In The Garden of Forking Paths, Ts’ui Pen, Governor of Yunnan, gives up temporal power to write a novel where time, which is never mentioned but obliquely referred to, is conceived as infinite, a web of time where every possibility can simultaneously be embraced. His novel is ignored if not repressed by his country. His conception of a network of dizzily diverging, converging and parallel times has ultimately the unbearable quality of the undifferentiated, where all meanings are possible and therefore cancel each other out creating a web of chaos. Like hunger and thirst, like desire, human need for meaning is all pervasive, even if this meaning is illusory. We are unable to look at chaos in the face for a long time. The fear of the undifferentiated seems stronger than the desire for it. Meaning emerges out of the struggle with the undifferentiated, out of the fear of chaos, out of the fear of vertiginous dissolution into the undifferentiated. You could say that what characterizes the human mind is its search for meaning, its perpetual tendency to generate ideas that will fill any gaps to explain the events that occur around us. Where there is a gap, there is a theory, a hypothesis. Gaps are loathsome to the human mind. But of course that does not mean that they are not there all devouring like black holes.

We even expect meaning to emerge from a gap, even if it is to tell us about the possibility of a lapse of meaning, the possibility that “something” might mean “nothing”. The human mind resists a vacuum of meaning. It is because there are vacuums of meaning that there is resistance. But of course, meaning is not unambiguous. And meaning cannot be equated with truth. For what is meaning? The phenomena of meaning present some of the most intractable problems of philosophy. And perhaps ultimate meaning is ultimately undecidable. It is thus that you could agree with Brian Lancaster when he says that “the drive to perceive is the drive to construct a meaningful world. This is a drive that is central to the mind’s very existence and extends beyond perception into all our thinking and general psychological balance. In general, meaning emerges when data are brought together and found to constitute a whole. The data find their place within a theory that is constructed to explain them. So it is with perception. The data - raw packets of energy falling on our various senses - become incorporated within a constructed image of the world” . It is perhaps paradoxically out of this drive to construct a meaningful world, a meaningful world would be a world that incorporates meaninglessness or the appearance of meaninglessness into its musings, that the surrealists, and thus Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, probe into the irrational.

If things only begin to be recognized when they are named, you could say that Un Chien andalou could not have been made, let alone attained its status, without Freud’s conceptual framework about the unconscious, as manifested foremost in dreams, being in the air. It is with Freud’s theory about the unconscious that Buñuel and Dalí attempt to construct a “meaningful” world in Un Chien andalou. Paradoxically, or perhaps not paradoxically, for the unconscious - and that is what Buñuel and Dalí are trying to consciously emulate - knows no paradox and knows no “no”, they try to construct this “meaningful” world out of gaps, out of a diversity of gaps, the unconscious being perceived as a field of gaps, the ubiquity of these gaps forcing the viewer into detective work. If according to Althusser a text tends to represent reality partially or incoherently, leaving gaps and it is through these gaps that an informed reader can see what the text was hiding from itself, it is the case of Un Chien andalou that the hidden discourse, represented in the submergence of the diegesis in a field of discontinuities, is already foregrounded in this usage of gaps.

It is Un Chien andalou ‘s intentionality to represent the hidden or repressed dimensions of the psyche, that is to say, to represent the unrepresentable, the unconscious, making both its characters and the lines of thought that surround them, embodiments of the unconscious. The film does not recount a dream but itself “profits by a mechanism analogous to dreams” and Buñuel affirms that it was made out of “dream-residues and spontaneously invoked gags and objects, a concoction resolutely shorn of conscious meanings and associations” . But he also states something that contradicts the latter and which is obvious in the rigorous editing of the film, when he maintains that the film makes “systematic use of the poetic image as an arm to overthrow accepted notions” . Thus, perhaps, it could be said that rather than representing the unconscious, Un Chien andalou represents the gap between the unconscious and the conscious, the symbolic and the imaginary, a gap where these realms are not distinctively separate, but interact, a gap that leans towards the imaginary consciously striving to mutilate the law out, presupposing that the law does not seep into the unconscious, presupposing that the unconscious is the realm of the lawless. Thus this first gap: a limbo that fancies itself as belonging completely to the imaginary and yet its very existence in terms of the materiality of the film, presupposes the presence of the symbolic, while the symbolic itself presupposes a human subject that is in constant tension between the imaginary and the symbolic.

Un Chien andalou partakes of the logic of a poem (poetry, or at least, C20th poetry, favours the signifier over the signified) to which bits of narrative adhere. These bits of narrative centre around two unnamed characters and their problematic relationship to the unconscious tensions that structure desire. Desire is portrayed as polymorphous in the film (mainly onanistic and sadomasochistic) and it is consistently frustrated. The female character will seem to make a transition from onanism to an acceptance of a normalized other (both the attire of the final suitor and his reproachfulness about time-keeping seems to make him an embodiment of the norm), only to find that normalized desire is not the least problematic, for it renders her and her companion to stagnation, the film ending with this couple buried in the sand up to their elbows, that is to say, immobilised, blocked, in a dead end, and moreover, apparently blind, in an image that will no doubt produce the central image of “Happy Days” by Samuel Beckett. The portrayal of desire is a portrayal of a desire that has a suicidal tendency, either running into frustration or into stagnation, sexual desire and death drive being inextricably linked in manifold ways throughout Buñuel’s ouvre.

So there is a narrative, there is a story, but this narrative or story is submerged in a space where the spots of indeterminacy cannibalize the diegesis, implode the story, where meaning is neutralized, that is to say, it is submerged in apparent contingency, submerged in apparent gaps, gaps as breaks in the continuity of the diegesis, this narrative only emerging after having seen the film a few times .

One of the main gaps that the film points out to is the gap between signified and signifier. If classical cinema favours the signified almost erasing the signifier, the surrealists and above all Buñuel and Dalí in Un Chien andalou, will favour the imaginary signifier as a way of representing the unconscious, giving the impression that some images may exist for themselves rather than for any inherent meaning or interpretation. As Linda Williams brilliantly argues: “Surrealist poets and film makers were the first to take seriously the striking resemblance between the film’s imaginary signifier and that of the unconscious. The exploitation of this essential resemblance led to the development of a film mode that reverses the usual fictional goal of inspiring belief in the fictional signified to focus instead on a primary belief in the image itself -its signifier” . And: “{…}in the fictional film we experience the signified as real, whereas we always remain vaguely aware that the signifier is imaginary. But in the dream, as well as in the entire realm of the imaginary, as Freud shows again and again, it is the signifier that is first believed. The signified remains latent” . This gap between signifier and signified is represented in Un Chien andalou above all by the severed body parts scattered throughout the film (there is formal similarity of signifiers which are moreover presented as close-ups, but there is no explanation on the level of signifieds), beginning with the main image of the prologue, the hair-raising sliced eye. In fact, we could say that this sadistic controversial image is the inaugural gap in the film. This inaugural gap has no apparent relation to the diegesis of the film and it has been variously interpreted as the eye of the film-maker who is a manipulator of images (seeing and cutting), a metaphorical penetration of the main female character, an assault on the viewer’s eye who will thus watch the film actively. If we interpret this inaugural gap as “mindscreen”, as Linda William does, we begin to see it as the originator, via the cumulative discourse of severed body parts, of the film as mindscreen, as “a field of thought in itself rather than the expression of any one character’s thought” . It is as mindscreen, that the severed parts (the hand with the hole out of which ants emerge, the mannequin hand the androgynous woman plays with or pokes at) , the rounded close-up shapes (breasts, buttocks) can be seen as oozing out from this inaugural gap, the hair-raising sliced eye, an inaugural gap that points to the gap between signifier and signified and reaches a given signified through cumulative effect and through the existence of the conceptual framework of psychoanalysis, this given signified pointing obsessively to castration, not only in the Freudian sense, but as will be seen later, in the lacanian sense of a more fundamental loss.

One of the gaps strictly affecting the diegesis is the gap effected by the disruption of spatial relationships, which results in a disorientating discontinuity between cause and effect. This gap works to effect a denial of the linearity of time, creating a fragmentary effect akin to the mechanism of dreams, as if there were no causes, as if there were mainly effects. Thus, to cite a few examples, the woman leaves the main room and comes into a room that is absolutely identical to the one she has just left. The woman manages to throw the cyclist out of the room and when she turns round he is in the bed of that very same room. When the woman finally leaves the room she does not come out into the street as previously -before, there had been a classical filmic transition in the steps that connect the inside and outside of the house-, but directly walks onto a seashore. This gap in spatial relationships that translates itself often in a gap between cause and effect has a double function. One the one hand it emphasizes the frustration of desire. On the other hand, it frustrates the desire for coherent knowledge. It could also be argued that this gap has a humorous effect, for, in as far as laughter is a response to incongruity, the space left by this gap is of the order of incongruence, even if this incongruence is at the service of subversion. Perhaps, as will be seen later, this gap is already a demonic gap.

While placing itself within conventional diegesis, Un Chien andalou consciously strives to critique the effortless transparency of classical narrative, as seen with the implosion of the signified and the disruption of spatial relationships. In fact, if it places itself within conventional diegesis it is in order to undermine it. The conventional intertitle “Once Upon a Time”, with its fairy-tale promise, moreover its promise of a story set in a remote and unspecified time, will be contradicted by the later intertitles which oscillate between specific temporal enunciations and general temporal enunciations : “Eight Years Later”; “Towards Three in the Morning”; ”Sixteen Years Before”; “In the Spring”. These intertitles certainly do not relate to time, for characters do not change dramatically in age or appearance and if they could work as explanations of psychological development or degeneration, they certainly do not seem to strive for this function. In fact, the function of the intertitles in the film is to dislodge linear narrative time, to frustrate any logical sequence of events and therefore any causality to them, to create meaninglessness. With the exception of the intertitle “In the Spring”, whose function is ironical given that it springs out into a waste land rather than a regenerative space, the other intertitles work to create a demonic gap. According to Kundera, “the demonic is the laughter which arises from things being suddenly deprived of their meaning, a kind of estrangement effect akin to Heidegger’s broken hammer, and which a monstrous proliferation of the supposedly singular can bring about” . If their intertitles are deprived of their meaning, creating this demonic gap, it is in order to point out to the gap between the imaginary and the symbolic, for the symbolic knows no temporal linearity, the laughter they release being the meaninglessness they create in relationship to the diegesis.

Which brings us into the realm of laughter. Apart from the fact that we may perceive silent films as ever so comical due to their speeded up nature, Un Chien andalou consciously uses gags which are often the result of an incongruous gap between an action and a reaction. It is perhaps a telling omission that none of the critics that write about Un Chien andalou write about laughter, about the profound comedy of repressed desire, about the laughter that slips manically throughout the film. Perhaps this omission is due to the fact that philosophers have not interested themselves in the phenomenon of laughter (with the exception of Aristotle whose ideas are too general to be rigorously applied to a text), as if laughter was an innocuous, negligible aspect of the human, as if laughter was untheorisable. Of course, we have laughter as theorized by Bakhtin, the carnivalesque laughter. But this laughter is limited to the idea of the carnival, the laughter of the lower stratum of the body, the laughter of the grotesque in Un Chien andalou perhaps only relating obliquely to the carnivalesque, borderlining with Bakhtin’s laughter in as far as Bakhtin’s laughter includes an implosion of meaning, but being far from it in as far as Bakhtin’s model of laughter places itself within the Marxist classic model, for Bakhtin “is concerned with the public, the outer and the surface rather than the private, the interior and the psychologistic: his is primarily a social and historical account of the grotesque, in opposition to psychoanalytical interpretations” .

In Un Chien andalou, it is the incongruous gap between action and reaction that releases laughter. Thus, the way the outlandishly dressed cyclist falls off the bicycle not as a human being would, but as an inanimate object incapable of reflexes; the way the fondling of the breasts, that will become buttocks following the formal logic that constitutes one of lines of sense throughout the film, cause a hilariously demented reaction in the cyclist embodied by his bizarre expression, expression that refers to the more prosaic meaning of “fou” in “amour fou”, divesting it from its fatalistic and romantic connotations while sending it to the realm of the “fou” gone so melodramatic that it goes catatonic and thus hilarious; the ringing of a bell twice followed by a shot of two hands shaking a cocktail-mixer as if turning the bell into some kind of G-spot; and finally, the enigmatic disappearance of the cyclist’s mouth, its replacement by a growth of hair that is seen as a consequence of the transmigration of the woman’s armpit hair, or more than a transmigration, a magic theft, and the hilarious masquerade of femininity put forth as a counter-argument by the woman: the woman’s childish and humorous assertion of her orifice by manically putting lipstick on and then manically sticking her tongue out. If the function of this last scene is to release laughter by the accumulation of incongruous events that bring about incongruous reactions, it is also, after all, the closing of one gap (the cyclist’s mouth) and the assertion of another one (the female protagonist’s). Moreover, with the disappearance of his mouth, the cyclist disappears from the diegesis and we enter into the realm of the woman’s assertion of herself emphasized by the closing of the claustrophic’s apartment door and her entering the open space of the beach, the last bit of the film functioning as an epilogue.

The demonic laughter that dances throughout the film can also be heard in the ironic use of melodramatic music from popular and classical sources. Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and the intense tangos, rather than being illustrative, are used in an inconsistently discontinuous manner echoing and reaffirming the film as a field of gaps: the inaugural gap in the hair-raising sliced eye, the tense gap between symbolic and imaginary, the abysmal gap between signified and signifier, the transgressive gap in cause and effect brought about by spatial disruptions, the incongruous gap between action and reaction that releases demonic laughter, the poking in these gaps pointing not only to a disruption of binary oppositions, but to the assertion that oppositions are not necessarily binary, to the fact that the binary is a conscious construction that the imaginary disregards, perhaps the diagonal stripes that recur throughout the film pointing to this collapse of the binary. If this field of gaps is at the service of a conceptual framework about the unconscious, mapping visually new territory, and can only be precariously understood having the Freudian model of the unconscious as a code, it is through these gaps that the film not only convulsively stutters about sexual desire, but also speaks about cognitive desire, about the desire to construct a meaningful world and the ultimate impossibility of doing so, about the millimetre that separates meaningfulness from meaninglessness, about the desire for meaning and the threat of meaninglessness. It is thus that the mindscreen discourse on castration could be understood in the lacanian sense of lack, an unbridgeable lack, moreover of loss, the irremediable loss suffered when entering the symbolic, sexual and cognitive desire being inextricably linked to the death drive in the vision of these existential hooligans. As Terry Eagleton writes when discussing Kunderas’s work: “Meaninglessness can be a blessed moment of release, a lost innocent domain for which we are all nostalgic, a temporary respite from the world’s tyrannical legibility in which we slip into the abyss of silence. The demonic is closely associated in Kundera’s fiction with the death drive, a spasm of deconstructive mockery, which, like carnival, is never far from the cemetery. It is a dangerous force {…} it has a malicious implacable violence about it” . It is also a function of these gaps that they point to a spasm of deconstructive mockery, to the malicious possibility of a signifier of the very impossibility of signifying something, what Lacan perhaps mockingly calls: S(A)

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