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Introduction
- University of Nebraska Press
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1 Introduction Surrealism was a haunted movement from the beginning. It began not quite four years after the end of World War I, with the response of André Breton to René Crevel’s story about what he did over his summer vacation. Walking on a beach in 1922, Crevel met a medium who invited him to a séance because she had “discerned particular mediumistic qualities” in him, resulting in what Breton called Crevel’s ““spiritualist’ initiation” (Lost 92). Breton and his friends, most of whom were involved with dada, then decided to practice on themselves the mediumistic techniques Crevel had learned, hoping to reveal buried secrets within themselves because of what they knew about Freud’s theory of the unconscious, while at the same time refusing “the spiritualist viewpoint” and the possibility of any “communication . . . between the living and the dead” (92). In his essay “The Mediums Enter,” a curious title given his categorical rejection of spiritualism, Breton identified this practice for the first time as surrealism (in homage to Apollinaire) and described it as “a certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the dream state” (90).1 He thus claimed the legacy of spiritualism for this new, Freudian-inspired avant-garde movement while simultaneously repressing and transforming it into a ghost, thus creating what I call surrealist ghostliness.2 Spiritualism was launched in 1848 when the Fox sisters of Hydesville , New York, claimed to communicate with the dead through knocking sounds in their house. It spread quickly to Europe and led to a rise in popularity of mediums and magnetic somnambulism , otherwise known as hypnosis, which was taken seriously by scientists such as Camille Flammarion and Pierre and Marie Curie.3 2 Introduction It had originated with the French craze for Franz Anton Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism during the political upheaval of the late eighteenth century, a theory that destabilized the ascendency of Enlightenment thinking and concurred with the rise in popularity in England of gothic fiction by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. Mesmer’s “discovery” of “a primeval ‘agent of nature,’” a “superfine fluid that penetrated and surrounded all bodies” that he claimed could be used to “supply Parisians with heat, light, electricity, and magnetism,” captivated his contemporaries, as Robert Darnton explains, because, like Newton’s gravity and Franklin’s electricity, Mesmer’s fluid confirmed that human beings were “surrounded by wonderful, invisible forces” (3–4, 10). Subsequently, despite Mesmer’s abhorrence of “superstitious and occult practices of all kinds,” his theories paved the way for both nineteenth-century spiritualism, which also explored invisible forces, and twentieth-century theories of psychology and psychoanalysis (Crabtree 171).4 The Gothic Imagination Surrealism’s historical link to the late eighteenth-century’s gothic imagination surfaces in Breton’s 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism,” in his high praise of Lewis’s gothic novel The Monk (1796). Breton makes it provocatively clear that he prefers Lewis’s ghosts to Dostoyevsky’s realism and holds up fairy tales as exemplars of literary fiction. In paying homage to Freud in the “Manifesto”—stating that he practiced Freud’s methods while working as a medical auxiliary during World War I—Breton embraces the creative practice of automatism, signaling surrealism’s attachment to both of Mesmer’s legacies, intentional and unintentional: the scientific and the spiritualist, the Freudian and the occult (Manifestoes 23). When Breton effectively recast the Cartesian cogito “I think, therefore I am” in the second sentence of the “Manifesto” with the suggestion “I dream, therefore I am” and with the characterization of “Man” as “that inveterate dreamer,” he established surrealism’s dedication to exploring all the ways in which [3.236.64.8] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:06 GMT) Introduction 3 nonrational, psychic, and paranormal phenomena may inform the understanding of human experience (3). Although partly motivated by the ghosts of lost friends and their own experiences in World War I, with their appropriation of spiritualist automatism the young surrealists transformed the ghosts that practitioners of spiritualism sought to conjure into ephemeral forces within the unconscious mind. The psychic forces they sought to understand were like metaphorical versions of the ghosts of spiritualism , which looked like bodies—particularly those captured on film by spirit photography—but were in fact only traces of bodies, matter left over after death yet retaining psychic awareness, an ability to communicate, and the double knowledge of life and the afterlife, of life before and after death. Unconstrained by mortal chronology or rules of behavior...