ON THE EROS OF SURREALIST WOMEN AND CLAUDE CAHUN IN PARTICULAR
Among surrealists, the loved woman, ambiguous, is, in turn, the lukewarm inhabitant of the cocoon and that of the outer space where the strident soul is alarmed by its own lucidity; sometimes too carnal creature, venomous, public rose, sometimes Nadja with eyes ringed in black, sorceress, sibyl, mediator of the invisible.
But perhaps she will know, does she already know how to assume both roles simultaneously? (Then masculine categories will no longer be worth much, and men will be afraid)
The ambiguity of the female woman communicates itself to the love of which she is the object or accomplice.
This quote confirms the ambiguity of surrealist women's situation and concerning eroticism, one could say they had their ass between two chairs and other stools...
Before addressing Claude Cahun's specific case, I would like to talk a little about their relationship to eroticism and the hiatus between their status as objects of desire and eroticism within the group as well as in the literary or artistic production of their partners and their search for an identity as a desiring subject with their own eros, mainly through their own art.
In 1960 appeared an unsigned erotic novel, entitled La Confession anonyme. It had a scandalous success, because Eros is presented there as part of a mystical quest from which all morality would be excluded. It was quickly sold out and the author was identified as Suzanne Lilar, a Belgian novelist (1901-1992), of the same generation as the eldest surrealist women, born between 1887 (Valentine Hugo) and 1907 (Lise Deharme, Leonor Fini, and Frida Kahlo); between these two dates one finds Claude Cahun, Denise Naville, Simone Breton, Valentine Penrose, Kay Sage, Eileen Agar, Toyen, Marcelle/Lila Ferry, Alice Rahon, and Elisa Breton; however, they did not all join the group during the twenties...
Around 1980, the Belgian filmmaker André Delvaux (1926-2002), an unconfessed surrealist who preferred to claim allegiance to Magical Realism, borrowed a copy of La Confession anonyme, which he devoured in one sleepless night and proposed a screen adaptation to Lilar the very next day. An exemplary collaboration, two years of intimate conversations, almost a platonic love between the old novelist and the filmmaker in the prime of life ensued, then a film, Benvenuta, of great richness, synesthetic, where surrealism and magical realism meet ↑. Delvaux juxtaposes and puts in abyme the story of the creators and the passionate, violent, and complicated liaison between the protagonists Benvenuta (Fanny Ardant), a young Ghent pianist, and Livio (Vittorio Gassman), a graying Italian magistrate.
This configuration cannot help but recall the numerous surrealist couples that formed and dissolved according to the years and encounters, couples of lovers, doubled by couples of artists, whose very variable collaboration Renée Riese-Hubert studies in her book Magnifying Mirrors ↑. The film brought Lilar out of the shadows and she then expressed herself on feminine Eros in a very interesting way in various interviews ↑. She spoke of her collaborator's "anima": "André is double, he also has a very feminine sensitivity" (ibid.), defined her personal perception of Eros as "The mystical line," and further affirms: "I know that in feminine Eros, which is very different from masculine Eros, there is a tendency toward abdication (...) a jouissance in submission," then added that it had taken her a long time to understand:
that this existed in love, that it represented one of the constants of feminine Eros, but that this relationship only has meaning if it is played. It is only beautiful in theater and revealing without masochism (...) it is indeed this theatrical experience of the ceremonial of love that makes Benvenuta able to receive slaps in the face. She knows well that after love she leaves the room free and that she will resume the concerts where she is applauded and celebrated. She is a free woman and Livio wanted her thus (ibid.).
A critic qualifies Livio's love as "tender sadism." The protagonist nevertheless reveals a psychological violence in the sequence where he confronts Benvenuta with a fresco representing the sadistic initiation of a young girl at the Villa of Mysteries in Pompeii. She finds herself entirely there, as in 1953 Unica Zürn had immediately recognized herself in Bellmer's Doll, who had simultaneously thought that Unica incarnated his creature.
The "mystical line" evoked by Lilar can be applied to a certain discourse of surrealists about love. I will take up on this subject a passage from my article on clouds in Mélusine XXV:
Like courtly love of the Middle Ages and romantic love, surrealist love retains a mystical aura. For Benjamin Péret, woman "releases the sacred as she calls love" ↑ and Sarane Alexandrian indicates that around 1924 the group of young surrealists "begins to consider love as a promise of the marvelous' ↑, then that later they considered the couple's dynamic as the desire for a common ascension (ibid.: 247). Also Benayoun remarks that among surrealists "the language of love becomes that of religion itself: there is no longer any question but of cult, adoration, ecstasy, and communion" ↑.
Thus Simone Breton wrote to her cousin Denise Lévy in November 1923 about André Breton: "He is the altar and the unique depositary of my faith" ↑ and she refers to a privileged moment of her relationship with Max Morise as "Miracle... as (operated) by a Christian, spiritual Aphrodite, who gives love" ↑. One also thinks, among other examples, of the poetic and anaphoric litany that Frida Kahlo addresses to Diego Rivera in her journal or of the unconditional adoration that Kay Sage still devoted to Yves Tanguy after his death ↑.
Among certain surrealist women, the sacred is accompanied by transgression in Bataille's sense, against religion, morality, and society, or again, among others, in Lilar's sense, against their own ideal of purity (Lilar conceives chastity as a rule "and making love (as) the marvelous exception, the transgression from time to time") (cited interview). One could see in this perspective the few adventures of Simone Breton and notably her liaison with Morise, when Breton neglected or infantilized her, as during the Germaine Berton affair:
I know so well that I would be different if he treated me differently, and that thus I will always be a child. And when I think of killing myself, or of doing some great action I can only imagine it outside of him, in opposition to him (Simone Breton, op. cit., p. 166, Dec. 24, 1923).
Let us not forget that the "woman child' was a masculine fantasy, in which very few women recognized themselves. All in all, in her letters, Simone often expresses a nostalgia for impossible monogamy with Breton:
André – why was it not possible for me to live only for him? I sometimes think that if I love others it is still for him. He is an essential being. He alone animates life for me (SB, op. cit., p. 218, December 13, 1924).
Sexual transgression manifested itself through a variety of behaviors. Léonor Fini liked to surround herself with a court of often homosexual men whom she dominated. The surrealist group sometimes practiced wife-swapping, which happened in 1937 in Cornwall, at Roland Penrose's instigation, whose relationship with Lee Miller (still Madame Eloui-Bey) had just begun. The rest of this group consisted of Paul and Nusch Éluard, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin, Eileen Agar and Joseph Bard, Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington (who had also just met) and a few others. The festival of Eros and nudism continued the same summer, this time under Picasso's auspices, who was then living with Dora Maar, on the French Riviera, in Antibes, Juan les Pins, and Mougins. Agar recounts in her memoirs that the Spanish painter invited them to change not only partners but also names and identity. She regrets "that no trace remains of the women's reaction to this game," even if they appreciated the freedom of these carnivalesque holidays. Agar emphasizes the surrealists' double standard toward their companions ↑, giving as an example Breton who preferred to ignore his wife Jacqueline Lamba's painterly talent, wanting her to play the role of the poet's muse, or again Man Ray, who proved incapable of accepting his companion Lee Miller's egalitarian sexual freedom.
As for theatricality, one finds a ritual sense of parade among surrealist women. According to Agar, their elegance testified more to their adherence to the group's philosophy than to a seduction strategy:
Our juxtaposition of a Schiaparelli dress and scandalous conversation or behavior only made public the very principles of surrealism (ibid.)
As for sadomasochism, it is difficult to differentiate between reality and fantasies, between art and life. The cult of the "Divine Marquis' represented an above all intellectual attitude, which inspired texts and illustrations to certain women, like Nora Mitrani, Toyen, Annie le Brun, and to a lesser degree Mimi Parent. When he found Lee Miller after the war, Roland Penrose offered her a pair of gold handcuffs from Cartier, because neither he nor his partners hid the fact that he invariably tied up all those with whom he made love. Men were generally the initiators of this kind of behavior, of which women frequently remained the passive and/or submissive object. This pattern was set up from the encounter, because for surrealists, as Sarane Alexandrian notes: "Woman is made to be met and man to meet her" (op. cit., p. 218). Also Breton opposed the presence of women during the sexuality research meetings that lasted from January 1928 to August 1932. Seven women nevertheless participated but only in the three sessions of November 1930 and they were the companions of some of the men, none of them artists or writers, except Nusch Éluard who made collages ↑. It is interesting to note that Breton, despite his refusal to consider the woman's point of view, was then living a passionate erotic relationship with Suzanne Muzard, who reversed the roles by submitting him to her comings and goings between him and Emmanuel Berl, whom she hastened to marry as soon as the divorce from Simone, which she had demanded from the poet, was pronounced.
Doubtless the men of surrealism did not want, for the most part, to mix dishcloths with napkins, that is to say their fascination for the idea of a completely liberated Eros (although Breton had prescribed male homosexuality), for all sexual perversions, for woman giving herself as spectacle, mad women, criminal women, and other witches — at a distance — with their companions whom they loved, for the most part, in a rather possessive, therefore conventional way. Xavière Gauthier was the first to note representations of perversions not only among male surrealists, but also among certain women, although she limited herself to Joyce Mansour, certainly one of the most important, to Leonor Fini and Dorothéa Tanning with her strange obsession for Tibetan dogs. Today we know many others, most of whom follow two tendencies: humor in eroticism and a sort of autobiographical confession closer to Lilar, genres that can be literary or iconographic. Humor sometimes takes the form of black humor as Breton advocated, like Joyce Mansour's black and lubricious tales, certain bizarre or grotesque photos of Dora Maar, Kay Sage's absurd and slangy poems, the objects of Meret Oppenheim, Eileen Agar, and Mimi Parent ("Maîtresse"), Nora Mitrani's caustic texts or Nelly Kaplan's parodic ones, and certain of Leonora Carrington's half-human, half-animal tales, like "La Débutante"; others produced a more pink and more mischievous humor.
Judith Reigl (born in 1923), a Hungarian artist who spent three years in the movement, wrote in 55, the year she left it, still impregnated with automatism images:
The representation of woman will be a dynamic-magical representation of what is unique and universal in her, matter will be transformed into the very word of woman, thus revealing her specific substance as attractive force, magnetic field, plenitude, enchantment, nostalgia, inspiration, perfume, beyond objective nature. ↑
When Carrington celebrates woman in 1970, through the canvas "The Godmother," representing a fertility goddess, painted in alchemy colors with human, animal, and vegetable attributes and containing in her vast rounded form a whole series of women, the artist had launched herself, for about thirty years, into a surrealism very much her own, which for her was no longer one. For years, she has been saying to all those who interview her and who don't believe her, about her years within the group: "I wasn't surrealist, I was with Max." Let us conclude this part with a pertinent remark from Marie-Claire Barnet: "Nomads of language, images, and desires, surrealist women are perhaps elsewhere" ↑.
Let us return to Claude Cahun. I will try to be brief. The verb "dare" being the anagram of eros, one can say that all her life, Claude Cahun (1894-1954) dared to fabricate for herself an other and indefinable eros. Was Claude Cahun a woman? It seems to me that this is the question she would have wanted us to ask ourselves and the answer will always remain yes and no. Born Lucy Schwob on October 25, 1894, in Nantes under the sign of Scorpio and died in Jersey on December 8, 1954, she was then forgotten until François Leperlier rediscovered her in the course of the 80s. Beautiful discovery, for no one in the group had been as extravagant or pushed the ideals of surrealism as far as she.
Claude Cahun/Lucy Schwob's unbalanced family structure constituted a serious psychic handicap from the start. On the paternal side, a double intellectual superego: her father Maurice Schwob, director of the newspaper La Phare de la Loire, and her uncle Marcel Schwob, a renowned symbolist writer. The Schwobs were liberal and lettered Jews but bourgeois and Lucy received "an education that would want to be particularly careful (English nurse, piano, precocious readings, studies at Oxford, at the Sorbonne, worldly relations)" ↑. On the mother's side: traumatizing primal scene, little Lucy having witnessed at age 4 the first crises of her mother's madness, Mary Antoinette Courbebaisse ↑, then shortly after came total deficiency, when the latter was interned for life, which provoked an autodestructive impulse in Lucy, that of anorexia, which I discuss in detail in an article in Mélusine XVIII, 1998. The only somewhat maternal figure of Claude Cahun's childhood was her paternal grandmother, Mathilde, née Cahun, hence the chosen pseudonym, with the epicene first name, Claude. The "madwoman in the attic" mother ↑ constituted what André Green calls a case of "dead mother" ↑, that is to say a woman who, following a strong personal trauma (a bereavement for example) completely disinvests from her child and Lucy/Claude presented all the symptoms of such a child/object: anxiety, insomnia, triggering of a secondary hatred against the mother, therefore against oneself because there is identification, auto-erotic excitement, intense homosexuality, frenetic activity which goes hand in hand with anorexia and:
The compromised Unity of the Self henceforth pierced is realized either on the level of fantasy giving openly rise to artistic creation, or on the level of knowledge at the origin of a very rich intellectualization (Green, op. cit., p. 233)
To the void left by the mother was added the enmity between the Schwobs and the Courbebaises, a conservative, anti-Semitic family of fanatical Catholicism, in the midst of the Dreyfus affair. It resulted that Lucy/Claude used her lucid intelligence to reject the attributes of model little girl and young lady of good family that they wanted to inculcate in her and to develop an indefinable proteiform identity.
At 26, in her strange autobiography Aveux non avenus, Cahun inscribed a preliminary note concerning her eros:
At seven I was already seeking without knowing it, with the strategic boldness and motor impotence that characterize me, the sentimental adventure ↑.
She noted everything in this text, being herself the matter of her book, like Montaigne, but more narcissistic. She speaks there of her anorexia, her auto-eroticism, her anxiety, her insomnia, her fantasies, her masochistic fascination for her own body, her hatred of her mother and femininity in general, etc. Her sentimental and sexual life took the form of a surrealist antinomy. At fifteen, she meets Suzanne Malherbe, whose widowed mother was to remarry a little later with Maurice Schwob, Cahun's father, and who incarnated the soul mate, the twin (although two years her senior) and soon the lover:
in the spring of 1909, it's the thunderous encounter (...) an exclusive, jealous passion (...) Soon nothing exists for me but my passion with Suzanne. ↑
It was another herself:
Lucy and Suzanne, sisters by marriage, Siamese twins they would say, who already frequented each other before the marriage will never leave each other. ↑
Malherbe was a plastic artist of great talent and under a masculine franglais pseudonym, Marcel Moore, she did painting, drawing, wood engraving, then especially illustration and painted decoration (ibid.). The collaboration between the two women proved phenomenal. Of her illustrations of various texts by Claude Cahun, one will retain above all the execution of the photomontages conceived by Cahun for Aveux non avenus. These images, patchworks mainly composed of multiple versions of Cahun's head and fragments of her body, as well as scraps of other photos she had taken, express and perhaps to a certain extent exorcise the hallucinations of the fragmented body testifying, according to Lacan, to a badly lived mirror stage. According to the psychoanalyst's theory, the specular image of the maternal figure (here Suzanne Malherbe) accompanying the subject before the mirror, can lead him to the jubilation of recognition. The exclusive lesbian relationship with Suzanne Malherbe therefore brought a foundation of affective stability to Claude Cahun's life. We will see however that she had a more complex eros that expressed itself in her polymorphous self-portraits always recommenced as well as in her writings, particularly in her "heroines' ↑, transposed self-portraits of popular female characters from the Bible, Greek Mythology, Perrault, or the Brothers Grimm among others.
Around 1932, when she settled in Paris with Suzanne Malherbe, Claude Cahun had a second coup de foudre, collective this time (although she was for a time in love with André Breton), for the surrealist group, their ideology, their revolt, their poetry. The character in perpetual mutation that Cahun fabricated for herself was highly surrealist, always eroticized and close to Suzanne Lilar's ideas by her constant theatricalization. It will always be the I (u) who will always be an other. Leperlier has very well described the multiplicity of this unique woman:
Through cross-dressing, the play of masks or stripping bare, Claude Cahun will never cease distributing roles, multiplying images of self until touching the limits of this sexual "indefinition" of which she dreamed of making a third gender. In fact, she aspires to a crossing of all genders: homosexuality, bisexuality, androgyny... to affirm her own, irreducible to any other (...) This radical atypicality puts her out of reach of any ideological-passional "recuperation," including feminist. She will never be anything but on "her own side," that is to say always on "the other side," where she is not expected but where she can reach herself even in the violence she inflicts on herself. To herself her own executioner, to herself her own demiurge... ↑
Here then is the other side of the antinomy. In an article to be published, I have established numerous correspondences between the texts of the "Heroines' and the photographic self-portraits, through anamorphosis and ekphrasis. In her works as in her life (she even did theater), Claude Cahun constantly stages herself and manages to metamorphose her body according to her fancy, not through surgery like Orlan, but by means of finely elaborated cross-dressing and a variety of accessories. The heroines flaunt with panache their sadomasochism while transgressing cheerfully their role in the corresponding hypotext. Like Benvenuta, Cahun parries her own masochism, so apparent in Aveux non avenus, by dramatizing it in her texts and especially in her photographed self-portraits. When she met André Breton, normally dressed as a woman or when she wrote to him, Claude Cahun lost all her means and one barely recognizes her in the group photos where she almost went unnoticed, while the androgynous "hundred heads' character of the self-portraits looks at us with the cold insolence of the dandy.
A photo from c.1930 exposes a nude Claude Cahun, a rope wrapped around her body, crawling on the sand toward a rock, doubtless in Jersey; sadistic scene? Where is the executioner? Behind the camera doubtless, because the legend informs us that it is once again a self-portrait and once more, theatricality transforms sadism into play. Thérèse Lichtenstein mentions a testimony found in the diary of a Nazi officer in Jersey ↑, who, in searching the house of Cahun and Malherbe, after their arrest for having distributed anti-SS propaganda, would have discovered "pornographic material' and "photos of the two women indulging in sexual perversions, including exhibitionism and flagellation." Lizzie Thynne took up this testimony in her film ↑, without comment. How to take seriously the moralizing judgment (he expresses his disapproval and disgust) of a Gestapo member, accomplice of the greatest enterprise of sadism ever inflicted on humanity, about sexual behavior between two consenting adults, in the strictest intimacy?
The cross-dressing from woman to man that Claude Cahun practiced remains a rarity, even an exception among surrealists, except perhaps in the context of the numerous masked balls they frequented, but it was not in the same spirit, because it was not a question of the search for a 3rd gender, as for Cahun. According to Marjorie Garber, specialist in cross-dressing in all its forms:
The 'third' is what questions binary thought and induces a crisis (...) the third term is not a term and it is even less a sex (...) the third is a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility(ies) ↑.
Garber concludes that "the disturbing element that intervenes then is not a simple crisis of masculine and feminine categories, but a crisis of the very notion of category" (ibid., p. 17).
And the very notion of category is precisely what Claude Cahun rebels against. A long time ago, around 1979-1980, I interviewed Christiane Rochefort and when I questioned her about her political and ideological leanings, she had answered me: "If it weren't already a label, I would be an anarchist" and it's a bit like that that I imagine Claude Cahun...
Paris, March 2006.
Nora Mitrani, "Des Chats et des magnolias", in Rose au cœur violet, Paris, Terrain vague. Losfeld, 1988, p. 89-93.
See my article, "Between Surrealism and Magic Realism : the Early Feature Films of André Delvaux (1926-2002)", to be published in Yale French Studies, summer 2006.
Renée Riese-Hubert, Magnifying Mirrors/Women, Surrealism and Partnership, Lincoln & London, Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1994.
Here I refer to Suzanne Lilar's remarks interviewed by Jacqueline Aubenas, in Visions 11 (Belgian cinema review), September 1983, p. 6. Reference: Visions.
Benjamin Péret, "Noyau de la comète", introduction to his Anthologie de l'amour sublime, Albin Michel, 1956, p. 76.
Sarane Alexandrian, Les Libérateurs de l'amour, Éditions du Seuil, 1977, p. 214.
Robert Benayoun, Érotique du surréalisme, Pauvert, 1965, p. 177 (Chapter VII, "Une Religion de l'amour").
Letter of June 16, 1923, in Simone Breton, Lettres à Denise et autres textes, edition established by Georgiana Colvile, Éditions Joëlle Losfeld, 2005, p. 135.
Ibid., p. 166, letter of November 14, 1923, where Simone attributes the role of "Aphrodite" to her cousin, Denise Lévy.
See Judith Suther, A House of her own/Sage Solitary Surrealist, London & Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1997, p. 163 & 177.
Eileen Agar, A Look at my Life, London, Methuen, 1988, p. 120.
See José Pierre, "Observations préliminaires", Recherches sur la sexualité, Archives du surréalisme 4, Gallimard, 1990, p. 193.
See Annie Richard, La Bible surréaliste de Gisèle Prassinos, éditions Mols, 2004.
See Nancy Spector, "Meret Opppenheim Performing Identities", Meret Oppenheim Beyond the Teacup, New York, Independent Curators Inc., 1996, p. 35-42.
First published in Médium, n° 4, 1955, then cited in La Femme et le surréalisme, cat. of the exhibition, established by Erika Billeter and José Pierre, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, 1987.
Marie-Claire Barnet, La Femme cent sexes ou les genres communicants, Berne, Peter Lang, p. 291.
François Leperlier, Claude Cahun/L'écart et la métamorphose, Jean-Michel Place, 1992, p. 21.
See the Letter to Henri Barbier of January 21, 1951, cited by François Leperlier, in "Claude Cahun la gravité des apparences' Rêve d'une ville/Nantes et le surréalisme, exhibition catalogue, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 1994-1995.
Reference to Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar's critical work on the feminine novel in England in the 19th century, The Madwoman in the attic (the madwoman in the attic, gothic character of Charlotte Brontë's novel, Jane Eyre), New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1984.
See André Green, "La Mère morte", Narcissisme de vie, narcissisme de mort, Éditions de Minuit, 1983, p. 222-253.
"Aveux non avenus", in Claude Cahun, Écrits, Edition presented and established by François Leperlier, Jean-Michel Place, 2002, p. 179.
CC, Letter to Henri Barbier of January 21, 1951, cited by FL in Nantes cat., p. 263.
François Leperlier, Claude Cahun l'écart et la métamorphose, Jean-Michel Place, 1992, p. 23.
In Le Mercure de France, n° 639, February 1925, appeared "Ève la trop crédule", "Dalila, femme entre les femmes", "La sadique Judith", "Hélène la rebelle", "Sapho l"incomprise", "Marguerite, sœur incestueuse" and "Salomé la sceptique" and in the Journal Littéraire, n° 45, February 28, 1925: "Sophie la symboliste" and "La Belle". In Claude Cahun's Écrits, Jean-Michel Place, 2002, F. Leperlier added the six unpublished texts of the "Heroines'.
François Leperlier, "L"œil en scène", introduction to Claude Cahun, Nathan Photo Poche n° 85, 1999, n.p.
Therese Lichtenstein, "A Mutable Mirror : Claude Cahun", Art Forum, April 1992, p. 64-67.
"Playing a Part/The Story of Claude Cahun", documentary directed and produced by Lizzie Thynne, Sussex University, Great Britain, 2004.
Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests/Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, New York, Routledge, 1992, p. 11 (my translation).