CLAUDE CAHUN: CONTEXT, POSTURE, FILIATION. FOR AN AESTHETICS OF THE IN-BETWEEN

Book Review par Agnès Lhermitte

In his biographical, historical, philosophical and literary essay Claude Cahun – L'exotisme intérieur (Fayard, 2006), which remains a sum and a reference of erudition and interpretation, François Leperlier tells how Lucy Schwob (1894-1954), niece of the symbolist writer Marcel Schwob, ended up choosing the pseudonym of Claude Cahun, the epicene first name and the paternal grandmother's surname signaling a double desire for displacement and neutrality. How she progressively freed herself from family culture to approach great contemporaries like Michaux, Bataille, Crevel, Man Ray, Desnos, Tzara, Breton. How she participated in avant-garde movements in magazines, experimental theater, revolutionary struggle. How, alongside the surrealists, she developed an original work-life based on a constantly renewed staging of self through photography, writing, the stage... Regarding this artist and writer's production, exhibitions, articles and communications have multiplied for fifteen years, on both sides of the Atlantic, in perspectives oscillating between ideology and aesthetics.

For the first time, a university collective is devoted to her, which takes into account Claude Cahun's complexity and her interpretations to the point of placing the work under the sign of "the in-between." This announces both the "pendulum movement" that seizes the "looker-reader" of an intrinsically double and transitory work, and the author's persistent will to "undefine" herself, to push aside borders, to escape norms and genres. Andrea Oberhuber has enriched the study day organized in May 2004 at the University of Montreal, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the author's death, with diverse contributions aimed at grasping and contextualizing Claude Cahun's approach: "the invention of self through artistic transformation." An elliptical wordplay very much in Cahun's manner titles the introductory chapter: "ENTRE" conjugates the invitation and the emblematic space of the studied work.

The first part deepens the study of the creation's context. The in-between concerns first of all the close and fruitful collaboration of Claude Cahun and her life companion, the graphic designer "Marcel Moore" (Suzanne Malherbe). The latter is not only the author of the illustrations of Cahun's first collection, Vues et visions (1919), but the co-author of the photomontages that accompany Aveux non avenus (1930) and numerous photographic self-portraits of Claude. Challenging the model of individual genius, Tirza True Lartimer highlights, for this unprecedented project, a "creative partnership," which echoes, in certain representations, a "subject-couple." The Cahun-Moore relationship arouses numerous analyses focused on sexual identity and the lesbian couple. Jean-Michel Devésa situates this couple in relation to the surrealist group, globally hostile to homosexuality, as René Crevel had experienced. Then, commenting on the analyses of François Leperlier, Elisabeth Lebovici and Marie-Jo Bonnet, he cautiously confronts Claude Cahun's refusal of sexual identity with queer claims and current gender studies analyses. Because the "ambiguous process" that constitutes her perpetual transvestism seems to him above all a work on signs. Moreover, the couple had engaged in the struggle against fascism and Nazism. Members of the AEAR (Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists), they nevertheless rejected Aragon's propaganda, criticized in Les Paris sont ouverts (1934), in the name of an "indirect action" supported by poetry's specific virtues. They applied this principle in a totally original way during their resistance activity against the German occupier on the island of Jersey, where they had settled in 1937. Lizzie Thynne dismantles the mechanism of subversion that makes this "good propaganda" a poetic creation analogous to the rest of the work, and faithful to the dada and surrealist spirit. Through parodic détournement, masked identity, reversal and humor, they provoke the enemy's conscience to sabotage totalitarian ideology from within.

The second part proposes analyses of Cahun's work that emphasize the dialogue, within her intermedial practice, of writing and plastic expression. Rolph Lohse makes doubling, central in Cahun, the structural framework of the illustrated collection Vues et visions, oscillating between analogies and differences. This figure renews the prose poem form by arousing an "intertextuality in praesentia." In fact, the play of mirrors characterizes all writings, particularly Héroïnes (1925), a series of subversive rewritings of ancient and biblical narratives or tales, enunciated by the speech of a sadistic or masochistic female character. Between anamorphosis and ekphrasis, Georgiana M.M. Colville sees literary self-portraits where Claude Cahun's original existential and sexual malaise is expressed obliquely. Joëlle Papillon completes the reflection by showing how these new Heroïdes, provocative desiring women, demystify and contest social discourse on the feminine. Aveux non avenus, whose eloquent title combines paronomasia and oxymoron, is a carnivalesque parade that plays with genres and where a painful and problematic identity marked by lack multiplies at will. Elusive except through fleeting flashes, the self takes for example the mask of the actor, the double or the child, according to Catherine Baron's reading. To this tour of Cahun's bovarysme, one could add Narcisse .. ou Dieu. Similarly, studies are still missing on the splendid unfinished autobiography entitled by F. Leperlier Confidences au miroir.

An abundant third part widens the perspective by situating Claude Cahun's approach in a sort of imaginary filiation that organizes, from the 19th to the end of the 20th century, a masquerade of singular women, author-artists attached to fabricating entirely a subjective, spectacular, evolving identity. The ancestor would be, under photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson's lens, the theatrical Countess of Castiglione, presented by Andrea Oberhuber. Irene Gammel, Elsa Adamowicz and Nadine Schwakopf then propose parallel analyses of three virtual "sisters" of Cahun: Baroness Elsa, New York dadaist with shaved head, pioneer of ready-made and performance, Hannah Höch, contestatory Berlin dadaist, and Unica Zürn, tormented companion of Hans Bellmer and the surrealists in 1950s Paris. Finally Maïté Snauwaert brings together with Cahun's the contemporary "autofictionalization" approach of Sophie Calle. All these eccentrics constructed themselves through a representation of the kaleidoscopic, polymorphic body always rebellious to generic constraints as well as social conformisms. These studies sometimes complete with finesse the approach to Claude Cahun, and the established parallels cannot prevent concluding with the paradoxical exception of she who was neither courtesan nor psychotic, neither uninhibited exhibitionist, nor reducible to feminist and political struggles, but whose "abysmal" and "suspended" body remained above all the object of an intimate hunt.

The work is punctuated by the reproduction of six photographic self-portraits chosen from the Jersey heritage trust and revealing Claude Cahun's existential and aesthetic postures in their diversity: on the cover, provocation and derision of the "Self-portrait" Don't kiss me, then multiplied synecdoche of hands ("Untitled"), humoristic theater of objects on sand ("Entre nous"), frontal but masked nudity in another "Self-portrait," inverted longilinear siamese twins back to back, like two seaweeds on rock ("Untitled"). At the work's close, in the frame of a window open on a dark background, two figures pose, frozen in parallel in their black cape: an empty mannequin and a pale Claude with closed eyes ("Self-portrait").

The reader-spectator, for his part, emerges on the contrary happily destabilized, eyes and mind more open.