whichwishes to distinguishitself from a commodifiedmass culture. I am,of course, alluding to AndreasHuyssen's objections to a Modernismidentified with literary or artistic experimentation, neo-fascistica-historicism and a maledominated authoritarian culture of elitism.48 On thisview, Modernismwould be a malehysteria compulsively rejecting any suspicion of femininityin the nameof a new"hardness" and poetic specialization: as Poundand Eliot wanted it, the new poet

47.David Trotter, Paranoid Modernism, pp.284-325. 48.Andreas Huyssen, "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other" inAfter the Great Divide (Indiana University Press,1986), p.45.

This content downloaded from 158.135.1.176 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 23:13:58 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 72 Journalof Modem Literature is a "professional"and nota feminizeddilettante who dabbles in versifying.For Huyssen,the Modernistas "seriousartist" chooses as his mostthreatening enemy the specter of a Victorian cultureidentified with a "bitch"and a botchedcivilization that had given birth to theGreat War. Butsuch a perspectiveshould be qualifiedif not resisted, and the example of Surrealism confirms certainof these reservations. The role of the War is clearlycrucial but the main divide is notbefore andafter 1914 or even1918, but before and after 1929-30. Or rather,itwas theneed to asserta discourseabout the war as hysteria(such as onesees it in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley) that seems to haveretarded the possibilities implied by paranoid readings. It wouldbe temptingto see a confirmationof this idea in thefirst text by AndréBreton in whichhe mimesautomatic writing and psychotic speech, all at once.Before Breton worked with Babinskiand was forcedto confronthysteria, at leastthrough a directrefutation of it,he had a previousencounter with psychotic delusion. At the time of the Saint-Dizier discoveries of Freud andof psychotic discourse, Breton encountered a particular type of delirium: it was a soldierwho hadbeen traumatized by the battle and who henceforth had stopped believing in the reality of war. Forthis shell-shocked patient, the only way to survivepsychically was to believethat the whole battlehad been a simulacrum:the bloody fields, ruins and corpses were an illusionmanipulated by occultpowers. Moreover, it was an estheticillusion aiming at creatingthe "sublime." This delirious discoursehad such a powerfuleffect on Breton that he decidedto copy it and transform itinto a prosepoem, his first prose piece in fact, simply entitled: "Subject." There he simplylet the soldier speakin a sortof dramatic monologue. He beginswith a wonderfullywell chosen double entendre onbecoming a warriorof madness: "How I wishI couldharden myself (m' aguerrir) one day, with thehelp of God."49 The speakingsubject announces that he feelsthat all ofhumanity watches him andthat he is readyto becomean experimenterwho will sacrifice his reason for the good of all. He cannotrefuse this call: "To whatwould my refusal serve. - Exploringthe so-called murder- ouszone, it became child's play for me to denounce blatant imposture."50 The denunciation ofsuch "imposture"takes on epicproportions when he evokeshis past experience during a battle:

Knockedout by gypsies, lost between ramps, a waltzer would fall once in a while,lifting hishand to his vermilion rose. Using the maximum ofart, they have maintained meall thattime under the empire of the sublime. And the apparatus ofdeath has not been able toawe me as theythought. I have walked over corpses it is true.One can see such as thesein any dissecting room. Quite a numbercould have been made in wax. Most of the "wounded"looked happy. As to the illusion of spilled blood, you see as wellthis in any provincetown when they produce Dumas's plays. . . . Whatdoes it cost to make a whole companydisappear little by little?51

The mechanismof paranoid interpretation ofthe world follows the most perfect logic: how could thespectacle of frenzied mass-slaughter and mechanized destruction be believable?Of course, for Babinski,this "subject" would have been called a simulator,and treated as such,but he is clearly nota hysteric.Breton's clever title stresses the ambiguity of a "subject"who will never be objecti-

49."Sujet," inNord-Sud ,April 1918, Oeuvres Complètes /,p. 24. 50.Breton, Oeuvres Complètes /,p. 24. 51.Breton, Oeuvres Complètes I,p. 25.

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fiedby medical knowledge. The subject'srefusal of thereality of waris radicaland goes much furtherthan the logics of persecution displayed by Yossarian in JosephHeller's Catch 22. When thewhole world has become a simulacrum,itdemonstrates how "little of reality" it contains. Simi- larly,Breton's 1934 "Introduction to the Discourse on theScarcity of Reality" refuses to believe in thetyranny of reality. He writes:"In reality,am I sleepingin a bed madeup ofelder marrow? Enough!I don'tknow: this must be truein someway since I am sayingit."52 We can understandwhy "Subject," this amazingly powerful prose text of 1918,immediately caughtthe attention of Paul Valéry and Jean Paulhan. However, both seem to believe that Breton inventeditfrom several patients, whereas it is likelythat he just transcribed one monologue. Here theidea that the whole world is a simulacrumgenerates a paranoid interpretation reshaping reality butalso producinga sharp critique of what is takenas "real"by people who have blindly accepted it.Indeed, a littlelater, Breton would quote Kraepelin and Freud together53: here they merge. It is as ifFreud presented us a PresidentSchreber who would not stop at transforming homosexual fan- tasiesinto a cosmicstruggle against an evilGod, but would show the whole war as an improbable sickjoke, a trickput on for his unique esthetic delectation. As Pascalwould say, there are situations whenone would be veryinsane not to become insane - andit is fromthis awareness that the text derivesboth its subversive power and its sombre beauty. The "paranoidstyle" that Modernism develops in the1930s shifts this very same ground by multiplyinglevels of reality while posing the question of the big Other, whether the Other be situ- atedas the"enemy" that Lewis was so fondof creating for his own endless execration, or for an Otherthat, as withJoyce, forces writing to descend into the deepest recesses of female schizophre- nia.Thus Finnegans Wake was in greatpart written for a "hebephrenic"Lucia Joyce, a psychotic daughterwho can be seenas Joyce's"ideal reader" and main dialogical interlocutor ofthe book.54 In fact,Lucia simplyacted out Joyce's most paranoid delusions of grandeur. Curiously, paranoia mighthave been the answer to the quandary in which hysterical high Modernism had found itself: for,as bothSalvador Dalí and ThomasPynchon have shown, paranoia is one conceptthat can bridgeeffortlessly the old gap betweenhigh and low culture. Dali's solutionhas beento project his archaicphobias (his fearof grasshoppersand rotting donkeys for instance) into images that wouldacquire a universalvalidity. They even seduced Freud, who could remark in 1938that Dalí showedan obvioustalent (an admissionhe nevermade facing Breton's poetry). Perhaps, it is true, hemerely reacted to Dali's incipientacademism. Whatever the motivation, hecould finally see that thisparanoid style was reshaping a world teeming with wild fantasies while reinterpreting itwith a semblanceof rational order. Closerto us, a (very)late Modernistsuch as Pynchonhas learnedto tap theinexhaustible Americanidea of a "paranoidstyle" in politics,tracing the movement further back in time;to a Puritanheritage obsessed with ideas of predestination orthe new purity found again in the wilder- ness.Again, the main danger lies in a fearedbut desired and necessary encounter with the Other. OedipaMaas discoversanother America through creative paranoia in TheCrying of Lot 49, while herpsychoanalyst is a formerNazi whosejob in deathcamps was to renderJews catatonic. His name,Doctor Hilarius, shows that we shouldnot take him too seriously, no morethan the pyro-

52."Introduction audiscours surle peu de réalité" inBreton, Oeuvres Complètes II,p. 278. 53.In a lettertoTzara from 1919, quoted inBreton, Oeuvres Complètes I,p. 1105. 54.I havetried todevelop this point inJames Joyce and the Politics ofEgoism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),pp. 19-23.

This content downloaded from 158.135.1.176 on Wed, 10 Sep 2014 23:13:58 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 74 Journalof Modem Literature technicsof paper rockets launched from Nazi Germanythat are still hovering above our heads in Gravity'sRainbow. In thiscontext, itcannot be a coincidencethat Aragon should have tried to define Modernism inthe twelfth issue of the Surrealist Revolution , the first issue to be illustrated(and abundantly so) byDali, a modernismhe seeshesitating between hysteria and paranoia. In an essaywritten in 1929 anddevoted to the new decade, "Introduction to 1930," Aragon writes:

Youwill not see, behind what constitutes themodernity ofa period,the fever it gener- ates,a feverwhich merits the name of modernism and needs a definition.Modernism is theacceptance ofconcrete watchwords made up of these modern words, objects and ideaswhose evocation implies a numberof particular claims, among which those of individualswho first feel their force and launch them first.55

If thedefinition is fuzzy, it has themerit of positing a bridgebetween the avant-garde constituted bySurrealism and the poetologic sense of Modernism, which is in factthe meaning institutional- ized in currentacademic discussions. Thus, Aragon concludes his hesitant definition with: "Poets are closerto seismographersthan to citizens.. . . [T]o analyzemodernism is to analyzethe rap- portbetween poetry and its time."56 Nevertheless, a sweeping avant-gardist discourse reasserts a politicalurge once more at theend of the section - themodern is calledthe "raw nerve" of an epoch'sconsciousness, and it has to be hithard by "armed people who know where to woundit best."The longishessay concludes on thenotion that the modern is nowin the hand of the police, notof poets - Aragonsees aroundhim the "teeming signs of a newviolence."57 If this confirms theemergence of a newparanoid Modernism, in itsparanoia such aggressiveness remains Mod- ernistin thesense that it does wantto abolisheverything or createa tabularasa of valuesand doctrines.Just a littlebefore this, Aragon had asserted that Surrealism and Modernism had always gonehand in handand stillwould, and that all the"precursors" the Surrealists had claimed for themselves- a practicewhich, as he notes,elicited some sneers from the Dadaists and other avant-gardists- would evince in oneway or another the qualities of a fundamentalModernism.58 Thistends to confirmthat the Surrealists (some of them at least;it is no doubtAragon who was closestto Anglo-Saxon writers and artists, from Peggy Guggenheim to Pound)were aware of the factthat their avant-garde movement had already turned into Modernism, high or low; it confirms also thattheir ambivalence facing this inevitable historicization, doubled by an eternizing enshrin- ingin culture, would be translatedinto the choice between the provocations ofa seductivehysteria anda paranoiaccriticism hitting the Other just where it hurts. Hurting and loving grandpapa Freud wasjust one step in thatdirection.

55.Aragon, "Introduction à 1930," inLa Révolution Surréaliste XII(15 December 1929), p.58. 56.Aragon, "Introduction à 1930," p.58. 57.Aragon, "Introduction à 1930," p.64. 58.Aragon, "Introduction à 1930," p.62.

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