52

Photography and surrealism

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What is a surrealist photograph?

by these stories. It was known that Philippe Daudet had aspired to become a poet, so much so that he had written a collection of poems in the vein of Baudelaire called Les parfums maudits.77 Also at the same time that Philippe had asked for ammunition from Pierre Le Flaouter at the bookshop, he had asked for the book by Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal. It might then be supposed, conjectured, that the relations between Philippe Daudet and Germaine Berton as lovers were joined in death (like Romeo and Juliet). Baudelaire’s ‘motto’ printed under the picture of Germaine Berton thus serves as a symbolic presence of Philippe.78 In other words, Baudelaire’s motto in the montage is not arbitrary; it signies Philippe, an epigraph as epitaph.

As for the function of light and darkness of Woman, we only have to refer to ‘light’ in everyday language, let alone the iconography of pictures or the visual logic of dreams, to know that light is associated with awakening knowledge and revelation.79 It has already been noted that darkness and ‘the night’ are an uncanny feature in tales, the (enigmatic) source of which Freud indicates: ‘the attacks of night terror accompanied by hallucinations (pavor nocturnus) which are so frequent in children … In this case too it can only be a question of sexual impulses which have not been understood and which have probably been repudiated.’80

Required here, to return to Laplanche’s proposal, is the move from the enigma of woman (Germaine Berton) to the function of the enigma in woman. This leads back to the surrealists and their group, the enigma in Germaine Berton of her terrible conicts as the light and dark of their dreams. Death and love, suicide and murder (‘criminality’ and ‘madness’), these are themes of a dialectics of desire and patriarchal law which governs them, and all issue forth from the associative trains of thought of the montage. The bleak ‘nocturnal’ existence of primal revenge (seduction, desire, castration) is brought to the surface in enigmatic form, but ‘enlightened’ by the acts of Germaine Berton. It is in a perverse fullment of wishes that Germaine Berton provided the surrealists with an allegorical or ‘emblematic’ image for liberating the darkness (and light) of dreams. In the fatal, almost fantastic, struggle of her desire in the real and its tragic

Weber, Action Française, p. .

Freud notes that words and speeches in dreams are not invented by the dreamer, but derived from words heard the day before. ‘For the dream-work cannot actually create speeches’ (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. ). In a similar sense the Baudelaire text would be something that had already been heard by the surrealists.

This is certainly conrmed in literature on dreams. Freud’s patient’s dream at the beginning of Chapter in the Interpretation of Dreams has a father awoken by the light pouring into his room and the child’s immortal demand-ing words: ‘Father can’t you see I am burning’? (PFL , ), p. .

Ibid., p. .