GISÈLE PRASSINOS OR THE SURREALIST REVOLUTION OF THE 'AMBIGUOUS SCHOOLGIRL'

par Annie Richard

May 7, 2016

Gisèle Prassinos passed away on November 15, 2015: this presentation, in these study days devoted to the "Rebels of Surrealism," serves as both a tribute and a memorial, in the double sense of a literary monument and a eulogy.

It was Mallarmé's verses about Edgar Poe that spontaneously came to my mind: "As he is in himself at last eternity changes him...," "changes her," in this case, for Gisèle Prassinos.

With Poe, Mallarmé, we are obviously on the path of surrealism and, just as much, on the path of a quest to reveal a misunderstood work.

1– Rebellion of the Work Against the Surrealist Movement.

"Rebel of surrealism," Gisèle Prassinos is so in a first sense: that of a rebellion of the work against the surrealist movement as it is constituted around André Breton in 1934 when the young 14-year-old Gisèle is recognized as a poet by the group, in a properly official manner, that is, according to the Robert dictionary definition, "whose authentic character is publicly recognized by an authority that has its guarantee, its endorsement."

Indeed, for Gisèle Prassinos's texts, this represents an exceptional mode of reception.

The circumstances of the meeting have been evoked many times: Gisèle's brother, the painter Mario, four years her senior, transmits to André Breton, through the intermediary of his friend Henri Parisot, the texts that his young sister writes "for fun"^1^. She is then "summoned"^2^ to Man Ray's:

"Yes, André Breton wanted to make sure it wasn't a hoax. With Mario and Henri Parisot, we went to Man Ray's and I wrote in front of them with the ease I had at that time. And they were satisfied."

We know what followed: Man Ray captures the event with a famous photograph illustrating the publication of the booklet published by GLM in 1935, The Arthritic Grasshopper. Present in the photo, besides Mario and Henri Parisot, are André Breton, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret and René Char. Publications in journals and with prestigious publishers will follow, making Gisèle Prassinos a chosen author of the restricted circle of bibliophiles.^3^

A solemn moment if ever there was one, likely to impress "the little girl":

"They all listened to me with a collected air, without a word, without a gesture. They impressed me..."^4^

The significance of this moment in the surrealist movement is well known: the photographic medium is privileged because of the technicality of recording similar to the automatism sought in writing^5^. The meeting is of the order of the marvelous^6^.

The photo-proof, photo-document testifies to the existence of automatic writing at a time when its productions prove somewhat disappointing. What confirms the hypothesis of its existence is a significant correlation: between automatic writing as it appears under the gaze of seers and this very young girl, Gisèle, whose image refers to the figuration of automatic writing, the allegory of the cover of La Révolution Surréaliste of October 1, 1927, that of the "ambiguous schoolgirl"^7^. Man Ray moreover takes another photo of Gisèle with her gaze aside^8^, recalling the attitude of the "schoolgirl" writing at a desk, not bent over her paper, but facing forward with her eyes turned toward an elsewhere from which doubtless comes that current of writing that traverses her. Here is confirmed the privileged, "natural" link between this mode that escapes reason and the eternal feminine that can best express itself on the side of the "woman-child," a new mythologeme in the tradition of the very young and innocent perverse, often illustrated by the symbolists notably Gustave Moreau appreciated by André Breton, under the features of Salome^9^.

But far from satisfying the adequacy dreamed of by the surrealists of suppression through immediate capture, of filters between object and subject, the photo is always a "speech of one or several subjects and therefore the beginning of fiction"^10^. This one illustrates "an escalation of the masculine" like the famous photo of the "serious gentlemen carefully costumed" around Simone Breton at the typewriter^11^. This is visibly here a group speech as specific imaginary of a key, founding moment that points to the ontological ambition of surrealism aiming in the manifestos at a beyond of the literary and artistic field.

What does "entering surrealism" mean under these conditions?^12^ Under these auspices, "entering" takes on an existential dimension: even for a simple passage, limited, even involuntary, in the surrealist movement, attachment to the group appears as a decisive and irreversible moment. This moment is explicitly engraved in marble, in this case, "the imperial monument to the woman-child" according to Salvador Dali evoked by André Breton in the notice devoted to Gisèle Prassinos in Anthology of Black Humor.^13^

Man Ray's print as a collaborator of the group participates in the elaboration of the history of surrealism: the presence of the photo in the consecration booklet The Arthritic Grasshopper, associated with a network of texts, beginning with Paul Eluard's preface then André Breton's notice devoted to Gisèle Prassinos in The Maniacal Fire,^14^ reprinted in Anthology of Black Humor, contributes greatly to constructing the reception of the work. Far from putting us on the track of the singular identity of "who am I?", we are in "the ghost women of surrealism"^15^: it is a usual process of typological thinking of the surrealists about the feminine,^16^ but Gisèle Prassinos's work carries a particular weight in the grand narrative of the surrealist movement, associated with automatic writing, the myth of the woman-child and Alice II^17^. As a critic, I was able to measure the effectiveness of this lasting control of the work's reception: thus the presentation of Fabrice Maze's film, "André Breton, despite everything," illustrated by Man Ray's famous photo whose caption enumerates the names of the men without mentioning that of Gisèle Prassinos who became "accessory, transparent, nameless"^18^.

The surrealists' attitude is accordingly, of an overwhelming logic: when Gisèle Prassinos returns to writing through the childhood narrative, one might expect from the group the customary vindictiveness that stigmatizes betrayals, why not that of the major sin of writing novels? Nothing however, no mention of the name recalls the one to whom "they had forbidden to read to avoid influences"^19^. In a strategy of controlling reception, only silence has the power to erase Alice's maturity, to eternalize the woman-child "that very particular variety that has always subjugated poets because time has no hold on her"^20^. The passage to maturity for any child prodigy is certainly a difficult threshold to cross, but Gisèle Prassinos's case is "unique" to speak in echo of André Breton's great voice: "Gisèle Prassinos's tone is unique, all poets are jealous of it..."^21^

The artist's awareness of the thickness of discourse in which the work is taken, understood, defined and eternalized is the first step of rebellion, concrete rebellion, lived before being conceptualized in the form of a narrative of the posing session^22^:

"The moment of posing for the photograph. We had to take very natural attitudes, which was difficult."

The analysis will come a posteriori, in the form of scattered judgments during interviews^23^ that constitute in some way a counter-historical narrative of her "official" attachment to surrealism:

"I wasn't lucid yet, but I felt that I was illustrating their theory: they were completely foreign to me. They were learned gentlemen who didn't really address me" (Lunes).

At the same time emerges the recognition of a surrealist spirit that animates her and takes source in her life: "I was born surrealist," "the surrealists taught me nothing" (Europe).

Surrealism is associated with childhood, with the creative companionship with her brother Mario in their family of Greek refugees dominated by the figure of the father, a scholar, painter, former director of the journal Logos in Istanbul, with her aunts, her grandmother, her mother who died when she was 7:

"Family of unhappy exiles who had to work very hard. I have the impression that we both wanted to escape from this family that we adored, but that talked too much about sacrifices" (Lunes).

Automatic writing? "I didn't write just anything..." (Europe).

Woman-child? "I never understood that, woman-child, they meant 'female-child, child of female sex. But me, I was a little girl...'" (Lunes).

The rebellion in Gisèle Prassinos is identitarian under the sign of cleavage, between the Gisèle Prassinos legitimately, timelessly recognized as surrealist and the surrealist artist in becoming. One must thus consider as an act of rebellion the text she writes specially for the retrospective of the Historical Library of the City of Paris: "Passage to the conscious act of writing."^24^

It is at this price doubtless that her return to writing reconnects with the surrealist spirit: The Dream^25^, the short stories in the collection The Cavalier^26^ are under the sign of the strange, The Great Meal is a surrealist novel^27^ whose poetic quality results from a tension or, in the language of music, very present in the novel, a mode held between conscious and unconscious, between reality and dream. Continuing in the surrealist path, in the surrealist spirit, without being a participant in the movement, only brings her closer in appearance to other dissidents such as André Masson who gains, with the rupture, freedom: the challenge is quite different to find her own path under the maintained aegis of the constituted movement that fixes her in a chosen and immutable place.

Existing as an artist therefore requires from the start a vital transgression, whose scope exceeds the literary and artistic field: engaging in the path of Alice II's maturity is to situate oneself immediately in the symbolic space of Masculine/Feminine^28^. The rebellion raises a question of identitarian cleavage between received image and creative individuality that certainly applies to all surrealist women stuck in a feminine typology, but Gisèle Prassinos is situated at an extreme of this cleavage where the existential quest has no other way out, against her will, than gendered subversion.

The major stake of gender in the surrealist movement, with the centrality of automatic writing associated with the eternal feminine of the woman-child refers to the major stake of the grand cultural narrative that encompasses it, where Gisèle Prassinos must conquer her place as an artist.

This contributes to giving, as we will see, a very particular, unexpected coloring to this subversion, which could be qualified as tender subversion, which does not prevent, quite the contrary, a scope, a reach that we will try, in a final moment, to appreciate.

2– Gendered Subversion.

The recognition of poet as woman-child is inscribed in the grand cultural narrative of the partition of masculine and feminine, like a "natural" law consented to that conditions family harmony. The surrealists who welcomed her "the learned gentlemen" refer to the father's prestige as evoked in the childhood narrative Time is Nothing through which she returns to writing in 1958. The gendered family partition of Oriental tradition, whose traces transcend eras and civilizations^29^, places men on the side of spirit while women devote themselves to domestic well-being, completely invested in this case, because of their refugee situation, in material tasks and notably sewing. Father Lysander contributes to the collective food work, but he keeps his "sanctuary room"^30^ place of spirit and naturally transmits the intellectual and artistic heritage to his son^31^.

From this time however, Gisèle is rebellious "without seeking"^32^ by transcending the limits of gendered roles that vanish as if by enchantment in the time of creative games mainly with her brother – "I was boy-girl and he, girl-boy"^33^ and also with her father: intermediate world whose tone can only also be intermediate, between fervor without breaking the primordial harmony and lucidity without losing Life, the Voice^34^, which gives her rebellion an unexpected coloring, in fact a tender subversion. She knows the sesame of these spaces, humor, that tone of the untenable, current laughter that deals with serious subjects: to the sacred childhood narrative Time is Nothing, responds almost twenty years later, the burlesque family narrative of Brelin le Frou or the Family Portrait^35^, illustrated with a series of 12 drawings and hangings^36^.

It is this creation which, according to Gisèle Prassinos's own words, gives the necessary impulse to the continuation of the work, beyond the novelistic and poetic wave that follows Time is Nothing^37^. Then come twenty years of writing poems and "craftsmanship," according to her own designation: two-faced work, one poetic, serious, of search for lost time^38^ and one playful, pleasurable, of felt hangings-paintings and wooden figures. She will then return to the short story^39^ and finally to drawing. It is the creative gesture that transforms things, finds a path of rebellion, continue to create in her maturity while remaining faithful to her childhood surrealism: the work indeed gives, to see and to read, the elaboration of the "ideal" artist^40^ from the original surrealism of the booklets and notably of Calamities of Origins, artist's book made with Mario up to the original surrealism of Brelin le frou, the artist as she writes, draws and sews him at the end of the book^41^, artist freed from generic identitarian limits in the double sense of literary genre and gender. The ideal artist is to himself his own painting, buried in one of those robes evocative of the Middle East of sober cut with sleeves in "bird wings" with geometric ornamental motifs readable as an autobiography as any painter seeks it behind the mirror: beyond the social and psychic determinisms of "his constitutional assembly"^42^. the signs display dreamed, "ideal" associations, such as male sexual emblems coexisting with feminine symbols of the pubic triangle perhaps as a beard and the horn of ancient goddesses, symbol of fertility.

Now Brelin, artist of "hangings-paintings" – in abyme of the artist Gisèle Prassinos, who signs GP Brelin's hangings – is manifestly rebel of surrealism, in a double sense: rebel first against the silence of the official movement, while remaining faithful to the source of the insolent games of childhood of the work's surrealism; rebel then of surrealism itself, at the level of "the soaring of thought"^43^ in the deployment of the hangings-paintings, notably those that I have gathered in The Surrealist Bible of Gisèle Prassinos^44^.

Brelin le Frou corresponds to this first time of rebellion that one can call paradoxically, of continuity, with the surrealist spirit of her own artist's history, her family history. Brelin rebel, but without war, without bellum, concerned-concerned about the link, allergic to rupture, inspires a recomposition of the Family Portrait, subtitle of Brelin le Frou.

At the start, there is an automatic image, like the first verse of the poem that Gisèle Prassinos finds while walking: in this image, she discovers a scholar and undertakes to tell his life. The narrator presents herself in the preface as on a "study trip" in "Frubie Ost located between the northern Bronze and the eastern Hure"^45^ she discovers to the illustrious Bersky, the scholar, an older brother, artist, the frou "old man between 90 and 95 years old"^46^ who will devote his life to fixing family history by making hanging-paintings whose signature GP echoes the signature of the ethnologist narrator and the name of the book's author Gisèle Prassinos: game of masks placed on the two-faced face of Gisèle Prassinos, on the side of image and on the side of text, association that she practices from her beginnings.^47^ In Brelin le Frou, the baroque symbiosis based on disguise and metamorphosis, produces the recomposition in images and words of the family portrait^48^. The humor supported by the note^49^ globally underlines the welded and gendered aspect from the disproportion of the father's stature and that of the very small mother.

The execution of the hangings is accomplished in reality in surreality by the ideal artist beyond cleavages. The book opens a path of hybridization that only humor can maintain thanks to parody: paintings promoted masterpieces effectively inscribed in their making in the great pictorial tradition, from the preliminary drawing reproduced by the publisher whose proportions translate a manifest concern for composition up to the choice of colors and materials, fusion of painter and tapestry maker, well distinct in Mario's career who has so continuously painted cartoons intended for tapestry reproduction. The major transgression is the audacity to ally this eminently pictorial genre with clothing sewing, without regard for the border between art and craftsmanship: indeed the forms cut from a colored fabric, felt chosen for its color quality and assembled, even re-embroidered, needle in hand, evoke the patterns used for the making of dresses which women have always made a place of personal expression and creativity^50^ and which will provide the clothing style, source of the unity of the whole sewn paintings. World suspended in the proper and figurative sense between painter's work and seamstress's work, between the world of men and the world of women of her childhood. The surface of the work, the very material of the fabric is in itself a veritable identitarian interrogation that bears on the dialectic of visible and invisible, of the work's surface and the deep self, sort of "skin of the painting"^51^ as metonymy of the artist's self breaking with the institutionalized solution of matter as painting and color.

Brelin's transgressive freedom can now lead to the Surrealist Revolution, that of the famous "schoolgirl" more "ambiguous" than ever, Gisèle Prassinos.

3– From Rebellion to Revolution.

At the end of this journey, the cover of La Révolution surréaliste imposes itself again with the figure of the schoolgirl in a black apron, seated in front of a desk, equipped with a pen holder and ready to write on an open notebook, brazenly made up and coiffed à la garçonne, the point on the hip and knees raised as high as possible supported on a stool. In palimpsest appears the photographic image of the modest-looking little girl, Gisèle Prassinos, in front of the initiating group of this "surrealist revolution," eyes lowered on her text and whose common point with the "schoolgirl" is the Claudine collar that she still dressed her dolls with at the time of the photo, declined by the aunts in this wide white collar adorning the dress made for the occasion. A new metamorphosis takes place, unexpected, with all the enigmatic charge of the self-portrait, that of the "Ideal Portrait of the Artist," Brelin.

At the end of this transgressive path, we find, associated with the image of the "ambiguous schoolgirl" alias Gisèle Prassinos, alias Brelin, not automatic writing, reductive vision moreover a posteriori of the surrealist movement, but indeed La Révolution surréaliste, main title now linked to the silent, individual revolution of the artist. To pass from rebellion to revolution, is it not, not to break, destroy, according to the emotional order meaning usually attached to it, but above all to ask fundamental questions in the proper sense, that is to say on the very foundations of order, in this case of gendered order, at the symbolic level? Parodying Duchamp, what we are going to examine could be entitled "The Nude Descending a Staircase by the Ambiguous Schoolgirl of Surrealism, Even": through the crossing in Brelin of the most anchored identitarian compartmentalization, that of gender, the "schoolgirl" in becoming can henceforth recompose the cultural and sacred substratum of the great parental figures rehearsed from history painting and thus operate the mutation of our symbolic space. When Gisèle Prassinos was asked when the period of hanging-paintings dated from, she said spontaneously, despite the exact chronology, "from Brelin."^52^

It suffices to make appear the transfiguration of our imaginary in the production of twenty years, to group in the biblically inspired hangings which constitute more than half^53^, the Fathers, Patriarchs, Prophets, the Mother and her antonym, the Prostitute. The Son and the Holy Spirit, as well as the Brothers and Sisters who testify (proper sense of the word "martyr") to the divine family, the golden legend of saints.^54^

A climate of mocking tenderness marks these holy images respectful of Scripture or the Golden Legend. The titles refer to it expressly: "Noah drunk and naked surprised by his son Ham"^55^, "Abraham leading Isaac to sacrifice"^56^, "Little Isaac between Abraham and Sarah aged 100"^57^... Yet under harmless appearances, it is a rewriting of the Bible, procedure in favor among the surrealists. Brelin is indeed there in the making of the hangings. He was supposed to copy in Brelin le Frou to make the "Family Portrait," an existing image, that of the family album. Here he copies the holy images. "Imitation" is moreover the title of one of the Kings^58^. He does it with the same displayed concern for fidelity and the same result: a subtle distortion of the model. The pastiche proceeds from self-criticism: it bears on the very movement of sacralization, on the hagiographic attitude which is that at the same moment of the poet Gisèle Prassinos celebrating through her poetry collections, the epiphany of her original world, the golden family legend that puts the brother and father on a pedestal. Perhaps this is the reason for the similarity of the oversized arm of the first father in date of the hangings "Saint Francis of Assisi," and the Father of the "Family Portrait" in Brelin le Frou.

The disturbing effect on the Father's stature is immediately felt: Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, are overwhelming figures whose weight in the sacred family suddenly lightens. It is impossible here to analyze each image: that of "Moses waiting to be saved from the waters"^59^ as a chubby baby, but horned, with a severe gaze, gives the measure of the amused derision of authority inflicted on all.

Choosing the letter before the spirit, that is doubtless where the most manifest heresy is. The titles play on this literality, contenting themselves with detailing or suspending, without ever contesting them, immutable sequences: "little Isaac between Abraham and Sarah aged 100" "Old King David, covered with clothes to warm himself. The Virgin Abishag seated on his knees is also charged with warming him"^60^. In "Noah drunk and naked surprised by his son Ham"^61^, humor seizes the sacred terror before the Father's nudity discovered by Ham: Noah is not asleep, contrary to iconographic tradition, he is only more manifestly and above all more comically drunk, dancing, like Bacchus, in the vine leaves, under the son's bewildered gaze.

Certainly, automatism is far away, the artist does not renounce her return "to the conscious act," but chance has not lost its rights: neither in "the word-pawn" nor in "the pawn object, form or color" that Gisèle Prassinos associates freely, as she writes in a letter of the time to her childhood friend Jean Jacques. At the start, it is always André Breton's "phrase that knocks on the window": the first verse of the poem that she finds while walking, the hooks discovered in the DIY department of BHV that will constitute the beard of "Hueïd"^62^ or a passage from Scripture, source of a hanging.

Words are respected like objects with their own existence: they are welcomed as such instead of being dissolved in their meaning. Quite the contrary, they will generate new relationships. The rewriting of the Bible by the hangings assembles words and images in an unexpected syntax – composition is primordial for G.P. – in a new text to decipher. The hangings appear innocent until the moment when the amused smile turns into inquiry: there is indeed a sword in Salome's story, but Judith the avenger's sword highlighted in a cartouche disturbs "the viewer"^63^. The power of capturing images is indeed in fact power of unusual associations. The recognizable, orthodox signs neighbor with others that draw from diverse sources more or less identifiable: source of medieval art of pious images, of church sculptures and paintings certainly, but also Byzantine source of icons with immense eyes, stylized features, long rigid robes embroidered with braids; African totemic sources, Amerindian of the Kachina... The spectator is free in his analogies in this universalist welcome of forms of spirituality.

Other more distant sources emerge from the movement thus initiated of reminiscence. An observation of the whole reveals constants of a troubling cohesion: there is first the frequent recourse for backgrounds to mountains, hills, mounds with rounded forms, covered with trees and flowers, scattered with childish houses, crisscrossed with paths or crops: the roundness — fertility of the earth is indeed there drawn in a naive way, a feminine pole of Creation that visibly enters into echo of Elizabeth and Mary in the scene of their meeting, parturient like the landscape behind them. The frequent presence of water since "Saint Francis of Assisi"^64^ where the sea appears against all expectations behind the hill, a whole bestiary, the ornamental motifs of tunics, chevrons, diamonds, parallel lines, are as many occulted symbols, but not forgotten, particularly through Greek culture, of an archaic cosmogony emerged from the discoveries of paleoanthropology as from the renewed interest it benefited from in the years of feminist effervescence, that of The Goddess-Mother or rather Mother-Ancestor^65^.

GP finds without difficulty this memory in the culture with which she is imbued and which springs so clearly from the depths of her past. The most subtle association consists in using the recurring ornamental motifs of tunics in the Byzantine manner. Two categories of forms associated with the Goddess Ancestor repeat: parallel lines, chevrons, labyrinthine designs, diamonds, esses significant of water and the crescent, the cross, the horn, the egg in relation to birth and growth. They ornament with impunity the robe of patriarchs and saints. The association process overturns the fundamental relationships between the members of the Holy Family. The hangings, one after another, play on this symbolic range where a familiar bestiary regains its ambiguity: not only the bird and notably the dove, but also the fish, the lion, as many figures attached to the feminine divinity that have survived in Greek mythology. These ambivalent, non-exclusive symbols, signifying the feminine and its opposite go against the symbolic law of separation and hierarchy that commands at all times the relationships of the Family Portrait. Ambivalent force ignorant of the Difference of the Sexes and conforming to the cosmogony of childhood.

For laughs, the Bible in the hangings tells in images an astonishing story.

Our Father may well display the marks of his power, he is no longer alone in imposing his Law. A force coming from the depths of time, personal time, collective time, surges at his side: force of terrestrial and maternal Life against transcendence and the hierarchy of the sexes. The two principles exist side by side in the hangings, often ambiguous. Complementarity and reversibility suppress all hierarchy. The hangings above all cast doubt on the war engraved in the founding scenes of sexual identity. The silent dialogue of Salome and Saint John who look at each other against all iconographic tradition, Dalila's suspended gesture distance their eternal guilt.

Dissimilarities and resemblances between masculine and feminine can henceforth be tied and untied in the eternal game of Desire and Law. Far from substituting the Goddess for the triumphant God, proposal of a reductive feminist absolutely foreign to the artist, a cosmology of origins recomposes the harmony of our human, animal, vegetable landscape. The image, in its traditional vocation of translation and commentary of Scripture, transforms the biblical narrative. Brelin, pastiche painter, has in sum found the path of childhood's imaginary where it takes birth, in the masculine — feminine surpassing of the interior "disagreement."

"The disagreement exists between me and myself alone," murmured the ghost character in The Great Meal, double of a narrator of indeterminate age and sex.

If there is a vocation of surrealism, it is indeed that of making the boundaries of the essential categories of thought move. It is indeed of the order of objective chance that it is the ambiguous schoolgirl of "La Révolution surréaliste" alias Alice II alias Brelin who finds the most radical and most playful means of accomplishing to the end the surrealist revolution by touching the symbolic order of cleavage and hierarchy masculine/feminine. "The sublime point" is indeed this point of view where the artist's subjective reality, the lived, vital, marvelous evidence of the double at once similar and different, the brother Mario, joins the universal. The harmony of childhood paradise is not regression, but symbolically corrects the differential valence, to take up Françoise Héritier's word, that separates the sexes, by going back to their source, the sacred model.

From then on the gaze of the "schoolgirl" become subject again leads us to question, with if possible more acuity, this blind spot of the Second Manifesto of Surrealism on the missing couple of "old antinomies" to surpass: that of the opposites Masculine/Feminine. Certainly, explicitly shaking the thought of gender dichotomy at the time of the Second Manifesto was going against nascent psychoanalysis and its vision of the hierarchical psychic construction of sexuation, prolonging a whole philosophical and religious tradition where woman has a specific and secondary place. Today, the problematic of gender allows us to see the epistemological gap between the sought objective of surrealism, "the soaring of thought" and the mode of discovery that the recognition of Gisèle Prassinos reveals: a major contradiction emerges in the displayed conceptual approach of the Second Manifesto.

From allegory to Gisèle Prassinos's photo, it is the whole passage from idea to external reality: the photo enters into André Breton's strategy^66^ to reconcile the idealism of the beginnings and the materialism of the 1930s. It is the time of the theoretical production of objectification when science is henceforth called to fill the role of a legitimation of surrealist theories. André Breton attached great value to Bachelard's work The New Scientific Spirit (1934), and to that of Henri Poincaré The Value of Science (1906) that he recommends to Jacques Doucet for his library project. The photographic lens captures the emergence of being in the line of spiritist photos that try at the end of the 19th century to fix on the plate "the emanations of thought, dreams, mental images"^67^. The photo is the very process of the flash of conscious thought that Breton displaces with psychoanalysis to unconscious thought in a "surrationalism," Bachelard's term used by André Breton^68^ It is in this spirit of access to objectivity that the photo of the meeting of Gisèle Prassinos and the surrealist group in 1934 is inscribed: the introduction of the collective observer gaze, which is the great difference from the allegorical photo of 1927, and its staging between the first and second take, belong to a naturalist, even supernaturalist ontology. The photo is the privileged medium of the "objective world"^69^ that is born on the impulse of modern science around the 17th century in Europe, material world that includes by its physical characters the being that contemplates it, but differs from it by the exclusively human interiority of consciousness. The Center for Research on Surrealism^70^ has questioned the relationships of surrealism and the baroque concomitant with the emergence of astronomy: according to Jean-Claude Vuillemin, the astronomical telescope pointed toward the world since Copernicus ruins the dichotomy between an intelligible engendered world and a sublunar world out of reach that formed a closed and ordered universe governed by analogies. The liberated gaze henceforth scrutinizes the mysterious and invisible laws that govern a reality to decipher, subject to optical illusion, inviting the eye to decentrate to grasp the hidden as in anamorphosis or the search for the ambiguity of forms so frequent in surrealist painting^71^.

The "Woman-child" fits perfectly into this epistemological puzzle as a notion issuing from Freudian scientific discourse in the line of medical knowledge constituted from studies on Charcot's hysteria^72^. Fritz Wittels, psychoanalyst born in Vienna contemporary and disciple of Freud, rediscovered by Edward Timms^73^ is one of the members of the Vienna psychoanalytic society and Freud's first biographer. His personal memoirs written in New York in the 1940s relegated to the shadows "reveal that during the first decade of the 20th century, the research of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society bore directly on the Viennese demi-monde of which, that, and not the least, relative to the questionable erotic cults that surrounded the 'woman-child,' Irma Karczewska"^74^. "The woman-child" is the title of an article by Wittels read to Freud in private and presented to the Psychoanalytic Society then published in Karl Kraus's magazine "The Torch": Wittels says he uses the Freudian framework of "perverse and polymorphous" childhood developed in Three Essays on Sexual Theory (1905). "She had been 'polymorphously perverse' as a little child is and had never developed cultural inhibitions of any sort"^75^.

What about the avant-garde "surreality" of the photo under these conditions? It is obviously on the side of what the enchanted gaze of the witnesses suggests: an unknown and vertiginous dimension of reality. But if male subjects can through a feminine being of flesh and blood contemplate the entity of automatic writing to which it is supposed to refer, it is because they perceive it in an analogical mode, antinomic to the one they seek, the scientific mode: that woman be in surrealism the sacred, non-individualized medium of the universe, contrary to man, acting and autonomous subject, corresponds to a traditional cosmology inseparable from social practices, the nature/culture tandem associated with the feminine/masculine relationship. It is easy to superimpose on the image of the young Gisèle Prassinos's meeting, that of André Brouillet's famous painting "A Clinical Lesson at La Salpêtrière"^76^. Psychoanalysis takes over from this analogical approach with the notion of "dark continent," of psychic development of the feminine subject that remains short of the symbolic, leading to Lacan's famous "woman does not exist": the "woman-child" proceeds from one of the grand narratives, in this case the philosophical, religious and artistic cultural construction of the feminine gender on the side of the absence of mastery and nature in opposition to the masculine bearer of civilization^77^. The analogist vision makes it the paradigm of real and imaginary epiphanies strung out by André Breton in his notice of the Anthology of Black Humor – Queen Mab, Max Ernst's "young chimera," the "ambiguous schoolgirl" – and Gérard Legrand following him^78^: Bettina Von Arnim, Violette Nozières, Shakespeare's Juliet celebrated by German romantics, Bellmer's Doll and the Melusine of Arcane 17.

Everything finally happens as if the link between the subversive principle of thought of the surrealist avant-garde, capable of satisfying the great surrealist ambition of giving back to the spirit "access to things," automatic writing, and the essentialized gender – the woman-child – served as a lock to the archaic cognitive structure issuing, according to Françoise Héritier from "the liminal observation of the astonishing and fundamental gendered difference"^79^.

But what would it mean to blow up this lock? What "soaring of thought" would the surpassing of gendered opposites in the form-sense of the artist's work let glimpse? It would no longer be a question of opposing André Breton's attitude attached to the eternal feminine to others "who would have defended a concept of open, fluctuating, non-essentialist gender."^80^ but indeed of calling into question the implication of "masculine" and "feminine" in the traits of the "individual machine"^81^. What the "ambiguous schoolgirl" alias Gisèle Prassinos, alias GP, alias Brelin would finally call into question, is the sexuation of surrealist monism. The "ambiguous schoolgirl" would lead us to the confines of our world, would lift the veil on an unknown landscape and above all on the unsaid in the symbolic par excellence that is language.

Nude Descending a Staircase by the Ambiguous Schoolgirl of Surrealist Monism, Even?

The Hegelian approach of surrealism aims to surpass the contradictory aspects of reality in a synthetic result until the sovereign Spirit puts an end to philosophical wandering. The concept of gender illuminates the gendered symbolic order that underlies this journey considered as civilizing: the "sublime point" aimed at consecrates the achievement of a humanist tradition of the primacy of spirit, of the powers of thought that intersects the masculine/feminine distinction, arrogating to men exclusively, in philosophy as in religion, the highest spiritual capacities. Monism, in other words, is gendered. Masculine/feminine are the symbolic pillars of the humanist tradition as of Freudian theory: the dialectical logic of surrealism remains in this tradition by advocating in conformity with Platonic Eros, the myth of the Androgyne, of the order of complementary reversibility masculine/feminine.

Surrealism is particularly significant of the blind spot of the Hegelian sublime, far from calling into question the symbolic categories in matters of sex, as if thought in movement needed to reassure its axiomatic base. Objective chance wanted it to be the incarnation of the eternally immature feminine, the "ambiguous schoolgirl" in flesh and blood, Gisèle Prassinos, who attacks the symbolic source of these "different eternities of man and woman"^82^ through the representations that perpetuate them. The culminating point is her version of the Trinities, Father/Son/Holy Spirit where the masculine monopoly of spirit at work in Hegelian surrealist monism is played out.

It is to the Spirit that the sacred Word leads, it is to the Spirit that Hegel leads as the completion of the movement of philosophy, it is the "victory of the life of the spirit over sensory life"^83^ corroborated by the establishment of the preeminence of the father over the mother, that Freudian then Lacanian teaching advocates in the civilizing march.

It is at this imaginary cultural foundation of sexuation that Gisèle Prassinos's two Trinities are found, "Great" and "Small Trinity"^84^ according to the parodic respect of the codes of painting in relation to the dimension of the paintings.

In the "Great Trinity," Son and Father side by side are surmounted and linked by the Holy Spirit, in the "Small" one, the Son is on the Father's shoulders, one proceeding from the other, according to the two canonical representations, western and eastern. The three persons are recognizable, square for the Father and the Son, welded oh how much, inseparable? Yet... Surmounting them, the Holy Spirit certainly bird, is a very curious dove, holding of the pelican with a disproportionate beak, plumage similar to the flower petals of the fertile branch on which it is installed, branch perpendicular to the two rigid and bare branches that come out each from the Father's and Son's head. In the "Small Trinity," the same bird tops a Father-Son totem disguised as an Indian evoking what has been confirmed by the drawings made by GP for the luxury edition of The Surrealist Bible^85^, the brother and sister's enthusiasm for the Redskins game in childhood time. Here the displayed orthodoxy becomes enigma: the comical volatile surmounts the father-son entity with a different accent with problematic connotations that rebound on the dogma of sacred filiation freed from the original maternal namely that flesh proceeds from the holy spirit whose two aspects are Mary's virginity and Father-Son identity. Here Father and Son appear finally the support of the most ambiguous symbol of Christendom, the bird represented in connection with fertility, one of the main epiphanies of the archaic Goddess, bearer of the cosmic egg consecrated to Venus in ancient mythology.

It is not a question of trenchant affirmation, especially not ideological, but of casting doubt on the canonically masculine transmission of the pneuma or the phallus. Gisèle Prassinos thus troubles with humor the symbolic foundation of the cleavage between the sexes. If the same were not so resolutely gendered, the other would not appear in its irreducible difference. That there be of the same in the other, it is the lesson of her "Salome and Saint John's Head" and of many other rewritings of the Bible^86^. The lived evidence of Gisèle Prassinos, of the phenomenon of the double at once similar and different, her painter brother Mario, does not inspire in her hangings, a childish return to original indetermination, but on the contrary an artist's approach of access to the spirit of childhood according to Jean François Lyotard^87^, not infantile, but authentically childish, state that persists in the adult, made of questioning in the face of the opaque world where one is thrown at birth and where then, the answers, the meanings can only be given by the other, mother, father, people of the entourage, in a situation of fundamental dependence and debt. Above all the biblical hangings question the gendered world by arousing astonishment.

Finally, what mute question would they pose to thought, to the "Sublime Point" of the surpassing of gendered categories? According to Slavoj Zizek^88^, carried to its term, the dialectic would strip the antinomies of content, making appear the essence of human symbolic functioning beyond gender, founded on lack, the absence of the object that the dialectical movement pushes back endlessly, object of quest that will always escape, as in Zeno's paradox concerning Achilles and the tortoise. Hegel consecrates the movement of the spirit that constitutes its object, thus of humanity founded on the dialectic of sexual difference that confers on alterity, a feminine content whereas pure alterity has as correlative the void and no longer "some — thing — other"^89^. Pure alterity is no longer woman grasped as "relation of the One and the void under the form of an external coexistence"^90^ as signified of lack, "same nothingness"^91^ distant from mastery, subject not in the modern sense of agent, but subject subjected to the lack inherent in language, eternally castrated except to seek to be filled: the famous penis envy is an outdated formulation that makes one smile and yet whose principle is still in force. The Surrealist Bible of Gisèle Prassinos leads to a vertiginous question, the one that makes one so afraid in discussions on gender, black humor under pink humor: the march of thought no longer braces itself on the absolute difference masculine/feminine, but on the void, in a creative surpassing without end of the human beyond psychic bisexuality, beyond the "bi" of the difference of the sexes.

The conclusion to which this reflection leads^92^ would have aroused Gisèle's humor if she could have heard it and would testify to the parodic force transmitted by her work: regarding the question so pressing today of Masculine/Feminine, let us say, in echo of Malraux, that "the 21st century will be surrealist or will not be," by giving back to "surrealism," as the "ambiguous schoolgirl" did, all its liberating meaning: that of good news, pleasurable, on the side of life and color, in the image of a work unthought by André Breton's group, Alice II's work of maturity, when becoming an artist requires gendered rebellion both against the surrealist movement that fixes her in eternity and against the familial gendered cultural order where the legitimacy to create returns to the brother.

This rebellion however of an unusual, tender tone, does not confuse beings with the ideas that move them despite themselves, that she defines by "imitating" the learned discourse, ethnological and psychoanalytical, as conditioning by "the infused familial and cultural objective stimuli" on which "will depend the integrated special reactions of the individual machine"^93^. The properly surrealist revolutionary approach of the "ambiguous schoolgirl," once out of her framework, is, in the rediscovered spirit of childhood, to flush out the major "stimulus" of conditioning, gendered difference. The work goes, in the playful mode, beyond or short of the question of exchanges, pluralities or ambiguity of sexual identities, to its source, the sacred symbolic order of partition Masculine/Feminine, of cleavage and hierarchy, foundation of the Hegelian monism of civilizing march toward spirit on the side of Man, capable of tearing himself away from the feminine of matter and nature in favor of culture.

The "sublime point," which would call into question in thought the gendered antinomies, would doubtless open a upheaval of symbolic space that would require modifying the symbolic space par excellence that is language: notably the words masculine and feminine that attach the traits shared by humans – passivity/activity, nature/culture, spirit/body – to the sole biological character. Matter of symbolic that must lead to dissociating masculine and feminine from invariants and thus to substitute for the difference of the sexes the "differend of the sexes"^94^, in a moving relationship of resemblances and differences. After all since surrealism did not disavow scientific progress, we are indeed in the quantum era.

^1^ Letter from Mario to Henri Parisot of September 26, 1934 exhibited at the BHVP for the retrospective "The Suspended World of Gisèle Prassinos," March 13-May 3, 1998, according to the book of the same title (Annie Richard, H.B. éditions, 1997).

^2^ Interview Gisèle Prassinos – Annie Richard, Lunes n° 5, October 1998.

^3^ This is evidenced by the numerous art bindings present in the exhibition "The Suspended World of Gisèle Prassinos" cited note 1.

^4^ Ibid. note 2.

^5^ Automatic writing is defined in 1921, on the occasion of the exhibition "Dada Max Ernst" at the Sans Pareil, 37 avenue Kleber, Paris, as "true photography of thought."

^6^ See def. by Henri Behar in "Marvelous and Surrealism," Mélusine n°XX, acts decade Cerisy la Salle (August 2-12, 1999), p. 15-29.

^7^ André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism, in Manifestos of Surrealism, Gallimard, 1973, p. 78.

^8^ Ibid., p. 79.

^9^ Ibid., p. 78.

^10^ Ibid., p. 79.

^11^ Ibid., p. 78.

^12^ Ibid., p. 79.

^13^ Ibid., p. 78.

^14^ Ibid., p. 79.

^15^ Ibid., p. 78.

^16^ Ibid., p. 79.

^17^ Ibid., p. 78.

^18^ Ibid., p. 79.

^19^ Ibid., p. 78.

^20^ Ibid., p. 79.

^21^ Ibid., p. 78.

^22^ Ibid., p. 79.

^23^ Ibid., p. 78.

^24^ Ibid., p. 79.

^25^ Ibid., p. 78.

^26^ Ibid., p. 79.

^27^ Ibid., p. 78.

^28^ Ibid., p. 79.

^29^ Françoise Héritier, Masculine/Feminine. The Thought of Difference, Odile Jacob, 1996.

^30^ Gisèle Prassinos, Time is Nothing, Gallimard, 1958, p. 15.

^31^ Ibid., p. 16.

^32^ Ibid., p. 17.

^33^ Ibid., p. 18.

^34^ Ibid., p. 19.

^35^ Gisèle Prassinos, Brelin le Frou or the Family Portrait, H.B. éditions, 1977.

^36^ Ibid., p. 20.

^37^ Ibid., p. 21.

^38^ Ibid., p. 22.

^39^ Ibid., p. 23.

^40^ Ibid., p. 24.

^41^ Ibid., p. 25.

^42^ Ibid., p. 26.

^43^ André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism, op. cit., p. 78.

^44^ Annie Richard, The Surrealist Bible of Gisèle Prassinos, H.B. éditions, 1997.

^45^ Gisèle Prassinos, Brelin le Frou, op. cit., p. 27.

^46^ Ibid., p. 28.

^47^ Ibid., p. 29.

^48^ Ibid., p. 30.

^49^ Ibid., p. 31.

^50^ Ibid., p. 32.

^51^ Ibid., p. 33.

^52^ Interview Gisèle Prassinos – Annie Richard, op. cit.

^53^ Annie Richard, The Surrealist Bible of Gisèle Prassinos, op. cit., p. 34.

^54^ Ibid., p. 35.

^55^ Ibid., p. 36.

^56^ Ibid., p. 37.

^57^ Ibid., p. 38.

^58^ Ibid., p. 39.

^59^ Ibid., p. 40.

^60^ Ibid., p. 41.

^61^ Ibid., p. 42.

^62^ Ibid., p. 43.

^63^ Ibid., p. 44.

^64^ Ibid., p. 45.

^65^ Marija Gimbutas, The Goddess and Gods of Old Europe, Thames and Hudson, 1982.

^66^ André Breton, Mad Love, Gallimard, 1937.

^67^ Ibid., p. 46.

^68^ Ibid., p. 47.

^69^ Ibid., p. 48.

^70^ Center for Research on Surrealism, University of Paris III.

^71^ Jean-Claude Vuillemin, "Surrealism and Baroque," Mélusine n°XXI, 2000.

^72^ Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, PUF, 1956.

^73^ Edward Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist, Yale University Press, 1986.

^74^ Fritz Wittels, "The Woman-Child," The Torch, 1908.

^75^ Ibid.

^76^ André Brouillet, "A Clinical Lesson at La Salpêtrière," 1887, oil on canvas.

^77^ Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX, Encore, Seuil, 1975.

^78^ Gérard Legrand, André Breton in his Century, Seghers, 1976.

^79^ Françoise Héritier, op. cit., p. 49.

^80^ Ibid., p. 50.

^81^ Ibid., p. 51.

^82^ Ibid., p. 52.

^83^ G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Gallimard, 1979, p. 53.

^84^ Annie Richard, The Surrealist Bible of Gisèle Prassinos, op. cit., p. 54.

^85^ Ibid., p. 55.

^86^ Ibid., p. 56.

^87^ Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Minuit, 1979.

^88^ Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, 1989.

^89^ Ibid., p. 57.

^90^ Ibid., p. 58.

^91^ Ibid., p. 59.

^92^ Ibid., p. 60.

^93^ Gisèle Prassinos, Brelin le Frou, op. cit., p. 61.

^94^ Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend, Minuit, 1983.