{"id":57818,"date":"2013-08-14T12:55:29","date_gmt":"2013-08-14T16:55:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=57818"},"modified":"2013-08-14T14:20:39","modified_gmt":"2013-08-14T18:20:39","slug":"the-surreal-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/08\/14\/the-surreal-life\/","title":{"rendered":"The Surreal Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Leonora-Carrington-Studio-Paris-Review\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A young woman from an affluent family finds herself dreading her formal entrance into high society. An affable hyena offers to take her place; the young woman acquiesces, but the hyena demands a face to wear in place of her own. A maid enters, and the hyena murders her. The debutante doesn\u2019t object; she merely asks that the killing be done quickly. Later, the debutante learns of what transpired at dinner: the hyena\u2019s masquerade persisted until she took umbrage to the cake being served. She stood, tore off her false face, and escaped through a window.<\/p>\n

All of this takes place in Leonora Carrington\u2019s short story \u201cThe Debutante.\u201d The motifs it contains recur throughout her fiction: an occasionally amoral protagonist; animals that speak and attract no alarm while doing so; and a satirical jab at certain institutions\u2014here, the wealthy. Carrington is best known for her surrealist paintings and sculptures, but her idiosyncratic literary legacy is equally deserving of attention.<\/p>\n

Carrington\u2019s best-known work of prose, the novel The Hearing Trumpet<\/em>, begins on a note of gentle absurdity and gradually becomes truly bizarre. Marian Leatherby, the novel\u2019s protagonist, is an elderly woman living with her son and daughter-in-law. Using the titular device, she learns that they plan to place her in a home; after she arrives there, her narration gives way to a low-grade conspiracy narrative. Marian discovers evidence of mysterious gatherings, disappearances, and hints of the supernatural. Ultimately, all this leads to a total reordering of the terrestrial order: a world “transformed by the snow and ice.\u201d Marian anticipates the day when \u201cthe planet is peopled with cats, werewolves, bees, and goats. We all fervently hope that this will be an improvement on humanity\u2009\u2026\u201d <\/p>\n

The Hearing Trumpet<\/em> is a genuinely strange work of fiction; it\u2019s also charming, due in no small part to Marian\u2019s unflappability and matter-of-fact narration. The characters undergo mysterious transformations, encounter figures out of mythology, and converse with aspects of the natural world, but the tone remains unflappable. Nonchalance in the face of the weird is a hallmark of Carrington\u2019s fiction.<\/p>\n

Carrington was born in England in 1917, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, but lived most of her life in Mexico City, and wrote in English, French, and Spanish. A central figure of the avant-garde, her life was turbulent: she would suffer several breakdowns and more than one traumatic love affair. Yet, these experiences merely served as inspiration. At times, she acted as her own translator; on other occasions, her work was translated by others. Delving into her books in this day and age can be a confusing prospect, as some overlap exists between editions. Much of her short prose\u2014almost all of it fiction\u2014was collected in two editions published in the U.S. in 1988 by Dutton\u2019s Obelisk imprint: The House of Fear: Notes From Down Below<\/em> and The Seventh Horse and Other Tales<\/em>. The House of Fear<\/em> incorporates a short collection called The Oval Lady: Six Surreal Stories<\/i>, first released in the U.S. in 1976 by Capra Press with an introduction by Gloria Orenstein; The Seventh Horse<\/em> includes a shorter version of the novel The Stone Door<\/em>. And this doesn\u2019t take into account the collections of her work published in other languages, which don\u2019t always correspond to the American editions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Anonymous narrators are a\u00a0recurring theme Carrington\u2019s fiction. Many of her stories are narrated by an amorphous I<\/em>: identified as neither male nor female, young nor old.\u00a0In some stories, such as \u201cUncle Sam Carrington\u201d and \u201cThe Neutral Man,\u201d the narrator seems to share certain biographical details with Carrington herself. But even when the narrator seems familiar, the details are often surreal. In \u201cUncle Sam Carrington,\u201d for instance, the narrator writes of encountering \u201ca friend: the horse that, years later, would play an important part in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"tumblr_llu5bdV1XC1qf0717o1_500\"<\/a>When she chose to, Carrington could also make magnificent forays into the Gothic. The narrator of \u201cWhite Rabbits,\u201d curious about the habits of her neighbors, buries some meat; her neighbor then summons her, feeding the rotted meat to a hundred white rabbits. The neighbor\u2019s skin is described as \u201cdead white and [glittering] as though speckled with thousand of miniature stars.\u201d Her husband, seemingly dead but warm, may well be Lazarus; the narrator\u2019s neighbor also proves to be an almost evangelical advocate of leprosy.<\/p>\n

Religious figures fare poorly in Carrington\u2019s fiction, particularly in the stories collected in The Seventh Horse<\/em>. An ineffectual monk attempts to convert a woman living in the woods named Virginia Fur; the animals of the forest rise up, invading his church and leaving him to an uncertain fate. Her short play The Invention of Mole<\/em> ends with an Archbishop about to be killed and eaten, and \u201cCast Down by Sadness\u201d features a priest whose \u201ccassock [is] spotted with food and all sorts of filth.\u201d Meanwhile, the title character of \u201cLittle Francis\u201d urinates on a church, said urine described by Carrington as \u201choly water.\u201d<\/p>\n

Down Below<\/em>, though nonfiction, is just as vivid as her more surreal prose. Its subject is more sobering, however: the nervous breakdown she suffered following the detention of her longtime lover Max Ernst during the Second World War. Here, Carrington presents an unfiltered view of her own conflicting emotions, from paranoia to guilt to confusion. It’s a striking glimpse into her life and into a troubled mind, the occasional forays into surreal imagery only deepening the experience.<\/p>\n

Not all her work is a pleasure to read. Carrington\u2019s other novel, The Stone Door<\/em>, follows a similar structure to that of The Hearing Trumpet<\/em>\u2014here as well, the rational world gives way to a sort of archetypal hero\u2019s journey. The novel (and its condensed predecessor) is structurally interesting: its narrator loses herself in dreams, a desert is crossed, and the narrator encounters a fallen angel. All the while, references are made to a search for the King of the Jews. Soon after, the narrator herself vanishes from the text, and the narrative it taken over by a young Hungarian boy at a sort of academy or institution who begins encountering a young woman in dreams. It\u2019s vividly written, but the disjointed narrative renders this one of Carrington\u2019s less accessible works. And some of the imagery she evokes here may be, if anything, too potent. Zacharias, the central figure, is a Jewish child sent into isolation, his identity replaced with a number. It isn\u2019t clear if she’s alluding to the dehumanizing effects of fascism, or, as in The Hearing Trumpet<\/em>, simply holding up modernity as the scourge of individuality. But this is one of the few places where one of Carrington\u2019s narratives is unable to bear the weight of the accumulated history, myth, and philosophy in its allusions.<\/p>\n

In recent years, a select group of authors have championed Carrington\u2019s work. Ben Marcus\u2019s introduction to a 2008 reissue of David Ohle\u2019s phantasmagorical Motorman<\/em> cited Carrington (along with the likes of Flann O\u2019Brien, Philip K. Dick, and Raymond Roussel) as one of Ohle\u2019s literary forbears. In a Village Voice<\/em> piece on obscure writers, Matthew Sharpe had glowing things to say about The Hearing Trumpet<\/em>. More recently, Bj\u00f6rk mentioned her fondness for that novel in an interview. And Ali Smith\u2019s genre-defying Artful<\/em> contains a short passage examining Carrington\u2019s art and writing. The narrator is recalling the sight of a Lee Miller photograph; her attention is drawn to one of the figures in it. \u201cThat\u2019s Leonora Carrington, you said, one of the most underrated of the British Surrealist artists and writers. Why we haven\u2019t had a huge retrospective of her work at the Tate I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Mexican writer Elenia Poniatowska\u2014whose Lilus Kikus<\/em> was illustrated by Carrington\u2014wrote a novel, Leonora<\/em>, based on Carrington\u2019s life. It was released in 2011; no English translation has been announced. For anglophone readers, information on Carrington the writer is sparse; those looking for more would do well to seek out Marina Warner\u2019s introduction to The House of Fear<\/em>, along with Helen Byatt\u2019s preface to The Hearing Trumpet<\/em>.<\/p>\n

With the single exception of The Hearing Trumpet<\/em>, Carrington\u2019s books are out of print in the United States, and the prices charged for used editions are at times astronomical. It\u2019s too bad, as these are works that deserve reconsideration; their vivid imagery, irreverence, and surreal transformations are as provocative as they were at the time of their writing.<\/p>\n

Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol. 1 Brooklyn. His writing has recently been published by <\/em>The Collagist, <\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books, <\/em>Tin House, and the anthology <\/em>Hair Lit, Vol. 1. Find him on Twitter at @TobiasCarroll<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A young woman from an affluent family finds herself dreading her formal entrance into high society. An affable hyena offers to take her place; the young woman acquiesces, but the hyena demands a face to wear in place of her own. A maid enters, and the hyena murders her. The debutante doesn\u2019t object; she merely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":438,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[11615,7647,10899,11614,11616,11612,10226,11613,7318],"class_list":["post-57818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-ali-smith","tag-ben-marcus","tag-bjork","tag-david-ohle","tag-elenia-poniatowska","tag-leonora-carrington","tag-marina-warner","tag-max-ernst","tag-surrealism"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Surreal Life by Tobias Carroll<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 14, 2013 \u2013 A young woman from an affluent family finds herself dreading her formal entrance into high society. 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