RECOMMENDED FOR READING
The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art
Book by Robert James Belton; University of Calgary Press, 1995
Because this well-travelled route
usually denatures the treatment of Woman in its overemphasis on fan-
tasy or form, it is not followed here. Besides, even in its visual manifes-
tations Surrealism always inclined towards rhetoric, which Barthes
characterized simply as "the signifying aspect of ideology." This ideol-
ogy was formed partly by the status quo and partly by the intellectual
hybridity of the Surrealists themselves. All of the Surrealists sought in-
spiration outside their own fields, yet it took historians of the visual arts
decades to go beyond passing allusions to examine precisely how, for
example, even the least literary painters were deeply affected by litera-
ture. Joan Miró is a case in point: he was long considered to be a playful
primitive, completely free of intellectual preoccupation. In 1973, Margit
Rowell questioned that commonly held opinion, discovering that Miró
was greatly indebted to writers like Alfred Jarry, Arthur Rimbaud, Blaise
Cendrars, and others. 9 The cross-fertilization worked both ways, of
course: it is now known that a substantial component of Breton's liter-
ary concept of femininity was inspired by his adolescent infatuation with
the women in the paintings of Gustave Moreau. 10 Nevertheless, there
are still many unanswered questions: why did Ernst read Edgar Allan
Poe and Otto Weininger, why did Magritte like detective stories, and
how did André Masson understand Johann Jakob Bachofen? Each of
these questions and more will be dealt with in the course of this study.
This study consists of several interrelated essays. The first gives the
general historical background. The second is a brief description of a spe-
cies of masturbatory fantasy as a figure for Surrealist intervention in the
world. The raw material for the production of this fantasy is then pro-
vided in the next three chapters, which examine the images of Woman
in male Surrealist art against intellectual backdrops assembled from
fragments of psychology, literature and mythology. Of course, this is
an over-simplification, for each essay speaks to its fellows in a way
that expands, without exhausting, the significance of them all. The sixth
essay is both a summary and a digression, raising two admittedly provocative questions: to what extent is Surrealism a relative of pornog-
raphy, and how did women artists function within its discourse? Since
the answers to both questions fall outside the reconstruction of the male
horizon of expectations, there will be no attempt to foreclose future con-
tributions to the discussion.
The continuous thread that holds these observations together comes
to the surface from time to time in the words "cultural" or "intellectual
fashion." These terms are too familiar to require an extended definition,
but two brief examples would not be inappropriate. Masson once ob-
served that he had willingly entered the Great War as a test of self. 11 His
attitude was formed by a cultural fashion of about 1914, which saw all
sorts of young people readily adopt notions of salubrious struggle and
domination in the shadows of Darwin and Nietzsche. 12 In addition to
this general conception of cultural fashion as "spirit of the times," there
are more specific comments like this one, written by Breton in 1922: "psy-
choanalysis is in fashion this winter." 13 With this in mind, I prefer the
terms cultural and intellectual fashion to putative synonyms like Zeit-
geist or Weltanschauung. 14 Neither of these words capitalize on the con-
notative chain of the word "fashion" - style, mode, vogue, fad, rage, craze
- the shared meaning element of which is a choice or usage (as in cloth-
ing, habits, and beliefs) about whose value there is a consensus among
those who regard themselves as sophisticated, in the know, and up to
date. Despite the similar vocabulary, however, it will become clear that I
have in mind something historically and metaphorically different from
the connotations represented in studies of fashion as actual costume.
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