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Artelogie Mondes

Working through trauma and self-writing in Leonora Carrington’s Down Below

Ana Carolina Magalhães Salvi

Résumés

Leonora Carrington has awakened significant interest in feminist and gender studies since the 1970s-1980s, first in Europe, the USA, and Mexico — where she resided for seventy years — and much more recently in Brazil and South America. The artist often drew from biographical elements and alchemic processes in the making of her artwork, being Down Below (both literary account and painting) among the most significant of such endeavours. In it, the artist works on narrating the events that led her to a Spanish sanatorium, her period there and her escape from it, along with the reconfiguring of the experience symbolically, and forging of subjectivity. It is in this sense that this paper analyses it in its double feature of psychoanalytical working through and Foucauldian self-writing, traversed by a feminist mode of subjectivation and practice of freedom.

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Introduction

  • 1 The essay uses the 1988 edited version of Down Below, which includes a postscript detailing Carring (...)
  • 2 Although information about this painting is relatively scarce, some sources, like Aberth (2010) and (...)
  • 3 It was first written in English somewhere around late 1940s and early 1950s, and it circulated for (...)

1This essay analyses Leonora Carrington’s Down Below in its significance as both working through trauma — and here I take both the war and the psychiatric incarceration as trauma — and self-writing, which in Foucauldian thinking is a form of subjectivation, that is, of becoming a subject. The text follows the publication of Leonora Carrington’s Down Below, an autobiographical account of her psychic distress, psychiatric internment, and escape1, as well as two other works that deal with the experience: the painting Down Below created between 1940 and 19412, and the story “The Hearing Trumpet”, which was written in the late 1940s and early 1950s but published in 19743. The addition of the latter comes as a complement in the analysis, to demonstrate how those elements were reconfigured and reinterpreted after the whole undertaking of “Down Below”.

2The painting’s title refers to a place attributed by Carrington to sanity and healing in her psychiatric experience. It was a place inside the asylum where she aspired to go and which she believed to be the end of the journey — convalescence. It is a painting dominated by dark green revealing several humanoid and mystical figures in the foreground.

3The hearing trumpet is a fantastical and surreal story of old women on a quest for a Holy Grail. The women in the story are all residents in a nursing home — most of them there against their will — who are also part of a coven, founded by a rebellious nun, that worships a Goddess [sic.].

4In this essay, both Down Below — painting and book — and The hearing trumpet are set as companion pieces, for I consider that they collate elements from the events related to her psychiatric experience, albeit in a slightly different approach. Whereas the literary Down Below is a direct narrative of the experience, The hearing trumpet is a re-signification of it, a recombination and transmutation, to evoke alchemical language, so dear to Carrington’s work. The painting, on the other hand, is presented as a complementary visual narrative of the experience, focused on the different fragments and selves in the scene. Since Down Below, both painting and text, are part of the alchemical process of healing, as we shall see later in this essay, together they represent a complex perspective on her psychiatric experience, which comprise the events, its sensations, and its effects as well.

5Given that Carrington constructs her oeuvre as a continuous alchemical process, this same process is understood here from complementary (in the sense that none negate or exclude the other) concepts derived from Foucauldian thinking, such as self-writing, and psychoanalysis, as in trauma and working through. The main argument is that different concepts might allude to similar processes: that of becoming a subject, aware of oneself and able to achieve transformation of the self. Therefore, the essay places those three works in the center of the argument for they more directly and consistently tackle and incorporate aspects of her psychiatric experience and help us understand some of the subjective impact and transformations arising from it.

6Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a British-born Mexican artist linked to Surrealism. Brought up in an affluent household, whose expectations were of a successful debut and respectable marriage, Carrington very early on, during adolescence, chose to follow an artistic life and broke off all familial expectations on her present and future. Indeed, the disruption of conforming roles and norms was present in Carrington’s journey from an early age, observable in her expulsion from catholic boarding schools and the horror she caused her nun-teachers due to her inability to behave properly (ABERTH, 2010; MOORHEAD, 2017). According to Aberth, she was, as a child, even deemed “mentally deficient” by one of the convents she was sent to.

  • 4 This series of paintings can be found in the website dedicated to her artwork and managed by her fa (...)

7The Celtic tales, horror fables, and mysticism she encountered during her childhood, derived from the pagan Irish influence of her mother and nanny, deeply inspired Carrington’s imagery. For instance, the series of paintings and drawings from as early as 1932, at the age of 15, entitled “sisters of the Moon” show several female characters and deities: Diana, Fantasia, Juliette, Indovina Zingara, Erebus, Fortuna, Lucienne, Aelda, La Strega, and Iris4. So, we can see numerous elements from this period that accompanied her throughout her career: mixed cultures and beliefs, female characters and animals in the center of the narrative, the fantastical, and the marvellous.

8In 1935, at 18, she went to London to study art at the Chelsea School of Art (ABERTH, 2010). A year later, she moved to study under Amedée Ozenfant’s supervision in his newly funded art school, where she met Usula Goldfinger, who introduced her to Max Ernst, who soon became her lover and creative partner (ABERTH, 2010; MOORHEAD, 2017). Her proximity with Surrealism had transpired slightly prior to their encounter, during her attendance at the surrealistic exhibition hosted by the renowned Mayor Gallery in Mayfair, an experience that profoundly influenced her and led to her attendance of the Surrealist circles and exhibitions for a few years (MOORHEAD, 2017).

9However, it is relevant to comment on her association with Surrealism and its ambiguities and complexities. Although the imaginative freedom promoted by Surrealism is probably what most fascinated her, she was also deeply critical of their treatment of women (CHADWICK, 1986; 2021). This complexity is due to the ambiguity of the movement, for by then no other avant-garde movement had proposed such a severance from the idea of reality and norms as this one. No other movement had opened its doors so widely to women artists at that moment either. However, no other movement had so exalted the idea of the muse and the female body as a means to achieve creative power, and it was this part of the movement that she criticised the most harshly, as she once stated: “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse… I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist” (CHADWICK, 2021: 78). Moreover, in the recently published memorial written by her son Gabriel Weisz Carrington, he commented:

Leonora never conformed to any of these passive tropes; she was far too wild to accept symbolic roles that other wished to impose on her. The femme-enfant is, after all, a narcissistic creation of the male gaze, in which women become mere objects for the ‘inspired’ male artist (CARRINGTON, 2023, p.41).

10According to Julia Salmerón (1997), she rejected surrealism because she wanted to achieve artistic maturity and independence, and she found it rather difficult to do so in their presence and under their rules. To that attitude towards the movement — which must be interpreted not only as a collective of individuals but also as an institution with sets of rules — Salmerón attributes the dramatic shift in her life caused by psychiatric incarceration in 1940. Both Salmerón and Whitney Chadwick (2021), indeed, consider this experience — which comprises patriarchal norms of madness and women — as a turning point in her life and career, which pulled her closer to a “feminist consciousness”, in Chadwick’s words (1986), and artistic maturity. Thus, it seems to have been much more the exploration of the unconscious, the centrality of dreams, and the incorporation of fantastic elements into the artwork that attracted her to the movement.

  • 5 Self-knowledge pertains to a Foucauldian concept elaborated in works such as History of Sexuality 3 (...)

11This highlights a crucial aspect of her career and journey: nonconformity. Carrington never conformed to things, as she puts in the opening of Down Below, in which she claims to understand that narrating the experience would be her “shield against the hostility of Conformism” (CARRINGTON, 2017: 3). Down Below was a turning point in her art and life, as both Salmerón (1997) and Chadwick (1986) have suggested. It was, as I analyze further in the essay, what allowed her to leave the traumatic state that paralyzes the subject and to move closer towards alchemy and self-knowledge5, which guided much of her feminist consciousness and artwork in general. In order to provide context to the essay and situate the reader, the following section will present a brief description of the events narrated in Down Below.

A journey of woe — the events narrated in Down Below

12 In 1943, three years after fleeing Europe and upcoming second psychiatric incarceration arranged by her family, Leonora Carrington wrote Down Below, an autobiographical account of the emergence of intense psychic suffering, caused by the anguishing World War II, her lover’s abduction to a concentration camp, and subsequent incarceration in a mental hospital. One should not lose sight that Carrington dictated it to Pierre Mabille and his wife, Jeanne Megnen. Mabille was a friend of hers, author of “Mirror of the Marvelous: The Surrealist Reimagining of Myth(1940), and the one to whom she refers in the first page: “Since I fortuitously met you, whom I consider the most clear-sighted of all, I began gathering a week ago the threads which might have led me across the initial border of Knowledge”. Hence, Down Below is structured as an alchemical journey, a catharsis and working through. It displays at once a quest for transformation and a deliverance from trauma.

  • 6 The use of “Reality” emphasizes it as a concept, a discourse, to take Foucauldian conceptualization (...)

13The account starts in Southern France during May of 1940, when Max Ernst, was taken for the second time to a concentration camp due to his affiliation with the Surrealists and his critiques of the Nazi regime, which had placed him among the degenerate artists. Carrington, then 23 years old, found herself alone in the small village of Saint-Martin-D’Ardèche, where she had been living with Ernst for the past year, followed and watched by Belgian soldiers and other neighbours. There started her journey of descent into profound sorrow and episodes of frail contact with Reality6 that would eventually lead her to a Spanish Sanatorium led by Christian psychiatrists named Don Mariano Rillo and his son, Luis Morales Noriega.

  • 7 Although Francisco Franco’s governing flirted with Nazism and fascism, Spain was yet to declare its (...)

14As she states, after a few weeks of voluntary vomiting to purge herself from pain, a friend intervened and suggested leaving for Spain, at that time a quasi-neutral country7. The barriers between her thoughts and the outside world began to fade on the journey from France to Spain, where she felt that the car jammed as a consequence of her own internal jamming. This porosity of barrier between the internal and external follows in the passage that describes her arrival in Madrid: “in the political confusion and the torrid heat, I convinced myself that Madrid was the world’s stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring this digestive organ to health” (CARRINGTON, 2017: 12).

15In Madrid, Nazism came closer in the form of Van Ghent, according to her, a Dutch Jew with a passport infested with swastikas who worked for Imperial Chemicals — a British company of which her father was a major shareholder. Carrington believed that Van Ghent had the people of Madrid under hypnosis and that he was responsible for all harm done to her — i.e. being raped by a group of Requeté officers soon after their meeting — as well as to Madrilenian people and humankind. Upon this realization, Carrington decided that it was urgent to “stop the war and liberate the world” from the “World War [that] was being waged hypnotically by a group of people — Hitler and Co. — who were represented in Spain by Van Ghent” (CARRINGTON, 2017: 16). As she took this idea to the British Consul, he declared her “incurably insane” and, with the help of her father, called a physician to have her admitted to a psychiatric clinic run by nuns, who could not contain her. Then, she was administered luminal three times — a dose nearly fatal — and “handed over like a cadaver to Dr. Morales in Santander” (CARRINGTON, 2017: 18).

16The stories from the sanatorium are notorious, as are its keepers Rillo and Noriega. It became known for receiving elite patients and for its controversial treatments inspired by German psychiatry, where Noriega had studied (ÁLVAREZ-ARENAS; CONSEGLIERI, 2022). The treatments included leucotomy (a predecessor of lobotomy) and cardiazol shots — an injection that simulated the effects of electroshock —, the latter described by Carrington as a torture so strong that made her admit her defeat and become “obedient as an ox” (CARRINGTON, 2017: 41). According to her account, in the six months that she spent in Peña-Castillo, she received three injections of cardiazol and one that she describes to have created an abscess in her thigh, leaving her stranded in bed for a couple of months, lying in her own excrement. Incidentally, despite being sometimes taken as a delusional narrative, and, therefore, possibly unreal, the brutal treatment endured and narrated, claims Ann Hoff (2009), is in fact amongst the most accurate and profound insights of patients subjected to psychiatric institutions and helps gain perspective into the proceedings of such institutions.

17Furthermore, it is relevant to state that Carrington did not know where she was, and most of the account speaks of her attempts to make sense of the experience. For example, at first, she claimed not to know whether she was in a hospital, fallen victim to a car crash, or at a concentration camp. The several pavilions of the hospital were unknown to her, as were the patients and staff of the sanatorium. Most of the narrative regarding the incarceration funnels her attempts to grasp and understand herself and the environment through alchemical and surrealist references and language, as in the passage: “I would sit up again very straight and examine the remnants of my fruit, rinds and stones, arranging them in the form of designs representing as many solutions to cosmic problems. I believed that Don Luis and his father, seeing the problems solved, would allow me to go to Down Below, to Paradise” (CARRINGTON, 2017: 44). However, after showing her designs to Don Luis, instead of gaining access to paradise, which she thought would be the result of it, Carrington faced another shot of Cardiazol. The narrative, then, proceeds as description and elaboration of the events from the awakening of painful psychic suffering, the even more painful treatments endured in the clinic, up to the journey towards convalescence and successful escape.

18The first version of the account ended when she met Etchevarria in the clinic, a man who showed her compassion and comprehension and helped to “demystify” “the mystery which had enveloped me and which they all seemed to take pleasure in deepening around me” (CARRINGTON, 2017: 62). Her release and subsequent escape from what would be a second, and probably definitive, incarceration was included in the postscript dictated to Marina Warner in 1988. As she told Warner, her family released her from Peña-Castillo by New Year’s Eve and arranged to send her to another asylum in South Africa. When she learned of this plan, she quickly plotted an escape. She fled a café through the backdoor, got in a taxi and went to the Mexican embassy to encounter Renato Leduc, an ambassador whom she had met years earlier and whom she had bumped into a few days earlier in Madrid. In order to leave Europe successfully, they married and soon left for New York, where they lived for a year, and then went to Mexico, where they separated and she lived the remainder of her life (ABERTH, 2010).

19As later told to Marina Warner, this experience changed her life in a terrible manner and the fear of losing her mind and being readmitted to a sanatorium accompanied her during her lifetime (WARNER, 2017). The dictation of Down Below was, for her, a way of relieving herself from the anguish and horror that the experience had provoked. In her own words “I know that once I have written it down, I shall be delivered” (CARRINGTON, 2017: 39). Although Carrington generally refused to speak of the experience in interviews and would flinch at the topic (MOORHEAD, 2017), she seems to have worked it into various paintings and stories, most notably the pieces analysed in this essay.

20As one of Carrington's major works, scholars from various disciplines have closely examined Down Below. Most analyses are complementary to one another, and each offers valuable insight into different aspects of it and its content. In the following section, I shall review and comment on some of those perspectives that more closely complement and connect with the analysis undertaken in this essay.

Circumambulation: The re-readings of Down Below

21Since its publishing, Down Below has sparked much discussion among scholars from various fields ranging from psychiatry to literature, who have given insightful comments on its accuracy, importance, and symbolism. So, in this section, I analyse and comment on some of them, to illustrate Down Below’s significance as well as the arguments that I propose.

22The first publication that analyses the story seems to be Gloria Orestein’s “Art History and the Case for the Women of Surrealism” (1975), in which the author considers the episode narrated in Down Below as a “breakthrough” instead of a “breakdown” — the opening to dream imagery, and diving to the deepest nooks of the mind to find Awakening and Liberation. As she states, “the experience thus symbolically signifies the need to recognize and reintegrate the supreme value of the spiritual wisdom inherent in the feminine principle as a prerequisite for human evolution and psychic growth” (ORENSTEIN, 1975: 38). In a similar vein, Whitney Chadwick in “Leonora Carrington Evolution of a Feminist Consciousness” claims that the experience of Down Below was a turning point in Carrington’s career and motifs, leading her towards a more political and feminist preoccupation. Chadwick considers it a “psychic quest for autonomy”, in which she “structures her understanding of psychic reality by using the language of alchemical lore” (CHADWICK, 1986: 38). Indeed, Carrington (2017) herself suggests that the experience, however awful it was, made her aware of health’s importance in the ventures of liberation from Conformism, as this journey involved the disruption of Reason in terms of social norms and (masculine) rationality.

23In Júlia Salmerón’s work “Las memorias políticas de Leonora Carrington”, the author adds a political layer to the story and considers that it should be taken as a serious historical document as well. In that sense, Salmerón brings the piercingly insightful comment that in both Down Below and The Bird Superior, Max Ernst (1942), Carrington “connects the outbreak of war to her severance to reality” (SALMERÓN, 2006: 157). Moreover, Salmerón believes, as do I, that the psychotic symptoms were a response to the traumatic witnessing of war instead of either a loss of love or inevitable madness, as some have suggested. Hence, the personal and the political intertwine. There seems to be no boundaries between the horrors perpetrated by Nazism on humankind and the ones perpetrated by patriarchy on herself and others — it is a complete violation and overpowering of body and mind.

24In Juncal Caballero’s “Leonora Carrington and Her Memoirs: an Experience of Violence and Madness”, the emphasis is to scour the circumstances in the narrative as expressions of the profound vulnerability of women in periods of political conflict. As put in the excerpt, “Leonora’s body is the body of thousands of women that are, as she, victims of a world at war. For it is known that a woman's body is transformed into spoils of war in the hands of combatants” (2012: 121). In Caballero’s analysis, Carrington’s body and mind were subjected twice to acts of brutality by men who were unable to comprehend and respect her — first by the Requeté officers who took advantage of her foreignness and confusion while in psychic distress, second by the doctors who tended to take a domineering approach to women patients. Indeed, throughout the narrative she undergoes a series of micro and major aggressions related to gender and power relations, from plain disbelief in her words to being stripped naked and unconscious, lying in her own excrement after an incapacitating injection in the hospital. Those whom she encountered did not take her words and body into consideration; instead, they were discredited, deemed mad, and violated.

25Carrington’s journey to the underworld, as put by Norma Telles (2008) is one imposed and against her will, for she was battling alone against (and amidst) three simultaneous wars: World War II, gender war, and family. As the battle advanced, her defenses weakened and she slowly became more and more vulnerable to the fragmentations provoked by the medication, the (mis)treatments, and distress. Telles also states that whilst she transposed the borders that segregate reason/unreason and reality/imagination, she turned the surreal into real, providing a critique of the “convulsive beauty” of madness proposed by male surrealists, for there is no beauty in psychic crisis, but pain.

  • 8 For a better comprehension of Foucault’s studies about psychiatric power and devices see Foucault ( (...)

26Likewise, in Laura de la Parra Fernandéz’s (2021) reading of Down Below the account is a journey of “gathering knowledge about the world and the Self beyond the literary and institutional conventions of the time”. In this context, overstepping the given reality would be a means of liberating oneself from the restraints of said reality — that of a patriarchal world at war against a diverging system of images, thinking, and belief. Authoritarian State and Psychiatric Power in her narrative are part of the same issue and of the same system; they are two of the several devices in operation in discipline and exclusion, a system to which she has renegaded in both the psychic disintegration and writing of it8. In Fernandéz’s words: “Carrington used madness as a weapon, not only metaphorically in her memoir through the representation of Leonora’s madness as a way to understand the world around her, but also in the writing of Down Below itself” (2021: 126). The author, additionally, reads the work in its diversion from traditional autobiography, intended usually as a teleology that explains a Unitary Self, with no disruptions nor discontinuities, which is an argument that resonates with my own.

27Lastly, reading through psychoanalysis and alchemy, Marcus Rogério Salgado (2021: 79), in the afterword for the first Brazilian translation of “Down Below”writes of the journey as “a psychoanalytical voyage towards the ritual death of all fathers: Papa Carrington, Max, God, Don Mariano)”. For Salgado, it is also an “initiatic voyage”, in which an alchemical process of death and rebirth helps achieve the expansion of consciousness. Salgado furthermore analyses the alchemical symbols that guide the narrative placing special emphasis on the Egg — cosmic oven, which contains the soul of the world in alchemy — and its possibility “to transform fracture into cleavage”, i.e., transform what once was pain into rebirth and expansion of consciousness. 

28This brief and limited literature review intends to demonstrate the range and rich layers of this work, to which I aspire to add another one, as detailed in the following sections. “Down Belowis a brutal account of gender violence that interweaves psychiatric power relations and the painful effects of war and trauma in the psyche. Simultaneously, it represents a counternarrative, resistance to power operations that allowed those violent events to happen. It also corresponds to what Elaine Showalter (1987) proposes as a feminist making of a cultural history of madness and psychiatry, that is, to lean over diaries, memoirs, and correspondences of women considered mad (and incarcerated in asylums) to gain insight into the history of madness from the perspective of those historically treated as objects instead of subjects.

Transmutation: elements recombine and create new images

29 As previously mentioned, after the events narrated in “Down Below” and after migrating to the Americas, firstly USA and later Mexico, in the early 1940s, Carrington embarked on a new life, psychically and physically removed from her formative continent. Although deeply scarred by the traumatic experience, Carrington appears to have been able to live in what psychoanalysis states as “afterwardness”, i.e., the possibility to work through the traumatic experience “in a later historical and subjective context, which provides it with a new meaning” (ROUDINESCO, 1998: 32). That is, the geographical commuting gave space for a subjective displacement of meaning. Two of the artworks that most closely allude to the events of 1940 came into existence in this scenario. Whereas the literary account was a direct narration of the events, the story The Hearing Trumpet unveils a new imagistic repertoire that re-signifies the main elements of the experience. The painting, on the other hand, is more closely related to alchemy and (an attempt at) transmutation. It provides an insight into her psyche and emotions during (or right after) the events, for it was the first artistic work among them to touch on the topic and experience.

Image 1 - Leonora Carrington, Down Below, 1941. © 2024 Estate of Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.The Leonora Carrington artwork and any reproductions thereof are expressly excluded from any open-access or open license grant of rights. All rights are expressly reserved by ARS on behalf of the owners of the copyrights in and to these artworks.

30 In the painting, it is possible to see in the foreground six figures, some humanoid and some mystical, in a garden with a castle and a large gate overseen by a stoned horse in the background. The lady in the right corner seems to represent a mystical winged self-portrait of Leonora Carrington, followed by a green horse next to her. In the center, there is a masked woman who seems to be wearing acrobat clothes while holding another mask. Next to her is an androgynous sort of knight without arms, and a birdlike humanoid next to them. Behind them is a female spectral figure, also green. This color dominates the image, occupying almost its entirety, except for the three figures in the left lower corner.

31 Its significance is observed in the note to Renato Leduc that accompanied the painting: “To thee, Renato, in the name of Magic, the Green which is my Colour” (SALGADO, 2021: 80). This green, Salgado says, could represent the alchemical Green Lion who devours (or liberates) the Sun. Both the lion and the color green represent regeneration and a necessary step into the transmutation process — the purpose of all alchemy to transform any matter into gold, the most prized element. In such a case, the inscription suggests that the painting somehow partakes in the transformative process that underlies not only “Down Below” but also most of Carrington’s body of work, since expansion of consciousness and transcendence are leitmotifs in her artwork.

32 The title “Down below” — which represented for her a place for the healthy and sane —, the open gate, and the horse, a symbol for freedom in her imagery, all seem to indicate that, even though still somehow attached to the experience, she is moving towards (or has found) liberation. It plays with ambivalence, as she depicts the figures in a garden rather than inside. This possibly suggests that while the effects of her condition may persist, she is nonetheless capable of desiring to overcome it and regenerate herself through alchemy and art.

  • 9 In reference to Deleuze and Guattari (1987).

33That said, while the painting appears to represent her exit/path into the “outside world”, the map (image 3) represents the interior of the sanatorium and her attempts to make sense of the place she found herself against her will. Fernandéz understands the map, most likely to have been made while hospitalized, as a subversion of traditional cartography, since the fragmented selves are recognized as equally important and coexistent parts of the Self — a Deleuzian rhizomatic self. As she puts it, “the rhizomatic Self is, like a map, ‘detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification’ (1987, 12)9. Carrington’s map thus enacts these connections, changes, and becomings of the subject in a nonlinear way” (FERNÁNDEZ, 2021: 124).

Image 2 - Leonora Carrington's map of the sanatorium. In: Down Below (2017: 36).

34In both images, the Sun plays a pivotal role and seems to relate to the following excerpt: “Later, with full lucidity, I would go to Down Below, as the third person of the Trinity. I felt that, through the agency of the Sun, I was an androgyne, the Moon, the Holy Ghost, a gypsy, an acrobat, Leonora Carrington, and a woman” (CARRINGTON, 2017: 45). The figures in the painting also appear to relate to the quote above and logic of the map: several selves that compose the Self in form of an image, as, indeed, there is an androgyne figure, allusion to circus and acrobat, an image of herself and a woman. Throughout its narrative, she presents the idea of several characters that inhabited her at that moment, and part of the healing process was to reintegrate and/or expel them: “I had reconstructed this image so that it might leave me. I had to get rid of everything my illness had brought me, to cast out these personalities, and thus begin my liberation” (CARRINGTON, 2017: 56).

35The place Down Below, in the map, is represented by a large sun, which in the painting appears in the form of the green that covers the whole painting, as suggested by Salgado. Sun, for alchemy, is also the higher matter, gold, into which alchemists aspire to transform all matter. That is, both images seem to incorporate the attempts of healing and transformation — of transcendence.

36That reconfiguration of elements through alchemical, mythical, and artistic repertoire is present once more in The Hearing Trumpet. It tells the tale of Marian Letherby, an elder woman of 92 living with her son Galahad and his family in an unidentified Spanish-speaking country in America — Mexico, according to Salmerón (1997) — who receives as a gift from Carmella, a friend: a special trumpet that allows one to hear what was once inaudible. When putting the trumpet to use, Marian learns that her family is planning to put her in a home for the elderly, since she is (for them) demented and a burden on their lives. As the grandson states, “[grandmother] can hardly be classified as a human being. She’s a drooling sack of decomposing flesh” (CARRINGTON, 1996: 15).

  • 10 Salmerón (1997) notices the catholic and Franquist vocabulary in Noriega’s speech during her interv (...)

37Curiously enough, the home where they send her is a place in the tradition of Catholicism, just as Dr. Luis Morales Noriega’s clinic10, who also seems to lend some qualities to Dr. Gambit in the story. For Gambit is a “kind of Sanctified psychologist. The result is Holy Reason, like Freudian table turning. Quite frightful and as phoney as Hell. If one could only get out of this dump he would cease to be important” (CARRINGTON, 1996: 42).

  • 11 Tartarus, in Greek mythology symbolises the Underworld. Hence, once more Carrington finds herself i (...)

38The home is also exclusively female, with Dr. Gambit the only male in the scenario, which Marian believes to make him feel somewhat too powerful. The women that inhabit the place all possess their own previous lives and mysteries, and the initial part of the story is mostly dedicated to Marian’s attempts to understand her companions. The adventurous journey starts from two simultaneous events: first, a letter from Carmella inciting her to plan her escape; second, a book given by Christabel Burns, a Jamaican-British woman, daughter of an alchemist, about Rosalinda, the mysterious nun whose painting had fascinated and intrigued Marian. Said nun seems to embody a witch and a pagan woman, half-saint half-monstrous. Canonized through mischief, Rosalinda, the nun-saint, promoted profanities and orgies in the convent of Santa Barbara of Tartarus11, where she was Abbess.

39Later, it discloses that Rosalinda, just like the female companions of the nursing home, was part of a coven that worshipped godesses and entities much different from the dominant male-Christian tradition. The coven seeks The Godesses’ Holy Grail, once lost and necessary to bring her back. Metaphorically, the tale is an acute criticism of the patriarchal world and its traditions that have perpetuated the mistreatment of animals and other peoples, engaged in wars and destructive bombs, given in to money and power, and annihilated the multiplicities of all that is outside it. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that “an army of bees, wolves, seven old women, a postman, a Chinaman, a poet, an atom-driven Ark, and a werewoman. The strangest army, perhaps, ever seen on this planet” conduct the retrieval of the Holy Grail (CARRINGTON, 1996: 198).

40In an interesting reading, Hannah Silverblank (2021: 104) notices how Down Below and Hearing Trumpet both enact journeys to the underworld as “symbolic gateways to escape from institutional cages”. Whereas in Down Below there seems to be a much rawer element of the first steps into catharsis and working through, it is undeniable that much of the experience narrated is enacted once more in The Hearing Trumpet, now much more elaborated, symbolized, and fictionalized. For Silverblank, these two hellish experiences symbolize dystopia (down below) and utopia (hearing trumpet).

41Somehow, Hell and the Underworld, in their simultaneous dystopian and utopian qualities, become heterotopies, by (re)creating the same-different space in memory and imagination, materialized in the text and image. The notion of heterotopy comes from Foucault and designates the juxtaposing “in a real place several spaces that, in general, would or should be incompatible” (FOUCAULT, 2013: 24). For the author, heterotopies are also spaces of contestation. If writing itself recreates the space through memory and imagination, it suffices to suggest that writing about asylums and places of exclusion and segregation, especially in a denouncing manner due to such an experience, is meant to challenge and confront such normative places and discursive practices. Similarly, transforming such places through literary and alchemical manipulations inevitably reinvents them. Thus, by creating from destruction — are asylums not degrading places? — Carrington constructs a new meaning for those spaces, making them heterotopies.

42Moreover, what most poignantly connects both texts is the idea of an internal vivid life that is incomprehensible for the surrounding family, who consider her invalid and somewhat mad, which seems to evoke a perception of her vivid imagination that, under distress, was considered insane and imprisoned by the familiar and psychiatric devices. Both enact and display the dispute between normative discourse and the fantastical imagination that it considers a deviation. And, in both, thankfully, the “deviants” prevail in escaping from such normative places.

43Despite drawing from the biographical to compose fiction, since a myriad of elements in the story seem to connect to her own personal life, The hearing trumpet is not to be read as an autobiographical account. It is, mostly, a reordering and reinterpretation of personal elements, this time transmuted into a surreal and fantastical fictional story. Its relevance in the essay is to show how, after working through the process, Carrington came to transmute what had once been disturbing into an amusing tale.

Narrating trauma and self-writing

44

45 Much of the analysis undertaken so far refers to trauma and the narrative of trauma as significant in the transformation process. The use of those concepts in this essay derive mostly from psychoanalysis, philosophy, literary theory and feminist theory.

46Trauma and testimony theories have flourished around the world in the last few decades, as noticed by the Brazilian professor Márcio Seligmann-Silva. In his latest work “A virada testemunhal e decolonial do saber histórico” [The testimonial and decolonial turn of historical knowledge] (2022) he claims that testimony has risen from twentieth-century catastrophes: wars, colonialism, imperialism, totalitarian and dictatorial regimes. It came from the necessity to present counterpoints to the forms of life that allowed and provoked such catastrophes. Indeed, significant contributions to trauma theory and testimony have come from war aftermaths, political conflicts, post-colonial, race and feminist theory and critique.

47 Although the notion of trauma has been around for over a hundred years, it is relevant to stress that the contemporary idea of trauma and its causes differ in more than one or two aspects from the earliest theories, especially since the strengthening of gender, race and colonialism standpoints in theoretical and political interventions. Authors such as Bracha Ettinger, Frantz Fanon, Cathy Caruth, Griselda Pollock, and Grada Kilomba, to name only a few, have been developing a strong body of work on the theme in the last couple of decades.

48 Therefore, the notion of trauma adopted in this paper focuses more on the collective and social aspect of the emergence of trauma, for it considers the experience of war conflict, sexual violence, and, most of all, psychiatric incarceration as the conditions of possibility for a traumatic experience.

  • 12 Whereas fragmentation of ego/self refers to the chasm resulting from traumatic events that function (...)

49 For this analysis, there are a few aspects of the definition of trauma that should be highlighted: one is that trauma is considered a violent shock and an intense upheaval that cannot be assimilated in the moment of its occurrence. Two, that it carries a strong charge of the unspeakable. Three, the dissolution of trauma’s intense effects on the psyche — the fragmentation of Self, timelessness12, etc. — usually pass through a process of abreaction and/or working through (LAPLANCHE; PONTALIS, 1991).

  • 13 For a detailed study of trauma and cleavage in Ferenczi’s theory, see Antonello (2016) and Ferenczi (...)

50Moreover, according to Ferenczi, there are two indispensable characteristics to trauma: the actual event and the discredit the victim receives when trying to tell it to another person. As put, “not giving credit to the account of a traumatic situation survivor, discredit him/her, makes it impossible that the impressions or index/signs of traumatic perception are introjected, processed by the psychic apparatus” (ANTONELLO, 2016: 61)13.

51In that sense, one should not lose sight that everyone around Carrington discredited the reports: in her account she mentions that Van Ghent calls her obscene when she denounces the rape; the British Council considers her insane when she denounces Nazism and Van Ghent, the doctors and asylum staff ignore and punish her attempts to explain her situation. However, as soon as she is heard and understood, first by Etcheverria, and then by her friends, this paralyzing and tormenting situation begins to fade (CARRINGTON, 2017).

52As for abreaction, according to Laplanche and Pontalis (1991), the subject dissipates the affect through an emotional discharge that prevents it from being pathogenic. Working through, in turn, concerns the deliberate psychic work of reordering and re-signifying the affects, as a “dynamic transformation” of the past that haunts the subject (ROUDINESCO, 1998; POLLOCK, 2006: 11).

53Therefore, narrating the trauma (SELIGMANN-SILVA, 2008), either in the analytical setting or in the creation of an artwork, is absolutely vital for its dissolution and successful exit of the paralysis/repetition and pathogenic state. It is based on those psychoanalytical premises that I read Down Below as an attempt to overcome trauma, or, adopting alchemical vocabulary, transcend from it. In her words:

I have been writing for three days, though I had expected to deliver myself in a few hours; this is painful because I am living this period all over again and sleeping badly, troubled and anxious as I am about the usefulness of what I am doing. However, I must go on with my story in order to come out of my anguish. My ancestors, malevolent and smug, are trying to frighten me” (CARRINGTON, 2017: 32).

54Nathalie Ségeral in a similar vein reinforces the argument by considering that, “telling and writing become a substitute for psychoanalysis which, much like the Freudian ‘talking cure’, may enable catharsis. For Carrington, writing madness serves the purpose of freeing herself and moving beyond the traumatic experience” (2020: 45).

55Thus, addressing it through writing, painting, or any other artistic expression, is a means to making the unspeakable, spoken. In Seligmann-Silva’s (2008: 69) words, by narrating the trauma the subject is able to reconstruct meanings, bringing a “new dimension” to such events and affects, which allows the subject to “leave the position of survivor and come back to life” — it breaks the traumatic cycle and resets life in motion.

56The approach taken in this paper considers this form of narration of trauma and testimony as self-writing in the tradition of Foucauldian studies echoed in Margareth Rago’s (2013) study of self-writing as particularly important in experiences of women who underwent traumatic and violent situations. Rago claims that when women write their experiences, when they testify, they re-interpret them and put under scrutiny power relations that, as in the case studied here, express violent marks on the bodies and minds of women.

57A constitutive self-writing is, for both Foucault (2017) and Rago, a construction of one’s own subjectivity, detached from alien expectations and fabrications, generally imposed onto the subject via power relations. While Foucault contraposes the Christian tradition of confession (the subject that does not know about him/herself) with the ancient Greeks (a citizen must know of him/herself in order to take care of him/herself, others, the city, and politics) Rago expands this same idea to the specificity of women and feminisms. It is an issue of ethical care work that promotes autonomy and freedom. As for its uptake in feminisms, Rago (2013: 319) says, “I aim to connect the feminist practices to a libertarian tradition capable of rethinking the political and undoing the crystalized knots that perpetuate the naturalization of gender violence over women’s bodies”.

  • 14 Such a notion might be applicable to other subjects as well.

58Additionally, Luana Tvardovskas (2013) develops the self-practices in the Foucauldian tradition — of which self-writing is part — in contemporary feminist art as a means to criticize and reconfigure politics, imagery and ethics, as they might part from the autobiographical to address cultural conflicts that traverse their bodies and experiences as women14 in western society. According to Tvardovskas, when they elaborate discursively about themselves, they open space for reversing notions of subjected femininity in society, a position widely adopted by women artists who, not rarely, deviate and deny such notions. In Carrington’s case, this denial tackles two objectified subjects in Western society: women and madness.

Final thoughts

59Carrington’s trajectory in Down Below is an indictment of patriarchal violence — the Father, the War, the Reason — and the confrontation of it. Just as Carrington refused to be governed by Luis Morales, she refused to be governed by gender oppression. Precisely, she repudiated being governed by any but her own self, as observable in the dialogue with Morales: “I don’t accept your force, the power of any of you, against me; I want my freedom to act and think; I hate and reject your hypnotic forces” (CARRINGTON, 2017: 60). Indeed, as Salmerón (1997: 80) explains, more than leading to a “poetic rebirth” it most of all “served to eradicate the claustrophobic personae imposed upon her: the ‘good girl’ the Carringtons had expected their daughter would become, and the ‘inspiring muse’ of her lover Max Ernst”.

60 Therefore, Down Below is a powerful document that resists and defies discursive practices and power relations of both gender and madness. On writing and painting it — and reframing — it was possible to denounce violent practices as well as cultivate a form of freedom practice. It allowed her to concomitantly dispel, or, at least, alleviate the trauma, and discard previous preconceptions of the feminine and her own self.

61From a blunt narrative of violence and psychic distress to a poetic process of becoming through writing and painting, those artworks embody what Deleuze proposes about literature and life: “Writing is a case of becoming, always unfinished, always making itself, and that extrapolates any liveable or lived matter. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses the liveable and the lived. Writing is inseparable to the becoming” (1997: 11). Hence, the profusion of works in varied areas that analyse it demonstrate its multiplicity of layers, meanings and inexhaustible possibilities. Expectantly, just as it has stimulated many studies so far, especially in the last twenty years, it might incite many more yet to come.

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Notes

1 The essay uses the 1988 edited version of Down Below, which includes a postscript detailing Carrington's escape from the asylum. This version was originally dictated in French to Jeanne Megnen and later translated into English and published in the surrealist journal VVV n.4 in February 1944. It was later published in French as a book by Editions Fontaine in 1946 (ABERTH, 2010).

2 Although information about this painting is relatively scarce, some sources, like Aberth (2010) and Moorhead (2017) claim it to be from 1941, after the incarceration. Whereas the portfolio from Gallery Wendi Norris claims it to be from 1940. The article from the Cantabria local newspaper, eldiario.es, alleges that it was painted during her incarceration on 12 December 1940.

3 It was first written in English somewhere around late 1940s and early 1950s, and it circulated for a while in the underground scene. Its first publication came in French in 1974 (BYATT, 1996). The version used in this essay refers to the edition from 1996.

4 This series of paintings can be found in the website dedicated to her artwork and managed by her family. See: https://www.leocarrington.com/paintings.html.

5 Self-knowledge pertains to a Foucauldian concept elaborated in works such as History of Sexuality 3 – The Care of the Self (1984) and The Hermeneutics of the subject: lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982 (2006), among others. In his conceptualization, self-knowledge is a form of life that directly contests norms and power relations and cultivates a transformation of the self towards an ethical and autonomous life. 

6 The use of “Reality” emphasizes it as a concept, a discourse, to take Foucauldian conceptualization of discourse. Thus, it shall not be considered as concrete reality, but the notion of reality that is confronted by Carrington. This use of Reality with capital R follows, as well, Carrington’s frequent use of ideas and concepts in capital letters, as seen in the excerpt: “[..] I began gathering a week ago the threads which might have led me across the initial border of Knowledge” (CARRINGTON, 2017, p.3).

7 Although Francisco Franco’s governing flirted with Nazism and fascism, Spain was yet to declare its official support to Hitler at that moment. The official support and meeting came around October of 1940.

8 For a better comprehension of Foucault’s studies about psychiatric power and devices see Foucault (2006) and Sandra Caponi’s analysis (2009).

9 In reference to Deleuze and Guattari (1987).

10 Salmerón (1997) notices the catholic and Franquist vocabulary in Noriega’s speech during her interview with him. In his book “Como són y como piensan las mujeres” [How women think and are] (1945) his Catholicism is emphasized as he considers that women and men should follow the morals of Christianity in order to live in accordance with a dutiful life.

11 Tartarus, in Greek mythology symbolises the Underworld. Hence, once more Carrington finds herself in the Underworld as the very place of her journey of imprisonment-liberation.

12 Whereas fragmentation of ego/self refers to the chasm resulting from traumatic events that function as defense or adaptation mechanism to prevent direct access to the painful event, as in Sandór Ferenczi’s theorization, the timelessness relates to a constant presence of trauma, that is, a “past that assaults in the present” (KILOMBA, 2019: 223).

13 For a detailed study of trauma and cleavage in Ferenczi’s theory, see Antonello (2016) and Ferenczi (1990).

14 Such a notion might be applicable to other subjects as well.

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Référence électronique

Ana Carolina Magalhães Salvi, « Working through trauma and self-writing in Leonora Carrington’s Down Below »Artelogie [En ligne], 22 | 2024, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2024, consulté le 14 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/15301 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12wv6

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Auteur

Ana Carolina Magalhães Salvi

Ph.D. Student. History Department – Universidade Estadual de Campinas

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