Ghostliness: A Double Take at Surrealist Art

Katherine Conley gives her readers new cause to be fascinated by surrealism as she explores the phenomenon of ghostliness as an influential aspect in the movement. Conley proposes that ghostliness may be understood through the visual paradigm of anamorphosis, or the device of “seeing double,” and understanding a work of art retroactively. In her introduction, Conley explores surrealism’s marked lineage to baroque innovation in visual art, gothic imagination in literature, and the vogue of nineteenth-century spiritualist activities, elaborating the historical context for her theory. Throughout the book’s eight chapters, Conley discusses a scope of individual artists whose work engages with the ghostly, focusing on the themes of spiritualism and the supernatural, automatism and the unconscious and conscious worlds, and the experiential feeling of bodies and things.

To illustrate her metaphor of anamorphic perception for ghostliness, Conley uses the classic example of Hans Holbein’s celebrated painting, The Ambassadors (1533), and explains how the optical illusion functions: after first looking at the painting head-on, viewers who see it from a side angle perceive the emergence of a ghostly skull. This second look at the painting offers an alternate perspective that changes the viewer’s comprehension of the work overall. Positing that “surrealist perception was necessarily double,” Conley gives the example of the “picture-poems” of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (Calligrams, 1918) where the viewer must consider both the visual and textual sign-systems of the poem to interpret the work as a whole (xi). Other introductory examples of this doubleness include Marcel Duchamp’s textual puns, such as “Rrose Sélavy” (the phonetic homonym for “Eros, c’est la vie”) and the surrealist drawing game of the Exquisite Corpse, where each part of the corpse is drawn independently from the rest but comes together to form a complete body (13–14). In each example are two versions of the text and thus two realities—one literal and one metaphoric—where the “secondary version hides behind the first like a ghost standing in for an unconscious dream reality that we know exists but have trouble seeing simultaneously with the conscious reality” (xii).

Conley explains that, in relation to the theory of surrealism, anamorphic perception translates into the synthesis of dream and reality, or the conscious and unconscious worlds coming together to form what André Breton called “surreality.” Just as Holbein’s painting reveals the ghost of mortality for the viewer who takes a second look, the surrealist double take heeds those Freudian phantoms that have been repressed by the overly rational world. This analogy thus grounds Conley’s examination of four particular aspects of ghostliness that will be read within the works of art she analyzes: (a) spiritualism as the “repressed” ghost of surrealism; (b) the rhythm of suspension and flow as seen in automatism and the Freudian idea of the unconscious; (c) the importance of the “sensual,” experiential, and tactile nature of these works; and (d) the mechanisms of doubling within text, visual art, and representations or manipulations of the human body within the works of art (8).

Citing Franz Anton Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism in the early eighteenth century, as well as the rise in popularity of gothic literature in England, Conley traces a convincing historical lineage to spiritualism and the Freudian notion of the unconscious up to the surrealist experiments in automatism that Breton and his friends practiced together in the 1920s. Conley notes that spiritualism and its variants were explored by the young surrealists who had experienced the atrocities of World War I, and who looked towards unconventional ways of conjuring “ephemeral forces within the unconscious mind” (3). Yet, while spiritualism was of interest to the surrealists, they rejected the ghosts implicated in mediumistic communication and adopted instead the practice of automatism. Conley points out that Breton did not outwardly affirm the presence of spiritualist ideas in the movement until the 1950s, thus making spiritualism “the repressed ghost of surrealism” which would surface at the end of the movement...