,-.- I -- --- qi �.n I4-

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Luis Bufiuel and Salvador Dali. Film stillsfrom Un Chlen andolou, 1929. i Les GrandsFilms Classiques, Paris. Stills courtesy ofBritish Film Institute.

1 -- r > _ . X > - x!D,, ..... , .- 1

11- I . 71

The humari being is thisniaght, this emptyinothing, that contains everything in its simplicity-an

unending wvealth of many representation, images, of which none belongs to him-or which are not

present.This night, this interior of nature, that exists here-pure self-in phantasmagorical represen-

tations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head-there another wvhite ghastly

apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one

looks human beings in the eye-into a night that becomes awvful.

-G.W F. Hegel, "Jenaer Realphilosophie"

In his "Critical Dictionary" entry on the "'Eye" in the September 1929 issue of

Documents Georges Bataille notes the seductive quality of the eye, only to add that

"extreme seduction is probably at the limit of horror." ' As an example of such

horror, he cites the eye-slitting scene from Luis Bufiuel and Salvador Dali's

recently completed film, Un Chien andalou:

In this respect, the eye could be related to the cutting edge, whose appearance

provokes both bitter and contradictory reactions; this is what the makers

of Un Chien andalou must have hideously and obscurely experienced when,

among the first images of the film, they determined the bloody loves of

these two beings. That a razor would cut open the dazzling eye of a young

and charming woman-this is precisely what a young man would have

Raymond Spiteri

Envisioning Surrealism inHistoire de I'oeil andLa femme 100 tetes

I would like to thank Alyce Mahon for the oppor-tunity to present an earlier version of this paperat Body and Soul 2000, the annual conference ofthe Association of Art Historians in Edinburgh inApril 2000, and Robert Lubar for invitng me topresent it at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York.I also thank Robin Greeley and Don LaCoss fortheir comments on the draft. Research for thispaper has been partiy funded by the School ofArchitecture and Fine Arts, University of WesternAustralia, and the University of North Dakota.

The epigraph is from G. W. F. Hegel, "JenaerRealphilosophie," in Fruhe polidsche Systeme(Frankfurt Ullstein, 1974); translation quotedfrom Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel's Recollection(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1985), 7-8; cited inSlavoj 2ijek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso,1999), 29-30.

1. Georges Bataille, Visions Excess: SelectedWritings, 1927-1939. ed. Allan Stoekl, trans.Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie, Jr.(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1985), 17.

admired to the point of madness [deraison], a young man

watched by a small, sleeping cat, a young man who by

chance holding in his hand a coffee spoon, suddenlywanted to take an eye in that spoon.'

Bataille, of course, shared the Surrealists' fascination

with the eye, but what is interesting here is the ambiva-

lence he identifies in the eye-the proximity of seduc-

tion to horror-and its relation to the image. Indeed,

this passage could easily pass as an example of Surreal-

ism that transposes the shock of the lacerated eye from

Un Chien andalou to the image of a spoon enucleating an eye. The proximity of

seduction to horror is also evident in the illustrations that accompanied this

entry: for instance, Bataille juxtaposes an engraving by J.-J. Grandville, First Dream:

Crime and Atonement (1 847), with a photograph of the Hollywood starlet Janet

Flynn. The juxtaposition of these images recalls the eye-slitting scene in Un Chien

andalou, particularly the episode in the lower left corner of Grandville's etching,

where the eye approaches a collapsing column. Bataille's discussion of the eye

seems to allude to an element of abyssal negativity that not only transforms the

seductive look into the threatening gaze, but provokes acts of unprecedented

violence-violence also evident in the illustration of the sensational magazine

L'CEil de la police (The Eye of the Police) and Dali's Blood Is Sweeter than Honey.

Despite his aversion to idealist philosophy, there is a distinctly Hegelian

aspect to Bataille's discussion of the eye, particularly what Hegel called the

"night of the world"-a night glimpsed "when one looks human beings in

the eye."3 Slavoj 2iiek, in a discussion of the phenomenological tradition from

Immanuel Kant to Martin Heidegger, has recently addressed this aspect in a fasci-

nating account of the deadlock of the transcendental imagination, "the abyss of

radical subjectivity announced in the Kantian transcendental imagination."4 Zizek

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" Derni,s dcssins dc J.J. Gramniville Pgeinic Rcvc. - Crine el Expi4tionAfaFlnb Pitlo"rcsuc. 1847, p. 212.

Page from Georges Bataille, Documents I,no.4 (September 1929),220:J.-J. Grandville,Frst Dream: Crime andAtonement (1847),and publicity photograph of Janet Flynn.

Janct llynn. quli puraitra poclu.neincent au T1isit du CMit 1 X.

n1ts unlc venio16 Ia,lsise (IC New Ahxil

discusses the aporia of the transcendental imagination as a way to articulate theimagination's role in giving ontological consistency to subjective experience.Whereas traditional accounts describe the imagination as an agency that eitherpassively receives images from the senses or actively posits images, the transcen-dental imagination cannot be located fully within this structure: it is both activeand passive. These two aspects are present in Kant's phenomenology, whichnonetheless places the accent on the imagination's power of synthesis, thethree-step passage from the diversity of pure intuition to conceptual cognitionthrough the synthetic power of the imagination. However, for 2izek, "Kant'snotion of imagination silently passes over a crucial 'negative' feature": that is,"imagination qua the 'activity of dissolution."' Kant downplays the imagination'sdestructive potential to focus on its constructive, synthetic power. Hegel, by con-trast, acknowledges the violence of the primordial "presynthetic imagination,"which contains a negative, disruptive feature that gives it the power to dismem-ber immediate perception into a series of partial objects. At any moment theimagination may open onto an experience of abyssal negativity that would dissolvethe ontological consistency of the world into a series of spectral images: as Hegelnotes, "here shoots a bloody head-there another white ghastly apparition."

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Page from Georges Bataille, Documents 1,no. 4 (September 1929),217: L'Eil de lapolice and Salvador Dali, Blood Is Sweeterthan Honey, 1927. @ 2004 Salvador Dali,Gala-Salvador Dali FoundationlArtistsRights Society (ARS), NewYork.

L'¢il d& 1 O , oic,pages de la couerture on rmolcurs. - 1908, Nt 26.

2. Ibid., translation modified. Bataille adds in afootnote: 'This film can be distinguished frombanal avant-garde productions, with which onemight be tempted to confuse it, in that the screen-play predominates. Several very explicit factsappear in successive order, without logical con-nection it is true, but penetratng so far into hor-ror that the spectators are caught up as directlyas they are in adventure films. Caught up andeven precisely caught by the throat, and withoutartifice; do these spectators know, in fact, wherethey-the authors of this film, or people likethem-will stop? If Bufnuel himself, after the film-ing of the slit-open eye, remained sick for a week.. . how then can one not see to what extenthorror becomes fascinatng, and how it alone isbrutal enough to break everything that sufles?"Ibid., 19, n. 1.3. Hegel, iJenaer Realphilosophie," cited in Ziiek,29-30.4. Zizek, 23.5. A link between German idealism andSurrealism can be found in German Romantcismand French Symbolism, two movements thatprofoundly influenced the Surrealist sensibility.6. Max Ernst, La femme 100 tetes (Paris: Editonsdu Carrefour, 1930); English translaton byDorothea Tanning, The Hundred-Headless Woman(New York Braziller, 1981); Histoire de l'eil parLord Auch (Paris: 1928), repr. in Georges Bataille,CEuvres completes I: Premiers Ecrits, 1922-1940(Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 9-78; English translauonbyjoachim Neugroschel as The Story of the Eye(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982).7. See, for instance, 'Corpus Delicti," in RosalindKrauss and Jane Livingstone, L'Amour fou:Photography and Surrealism (New York AbbevillePress, 1985); Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); RosalindKrauss and Yves-Alain Bois, Formless: A User'sManual (New York Zone, 1997).

Salvador Dali,L1 k an cst plus doux quc le mid (1927).Bareclonc, Coll. pnivie.

What do these questions have to do with Surrealism, a movement that

seems far removed from the ontological subtleties of Kant or Hegel?The connec-

tion is found in Surrealism's valorization of the imagination.5 The primordial

"activity of dissolution" of the presynthetic imagination is operative in Surreal-

ism, not only in the so-called dissident Surrealism commonly associated with

Bataille, but also, albeit to a lesser degree, in the practice of orthodox Surrealists

associated with Andre Breton. To demonstrate this point I will discuss two works:

Max Ernst's collage-cycle La femme loo tetes (The Hundred-HeadlessWoman) and Georges

Bataille's erotic narrative Histoire de ]'cil (The Story of the Eye). 6 Immediately, it will

appear that I have selected examples of so-called "orthodox" and "dissident"

Surrealism, inevitably recalling the Breton-Bataille polemic that has assumed a

pivotal role in recent accounts of Surrealism. 7 However, my intention here is not

to rehearse arguments about Bataille's materialism and Breton's idealism, the

uncanny, or the role of the informe; rather, I want to focus on the deadlock of the

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Andr6 Masson. Illustration for Histoire del'"el par LordAuch, 1928. Lithograph. 5"A(. x4'% in. (I4.7 x 1 1.6 cm). Source Bibliothequenationale de France. 0 2004 Artists RightsSociety (ARS), NewYorldADAGP, Paris.

8. The Breton-Bataille polemic is conventionallyinterpreted on a theoretical level as a conflictbetween Breton's idealism and Bataille's 'base"materialism; I would suggest, however, that thepolemic needs to be understood on a sociologicallevel, in which the principal cause was less theo-retcal differences than Breton's and Bataille'sproximity within the cultural avant-garde. Thisstrategy would allow a more nuanced reading ofthe polemic.9. Roland Barthes has discussed the pivotal role ofglobular objects in the unfolding of The Story ofthe Eye in his essay, "The Metaphor of the Eye."repr. in Bataille, The Story of the Eye, 1 19-27; fora criuque of Barthes's essay see Michael Halley,". . .And a Truth for a Truth: Barthes on Bataille,"in On Bataille: Critical Essays, ed. Leslie AnneBoldt-lrons (Albany SUNY Press, 1995), 285-94.10. Bataille, The Story of the Eye. 66-67, transla-tion modified; Bataille's ellipsis.I1. According to Freud the basis of a fetsh layin the disavowal of castration. See SigmundFreud, "Fetishism," in 7he Standard Edition of theComplete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,vol. 21, ed. James Sutachey (London: HogarthPress and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis,1953-66), 147-57.

imagination that both these works seek to render-a deadlock, I would argue,anterior to the question of orthodox or dissident Surrealism.8 Indeed, both TheStory of the Eye and The Hundred-HeadlessWoman address a deadlock similar to that ofthe transcendental imagination through the motif of the eye, and it is this motifthat links Surrealism with the Hegelian presynthetic "night of the world" andBataille's characterization of the eye as the limit of horror.

Georges Bataille originally published The Story of the Eye in 1928 under the pseudo-nym Lord Auch in a limited edition of 134 copies, with eight lithographic illus-trations by Andre Masson. The first-person narrative recounts the lugubriouserotic adventures of two adolescents-Simone and the unnamed male narrator-and their erotic obsession with a series of pale globular objects: a saucer of milk,eggs, bull's testes, and the eye.9 The narrative is broadly divided into two sec-tions: the first section, set on the Normandy coast, culminates with the death ofMarcelle, a young friend of Simone and the narrator. The narrative opposes theimpure and debauched Simone to Marcelle's innocence and piety, qualities thatare corrupted through contact with Simone's and the narrator's anarchic desire:Marcelle is first interned in an asylum, then driven to suicide after becomingentwined in Simone's and the narrator's erotic obsessions. The second sectiontakes place in Spain, where Simone and the narrator flee after Marcelle's death,aided by Sir Edmund, an English libertine. After a bullfight in which the famoustoreador Granero is fatally wounded, his right eye enucleated by the bull's horn,the narrative culminates in a violent orgy in a Spanish church: here the male nar-rator, Simone, and Sir Edmund kidnap, rape, and murder a priest.Yet these eventsare merely the pretext for the notorious final tableau: not yet satiated, Simonedemands the eye of the unfortunate priest, which Sir Edmund calmly excises andpresents to her; the narrator then forcefully copulates with Simone while SirEdmund rolls the eyeball between their bodies:

Simone finally left me, grabbed the beautiful eyeball from the hands of thetall Englishman, and with a steady and regular pressure from her hands, sheslid it into her slavering flesh, in the midst of the fur. And then she promptlydrew me over, clutching my neck between her arms and smashing her lipson mine so forcefully that I climaxed without touching her and my come[foutre] spat all over her fur.

Rising to my feet, I spread Simone's thighs so that she lay stretched onher side; I then found myself before what-I imagine-I had always beenwaiting for, as the guillotine awaits a neck to slice. My eyes, it seemed, werestanding erect from horror; I saw in Simone's hairy vagina, the pale blue eyeof Marcelle, watching me, weeping tears of urine.Threads of fuck in thesteaming fur managed to give this lunar vision a final character of disastroussorrow. I held Simone's thighs open and burning urine streamed out frombeneath the eye, falling on the lower thigh . . . '°

It is difficult to know what to make of this scene, which seems to confoundthe conventional Freudian narrative of fetishism and sexual difference." It repre-sents the culmination of the accelerating violence of the preceding narrative,staging an encounter with the real, the flesh from which all life originates, by

8 WINTER 2004

. . .

9 art journal

12. Cf. Jacques Lacan's commentary on Freud'sdream of Irma's injection: "There is a horrendousdiscovery here, that the flesh one never sees, thefoundation of things, the other side of the head,of the face, the secretory glands par excellence,the flesh from which everything exudes, at thevery heart of the mystery, the flesh in as much asit is suffering, is formless, in as much as its formin itself is something which provokes anxiety.Spectre of anxiety, identificaton of anxiety, thefinal revelation of you are this-You are this, whichis so far from you, this which is the ultimate formless-ness." Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I:The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique ofPsychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed. Jacques-AlainMiller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1988), 154-55.13. On the informe, see Krauss and Bois, Formless-for an alternative reading of the role of theinforme, see Georges Didi-Huberman, La Ressem.blance informe. Le Gai Savoir visuel selon GeorgesBataille (Paris: Macula, 1995); and Pierre Fedida,'The Movement of the Informe," trans. M. Stone-Richards and Ming Tiampo, Qui Parle 10 (1996):49-62.14. Ernst remained closely associated to the

"orthodox' Surrealist group around Breton untl1938, and Breton contributed a preface to La

femme 100 tetes upon its publicaton in 1930; seeAndr6 Breton, 'Notice to the Reader of TheHundred-Headless Woman," in Break of Day, trans.Mark Polizzotti and Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 45-50.15. Bataille, "The Big Toe," in Vsions of Excess, 23.This aversion to poetic transpositon was onereason why Documents employed photographicillustraton as a counterpoint to descriptve prose,precisely because photographic illustrationsappeared to suspend the process of symbolicmediaton.

conflating the eye as the origin of subjectivity (the "window of the soul") withthe female genitals as the site of castration and sexual difference. "2

In the accompanying illustration, Masson has restaged the scene to focusthe beholder's attention on Marcelle's eye. He depicts the baroque interior ofthe church with four figures (Simone, the narrator, Sir Edmund, and the deadpriest); the recumbent Simone is flanked by the standing figures of Sir Edmundand the narrator, who lean back in spasms of ecstasy so that their heads arecropped at the eye; the only full head that appears in the image is that of thedead priest, a thin stream of blood flowing from his empty eye-socket, whilethe only eye that appears is that of the priest, relocated to Simone's vagina,now animated by the memory of Marcelle.The stream of urine that flowsfrom Marcelle's eye, which echoes the emissions of Sir Edmund and the priest,emphasizes the phallic character of the eye motif.Yet there is also somethingreticent about the eye's phallicism; whereas the phallicism associated with themale characters is highly visible and localized in the central third of the compo-sition, thus emphasizing the horizontal axis of the composition, Simone's phal-lus is reduced to the oval of an eye. Perhaps the best way to describe this effectis as an instance of anamorphosis, in which the (male) beholder misperceivesthe size of Simone's phallus because of his position directly in front of the scene;yet, equally, this eye "ejaculates" when the beholder acknowledges its gaze.

It could be argued that Bataille's conflation of eye and female genitals is the con-summate operation of the informe, but this operation does not escape a certaineconomy of meaning. Is To establish this point I want to introduce an image fromErnst's The Hundred-HeadlessWoman: Germinal, my sister, the hundred-headless wvoman. (In theback-ground, in the cage, the Eternal Father). There is a subtle parallel between this imageand the final tableau in The Story of the Eye: the figure plays with the eye of a head,placed in her lap over her genitals. Now, admittedly, there is a striking differencebetween the two images, but both establish an equation between the eye, castra-tion, and the female genitals, a logic reinforced by the figure's exposed breast inErnst's image. A comparison with Masson's illustration also reveals opposed com-positional strategies. Whereas Ernst's collage is structured around the central fig-ure of Germinal, who occupies a large proportion of the composition and looksout at the beholder, Masson's illustration is structured around a central void, withthe figures pushed out toward the edges of the composition. Masson depicts thescene as a play of mechanical forces, seeking to render the event in its actuality,while Ernst relies on a psychological reading of the figure as a malevolent girl-child.

At this point it would be easy to object that, rather than establishing anyaffinity between Bataille and Ernst, this comparison merely reinforces the dis-tance between their respective positions. 4 For is not Ernst's collage an exampleof the type of poetic transposition that substitutes the idea for material realitythat Bataille would criticize in Surrealism? Had not Bataille called for "a directand explicit questioning of seductiveness, without taking into account poetic con-coctions that are, ultimately, nothing but a diversion," and stated: "A return toreality does not imply any new acceptances, but means that one is seduced in abase manner, without transpositions and to the point of screaming"?'s Even ifthis point is conceded, what is interesting here is the degree to which The Story of

10 WINTER 2004

Max Ernst. Germinal, my sister, thehundred-headless woman. (In the back-ground, In the cage, the Eternal Father), 1929.Plate 23 in La femme 100 tetes (Paris:Editions du Carrefour, 1929). 5'4% x 5'!. in.(13.5 x 13.3 cm). @ 2004 Artists RightsSociety (ARS), NewYorWADAGP, Paris

I I art journal

16. Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," 152-53.17. Bataille, Histoire de I'ceil. 13.18. The English translation renders cul as "cunt"rather than "arse," thus sacrificing this aspect ofthe French texL19. Is this not the significance of Marcelle's eye,

since when Marcelle succumbed to herjouissance,she rapidly descended into madness and suicide?20. Ernst not only used repetition to confer adegree of unity to the cycle, but the eye-motiflay at the very heart of La femme 100 tetes, itsspherical shape the nexus of an extended chainof metaphors. The motif of the eye appears inthe globe in Crime ou miracle: un homme complet(pl. I), the masked face in L'immaculee conception(pl. 12), the globe-fantfme (pl. 72,75, and 76), thespherical object ( pl. I08), and the eggs (pl. 132and 133). This list is by no means comprehensive.On the role of circular objects in The Story of theEye see Barthes, "The Metaphor of the Eye."

the Eye is already ensnared in the very logic of poetic transposition that Bataillewould criticize in Surrealism.

To illustrate this point it would help to draw out some features of the finaltableau in The Story of the Eye, particularly its perverse reworking of the Freudianscenario of castration anxiety and fetishism. According to Freud, the basis of afetish lay in the disavowal of castration: "The fetish is a substitute for the woman's(the mother's) penis that the little boy once believed in and ... does not want togive up." 16 Bataille's tableau reworks three aspects of this definition:

i. Simone first demands the priest's eye, in effect symbolically "castrating"the priest's corpse; then she literally substitutes this phallus for the narrator'spenis. If her desire is related to castration, it is a desire for the severed organ,detached from the order of nature; that is, her desire is expressed on thesymbolic level.

iB. Whereas the goal of fetishism is to disavow the absence of the maternalphallus, here the narrator wimesses the return of this phallus. However, thisreturn is as traumatic as its initial absence. This trauma is registered in apeculiar way: what the narrator sees lodged in Simone's vagina is not anyeye, and certainly not the eye of the priest-but rather Marcelle's eye.Indeed, the imagination intervenes at this precise moment, transformingthe dead eye of the priest into Marcelle's living eye.

iii.This scene also contravenes another convention of the text. On the firstpage, the narrator signals his preference for the word cul (arse) to describeSimone's genitals: "le plus joli des noms du sexe." 17 Cul represents an infan-tile confusion between vagina and anus, a confusion absent from the moreexplicitly gendered con (cunt).'8 Like the fetish, cul disavows sexual differ-ence.Yet in the scene of Marcelle's eye the narrator substitutes the descrip-tive term vagin (vagina) for cul.

What Bataille stages here is precisely the deadlock of the imagination. Theeye functions as a speculum that not only holds open the abyss of the visceralflesh of the preontological void, but simultaneously returns Marcelle's gaze. Theimagination does not simply intervene at the point where the visceral truth offeminine jouissance is about to be unveiled, but it is precisely this intervention thatpreserves the fantasy of feminine jouissance. Marcelle's eye exists for the narrator;it is how the maternal phallus-if this is what it is-appears to him, not forSimone (for whom it does not appear but is experienced on a tactile level).Indeed, the narrator knows nothing of Simone's jouissance, which remains asopaque as a dead priest's eye. 19 Here Bataille stages the proximity of seductionand horror: the horror of the gaze returned by the eye in Simone's vagina, andthe seduction of that gaze being identified with Marcelle's subjectivity.

* * .

In 1929 Ernst published The Hundred-HeadlessWoman, the first of three "collage-nov-els" he would complete during 1929-33. Like The Story of the Eye, the "narrative"of The Hundred-HeadlessWoman revolves around the circulation of a series of circularobjects like eggs, eyes, spheres, and wheels.2 0 Images of blindness and symboliccastration also abound in The Hundred-HeadlessWoman, but for Ernst they are related

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Max Ernst. The eye without eyes, the hun-dred-headless woman keeps her secret, 1929.Plate 133 in La femme 100 tetes (Paris:Editions du Carrefour, 1929). 4'M. x 5% in.(12.5 x 13.5 cm).O 2004Artists RightsSociety (ARS), NewYorWADAGP, Paris.

21. This is a recurring theme in Ernst's work;see, for instance, Les hommes n'en sauront rien(1923). See Elizabeth M. Legge, Max Ernst ThePsychoanalytical Sources (Ann Arbor UMIResearch Press, 1989), and M. E. Warlick, MaxErnst and Alchemy: A Magidan in Search of Myth(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).

to the theme of poetic revelation, a theme addressed in the book's last chapter.

Seven of the chapter's eighteen plates were based on the theme of "She keeps her

secret," which revolves around images of physical blindness and poetic insight.2 '

The plate The eye without eyes, the hundred-headless voman keeps her secret establishes the

basic topos: a female figure places her outstretched hand over the eye of a male

figure, who is flanked by a child and animals. This basic motif is repeated against

different backgrounds in subsequent plates: an egg floating on the ocean, a nat-

ural landscape, and a bedroom, suggesting different historical periods. The ges-

ture of enucleation, which first appeared in Germinal, my sister, the hundred-headless

wvoman, represents an obvious allusion to castration anxiety; yet this anxiety plays

an ambivalent role in the collage cycle.One difficulty with The Hundred-HeadlessWoman is related to the role of ambiguity

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Max Ernst. The eye without eyes, the hundred-headless woman and Loplop return to thesavage state and cover [recouvrent] the eyesof their faithful birds with fresh leaves, 1929.Plate 136 in La femme 100 tetes (Paris:Editions du Carrefour, 1929). 6Y. x 4% in.(16 x 1 1.8 cm). © 2004 Artists RightsSociety (ARS), NewYorkWADAGP, Paris.

22. Breton, Break of Day. 48.23. The original French capton reads: L'Leil sansyeux, la femme 100 tetes et Loplop retoument d l'etat sauvage et recouvrent de feuilles fraTches les yeuxde leurs fid8les aiseaux.'24. Blindness was also an element of the Oedipusmyth: "The blinding in the legend of Oedipus ...stands for castration." Sigmund Freud, TheInterpretation of Dreams, in Standard Edition, vol. 5,398, n.l.25. The mouif of regaining eyes from leaves recallsthe source textures of Ernst's frottages, particu-larly the nervations of a leaf: see, for instance,"Les Eclairs au-dessous de quartorze ans," pl. 24of Histoire naturelle (Paris: Edituons Bucher, 1926).26. This was the target of Breton's critque of therealist attitude in the Manifesto of Surrealism; seeAndre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism. trans.Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann ArborUniversity of Michigan Press, 1972), 6-10.27. The three subsequent plates continue the'She keeps her secret" theme, but the aspect ofrevelation is progressively obscured. They repeatthe industrial setting of pl. 138, but the eye motifhas been displaced in favor of bodies suspendedfrom the scaffolding. Similarly, the tiues have con-tracted to Elie garde son secret (pl. 139-40) andEJle le garde (pl. 141). Whereas the homopho-nous phrase "L'oeil sans yeux, la femme 100 tetesgarde son secret," which was based on the alliter-aton of sans, cent, and son, is open to multpleinterpretation. "Elle garde son secret" and "Elle legarde" progressively reduce the connotations ofthe phrase from "She keeps her secret" or "Shekeeps a hundred secrets" to "She keeps it' or"She keeps him."

in the cycle. Ernst carefully constructed the cycle of images to frustrate interpre-tation-what Breton called the "will towards complete disorientation" in thebook's preface-so that the act of interpretation would continue the process ofcreation. 22 An example of this strategy is evident in The eye without eyes, the hundred-headless woman and Loplop return to the savage state and cover [recouvrent] the eyes of theirfaithful birds with fresh leaves, which provides an important clue to the significanceof the "She keeps her secret" theme. This plate depicts a male and a female figuresurrounded by several gigantic birds, against a backdrop of lush vegetation.The plate repeats the enucleation gesture of the previous plates, yet reverses thegender of the protagonist: the female figure languidly rests amid the vegetation,while the male figure, whose head has assumed simian features, averts his eyesas he extends one hand toward the bird's eye, and places his other hand in thebird's open beak. Although both these gestures recall the threat of castration, thetitle provides the key to the image, particularly the double meaning of the verbrecouvrent, which is the third person plural of both recouvrir (to cover) and recouvrer(to regain).2 3 Thus, in the first case the title would read: "The hundred-headlesswoman and Loplop return to the savage state and cover the eyes of their faithfulbirds with fresh leaves"; in the second case it would read: "The hundred-headlesswoman and Loplop return to the savage state and regain the eyes of their faithfulbirds from the fresh leaves."

The eye-motif in The Hundred-HeadlessWoman functions as an image of bothrevelation and concealment, vision and blindness. If the blinding of an eye isinterpreted in a strict Freudian sense in terms of symbolic castration and sexualdifference, then the image establishes an equation between vision and the phal-lus, on the one hand, and blindness and the absent phallus, on the other hand.24Thus the first interpretation suggests a scene of castration and blindness: thefigure's gesture is one of enucleation, the bird is about to bite his hand, and thetitle suggests that he covers the bird's eye with leaves.Yet this oedipal gaze isitself a form of blindness that drains the world of mystery and enigma, reducingit to an object of rational knowledge.The second interpretation suggests a sceneof poetic revelation: in this context the male figure recovers the bird's eye fromthe leaves, in effect restoring sight to the blind.25 This interpretation not onlysuspends the Freudian allusions to castration, but suggests the existence of otherforms of knowledge capable of challenging the proportion and ratio of bour-geois culture.?6

A number of themes in The Hundred-HeadlessWoman converge in the followingplate, again entitled The eye without eyes, the hundred-headless woman keeps her secret, whichdepicts a female figure with a large eye in her abdomen looking at an ambigu-ous, anthropomorphic form set in an industrial environment. The workers in thebackground carry out their labors oblivious to the foreground, where the femalefigure contemplates an anthropomorphic form, placing her hand over its headin a repetition of the enucleation gesture.Yet this figure lacks eyes; it is simply aninchoate texture almost devoid of human physiognomy. Once again the signifi-cance of the anthropomorphic figure is ambivalent: on one hand it may havebeen blinded and transformed into stone; on the other hand, its evocative texturerecalls Ernst's frottages, suggesting another site of poetic revelation.2 7 Furthermore,the association of the eye with the woman's abdomen conflates eye and womb,suggesting the matrix of the female body as the site of poetic revelation, a theme

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28. Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vncnd and aMetnory of His Childhood, in Standard Edition,vol. II ,57-137.29. On Emst's involvement with Leonardo's vul-ture, see Wemer Spies, Max Ernst-Loplop: TheArtist's Other Self (London: Thames and Hudson,1983), 101-06.30. 'Je suis tente d'y voir l'exploitation de larencontre fortuite de deux realites distantes sur unplan non-convenant . .. ou pour user d'un termeplus court, la culture des effets d'un depaysement

that also recalls the immaculate-conception theme of the opening chapter of TheHundred-Headless Woman.

A second glance at this image reveals a third figure. Ernst has collaged abeaklike protuberance on the left-hand corner of the eye, so that the eye motifalso suggests the figure of a bird emerging from the woman's skirt, like thefamous vulture hidden in folds of drapery in Leonardo's Madonna and Child withSt.Anne discussed by Freud. 8 Ernst had earlier alluded to this vulture in the paint-ing ThelVirgin Mary Punishing the Infant Jesus beforeThreeWitnesses (AB, PE, and the Painter).29Indeed, in this context the collage exemplifies Ernst's description of the mecha-nism of collage: by grafting the eye-motif onto the woman's figure, Ernst pro-duces a "fortuitous meeting" between these elements: woman and eye engage ina "pure act like that of love," which engenders the bird.30The sexual character of

the image is highlighted by the nude female figure swinging from the rafters,who approaches the bird's phallic beak.

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systematique.... La transmutation completesuivie d'un acte pur comme celul d'amour, seproduira forcement toutes les fois que les condi-tons seront rendues favorables par les faits don-nees: accouplement de deux realites en apparenceinaccouplables sur un plan qui en apparence ne leurconvient pas." Ernst, "Au-delA de la peinture,"Ecitures (Paris: Gallimard,'1970), 253-56.31. There are clear parallels here with the roleof repetiton in the work of Lacan: as the missedencounter in which the automaton of representa-tion encounters the tuche of the Real. See JacquesLacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. AlanSheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), par-ticularly 48-64.32. The principal cause behind this reading layin the polemics on Surrealism in Tel Quel during1968-73, which valorized the writings of Batailleand Antonin Artaud against those of Breton. Thisreading would significantly influence the receptionof Bataille in the English-speaking world. On TelQuel, see Philippe Forest, Histoire de Tel Quel,1960-1982 (Paris: Seuil, 1995).33. See, for instance, Foster, Compulsive Beauty,106, and Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellec-tual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski andMichael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002), 106.34. Letter from Andre Breton to Simone Breton,dated August 18, 1928, cited in Andr6 Breton: Labeaut6 convulsive, exh. cat., ed. Agnes Angliviel dela Beaumelle and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine (Paris:Mus6e national d'art modeme, 1991), 188.

In the wake of the foregoing analysis, it is perhaps time to restate my argument

that the positions of Bataille and Ernst (and by extension Breton) are comple-

mentary rather than antagonistic. Although it is easy to characterize Ernst's use of

collage as an example of poetic transposition and contrast it with the uncompro-

mising character of Bataille's writing, to do so would sacrifice what is truly radi-

cal in the travail of the image in Surrealism. The key to a profound reading of

both the The Story of the Eye and The Hundred-HeadlessWoman is to recognize the eye as

an image of the imagination in its disruptive and constructive aspects, of seduc-

tion and horror. The eye is a highly charged object, and the beholder experiences

assaults against it viscerally-something readily evident to any spectator of Un

Chien andalou. In Surrealism, however, it functions as a veil over the preontological

realm of part-objects, the H-Iegelian "night of the world." Any attempt to rend

this veil only results in blindness and castration; yet as a veil the eye also acts as

a screen upon which fantasies can be projected, as in the example of Marcelle's

eye in The Story of the Eye or in the final chapter of The Hundred-HeadlessWoman.

Bataille would repeatedly attempt to take the impossible step beyond con-

ceptual thought to disclose the mechanism behind symbolization, the place

where the image emerges from the abyss of nothingness. 3 ' In keeping with the

dualistic character of Bataille's thought, he opposes rational knowledge to the

immediacy of experience, discovering in the latter something that exceeds the

limits of reason (and thus representation).Yet Bataille is unable to articulate this

experience directly without recourse to the agency of the imagination, albeit as

the "activity of dissolution" that 2izek discerns in the deadlock of the transcen-

dental imagination. In The Story of the Eye, he renders this deadlock through the

figure of Marcelle's eye, and it is at this point that Bataille's work is closest to

Surrealism. Similarly, in The Hundred-HeadlessWoman Ernst turns to the image of

the eye to render the deadlock of the Surrealist imagination through the theme

of vision and blindness.Yet in place of Bataille's attempt to arrest the process

of symbolization, Ernst reconfigures the eye on a thematic level as a symbol of

revelation, transforming blindness into illumination.

Finally, what does this reading contribute to our understanding of the Breton-

Bataille polemic? I believe it demonstrates an underlying affinity between Bataille

and Surrealism, the degree to which his thought was consonant with Surrealism.

Since the late 196os discussions of Surrealism have repeatedly emphasized the

distance between Bataille and Surrealism.32 What these accounts share is the

assumption that Breton was automatically and innately hostile to anything trans-

gressive. Indeed, it is commonly assumed that Breton rejected The Story of the Eye as

an example of the base materialism to which he was constitutionally adverse.33

Yet, surprisingly, Breton was an enthusiastic reader of the book upon its publica-

tion, as recorded in a letter to his wife, dated August 1928:

Just published, in the same collection as Aragon's book [i.e., Le con d'lrene],

is a book by Bataille, by Georges Bataille: Histoire de l'eil, par Lord Auch. It is

absolutely marvelous. It is not only the most beautiful erotic book that I

know, but it is also one of the seven or so most beautiful books that I have

read.... The intellectual event of the year.34

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High praise indeed.This is 1928, the year Maurice Nadeau described as the"year of achievements": Breton had just published Le Surrealisme et la peinture andNadja, Louis Aragon had published Traite du style, Ernst and Joan Mir6 had just heldsuccessful exhibitions.3 5Yet against these achievements, Breton still describesThe Story of the Eye as "absolutely marvelous" and "the intellectual event of theyear." If nothing else, this letter underlines the proximity between Bataille andSurrealism.36

Many themes in this paper recall recent discussions of the uncanny inSurrealism, but I want to distance my interpretation from these readings. It is notthat these readings are incorrect, but rather that they do not go far enough; theysucceed in transposing Surrealism from an aesthetic context to a psychoanalyticalcontext, yet evade the socio-political dimension that was always central to theSurrealist enterprise. Nor do I claim that my interpretation escapes the uncanny,since it undoubtedly revolves around failure and repetition. What I'm attemptingto do is simply open the terms of the debate, to identify the articulation betweenthe aesthetic, the social, and the political in Surrealism, and, more important, tosuggest that Surrealism's failure was as much sociological as psychological. Inpractical terms this means engaging with the minutiae of historical experience,recovering the contemporaneity of the Surrealist enterprise: that is, to encounterthe deadlock of the Surrealist imagination anew with the hope that its promisewill one day be redeemed.

Raymond Spiteri is Lecturer in Art History at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Hecoedited Surrealism, Politics, and Culture (Ashgate. 2003) and is currently working on a study of theBreton-Bataille polemic.

35. Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism,trans. Richard Howard (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1989), 143; Andre Breton,Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism,trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York. Marlowe,1993), 105.

36. It is worth noing that Simone Breton sharedher name with the protagonist in The Story of theEye, which may have colored Breton's perceptionof the narrative. Furthermore, Breton's acrimo-nious divorce from Simone in 1929 contributedto the polarization of the Surrealist movementinto antagonistic factions, since the Surrealistswho sided with Simone would also form thenucleus of the 'dissident" Surrealist group (MaxMorise. Raymond Queneau, Robert Desnos,Jacques Baron, Roland Tual) who would gatheraround Documents after the publication ofBreton's Second Manifesto in December 1929.On Breton's divorce, see Mark Polizzotti, Revolu-tion of the Mind: The life of Andre Breton (London:Bloomsbury, 1996),308-24.

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TITLE: Envisioning Surrealism in Histoire de l’œil and Lafemme 100 têtes

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