A few years later, in the nouvelle série, nos. 11/12, 1923 issue of Littérature, André Breton and his fellow nascent Surrealists would famously include the Fantômas pulps amongst their list of “accursed literature”, aligning the series with the dangerous works of such authors as de Sade, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vaché, and Raymond Roussel.[1] Fantômas can certainly be seen as linking back to Lautréamont’s Maldoror in certain of its themes; both Maldoror and Fantômas are elusive, shape-shifting outsiders, scornful of humankind, with penchants for wanton and irrational acts of cruelty and violence.

"Today he is in Madrid, tomorrow he will be in St. Petersburg; yesterday he was in Peking.... This assassin is perhaps seven hundred leagues away from this country; or perhaps he is a few steps behind you..."

–Les Chants de Maldoror

This aspect of Fantômas, his ability to become any person, any object, at any place, is also reflected in Max Jacob’s Fantômas: “On the burnished silver knocker of the door, darkened by time, by the dust of time, was a kind of chiseled Buddha with a too-high forehead, with pendulous ears, with the look of a sailor or a gorilla: it was Fantômas…”.[2]

Fantômas is simultaneously everyone and no-one, anything and everything, real and illusory; unseizable as he recurringly slides in and out of reality, his convolutions recall the mechanism of an endless, metamorphic dream.

Also deriving from Maldoror – specifically from the infamous simile “as beautiful as the random meeting of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on a dissecting-table” – is the notion of something marvellous erupting from such a collision of everyday objects, a collision that jolts perception; this in turns leads to Breton’s key assertion that “beauty must be convulsive, or not at all”, and the Surrealists could clearly perceive convulsive beauty in the anarchic, murderous mayhem perpetrated by Fantômas at every opportunity.[3] This aesthetic of “sublime horror” also relates strongly to Freud’s notion of the uncanny.

“Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist... all of these have something particularly uncanny about them.”

–Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919).

The Freudian uncanny, much embraced by the Surrealists, is often evoked in the pages of Fantômas; guillotined heads, skin stripped from flesh, mangled bodies, hands chopped off – particularly in the grotesque/bizarre cover image of La Main Coupée, which depicts a severed hand gripping a roulette wheel[4] – and even the deathshead tattoo of Hélene, Fantômas’s daughter, are all reminiscent of Freud’s syndrome[5].