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Abstract
When Antonin Artaud wrote about “the gods that sleep in museums,” he could have been describing André Breton's personal collection, which included the kinds of non-Western works Artaud admired in what were then museums of ethnography. Such objects were plentiful in Breton's study and included shape-shifting animals such as the Haida transformation mask Breton wrote about in 1950, whose features move back and forth from human to animal, recognizing the common spiritual connection between the two in a material representation of the concept of the totem animal embraced by several surrealists—the fish for Breton, the bird for Max Ernst, the horse for Leonora Carrington, the dog for Dorothea Tanning. This article examines how the surrealists’ talismanic animal totems, reflected in their love of non-Western spiritually infused objects, anticipated the current trend in animal studies to expand the human understanding of consciousness in light of animal–human commonalities.
Notes
1. In the first of the famous lettres du voyant, Rimbaud follows his statement with the comparison of the poet to a violin, a piece of wood possessed (not necessarily voluntarily) by music: “Je EST un autre. Tant pis pour le bois qui se trouve violon” (249). Two days later, Rimbaud followed this letter to Georges Izambard with one to Paul Demeny in which he repeats the formula, this time evoking a trumpet: “Si le cuivre s’éveille clairon, il n’y a rien de sa faute. Cela m’est évident: j’assiste à l’éclosion de ma pensée: je la regarde, je l’écoute” (250).
2. See Neel Ahuja, Kimberly Benston, Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, and Marianne DeKoven's contributions to PMLA 124.2.
3. Breton described himself and his companions in the newly formed group as “les sourds réceptacles de tant d’échos, les modestes appareils enregistreurs” (Œuvres complètes 1: 330). See the Introduction.
4. See Cowling (488) and the entire essay for more detail about the objects in Breton and Eluard's collections.
5. See Price. I thank Katherine Hart, Juliette Bianco, and Brian Kennedy for discussing this question with me at length.
6. Jonathan Eburne brilliantly explains these postwar surrealist politics in “Antihumanism and Terror: Surrealism, Theory, and the Postwar Left” (39–51); see also the conclusion to Surrealism and the Art of Crime (266–76).
7. See Mileaf's thorough study of the contradictions between surrealist politics and collecting practices in “Body to Politics,” in which she argues that the surrealists believed in the functionality of the objects they collected, mitigating their view of these things as merely aesthetic (252). See also Sophie Leclercq's study, La rançon du colonialisme. I have argued this contradictory behavior as it applied to their views of women in “Surrealism's Ghostly Automatic Body” and “Safe as Houses.” See also Mary Ann Caws's now classic essay, “Ladies Shot and Painted.”
8. “Les poètes, les artistes se rencontrent avec les savants au sein de ces ‘champs de force’ créés dans l’imagination par le rapprochement de deux images différentes. Cette faculté de rapprochement des deux images leur permet de s’élever au-dessus de la considération de la vie manifeste de l’objet, qui constitue généralement une borne” (“Crise” 22).
9. This letter to Doucet from December 12, 1924, was reproduced in the two-volume catalogue published by the Picasso Museum in Paris (Seckel 2: 590).
10. Breton explains that he is attracted to places that include the word dolphin as an alternative to fish: Breton and Nadja meet for dinner at the Place Dauphine and then go Le Dauphin restaurant and café (Œuvres complètes 1: 698).
11. My thanks to Marian Eide, Richard Stamelman, Meryl Altman, and Dennis Manos for their comments on this article.
12. For example, Ernst used illustrations for Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo from La Revue des deux mondes. See Spies 38.
13. See also Deloria 117, n. 27.
14. See Lévi-Strauss and Eribon for anecdotes about these purchases (31, 33). In Jean-Michel Gouthier's 2003 edition of the auction catalogue of Breton's possessions, Pierre Amrouche confirms that Carlebach's shop, which had been discovered by Ernst, had “une source inépuisable de trésors obtenus par échange à la Heye Fondation” (17). Women surrealists also bought masks from Carlebach, as Terri Geiss and Rita Eder had discovered (167 and talk delivered in Mexico City, October 10, 2012).
15. Cheng argues “that the avant-garde's recuperation of the mask has [ … ] resuscitated the transcultural value of the third-person, whose historical marginalization in the West must be held partially responsible for the rift between modern Europe and the cultures that became victims to its various forms of social, political, and spiritual violence” (83).
16. See Mileaf 239 (and entire article).
17. I argue in Surrealist Ghostliness, my forthcoming book from University of Nebraska Press, that the photographer Claude Cahun also asks the question “how we know” in a surrealist context, pushing the French masculine singular notion of the human in the 1920s from the perspective of gender, most particularly in her photograph Frontière humaine from 1930.
18. Several pieces purchased from Carlebach by the surrealists, including Breton, are now in the collection of the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.
19. Breton's Haida mask is featured in the Quai Branly's Chefs-d’ œuvre books as coming from Breton's collection (as well as his Yup’ik, anthropomorphic mask; 86–87).
20. The mask of Breton's face is now owned by the Menil Foundation in Houston. The placement of masks of his own face and that of Eluard next to his Haida and Haisla masks may be seen in a photograph by Gilles Ehrmann in Gracq and Ehrmann.
21. Breton's article was originally published in June 1950 in Neuf (revue de la Maison de la Médecine, numéro 1). It is reproduced in Gouthier 143–44.
22. Originally in Buraud 96–97.
23. I have not found out yet to whom this mask once belonged or whose mask it was supposed to resemble.
24. Animal-to-animal examples hang in the room, too, such as a mask that shows the coexistence of a wolf and a caribou (above the Hopi mask on the back wall).
25. Carpenter made this unreleased video as he was working on the Witnesses Room in November 2000. I thank Menil archivist Geri Aramanda, her assistant Amy Chien, and Kristin Van Dyke for giving me access to the archive.
26. I cite here from Derrida's talk published after the conference on “l’animal autobiographique” at Cerisy-la-Salle (1999), later translated by David Wills as “The Animal That I Am (More to Follow),” and not from the book Derrida subsequently published in 2006.
27. See my “Rrose Sélavy's Ghosts” 967.
28. Benston clearly is not using the term “reciprocity” in the same way as Jonathan Eburne; in “Leonora Carrington, Mexico, and the Culture of Death,” Eburne opposes the notion of reciprocity (linked to the Mexican Cult of the Dead) to mortality as a non-Western challenge to Western assumptions, which Carrington deploys with black humor, enacting the triumph of Mexico's pre-Columbian “economy of death” over European attempts to eradicate non-European culture through colonialism (30–31).
29. See also Effie Rentzou's essay in this issue of Symposium.
30. This talk was first published in Les Temps Modernes 6.58 (August 1950): 357–74.
31. See Mileaf and Jolles for their analyses of “La Vérité sur les colonies,” the surrealist anticolonialist exhibition of 1931.
32. See my Automatic Woman as well as the issue of the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas devoted to women surrealists.