Crimes of passion: Surrealism, allegory and the dismembered body

This study focuses on the pictorial metaphor of bodily dismemberment and mutilation in the surrealist art of the 1920's and 30's in order to make the case for allegorical understanding of surrealism. It proceeds in five stages. The first chapter traces the metaphor of dismemberment to Lautreamont's prose from which the founders of the surrealist movement borrowed the technique of linguistic disfiguration. The second chapter demonstrates how the surrealists "visualized" Lautreamont's lessons through the story of Gradiva. The third chapter argues that a conception of mutilated human anatomy was part of the hidden topography of the surrealist object. The fourth chapter relates this conception to the surrealists' interest in psycho-analysis and psycho-pathology. The fifth and final chapter explores Walter Benjamin's vision of allegory and modernity and suggests that the surrealists' fascination with the metaphor of bodily dismemberment was a form of allegoricization that situated surrealism historically as a modern intellectual phenomenon.