Plastic / Explosive: Claude Cahun and the Politics of Becoming Otherwise
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Plastic / Explosive: Claude Cahun and the Politics of Becoming Otherwise Ryan Helterbrand A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2016 Reading Committee: Brian Reed, Chair Carolyn Allen Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English ©Copyright 2016 Ryan Helterbrand University of Washington Abstract Plastic / Explosive: Claude Cahun and the Politics of Becoming Otherwise Ryan Helterbrand Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Dr. Brian Reed, Professor English Plastic / Explosive: Claude Cahun and the Politics of Becoming Otherwise is the first full-length English-language treatment of the long-neglected political work of Claude Cahun, a French Surrealist writer and activist most famously known as an avant-garde photographer active in the 1920s but who later formed a powerful anti-Nazi resistance movement on the Channel Island of Jersey in the 1940s with her collaborator Suzanne Malherbe, dubbing themselves “the Nameless Soldiers." They fought the Nazis with what they called Surrealist "weapons of chance," mounting a devastating campaign against the German soldiers that sought to confuse and demoralize them, fomenting revolt in the Nazi camp. While contemporary Anglophone scholarship is focused almost exclusively on Cahun’s self-portraits, I argue that Cahun's most important contribution to our present moment lies in her radical rethinking of the place of the artist and avant-garde aesthetics in revolutionary political struggles, a theme that runs throughout her literary work of the 1920s, her political work with the Surrealists in the 1930s, and her resistance activities against the Nazis during the 1940s. The study, then, is oriented around two central questions: what can be the role of the artist in radical political struggles? And what part might an avant-garde aesthetic have to play in them? The first part of the dissertation, “A Multiple Always,” investigates by turns Cahun’s radical rethinking of the link between avant-garde art and revolutionary politics throughout the 1920s, her political work with André Breton and the Surrealists in the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires in 1932 and 1933, her polemics with Louis Aragon during the “Aragon Affair” in 1933 and 1934, her complete disillusionment with bureaucratic Communist politics during the First International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in 1935, and her decisive intellectual engagement with Breton and Georges Bataille in Contre-Attaque in 1935 and 1936. The second part, “The Nameless Soldiers and their Friends,” turns to Cahun’s resistance work against the Nazis on the island of Jersey between 1940 and 1944, showing how her resistance movement was at once the culmination and transfiguration of her literary and political work from 1925 to 1940, a movement that explicitly operated at the intersection of avant-garde art and radical politics and intentionally blurred the line between them. By the end of the work, I hope not to have answered conclusively the twin questions guiding the study—what can be the role of the avant-garde artist in radical political change? And what part can an avant- garde aesthetic itself have to play?—but to have provided the reader with a new way of approaching them through the life and work of Claude Cahun, giving Cahun her due as one of the most powerful and innovative thinkers who worked and fought at the intersection of these problems. A Note on References I use a simplified reference system in this dissertation. The original French for each translation I give from Claude Cahun’s work is available in the endnotes, as are all bibliographical references. Endnote citations give the author’s name and page number(s) and refer to a list of entries in the works cited. For two works by the same author I give the author’s name and year of publication of the relevant text, and for two works published in the same year by the same writer I give the author’s name and a shortened form of the title. The endnotes are purely documentary, and all exposition and digression has been kept to the main body of the text. Table of Contents Introduction: The Politics of Becoming Otherwise .........................................................................1 Chapter 1: The Unknown Heroine .................................................................................................24 Chapter 2: The Stiletto of Poetry ...................................................................................................43 Chapter 3: The Perpetual Insurrection ...........................................................................................67 Chapter 4: The Nameless Conspiracy ............................................................................................93 Chapter 5: The Nameless Weapons .............................................................................................. 113 Chapter 6: The Spiritual Sharpshooters of Jersey ........................................................................139 Conclusion: Symbolic Misery or Permanent Revolution ............................................................158 Notes ............................................................................................................................................168 Works Cited.................................................................................................................................. 211 Helterbrand 1 Introduction: The Politics of Becoming Otherwise For nearly half a century the name of Claude Cahun was all but unknown. It is absent from nearly all of the seminal works on Surrealism and the avant-garde—a tragedy, given that her address book, to name just a few of her more conspicuous friends, contains listings for Aragon, Barney, Bataille, Breton, Beach, Caillois, Cocteau, Crevel, Dalí, Desnos, Éluard, Ernst, Ferdière, Giacometti, Gide, Heap, Huxley, Lacan, Lamba, Michaux, Monnier, Ray, Stein, Tzara, and Valéry.1 While she was active within Surrealism for over two decades, her name gradually faded from the historical record: only the chance recovery of her literary and photographic work on the Channel Island of Jersey in the 1980s—one of the true miracles in art history—kept her from being completely forgotten. Today, there are two Claude Cahuns. One, more familiar to Anglophone audiences, is the creator of stunning, metamorphic self-portraits, heralded as a theorist of gender performativity before her time, famously praised by Hal Foster as a “Cindy Sherman avant la lettre.”2 This Cahun was recovered from near art-historical oblivion in 1992 when the rediscovery and premiere exhibitions of her photographs, first in New York and then in Paris, brought her back into the public eye. Almost immediately, and in the wake of Judith Butler's seminal theories of gender performance and fluidity, feminist scholars began hailing her as a forgotten forerunner, a gender-bending artist who played with our assumptions of a singular identity in photographic self-portraits that captured her putting on and taking off identities as one might a change of clothes. So great was the enthusiasm for this “unknown heroine” that more work was published on Cahun in 1992 than had been published in the previous four decades combined.3 Worldwide exhibitions of her work were mounted, her name began appearing in anthologies of avant-garde photography for the first time, and the volume of critical discourse on her increased, year by year. Helterbrand 2 Unknown for so long, it seemed that this Cahun had been given a second life. There is another Cahun, however, much less familiar to English-speaking audiences, and one who is only now beginning to come into full view. This Cahun was a radical revolutionary and anti-fascist militant, one who joined the Surrealists as the threat of European fascism was on the rise in order to put herself at the service of its political interventions. This Cahun worked alongside André Breton in the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (AEAR) in 1932 and 1933, attempting to retheorize the place of avant-garde aesthetics in social and cultural change. One of only two women who appear in the minutes kept by the organization, this Cahun doggedly attacked the presumptions of the Soviet ideologues who claimed that poetry had no other function in politics than to encourage the adoption of Russian socialism and membership in the French Communist Party. This Cahun also, in 1935, helped found Contre-Attaque—the “combat union of revolutionary intellectuals”—alongside Breton and Georges Bataille, hosting many of the group’s meetings at her house and tirelessly rethinking with them poetry's place in radical politics outside of the strictures of Soviet bureaucracy. It was also this Cahun who, when the Nazis invaded Jersey in 1940, mounted a devastating resistance movement against them, using “weapons of chance” against the visceral threat of imprisonment and death. Often overshadowed by the first Cahun in the critical literature, it is this second Cahun, the revolutionary political theorist and anti-Nazi resistance fighter, who is the focus of this work. Plastic / Explosive: Claude Cahun and the Politics of Becoming Otherwise has two distinct but related aims: first, and most ambitiously, it hopes to help recover the long-neglected literary and political work of Claude Cahun for an English-speaking audience. While Cahun’s photographs have been commented on extensively