Linda Carol Ganus

VISUAL CULTURE PROJECT FALL 2008


PAS TA PHYSIQUE ("Not Your Body"): The Evolution of the Early Modern Body as Uncanny Text

“…with artists… the insatiable eye (is) always in heat, savoring endless pleasures.¹    —Paul Gauguin, in a letter to Schuffenecker, September 1888, Pont-Aven.

 “…What’s a desire originating from a lack? A pretty meager desire.^1a”—Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa.

            The way we experience and make sense of the world and temporality are directly connected to our corporeality, and we are compelled to record those sensory experiences in a myriad of different ways. The human body itself, through its movements, gestures, and expressivity, is perhaps the most primal text that we all use to communicate with each other, before learning any other kind of written or spoken language. In addition, there is a strong interconnection between the way we can empathize with each other’s physical experiences and the way we process written or spoken words as signifiers of the intangible mental and spiritual condition of one’s day-to-day existence in the world. 

            In visual art and culture, the human figure has been represented since at least the time of the creation of the Venus of Willendorf and probably long before. Beginning with the advent of Enlightenment thought and rationality in the eighteenth century, the shift of focus away from the Church as a governing and regulatory body, the human body began to be used as a subject in visual culture in ways that often far exceeded mere literal descriptions of its outward appearance or as one-dimensional symbols of moral values. With the advent of the industrial age, Darwin’s evolutionary theories, the harrowing spectre of the first world wars, and, perhaps most forcefully, with the seismic formulation of psychoanalytic theory and criticism, representation of the body in modern art and literature began to be increasingly used as a textual metaphor for the particular condition of contemporary unease that Freud, as well as Lacan and many others, have attempted to define as the “uncanny” (das Unheimliche).

            The study of the contemporary body as text is a currently exploding field, and even with a narrow focus on the body used as a textual metaphor for the uncanny, there is an overabundance of fascinating examples that have warranted scrupulous exploration in this vein (no pun intended!): from Francisco de Goya’s haunting creature-figures in his series of aquatints called Los Caprichos to fragmented and reconstructed bodies in the collage novels of the surrealist artist Max Ernst. The protagonists of the absurdist illogical narrative journeys of Alfred Jarry’s Dr. Faustroll and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Underground find their uncanny contemporary counterparts via animated vehicles such as the television black comedy South Park. The tenets of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty extol the body as a performative text, as do the mordant, existentialist short radio, television and stage plays of Samuel Beckett. Many of the themes of the work of early feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous vis-a-vis the particularities and re-politicizing of the feminine body-as-uncanny-text are taken up by many contemporary feminist visual artists and writers, including Faith Wilding and Jeanette Winterson, who explore these particularities in original directions of their own.  Understandably, in a writing project with these parameters, the all-too-brief introductions to these examples will hopefully serve as flavorful enticements to the interested reader to further explore the fruitful topography and interiors of these and many other uncanny textual bodies.

In order to first illustrate the basic concept of the body itself considered as a text, it may be useful to refer to The Pleasure of the Text, in which the author, French theorist Roland Barthes, provocatively compares the body of a text of written language to the human body:

…the body. What body? We have several of them; the body of anatomists and physiologists, the one science sees or discusses…

But we also have a body of bliss consisting solely of erotic relations, utterly distinct from the first body…Does the text have human form, is it a figure, an anagram of the body? Yes, but of our erotic body. The pleasure of the text is irreducible to physiological need.

The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas - for my body does not have the same ideas I do.²

             Hence, to further understand the context in which the body has been used in the past century as a signifier of the uncanny, as well as the origins of much of the critical contemporary theory regarding the body as a specifically uncanny text, the body’s role should be examined insofar as it relates to the formulation of Freud’s seminal work exploring the definition of the uncanny, as well as Lacan’s further exploration and examination of Freud’s work in this regard. 

            Freud was interested in the uncanny mainly in relation to its effect of exciting fear and discomfort in people, and found limited extant research material on the subject. His essay, Das Unheimliche, published in 1925, consists of two parts: the first in which he defines the term ‘unheimlich’ (or in English, ‘uncanny’), and the second, where he provides several illustrations of uncanniness.

Freud quotes one of his sources, Schelling, as defining the uncanny as “something which should have remained secret and hidden that has been brought to light.³” He then goes on to further refine his own assessment of the uncanny as being “the class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.⁴”

         In the second part of his essay, Freud discusses and analyzes qualities and aspects of the uncanny, such as the feeling that an inanimate object is really alive; the uncanny double of the self; the fragmented body; fear of the dead or ghosts; automata and the compulsion to repeat. Using examples from literary sources (such as E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman) and his own case studies to demonstrate and illustrate his theories, Freud posits that many of the feelings of uncanniness his patients experienced were ways they were compensating for primal traumas related to the body and self that he believed every child experienced, such as the fear of castration because of perceived sexual rivalry with a parent.

            The psychotherapist Jacques Lacan championed Freud’s psychoanalytical theories of development and ego formation, and elaborated on them further in his own work and seminars (held from 1951-1980) as regarding the subjectification of the infant in his theories of the ‘mirror stage’ and the trauma of ‘the missed encounter’ with its mother.  At approximately six months, an infant can recognize itself in the mirror, although it still lacks control and awareness of its own body. Upon seeing the mirror image as a whole, the mirror image is perceived as a threatening contrast with the experience of being in its own fragmented (from its own field of vision) and out-of-control body. To cope with this aggressive tension, the infant identifies with the image in the mirror, and this identification with the counterpart is what forms the Ego.  Lacan wrote in the first of his Ecrits,

The mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body image.⁵

            As Lacan returned to this theory repeatedly in his work over the years, the mirror stage became less of a historical moment of development in his eyes and more of a permanent structuring of the self in relation to what he called the symbolic order, represented by the figure of the adult accompanying the infant, to whom the infant turns for confirmation after identifying its own body as self in the mirror image.

            The ‘missed encounter,’ as Lacan describes it, is the moment when an infant first perceives the mother as a separate Other, rather than a boundary-less extension of itself, while at the same time realizing its own identity as being defined by the mother’s mirrored gaze directed back at it. This moment is experienced as a traumatic missed encounter, simultaneously discovering and losing the mother/caregiver; an object-body lost (fragmented from self) at the instant of realization.

            Lacan befriended many of the European male Surrealist artists who were well aware of his and Freud’s theories, and this influence is evident in much the work of artists such as Max Ernst, who will be discussed further as we examine many of the abovementioned primary texts.

            Some of the first and most groundbreaking examples of the evolution of the body used as an uncanny text can be found in the series of aquatint etchings by Francisco de Goya called Los Caprichos. Goya produced this haunting and disturbing series of plates after recovering from a debilitating illness that affected his balance, vision, and left him deaf for the rest of his life. The disturbances to his spatial orientation that he experienced physically were manifested in the distorted, warped space that the monstrous and enigmatic creatures inhabit in the Caprichos; their abject physiognomies and fantastic, truncated bodies reflect not only the concurrent political upheavals and anxieties of the time, but also function as Goya’s commentary regarding innate psychic qualities of human frailty and savagery.  Vertiginous spaces are filled with flying and floating figures; men and women appear as ravenous half-beasts, witches and crones; their wildly apparent and uncontrollable orifices and organs figuratively excrete and explode onto the page, dissolving boundaries between the interior and the exterior of the body, between the unconscious and wakefulness. In what is one of probably the most well-known images from this series, “The sleep of reason produces monsters,” (Fig. 1) a figure (likely a self-portrait) is asleep at his desk, while dark and demonic bat-and owl-like winged nocturnal creatures flutter upward into the upper right of the image; it is unclear whether they are menacingly surrounding him or whether they are issuing like dreams from his sleeping head.  While the title could be read as a current expression of Enlightenment rationality, the imagery also evokes the uncanny sensation of claustrophobia and strangeness in a familiar, homely setting.

            Another plate, “Where is mother going?” (Fig. 2, plate 65), depicts a tangle of figures that have joined together in an uncanny collage to create a monstrous walking mélange of human and animal limbs. Heads of creatures appear in place of genitals, and human legs and feet protrude into the air like beastly horns or wings as a dropsical old woman is being transported and paraded via this twisted cortege to some nefarious destination.  A baleful-looking cat holds a parasol over the whole procession, referencing the history paintings Goya was commissioned to do in the early part of his career, wherein elegant young women were graciously posing, attended by handsome men with similar parasols. In the Caprichos, Goya, who by this time is older and has suffered physically, revisits the luminous atmosphere of his older figurative tapestries and recreates the same familiar scenes with strange, disquietingly grim actors. Although the surface messages of the Caprichos seems altogether dire and cynical, Goya’s satire points up an underlying idealism for what should be the human mission and the hope that people, despite their many weaknesses and fears, will somehow fiercely keep on surviving in spite of their own foibles.

            When the poet Charles Baudelaire first saw Los Caprichos in Paris, he commented,

Goya’s great merit consists in his having created a credible form of the monstrous…the line of suture, the point of juncture between the real and the fantastic is impossible to grasp…⁶

This observation about the line of suture is apropos in considering  the Surrealist Max Ernst’s sensational collage novels and their strange wordless narratives, populated by fantastic amalgams of people/beasts/furniture, furtively or exuberantly acting out every deadly sin and implying still others yet to be invented. Using reproductions of Victorian-era catalog engravings as source material (Ernst was well aware of that period's atmosphere of rigid control contrasted with repressed sexuality), the imagery from the collage novels (such as La Femme 100 tetes and Une Semaine de Bonte ) has a visual cohesion and consistency often less evident in his experiments in other media.  The reproductions lend an uncanny flavor of cozy domesticity turned sinisterly upside down as Ernst reconfigures and recontextualizes the imagery.

In her tour-de-force collection of essays, The Optical Unconscious, the critic Rosalind Krauss suggests that Ernst’s frequent use of oversized gesturing hands or limbs that appear to draw the viewer into his distorted interiors or subterranean marine spaces symbolize his own Lacanian lost objects of desire, or missed encounters. This interpretation becomes even more poignant after reading that Ernst’s father worked with deaf and dumb children, and was an expert in sign language.⁷

The artist often joked about the game of cutting, (doubtless fully aware of the implications of collage’s very process referencing the uncanny overtones of severance and mutilation) and hiding the surface of the cut in the print production process, adding another uncanny feel of the inevitability of the bizarre juxtaposed elements:

“Ce n’est pas la colle qui fait le collage.”⁸  

        Ernst himself was a point of juncture for many of the artists mentioned previously; he was obsessed with the work and sensibility of Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson, collecting his original manuscripts and illustrating many of his written works. It is interesting to compare a plate from John Tenniel’s illustration for Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (fig. 2) with one from Ernst’s Une semaine de bonte. Tenniel’s already uncanny scene of Alice being scrutinized by the train conductor in the claustrophobic coach interior, as she rides with her two absurd and anthropomorphic companions (one is a caricature of Benjamin Disraeli), is taken to a new level of audacious oedipal perversity in Ernst’s collage, the terrifying, looming Sphinx as all-seeing witness to the strange but matter-of-fact scene of carnage or violation on the floor of the transformed car (fig. 3).        

            In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865, Carroll manages the sympathetic feat of portraying his protagonist’s distress at her ever-changing body in a way that seems very personal and not objectifying; as Alice drinks and eats her way through the warped spaces of her Wonderland, alternately growing and shrinking, her changing relative scale to her strange compatriots constantly recontextualizes her implied position of power within each scenario.  Tenniel’s wry yet oddly unsettling illustrations are unforgettably linked to each particular scene; Alice’s giant hand groping towards the white rabbit…her sullen expression as her giant form lies filling a cramped, womb-like room; tiny Alice, as if witnessing the primal scene, furtively peeking at the phallus-caterpillar perched on the mushroom. No accompanying figures are even necessary here as reminders, as these figural images are so branded in our collective (Western) memories as signifiers of childhood fantasy and anxiety.

          The French writer Alfred Jarry, (who was also an accomplished printmaker and for whom Max Ernst also did set designs!) is perhaps best-known for his absurdist and nihilistic play Ubu Roi, which scandalized Paris in 1896 and inspired many in the Dadaist movement to come. Two years later, this free-wheeling, alcoholic, eccentric, and incredibly rigorous writer finished a huge, sprawling novel, The Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, ‘Pataphysician. This work, Rabelaisian in excess and Pynchonesque in scope and fantastic imagery is less widely-known today but extremely important to Jarry’s philosophical bent as a whole. Unlike the Ubu plays, which were received with great hoopla and shared both extremely negative and positive reviews in the Paris press, the manuscript of Faustroll was greeted with relative confusion and silence, and was refused publication in his short lifetime. Roger Shattuck, in his insightful preface to the English translation of Faustroll, introduces Jarry’s possible impetus for this uncanny narrative:

Beneath the highly congested surface…one senses in Faustroll the search for a new reality, a stupendous effort to create out of the ruins Ubu had left behind a new system of values - the world and science of ‘pataphysics… its for­mal definition seems to mean that the virtual or imaginary nature of things as glimpsed by the heightened vision of poetry or science or love can be seized and lived as real. This is the ultimate form of "authentic enactment."⁹

            The novel is narrated by a barrister who is pursuing Dr. Faustroll (a colorful eccentric described as being born full-grown at age 63) for non-payment of rent, and is subsequently drafted into serving as one of his crew members on a boat-cum-bed-cum-sieve. The other crew member is a baboon, whose occasional sole cryptic remarks, “ha ha,”  provide a droll, Zen-like commentary on their fantastic and strange adventures.   The reader’s sense of temporality is distorted while the characters’ sensory experiences and bodily mutations are described in detail in a mock-heroic, pseudo-scientific and absurdist manner. Characters summarily die, then unexplicably appear robustly full of life in the next chapter (I imagine that Jarry might have been a fan of the current animated series South Park, and, along with the scatological humor, brazen taboo-breaking and satirical commentary on current events, would have relished the gleeful, uncanny elements such as the character Kenny dying a horrific and gory death in every episode, only to reappear, sanguine and inscrutable as ever in the next one. “Ha ha!”).

            Jarry was intensely interested in the Symbolist movement in art and poetry; he also was captivated by brilliant, eccentric (mostly English) contemporary scientists and mathemeticians such as (once again!) Dodgson (-Carroll) and Lord Kelvin, who seemed to write about their theoretical work as exuberantly bizarre but logical adventures. Given the current interest and research into the atomic and space revolutions, anti-matter, string theory of physics and the supposed contingenicies of the time/space continuum, Faustroll's fantastic voyages and science of ‘pataphysics seem more and more plausible with each passing day.

            Jarry’s prescient theories about the supposed limits of physical reality (personified in Faustroll) and how this bold physicality of expression could be experienced as live theatre (the Ubu plays) were eagerly embraced by the French playwright, poet and artist, Antonin Artaud. In November of1926, Artaud founded The Alfred Jarry Theater as an homage to Jarry and his philosophies; during the next decade, he continued to develop his own startling manifesto which was published in 1938 as The Theater and Its Double. Artaud passionately believed that the theater should be about the actor’s body serving as a performative text, instead of being dependent on words in a script, and advocated what he called a "Theater of Cruelty." His use of the term "cruelty" was multi-layered; among other things, it referred to his Nietzchean world-view of the inherent brutality of life, and to the imperative of all art to rigorously and unsentimentally reflect this. To Artaud, this meant that the raw physicality of performances and how they were manifested in the body of the actor were necessary to shock the audience into a physical reaction to the performance, forcing them to engage in the action and to jolt them out of the complacency of their very existence. He wrote in The Theater and its Double:

As long as the theater limits itself to showing us intimate scenes from the lives of a few [human] puppets, transforming the public into Peeping Toms, it is no wonder the elite abandon it and the public looks to movies, the music hall or the circus for violent satisfactions, whose intentions do not deceive them.¹⁰

            Artaud’s work and writings served as a crucial bridge to coming generations of playwrights who radically expanded the conception of the performative body as a vehicle for addressing the enigmatic question of human existence. Perhaps the work that best exemplifies this development is that of the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett.

            A brilliant wordsmith and heavily influenced in his early prose style by Joyce, Beckett’s writing is extremely cryptic and, to the reader just being introduced to his work, fiendishly elliptical. It is rather absurd in itself to attempt to capture in a few paragraphs the sensibility of Beckett’s wide-ranging work for theatre, radio, television. He wrote specifically with each medium in mind, highly cognizant of the fact that the listener to a radio play would be dependent on one sense, hearing to inform the visualization, and that this awareness of the corporeal body of the audience would synesthetically reveal the author’s intent.

            In one of his plays for radio, Cascando, there are multiple players; the first, called “Opener,” speaks in the first person and serves to introduce the others. One of these is called “Voice”, whose speeches form a panting, disjointed narrative that seems to describe the never-ending struggle of a mysterious old character called Woburn who attempts to traverse an eerie  seascape, keeps falling, “face in the sand,” and repeatedly gets up to struggle on. Another is called “Music,” indicated only in the script by ellipses (various Beckett productions have had music specifically composed for them by notable composers such as Morton Feldman and William Kraft). A fourth implied sonic player and respondent is present in the resounding silences indicated in the script. As the play inexorably unfolds, it becomes apparent to the listener that the “Opener” is obliquely describing the difficulty of the creative process, perhaps as a larger metaphor for the creative artist’s imperative for an uncompromising form of expression in spite of obstacles, incomprehension and criticism. One aspect of the the uncanniness inherent in this work, as in much of Beckett’s oeuvre, seems to be that he is describing and longing for something absent; the futility but necessity of trying to recapture the “invisible object”, which to Beckett seems to be the answer to the purpose of existence.   

            Beckett’s impenetrable prose often veers between being suddenly bawdily humorous and just as suddenly tragic. Coupled with the repetitive, surgical, poetic choice of words and strictly dictated, enigmatic stage directions, his writing style seems to be a comment in itself about the uncanny and absurd particularities of life, and our task as humans to discover the fierce joy of being alive and to embrace the confusion and hardships in spite of our weariness, anxiety and lack of control.

            Beckett chose early on to write in his non-native language of French, perhaps as a way to introduce a layer of distance to his observations; this also serves to automatically incorporate a level of estrangement, which could be viewed as an embodiment of uncanniness as foreigner, or a manifestation of “otherness.” Women have long experienced being the subject of figurative art cast as the “Other” ad nauseum. However, the specificity of a woman’s bodily experience as artistic text has also been explored by many feminist theorists, such as Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous, as well as in the work of several feminist artists and writers working today, such as Faith Wilding and Jeanette Winterson.

            The feminist psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva was Bulgarian and married a Parisian, Philippe Sollers, and stayed in Paris as an Eastern European dissident. In her work, which is concerned with the concepts of abjection and intertexuality, she writes about the Freudian concept of uncanniness and how it applies to “otherness…” the otherness of being non-native born, the otherness of being a woman in the patriarchal order of things, belonging in one way, but not quite fitting; the otherness of a position of exile which she relates to sexual difference.

           Kristeva’s perspective of being at once outside and inside hints at the uncanniness of preuterine existence and the trauma of birth itself, and therefore it seems logical that many of her early writings are concerned with pre-oedipal mother/daughter fusional relationships and the work involved for the female child to achieve a healthy separation and differentiation from the mother. She writes sensitively about the particular difficulty this presents for women to achieve separateness from other women without conflict later in life. Vis-à-vis the act of writing itself, Kristeva feels that a woman’s means to express and differentiate herself as a singular identity and not be defined solely by her anatomy is made difficult by the established order of language and the symbolic in our culture. She also articulates the conundrum faced by women to balance identification with a familiar (female) body with the demands or desire to have children, hence the apparent implicit demand of heterosexuality to define one’s sexual identity as adaptive to biology.

            Helene Cixous, in her fierce essay, The Laugh of the Medusa, specifically addresses similiar concerns of women claiming their own femininity through their writing; she advocates women to write from a vantage point of their own bodily experience and attempt to forge their own vocabulary of verbalizing the particularities of their own existence, emphatically repudiating the Freudian and Lacanian model of the “uncanniness” of Woman defined by a lack-of-the-Phallus. She chooses the title of her essay to refer to a powerful classical Freudian and Lacanian symbol of uncanniness: the mythological Medusa, with abundant and numerous uncannily doubled and redoubled phallic symbols as her hair, an inanimate body part coming to life while simultaneously ostensibly signifying the fetishization of the “lack” of her castrated phallus; the myth of her subsequent decapitation reading then as a multiplied castration fantasy. Cixous asserts that to look straight on at the Medusa (signifier) is to see that she is laughing; laughing at the idea that she lacks anything! Cixous also claims that she holds no animosity against the penis per se, and in fact embraces it as a part of the entire male body as a whole; she merely demands to give voice to the desires of her own female body in its entirety, and not to be measured or defined by a comparative “lack” of anything.

         The work of the feminist multimedia artist and writer Faith Wilding addresses contemporary concerns of specific female physicality and identity in varying stark, powerful and ultimately empowering ways.  Wilding, who worked with Samuel Beckett and was a co-producer of several of his radio plays (including Cascando), references the uncanny poetic longing and hypnotic repetiveness of Beckettian monologue but makes it unmistakeably her own in her celebrated 1972 performance piece, Waiting, in which she portrayed a woman alone, keening in a rocking chair, chanting and describing the universal yet searingly personal female experiences of passively and despairingly “waiting”, as if to be given permission, for life-defining events to happen to her. Wilding recently re-performed her Waiting piece at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, inviting audiences to participate in an extremely moving re-imagining performance called Wait-With, a newly re-written version to reflect her philosophy of support and sharing among women and other outsider artists.

            Wilding’s visual work shows a wide-ranging concern with the female bodily experience and contemporary cultural politicization. Bodies are reimagined as fluid convergences of machines, animals and humans into monstrous cyborgs (Recombinants).¹¹ Wilding also makes trenchant visual commentary on new techniques in assisted reproduction and biotechnologies and how they inform the concepts of motherhood and the very creation of life, raising fascinating questions about any previous assumptions about society’s implicit demand as to the biological imperatives of the female (Embryoworld, parts I and II, Fig. 4).¹² Much of Wilding’s 2-D work concerns science and war as gendered practices that have historically destroyed or reconfigured women; the methodology of the collage works themselves comment on the fluidity of gender as well. ¹³

            The feminine body experience is also lovingly narrated down to the cellular level in the work of Jeanette Winterson, in her novel Written on the Body. In this tender and lyrical novel, the narrator, of indeterminate gender, falls in love with a married woman named Louise. After impulsively breaking off the relationship and abandoning Louise to avoid the possibility of being discarded in favor of her husband, the narrator discovers circuitously that Louise has terminal cancer and has subsequently left her husband and fled to an unknown location. The narrator, who then seeks solace in vicariously maintaining some sort of contact with Louise by researching the disease and its clinically-described effects on the body, reminisces in ravishing passages about Louise’s body in loving, elegiac detail, describing the beloved face, skin, hair, hands, sex, bones, renegade blood cells: all of the inner and outer fragmented physical parts that, however revisited and obsessively catalogued, still are insufficient to describe the elusive and uncanny total essence of a longed-for absent lover, parent, or any human, male or female, in their incredible entirety.

How can we transcend our own inherent condition of solitude and penetrate the secret, private, “heimlich” consciousness of another? To what degree do we wish to find a mirroring of our own familiar self and desires in others? How do we celebrate our uniqueness and particularities while wanting to be a part of a whole body/culture?  Perhaps our desire to read and reinterpret the texts of our own and each other’s bodies in this current climate of social fear and distrust is one of our last straws of empathy we all can relate to … to simply risk taking another’s hand thereby feeling the pulse in our own.

Endnotes

¹Paul Gauguin, in a letter to Schuffenecker, September 1888, Pont-Aven. From The Writings of a Savage, Daniel Guerin, ed. Da Capo Press, 1996.

^1aCixous, Helene. The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs, Vol 1, No. 4. (Summer, 1976. Trans. Keith and Paula Cohen.), p. 891.

² Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text.

³Daniel Sanders, Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (1860), p.729.

⁴Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny. From the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol 17 (The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955), p. 220.

⁵Jacques Lacan, Some Reflections on the Ego. Journal for Lacanian Studies, Volume 2, Number 2/2004. Pages 306-317

⁶ Hustvedt, Siri. Narratives in the Body: Goya’s Los Caprichos. From Mysteries of the Rectangle. Princeton Architectural Press, 2007. p. 79.

⁷Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1993), p. 178.

⁸Sarah Wilson, Max Ernst in England, in Max Ernst: A Retrospective. Werner Spies, ed. Prestel-Verlag, Munich, 1991, p 364.

⁹Roger Shattuck. Preface to Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, by Alfred Jarry. Exact Change, 1996.

¹⁰Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double.

¹¹Faith Wilding Home Site, http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fwild/faithwilding

¹²Ibid.

^13. Faith Wilding, marginalia, 2007.

Bibliography

Artaud, Antonin (trans. by Mary C. Richards), The Theater and Its Double.  Grove Press, 1958.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text.

Beckett, Samuel. From Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett, Grove Press, 1984.
             Cascando, Not I,  Play, Cry, Words and Music, Nacht und Traume.

Bryden, Mary, Samuel Beckett and Music. Clarendon, 1998.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex.

Calbi, Maurizio, Approximate Bodies: Gender and Power in Early Modern Drama and Anatomy. Routledge Press, 2005.

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures Underground. Signet Classics, 2000.

Cixous, Helene. The Laugh of the Medusa. 1975. Signs, Vol 1, No. 4. (Summer, 1976. trans. Keith and Paula Cohen.), 875-93.

De Goya, Francisco. Los Caprichos. Dover Publications, 1969. Essay by Philip Hofer.

Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Dolar, Mladen. “I Shall Be With You On Your Wedding Night:” Lacan and the Uncanny. October, Autumn, 1991, Vol. 58, pp. 5-23.

Ernst, Max, collage novels (La Femme 100 tetes, Une Semaine de Bonte) Dover Publications, New York.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. From the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol 17 (The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955)

Guerin, Daniel. Writings of a Savage, ed. Da Capo Press, 1996

Hughes, Robert. Goya. Knopf, 2003.

Hustvedt, Siri. Mysteries of the Rectangle. Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.

Jarry, Alfred. Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. Exact Change, 1996.

Krauss, Rosalind, The Optical Unconscious. The MIT Press, 1994.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits.

Oppenheim, Lois. European Joyce Studies:  Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the Negative. Rodolphi, pp. 125-140.

Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years: The Origin of the Avant-Garde in France 1885 to World War I. Vintage Books, New York, 1955.

Stafford, Barbara Maria. Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine. MIT Press, 1991.

Smith, Anne-Marie. Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable.

Wilding, Faith. Vulvas With a Difference.

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Wilson, Sarah, Max Ernst in England, in Max Ernst: A Retrospective. Werner Spies, ed. Prestel-Verlag, Munich, 1991, p 364.

Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. Vintage Books, 1993.

List of Illustrations

Fig. 3: John Tenniel, illustration for Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.

Fig. 4: Max Ernst, illustration for Une semaine de bonte.

Fig. 5: Faith Wilding, Embryoworld.

Fig.6. Linda Ganus, She Always Cleaned Up After Herself, etching/monoprint, 2007.