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• 1 media/Fantomas_early_film_poster.jpg media/Fancy Dress v20.jpg media/Fantomas_early_film_poster.jpg 2024-10-13T08:32:01-07:00 Detecting Attention: Fictions of Perception in Paintings of Fantômas 10 image_header 2024-12-21T17:10:00-08:00 Tara Kraft-Ainsworth
  University of Georgia
  
  Abstract
  
  Fantômas, a popular French detective series written by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain between 1911 and 1913, captured the attention of avant-garde painters between 1915 and 1927: Juan Gris inserted a copy of one of the novels in his still life, Pipe et journal (Fantômas) (1915); Yves Tanguy included the villain’s name in his dreamscape, Fantômas (1925); and René Magritte borrowed his formal organization for L’assassin menacé (1927) from Louis Feuillade’s 1913 film adaptation of the books. What enticed these artists to turn to popular fiction as inspiration for their visual work? Scholarship has approached this question through the plots, people, and particulars of Souvestre and Allain’s serial, but perception’s role in the formal structure of the detective story remains an understudied component of this literary genre’s appeal. This paper demonstrates how Gris, Tanguy, and Magritte’s compositions attend to the methods of focusing, or distracting, readerly attention by showing how these forms of perception appear throughout the viewers’ daily life in experiences of surfaces, self, and space. When viewed through this framework, paintings of Fantômas reveal a pointed critique of the way modernity’s organizing systems construct not only the lens through which one views the world but the significance one draws from these observations.
   
  Keywords: Detective Fiction / Attention / Fantômas / Juan Gris / Yves Tanguy / René Magritte
  
  
  Introduction
  
  In 1927, Belgian Surrealist René Magritte opened his first solo exhibition at Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels.¹ Among the forty-nine paintings in his show, a crime scene, L’assassin menacé (The Menaced Assassin) (1927, Fig. 1), was one of the largest canvases on display. Its scale and subject matter positioned it as a focal point in the space even as the considerable number of compositions that surrounded it vied for the spectator’s attention. Arguably, these same dialectics of perception appear in the painting itself. Two detective-esque figures flank the foreground, their bodies turned as if to address the homicide behind them while their focus is captured by something beyond the picture plane. In the central room, a young man contemplates a gramophone, his preoccupation with the object at odds with the arresting presence of a dead woman lying on a chaise lounge behind him. Indeed, the corpse is curiously neglected by all the figures except the viewers, as the three men occupying the balcony in the background alternately watch the man in the central room and the spectators themselves.
  
  
  
  L’assassin’s ambivalent portrayal of attention is amplified by the painting’s association with Louis Feuillade’s 1913 film Fantômas: le mort qui tue (The Corpse that Kills) (Fig. 2) and the widely read detective novels by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain from which the film was adapted.² Written in the hard-boiled style, Souvestre and Allain’s stories (and Feuillade’s later films) follow the gentleman criminal, Fantômas, as he eludes police officer Juve and his journalist sidekick, Fandor, by using a myriad of disguises.³ As José Vovelle first suggested, Magritte transposes the narrative’s perceptual ambiguity to L’assassin by quoting the formal composition of a scene from Feuillade’s production: the two men framing the open doorway recall Fantômas’s henchmen awaiting their unsuspecting victim (106-107). For Robin Walz, however, Magritte’s foregrounded figures borrow more than formal arrangements because the men embody the novel’s complicated boundary between law enforcement and criminality. Their postures could be poised to apprehend a suspect or to commit their own malefaction (48, 71). Annabel Audureau and Jonathan Eburne further expand on Magritte’s use of Fantômas: the former views the artist’s adaptation as hermeneutic, the translation from novel to film to painting underscoring the malleability of narrative, while the latter interprets Magritte’s painting as transferring detective fiction’s demand for a solution to the spectators by calling into question visual art’s ability to convey reality (271; 41). In her study of the work, Anne Umland argues further that Magritte abstracts the film and novel’s characters, dissolving distinct categories of individuality and anonymity, good and evil (34). Collectively, these interpretations underline the primacy of perception in Magritte’s appropriation of Fantômas.
  
  
  However, Magritte is not the only modern artist fascinated by this French villain and his relationship to attention. In his 1915 still life Pipe et journal, Juan Gris reproduced a copy of the novel among furniture, fruit bowls, and other ephemera (Fig. 3). The book, and an issue of Le Journal, alternately appear situated on the edge of a table, due to the stark black shadows they cast, and scattered on the floor, as the surface crops both objects at odd angles, disrupting a stable perspective for viewers. Yves Tanguy’s Fantômas (1925) [link to image of Tanguy's painting]⁴ similarly frustrates easy legibility as the faceless figures and plethora of visual signs complicate their association with the series. As with Magritte’s L’assassin, the reference to Fantômas in Gris’s and Tanguy’s work emphasizes, and undermines, the ways detective fiction orchestrates the act of viewership. I explore this dialogue between pulp fiction, mass-market publications (of which detective stories were a popular type), and painting by placing the above works in conversation with the detective genre’s structure as it is seen to embody the experience of modernity. When examined in relation to the formal construction of early twentieth century detective fiction, the layered forms of attention embedded into these canvases resemble the multivalent forms of perception built into the novels, prompting the question, what made this hard-boiled style detective story an apt medium to think with, create with, and challenge viewers with beyond the literary sphere at this historical moment?  
  
  The answer to this question is found in the structural makeup of Fantômas. In the Fantômas series, the nature of crime and criminality is determined largely through context, a narrative technique that encourages a reconsideration of how perception operates in the detective novel as well as in modernity. I trace the presence of this attentional form through Gris’s ambiguous treatment of surfaces, Tanguy’s duplicitous modeling of the human body, and Magritte’s uncanny spaces. Drawing on the theoretical developments of Caroline Levine and Anna Kornbluh, I reposition attention as a provocative, active force in molding modern spectators. Paired with Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer’s critical analyses of detective fiction and twentieth-century culture, this framework demonstrates that the dialogue between painting and this popular form of prose is concerned with the fictive nature of attention rather than crime, murder, or mystery per se. Building on Jonathan Crary’s foundational work on spectacle, I argue that artists appropriated the formal qualities of detective fiction to confront individuals with the fact that the perception they called their own was as composed as the artwork and novels they consumed.   
  
  
  
  Detection on the Mind
  
  Appearing shortly after Souvestre and Allain’s publication of their final novel and only a year after Feuillade’s last Fantômas film, Gris’s Pipe et journal constructs a parallel between the fictional methods of investigation featured in the series and Cubism’s challenge to modern perception. The still life illustrates this relation through its manipulation of visual planes and surfaces (Myers and Rothkopf 127-8). Initially, the composition eschews illusions of depth and weight; the objects are compressed, appearing as layered images rather than as physical things. However, the artist’s use of texture and shading challenges this two-dimensionality. Deep, dark shadows on the left of the painting thrust the wooden tabletop into the foreground of the composition, creating volume between it and the wood floor. This play with space is further accentuated by the white chalk outline of the table leg in the lower left quadrant, which situates the observer’s point of view above the piece of furniture rather than in front of it. Gris’s shadows do not only double the tabletop, book, and abstracted fruit bowl but also morph these items into objects in and of themselves, their stark contrast to the palette of the painting extending and contracting viewers’ perception of the canvas’s surface. Scattered on the table and lying beneath it, the bright green copy of Fantômas and issue of Le Journal continue the dialectic of physical thing and flattened image. White outlines extend their respective covers onto the wooden slab through book bindings, price tags and titles, even as the table itself conceals the lower half of the texts. Although provided with traditional formal cues like foreshortening, perspective, and shadows, observers cannot determine a secure perspective for the painting; these visual identifiers do not allow a singular point of view. Instead, they fracture it. Depending on the detail the viewers focus on, they are standing in front of a table with fruit, peering down upon a scattered arrangement, or confronting the two-dimensional surface of a canvas. Like clues in a detective story, the objects presented are elusive, alternately revealing and concealing their relationship to one another.
  
  
  The more viewers attempt to construct a linear narrative out of Gris’s visual signs, the more convoluted and chaotic the still life becomes. One can trace the edges of a particular form, such as the cover of the Fantômas book, but as it intersects with another alternative plane, focus is interrupted, perception is disjointed, and positionality is displaced. Observing Gris’s still life becomes an act of continually recalibrating one’s attention. The fractured visual planes of Pipe et journal oscillate between focus and diversion, a movement that acts as a “latent structure” supporting the painting’s multitudinous perspectives (Llorens 65). Scholars of modern spectacle have argued that the same structure underpins modern life. Individuals walking along an urban street were bombarded by an “endless sequence of new products, sources of stimulation, and streams of information” resulting in a fleeting and fickle focus (Crary 13-4). As people moved their bodies through anonymous crowds, catching fragments of conversations, advertisements, and headlines, the individual’s perceptual field was constantly redirected and reshaped. Attention, then, sits on a continuum with distraction (Crary 47), a product of where, how, and to what it is directed; attention is a malleable action that, like Gris’s intersecting objects, adjusts the viewers’ perspective as it encounters new things. For Crary, this expanded conception of attention required “new methods of managing and regulating perception” in order to assist individuals in sifting through the overwhelming stimuli of modernity to reach important truths about themselves and their relation to their evolving surroundings (13-14).
  
  Detective fiction acts as one of these management methods by spinning stories of focused attention out of the distractions of modern life. Regardless of the particulars of a tale, the sleuth is tasked with sorting through a substantial number of seemingly random details, determining which facts are important, and organizing them into a cohesive solution by the final pages. In essence, the investigator successfully absorbs and synthesizes the myriad stimulations, encounters, and experiences, processes them using a universal logic applicable regardless of the given circumstances, and extracts knowledge from the chaos (Goulet 112). Before reaching the denouement, however, the detective experiences the same spectrum of attention and distraction that Gris paints into his canvas and modern readers experience in their daily interactions. Artists were especially drawn to the creative potential of this liminal space between inundation and ratiocination. For instance, Gertrude Stein’s detective novel, Blood on the Dining Room Floor (1948), composed in 1933 as an attempt to cure her writer’s block, tracks three mysterious events (Robbins 25): the suicide/murder of a hotelier’s wife, a strange interaction with Stein’s household staff, and the murder of a woman in a country home. Replacing the traditional detective, Stein uses a narrator who presents, rather than investigates, a series of facts concerning the cases. Interwoven together, the stream of information collapses all three events into a circular narrative that resists a single solution:

  The elder brother got rid of the father. [. . .]
  This is the way they were.
  The eldest brother, the brother and the mother and the seven younger did not get rid of the father. The eldest brother with the help of a rich old woman, not so rich but very old and very well known, and full of resolution and wonder got rid of the father. That is, the eldest brother following advice and taking his courage altogether got rid of the father. And then what happened. (21)

  Repeated, rearranged, and respoken, the facts become abstractions, the information at times incorrectly attributed to a different case through syntactical proximity. Stein’s adjustments to detective fiction rhetoric and plot position the details of the cases as isolated images whose relation to one another occurs, as in Gris’s visual planes, through the dissolution of logical connection into random juxtaposition. Just as viewers of Pipe et journal must reconsider their relationship to the painting as they trace the objects in the still life, Stein’s readers must reassess their conception of the murders every time the information is restated. In this way, Gris’s and Stein’s work calls perception’s linearity into question by bringing the forms of representation used by detective fiction into conversation with the experience of modern attention. Detection is on the artists’ minds not because of a particular plot or desire to align themselves with mass-market fiction so much as the genre’s treatment of perception as a malleable form at the structural level. The novel’s closed system renders the changes made to attention throughout the narrative almost undetectable, mirroring the mediating structures modern subjects experienced. Souvestre and Allain’s Fantômas is no exception: each installment ends by revealing the many imperceptible roles played by the protagonist throughout the story. This denouement underscores the futility of focus as readers are shown how many times they failed to notice the villain.       
  
  
  
  An Infatuation with Fantômas
  
  Incorporating Fantômas into their painting thus provided artists with a visual shorthand that prompted reflection on modern attention’s fluid nature. Yves Tanguy’s Fantômas (1925) demonstrates the ways in which this popular antihero infused compositions with the same ambiguity as the novels. Written in bright red letters, the name “Fantômas” appears above the leg of a kneeling man firing a gun. Although the labelled figure may be the famed protagonist, nothing else about Tanguy’s painting directly references events in the series. On the far left a man with a faint mustache and bandaged arm is placed slightly in front of a nude woman or mannequin, whose only defined feature are her breasts. The spectral outline of a second woman contrasts with the corpse opposite her, which displays signs of rigor mortis in its splayed fingers and flexed heels. Above this pairing, a crude outline of facial features and hand extend from the kneeling figure in green; the outlined features confront the viewers’ gaze even though the kneeling figure is oblivious to the spectators’ presence. Tanguy’s inclusion of Fantômas’s name frustrates rather than illuminates the relationships among the various characters. Appearing in a small script in a crowded composition, the appellation attracts viewers’ attention because of its familiarity, yet its presence fails to produce a framework through which spectators might create meaning. In other words, spectators approach the painting in expectation of finding a well-known narrative but there is a disconcerting lack of continuity between the visual composition and the story. Echoing the fallibility of perception found in the Fantômas novels, this visual shock is also foundational to Surrealism’s efforts to illustrate problems of modern subjectivity.
  
  Indeed, Surrealism’s correspondence with Fantômas is first documented in the final issue of Littérature (1923). Grouped under the backward title of the journal, “Erutaréttil,” two pages of names catalogue the movement’s self-identified predecessors (Aragon, Breton, and Soupault 24-5). Fantômas sits among poets, philosophers, and popular novelists such as Lautrémont, Hegel, and Lewis Carroll. Printed in varying size and typeface, the appellatives encourage an evaluation of each listed individual by means of differing scale and styling of the letters. Fantômas is the only fictional character to appear in the collection and his name is printed in the same large, bold-face font as those of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The character’s appearance among these acknowledged forebears situates him as a pivotal figure for Surrealism. For Umland, this infatuation arises from the Fantômas series placing “all supposedly rational systems and signs of authority on trial,” an apt observation that can be expanded to include the forms of perception imposed by modern life (34).  
  
  Fantômas belongs to a subgenre of detective fiction that challenges the genre’s premises. Investigation occurs, but instead of leading to a clear identification of the criminal, the process of finding and interpreting clues builds a case against observation’s ability to reveal truth. This feature is most explicit in Le mort qui tue, in which Fantômas frames the sculptor Jacques Dollon for murder and foils the police investigation by exploiting its allegedly foolproof methods: once the artist is arrested and documented using the Bertillon method of measurements and fingerprints, Fantômas disguises himself as a jail guard, kills Dollon in his prison cell, and steals his hands. The villain then commits several more crimes using the deceased man’s uniquely fingerprinted identity. Fantômas plants this evidence at each infraction, leading investigators back to the deceased Dollon in order to divert suspicion away from himself. By rendering early twentieth century detection methods a literal dead end, the Fantômas storyline dismantles the viability of la police scientifique, an early form of forensic science developed by Bertillon, which relied on the ostensibly objective vision produced by photography and individual characteristics to determine culpability (Fornabai 62; Gürsel 247). For the Surrealists, the novels not only exhibited the fallacy of investigative tactics but also pointedly critiqued the positivism of perception. In the Second manifest du surréalisme (1930), André Breton disparaged Edgar Allen Poe as a “master of scientific policemen,” proffering the rhetorical question, “[i]s it not a shame to present in an intellectually attractive light a type of policeman… to bestow upon the world a police method” (127). For Breton, the police method—and the literary genre celebrating it—resulted in a “sole possibility of the things which ‘are’”, a linear and static connection between observation and meaning predetermined by cultural beliefs (128).
  
  In the first Manifest du surréalisme (1924) Breton applies this critique to a passage from Fyodor Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment that contains an in-depth description of the space, furniture, and narrator’s perception of a yellow, wallpapered room in which a murder will soon occur (7-8). Frustrated by the excessive visuality of popular writing, and outraged that it presents readers with an “observation” rather than an experience, Breton reads Dostoevski’s text as a simulation devoid of possibilities (8); it is an image rather than a physical space where bodies might interact. Eburne argues that Breton equates Dostoevski’s purple prose with the closed circuit of thought found in detective mysteries since both present a form of literary rationalism that controls the connections built by readers by “trapping experience within its ideological constraints” (25). Trained to observe their surroundings rather than contemplate their points of intersection between self, senses, and setting, the modern individual was more susceptible to blindly accepting predetermined meaning about themselves, others, and the things they encountered. As such, Surrealism positioned itself as a way to assist “that inveterate dreamer . . . [who] has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use” in reclaiming his sight (3). The vision Surrealists promote is not a mere surveying of the natural world, nor introspection isolated from reality, but rather a dialectical perception that collapses these two spheres of experience into a fluid plane mediated by space and the individual’s senses.  
  
  Viewed through this lens, Fantômas contributes to Surrealism because the character embodies modern perception as a malleable substance. If Dostoveski’s descriptive prose presents an image devoid of imaginative flexibility, Souvestre and Allain’s introduction of Fantômas presents a multitude of possibilities. The narrator describes the protagonist as “nothing . . . and everything . . . nobody . . . and yet nevertheless somebody!” who “Spreads terror!!!” (1). Readers experience Fantômas as both a specific and general character; he is the abstract mastermind behind the crimes and, alternately, a banker, jail guard, and a bourgeois gentleman. Walz argues Fantômas is only visible when he takes on the appearance of another; it is only when he dons the form of something he is not that he “becomes more than a shadow,” more than a concept to be contemplated (59). Fantômas, like attention itself, is elusive, shapeshifting, and subjective, a form constantly in flux. As Walz infers, he is a name, a figment of the imagination, only until the spatial circumstances give him both a place to hide and be discovered. Adding an additional layer of tension to the novels, the protagonist’s morphology is intimately linked to the readers’ interpretation of the story’s spaces and sensorium. It is up to individuals to determine whether Fantômas is present or not (Gunning 132). As each person might reach their own conclusions, the villain’s shapeshifting echoes the fluidity of modern attention, as both are definable and nebulous, present and absent, active and futile.
  
  Late nineteenth century treatises on psychophysics popularized this dialectical definition of perception. Expanding the work of German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, who first introduced the idea that perception was comprised of personal experiences as well as visual impressions, Théodule-Armond Ribot’s La Psychologie de l’attention (The Psychology of  Attention, reissued 1903) argued that attention was constructed through cultural context (35). For Ribot, attention was comprised of two forms: spontaneous and voluntary. The first is sparked by emotion and interaction with the world while the latter is learned through society (Ribot 8). Since spontaneous attention is momentary and easily manipulated, voluntary attention must be acquired through one’s culture in order to properly digest information (Ribot 35). Similar to Fantômas, only visible when inhabiting another identity, attention was only definable when exercised in a certain, predetermined capacity or projected onto a particular thing. Crary emphasizes that, under the conditions of modernity, attention shifted from an individual act observing the “objectivity of the external world” to an overarching management system in which “a subject is provisionally constructed through language and other systems of social meaning and value” (44). Attention was no longer an inherent or practiced personal characteristic, but a currency governed by the silent forces of culture. Souvestre and Allain take this latent structure of modernity as the basis for their novels, using Fantômas’s imperceptible disguises to demonstrate the ways in which truth is revealed only when those in power want it to be. As the mastermind behind the crimes, Fantômas chooses when to uncover his performance as another character; nothing about his hidden identities is discernable in the narrative—even with careful reading. The villain’s fluid movement between nothing and everything, nobody and somebody, “spreads terror” because his presence is undetectable to readers (Souvestre and Allain 1). For the modern individual, this experience of failed perception was more fact than fiction, as their shifting surroundings constantly highlighted the unattainability of intersubjectivity.
  
  Attention’s uneasy ambivalence, its ability to misdirect and misinterpret, evokes the same tensions as Fantômas’s invisibility because both underscore the fluid correspondence between space and senses in constructing perception. Visual artists were especially attuned to the fault lines between sight, site, and self. In a 1930 essay, Paul Nougé, leader of the Belgian Surrealist group, postulated that objects and their meaning were constructed in the mind of the individual, which allowed two people to view the same thing and award it different descriptions and significance (46-49). As Ribot made clear in his treatise, however, the individual mind was not wholly unique in its construction but rather largely produced by its surroundings. As a movement, then, Surrealism endeavored to reveal this fabrication of interpretation by confronting observers with the reality that what they saw and experienced was mediated through a contextually composed lens they had been told was their own (Breton 128-29; Nougé 48).
  
  Viewed through this lens, Fantômas’s name offers us an entry point to Tanguy’s Fantômas that is separate from the novel’s narrative. Curator Karin von Maur reads the kneeling figure as Fantômas, the crude outline behind him as the ghost of the murder victim lying on the bed below, the spectral female as Lady Beltham, Fantômas’s mistress, and the bandaged man on the far left as Juve, the detective (21). Yet, if read individually, Tanguy’s figures are empty signs. The bodies oscillate between conceptual entities, akin to Fantômas’s name, and constructed identities, parallel to the protagonist’s various disguises. Upholding the Surrealist endeavor to recalibrate modern perception, Tanguy’s use of Fantômas harnesses the pulp novel’s dialectics of attention to confront his viewers with the elusiveness of individualism. Indeed, the villain’s repeated appearance on canvas has been read as a deliberate play with individuality (Varnedoe and Gopnik 44). If not for the name in Tanguy’s painting, none of his figures could be identified as specific people. Situated in an obscure, smoke-filled atmosphere, whose central buildings infer an urban setting but not a particular locale, every character is faceless except the corpse and the jester pictured on the right-hand side of the composition. Even these figures, however, deny identification. The jester’s heavily shadowed eyes, rouged cheeks, and bright red lips recall the painted masks of carnival performers. Like Fantômas, they are neither a specific somebody nor an anonymous anybody, but rather a performed identity. Comparatively, even though the corpse is fully exposed, its body is generalized; simple lines delineate its facial features. Yet the gaping wound in its abdomen spills blood that infers its human vulnerability, a statement ironically underscored by the bright, red fluid pooling into the shape of a crude, smiling face.
  
  Tanguy’s represented bodies are both definitive and interpretable; they can be altered to fit any narrative and simultaneously operate within the specific one identified by Fantômas’s name. Frustrating the correlation between appellative and body, site and sight, Tanguy underscores the constructed nature not only of perception but of individuality. If Fantômas’s name initiates a sense of familiarity that is continually thwarted by the lack of specificity, the viewers’ conception of self is shown to function similarly. Comprised by their surrounding culture as much or more than their personal characteristics, the modern individual appears here to be subject to attention’s subjectivity. This intersection between site, sight, and self is at its core a collision of attentional forms, one that complicates and expands the parameters of modern perception.
  
  
  Similia Similibus: The Case for Attention as Form
  
  Although the concept of form in art history recalls a fixation on formal qualities—shape, color, perspective—often accompanied by an omission of anything not readily visible within the composition, Levine and Kornbluh have proposed an enticing, expanded definition of this term: they articulate form as various types of organizing systems, “an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping” (Levine 3), that orchestrate and direct our perception of the world around us. Framed this way, form is both visible and invisible, pervasive in aesthetics but present in politics, economics, and culture, an overarching influence in private and public life capable of appearing as an image or experience, as fact or fiction. As such, Levine encourages readers to consider the ways in which these organizing patterns materialize and how they shape the experience of a historical moment (117). Kornbluh expands this reconceptualization by asserting that aesthetics mediate sociality, prompting us to move our formal analyses beyond the realm of paint and prose to the intersection of these mediums with cultural phenomena (15). Attending to attention as form, then, draws our focus not only to the ways in which perception mediates what we see and how we extract meaning from these observations but also how it delineates the forces in our surroundings that construct the frameworks through which we encounter the world.
  
  Levine and Kornbluh’s reframing of form reflects the early work of Frankfurt School critics, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, both of whom used the detective novel to critique modernity’s overarching structures and their impact on perception. In Benjamin’s “Kriminalroman, auf Reisen” (“Detective Novel, on Travel,” 1930), he lists several authors one might choose as travel companions: Sven Elvestad (Norwegian), Frank Heller (Swedish), Gaston Leroux (French), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (British), and Anna Katherine Green (American) (381-83). Beyond their convenient availability in the train station, detective novels by these authors suit train travel because their forms of perception parallel those the traveler experiences. Riding on a train is described as an “unabsehbare Flucht raumzeitlicher Schwellen” (“incalculable flight of spatiotemporal thresholds”) (381)⁵ where one’s body is at once still and moving swiftly, enclosed within the consistency of the cabin and passing through various landscapes visible through the windows of the train; the anonymity of the other passengers is isolating even though they are physically present, a dialectic heightened by the “Grauen der unbekannten Halle” (“horror of the unknown hall”) one experiences on the other side of the trip: one spends the travel time fearing a missed connection, fracturing focus between a visualization of the station, timetables, one’s arrival and one’s current space which is constantly changing (381). Opening his next paragraph with the Latin phrase similia similibus, or “like is cured by like,” Benjamin prescribes particular aspects of the detective story for these symptoms (382). Elvestad and Heller’s “smarte Gesellschaft” (“smart society”) (381) novels distract readers from the anxieties of the unknown passengers and hall; Gaston Leroux’s ghosts absorb the unsettling discomfort caused by the displaced bodily movement and unnerving collapse of time and space; and Conan Doyle and Green organize the details that threaten to overwhelm the traveler into straightforward truths. At the core of this essay, Benjamin describes the overlapping of two forms of attention, that of detective fiction and that of modern travel, with the intention of demonstrating the extent to which perception, even though experienced through the body, is mediated by external forces. Rather than describe details of particular stories, Benjamin discusses the authors’ various structures and how these techniques impact readers and their conceptions of the trip. For just as train travel repeatedly alters the traveler’s perception of themselves and their surroundings, so detective fiction adjusts the ways in which readers encounter the objects presented in the narrative.  
  
  Anna Katherine Green’s 1915 short story, “An Intangible Clue,” illustrates this point in a manner that reflects the structural politics of Magritte’s L’assassin, to which the next section returns. In this story, Violet Page, the respectable lady-detective, takes on a tricky case because her boss’s lengthy, ekphrastic rendering of the crime intrigues her. He describes the place where the crime was committed, the surrounding neighborhood, the interior of the home, the victim’s character, and the state of the body upon its discovery, admonishing Violet that “no crime is low-down which makes imperative demand upon the intellect . . . of its investigator” (27). This opening scene presents the case as an image in need of contemplation rather than a crime scene that must be maneuvered. As the narrative progresses, additional clues, from the mysterious box of linens to blood-stained floorboards to a forgotten wallet to an adjacent window, fill out the canvas as objects to be examined rather than a space or thing to be experienced. Lee Clark Mitchell labels this strategy the “oscillating poetics” (36) of detective fiction, as the shift between recounting facts and descriptive representations conceals the importance of a pool of blood slightly larger than the others. Only when Violet changes her perspective, arriving at the scene and walking around this blood stain, does she pick this detail out as the necessary evidence to crack the case. When the detective reframes the crime scene as a space to be experienced through the body, the blood takes on critical significance. This importance is revealed through the combined efforts of Violet’s own intellect, attention, and presence onsite. It is her appearance at the crime scene, her observation of the evidence, and her own knowledge of sewing needle pricks that allow her to extract meaning from the various details. Green’s detective story frames space as the missing component of Violet’s perception, allowing her to solve the mystery. It is the collected efforts of these forms of attention, brought into a mutually beneficial relationship by the detective novel, that results in a complete picture of the murder.
  
  For Kracauer, the attentional forms of the detective novel did not provide a straightforward curative for the uncertainties produced by the modern city. In his “Der Detective-Roman” ("The Detective Novel," 1922-25), Kracauer constructs a parallel between this form of pulp fiction and the hotel lobby. The latter is positioned as a replacement for the Church, its empty spaces and depersonalized setting framing connections devoid of authentic engagement. Impersonal and isolating, the hotel lobby facilitates interaction that nonetheless lacks meaning and purpose (131). Just as the lobby presents a plethora of stimuli in the forms of anonymous persons and mysterious parcels, so the detective novel provides a multitude of details that, until the final pages, appear random and functionless. Detective fiction creates, Kracauer claims, meretricious patterns of viewing. Although the novels successfully translate distractions into valuable clues by the end of the story, Kracauer argues that these demonstrations of attention produced modern spectators that were “substanzlosen Marionetten” (“insubstantial marionettes”) (148). In this way, the detective novel acted as a microcosm of reality: “Ohne Kunstwerk zu sein, zeigt doch . . . ” (“without being a work of art . . . ”) it “einer entwirklichten Gesellschaft ihr eigenes Antlitz reiner, als sie es sons tzu erblicken vermöchte” (“shows a de-realized society its own face more purely than it would otherwise be able to see”) (116). By equating the viewers with marionettes, Kracauer defines modern individuals as part of the choreography of modernity rather than unique agents. The viewers move through the world but are also directed by it: they experience the evolution of their surroundings and are conformed by them. In essence, the forms of attention they interact with throughout the day, whether performed, printed, or painted, do not merely live in their imaginations or thoughts but operate their bodies. Manipulated by the “ästhetischen Medium” (“aesthetic medium”) of descriptive text (116-17), readers of detective fiction were, for Kracauer, merely acting out perception rather than engaging in it authentically. Instead of this being contained within the fictional realm, however, Kracauer argues that the detective novel revealed this condition as the reality of modern life. Reflecting readers to themselves, the stories collapse observations, bodily experience, and cultural beliefs into a single perspective point that is framed as the reader’s own. What Benjamin and Kracauer draw attention to using the detective novel is the way modern society’s forms of perception mold passive spectators who nonetheless believe in their own subjecthood. It is the collapse of attentional forms into a controlling force that visual artists put on display in their appropriation of this popular genre.  
  
  A Forgotten Corpse:  L’assassin menacé
  
  To make this point, we return to Magritte’s L’assassin, and its exhibition at Le Centaure, which harnesses the popularity of Fantômas to enact a tangible, Surrealist encounter with attentional forms. In the exhibit, Magritte included multiple references to Fantômas, in L’assassin and in works such as Le supplice de la vestale (The Torturing of the Vestal Virgin, 1927) and L’homme du large (The Man from the Sea, 1927), which both present a cloaked central figure reminiscent of the villain (Sylvester 205-6). Combined with L’assassin’s reference to the film, these figural quotations encourage viewers to seek further evidence of the protagonist and his pulp fiction narratives in the exhibit. Magritte’s use of the popular motif alters the viewers’ form of attention by initiating a type of investigation. Instead of approaching the works on display through considerations of technique or as prompts for aesthetic reflection, viewers begin to seek out clues and traces of foul play that transform the artist’s mysterious spaces and uncanny scenarios into potentially violent spectacles. The repeated reference to Fantômas reframes the gallery as a fictional crime scene rather than a place of intellectual projection, a shift amplified by Magritte’s curation of the show. As Sylvester notes, Magritte completed the forty-nine paintings presented at Le Centaure in the year leading up to the exhibition (67), so it was more mass-market display than quasi-retrospective of the artist’s development.
  
  Magritte’s rapid composition echoes the methods of pulp novels. Constructed using sensationalized news stories and collaborative writing, detective fiction was enjoyed more for its alignment with the genre expectations than its association with a particular author’s name. Individuality was subsumed under the product itself; originality and authenticity gave way to organizing systems and patterns of use. Magritte’s appropriation of detective fiction underscores a parallel homogeneity in aesthetic perception during this historical moment—a condition the Surrealists were intent on dismantling. In a gallery space where viewership was intended to be slow, methodical, and contemplative, Magritte’s display becomes a series of distractions that mirror the consumption patterns of modern life. Infusing fine art with mass-market fiction, 
  Magritte’s show mismatches forms of attention and their objects, encouraging a visual appetite for the shocking, sultry, and tantalizing over the moral, didactic, or transcendent. In doing so, Magritte positions painting as equally constructed by spectacle as the popular novel.
  
  L'assassin draws the parallel between painting and pulp fiction into the realm of the everyday. Although Sylvester proposed Le joueur secret (The Secret Player, 1927) as a pendant to L’assassin because of its similar dimensions, the latter operates as the centerpiece of the exhibition because of the way it engages, and distracts, attention. Indeed, Pierre Flouquet’s contemporary review of the show states that visitors to the gallery ignored Le joueur for L’assassin (207). He attributes this phenomenon to the distraction of the crowd who “menace vraiment l’assassin tant elle se presse devant lui et l’admire . . .  ployées d’hystéries” (“literally threaten the murderer so densely does it [the crowd] swarm around him and admire him . . .  warped by hysteria”) (3; also quoted by Sylvester 209). Flouquet’s invocation of hysteria ties the crowd’s response to diagnoses of modern existence. Hysteria, as Crary argues, was defined as a fracturing of observation and sensory experience, a cognitive fluctuation that suggested “dynamic oscillations of perceptual awareness and mild forms of dissociation” were becoming a normal part of everyday life (95). For Crary, this vacillation was the result of modern capitalism that increasingly separated the consumer from the people and products involved in creating an object; heightened anonymity and distance impacted both the perception of a thing and how the individual related to it (214). Flouquet’s review underscores Magritte’s success in using detective fiction to highlight this shift from individualization to transaction, producing the perceptual dissonance surrealists sought. The quantity of works on display homogenizes the artist’s style, echoing the detective novel’s generic form, and the references to pulp fiction frame art as mass production rather than as unique instances of creativity. For instead of encountering Magritte’s paintings as spaces for reflection or intellectual play, visitors to the show were confronted with the ways in which the products they consume without much thought, such as detective stories, reshape and reform their perception, regardless of the setting or object. By employing the forms of attention found in detective fiction, the artist gives shape to the societal methods for managing focus, demonstrating the ways in which the spectator’s interpretation of senses, space, and self are informed by cultural systems operating their day-to-day lives.  
  
  In L’assassin menacé, Magritte reveals this collision of attentional forms through the most pointed change he makes in translating Feuillade’s film still to canvas, which is to situate the murder in a gallery-like space as opposed to Fantômas’s lair. L’assassin reflects the gallery space less because of its plain white walls than because the artist treats individuals and objects simultaneously as embodied beings exercising various modes of attention and flattened images to observe. Magritte frames each set of characters as a visual point of interest; the two foregrounded men are flanked by the portioned wall behind them, the central figures are framed by the wall’s cased opening, and the three men in the background are outlined by the balcony and railing. None of the figures overlap or engage directly with the things around them. The distinct separation prompts viewers to fill in the static painting with possible actions, to create a narrative logic that accounts for the positioning—a narrative urgently called for by the homicidal scene yet left uncomfortably open-ended by the disconnection between the figures. For example, the men in the bowler hats could jump out and surprise the man in the central room with their club and net, yet they are glued to their hiding spot in front of the wall. The dialectics between movement and stasis, embodied engagement and dissociated viewing, possibility and predetermined placement, culminates Magritte’s interleaving of detective fiction and painting. L’assassin does not reflect a generic gallery but rather the exact gallery experience visitors to Le Centaure encountered as they maneuvered through the display.
  
  Recalling Kracauer’s proposition that detective fiction confronts society with its own image, Magritte’s reflection of Le Centaure accosts visitors with their own act of viewing. Magritte achieves this most pointedly through his treatment of the corpse, which infuses each of the male figures with significance and ambiguity even though none of them directly gaze at the body. The foreground figures are potential detectives or thugs because there is a murder victim in the central room, the distracted young man is an innocent bystander or culprit because there is a lifeless form behind him, and the background surveyors are witnesses or suspects because there is a dead woman in front of them. Martin Jay argues that the Surrealists viewed the eye as a “vehicle of its own violence” (260) and L’assassin enacts violence precisely through distraction. By having each figure ignore the corpse while being read in relation to it, Magritte underscores the tendency of modern vision to “effectively delet[e]” the body itself (Crary 220). The figures’ postures further amplify the discontinuity between embodied perception and insulated observation; the woman’s nude state contrasts the men’s tailored suits, the woman’s congealing blood and dangling leg diverges from the men’s static, upright postures. Dead, the corpse conveys more life force than the living beings that surround it. Arguably, this is Magritte’s point, that vision is nothing without the body, that observation is a lifeless form without sensation, that attention without perception is mere distraction. This reading only reveals itself, however, by surrounding the corpse with motionless bodies. If the artist’s curated encounter between detective fiction and painting reveals the constructed nature of both, his presentation of a murder in a gallery highlights the significance of setting in determining one’s explanation of perception. Even though the men seem individualized because of their spatial separation, they are outwardly almost identical, and their diverted attention is a shared trait. Like the homogenized viewers in the painting, the observer in the gallery is one of many, one who will look through a disassociated lens, and one who will draw conclusions about the scene without recognizing the force of Magritte’s attentional forms on their interpretation. Occupying a role similar to that of Fantômas, the viewers are both nobody and somebody, nothing and everything; their fluidity and significance is tied to the overarching perceptual structures that conduct their interactions and experiences. Like Fantômas, they spread terror, not because they are murderers, but because their perception of perception itself leads to faulty readings of the world around them.
  
  Magritte, then, through the subject matter and the organization of his first solo exhibition, frames the fictions of perception as necessitating more careful contemplation. By drawing attention to the corpse through the bodies of the living, he underscores the need to account for attention’s various forms—superficial, sensorial, and collective. Exploring modern paintings of Fantômas through the structure of detective fiction provides a broader line of inquiry into the construction of perception during the early twentieth century. This framework situates attention as more than an individual act, awarding it the significant social force it wields in molding modern subjects. While Fantômas is the most commonly discussed detective novel in relation to painting, further investigations into the relationship between these two mediums would prove fruitful, offering us deeper insight into how artists grappled with the constantly changing forms of perception. Using popular fiction offered Cubists and Surrealists alternative ways of making attention visible, tangible, and complicated, alerting viewers to the ways in which their observation and determination of value were susceptible to culture’s overarching systems of power. Teasing out the intricacies of attention’s forms in the twentieth century reminds us that focus and distraction have been with us long before mobile screens and television. This analysis challenges us to consider, as Magritte encourages his gallery visitors, how forms of perception mold the way we view the world and our experiences in it.
  
  
  The artworks of René Magritte and any reproductions thereof are expressly excluded from any open-access or open license grant of rights. All rights are expressly reserved by ARS on behalf of the owners of the copyrights in and to these artworks.  
  
  
  Notes
  
  1. This paper has grown significantly from its first inception, and I have several scholars to thank for this development, including Nell Andrew, for her early readings and guidance, and the two anonymous readers for their careful attention (no pun intended) to my ideas and for their thoughtful propositions that helped shape a more provocative form for this essay.
  
  2. I use the term attention here to distinguish the layered (inter)actions of perception from the one-way, consumptive vision typically associated with the gaze. 
  
  3. Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain were contracted to write a 400-page novel each month for 36 months beginning in 1911. The Fantômas stories were very popular in France and five were turned into films by Louis Feuillade between 1913-1914. For more information, see Audureau; Benjamin.
  
  4. The link leads to the image list for Audureau’s book on Fantômas; Yves Tanguy’s Fantômas (1925) is located towards the bottom of the page but do enjoy the fantastic Fantômas book covers as you scroll.
  
  5. All translations by author unless otherwise noted.
  
  
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