conclusions.6 E. Zola, `Le Moment artistique', L'EveÂneÂment, 4

May 1866, translated in C. Harrison, P. Woodand J. Geiger, Art in Theory: 1815±1900. Oxford,1998, pp. 552±3. For an interesting argument onthe equation of avant-gardism and `realism', see

L. Nochlin, review of G. Weisberg, The RealistTradition: French Painting and Drawing 1830±1900, in Burlington Magazine, April 1981,pp. 263±9.

7 C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory ofPossessive Individualism, Oxford, 1962.

Occluded FrontSteven Harris

The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity by David Lomas, New Havenand London: Yale University Press, 2000, 269 pp., 33 col. and 97 b. & w. illus., £35.00

The subject of David Lomas's The Haunted Self is the fracturing or fading of the subjectin surrealist texts and images, in keeping with his psychoanalytic sources (Freud, Lacan,Klein and others), as well as with those poststructuralist authors, like Derrida andKristeva, who have touched on psychoanalytic concepts in their writing. The paradox atthe heart of the book, which Lomas foregrounds, is that of knowing oneself whenpsychoanalysis undoes the very possibility of knowing the self, in proposing a splitbetween ego and unconscious.

The Haunted Self is self-consciously a work of the present, which works in a dialoguewith other reception; in keeping with his psychoanalytic model, Lomas's approach to hismaterial is often speculative rather than definitive, working intelligently with primary,secondary and theoretical sources to suggest interpretations of the works he is discussing,which also often bear on a more general understanding of Surrealism. The broadmetaphor here is of The Interpretation of Dreams, of a speculative interpretation which isusually persuasive, even where it is undertaken in the absence of solid evidence. He has athorough understanding of the primary material, its reception and its intellectual sources,as well as of the contemporary theory he uses. He is familiar as well with the considerablesecondary literature on Surrealism, but has gone back to rethink the primary sourcesrather than depend on existing scholarly interpretation, in many instances to deepen ourunderstanding of those sources by looking into their intellectual foundations. To take butone example, his work finally allows us to go beyond the sterile Janet/Freud debate thathas exercised so many scholars, by elucidating the debt that automatic writing owes toFrench psychology, while acknowledging the primary influence of psychoanalysis on theelaboration of surrealist thought.

The book is organized into five chapters, within which drawings, prints, paintings andtexts are discussed in relation to the themes of automatic writing (Miro , Masson), hysteria(the Breton/Eluard simulations of mental illness in L'Immacule e Conception, Ernst's Reà ved'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel), the uncanny double (Picasso), abjection(Dalõ ) and self-portraiture (Miro again). The question of subjectivity informs all thechapters, discussed in different ways and with different sources. The book is thus not a

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developmental narrative, and it has no definitive conclusion, in keeping with the notion ofrepetition or recurrence that structures some of its chapters.

This consciously postmodern attitude also situates Lomas's book in relation to otherart histories. He is frequently generous to other scholars, and his book is by no means apolemical text ± rather it works to open up understanding ± but he can be aggressivetowards the approaches taken by Kenneth Silver and Rosalind Krauss (not to mentiontowards modernism), when he positions himself against both a formalist and a social arthistory, and against an art history oriented towards contemporary critical imperatives. Itis quite natural, I suppose, when situating himself within a psychoanalytic frameworkconcerned with issues of identity and subjectivity, to take up a position against Krauss andHal Foster, who have worked adjacent territory. Krauss's and Foster's work onSurrealism has certainly been more oriented to critical issues in contemporary art than isLomas's, who is more exclusively concerned with a contemporary understanding of anhistorical moment in art; one now achievable through recent work on gender andsexuality. Yet I think Lomas is ungenerous to Krauss's extraordinary earlier breakthroughin rethinking Surrealism with the aid of poststructuralist theory, which prepared theground for the kind of subtle interpretive work he is doing in this book.

Lomas begins the chapter on automatism with a convincing discussion of the genesisof Joan Miro 's 1925 painting The Birth of the World in a sequence of sketchbookdrawings. These sketches have been discussed before in relation to this painting, butLomas provides a plausible ordering of the sketches, and interprets them in relation toFreud's and Derrida's notion of the trace, and of a fading of the subject that at the sametime generates the seemingly casual and automatic iconography of the painting. WhenMiro revealed the sketchbooks in the 1970s, it was realized that the painting itself is notautomatic. However, its effects were generated through a series of tracings similar tothose Freud noted in his essay on the `mystic writing pad', which are the visual equivalentof unconscious mental processes. In this way, through an interpretive act, Lomas movesbeyond the simple question of whether or not Miro 's painting was automatic, to considerhow it might be related to surrealist concerns, and how it can be understood in relation tothe psychoanalytic theory that informed them.

In the same chapter, Lomas discusses two moments of Andre Masson's artisticproduction, that of the mid-1920s when he was developing an automatic drawing thatwould be a counterpart of automatic writing, and that of the mid-1930s when he wasattempting to develop a more consciously `vertiginous' style, based upon his interest inNietzsche and his friendship with Georges Bataille. Lomas relates both of these momentsto the trauma suffered by Masson during World War I, when he was wounded andsuffered a mental breakdown. The notion of a repetition compulsion advanced by Freudin relation to war trauma, and of the inability to articulate this trauma, affects all ofMasson's work according to Lomas, although he is also careful to read repetitioncompulsion as one component of an effort to discover a method by which to representunpremeditated thought.

In the last section of the chapter Lomas joins this discussion of repetition toNietzsche's notion of `eternal recurrence', which was intended to counter the bourgeoisnotion of progress. In its wish to bring together two different registers of thought andexperience, the one a compulsive repetition of trauma, the other a mythical and cyclicalunderstanding of time achieved through Nietzsche, this section of the book is, in my view,the least convincing. It remains unclear why Lomas thinks it necessary to propose acontinuity in Masson's work over two decades, when he does not do so elsewhere. This isthe one instance in The Haunted Self where the author fails to articulate the relationsbetween the different discourses he employs in his analysis, perhaps because the need tofind a relation between the notions of repetition and recurrence that structures the work,

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between Freud and Bataille, is too great. Lomas discerns a relation between these differentdiscourses in Masson's work, and so can we, but the distance between them remains toolarge, and the bridge established between them too frail, to support his discussion.

The following chapter, however, on the Eluard/Breton simulations of mental illnessand on Max Ernst's 1930 collage novel, Reà ve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer auCarmel, is a far more successful and instructive, at times brilliant discussion of surrealiststrategies in relation to psychoanalytic concepts, using hysteria to discuss the sliding ofsubject positions in these works, in order to enable us to understand how these worksmight contribute to a subversion of bourgeois values. For Lomas is fully attentive to thesurrealist's critical use of psychoanalytic concepts, which is integrated into his analysishere as elsewhere in his study. It is in this chapter that we find the judicious discussion ofthe significance of pre-Freudian psychology for the surrealists.

The third chapter uses both Freud's discussion of doubling in `The `̀ Uncanny''' andJulia Kristeva's discussion of the uncanny as foreign presence in Strangers to Ourselves toaddress the co-existence of classical and surrealist modes of image-making in Picasso'swork in the 1920s. This approach, Lomas believes, offers a more nuanced reading ofPicasso's classical turn than the analyses of that turn made by Silver or Krauss, whichfavour an ostensibly progressive modernism over the reactionary `rappel aÁ l'ordre' ofpostwar classicism. Instead, Lomas describes a divided work that incensed postwar criticslooking for a unified oeuvre, a self-division that he interprets through Freud and Kristeva,using as his evidence the contemporary critical reception of Picasso's work to underscorethis need for unity felt by critics of all persuasions. Lomas also interprets Picasso's turn toclassicism, and indeed that by so many postwar artists, as a form of mourning for atraditional culture whose death was desired by so many cultural figures before the war,yet whose actual demise during the war, which was only recognized after the fact,triggered an unconscious sense of guilt. Although this phenomenon is analysed throughPicasso's postwar painting, it would appear that Lomas is more concerned with ananalysis of the period here than with the work of individual artists, which is a departurefrom his other chapters.

The last section of the chapter discusses Picasso in relation to Georges Bataille'snotion of the informe; Bataille looms large not just here or in Lomas's discussion ofMasson, but in the fourth and fifth chapters on Dalõ and Miro as well. In this section andin the fourth chapter, it becomes a question of opposing a supposedly sublimating Bretonto a desublimating Bataille, in a book that generally manages to avoid these kinds ofpolarities. Despite an acknowledgement of Surrealism's complex relation to the real ± asopposed to the familiar charge that it is a flight from the real, advanced by Bataille amongothers ± Lomas accepts Bataille's description of the surrealists as `Icarian idealists', whichBataille opposed in 1929±30 to his own conception of a `base' materialism (by which theforms of bourgeois culture are undone or at least opposed by the formless). While anunderstanding of Picasso's own disruptions of form in the postwar period is furthered byLomas's use of this `concept' of the informe (ostensibly less a concept than an undoing ofform), this is at the expense of an understanding of what would relate Picasso toSurrealism. In proposing a fundamental difference between the high and low of surrealistidealism and `base' materialism, Bataille and former surrealists like Michel Leiris weretrying to wrest Picasso (as well as Miro , Dalõ and Giacometti) from surrealist influence in1929±30, but it is by no means necessary to accept this polemical description withoutqualification today.

This problem is related to a larger misgiving I have with Lomas's study, which is thatin focusing on one component of the constellation of discourses that made Surrealismpossible ± psychoanalysis ± he forgets, ignores or represses the aesthetic dimension ofSurrealism, and particularly its essentially romantic conception of poetry synthesized from

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French and German sources. One of the surrealists' most powerful arguments againstcontemporary forms of modernist art and literature was made through the conjoining ofpsychoanalysis and poetry, in the understanding that the logic of the dream-work and themost unpremeditated poetry were essentially the same. That is, there was a regressionfrom concerns of craft and form to the content of dream-thought in this opposition tocontemporary forms of bourgeois culture, which would undercut and supersede allconventional forms of art. Art would be redirected to its sexual origins in unconsciousthought, and in this sense surrealist texts or objects can also be understood as a form ofdesublimation, although in a way quite different from Bataille's understanding of whatthis would mean (the term `desublimation' was only coined later by Herbert Marcuse, andrevived by Foster). I think that Breton's term `convulsive beauty' can be understood in thisway, as a sexualized mode of beauty linked to the uncanny shiver of recognition, to thehysterical symptom or to orgasmic bliss, which nevertheless retains a poetic dimension: aconvulsive beauty that, in its very lack of form, is the antithesis of a Kantian conception ofbeauty as bounded form. Although I do not question Lomas's use of the informe to discussPicasso's work, it makes less sense then to oppose Bataille to Breton (or later, DalõÂ toSurrealism), for this makes an understanding of their historical relation to Surrealismdifficult if not impossible, and for no valid reason. Surrealism was broader than thecritique of its `Icarian idealism' allowed for, and the acceptance of this description reducesthe scope for understanding, even as Lomas has opened it up in so many other areas.

These criticisms hold for the chapter on DalõÂ and abjection as well, to the extent thatLomas opposes the poetic to the perverse, when DalõÂ himself encouraged a thinking of therelation between the two precisely as a way to counter the sublimatory tendencies ofmodern art and literature. While this does not preclude a contradiction and anantagonism between the different strategies of automatic writing and paranoia-criticism,which indeed led to an irreconcilable conflict between Breton and DalõÂ after 1935, Lomaswrites at times as if DalõÂ , like Picasso, was completely outside surrealist concerns, when hewas linked historically to this movement for ten years, and was close to Eluard, Crevel,Tzara and others in the group during much of that time. It is not a question of either/or,but of how, which depends again on one's conceptual framework for understandingSurrealism, and on what can be admitted or what is excluded from that understanding.

The chapter on Dalõ is in two parts, one concerning his illustrations for Lautre amont'sChants de Maldoror, published by Skira in 1934, and the other the 1937 painting andpoem that are both entitled The Metamorphosis of Narcissus. He reads both sections inrelation to Kristeva's writings on abjection, incorporating a psychoanalytic understandingof narcissism into the discussion of the later painting and poem. He notes, usefully, thatBreton and Dalõ find essentially different texts in the Maldoror; if Dalõ brings out whatLomas sees as its abject core of excrement and putrefaction, Breton represses itshomosexual thematics, in suppressing the `il' from the famous `beau comme' simileaddressed in the poem to a male youth, in favour of a heterosexual interpretation of thecomponents of that simile ± the sewing machine and umbrella ± as male and female.Lomas will later speculate, after his analysis of The Metamorphosis of Narcissus andfollowing Freud's interpretation of narcissistic object choices, as to whether the amour fouthat animated many a surrealist life and text was not fundamentally narcissistic and thushomosexual, explicating in this way Breton's well-known homophobia.

This is possible, although I am not convinced that this deconstructive reading bringsus any closer to an understanding of surrealist art and theory, as opposed to the lives of,say, Breton, DalõÂ or Aragon. It may, although it remains possible to read the evidenceanother way without rejecting Lomas's speculative reading here. While so much of thisbook is a real contribution to an understanding of Surrealism, in a significant number ofinstances (and I would say this is one of them), there is a tendency to propose

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symptomatic readings of the works in question in keeping with his paradigm ofpsychoanalytic interpretation. Following Lomas's reading, there seems little doubt thatBreton (but Aragon, too? since he and Breton were discovering Lautre amont at the sametime) repressed the homosexual dimension of Lautre amont's prose poem. Yet it does notseem to me that an instance of repression accounts for the extraordinary value that Breton(and so many others) saw in the Maldoror as a kind of counterpoetics that, all at once,appeared to coincide with Rimbaud's contemporary imagery, Breton's discovery ofpsychoanalysis, the cubist invention of collage, Pierre Reverdy's theorization of poetry ±after Rimbaud and after Cubism ± as the rapprochement of distant realities and, slightlylater, with the production of astonishing images in automatic writing. The constellation ofthese discoveries in 1916±19 appeared to offer immense possibilities for an alternativeaesthetic that, in a sense, produced the surrealist movement, and if this sequence of eventsappears more familiar than the suggestion that a homosexual thematics underlies theMaldoror, the latter interpretation does not negate the former, but complicates it ininteresting ways. The meeting of opposites in the surrealist image still occurs, and remainsimportant as a method founded upon the insight that the production of images inautomatic writing is to all intends identical to the process of collage. I would still claimthat an approach that works toward an understanding of the integration ofpsychoanalytic and aesthetic discourses in surrealist theory and practice offers morelatitude than one that relies on psychoanalytic interpretations alone, for this willinevitably produce symptomatic readings, as it did for Krauss and Foster.

The final chapter is a brilliant reading of Miro 's self-portraiture as rupture and loss ofself. This is achieved both through Lacan's discussion of the ego as meÂconnaissance, andthrough Bataille's notion of sovereignty as dissolution, read against the political history ofthe late 1930s.

The Haunted Self is a rich and complex work that makes an important contribution tothe literature on Surrealism, notwithstanding the misgivings I have expressed. It does notpropose definitive readings of the material, but is a kind of conversation with otherreception that pushes our understanding of the subject further, and it is in that spirit that Ihave made some of my comments here. Lomas's profound knowledge of both primary andsecondary sources and material means that there are very few errors here, apart from ahandful of typographical ones; the only factual error I found, and it is a minor one, wasthe misattribution in passing of Magritte's grouping of photomat portraits of thesurrealists around his 1929 painting Je ne vois pas . . . etc. to Man Ray. In a book as richand considered as this one, I regret the lack of a bibliography, for it is evident that Lomasis much more familiar with the field and with the theoretical literature than is indicatedeven in his extensive notes. But this unfortunate decision was probably one taken by thepress and not himself, as it is a common one these days. Despite my arguments with someof its conclusions, The Haunted Self, in my view, marks an important step in the currentre-evaluation of Surrealism, precisely because it works a sophisticated understanding ofcontemporary theory and issues against a thorough knowledge of the primary sources.

Steven HarrisUniversity of Alberta

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