| dc.description.abstract | In the original preface to Aveux non avenus [Disavowals, 1930] Pierre Mac Orlan describes Claude Cahun’s collage text as a series of ‘essai-poèmes’, or ‘poèmes essais’. Certainly, Cahun’s writing – from the anti-confessional Disavowals and ‘counter archival’ Heroines [1925], (Conley, 2006), to articles of art historical and literary criticism – probes questions of self and identity through a deliberately misleading and forking essayistic style. Fiercely political, unafraid, resolute and anecdotal, her lyricism is equal to the brutal and accelerated chaos of early twentieth-century European life. Attempting to hunt down ‘ The void bang in the middle’ of the self (Disavowals, 2) Cahun asks both herself and her reader to face not only their/her own perceived lack but, more widely, to consider the often invisible and indeterminate aspects at the heart of modern existence. For Cahun, nothing is fixed, nothing is certain, and if we stare hard enough in the mirror the world, its history, and its rules starts to unravel. Whether responding to consumer-capitalism, discoveries in sexology, questions posed in Minotaure by the surrealists, or classical narratives on femininity, Cahun’s rapier-wit and refreshing honesty shatter preconceptions of what it is to be a modernist woman writer, just as her photography challenges the oft-discussed misogyny of Surrealist artists which favours women as muses. The majority of critical work on Cahun has tended to focus on her photographic (self) portraits, and the obvious challenges they posit to hetero-normative conceptions of gender and sexuality. This chapter prioritises, instead, her textual politics and what the meandering word-paths that she creates might tell us about a female poetics that eschews shame or embarrassment. It takes Mac Orlan’s descriptors – the essai-poème/poème-essai -, and examines the contradictory force of her verse. In particular it draws upon the evocation of affective shifts that proliferate in and between the words and that ask the reader to reflect upon themselves in amongst the layers. Ultimately, Cahun’s is a poetics that is political, didactic, elusive, funny, and intensely affecting. | en_GB |
