L'enfer de l'œil

La femme 100 têtes (Max Ernst) was the first collage novel. The title itself is a collage of meanings: The woman a hundred heads as well as The headless woman - and there are more possibilities than ‘100 têtes’, 'sans tête’, ’s'entête’ or 'sang tête’. Nine chapters 'tell’ the story of a woman who is believed by some to be Mary. Her name is Wirrwarr, Perturbation and Germinal ('my sister’, camping out alone between phantoms and ants). As each page contains a single print with a brief subtitle (the legend), the reader mostly follows the trail of the illustrations. Although they are intentionally confusing, the subtitles are crucial in meaning. In the first chapter for instance, the consecutive collages as a whole appear to reject the dogma of the Virgin Birth. The legends were also published subsequently by Ernst under the title Le poème de la femme 100 têtes (1959). Two other collage novels were published in 1930 and 1934: Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel has a certain narrative progression, and in Une semaine de bonté, the images are derived from eroticism, hysteria, and mysticism.