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Surrealist Ghosts and Spectrality in
Surrealist Ghostliness
by Katharine Conley
University of Nebraska Press, 2013, 299 pp.
Martine Antle
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
The spectral, ghosts, and ghostliness, haunt Surrealism. Whether at the
movement’s center starting with Nadja, or at its peripheries within the communities
of artists who rejuvenated the movement, or with those who continue to redefine
Surrealism even today, the notion of the ghost is omnipresent in both the writing
and the visual art of the avant-garde. It is one of the most important and wellknown clichés of Surrealism; everyone talks about it. Moreover, the avant-garde
movements, bearers of the memory of the two World Wars, are themselves
movements haunted by the memory of war. Ghostliness is a polysemic and yet
unifying concept capable of taking on various forms, from the haunting of history
to repressed ghosts. As Conley affirms and demonstrates judiciously, “Ghostliness as
a keystone idea unifies a movement with disparate artistic practices. It concentrates
on the common thread the ghostly legacy of automatism weaves through the
movement’s thought and works: its punning texts and anamorphic images” (19).
Nonetheless, even though critics have successfully discerned the
omnipresence of ghostliness before the publication of Katharine Conley’s work,
no study had been entirely dedicated to this subject within the framework of
Surrealism. How can we explain this gap in the criticism of Surrealism, a gap that
Conley’s study is finally going to fill? Conley’s study of ghostliness—and all its
derivatives, such as “ghosts,” “ghostly,” “ghosting effects,” etc.—fills a sizeable void
in contemporary European and transatlantic studies. Some may argue that several
critics have worked on the function of the ghost and on what has also been called
“spectral identities” in Surrealism—for example, in Nadja, Aragon’s Paysan de Paris,
or de Chirico’s Hebdoméros. Still, no one has explored this notion in depth by taking
it from the center of the movement to its peripheries, thereby providing a stage not
Martine Antle: martine.antle@gmail.com
Copyright © 2014 (Martine Antle). Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative
Works 3.0 Unported License. Available at http://jsa.asu.edu/

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only for the contributions of women artists, from the surrealists Claude Cahun, Lee
Miller, and Dorothea Tanning, to Francesca Woodman’s photographs of haunted
houses in the 1970s, and Susan Hiller’s work From the Freud Museum of 1991-1997;
space is also thereby cleared for film, specifically, Man Ray’s early films. Conley’s
thorough, detailed and systematic analysis in Surrealist Ghostliness is also a welcome
and much needed addition to studies of modernity since it re-contextualizes
vanguard movements and their aftermath. She traces ghostliness from Lewis’ gothic
novel The Monk, in its cartography, and in the Freudian unconscious or “psychic
geography” from Europe to North America. Throughout the study, ghostliness
becomes a vehicle to re-examine the Surrealists’ attraction to objects, and it emerges
as a “creative practice” (237). According to Conley it permeates and haunts the entire
twentieth century.
Moreover, Conley’s approach is original, unprecedented and multifaceted.
Demonstrating the extent to which surrealist perception and representation of
ghostliness is above all anamorphic, Conley engages the reader in a close reading
of the anamorphic paradigm and its ghostly effects. She clearly identifies and
problematizes the main functions and traits of surrealist ghostliness, including
a detectable connection to spiritualism. The omnipresence of automatism also
generates ghostly effects; its manifestations are analyzed and identified through the
opposition between moments of suspension and those of flow. Finally, her analysis
of the art of the senses problematizes the sensuality of the surrealist experience and
the extent to which tactile art takes on the role of the double in artistic experience.
Conley explains, “The surrealists were also attracted to the creation of works that
depended on touch” (9). She charts ghostliness from this standpoint in European
and North American film, visual art, collage, and in objects, from the 1920s to the
1990s.
Additionally, this study offers new and original readings of surrealist
photography, including that of Man Ray—“the scintillating light captured by the
camera” (43)—and the ghostly effects of the Rayograph in his early films, for
example (Chapter 1). Brassaï and Claude Cahun also engage in ghostliness and
create a new artistic language: “Human frontier invites the viewer to see at least double:
to look up, down, and behind the human head; to imagine a man and see the ghost
of a woman” (66).
Miller’s photographs of Egyptian lands evoke a “temporal doubleness
inherent in surrealist ghostliness” (115). Tanning’s creations (Chapter 5) are situated
at the crossroads of the gothic and the baroque, and connect ghostliness to everyday
life. With Pierre Alechinky’s palimpsests, ghostliness is born from the juxtaposition
of historical references and representations of the world. As Conley argues, his work
functions as ghosts of Bretonian and Desnosian automatism (Chapter 7).
Chapter 8, which treats Hiller’s Freudian ghosts, offers a probing case of
the legacy of Surrealism. Conley’s choice of this contemporary figure as the final

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artist of the study reveals a solid strategy, namely, to conclude Surrealist Ghostliness by
bringing Surrealism’s legacy into the contemporary “postmodern” age. She states, “In
its persistent reflexivity, its inherent doubleness, its forceful insistence on the most
fundamental human truth—that human beings are being defined by their mortality—
Surrealist Ghostliness illuminates the ways in which Surrealist theories always embodied
aspects of both modernist and postmodernist tendencies” (239).
Given the depth and the quality of its analysis as well as its expansive
attention to visual art, it is unfortunate that the University of Nebraska Press could
not provide larger, high-resolution color illustrations. The illustrations are adequate
and the front cover is indeed beautiful, but the superb quality of this scholarly work
surely merits superior illustrations.
Surrealist Ghostliness is undoubtedly one of the best studies of Surrealism
written in the last decade. It is likely to foster much discussion and invite new
studies of the legacy of Surrealism within contemporary art. Overall it offers new
approaches to the surrealist movement and draws chief connections between the
center of the movement and its peripheries. It re-situates studies of Surrealism in the
U.S. and beyond in doing so. First and foremost, Conley’s study is directed toward
specialists in the field of Surrealism, art historians and film scholars. Yet because
of its wide and far-reaching approach, it will also appeal to scholars interested in
modernity, and in visual art, Cultural Studies, and Women’s Studies.