WorldWarITrauma(Warninggraphicimages.Ifyouhavesensitivitiestoviolenceandgore,youmightwanttokeepscrolling.)

BritishSoldiersOperatingaVickersMachineGun,BattleoftheSomme,July1916.

GasMasksMachineGun

WorldWarICasualtiesontheBattlefield,France,1914.

Onthe1916Frontalone…

850,000Germans

700,000French

400,000British

Photographsandreconstructiondrawingsofwarinjuries,c.1917

50 I AMY LYFORD

set-its visceral charge emphasizes trauma as something permanent, static, endless (figure 2). When set into a visual narrative of thera- peutic reconstruction (placed next to other stages in the treatment process), one reads the moulage as a stage of recovery instead of a fact of physical trauma (figure 3). By reading the moulages from left to right (from before to after), one sees the injured body as an object that appears to erase its own violation. The violence embodied by a single moulage is repressed in their sequencing as part of an evolu- tionary chain.

The fragments of soldier's bodies displayed at the museum oper- ated like parts of speech, with each body part conforming to the rules that bound the collection's discourse about social reconstruction. Val- de-Grace shaped that discourse around the indisputable facts of the war while simultaneously transforming those facts (body parts) into embodiments of the state's commitment to social progress. Individ- ual loss and suffering was replicated for the museum's audience as the grounds for collective regeneration. Yet somewhere between the facts of dismemberment and this rhetoric of reconstruction was the space of ideological construction, and it was this space that I imagine

Figure 2. Moulage (painted plaster), Mus:e du Val-de-GrAce, Paris. Photo courtesy of Musce du service de sant6 des Arm6es, Val-de-GrAce, Paris.

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Figure 1. Salle Morestin, Muske du Val-de-GrIce, Paris, 1916. Photo courtesy of Mus&e d'Histoire Contemporaine-BDIC, Paris.

Waxcastsofwarinjuries,Val-de-GraceMuseum,c.1917

THE AESTHETICS OF DISMEMBERMENT | 51

surrealism might have viewed as a vehicle for cultural critique. If progress was to be demonstrated using the bodies of French soldiers, could surrealism counter that proposal by showing how the body was being used to fabricate political consent? Not only were Aragon and Breton likely to have been among the museum's first viewers, but they apparently grasped the implications of its displays. The logic of an aesthetic of dismemberment was something that they and their cohort would later deploy as a sharp, political weapon." The collections of Val-de-Grace proposed a grammar of the human body that parsed the human form into pieces that could be manipulated for aesthetic purpose just as words and parts of speech were mobi- lized in the process of poetic construction.12 In this way, dismember- ment became one of surrealism's primary aesthetic models.

What is significant about the museum of Val-de-Grace for surre- alism is the fact that the collection fabricated an iconography of re- construction that was based upon the visual display of body parts. My claim is polemical and aims to question the implications of such an iconography for surrealist imagery. While we cannot know how and to what degree the museum's rhetoric specifically was of concern to surrealist makers, the collection's imagery and organization gener- ated a structural conflict that often appears in surrealist art and liter- ature. Surrealism mined the gap between trauma and repair and made it visible. In its formation of an aesthetic practice aimed at critiquing

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Figure 3. Pair of moulages (painted wax), Musee du Val-de-Grace, Paris. Photo courtesy of Musee du service de sante des Armees, Val-de-Grace, Paris. Waxcastsofwarinjuries,Val-de-GraceMuseum,c.1917

Britishsoldiersufferingfrom“shellshock”,c.1917.

Over80,000Britishsoldiers sufferedfrom“shellshock.”