I've loved prints for as long as I can remember.
Especially the European kind, where every inch is packed with fine engraved lines. Gustave Doré, for example. I can't get enough of him.
Take Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Honestly, the story is mostly technical trivia, and I yawned my way through it more than once. The only reason I finished it was the illustrations.
Maybe you have one too. A book where you remember the pictures better than the plot.
Book 12 of 100 Debuts is Max Ernst's The Hundred Headless Woman. It's the first collage novel by Ernst, one of the giants of 20th-century art. Every page is just one collage print and a short, caption-like line.
Wait, that's a novel?
Yes, it's a novel. Probably.
Flip through it and you'll be done in an hour. But once you start imagining what happens in the gaps between the pages, it never ends.
A "Picture Novel" Printed in Just 1,000 Copies
It first came out in 1929 from Éditions du Carrefour in Paris, limited to just 1,000 copies. In 1956, Éditions de l'Œil in Paris reissued it, again limited to 1,000. In 1962, Gerhardt Verlag in Berlin released a German edition of 4,000 copies.
After that, every edition went out of print, and for a long time you couldn't find it in any bookstore. 147 plates, nine chapters. It's a hefty piece of work.
It all goes back to 1919, when Ernst was 28. One rainy day in a town on the Rhine, he "discovered" a method called collage.
Old illustrated books, natural history encyclopedias, mail-order catalogs. He cut images out of existing books and pasted them together, making paintings that could be printed. Call it image alchemy.
And he put it right at the center of a new kind of painting. That's the genius of Max Ernst.
The Man Who Died in 1914 and Came Back as a Magician in 1918
Here's a quick rundown of who Ernst was.
He was born in 1891 near Cologne. While studying philosophy at the University of Bonn, he fell for Picasso, de Chirico, and the philosopher Max Stirner, and started painting in an expressionist style.
Then came World War I. He was sent to the front as a soldier, and it shook him deeply. Ernst himself wrote:
"I died on August 1, 1914, and was resurrected on November 11, 1918, to become a magician."
August 1 is the day Germany entered the war. November 11 is the day of the armistice. How cool is that? It's an almost unfairly good line.
After the war, he threw himself into Dada with Hans Arp and others. But something was missing. Shouldn't art make people far more uneasy than this?
Then, one rainy day in Cologne, the pages of a teaching-supply catalog, full of diagrams for anthropology, microbiology, psychology, mineralogy, and paleontology, suddenly seized his attention with startling force. So he made up his mind. He'd become a magician.
That's how Cologne became the birthplace of Ernst's surrealist painting.
Later, André Breton and his circle invited him to Paris, where he became a central figure in Surrealism alongside Joan Miró. Loplop, the giant bird often seen as his alter ego, first spread its wings around this time.
During World War II, he fled the Nazis and escaped to New York in 1941, where he had a huge influence on what became action painting. Then, for reasons of his own, he moved to the Arizona desert and painted the people and landscapes there. He died in Paris in 1976.
See? You could write a whole novel about this life alone.
A Crime Scene in a Dream
"So what's The Hundred Headless Woman actually about?"
That's hard to explain. Technically, there is a story. (I think.) A strange tale where the avant-garde and tradition collide in ways neither saw coming.
Here's the cast:
A man jumping from a balloon
Loplop, the giant bird
Doves and swallows
A baby with its belly cut open
All kinds of women
Outrageous rewards, vague warnings, and the cries of fairies fill every page.
Is this someone's unsettling dream? Or a story the cut-out images started telling on their own? The answer is probably neither, and both.
If I had to sum up the feeling, it's like a scene from a dream recreated in unbelievable detail. And yet, inside the dream, we don't care about that scene at all.
As a mystery fan, that gave me chills. There's a mystery, but you don't have to solve it. Maybe solving it means you lose.
What's With the Hundred Heads?
"By the way, why 'hundred headless'?"
I'd been wondering that too.
The popular prints Ernst cut up have countless faces. A hundred heads. Flip that around, and they don't have any one face. They're headless works, in a sense.
Fun fact: the original French title, La Femme 100 têtes, is reportedly a pun. It can sound like both "the hundred-headed woman" and "the headless woman" (sans tête).
So the title might be collage itself, personified.
Illustrations cut from a thousand old books nobody reads anymore, as if they'd been waiting to die somewhere apart from the main text. Here, they all wake up at once.
It feels like you're looking at a "real cross-section" of something, cut loose from time, place, customs, and faith. That's the magic of this book.
The philosopher John Dewey said in Art as Experience that a work of art is completed in the person who receives it. Novels are the same. And The Hundred Headless Woman leaves an enormous gap for interpretation, so there are as many stories as there are readers.
So What Is Surrealism, Anyway?
Let me give you a quick summary of Surrealism here.
Surrealism is an art movement that officially began in 1924, when the poet André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto. In Japanese, it's sometimes called "super-realism." But it doesn't mean a fantasy world beyond reality.
The key is Freud's psychoanalysis. The human mind has an "unconscious" we don't usually notice. Our true selves hide in dreams, stray associations, and slips of the tongue.
So why not take off the filter of reason and turn the unconscious straight into art? Do that, and a "denser reality" than everyday life should emerge. Hence the name: sur (beyond) + realism.
The tools for this included:
Automatic writing (writing whatever your hand does, without thinking)
Recording dreams
Using chance
Collage
The line everyone quotes like a password comes from the poet Lautréamont:
"As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table."
A sewing machine, an umbrella, and a dissecting table. When completely unrelated things meet, a beauty no one's seen before is born. Dalí's melting clocks and Magritte's floating rocks are all cousins of this idea.
And the quickest way to make those encounters happen was collage.
Collage Isn't Just a Rip-Off
"If collage is just cutting and pasting, isn't it a rip-off?"
These days, that's what most people would think. Do anything that looks like imitation, and copyright and IP issues come up right away.
But in Ernst's time, collage meant something a bit different. It was resistance against capitalists and the rich hoarding value, and a way to change society.
Within Dada and Surrealism, collage burst into bloom:
Collage of words
Collage of images
Collage of sound
Collage of action
It exploded everywhere at once.
But the real aim wasn't the cutting and pasting itself. It was breaking the spell of "this is what this thing is" that clings to objects and information.
And it was pushing reason and common sense to re-edit themselves. Breton even said that just swapping the everyday order for another order is meaningless.
You have to betray every expectation, and then some. Not reason, but unreason.
The Surrealists called this "dépaysement." It's a French word that originally means "sending abroad" or "changing surroundings."
You tear things out of their usual relationships and drop them into impossible ones. Then an impossible scene rises up.
The Hundred Headless Woman is a collage novel by Ernst, a man who knew this principle inside out.
Captions as the Alchemy of Words
"Okay, I get the pictures. But what about those short lines?"
This is where it gets tricky. Ernst probably had a passage from Rimbaud's A Season in Hell in mind while he played with words.
He was drawn to a world of ready-made images and words that were a little cheap and a little old-fashioned. The material for magic wasn't in high art. It was in the junk.
My Favorite Pages
My favorite is page 51.
The great Saint Nicholas, attended by impeccable parasites. Guided from afar by the two appendages at his sides.
What does that even mean? Yet when you see it next to the picture, it somehow makes sense.
Then there's page 179, "On every wharf."
And page 265.
Just looking at these images makes me feel I could write a whole story. Inspiration keeps pouring in, one idea after another.
That's what's fun about reading debuts, I think. The Hundred Headless Woman is a book in which someone later called a master felt his way toward a form no one had ever seen.
It isn't polished. It isn't easy to understand. But the heat of "this is where it all began" spills off the edges of the pages.
Invention comes before refinement. As a writer, that's what gave me the most courage.
My Writing Practice
So, about my own novel.
Hmm. The ideas just won't come together. The deadline's the end of January, so I really need to start writing.
What I'm working on is a story about a psychopathic serial killer who only targets criminals. Thing is, no matter how many people he kills, there's still no "mystery" at the core. Right now, it's just mass murder.
Speaking of which, my wife recently started watching a German series called Murder Mindfully. At its core, it's the story of a man passing himself off as a gang boss. This might be useful. Now, what to do?
Getting from zero to one seems to be a black box even for writers at the top of their game. One of them said what matters is "creating chaos."
Expose yourself to lots of things.
Watch your favorite works over and over.
Put into words why the things that move you actually move you.
That, apparently, is how you create chaos.
So here's every work that's influenced me so far.
Novels
・In Cold Blood
・The Divine Comedy
・Brave New World
・The Notebook
・The Name of the Rose
・Kusamakura
・No Longer Human
・The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
・The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
・QJKJQ
Films
・Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla
・Gamera 2: Attack of Legion
・Being John Malkovich
・The Silence of the Lambs
・Cool Runnings
・Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
・The Matrix
・The Lord of the Rings trilogy
・Hot Fuzz
・Star Trek (2009)
TV Series
・Star Trek: The Next Generation
・Suits
・Brooklyn Nine-Nine
・Yellowstone
・Peacemaker
・The Office (US)
・Shameless (US)
・Peaky Blinders
・The Inbetweeners
・Skins (Season 1)
・Sherlock
・Kamen Rider Kuuga
・Kamen Rider 555 (Faiz)
Anime
・Kill la Kill
・Gundam Build Fighters
・Devilman Crybaby
・Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine
・Hunter x Hunter
・Psycho-Pass
・Beast Wars: Transformers
・Thunderbirds (puppet series)
・Ranking of Kings
・Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation
Manga
・Naruto
・Meiryoutei Gotou Seijuurou
・Ajin: Demi-Human
・One-Punch Man
・Medarotter Rintarou
・Uzumaki
Looking at this list, my head's quite the collage. Godzilla, Dante, and Kamen Rider are lying on the same dissecting table. Maybe these are my "hundred heads."
Also, taking a cue from Agota Kristof and Agatha Christie, I've gotten into the habit of always spinning stories in my head while I walk or do housework. If stories came to me unconsciously, I'd have written several books by now.
It really hits me that our brains don't get a workout unless we push them on purpose. So this is how I'm building my story brain, bit by bit.
Rating
Originality: ★★★★★
Intensity: ★★★
Polish: ★★
Structure: ★★
Aftertaste: ★
As an invention of form, it's a perfect score. But if you want the texture of a story or a satisfying aftertaste, you might feel a bit left behind.
And that's fine. This isn't a book you read. It's a book you finish in your own head.