Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
6KDURQ6OLZLQVNL
American Imago, Volume 68, Number 3, Fall 2011, pp. 489-516 (Article)
3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
DOI: 10.1353/aim.2011.0032
Access provided by UFMG-Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (8 Nov 2015 18:08 GMT)
Sharon Sliwinski 489
Sharon Sliwinski
An earlier version of this paper was given at the international colloquium Imagi-
naires du prsent: Photographie, politique et potique de lactualit at the Universit
du Qubec Montral. The paper is supported by a Social Science and Humanities
Research Council of Canada grant called Dream Matters: The social and political
significance of dream-life.
American Imago, Vol. 68, No. 3, 489516. 2011 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
489
490 Air War and Dream
His first sketches for his now-famous Guernica mural date from
May 1 (Picasso, 1995, p. xi; Patterson, 2007).
In an anti-war essay written during the time, Virginia Woolf
describes receiving a package of these pictures in the mornings
post. She reports that one photograph shows dead children.
Another shows a section of a house: A bomb has torn open the
side; there is still a bird-cage hanging in what was presumably
the sitting-room, but the rest of the house looks like nothing so
much as a bunch of spillikins suspended in mid-air (1938, p.
125). When Woolf looks at these pictures, her feelings become
unequivocal: some fusion takes place within us; however dif-
ferent the education, the traditions behind us, our sensations
498 Air War and Dream
are the same . . . the same words rise to our lips. War is an
abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped (p. 125). Like
Picasso, the pictures arouse a potent moral response in Woolf,
opening an imaginary plane from which an unequivocal voice
finds expression.6
One could read such aesthetic encounters as exemplars of
what Jacques Rancire (2009) calls the redistribution of the
sensible, that is, new organizations of the sensory world that re-
configure the landscape of what can be seen and thought. If air
war wreaked damage from the third dimension, photography
was called upon to combat this violence through its networks
of distribution, its capacity to generate an international align-
ment of witnesses, to offer a venue for the world spectators
shock, censure, and grief. There is much to be said, in other
words, about the relation between the new violence wrought
from above and photographys ability to help weave a new com-
munity of aesthetic judgementa sensus communisfrom below.
But beyond journalistic expos, photography also served
as a special instrument for describing the inward effect of the
outward destruction wrought by air war. In this respect, Edward
R. Murrow was not alone in his presentation of the London
Blitz as a dreamscape. The photographer, lapsed Surrealist,
and former Vogue cover girl, Lee Miller, similarly turned up
in London on the eve of this Peoples War and she too was
captivated by and sought to capture the citys unreal reality.
Miller landed in London in June 1939 to join her lover,
the painter and Surrealist promoter, Roland Penrose. By the
end of the summer the pair were visiting Picasso in France,
but returned to England once news that Hitler had invaded
Poland broke at the beginning of September. They arrived
back in London just in time to hear the first air raid sirens and
watch the enormous gray, anti-aircraft balloons rise into the
sky. It would be another year, however, before Hitlers Blitzkrieg
reached English shores. The Fhrer authorized an all-out as-
sault on the British capital beginning on September 6, 1940.
London was bombed for 76 consecutive nights. By the end of
May 1941, some 43,000 civilians, half of them Londoners, had
been killed in one of the longest city sieges in modern times.
As an American, Lee Miller was prevented from joining
the thousands of women who enlisted in the auxiliary forces,
Sharon Sliwinski 499
aspects of Total War the way a subject can lose the capacity
to distinguish dream from reality:
Figure 8. Lee Miller, Broken typewriters, London, England, c1940. Lee Miller
Archives, England 2011. All rights reserved.
Figure 9. Lee Miller, Roof of University College, London, England, 1940. Lee
Miller Archives, England 2011. All rights reserved.
us might do, she seems to have wandered into the atrium and
angled her camera upwards towards the gaping hole in the
dome. But this view does not express a real emotional sense
of the Blitz; it fails to convey the field of force of destructive
torrents and explosions, the unreal reality of living in a city
that is being destroyed slowly, methodically, night after night.
Eventually Miller turned her attention away from the ceiling,
letting her gaze wander downward toward the fragile human
domain, until she finally focused her favoured Rollieflex
twin-lens camera on the ground. Rain has poured through
the shattered roof leaving a pool of water on the stone floor.
Her final composition (Fig. 9) shows the shattered dome as
a watery reflection, a surreal presentation of the kind Walter
Sharon Sliwinski 513
Notes
1. As Sebald reports, by the end of the war there were some 31 cubic meters of
rubble for every person in Cologne and some 42 cubic meters for every inhabit-
ant of Dresden (1999, p. 4).
2. Of all the German literary works written at the end of the 1940s, Sebald finds only
two that dared to face the horror of the ruins, Heinrich Blls Der Engel schwieg
(The Angel was Silent) and Hans Erik Nossacks Der Untergang: Hamburg 1943 (The
End: Hamburg 1943).
3. In The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freuds Aesthetics, Sarah Kofman (1988)
approaches the relationship between psychoanalysis and aesthetics from the
opposite direction. She characterizes dream as the paradigm of the work of art
and argues that Freuds method of interpreting dreams is borrowed from the
interpretation of art, which is to say Kofman suggests that Freuds theory is more
indebted to aesthetics than he cared to admit. Visual and literary symbolism cor-
roborates the symbolism of dreams. Meanwhile, George Didi-Huberman (2005)
argues that art historians have failed to incorporate the blow that Freuds method
dealt to the concept of representation. In his view, the dream-works means of
representation or figuration opens up, or indeed, rends the very logic of the
image.
4. Sarah Kofman offers a fuller picture of Freuds use of the photographic metaphor
in Camera Obscura of Ideology (1998) and Ulrich Baer traces the connection between
the experience of trauma and the photographic image in Spectral Evidence: The
Photography of Trauma (2002). I lean heavily on both texts here. In a less theoreti-
cal sense, however, the idea that photography provides a protective shield is
plainly evident in the way any number of human rights organizations make the
514 Air War and Dream
distribution of cameras central to their project of monitoring violent abuses. To
cite just one example, in 2007 Btselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Hu-
man Rights, launched a camera distribution project, providing Palestinians living
in high conflict areas with video cameras, with the goal of bringing the reality
of their lives under occupation to the attention of the Israeli and international
public, exposing and seeking redress for violations of human rights. See: http://
www.btselem.org/
5. In this respect Kristeva seems to depart from Freuds (1920) view that there is
no such system of defense that protects against stimuli coming from the inside.
Compellingly, if unelaborated, she imagines literature provides a refuge from
our loves and insomnias, our states of grace and crisis (2010, p. 20).
6. It would not take long for the bombs to reach Woolf in London. In her remark-
able essay Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid, written shortly before her suicide
in the spring of 1941, she describes the queer experience of lying in the dark
and listening to the zoom of a hornet, which may at any moment sting you to
death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace.
Yet it is a soundfar more than prayers and anthemsthat should compel one to
think about peace (1942, p. 1). The short piece perhaps itself represents a way
to dispel this destructive force via the labour of writing. Yet, the essay also betrays
something of the difficulty of the struggle to maintain a protective shield for
the mind in such times.
7. Of course there was civil resistance among the occupied countries. In this re-
spect, Lee Millers lover Roland Penrose made a clandestine trip into occupied
France to compile documents made by the intellectuals of the French Resistance
Movement. He published his collection, In the Service of the People, in 1945. In the
second chapter, entitled The Crime Against the Spirit, he writes of the Nazi
occupation: Not only was the repression exercised by them political but it also
attacked liberty of thought and expression. It meant the reversal of long stand-
ing rights and fundamental ideas. In the campaign for the re-education of the
national inscriptions dating from the French revolution such as Liberty, Equality,
Brotherhood were erased from public buildings and from the coinage . . . Life
without their habitual liberties was inconceivable . . . No matter who they were,
young or old, peasants or cultured Parisians, this alone was enough to awaken
revolt (Penrose, 1945, p. 8).
8. This is one of Freuds central arguments in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. There he
assigns the protective function to the perceptual consciousness (Pcpt.-Cs.) system,
which must lie on the borderline between inside and outside; it must be turned
towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical systems (1920,
p. 24). As he later notes, protection against stimuli is, in fact, a more important
function for the living organism than reception of stimuli, and the common trau-
matic neurosis is the consequence of a breach of the protective shield (p. 31).
9. Caitlin Davis (2006) suggests that Miller was not permitted to photograph the
dead during the Blitz. But after D-Day, Miller gained U.S. Army accreditation
and headed to the European front. She traveled with the units that liberated
Buchenwald and then Dachau concentration camps, and there she did indeed
train her camera on the dead, managing to transform even this difficult raw
matter into remarkably potent signs. See Penrose (1992, pp. 183187).
10. Millers contact sheets are housed at the Lee Miller Archives (Blitz folder).
References
Anzieu, D. (1989) The skin ego. (C. Turner, Trans.). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Baer, U. (2002) Spectral evidence: The photography of trauma. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Benjamin, W. (1929). Surrealism. In M. Jennings (Ed.) Selected Writings: Vol. 2, Pt. 1,
19271930 (pp. 207221). (M. Bullock, H. Eiland, & G. Smith, Trans.). Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press, 2002.
Sharon Sliwinski 515
Benjamin, W. (1936). The story teller: Observations on the works of Nikolai Leskov. In
M. Jennings (Ed.) Selected Writings: Vol. 3, 19351938 (pp. 143166). (M. Bullock,
H. Eiland, & G. Smith, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002.
Benjamin, W. (1936). The work of art in the age of technological reproducibility. In
M. Jennings (Ed.) Selected Writings: Vol. 3, 19351938 (pp. 101133). (M. Bullock,
H. Eiland, & G. Smith, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002.
Bion, W. (1962). Learning from experience. London: Karnac.
Bion, W. (1991). A memoir of the future (Vols. 13). London: Karnac.
Bion, W. (1997). War memoirs, 19171919. F. Bion (Ed.). London: Karnac.
Carter, E. (Ed.). (1941). Bloody but unbowed: Pictures of Britain under fire. New York:
Scribners.
Davis, C. (2006). Lee Millers revenge on culture: Photojournalism, surrealism, and
autobiography. Womens Art Journal, 27 (1), 39.
Didi-Huberman, G. (2005) Confronting images: Questioning the ends of a certain history
of art. (J. Goodman, Trans.). University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State
University Press.
Douhet, G. (1943). The command of the air. (D. Ferrari, Trans.). New York: Faber.
Ferenczi, S. (1931). On the revision of the Interpretation of Dreams. In Final contri-
butions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis (pp.238243). M. Balint (Ed.).
London: Hogarth, 1955.
Flanders, S. (1993). Introduction. In S. Flanders (Ed.), The Dream Discourse Today.
London: Routledge.
Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. Standard Edition (Vol. 45, pp. ix627).
London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1914). On the history of the psycho-analytic movement. Standard Edition
(Vol. 14, pp. 366). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. Standard Edition (Vol. 18, pp. 364).
London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1925 [1924]). A note on the mystic writing-pad. Standard Edition (Vol. 19,
pp. 227232). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1927). Humour. Standard Edition (Vol. 21, pp. 159166). London: Hogarth
Press.
Freud, S. (1929). Some dreams of Descartes: A letter to Maxime Leroy. Standard Edi-
tion (Vol. 21, pp. 199204). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1933 [1932]). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. Standard Edition
(Vol. 22, pp. 3182). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1939 [193438]). Moses and monotheism: Three essays. Standard Edition
(Vol. 23, pp. 3137). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1940 [1938]). An outline of psycho-analysis. Standard Edition (Vol. 23, pp.
141207). London: Hogarth Press.
Kofman, S. (1988). The childhood of art: An interpretation of Freuds aesthetics. (W. Wood-
hull, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Kofman, S. (1998). Camera obscura of ideology. (W. Straw, Trans.). Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Kristeva, J. (2010). Thinking about liberty in dark times. In Hatred and Forgiveness. (J.
Herman, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Lee Miller Archives (Blitz folder). Farley Farm House, East Sussex, England. Retrieved
from http://www.leemiller.co.uk
Levy, J. (2011). The dream in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and beyond. In S. Akhtar
& M. K. ONeil (Eds.), On Freuds Beyond the Pleasure Principle (pp. 128153).
London: Karnac.
Meltzer, D. (1983) Dream-life: A re-examination of the psycho-analytical theory and
technique. Oxford: Clunie.
Mondzain, M.-J. (2009). Can images kill? Critical Inquiry, 36, 2051.
Murrow, E. R. (1941). This is London. E. Davis (Ed.). New York: Simon and Shuster.
Patterson, I. (2007). Guernica and total war. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Penrose, A. (1985). The Lives of Lee Miller. London: Thames and Hudson.
Penrose, A. (Ed.). (1992). Lee Millers War. Boston: Bulfinch.
516 Air War and Dream
Penrose, R. (1945). In the service of the people. London: William Heinemann.
Picasso, P. (1995). Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture: A Comprehensive Illustrated
Catalogue: Spanish Civil War 19371939 (Vol. 6). San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts.
Rancire, J. (2009). The emancipated spectator. New York: Verso.
Sartre, J.-P. (1943) Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology. (H. E.
Barnes, Trans.). New York: Pocket Books, 1958.
Schneider, J. A. (2010). From Freuds dream-work to Bions work of dreaming: The
changing conception of dreaming in psychoanalytic theory. The International
Journal of Psychoanalysis, 91, 521540.
Sebald, W.G. (1999) Air war and literature. In On the Natural History of Destruction (pp.
1104). (A. Bell, Trans.). New York: Hamish Hamilton, 2003.
Woolf, V. (1938). Three Guineas. In A Room of Ones Own & Three Guineas. London:
Penguin Books, 2000.
Woolf, V. (1942). Thoughts on peace during an air raid. London: Penguin, 2009.