Project Abstract
2004, Jonathan P. Eburne
Surrealism and the
Art of Crime studies a critical
juncture in modernist thinking of the interwar period. Approaching surrealism as an
international movement whose participants devoted attention to cultural and
political issues in the U.S., the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and Northern
Africa, as well as in France and Western Europe, my book offers a reassessment
of surrealisms role in the development of twentieth-century cultural and
political thought between the wars. What I call the art of crime denotes a
composite form of cultural production that includes the detective mysteries,
crime films, sensationalist journalism, and documents of medico-legal opinion
that, for the surrealists, formed a grimly accurate mirror of modern
experience. Far from merely
fanciful representations of the world, these forms bore the authority of the
medial, legal, and political fields, comprising the forensic use of photography,
the socio-biological analysis of criminal types, and the medicalization of
the criminal mind through the institutionalization of psychiatry. The analysis of such material in the
surrealist movements original pamphlets and publications demonstrates the
acuity of the groups response to contemporary public scandals and political
events. That is, the surrealists
recognized that in order to understand criminal violence, it was necessary to
examine the way it was represented and studied. In turn, the surrealist interest in crime as a cultural
phenomenon made it possible to examine the broader historical forces that
otherwise resist representation from the origins of violence and social
transformation, to the very problem of understanding real life itself.
As early as 1919, the
surrealist group began to scrutinize contemporary murder cases with a growing
attention to the ways in which these murders challenged the accepted categories
of public order, criminal motive, and criminal types. Throughout the movements
history, news items from the back pages of popular newspapers played a critical
role in shaping the groups strategy for assessing how and why certain forms of
violence tended to elude public scrutiny.
In response, the surrealists launched a vast array of political tracts
and pamphlets that sought to expose the latent forms of violence exercised in
the name of justice, the state, and even middle-class values. Such writings also debated the criminality
of using violent force in political crises such as Abd-el-Krims anti-colonial
uprising in Algeria; the Sacco and Vanzetti trial; the struggles between
colonial oppression and resistance in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean; the
Scottsboro case; the rise of fascism in Europe; the Moscow trials and Stalinist
purges; and the Algerian and Indo-Chinese wars.
Meanwhile, beginning
with Germaine Berton, the young anarchist assassin who, in 1923, stormed the
offices of the right-wing newspaper LAction Franaise and killed its publishing secretary, the group
championed the causes of a number of female murderers and assassins. Long before they fully accounted for
the women who actually participated in surrealist activities, the surrealists
understood the acts of figures like Berton to be forms of historical agency in
their own right, and not simply degenerate acts of perversity or evil. A
decade later, certain famous paranoia cases of the 1930sJacques Lacans
patient Aime and the murderous Papin sistersbecame the object of further
study for the surrealists, and were read as harbingers of a darker period in
Europes future. In August 1933,
the 18-year-old Violette Nozires fatally poisoned her father, inciting the
moral outrage of many journalists when she soiled her fathers memory by
claiming that he had been sexually abusing her since she was twelve. For the public, who refused to heed
Violettes terrible accusation, the case became a scandalous example of
disgraced and degenerate youth.
For the surrealists, who took Violettes charge at face value, the
parricide became instead a form of autobiographical revision whose desperation
laid bare the structures of patriarchal power and privilege at work in the
family, in the state, and in the medico-legal system as well.
Surrealism and the
Art of Crime examines such criminal
cases within the context of the many classifications and prognoses that the
surrealist writers and artists threw into doubt. By contesting the clinical notion that criminal behavior, like
insanity, or even gender, was a natural or fixed constitutional propensity,
the surrealists understood such tendencies as complex patterns of behavior
governed by warring forces: not only by psychiatric and legal judgments, but
also by an individuals own conscious and unconscious motives. Without ever equating criminal behavior
with revolutionary activity, the surrealist interest in violent crime formed an
essential part of the movements reevaluation of psychological and political
drives whose effects upon modern life, and whose contribution to a massive
liberation of the human imagination, was nothing short of revolutionary.
The book is divided into three sections. The first consists of an introduction
and two chapters that discuss the epistemological and ethical preoccupations
that lay within surrealist aesthetics during the movements early years. Chapter One, Locked Room, Bloody
Chamber, studies the early surrealist interest, however ambivalent, in
the mechanics of locked-room mystery stories, such as Poes Dupin tales, Dostoyevskys Crime and Punishment, and Gaston Lerouxs The Mystery of the Yellow Room. Such
stories, I argue, were instrumental to the movements epistemology, most
significantly in articulating its abandonment of literary naturalism and
philosophical positivism. The second chapter, On Murder,
Considered as One of the Surrealist Arts, argues that the idea of the
beautiful that emerges from the often violent and unsettling articles and
paintings published in the movements early years prefigures surrealisms later
rejection of taste in favor of an analytical rather than evaluative aesthetic
system.
The second section contains two chapters documenting the movements turn toward leftist politics; it examines how members of the group confronted the vague and treacherous distinction between revolutionary violence and murderous crime. The role of aesthetics as a form of judgment nevertheless remains central to this development; under scrutiny is the role of the author as an agent of historical change. Chapter three, Dime-Novel Politics, focuses on the movements tumultuous entry into, and debates with, the French Communist Party during the mid- to late- 1920s. In particular, this chapter examines the role played in this engagement by popular literary and film criminals and anti-heroes, from the fictional villain Fantmas to the historical figure of Jack the Ripper. Chapter Four, X Marks the Spot, examines the role played by the Marquis de Sades pornographic theories of revolt, liberation, and cruelty in the wake of surrealisms engagement with leftist politics.
The books third section, also consisting of two
chapters, examines the groups political migration from a red period of
communist activism into what I call its noir period. Striving to understand the nature of
causality itself, the surrealists attempt to comprehend the rapidly
deteriorating political universe of the 1930s, becoming aware of the latent
forces of terror and social dissolution at work in psychic and political
reality. The books final chapter
is a discussion of the popular, vernacular forms of surrealist thought that
emerged after World War II, even as the movements critical force seemed to be
dissipating. Chapter four,
Surrealism Noir, consists of two parts; the first examines the atrocities
committed by Christine and La Papin upon their employers in early 1933, which
formed a critical case study for theories of paranoia that had been developed,
almost simultaneously, by Salvador Dali, Ren Crevel, and Jacques Lacan. The second part discusses the parricide
committed by the 18-year-old Violette Nozires later that same year. The noir
surrealism that characterizes the surrealist analyses of these contemporaneous
crime cases, I argue, is dedicated to understanding the latent or sublimated
political drives lurking within the troubled historical situation in which the
surrealists were engrossed. Chapter six, The Transatlantic Mysteries of Paris:
Surrealism and the Srie Noire,
continues to explore the noir cultural stance of the previous chapter by
examining the dissemination of surrealist practices throughout the public
sphere in the years following the Second World War. The book concludes with a
discussion of surrealisms continued place in contemporary debates about the
avant-gardes role in twentieth-century politics, and about the function of
leftist theory in a globalized world.
2004, Jonathan P. Eburne.