In Une Semaine de Bonté, Max Ernst presents us with many human-beast composites. The broad term for these creatures (according to Wikipedia) is Chimera, and although our Western understanding of these manifestations mainly comes from Greco-Roman tradition/mythology, depictions of beings composed of disparate body parts is a universal trope.
He focuses on birds, especially in Jeudi (Thursday): Le noir (blackness) and Mercredi (Wednesday): Le sang (blood).
My question: what are the cultural and literary implications of turning into a bird? What do birds traditionally symbolize, and how does Ernst manipulate artistic/cultural paradigms to add meaning to his novel?
A popular motif in Greco-Roman and, later, Victorian art is the Harpy. The harpies were typically birds with women’s heads. They are wind spirits–sometimes hideous hags, sometimes beautiful young women–known to scoop people up and carry them off as punishment. William Blake depicts these creatures in one of his last works:
How do other monsters and mystical figures, like the Gorgons or Harpies, contrast with one of the most popular chimeric avian-human transformations: the angel (in addition to winged Greco-Roman figures such as Mercury/Hermes, Cupid/Eros)? Ernst clearly juxtaposes the angelic association of wings and birds with the base and disturbing actions of his characters.
I was also very interested in the meaning behind all of the bird heads. I thought it was interesting that though a lot of the characters were given the head of a bird, almost none of them have wings. Maybe there is something behind that idea of a flightless bird, or the fact that birds have particularly small brains. I like your comparison to the harpies from mythology. That is really interesting and I’m sure there is more to explore there.