Cultures du surrealisme: les representations de l'autre (review)

If the international ambitions of surrealism have been acknowledged, as has its overarching anti-bourgeois project (and this despite certain fundamental contradictions), systematic considerations of surrealism's relation to its/the other have been slow in coming. Martine Antle's Culture du surréalisme is an excellent study that begins to remedy this lacuna by exploring the explicit and implicit function of the "other" as a cultivated site of resistance and as a continual source of inspiration for the movement. If women serve as one of—if not the—primary object(s) of surrealist production, the racial/ethnic other serves only a slightly less important role (and this only when the sexual and racial other are not conflated). The one mode of alterity that does not pass muster for the surrealists is homosexuality. Yet, it is precisely these three modes of alterity—racial, gender, sexual—that Antle examines in Culture du surréalisme, both separately, and as the interconnected parts of a greater phenomenon. The only regret that we might have with respect to this timely critical enterprise is the ultimately very minor importance of the racial and ethnic other in this volume. Despite this weakness, her text is a necessary invitation to other scholars to reconsider surrealism's traditional conceptualization as a center (Paris/Breton) and a series of margins (Japan, Mexico, the Caribbean, women, colonial subjects, and more surreptitiously, gays and lesbians). Antle's study is significant in that it recognizes the necessity of addressing several imbricated features of what can only be called a surrealist hegemony. In this sense, her text concurrently situates her investigation in three different arenas.

The first aspect of Antle's analysis largely structures her text. In an attempt to underscore the importance of "other voices/the voice of the other" in the surrealist movement, she simultaneously rehabilitates several media and genres that surrealism in its Bretonian incarnation tended to relegate to a secondary status or ignore. Thus, Culture du surréalisme begins with an examination of women in photography, arguing that, despite the well-known experiments of photographers such as Man Ray, the movement largely rejected photography as excessively mimetic. Antle shows that beginning in the 1920's, women photographers such as Dora Maar, Germaine Krull and Laure Albin Guillot, using the principle of "écart," "commence[nt] à s'attaquer aux clichés de la féminité et à ceux qui régissent l'hétéronormativité, comme, par exemple l'éternel féminin."(16) Given the foundational role of the eternal feminine in surrealism, one can guess the subversive and de-centering impact of such a gesture from within the movement.

The second genre/medium that Antle focuses on is theater and the theatrical. Here, as with her examination of photography, Antle carefully reviews Breton's simultaneous rejection and semi-conscious embrace of theater. As she notes, despite Bretonian surrealism's apparent rejection of theatre, on closer examination, the theatrical resides at the core of surrealist manifestations, in painting as well as poetry. She suggests that what is perhaps Breton's most famous work, Nadja, is largely inspired by P. L. Palau's "Les Détraquées" (a homophobic tale of lesbian infanticide). Likewise, Antle points out that "les apparitions spectrales et les figures à mi-chemin de l'animé et de l'inanimé qui habitent des toiles. . . attestent que la peinture surréaliste s'appuie bien sur des techniques spécifiquement théâtrales."(108) In particular, Rémédios Varos and Léonor Fini both systematically try to find the "double" of the self, the spectral self-alienation, that lies at the heart of the theatrical. Once again, it is women who may most dramatically exploit this otherwise underused medium.

Finally, Antle concludes with an analysis of three more recent surrealist works by Unica Zürn, Leonora Carrington and Nelly Kaplan. This last section deals with madness, literature and film. It is ultimately her profound...