Breton had discovered the nineteenth-century poet Lautreamont, whose Les Chants de

Maldoror provided what would become the paradigmatic Surrealist metaphor: "the

chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table." In

couture-and it was haute couture that transformed sculptures into mannequins-the

Surrealists found an ideal dissecting table where the bizarre in the banal, the marvelous in

the everyday, could be revealed. They were fascinated by couture because it seemed to

possess an air of surrealism. In Une Vague de REv'\\", Louis Aragon drew attention to

sartorial details that could be transformed in an instant: "There is a surrealist light: the

moment when the cities go up in flames, it falls on the salmon-colored decoration of

stockings; ... it lingers till late on the avenue de l'Opera at Barclay's, when the ties

transform themselves into phantoms" (qtd. in Ulrich Lehmann 324). And, like Walter

Benjamin, the Surrealists sought to investigate history through these fragmentary sartorial

glimpses. For sartorial objects were capable, as Ulrich Lehmann suggests, of "reach[ing]

below the visual surface and evok[ing] the erotic and mysterious" (325). It was not

surprising, then, that Rene Magritte's Homage to Mack Sennett used clothing to evoke a

kind of mysterious and instantaneous Proustian memory. The painting shows a dress in

human form, hanging in a wardrobe, but the human body no longer inhabits it. What is

left is an undeniable trace or memory of that body in the striking visual detail of female

breasts exposed underneath the surface of the dress.

 While Magritte was painting his homage, ironically, both Mack Sennett and

couture's spectacular ability of instantaneously disrupting the linear narrative were fading

in popularity in Hollywood. With the onset of the talkies, slapstick comedies like

Sennett's, whose films had markedly negligible script outlines, were succeeded by