The Ways of Paradise, page 6
26. The nascent collaboration between early psychoanalysis and linguistics – so full of hope – was sealed genealogically with the marriage between Saussure’s son and Théodore Flournoy’s daughter.
27. In a footnote to his novel Nadja, André Breton confirms: ‘Madame Sacco, clairvoyante, 3 rue des Usines, who has never been mistaken about me, assured me early this year that my mind was greatly occupied with a “Hélène”. Is this why, some time after this period, I was so greatly interested in everything concerning Hélène Smith? The conclusion is evidently on the order of that previously imposed upon me by the fusion in a dream of two extremely disparate images.’ Hélène Smith’s medial sensitivity seems to reverberate in the eponymous Nadja, who on one occasion exclaims: ‘Hélène, c’est moi.’ In surrealist mythology Smith is one of the great heroines, and like perennial favourites Freud, Marx, Sade, etc. she was honoured with her own playing card in the Jeu de Marseille, a deck of cards which the surrealists designed in 1941. There she represents ‘knowledge’ – placed between Hegel (‘genius’) and Paracelsus (‘magic’).
28. As it happens, in the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet’s encompassing study of hysteria, De l’angoisse à l’extase (1928), he gives accounts of a series of detailed case studies. One of them regards a 28-year-old woman by the name of Nadia.
29. The author’s observations here are presumably correct; great demands should be made for meticulous detective work, particularly in public legal affairs. Accordingly it can be of significance to follow each clue, for example to bring clarity to the snarls and passageways of the labyrinthine telephone network: ‘District Chief Norberg has stated that the great number of reported errors with Kejne’s home telephone were probably due to the rubber spiral attached to the microphone cable, per Pettersson’s report, which was not approved by the telephone company, as well as to the loose screw in the cable distribution head… Faulty connections and disruptions during calls and attempted calls are considered normal phenomena caused by wear and tear, dirt and oxide accumulation in the telephone exchange equipment, damp-damaged cables, greater or lesser problems with cables and defective telephones, and so on. Defective telephone exchange equipment could, for example, be caused by dust in the sockets, “friction” at various levels, burn damage from electrical currents, etc. Such defects could lead to faulty connections, “selector noise” (“fry” on the line) and similar.’ From the files of the investigation by the Swedish Chancellor of Justice into allegations of illegal wiretapping in the Kejne Affair and certain allegations against members of the Kejne commission, etc., 1951.
30. Figure taken from the official government reports on the Kejne Affair, no. 21, 1951.
31. Cf. Jackson Pollock’s painting, Guardians of the Secret, 1943.
32. That is to say, on one hand, preserve; on the other hand, invade it. Referring here to the Order of the Temple, established in the year 1118 in Jerusalem on the site of the ancient temple and tasked with protecting holy sites and Christian pilgrims. The Order’s rules for this monk-like, military rank had been authored by Bernard de Clairvaux. The Knights Templar eventually came to possess incredible amounts of landed property and amassed vast treasures of gold and silver. Their immense riches in France were perhaps the key factor behind the conflict with the French King Philip the Fair. This wealth was also confiscated after a notorious trial that emerges as an eerie harbinger of the inquisitions of later times.
Several taboos were utilised in a way that may recall the great show trials and legal affairs of the 1930s and 1950s: sometimes purely ideological, sometimes sexual, sometimes both entwined. In a record from 9 November 1307 we can, for example, read the following about Hugues de Pairaud, a leader of the Knights Templar. When asked how he went about initiating new brothers, he responded under oath that after they promised not to reveal the Order’s statutes or secrets, ‘he led them to a secret place and caused himself to be kissed on the lower of the spine of the back, on the navel, and on the mouth, and afterwards caused a cross to be brought into the presence of whoever it was and told them that it was necessary, according to the statutes of the said Order, to deny the Crucified and the cross three times and to spit on the cross and the image of Jesus Christ crucified’. Georges Lizerand, ed., Le Dossier de l’affaire des Templiers. Vol. II, Les Classiques de l’Histoire de France au Moyen âge, 1923.
33. Minutes of the interrogation recorded in automatic writing by painter Ernst Josephson on the island of Bréhat at the onset of his schizophrenia. In these minutes the spirits (each in their own handwriting) confess, through Swedenborg’s mediation, to a number of taboo violations relating to incest and homosexuality; in all, these minutes form a veritable dossier, a sheaf of pages measuring 18cm by 11.5cm, folded in half. On the first page, the name of the spirit is given along with a drawing of the spirit in profile, executed in seven strokes. Among these tormented spirits are the artist’s relatives, kings, members of parliament, philosophers and the greats of world literature. Josephson imagines that he lives in the gatekeeper’s lodge of the kingdom of heaven; in order to be granted entry by him the spirits must confess their most secret sins.
Ernst Josephson, Napoléon III (1888)
34. Despite the labyrinthine character of Moscow’s major show trials, of which it is impossible to gain an overview, their centre is sometimes pointed out with astonishing clarity:
Vyshinsky: Bakayev, were you a member of the terrorist centre? Is that correct?
Bakayev: Yes, it is.
Vyshinsky: In 1932 did you receive instructions to organize the assassination of Comrade Stalin? Was that the case?
Bakayev: Yes.
Vyshinsky: You took a series of practical measures to carry out the act, that is, you organized several attempts to assassinate Comrade Stalin, which failed through no fault of your own?
Bakayev: Correct.
Vyshinsky: In addition, you took part in the assassination of Comrade Kirov?
Bakayev: Yes.
Vyshinsky: Furthermore, you travelled to Leningrad on assignment from the terrorist centre to monitor the preparations for the assassination?
Bakayev: Yes.
Vyshinsky: Upon returning from Leningrad, you reported that all was in order and that the preparations for the murder were proceeding successfully. During your visit did you meet with Kotolynov, Rumyantsev and others?
Bakayev: Yes.
Vyshinsky: Not only that, you met with Nikolayev, gave him instructions regarding the assassination and were convinced that he was a decisive person capable of carrying out said instructions?
Bakayev: Yes.
Confessions can in their willingness to oblige become so exemplary that they leave in their wake a feeling of emptiness and despair.
Vyshinsky: How are the articles and statements you wrote in 1933, in which you gave the impression of being entirely dedicated to the Party, to be judged?
As wilful deceit?
Kamenev: No. It was worse than wilful deceit.
Vyshinsky: A breach of faith?
Kamenev: Worse.
Vyshinsky: Worse than wilful deceit, worse than a breach of faith – can you find the word? Treason?
Kamenev: You’ve found it.
Cf. ‘The Truth About the Trial Against the Terrorist Conspirators in Moscow’, 1936.
35. Here see the very titling of the official documents, for example, ‘United States of America v. Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg, Anatoli A. Yakovlev, David Greenglass and Morton Sobell’.
36. The Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay, confessed: ‘Brother Humbert finally had an Arian cross with an image of the Crucified brought out and ordered me to deny this image of our Lord Jesus Christ. Reluctantly, I complied…’ And Geoffroi de Charny confessed: ‘After I had been received and dressed in a cloak, a cross with the effigy of our Lord Jesus Christ was brought in. Father Amaury said to me that I should not believe in the one here represented, for he was a false prophet, this was not God. Thrice he made me deny our Lord Jesus Christ.’
Almost all the Templars confessed under duress during their first interrogation that they had indulged in sodomy, that they had worshipped the idol Bahomet – a name heretically similar to ‘Mahomet’, the French name for Muhammad – and they had denied Christ.
Unlike the others accused, Molay and Charnay retracted their confessions before the papal tribunal sitting on 18 March 1314; on the express orders of the enraged king, they were burnt at the stake that very night.
At the stake, located in today’s Place Dauphine, Jacques de Molay behaved in a dignified and stoic manner. King Philip the Fair himself witnessed the scene from a window of the nearby Palais de Justice. According to one witness, Molay cried out from the stake: ‘God knows this is wrong. Woe shall soon befall those who have wrongly condemned us; God will avenge our death. I die with this conviction.’
Thirty-seven days later, the Pope died of a painful illness – he had condemned the Knights Templar in a special bull – and eight months later, Philip the Fair was thrown from his horse and killed; the same year the architect of the trial, Guillaume de Nogaret, also perished under mysterious circumstances. And, according to legend, the Templars’ vengeance continued to be visited upon the king’s offspring, vengeance that culminated in 1793 with the execution of King Louis XVI. The masses are said to have stormed the Bastille in tribute to Molay, who had been imprisoned there before his burning. And the legend only becomes more fantastical. It is said that during his imprisonment at the Bastille, Molay founded four masonic lodges, including one in Edinburgh and another in Stockholm. The task of these lodges was to guard the Templars’ secrets and the memory of the iniquities and to become the executors of vengeance. They were sworn to eradicate all the kings of the Capetian line, weaken the pope’s power, preach freedom for all people and to found a universal republic.
The heirs of the Knights Templar – the Jesuits sometimes included among them – are thereafter said to have been involved in various subversive and disruptive movements; legend has it they supported Cromwell, assassinated Henry IV and Gustav III, and lent their support to Swedenborg, Cagliostro and the Jacobins. This myth is formulated in the most fanciful way by Charles-Louis Cadet de Gassicourt, Le tombeau de Jacques de Molay, ou le Secret des conspirateurs, c. 1800; cf. J.M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies, 1972; Auguste Viatte, Les sources occultes du romantisme 1770–1820, 1928.
37. Even Hwasser seems to accept such a possibility with these words: ‘Whether great and true, if as yet undeveloped, ideas are in motion beneath the rich garb of fables, or whether their basic idea is in itself a deep and pervasive irony, remains to be seen.’
38. Places full of pain. ‘Throughout his life, Masson painted “emblematic places”’, Jean-Paul Clébert writes in his book about the French artist André Masson, Mythologie d’André Masson (1971). Masson served as a young private in World War I and was badly wounded at a place in Flanders that bore the name Chemin des Dames (Ladies’ Way). Thereafter, he could never bring himself to stay in those parts. During much later travels through the region he was beset by chills, extremely sensitive to this bloodied geography that the very place names seem to have portended. There in the area of conflict lay, for example, Heurtebise (nigh on black, northerly wind); La Grotte du Dragon, where a massacre took place in 1917; and not far from there the village of Soupir (sigh), Pontavert (bridge, warning) and Craonne, where he took up residence, which rouses associations with a skull. All coincidences that must be the work of chance, or, in Masson’s words, ‘what André Breton calls “objective chance”… Yes, I am a bit like Breton’.
39. The tunnel, the mouth of the Brunkeberg Tunnel. By chance Andrei Tarkovsky’s choice of this peculiar and crowded urban space for the apocalyptic scenes in the movie The Sacrifice (1986) portend the scene of the murder.
40. Nadja reveals a new dimension in life and in the city. She talks about how she chose her name, ‘because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning’. Yet had Breton not chosen this name for it also conceals itself as an anagram in ArIADNe?
41. Coincidences or chance as the procuress of analogies. André Breton is of the opinion that ‘objective chance’ constitutes the very junction in what he has called the ‘problem of all problems’. It is precisely objective chance that leads him to the life-changing encounter with the magnetic, fragile, eccentric Nadja. They meet in various places in the city, but their friendship ends when Nadja, like a roving spectre, disappears into the world of the mental institution. Their first, sudden encounter takes place on one of the dreary aimless afternoons during which Breton would roam around Paris: ‘I had just crossed an intersection whose name I don’t know, in front of a church. Suddenly, perhaps still ten feet away, I saw a young, poorly dressed woman walking toward me, she had noticed me too, or perhaps had been watching me for several moments. She carried her head high, unlike everyone else on the pavement. And she looked so delicate she scarcely seemed to touch the ground as she walked. A faint smile may have been wandering across her face. She was curiously made up, as though beginning with her eyes, she had not had time to finish, though the rims of her eyes were dark for a blonde… I had never seen such eyes. Without a moment’s hesitation, I spoke to this unknown woman, though I must admit that I expected the worst.’
42. Cf. Nadja’s gait (‘so delicate she scarcely seemed to touch the ground’) with Gradiva’s characteristically light steps.
43. 4 October 1926.
44. Indeed André Breton begins Les vases communicants (1932) with a motto from Wilhelm Jensen’s novel Gradiva. And in 1937 he ran an art gallery of the same name on the rue de Seine. The entrance was made by Marcel Duchamp: visitors walked in and out of a doorway with a silhouette of the lovers from Breton’s novel cut from glass.
45. A metamorphosis. In André Masson’s painting Gradiva from 1939 – after Jensen’s novel and Freud’s essay – Gradiva is depicted in the moment of transformation between virginal, chaste marble and a living, physical body. It shows the very transition – or passage – between the classical object of art and the wild object of desire. In the background is a glimpse of the violent eruption of Vesuvius. Gradiva’s torso is a piece of raw meat, her sex a toothed shell.
46. Cf. Marcel Duchamp’s painting Le Passage de la vierge à la mariée (1912), with the transition, the metamorphosis from virgin to bride, noted in the painting’s title.
47. Utterly superfluously the author conducts a systematic survey of the theme in Joyce, Kafka, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, et al.
André Masson, Invention of the Labyrinth (1942)
48. It is correct to say that much of André Masson’s artistic production circa 1940 revolves around the myth of the Cretan labyrinth. Indeed, it was Masson who, together with Bataille, christened the new surrealist journal Minotaure (the title The Golden Age had been in the running too). In Invention of the Labyrinth, Masson’s ink drawing from 1942 (see above), the line seems to get lost in a turbulent, tangled jumble. Only after a while can we make out a few threads: a fragment of a coupling between Pasiphaë and the white bull; a chaos of limbs, sexuality, genitals and explosions. The work of art itself traces a journey through a labyrinth, in which the artist is Theseus and automatism his Ariadne’s thread.
49. One example is Jackson Pollock’s 1943 painting Pasiphaë (originally titled Moby Dick). Pollock painted it after seeing Masson’s pastel of the same name in New York the same year.
50. Notably in Homer, Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, Ovid, etc., King Minos of Crete receives from Poseidon the gift of a magnificent white bull, which is intended for sacrifice. Instead, Minos incorporates the creature into his herd and sacrifices a different bull. Poseidon then instils in Minos’s wife Pasiphaë an irrepressible sexual desire for the white bull. Daedalus, the inventor, helps her by building a hollow, wooden cow decoy which Pasiphaë can enter, and there allow herself to be mounted by the bull.
As a result of this coupling, she births the Minotaur – half-human, half-monster. Minos wants to conceal and protect the Minotaur from the world and orders Daedalus to build a labyrinth, at the centre of which the Minotaur was to be placed. There the Minotaur fed on human sacrifices alone. Athens, too, had to contribute and was enjoined to send seven maidens and seven young men into the labyrinth every nine years. One day Theseus convinces his father, the King of Athens, to allow him to join this group of youths in order to destroy the Minotaur.
