Leonora carrington short stories pdf

Surreal Short Story

Surrealism is a literary and artistic movement in which the goal is to create something bizarre and disjointed, but still somehow understandable. Surrealist paintings and novels often have a dreamlike quality – they sort of make sense, but they’re extremely bizarre and sometimes hard to follow.

Surrealism emerged as a direct response to World War I. People all over Europe experienced the devastation of industrialized warfare for the first time. The war left an entire generation deeply traumatized, and in the wake of these horrific events, nothing seemed to make sense. The old certainties that had given life meaning – religion, nationalism, etc. – had burned up in the fires of war. How could artists and novelists create anything meaningful in a world so bitter and damaged? One answer was surrealism. By embracing the world’s chaos and irrationality, surrealist artists helped European culture recover from the trauma of World War I. They blamed rationality for causing the First World War and claimed that to avoid more horror we needed to free up the irrational, unconscious mind of dreams.

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 how 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealist_Manifesto
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.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0500276226/?tag=hyperallergic-20
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.”