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Surrealism, Lacan, and the Fragmented Self:

Examining André Masson's Battle of Fishes

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Surrealism, Lacan, and the Fragmented Self: Examining André Masson's Battle of Fishes

Praised by André Breton in the first Manifesto of Surrealism, André Masson was intimately involved with early Surrealist efforts. In fact, many of his automatic drawings appeared in La Révolution Surréaliste1 as visual equivalents to automatic writing, a Surrealist practice involving the free movement of the pen across the page in an attempt to minimize interference by the rational mind.2 In 1926, Masson began to experiment with unconventional, non-art materials such as sand, and to apply glue and paint using elements of chance in order to achieve automatist effects.3 From the mid-1930s onward, Masson was deeply influenced by Jacques Lacan's theories on the stages of development, which has led to a productive examination of his work within a Lacanian framework.4 However, predating his involvement with Lacan,

Masson's earlier automatist works, particularly his 1927 sand painting entitled Battle of Fishes, already exhibit strong affinities to his mirror stage of development and suggest an enduring engagement with notions of the self. By examining Masson's affiliation with other Surrealists and contextualising his work within the Surrealist project, the distinctive Lacanian elements of Battle of the Fishes become evident.

In the first Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton defines Surrealism as "psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other way—the true functioning of thought . . . in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern."5 Masson's relations with Surrealist writers deeply influenced his approach to automatism6 and philosophy of the self; in the early 1920s, he worked in a studio next to Joan Miró, where he met writers

Antonin Artaud, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Armand Salacrou and Roland Tual.7 When he and Miró

1. Clark V. Poling, André Masson and the Surrealist Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 5, 43. 2. Fiona Barber, "Surrealism: 1924-1929," in Art of the Avant-Gardes, eds. Steve Edwards and Paul Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 430. 3. Barbara McCloskey, Artists of World War II (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005), 34. 4. Poling, André Masson and the Surrealist Self, 113-147. 5. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971), 26, quoted in Dawn Ades, André Masson (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1994), 12. 6. Rooted in French psychiatry and Freudian psychoanalytic theory, automatism drew on Freud's process of free association to access the unconscious mind. (Poling, André Masson and the Surrealist Self, 43) 7. Poling, André Masson and the Surrealist Self, 9.

first heard of Breton's attempts at automatic writing, they developed new procedures as direct counterparts to automatic writing.8 Having experimented with automatic drawing practices since 1923, Masson became closely affiliated with Breton in 1924 and was a full member of the Surrealists until 1929, when the dissidents Artaud, Bataille, and Lieris broke away from the group.9 According to them, Masson's work gave a lot of importance to nature and had a Dionysian quality that was outside of the Surrealist purview.10

Influenced by Nietzsche's notions of ecstasy and self-forgetfulness in The Birth of Tragedy, Masson connected automatism and ecstasy, stating that the Dionysian "corresponds to an . . . ecstatic and explosive state allowing one to leave one's self, to give free rein to one's instincts, and thereby to arrive at automatism."11 And although Masson was wildly criticized by Breton in the second Manifesto of Surrealism, they eventually renewed efforts from 1936 to 1943. It is precisely through his close affiliation with Breton and other Surrealists that Masson fused visual art with philosophy, calling himself a "poet-painter."12

Turning our attention to Battle of Fishes (fig. 1), we will now outline Masson's method of creation, which is central to the work. As previously stated, Masson was experimenting with sand at the time in order to create automatic paintings as an extension of his drawings;13 after randomly applying adhesive and letting the sand adhere to the surface, he drew lines in graphite and charcoal, and added patches of colour in response to the suggestive forms and shapes of the sand.14 By working with sand, Masson's intention was to use a chance-directed medium, thus allowing his unconscious mind to respond to abstract forms.15 By applying paint directly from the tube instead of continuously re-loading the brush, Masson overcame the inherent difficulties surrounding automatic painting.16 Indeed, this direct application of paint to the surface

8. Michael Sansom, "Imaging Music: Abstract Expressionism and Free Improvisation," Leonardo Music Journal 11, no. 1 (2001): 31. 9. Poling, André Masson and the Surrealist Self, 5, 23. 10. Dawn Ades, André Masson (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1994), 7. 11. André Masson, La Mémoire du monde (Gèneve: A. Skira, 1974), 11, quoted in Clark V. Poling, André Masson and the Surrealist Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 57. 12. Poling, André Masson and the Surrealist Self, 1. 13. Sansom, "Imaging Music," 31. 14. McCloskey, Artists of World War II, 34; Sansom, "Imaging Music," 31. 15. Ades, André Masson, 16. 16. Barber, "Surrealism: 1924-1929," 431.

enabled Masson to somewhat remove the mediation of his body in the process, allowing the unconscious mind to respond to spontaneous shapes rather than letting the memories of the hand dictate the forms.

Fig. 1 André Masson, Battle of Fishes, 1926. Sand, gesso, oil, pencil and charcoal on canvas, 36.2 x 73 cm. New York, The Museum of Modern Art.

From the mid-1920s onward, Masson's work exhibited themes of primordial struggle and death primarily featuring animals.17 Since the violent marine imagery of Battle of Fishes has literary roots in Comte de

Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror (1868)—a Surrealist favourite that equates animal violence with human cruelty18—the fish and birds that it portrays may be allegories for human figures. Significantly, the circular composition of Battle of Fishes evokes a cyclical process of aggression, in which each element is held within a swirling and ambiguous tension. According to art historian Dawn Ades, Masson's images of animals and nature embrace the excessive and overpowering Dionysian forces, allowing the artist to overcome the individual sense of self and to come to union with nature.19 However, in Battle of Fishes, the violent forces seem to have not yet culminated, as the fish remain locked in a battle evoking a dance; because of its cyclical composition, there seems to be less of a sense of union than of energetic tension and balance. This cyclicality in turn becomes essential to a psychoanalytic reading of the work.

17. T. Catesby Jones, "André Masson: A Comment," Kenyon Review 8, no. 2 (1946): 226; Poling, André Masson and the Surrealist Self, 63. 18. Poling, André Masson and the Surrealist Self, 64. 19. Ades, André Masson, 8.

At this point, it is important for us to consider Masson's work in relation to Lacan's theory of the fragmentation of the self. Although Masson had been aware of Lacan's theories since the mid-1930s and was from then on deeply influenced by his conception of selfhood and existence, the two men only met in

1939.20 Lacan's experience with Surrealist theories provided the bedrock for his own theoretical models, which he expanded on Freud's oedipal stage of psychic development, emphasizing the child's recognition of him or her "self" in relation to "others"—this dimension of Lacanian theory has already been productively applied to Masson's mythological work of the late 1930s.21 According to Lacan, for the first six months of life, infants are in a state of prematurity characterized by an unintegrated sense of self. Their experience of being torn away from their mother creates feelings of bodily fragmentation which remain with them throughout their life. In the mirror stage of development, they form a coherent self by experiencing a counterpart in the mirror image (or in a sibling). Indeed, children form a sense of self through the affirmation of the unity of their own body and mind, yet remain alienated because they do not distinguish between the image and the self.22 Feelings of intense jealousy and aggression are tied to this identification, which remain within the unconscious throughout people's lives, at times leading to an imaginary murder of the double that

Lacan refers to as "the drama of primordial jealousy."23 As scholars have noted, Masson's Skull City series from the late 1930s directly respond to these Lacanian notions of unity and fragmentation.24 Lacanian theory therefore deeply informed Masson's understanding of the self, as reflected in many of his later works.

Returning to Battle of Fishes, we will now explore the parallels that exist between Lacanian theory and the image even though it predates Masson's deep engagement with Lacan. The most evident similarity is the aforementioned mirror structure of the image, with the two large fish facing one another as if in a reflection. The fish on the left appears to have sustained critical wounds during a battle. Within Lacan's framework, the image is evocative of the mirror stage of development, with fish standing in for human

20. Poling, André Masson and the Surrealist Self, 128. 21. Ibid., 1, 131. 22. Jacques Lacan, Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l'individu – Essai d'analyse d'une fonction en psychologie (Dijon: Navarin, 1984), 44-45. 23. Poling, André Masson and the Surrealist Self, 134. 24. Ibid., 132.

subjects. As previously stated, animals often represent human figures in Masson's work and, in other paintings from the late 1920s, he explicitly anthropomorphizes fish.25 Furthermore, the animal interaction appears to be occurring in an almost primordial landscape—the automatist shapes evoke hills and streams, yet they remain somewhat abstracted, as if out of time and space. Certain theorists have described this as a

Darwinian scene of the "survival of the fittest," with the biggest and strongest fish surviving.26 While this interpretation illuminates the kind of violence in nature that was a central focus for Masson,27 the image reads ambiguously as a Darwinian scene; not only the larger (and presumably stronger) fish appears to suffer from more substantial wounds, but the balance of both halves of the image created through the mirror structure also suggests a more symbolic than biological reading. Indeed, in Lacanian terms, we can say that the fish is beginning to form a concrete sense of self in the recognition of its double, and that this jealousy is prompting a violent encounter. The balanced structure of the image makes the outcome of the battle ambiguous, suggesting an almost indefinite duration. This has important ramifications for the self, whose psychic development is based on the removal of the double. The recurring presence of Lacanian imagery in

Masson's later work implies an engagement with ideas of selfhood predating the 1930s.

In the end, it is clear that Masson's involvement with Surrealism had a profound influence on his artistic trajectory. In turn, his automatist works were of crucial importance to the early Surrealist project due to their ability to offer a visual equivalent to Breton's automatic writing practices. In Battle of Fishes, Masson experiments with new materials, uses elements of chance, and responds to spontaneous forms using unconscious associations. Masson's early work may therefore be productively examined using Lacan's theories on the stages of development, specifically the mirror stage in which the individual forms a coherent sense of self. Within this framework, Battle of Fishes suggests that the outcome of the self's encounter with its double is ambiguous. Masson's automatist paintings can therefore be understood as a reflection of his enduring engagement with notions of the self.

25. Poling, André Masson and the Surrealist Self, 65. 26. Ibid., 63. 27. Ades, André Masson, 8.

Bibliography

Ades, Dawn. André Masson. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1994.

Barber, Fiona. "Surrealism: 1924-1929." In Art of the Avant-Gardes, edited by Steve Edwards and Paul

Wood, 426-448. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Jones, T. Catesby. "André Masson: A Comment." Kenyon Review 8, no. 2 (1946): 224-237.

Lacan, Jacques. Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l'individu – Essai d'analyse d'une fonction

en psychologie. Dijon: Navarin, 1984.

Masson, André. "Battle of Fishes" [sand, gesso, oil, pencil and charcoal on canvas]. New York: The

Museum of Modern Art, 1926. In André Masson and the Surrealist Self, Clark V. Poling, plate 37.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

McCloskey, Barbara. Artists of World War II. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005.

Poling, Clark V. André Masson and the Surrealist Self. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

Sansom, Michael. "Imaging Music: Abstract Expressionism and Free Improvisation." Leonardo Music

Journal 11, no. 1 (2001): 29-34.