Date: Wed, 11 Feb 1998 03:44:19 +1100
Subject: Re: Leonora Carrington


Leonora Carrington
Where is the ebullient infinite woman who immersed as she was in
naïveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self disdain by the
great arm of parental conjugal phallocentrism, hasn’t been ashamed of
her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of
her drives . . . hasn’t accused herself of being a monster?
Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’.

“Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I am a hungry hyena and you’re a bone!
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass.

We are, therefore we are not that what we might have been if we were
otherwise than that which we would have been if we were.
Leonora Carrington.

The synthesis of the animal and natural world with that of the civilised
and human is an essential and repeated topos in the literary and visual
work of Leonora Carrington - a synthesis that does not necessarily
create the monster of Cixous’ passage, at least not a monster that
Carrington would hide away in the dark. Just as the ‘monstrous’ Juniper
of Carrington's work ‘The Sisters’ is released from her attic prison to
wreak havoc as she searches for the moon, Carrington's monstrous women
are symbols of liberty and autonomy - desiring creatures that embrace
mouvance; as Carrington herself refused her proscribed identity as a
polite nouveau riche debutante and escaped into the havoc of the French
Surrealist group.

Many critics have embraced a psychobiographical approach to Carrington's
literary work, reading her stories as extensions of autobiography.
Whilst this approach is certainly valid in respect to some of her work
(‘En-Bas’ especially), it has a tendency to elide her project as a
Surrealist writer. Similar to the ‘prose poems’ of André Breton,
Carrington’s stories reflect partly a Surrealist autobiography, but as
Renée Riese Hubert suggests, Carrington’s work is a self-conscious
project in which her combination of grotesque forms depict ‘a fantastic
world that is entirely of her own making’.   Not only does this world
remake another in its combinations of forms and antitheses, it conforms
in many ways directly to a tenet of Bretonian Surrealism - creating
‘communicating vessels’ of binary propositions (human/animal,
civilised/uncivilised) and breaking down dualism, to create a realm of
compulsive beauty.

Reading Carrington's work as a synthesis of Surrealist biography and
Surrealist fiction one can reach a closer understanding of her literary
project. Further than this, Carrington should be read as not only a
Surrealist, but as a woman Surrealist, for whom autobiography and the
literature of subversion create a discourse for the expression of her
desires and her lived experience. Like Giséle Prassinos, Carrington was
hailed as a femme enfant by the Surrealists (by Max Ernst particularily,
with whom she had an intimate relationship) - a position that placed her
as the bearer of meaning in male Surrealist revolution, instead of an
active participant in it. Carrington however, as her disruptive fiction
shows, was a ‘femme enfant who was also an enfant terrible’.   For
Carrington the rôle of femme enfant was not one that required submission
to the male Surrealist, but was in itself a rôle that encouraged a
female/feminist Surrealist revolution. According to Marina Warner
‘departing from Surrealism’s erotic voilée Carrington created a
different aesthetic for female representation’.

Carrington's fiction is populated by the femme enfant. In the story ‘The
Oval Lady’ Lucretia is literally the woman-child. She has been kept in
her nursery until the age of fifteen, creating a fantasy world with her
fantasy equine lover Tatar the rocking horse - a world she is loathe to
give up in exchange for womanhood and subjugation by her father.
Lucretia refuses patriarchy and instead opts for the ‘feminine’ realm of
her nursery, defying her father and changing into a horse. In this story
the father forces her to ‘put away childish things’ by destroying Tatar,
which becomes a metaphor for the disempowerment of female desire. In the
stage play Penelopé based on this story, the father fails to overcome
Tatar (who was also the fantasy lover of his dead wife) when
Penelopé/Lucretia morphs into a horse (Carrington’s ‘chosen avatar’)
and escapes with Tatar into a stream of white light, causing the father
to destroy himself.

Carrington's identification with the femme enfant is evident in her
self-portrait. Carrington is seated in a room in riding clothes whilst
on the wall behind her hangs a rocking horse. In the window a real horse
is seen galloping in the distance and approaching her from the left is a
hyena bitch whose teats are swollen with milk. In her work the femme
enfant does not exist for the gaze or the for the projection of meaning
onto her by the male observer. Hers is an autonomy created by an
inherent power found within the mythos of the femme enfant. As
Lucretia/Penelopé refuses to obey the law of the father, so too does she
revel in her subversive position which combines elements of both child
and woman - both desiring creatures, the untamed ‘irrationality’ of the
child giving power to the woman. Carrington does not aver from the
images of childhood and madness that so enticed the Surrealists but
reads/re-reads them in ways that create an identity that is for oneself
instead of as a space for projection by the male. This alterity is a
position of power for Carrington, a place of subversion, containing an
awareness that the masquerade of femininity can be extended to include
irrationality and hysteria. This position is posited by Georgiana M. M.
Colville:
Women Surrealists made extensive use of their own beauty in self
portraits and explored the worlds of childhood and madness, where men
tried to confine them, as passages to their true identity.

Irrationality and madness are present in Carrington's writings, but they
are rarely the exclusive domain of women. In ‘As They Rode Along the
Edge’ it is not the protagonist Virginia Fur who symbolises madness, but
the religious zealot St. Alexander. In true Surrealist style, Carrington
attacks the behaviour of the church as hypocritical and amoral, but also
in Surrealist style she presents these elements in an absurd way:
Alexander’s piety is parodied as he appears in his concrete underpants -
exposing both the violent and absurd history of Christian martyrdom and
an uncanny resemblance to Sadean erotics.

This story also features one of Carrington's ‘monstrous’ women, Virginia
Fur. Unconcerned with cleanliness, ‘civilised behaviour’ (although she
‘always showed a deference’   for animals), or traditional femininity,
Virginia is a forest dweller whose body is as much animalian as human.
. . . and then her, and one couldn’t really be altogether sure that she
was a human being. Her smell alone threw doubt on it - a mixture of
spices and game, the stables, fur and grasses.

Virginia’s body moves beyond the pristine and self-conscious nakedness
of Magritte’s symbolic ‘woman’, or the twisted and tortured bodies of
Bellmer or Masson- this body represents an unconscious liberty that
contradicts the patriarchal conception of the feminine. Colville asserts
‘Carrington is forever trying to create a wondrous creature in whom,
feminine, childlike, animal and plant qualities would harmoniously
merge’  . Despite the violence of the tale Virginia appears to have
merged these qualities, creating for her autonomy from man, church and
society. Virginia subverts notions of docility, cleanliness, and even
‘maternal instincts’ by eating her babies and exacting violent revenge
for the death of her lover.

For Carrington the animalian is preferable to the human. Marina Warner
states:
The human emerges as only one, lesser aspect of a polymorphously organic
universe, and people in Carrington’s art gain in stature, and by
implication, in wisdom, the closer they come to the creaturely. . .
Carrington on the whole considers animal transformation a blessing, a
deliverance, a site of transcendence.

In this way Carrington avoids endorsing a biologically essentialist view
that directly relates woman to nature. She posits the addition of the
animalian to the human instead of the stripping down, or replacing the
one position for the other.
The many hybrid creatures can be seen as an attempt to balance
polarities while transcending the normal, rational boundaries of reality
rather than fusion, they symbolise the juxtaposition of two distinct
identities. Their double origin marks a surplus rather than a
subtraction of being.

Carrington’s penchant for addition includes the representation of the
erotic in her work. With a wink to Surrealist games and role playing her
creatures clothe and decorate themselves in exotic rituals. In ‘As They
Rode Along the Edge’ Igname dresses himself to court Virginia - and in
‘The Sisters’ Drusille prepares an elaborate erotic stage for the
arrival of Jumart. Conforming to Baudrillard’s notion of ‘the feline,
theatrical nostalgia for parade and ornament’   that animals inspire,
Carrington's characters accumulate pattern and consume - a bower bird’s
mating ritual of giving and adornment in superfluity. According to
Warner:
make believe turns the key to the imaginal space and its voluptuous
pleasures, and make believe requires dressing up. Some of the
playfulness is erotic, though the costumes and stages are unfamiliar,
and the player, even when she laughs out of the side of her face, plays
for real.


The seriousness of Carrington’s writings should not be obscured by their
fantastic style. In fashioning a new discourse of female desire in
Surrealism she also alludes to the problems associated with writing
within this male dominated discourse. This fear is given voice most
clearly in her story ‘Pigeon Fly’ where the young woman artist, under
summons from the mysterious Célestin des Airlines-Drus, * paints a
portrait of the man’s dead wife. As she paints she makes the terrible
discovery that she is painting herself, and as the painting progresses
she exists only as the image she paints. Carrington’s awareness of
‘painting herself into a corner’ in the Surrealist movement is acute,
and indeed she has been decried by various critics as ‘speaking with a
forked tongue’ and toeing the Surrealist party line to the point where
her own feminist and aesthetic sensibilities have been obscured.   This
is certainly the view that has been propagated towards Joyce Mansour and
to an extent Leonor Fini, and has also problematised the writings of
Giséle Prassinos (as I will come to later).

Carrington's ‘monsters’ are as Cixous suggests emblems of ‘strong and
ebullient women’. They move beyond the prescribed positions of women as
objects of Surrealist revolution, and instead offer them a chance to
participate in their own revolution through re-appropriation of their
images, and attempting to break down at least one of the dualities
Surrealism seemed to ignore - that of masculine and feminine.

Nadine van Hasselt

uzs106-AT-IBM.rhrz.uni-bonn.de wrote:

> I bought Lipstick Traces and yellow FluxAttitudes, lots of
> pictures of young Dick Higgins, and read Leonora Carringtons
> En Bas. Bought it three times and gave two copies away.
> Had bought it same years ago allready and given it away.
> I wouldnt say its the greatest book ever, Unten in german,
> but has anybody read it too? How normal is she ? When she
> is crazy. Etc, sorry for my poor english, but I think this
> book is worth to be mentioned. Nice B literatur like Ivan Goll.
> Could, how could En Bas be played in a movie ? Meshes of
> the afternoon........not a b movie. Whats a, whats b.....
>
> Heiko
>
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