Where Art Never Dies

Avalon Grover 02/23/2023

Through his psychoanalytic theory of dreams and his book The Uncanny, Sigmund Freud argues that many, if not all, people battle with their conscious and subconscious mind, and that the latter reflects many of our suppressed desires which struggle to adhere to society’s idea of a ‘civilized’ reality: rational thought and bourgeois morality. Specifically, he outlines his Oedipus complex and his castration complex regarding the relation of trauma and fetishes. The Surrealists in the 1920’s, who were interested in the mentality of the insane and the uncanny, incorporate his theories into their art through films, photography, stories, and other artistic mediums. Their goal was, not only to expose the deepest desires of the unconscious, but to “revolt against a society that reduced all human desires to `market values, religious impostures, universal boredom and misery’” (Greeley 467). Surrealism artists worked to shock their viewers and immerse them into a dream-like environment meant to resemble and trigger the unconscious mind. Freud takes a key interest in the desires that lay behind one’s dreams, which he explores in The Interpretation of Dreams by drawing on his own patients’ dream experiences. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali visualize this theory of the unconscious as a powerful way of accessing the truth of one’s mind, especially through their dreams, in their 1929 work Un Chien Andalou, where the two combined their dreams into a stylized form of reality: a motion picture. In a more literary medium, Georges Bataille also creates an entirely surrealist world in his 1928 book Story of the Eye where a man’s deepest, most obscure and disturbing desires are explicitly exposed and made manifest in the protagonist’s direct attack on the eye. Both the film and the novella stem from an attempt to understand the structure of desire through a blatant attack on the viewer’s subjectivity and challenges society’s perception of reality post World War I.

Before diving into the surrealist interpretation of desires, trauma, and the unconscious, we must first understand the origins of these theories: Freud. The psychoanalyst inspired much if not all surrealist art in the 1920’s because of his focus on the subconscious in his works, which the Surrealists found to be a source of inspiration and truth behind the unconscious. They were essentially “captivated by Freud’s theory of dreams as twisted images of socially repressed desires” (Greeley 467). As a result, many works by the Surrealists were considered dream-like and replicated the environment of the unconscious into a form of reality through film, literature, painting, and sculpture. In particular, Freud’s The Uncanny outlines what he defines as the castration complex, in which a male is fearful of losing his eyes at the hands of his father for punishment of incestuous thoughts towards his mother; as a result, a fetish is developed to weigh the difference between anxiety for the sexual organ and a fear of their father (Freud, 140). This concept of castrating one’s eye or another person’s eye repeats throughout Surrealism, especially in Un Chien Andalou and Story of the Eye.

The latter in particular questions society’s habit of reducing human desires to forms of insanity and religious blasphemy. In revolt of tradition and strict morality, Bataille writes Story of the Eye, an erotic fictional tale from the perspective of a teenage boy regarding him and his lover’s bizarre, erotic perversions and fetishes, both disturbing and violent. Although not explicitly stated, the reader may infer the idea stems from the notion of the unconscious through its direct connection to the narrator’s fetishes, an established Freudian theory of fetishes as a male’s unconscious search for his mother’s castrated penis, outlined in his work The Uncanny. In Bataille’s book, the narrator, who remains unnamed, and his lover, Simone, embark on a series of sexual fantasies ranging from a bothersome fascination with inserting animal testicles, eggs, and other more concerning objects into Simone’s vagina to having intercourse in front of other people, both living and dead. The story is a series of metaphors related to the eye and is meant to stray as far away as possible from the traditionally logical narrative of literature during the wake of Surrealism. To take the plotline literally is to take Story of the Eye as offensive, unsettling, and violating when in fact it is challenging, bizarre, and revealing. Many of the objects Simone places into her vagina resemble the anatomy of an eye: the eggs, the bull’s testicles and the actual eye of a priest. Bataille even goes so far as to pointedly define Simone’s obsession with eggs when she explains to the narrator that she associates eggs with “a calf’s eye, because of the color of the head (the calf’s head) and also because the white of the egg was the white of the eye, and the yolk the eyeball. The eye, she said, was egg-shaped” (Bataille 38). Her connection, and so Bataille’s connection, of an egg and an eyeball stems from the relation between fertility and the act of watching, or voyeurism. By attacking the eggs, in which the couple boil, break, flush, and urinate on, they attack the eye as well; and thus, destroy any voyeuristic ability. Furthermore, the origin of eggs as the fertile conception of sex in any organism in conjunction with the unconscious attack on an eye therefore violates the traditional meaning behind the act of intercourse. In doing so, Bataille challenges reality by prompting a form confusion, subconsciously inflicting a fetishized seduction, and contesting society’s established understanding of the norm.

Buñuel and Dali take a similar, but an arguably less gruesome, approach to the unconscious in their film Un Chien Andalou. The film consists of a series of dream-like sequences with no particular rational meaning. Like Bataille’s Story of the Eye, the two Surrealists use an attack on the eye to challenge reality and spark an unconscious response from the viewer. The film begins with its iconic sequence of man horizontally slicing what we believe to be a woman’s eye but is in fact a calf’s eye (Un Chien Andalou, 00.01.38 – 00.01.44). Through an expert use of montages and cutting between shots, the difference is almost impossible to see at a first glance, and so, one is tempted to believe the woman’s eye was actually cut open. Although a viewer’s first response would be disgust, the unconscious one is fear; fear of castration and fear of that act being inflicted onto the viewers’ own sexual organs. It is an attack on the viewer’s subjectivity. By implicitly cutting the woman’s eye, the man castrates her, directly linking to Freud’s theory of the castration complex, where those that have formed distinct fetishes are in fact searching for a replacement of their mother’s castrated penis and act out of fear of being castrated themselves. This castration deems Freud’s complex true and opens the door for more fetishes to be born.Furthermore, Dali and Buñuel’s use of montages and confusion attacks the viewers eye, leading them to believe something that isn’t true. The same can be said about Bataille’s Story of the Eye. This trickery acts as a threat of castrating the viewers’ eyes thus threatening the subjectivity and sexuality of them as well.

Beyond the threat of a father or castration, Bataille embodies the consequences of suppression and expectation in his character Marcelle. She first is exploited when Simone and the narrator include her their eight-person orgy where she “wanted to jerk off in the wardrobe and was pleading to be left in peace” (Bataille, 14). The experience results in her relocation to an insane asylum where she feels so comfortable that she jerks off and hangs the white sheets to dry. In doing so, Marcelle proves her ability to regain sensibility after, what society would deem, a demeaning act of masturbation. Her sense of freedom in the asylum and the wardrobe reveals the manifestations of bourgeois society suppressing her prerogative to relish in her true desires. She may only express them in a closed setting, such as the wardrobe or the asylum, out of fear of the bourgeois’ ability to judge, repress, and castigate. While this sense of freedom exists in private for Marcelle, her placement in the asylum at the hands of her parents grants Bataille the opportunity to celebrate the uncanny because, as Freud’s The Uncanny says, “a sense of the uncanny can arise only if there is a conflict of judgement” (Freud, 156). It is because Marcelle is alone that that sense of the uncanny disappears whereas the pleasurable act she inflicts on herself in the asylum is the same act that prompted her parents to place her in it primarily. This character acts as a symbol of revolt and a result of suppression, therefore challenging reality’s degredation of sensual desires and disgust of any action that is considered unrational, seen through the actions of Marcelle’s parents.

Both surrealist artworks operate in a dark dream-like setting exhibiting the male protagonist’s unconscious desires being brought to light. Surrealists in this time period focused on this idea of dreams and specifically the repressed desires that drive them. Freud argues that dreams are wish fulfillments, or wishes that can’t be carried out in reality and are thus imagined in the dream world. Similarly, Surrealists believe dreams are the unspoken desires or feelings we all either secretly or subconsciously want to experience. In Un Chien Andalou, the film begins with a black screen and the words “Once upon a time…” displayed in French (Un Chien Andalou, 00.00.49). From the very beginning, the viewer is told directly the story is not real and therefore inherently similar to a dream. The narrative continues with the next all-black shot stating “eight years later” in French (00.01.45). The film has no linear direction and therefore no set plotline, so these shifts in time and space exist merely to confuse and displace the viewer thus immersing them into the dream setting. In the case of Story of the Eye, we know the story is not real because of the characters’ abilities to expose and express their bizarre desires without care for consequence or judgement. There is a sense of freedom threaded through the words, allowing the reader to explore the erotica without feeling shame. Although clearly untrue stories, both take place in settings similar to our idea of daily life with civilization, homes, and familial constructs. As a result of Dali’s, Buñuel’s, and Bataille’s connection between reality and chaos, both Un Chien Andalou and Story of the Eye qualify as forms of automatism, a surrealist “tactic for releasing the unruly and chaotic imagery of dreams into the waking realm of everyday life” (Greeley 467). The approach allows dreams to take place in reality and repressed desires to be considered insane but still accepted whereas the opposite would be usually true in reality. Through automatism, Surrealists are allowed to abandon conscious control which reflects into their art and the actions of their characters. They choose to challenge reality by changing it in their stories, making the viewers question what exactly they are experiencing: reality or a dream?

The 1920’s sparked the age of Surrealism, where artists examined one’s unconscious and the suppressed desires that are exposed in the realm of the dream-world, as well as the origin of fetishes. All of these concepts in question stem from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic work in his books The Uncanny and The Interpretation of Dreams where Freud argues that fetishes form out of a childhood trauma event categorized as the castration complex, involving a sexual attraction towards one’s mother and a fear of a violation on one’s eyes at the hand of their father; he also argues dreams directly reflect the desires that we either cannot express in reality and that the unconscious is a powerful way of accessing the truth of one’s mind. In this essay, I used Story of the Eye written by Georges Bataille and the film Un Chien Andalou created by Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel to expose the Surrealists’ connection between their art and Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, specifically through their joint interest in attacking both the viewers’ and their characters’ eyes thus also performing an act of violence on the viewer’s subjectivity. Through their art, the Surrealists sought to revolt against a society where the normality was strictly defined as sane, rational, and prudent and to closely examine the mind of the insane in relation to their desires, dreams, and traumas.

Works Cited

Bataille, Georges, and Joachim Neugroschel. Story of the Eye. Penguin, 2013.

Buñuel, Luis, director. Un Chien Andalou, 1929, https://www.openculture.com/2014/05/watch- a-restored-version-of-luis-bunuel-salvador-dalis-surreal-film-un-chien-aldalou- 1929.html. Accessed 2023.

Cook, Kristopher. “Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille: French Surrealist Erotica.” Kristopher Cook Book Blog, 13 June 2021, kristophercook.com/story-of-the-eye-by-georges-bataille-book-review/. 

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. London: Penguin Classics, 2003.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by A.A. Brill, Wordsworth Editions,1997.
Greely, R.A. (2001), Dalí’s Fascism; Lacan’s Paranoia. Art History, 24: 465-492. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.00278