Surreal Story

SURREALISM &

LEONORA

CARRINGTON

When asked to describe the circumstances of her birth, the

Surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington liked to tell

people that she had not been born; she had been made. One

melancholy day, her mother, bloated by chocolate truffles,

oyster purée, and cold pheasant, feeling fat and listless and

undesirable, had lain on top of a machine. The machine was a

marvellous contraption, designed to extract hundreds of

gallons of semen from animals—pigs, cockerels, stallions,

urchins, bats, ducks—and, one can imagine, bring its user to

the most spectacular orgasm, turning her whole sad, sick

being inside out and upside down. From this communion of

human, animal, and machine, Leonora was conceived. When

she emerged, on April 6, 1917, "England shook."

The success of a creation story hangs on how richly it seeds the life to come. Carrington’s encompasses all the elements of her life and her art. There is her decadence and indelicate sense of fancy; her fascination with animals and with bodies, both otherworldly and profane. Above all, there is her high- spirited, baroque sense of humor, mating the artificial to the natural, and recalling Henri Bergson’s claim that the essence of comedy is the image of “something mechanical encrusted upon the living. ” Her humor and its offspring —two novels, a memoir, a delightfully macabre collection of stories, along with hundreds of paintings, sculptures, and objets—have been unearthed on several occasions since her death, in 2011. Each time her work is reborn, it seems more prescient, her comedy more finely tuned to our growing consciousness of the nonhuman world and the forces that inhabit it.

Though it was a movement dominated by men—and

often regarded as outright sexist (it was)—several

talented women made inroads, if only briefly, into

Breton’s tight-knit circle. Many of the women had close,

usually intimate, relationships with the male artists, but

they also flourished artistically. The torchbearers of

surrealism were not “forward-looking when it came to

women and their place in the world.” To understand the

macho, egocentric nature of Surrealism and the eliding

of women artists of this time, we will look at the fiercely

imaginative and belatedly recognized artist Leonora

Carrington, an essential member of the Surrealist group.

When it comes to surrealism, women had a much

different experience, and she rewrote the surrealist

narrative for women. Born in 1917 to an overbearing,

well-to-do family in Lancashire, England, Carrington

entered Surrealist circles upon falling in love with the

revered artist Max Ernst, who was 26 years her senior.

While it’s notable that many women participated in Surrealism, albeit on the sidelines, the movement was

sexist even as it pretended to exalt women and encourage their liberation. Woman is the key to man’s

search, the surrealists cried. The great secret of nature, the incarnation of man’s subconscious destiny.

Women are manipulative muses, sweet and innocent of their mysterious powers. Women are the answer.

The Surrealists were fascinated by women: beautiful women, mad women, young women (under the age of

about 25), or preferably all three conjoined in the ideal figure,— the femme enfant, or woman-child —

whose mystical, erotic, and naïve spirit bewitched and aided men in channeling their irrational side. Breton

famously proclaimed in his second Surrealist manifesto in 1929, that, “The problem of woman is the most

marvelous and disturbing problem in all the world.” For the femme enfant, “the element of instability, often

bordering on madness was as much a part of her image as was her naiveté.” Breton believed that insanity in

a woman gave her visionary power, becoming even more transporting and mythical in men’s eyes. Breton

rendered the mad woman “a subject for scientific and poetic inquiry,” where she in turn was “passive,

powerless, and at the mercy of the unconscious.” Breton’s commentary sums up much of Surrealism’s

chauvinism and pompousness, as it shamelessly regarded women artists as muses.

Carrington could’ve been the perfect profile for a femme enfant: in

her early twenties, beautiful, eccentric, and subject to a bout of

insanity. But Carrington avidly rejected the label of a femme enfant.

As she put it in 1983, “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse… I was

too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.”

Many of Carrington’s stories are themselves a subversive retort to the

male surrealists’ view of women; they have a “fuck you” quality to

them, which sits nicely alongside their sheer dreamlike weirdness.

The majority of women artists associated with Surrealism did not

identify with it — they were uninterested in unleashing the

subconscious through illogical, uncanny compositions. Rather, they

articulated their work in much more personal and purposeful terms,

often grounded in autobiography. Even Carrington stated that every

piece of writing she ever did was autobiographical. What we see as

fantasy, Carrington experienced as real. “Even though you won’t

believe me / my story is beautiful,” she writes in a coda to a story.

The images in her stories are striking and visceral, and for Carrington,

at the time, they were not metaphors. This was her reality, and there

was no immediate way out of it.

In her memoir and fiction — and, in her visual art as well — Carrington

strives to understand people’s “systems;” to peer into them and visualize all

their beautiful or ugly selves, often through animal incarnations (as in

fables). She advises, “We have to listen to the soul … and to know when it’s a

soul. … Each soul has a daemon.” Both her writing and visual art takes up

this very exercise — a kind of study of the human soul.

Carrington, like other female surrealist writers, wasn’t interested in simply

letting the mind go and seeing where it might wander, but rather wanted to

probe and question it more deeply. She considered this gift specific to the

artist, whom she described as a kind of magician — though her magic wasn’t

used to bewitch men, but to give her independence. “A soul is very

important… You have to own your soul as far as it’s possible… To hand it

over to some half-assed male — I wouldn’t recommend it.”

Surrealist art, with its convulsive, outlandish juxtapositions, showed

Carrington how to discern the folly of the humans she knew. It also

invited her to cavort with nonhuman creatures, drawing on their beauty

and suffering to make tame ideas about character and plot more

porous, elastic, and gloriously unhinged. The distinctions between

human and animal, animal and machine, flicker in and out of focus in

her early stories, but the fiction she wrote in the nineteen-fifties and

sixties dissolves them lavishly.

I

In Carrington’s writing, the critic Janet Lyon has observed, the appearance of an

ordinary human always feels like an aberration, a harbinger of death. Ordinary

humans, when confronted with Carrington’s creatures, brandish their superior

rationality and industry. For Carrington, humanity was a seductive costume donned

by dummies. To step out of the costume risked deranging the self that one

unthinkingly inhabited, courting madness, the dissolution of the belief in the

human world as the arbiter of reality. But it was also to draw closer to Great

Nature, in the quest for a new, liberating art.

The woman artist of “Pigeon, Fly!” has been partially

erased, but she isn’t dead yet. And the narrator of “The

Oval Lady” is not Lucretia but her playmate, who sticks

her fingers in her ears in order to block out the “frightful

neighing” of Tartar’s incineration. In their art, the

Surrealists used women as symbols of volatility, but the

minority of women Surrealists suggested that

changeableness itself could be a source of power. These

women tapped into a long line of mythic female figures—

the nymph, the witch, the fairy, the crone—who have

used metamorphosis in order to outwit, and outpace,

their more solid, and literal, male kin. Maybe this is why

Carrington identified so closely with horses: because she

could imagine herself, like them, being used as a vehicle.