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Explorations, Simulations: Claude Cahun and Self-Identity

Viviana Gravano European Journal of Women's Studies 2009 16: 353 DOI: 10.1177/1350506809342619 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ejw.sagepub.com/content/16/4/353

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Explorations, Simulations: Claude Cahun and Self-Identity

Viviana Gravano
ACCADEMIA DI BELLE ARTI DI MILANO BRERA

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to construct a critique of some works by the French artist Lucy Schwob, better known as Claude Cahun, who was active between 1910 and 1950. A writer and photographer, Cahun was at first very close to symbolist positions; later she was closer to the surrealist movement. Her work and her life, continually suspended between genders, and between normality and deviance, have so far been analysed mainly through gender studies. This article attempts to restore the inherent complexity of her poetic work and aesthetic. It tries to widen the field of study to deal with the representation of alterity, through reversing the stereotypical representation.

KEY WORDS

Claude Cahun N deviance N female surrealism N self-figuration self-identity N surrealist photography N self-portrait

In 2002, the French historian Franois Leperlier edited a philological collection of texts by a then little known French authoress: Lucy Schwob, better known as Claude Cahun (Cahun, 2002). Four years later, the same scholar published a detailed biography of the artist (Leperlier, 2006), which revealed a really significant corpus, including essays, fiction and photography. What was odd was that although Claude Cahun was a well-known member of the surrealist movement, and well-known by the public, at least up to the 1940s, she was completely excised from critical histories of literature or arts after her death in 1954. Leperlier alleged that the main reason for this repression was the voluntary isolation of Lucy Schwob and her inseparable companion Suzanne Malherbe (pen name Marcel Moore) on the island of Jersey, in the English Channel, ruled by the British Crown. This place suited Lucys history, as she lived and grew up between two cultures: her French origin and background, and the English culture that hosted her
The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav European Journal of Womens Studies, 1350-5068; Vol. 16(4): 353371; 342619; DOI: 10.1177/1350506809342619 http://ejw.sagepub.com

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higher education, after her familys decision to leave France. France had become an insecure country for Jews after the Dreyfus case, which had, marginally, involved Le Phare de la Loire, the newspaper directed by her father in Nantes. Lucy was only partly Jewish: on the side of her paternal grandmother, whom she loved so much that she made her the source of her new surname: Cahun (Leperlier, 2006: 40). Undoubtedly, the decision to withdraw to the margins of cultural life strongly contributed to the decades-long oblivion of her work. I believe we can add to the embarrassment of the critics, given Claude Cahuns really remarkable number of works, some of which were so difficult to identify because of the overabundance of names by which she signed them forming a kind of disseminated, pulverized dynamic among the conventional cataloguing of contemporary and modern art. A careful reading of her literature, journals and private letters and a comparison with her photographs reveals a labyrinth of cross-references that form an articulated meta-linguistic system. The photographic images have been the subject of my study for several years, and I believe it is important to understand that all her work forms an integrated whole: the building or showing of what we would define today as a self-identity,1 assembled through the juxtaposition and the gathering of elements from her background including her family descent and that works exactly as a huge, unfinished cadavre exquis.2 I would like to start from some interpretations that make her an exemplum for gender studies (Rice, 1999), proposing a reading that at times may reveal the essential points of her work, and may at other times do the opposite, framing her in an anachronistically postmodern vision a decontextualized (Chadwick and Latimer, 2003: 12743) view which does not properly acknowledge Cahuns strong, carnal links to her own times. Undoubtedly, her biography is a key factor in reading her works: an avowed lesbian, she fell in love with her stepsister, Suzanne Malherbe, daughter of her fathers second wife whom he married after the premature death of Claudes mother and shared her life with her until she died in 1954 also sharing a shocking spell of imprisonment during the Nazi occupation of Jersey.3 Part of the feminist literature (Caws et al., 1990) identified some sort of misogynous vein in the underlying philosophy of surrealism, which obscured the creative potential of the women within the movement, and which is reported only to dissent from it in Rosalind Krausss essay Bachelors (Krauss, 1999). Such views would explain the apparent absence of Claude Cahun from essays dedicated to surrealism, in spite of her close friendship and continuous association with Andr Breton, and her official and widely documented presence within the movement.4 Without going any further into the controversy over the alleged misogyny of surrealism, something that is worthy of wider discussion, I believe it important in the specific case of Claude Cahun to consider

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that her connection to the movement was characterized by a strong involvement, filled with meetings and conflicts, firmly focused on the idea of a surrealist revolution. It would be unfair to repudiate this expost, to relegate her position to a mere cataloguing of her role as woman and lesbian in this specific cultural context. Lucy Schwob was an intellectual, an extraordinary expert on symbolism, an acknowledged member of surrealism, in an apparently more intimate and less exposed, but certainly no less committed, dimension. She decided to achieve this through building an imaginary that working mainly on herself developed an entire universe of meanings. The continuous attempt to read her, a posteriori, as a sort of precursor of postmodern instances is insufficiently philological. Such a reading would forcibly connect her, for instance, to the work of Cindy Sherman (Chadwick, 1998: 6681), and would therefore once more restrict her range of activity and influence to a well-defined but limited context.5 I would therefore like to analyse some self-portraits, moving chronologically across a very short period of production, in order to attempt a reading that, for reasons of space, can only be outlined in this article. I might summarize my position using a postscript by Claude Cahun as an incipit to the analysis of her photographic works: A prsent jexiste autrement6 (Cahun, 2002: 191). One of the self-portraits of 1920 (Figure 1), which is now an iconic image of Claude, represents her from behind, in a dark singlet, her head completely shaved, her face turned to the left and her mouth half open with the corners turned down, looking behind herself out of the corner of her eye. The bizarre position of her shoulders almost suggests a masculine, or in any case breastless, bust as seen from the front; the junction between the head and the shoulders is disquieting. Claude does not seem to have been interested in the anamorphic or deforming aspect of surrealist photography, apart from just one image of 1929, which I mention later. In this photograph, nevertheless, a very subtle formal ambiguity makes this body odd, because of the well-defined shape of the shaved cranium, and the position that seems to reverse the body, clearly alluding to some sort of inner estrangement, an ambiguity of the limbs. The protrusion of the aquiline nose emerges from her profile: an element that in racial cataloguing7 strongly identifies the stereotypical Jewish type. In the series of portraits depicted by Claude Cahun in the texts collected under the title rones, the Old Testament heroine Judith speaking in the first person8 in the description of La sadique Judith depicts her beloved/ hated one, Holofernes:
Ah! Surtout, que me plaisent ces oreilles en ventail, cette nuque au poil court, et la superbe verticale du crne au cou, sil penche la tte en arrire, brise par les plis de reptile! Je les aime parce que jy reconnais les caractres distinctifs, de la race ennemi.9 (Cahun, 2002: 131)

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FIGURE 1 Self-Portrait from 1920. Copyright Jewish Heritage Museum. This description, obviously written some years after the photograph, is incredibly close to the self-portrait in the singlet, even in the detail of the skin folds of the neck, and closes with the phrase the enemy race, where in a skilful play of identification/inversion the artist hosts in her body the image of the evil/masculine Holofernes, who was loved, but also defeated by the Jewish heroine. In both the text and the image we can see this same intensive process at work, which I believe characterizes the work of Claude Cahun: taking physical charge of herself, embodying several conditions in her own limbs, not harmonizing them, or searching for some resolutive mediation, but keeping them in a constant condition of negotiation and contradiction. In that body, which appears both front and back to be both masculine and feminine, there is no attempt at gratification, rather, a vital, disquieting sense of the indefinite. In another text, again contemporary with the photograph and contained in Aveux non avenus (Cahun, 2002), Claude Cahun describes a dualistic portrait that might serve as an extended caption to the photograph:
A lInvitable./O fillette gentille, dpose ta grce de fleur sche entre les feuillets de mes livres et de mes actes prfrs, que je mhabitue ton parfume dont la faduer mecure un peu encore, et dont livresse amre, et que jaime! me suffoque dabord malgr moi. . ./O mort camarde, ton immutable moule simpose atrocement aux visages nez aquilin. Aussi les hommes de ce type te redoutent-ils davantage. Pourtant sois inflexible, masque implacable; reste rigide, que tu les veuilles ou non. Ne te laisse pas injurier par moi, petite douceur.10 (Cahun, 2002: 191)

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I would like here to make a short digression on the issue of the name selected by the artist, who related to Charles Henri Barbier in 1951:
. . . Claude Cahun qui reprsentait (reprsente mes yeux) mon vritable nom plutt quun pseudonyme.11 (Leperlier, 2006: 41)

I believe this is an essential passage in clarifying that for Lucy Schwob Claude Cahun is not an alter ego; it is not, as she declares, a nickname, but is an actual self-nomination, i.e. it is part of the reconstructive process of a self, which, to be effectively accomplished, must start from a basic element, i.e. from the definition of the very coordinates it belongs to, so that once reprocessed they may introduce and contain congenital elements of a new, self-determined personality. I believe it is not at all an accident that such a new nomination of herself involves the acquisition of a surname taken from her paternal grandmother, of easily recognizable Jewish descent, something that was rather uncomfortable at that time. In Confidences au miroir (Cahun, 2002) a poetic autobiography published for the first time by Leperlier Claude Cahun writes, in a form of sorrowful invocation:
mal nomms, je vous renomme! bien aims, je vous surnomme, discrdits . . . objet, sujet, ide, mot, je vous fais confiance.12 (Cahun, 2002: 585)

The representation of her own subjectivity is no longer dictated by any family line, or by birth; rather, it is an a posteriori choice, conscious and determined and to transform herself and set up her own world. Hence the reason to choose not only the surname, but also the given name Claude, which enables her to stand on that threshold without revealing her gender (in French it is written the same for masculine and feminine). She also said:
La gne des mots, et surtout de noms propres, est un obstacle mes relations avec autrui, cest--dire ma vie mme. Obstacle si ancien quil mapparat en quelque sorte un trait congnital.13 (Cahun, 2002: 585)

Claude Cahun reiterates that the new name does not belong to her literature, but in absolute terms to her life, and she mentions the term congenital, a word in vogue at the time as it related to sexual deviations, such as the homosexuality analysed by Havelock Ellis, whom Claude Cahun herself translated from English within the animated debate on the genetic origin of the then so-called inversion14 (Ellis, 1966). I therefore believe it interesting to see some intended physiognomic accentuations in her first portraits, like figural renominations: a way of staging her claimed belonging, using the stereotyped signs by which the conventions normally depict it. Thus, returning to the elements of the aforementioned photographs: the shaving a clear sign of rebellion because of long hair being a strong sign of feminine distinctiveness at that time

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(Doy, 2007: 1535) the ostentation of the Jewish nose, and the position of the bust, which androgynizes her, bring to the surface a strong will to identify herself as an anomalous being, not only in the meaning of the not readily identifiable sexual ambiguity as related to gender, but close to the aesthetics of anomaly that at that time were on a similar level to photographic representation of lunatics, of deviants and of the other in more general terms. In the figuration Claude Cahun gives herself I see some kind of individual to be corrected, in the meaning given by Michel Foucault (1999) in Les Anormaux, which he developed for his lectures at the Collge de France between 1974 and 1975. Somebody who can be defined just through his or her incorrigibility, who knows the rules well yet infringes them willingly, and puts him- or herself on the limits of any normalization, starting with a basic refusal of the family. I believe it is essential in understanding Lucy Schwobs relationship with abnormality to take seriously into account how her life had been disrupted by a traumatic event she herself reshaped by translating and conceptualizing it several times throughout her work. When Claude was still a child, her mother was committed to a lunatic asylum, a victim of a very severe depression, from which she would never recover or return, thus disappearing completely from her daughters life. Before being interned, Lucys mother, Marie Antoinette, manifested a dramatic refusal of Lucy: she could not touch her and even committed violent acts against her. Her mothers detention would generate in Lucy the constant fear, which was also obsessively shared by her father, of ending in the same terrible vice-like grip of mental illness. In these first self-portraits, there is a precise iconography of alienation, an image suspension between the self-representation and the foreshadowing of a sick future. Claude Cahun presents herself willingly as an ostensibly embarrassing figure to be looked at, through a declared deconstruction of her physical features. A feminine body through the shaved cranium and the androgynous slimness, ethnicized by the Jewish nose and the starting point of a more general, deep and continuous reflection on this condition of alteration, which would soon find for her a conceptual, intellectual meaning in her approach to the surrealist movement. Again, in Aveux non avenues, she writes:
Ah a je deviens fou! Et la Folie- bouche malaise lhaleine contagieuse qui ma dchir loreille dune voix monstrueuse me souffle son doute empoisonn: Lalination mentale est-elle subite ou graduelle? Je rpte docilement: Et la Folie me regarde de ses yeux fixes./ Docilement . . . dune comprhension de plus en plus attnue. Je me surprends dire:/ Lalination consciente est elle subite ou graduelle?15 (Cahun, 2002: 195)

Madness is not only a possible, codified condition to be submitted to, but it can be transformed into a voluntarily built position, into which can

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FIGURE 2 Self-Portrait from 1920. Reproduced with permission of the Muse dArt Moderne, Paris.

one step consciously, keeping for oneself a sought-after threshold. Hence the choice to portray herself as freak, crazy, lunatic, other. We might agree with Lucy La folie nest moins vaniteuse que la raison16 (Cahun, 2002: 201). And also:
Je me fais raser les cheveux, arracher les dents, les seins tout ce qui gne ou impatiente mon regard lestomac, les ovaires, le cerveau conscient et enkyst. Quand je naurai plus quune carte en main, quun battement de coeur noter, mais la perfection, bien sre je gagnerai la partie.17 (Cahun, 2002: 215)

I believe that another self-portrait (Figure 2), housed at the Muse dArt Moderne in Paris, again dated 1920, validates the assumption that one of the key elements in Claude Cahuns iconography starts from building a self-identity connected in a very wide sense to the representation of alterity. The photograph shows her in profile, with her arms folded, but only just visible, in an oversized velvet jacket with a large shawl collar enclosing the thin body we guess underneath it. The hair is very short, cut in a masculine style; a direct light hits the visage and the profile parades once more the aquiline nose, with the same half-open mouth, the corners turned downwards. The gaze is fixed forward, but the eyelids are slightly closed. This image actually appears as the countermelody of the former: Lucy covers that anomalous body in the jacket, not to hide it, but in this case to

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highlight it even more and celebrate it, to expose its refiguration. Given that the hair has grown a little, this self-portrait, from the same year, must be a little later than that shown in Figure 1. The shape of the nose gives form to the rift within the family: a paternal grandmother very proud of her Jewish lineage18 and a Catholic, avowedly anti-Semite maternal family.
Maman me nommait mon petit cochon! Elle me retroussait le bout de nez. Elle sattristait de constater que, malgr tout, je navais pas le nez grec. Mes oreilles un petit peu dcolles la dsolait. Cest comme pour le nez Il est petit; il serait tou fait joli si . . . Elles seront parfaites tes oreilles, mon petit crochon, si tu veux bien . . . Je la laissais faire. Elle me faisait porter un bguin . . . qui disparut avec elle.19 (Cahun, 2002: 618)

In these early self-portraits, Lucy/Claude includes all her worst fears, but also her family roots, which she redesigns, transforming them from an essential element to a poetic, formal one. The format of the images clearly obtained from a far larger negative in the case of the second refers to the photographic portrait, which is already aligned with the documentary photograph. It is interesting to note the subtle work of the semiotics of form: the use of a format that evokes identification, and therefore a compulsory, institutional pose; it is used to represent herself as a foreign body, even turning its back, not well identifiable and liminal. It is clear that Claude Cahun, because of her association with surrealism,20 would certainly have had the opportunity to see and, I assume, also to participate in the research developed in the pages of La Rvolution surraliste, and then Documents and Minotaure, around photo identification images. A picture of 1924, published in issue 1 of La Rvolution surraliste shows at the centre a mug shot of the young anarchist Germaine Berton known for having killed the monarchist Marius Plateau, founder of lAction Franaise surrounded by 28 photo IDs of men suspected of surrealism, including Freud and Picasso. The last issue of the same publication that year printed another picture, this time having at its centre a reproduction of Magrittes painting representing a feminine nude, in a posture reminiscent of Botticellis Birth of Venus or more generically of the Venus pudica with the inscriptions je ne vois pas21 above her head and cache dans la fort22 under her feet, and word femme replaced by the feminine image. This is surrounded by 16 photographic portraits of surrealists, all with their eyes shut, an obvious tribute to Andr Bretons automatic thinking.23 The two photomontages deal in two different perspectives with a theme dear to the surrealist movement: the unconditional adhesion to the acts and biography of whoever is breaking the rules, be they criminals, madmen or any other form of deviation or alienation. The choice of the identification photograph has in both cases a strongly subversive value, precisely because of the formal contradiction into which it throws the categorizing stereotype, which is consolidated and made scientific

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by the birth of photography. Allusion is made here to a phenomenon first introduced in Disdris Cartes de Visite, and later developed in identification photographs as a possible tool of self-representation. This often pushed the most conventional of bourgeois to become exhibitionists within the photographic studio, even taking the en travesti well beyond the stage. Therefore, at least two different approaches to Claude Cahuns world lie concealed in the context of the small photographic self-portrait: the scientific identification photograph (psychiatric, criminal and racial, all placed on the same level) and the opportunity of self-definition and self-representation by putting oneself on stage. In 1930, Georges Bataille published the essay Figure humaine in issue 4 of Documents; the essay introduces an intense reflection on the inner/outer relationship in the representation of the human figure, and hence on its relationship with the concepts of beauty and deviation. A reading of Nicolas-Franois Regnaults 18th-century anatomical tables, which could be seen in the Bibliothque Nationale de France, and which illustrated human anatomical anomalies and deformations, developed into the awareness of the need for a human presentation, even depicting the worst monstrosities. The twins joined at the head, for instance, assumed a posture to the public that invoked pity for them; the man with the four atrophic limbs drew a scimitar and wore a beautiful turban. What attracted and interested Bataille was the urgency of staging diversity. At the end of 1933, issue 3 4 of the magazine Minotaure , alongside Salvador Dals text Le Phnomne de lextase, published a sort of photographic mosaic portraying women with closed eyes and half-closed lips, in an ecstatic pose, accompanied by close-up photographs of ears reminiscent of Bertillons anthropometric photographs and reproductions of artwork details showing figures in ecstasy. The images clearly refer to the iconography born around the phenomenon of hysteria, which was discovered by Charcot, and which he turned into an actual artform in his laboratory at the lunatic asylum of the Salptrire in Paris in the early 19th century. In his enlightening essay LInvention de lhysterie, the historian Georges Didi-Huberman reveals from the very beginning the marvellous and yet terrible focus of Charcots research:
Jinterroge ce paradoxe datrocit: lhystrie fut, a tous moments de son histoire, une douleur mise en contrainte dtre invente, comme spectacle et comme image; elle allais jusqu sinventer elle mme (sa contrainte tait son essence) lorsque faiblissait le talent des fabricateurs patents de lHystrie.24 (Didi-Huberman, 1982: 9)

I would like to make clear here that the idea of discovery works in reality as a system of invention and building of alterity a key concept to understand, for instance, a large part of the colonial literature founded on the definition of race, because, as the anthropologist Mondher Kilani writes:

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This is why seeing was systematically invoked in support of saying, and assigned to the task of telling the truth (Kilani, 1994: 79). To return to Claude Cahun, her mothers madness would mark her for life, and she would keep a veil of mystery over her concrete manifestation. As an adult, Claude went to look for her mother in Paris, in the asylum where she was last seen, to be with her physically, but discovered she had been dead for years. Again in her confessions, she wrote:
. . . lobsdante absence de ma mre, traite en aline, considre par les siens par sa mre et sa soeur comme une honte quil convient de cacher au monde, le merveilleux et consternant mystre de ce que les adultes nommaient ses crises, le dchirement de lui tre arrache, rendue pour en tre, spare de nouveau . . .25 (Cahun, 2002: 585)

Claude would find the mystery and pain of this illness represented publicly in much of the literature and art that from the beginning of the century focused on lunatic women, and this became, in my opinion, another central element in her iconography, at least in her first photographic self-portraits, and a conspicuous part of her writings. The encumbering character of her mother, who was abnegated as a sublimated image, is to be first of all impersonated, put back on the stage, concretized using the stereotyped iconography she had already met as a child, in the refusal and shame of family respectability, and then met again at an intellectual level in the public representation of diversity. So far, in the documents referred to the Claude Cahun Collection in the Jersey Heritage archives I have not found any references to the study of Charcot in her early years, but Leperlier mentions a visit paid by Claude and Suzanne to a demonstration of the patients at the Salptrire, in the mid-1930s, accompanied by a Tunisian friend of theirs, Nocls Coutouzis, a fellow combatant in the Groupe Brunet. In a letter, Coutouzis writes that their interest was not medical, but addressed whatever would represent, philosophically and politically, the state of alienation, this was additionally so in view of their innate opposition to the psychiatric institution itself (Leperlier, 2006: 222). Furthermore, between 1934 and 1935, Claude Cahun, accompanied by Michaux, Breton and Crevel, attended the lectures of the psychiatrist Gastone Ferdire (Leperlier, 2006: 223) at the SaintAnne hospital in Paris. She then remained in close contact with Ferdire who was to assist Antonin Artaud in Rodez hospital in 1944, submitting him to electroshock for a long time. We can therefore imagine that Claude Cahun was somehow capable of what Didi-Huberman defines as the imaginatio plastica (DidiHuberman, 1982: 13), which is pushing Charcot not to document/describe hysteria, but to stage it, up to the actual invention of its representation (which, in its most extreme instances, sees the voluntary participation of the sick women themselves), and up to her becoming curator of the Muse de la Salptrire, the actual temple of the figuration of the disease.

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Looking back at the two Claude Cahun photographic self-portraits, we can recognize characteristics of the classic iconography devised for the lunatic: the same shaved cranium, the half-open mouth, the attitude of being closed in on herself, in particular in the image with the jacket, and the almost terrifying aspect as in the image of her turning backwards to look over her shoulder with that disquieting gaze. Claude Cahun presents the private ghost of her mothers madness, still using the stylistic elements of the stereotypical representation of the lunatic and deviant, to set up her own public image of diversity. In a very significant passage of Aveux non avenues, the artist writes about the infanticide/suicide of a mother and her son/daughter, sketching some interesting character traits:
Avis: il a t tu dans le commune de Guerlande un enfant g de trente . . . rrr . . . trois ans: Yves Claudanec. Rapporter lassassin, 26, rue Saint-Antoine. On promet une rcompense./ Cependant, sur la peau du tambour, comme sur la toile tendue dune lanterne magique, je voyais sinscrire trait par trait, seffacer, reparatre, tous le soupons des spectateur: les voyous notoires du pays, un oncle de lenfant, hritier ventuel, enfin la mre elle mme. Limage de celle-ci persista, disparaissant un instant pour venir reconstituer la scne dun gorgement imaginaire. Cette femme, ardente, irrligieuse et peu bavarde, passait pour folle dans le pays. Elle fixa le regard, les prventions. Faute de prouves suffisantes dinnocence, elle fut incrimine incarcr, tandis quelle rptait dun ton monotone comme une vache rumine la tte vraiment perdue cette fois: Oui cest moi qui lai envoy la mort! Cette parole fut compte pour un aveu. Et la fille Claudenac marcha vers la guillotine comme pour un dpart vers la Terre Promise, riant travers ses larmes . . . On a bien fait de la condamner, dit quelquun. Elle simule la folie. Quimporte cette femme de vivre? Elle simulait, certes, la foule avait raison.26 (Cahun, 2002: 198)

At the end of the passage, the idea of feigning madness is explicit, and might seem an autobiographic, but also a poetic note; and like in a Greek tragedy the chorus is right about the self-confessed infanticidal woman, who goes voluntarily to her death. In another, less well-known photograph, again of 1920, Claude Cahun is shot from the front, at half length; she wears a singlet perhaps the same as in the other photograph and holds her hands over her ears, as in the gesture of not wanting to hear. The eyes are wide open, the head again shaved. The white light hitting her face makes it rather two-dimensional, and confers on it an estranging fixity. On the one hand, her gesture actually looks almost desperate, like someone who does not want to hear, and once again is reminiscent of the typical iconography of lunatics with their hands in their hair, or the autistic gesture of isolation from the world. On the other hand, nevertheless, the strange light that separates the head from the shoulders gives her face the character of a mask, introducing a theme that would prove to be central, both in her writings and in many of her subsequent images. The gesture is disquieting, and it conjures a sort

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FIGURE 3 Self-Portrait from Bifur Magazine, 1920. Copyright Jewish Heritage Museum. of humanized dummy changing its head, putting another one on its shoulders. In 1930, Claude Cahun published a self-portrait in the surrealist magazine Bifur (Figure 3), where the cranium is again shaved and completely deformed, lengthened out of proportion.27 The head, set against a black background, has an almost frightened gaze. The image immediately recalls a sentence Claude Chaun writes in the fourth chapter of Aveux non avenues portraying Auriga:
Des seins superflues; les dents irrgulires, inefficaces, les yeux et les cheveux du ton le plus banale; des main assez fines, mais tordues, dformes. La tte ovale de lesclave; la front trop hautou trop bas; un nez bien russi dans son genre un berne affreux. . .28 (Cahun, 2006: 241)

Besides the nth reference to the nose, which is well made of its kind, but in reality obscene, we have the unexpected definition the oval head of the slave, which evokes a racial cataloguing, a downwards identification, a brutish category, and especially if we also consider that in the photographic image Claude appears to be constrained, as though her arms are bound. Once again, the image focuses upon the bust, so that any possible/impossible identification suspended between masculine and feminine, but also almost between human and animal, between current and primordial passes through the shape of the head and the expression of the face. A further topic, which is the subject of my ongoing research, are Claude Cahuns links to what James Clifford defines as ethnographic

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FIGURE 4 Que Me Veux-Tu? Copyright Jewish Heritage Museum. surrealism (Clifford, 1988). Certainly her close relationship with Bataille, her link with Documents and therefore her knowledge of Michel Leiris works, would imply some degree of closeness with the dawning ethnographic thinking within the surrealist environment. It must be added that such a context established an ideal bridge between dealing with alterity in the colonial and racial environment (it must not be forgotten that Claude Cahun was a fervent anti-imperialist activist) and in the psychiatric and criminal one. I therefore believe we should develop a new reading about the use of the mask in Claude Cahuns images, precisely associating her with ethnographic surrealism, starting with a photograph where the heads of Claude and Suzanne appear from behind a museum window exhibiting what are presumably African masks, so that they appear themselves as finds in an exhibition. This can be added to her clear interest in exoticism and orientalism in her first symbolist period, which she also partially inherited from the deep link she felt with her uncle Marcel Schwob, a well-known writer, whom although she never met, she considered a sort of guiding star. In 1928, a self-portrait titled Que me veux-tu? (Figure 4) shows a montage of two images of Claudes head, one turns slightly, with an almost intimidated expression, and seems to be attached to the other, which is turned to look over the shoulder. It depicts a sort of two-headed torso. The title refers to some suspended issue between the two of them, thus manifesting a strong sense of extraneousness, even repulsion and fear of one another. One of the most interesting aspects of Claude Cahuns figurative and literary reflections is the irreducibility of opposites i.e. the

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refusal to think in a dichotomist, opposing way and the attempt to consider not only contamination, but also continuous conflict, as vital elements. Two figures play two different roles, but contain each other, face each other and yet are joined at the base. Vie, mort, sur sans ge. Et pourtant, la cadette, cest toi: tu ne pouvais exister sans ta fausse jumelle. Vous avez parti lie. Tu ne peux pas lexterminer sans tabolir29 (Cahun, 2006: 192). The two opposites are actually twin sisters: the one can only exist by exterminating the other, who, nevertheless, represents an ever reversible alterity, and would therefore lead to some sort of suicide. Lucys perplexed visage asks Claudes hooked profile, Claude, what do you want? or perhaps how do you want me? Again in Aveux non avenues, she writes:
Amour? . . . Les amants trop heureux forment un couple pareil au monstre hermaphrodite ou encore aux frres siamois. Si lon ne peut dnouer, il faut couper cet enchevtrement gordien, ce noeud de serpents. . .30 (Cahun, 2002: 213)

Much has been said about Claude Cahuns connection to the psychiatrist and philosopher Jacques Lacan, and this is confirmed by Claudes and Suzannes private diary, which records, with a wealth of detail, his address and phone number, as is usual for a good acquaintance at least. As documented by Leperlier, Lacan visited the two womens house in Paris several times. Lacans mirror stage theory (Lacan, 1966), as a definition of the self from early infancy, is very close to Lucy Schwobs vision of a personality, which splitting in the vision of alterity builds the so-called imago of the self. I would also like to reconnect this image to Claude Cahuns enthusiastic adhesion to the idea of narcissism, which I believe was drawn from Havelock Elliss theories (Ellis, 1966), in the early 1920s. Starting from a detailed analysis of the invention of the term in psychoanalysis, passing through Freuds theories, Havelock Ellis associates this concept with homosexuality. Furthermore, in a text explicitly dedicated to the theme, Ellis makes continuous references to the mirror image, also, from a literary point of view, mentioning as a meaningful example Oscar Wilde. Wilde was a literary cornerstone for Claude Cahun, again because of the influence of her uncle, Marcel Schwob, who translated Wilde and defended him in a passionate article of 1918, published in the Le Mercure de France (Cahun, 2002: 451), when Oscar Wilde was attacked for his play Salom, which was forbidden in England. It would be interesting to reconnect the mirror image and narcissism to a further series of portraits of both herself and Marcel; portraits that Claude developed in front of the mirror and which again, I believe, not only refer to the condition of ambiguity and split personality in general, but transcend, in a very deep manner, a trend to analyse the relationship between matter and form, between reality and image, between materialism and abstraction. This is invested with her

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mystical research, and has connections to lacal esotericism, which of course was an important theme within the surrealist movement. As a conclusion, I believe that the corpus of photographic images produced by Calude Cahun must lead to a re-evaluation of the myriad of connections and the vast network of intellectuals who met and influenced her, and who drew so much inspiration from her polymorph intelligence.

NOTES
1. This refers to the literature connected to the vision of the new anthropology developed after the Santa F seminar of 1984, which traced a series of innovative paths in social research, opening the way to a new concept of subjectivity, to the concepts of self-representation and identity negotiation, which in turn led to the idea of self-identity in the specific meaning I refer to here. See Clifford and Marcus (1986) and Marcus and Fischer (1986). 2. Illustrious corpse (translators note). 3. Jersey, an English dominion, was invaded by the Nazis. The two women started their own peculiar resistance action, dressing up as men and infiltrating the enemy occupation troops to drop hints in German inviting them to desert and not to pursue their terrible venture. They were arrested, their house ramsacked, with a terrible loss of their work, and they were sentenced to death. Only the arrival of the Allied Forces saved them from being shot. A wide range of documentation, including a very precious journal of the period, is kept in the Claude Cahun Collection at the Jersey Heritage Museum. 4. Claude Cahuns participation in the surrealist movement is far from marginal and is located within a sharply politicized context. In 1932, she joined the Association des crivains et Artistes Rvolutionnaires (AEAR) with her companion Suzanne, and then approached the Groupe Brunet, a strongly critical Trotskyist movement, with the intent of facilitating cooperation between them and the surrealists. In particular, she was associated with Henri Michaux, Andr Breton himself and Ren Crevel. In 1933, she signed the AEAR declarations Protestez and Contre le fascisme mais aussi contre limprialisme franais. She thus met Tristan Tzara, Salvador Dal and Man Ray. In 1934, she published Les Paris sont ouverts [The Odds are Open], which generated a vehement debate within the movement on the political role of culture. Finally, in 1935, she participated in the foundation of Contre-Attaque and met Roger Caillois and Georges Bataille. 5. I would like to mention here Gen Doys recent monographic essay, which seems to me to depart for the first time from the trend of reading Claude Cahuns work only within the ambit of gender studies. See Doy (2007). 6. Today, I exist otherwise (translators note). 7. The term racial is used here in a clearly critical way, to indicate any form of building an identity in a racist way: those that derive from the first anthropological studies up to those related to any sort of diversity, sick people, alleged delinquents, homosexuals, victims of political persecution. Photography played an essential role in creating a sort of scientific legitimization to the invention of the other, understood from the beginning as a potential enemy. The list of the scholars who contributed to the consolidation of this study of human difference is long, we mention, as reference: Francis Galtons research, with his text of 1883 Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development; Cesare

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Lombrosos and Alphonse Bertillons systematic museum work; and the very famous Iconographie photographique de la Salptrire by J. Martin Charcot. See also: Gilardi (2003) and Muzzarelli (2003). I really find it very relevant that all Claude Cahuns heroines speak in the first person, as in the ancient monologues of the great feminine characters of the Greek tragedies; but also I believe she used this to emphasize awareness and strongly objective involvement, which can be related to the firm political will that characterizes all her life and poetics. Ah! How I love those jug ears, that short-haired nape, and the superb vertical from the skull to the neck, if he tilts his head backwards, broken by the reptilian folds! I love them because I recognize there the distinctive characteristics of the enemy race (translators note). To the Inevitable./Sweet girl, lay your grace of dried flowers between the pages of my books and of my favourite acts, so that I get used to your scent, whose insipidity still makes me somewhat sick, and whose bitter intoxication, which I love! suffocates me in spite of myself . . ./Dead companion, your immutable mould imposes itself atrociously upon aquiline-nosed faces. Thus, men of this kind dread you even more. Nevertheless, be inflexible, implacable mask; remain rigid, like it or not. Do not let me insult you, little sweetie (translators note). . . . Claude Cahun it represented (represents in my eyes) my actual name, rather than a nickname (translators note). Badly named, I recall you! Well loved, I nickname you. Discredited . . . object, subject, idea, word, I trust you (translators note). The embarrassment of the words, and mainly of the proper nouns, is an obstacle to my relationships with the others, i.e. to my own life. An obstacle so ancient that it seems to me it is somehow congenital (translators note). I believe much more attention should be paid to the connection between the positions of Claude Cahun and the texts of the psychologist Havelock Ellis, who was the first to deal with the acknowledgement of some sort of third gender. The importance Claude Cahun placed on this scholar is shown by the fact that, in 1928, she translated into French his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, part of which would be published in 1929 in Le Mercure de France as LHygine sociale La femme dans la socit. Ah, I am becoming crazy! And Madness, its sick mouth of contagious halitosis has torn my ear open in a monstrous voice it whispers its poisonous doubt: Is mental alienation sudden or gradual? I repeat docilely: And Madness looks at me with its fixed eyes./ Docilely. . . in an understanding that progressively diminishes. I find myself saying:/ Is conscious alienation sudden or gradual? (translators note). Madness is no less vain than reason (translators note). I am having my hair shaved, my teeth pulled out, the breast all that embarrasses or tries the patience of my look the stomach, the ovaries, the conscious and encysted brain. When I am left with only one card in my hand, a heartbeat to note, I will certainly win the game (translators note). Attention should be paid to Lucy Schwobs more or less intentional and sought-for Jewish origins. In her texts, God and the mystics are sometimes reviewed in a way that imply that she had an understanding of the messianic theories of the Hebraism of that time. Her familiarity with some of texts of the philosopher Walter Benjamin could be investigated, because of her close connection in those years with the French librarian Adrienne Monnier, who would help the German philosopher escape from the Nazis. In support of my assumption, which I am going to investigate further in my research, I would

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

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19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

like to quote but one sentence drawn from Aveux non avenues: Moi, juive au point dutiliser mes pchs mon salut, de mettre en uvre mes sous-produits, de me surprendre continuellement, lil en crochet, au bord de ma propre poubelle! (Cahun, 2002: 211) [I am a Jew, up to the point of using my sins for my salvation, of taking advantage of my by-products, of catching myself continuously, out of the corner of my eye, at the edge of my own garbage can!]. Mummy used to call me my little piggy! She rolled up the tip of my nose. She had to admit that in spite of this I had no Greek nose. My slightly jug ears upset her. It was like the nose. It is small, it would be very nice if . . . Your ears would be perfect, my little piggy, if you just wanted it . . . I let her do it. She made me wear a bonnet . . . which disappeared with her (translators note). Here, we need to digress and ponder on the possible position of Claude Cahun within the quarrel that arose within surrealism between Breton and the so-called heretic wing, essentially represented by Bataille. Because while, on the one hand, Claude Cahun was linked to Breton by very strong ties of friendship, on the other, the technical connection between her work and all the members of Documents is rather obvious. I cannot see (translators note). Hidden in the forest (translators note). With regard to this, see: Lahuerta (2004). I question this paradox of atrocity: throughout its history, hysteria has been a pain which needed to be invented, as a performance and as an image; it went as far as inventing itself (this need was its essence) when the talent of the licensed constructors of hysteria was weakening (translators note). . . . The obsessive absence of my mother, treated as a lunatic, considered by her own family by her mother and sister as a shame that should be hidden from the world, the marvellous and appalling mystery of what the adults called her crises, the ripping of being torn off from her, returned to be separated again . . . (translators note). Attention: a child aged thirty . . . rrr . . . three years, Yves Claudanec, was killed in the municipality of Guerlande. Report the murderer, to 26, rue SaintAntoine. Reward promised./ Nevertheless, on the head of the drum, like on the stretched canvas of a magic lantern, I saw being inscribed, stroke by stroke, and then erased, and appear again, all those who the spectators suspected: the well-known roughnecks of the village, an uncle of the child, possible next of kin, and then the mother herself. Her image remained, disappearing for a time to then reconstruct the scene of an imagined throat cutting. This ardent, nonreligious, silent woman was considered the village idiot. She fixed the gaze, the prejudices. Failing sufficient evidence of her innocence, she was prosecuted, incarcerated, while she was repeating monotonously as a cow chewing the cud her mind actually lost this time: Yes, I am the one who sent him to death! These words were considered a confession. And the Claudenac girl walked towards the guillotine as if she were leaving for the Promised Land, laughing through her tears . . . It was right to sentence her, somebody said. She pretends to be mad. This woman doesnt care to live? She was pretending, sure, the crowd was right (translators note). This image is often compared to Andr Kertzs Distortion series, yet I believe that apart from the aesthetic closeness Claude Cahuns work has not much to do with it, because it develops a concept, even formally, connected to a logic totally inherent to the self-portraits of the French artists first period. Superfluous breast; irregular, next to useless teeth, eyes and hair of the plainest shade; rather fine hands, but, twisted, deformed. The oval head of the

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slave; the forehead too high . . . or too low; a well-made nose of its kind an awful deception (translators note). 29. Life, death, ageless sister. And nevertheless, you are the youngest: you could not exist without your false twin. You are tied. You cannot exterminate her without abolishing yourself (translators note). 30. Love? . . . Lovers who are too happy form a couple like the hermaphrodite monster, or even Siamese twins. If you cannot untie this Gordian Knot, this serpent knot must be cut . . .(translators note).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blessing, Jennifer, ed. (1997) Rrose Is a Rrose Is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications. Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Cahun, Claude (2002) crits. Paris: ditions Jean-Michel Place. Caws, Mary Ann, Rudolph E. Kuenzli and Gwen Raaberg (1990) Surrealism and Women. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Chadwick, Withney (1985) Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. London: Thames and Hudson. Chadwick, Withney (1998) Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Chadwick, Withney and Tirza True Latimer (2003) The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris between the Wars. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Clifford, James (1988) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus (1986) Writing Culture: Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: The University of California Press. Didi-Huberman, Georges (1982) Invention de lhystrie. Charcot et liconographie photographique de la Salptrire. Paris: Macula. Downie, Louise, ed. (2006) Dont Kiss Me: The Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore (2006) London: Tate Publishing and Aperture. Doy, Gen (2007) Claude Cahun: A Sensual Politics of Photography. London: I.B. Tauris. Ellis, Havelock (1966) tudes de psychologie sexuelle. Paris: Cercle du Livre Prcieux. Foucault, Michel (1999) Les Anormaux. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard. Gilardi, Ando (2003) Wanted! Storia, tecnica ed estetica della fotografia criminale, seganeletica e giudiziaria. Milan: Bruno Mondadori. Kilani, Mondher (1994) LInvention de lautre. Essais sur le discours anthropologique. Lausanne: Payot. Krauss, Rosalind (1999) Bachelors. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Lacan, Jacques (1966) crits. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Lahuerta, Juan J. (2004) El fenmeno del xtasis. Dal ca. 1933. Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, S.A. Leperlier, Franois (1992) Claude Cahun. LEcart et la metamorphose. Paris: ditions Jean-Michel Place. Leperlier, Franois (2006) Claude Cahun. LExotisme intrieur. Paris: Librairie Arhme Fayard. Marcus, George E. and M.J. Fischer (1986) Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Muzzarelli, Federica (2003) Formato tessera. Storia, arte e idee in photomatic. Milan: Bruno Mondadori. Muzzarelli, Federica (2007) Il corpo e lazione. Bologna: Atlante. Rice, Shelley (1999) Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman. New York: Aperture.

Viviana Gravano is Professor of History of Contemporary Art at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Milano Brera and writes for ArtO, a performing and visual arts magazine. Her most important work includes: LArte fotografica, Fotografi di tutto il mondo nelle collezioni italiane (Rome: Carte Segrete, 1996); Limmagine fotografica (Milan: Mimesis, 1997); Crossing. Progetti fotografici di confine (Milan: Costa & Nolan, 1998); Paesaggi attivi Saggio contro la contemplazione. Larte contemporanea e il paesaggio metropolitano (Rome: Costa & Nolan, 2008). Address: Accademia di Belle Arti di Milano Brera, Via Brera, 28, 20121 Milano, Italy. [email: Viviana.gravano@gmail.com]

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