It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, January 25, 2020
Symbolic Death and Rebirth in Little Francis and Down Below
Kristoffer Noheden
Abstract
In 1940, the surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was incarcerated ina Spanish mental asylum, having been pronounced “incurably insane.”
Down Below , an account of the incident first published in the surrealist journal VVV in 1944, acted as an important part in her recovery from mental illness. In it, she works through her experience in the light of her reading of Pierre Mabille’s (1908–1952) book Mirror of the Marvelous (1940).
This work let Carrington interpret the intricate correspondences she perceived during herillness through the imagery of alchemy, and allowed her to find a similarity between herexperience and the trials depicted in many myths, thus infusing her harrowing experiences with symbolic meaning.
This article discusses the significance of Mabille and his work forCarrington’s sense of regained health. This is further emphasised through a comparison ofthe motif of symbolic death in Down Below
with its depiction in Carrington’s earlier, partly autobiographical, novella “Little Francis” (1937–38). The depiction of a loss of self in this work prefigures the ordeals in Down Below, but it is only in the latter text that Carrington also effects a form of rebirth. The article proposes that the enactment of a symbolic rebirth means that
Down Below can be considered a form of initiation into the surrealist marvellous, and that Carrington’s experiences both parallel and prefigure surrealism’s concerns with esotericism, myth, and initiation, during and after the Second World War.
Keywords
Pierre Mabille; alchemy; myth; André Breton; esotericism; psychosis
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