Writing and Painting with Both Hands

“Motley-in-motion can be refigured as the babel of tongue and its mental reflection as the polyglot mind. Regularly we hear of tricksters being involved in the origins of linguistic multiplicity.”

Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, 1998.

These words belong to the eminent essayist, mythologist, translator, cultural critic, and scholar Lewis Hyde, an interloper of genres, fields, and modes of inquiry, whose book Trickster Makes This World (1998) makes an insightful case of a mythological trickster who can change skin and colors, like an octopus, and whose mind of a traveler, like Odysseus’, can shape itself to whatever situation it encounters. In his book, Hyde argues that the trickster’s mind is that of a multilingual creator and outsider who fulfills the prophecy of Babel by living among us and ‘translating’ from “the muddiness, the ambiguity, and the noise” of the world.

Such a life, of a multilingual trickster and an artistic ‘translator,’ was Leonora Carrington’s, lived as it was written and painted. Refusing to conform to society’s norms, moving across continents, and crossing historical eras, all along breaking her chains in the quest for free creative expression in art and language, Carrington was so eccentric that her biographical facts seem stranger than fiction. It is no wonder that her own creations blur genres in their relation to reality. Her short fiction and paintings are mostly autobiographical, reflecting her life’s big leap, the escape from England and from her family; her nonfiction, the memoir of her stay in a psychiatric asylum, Down Below (1988), reads like a fantasy novel.

To this day, Carrington’s books in new editions keep ‘reappearing’ on the market, and new essays, biographies, movies, and articles, as well as exhibits, make their way from obscurity; to mark her centennial in 2017, Carrington’s books, originally written in English and French, have been reprinted, and many have been translated into Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, and other languages. She lived to the age of 94 in Mexico City, but was born and raised in a family of a wealthy English industrialist who aspired to be an aristocrat. As a nineteen-year-old, she escaped his home to become the lover of Max Ernst, a much older and established surrealist artist, who inspired her and initiated her into bohemian life. A form of rebellion, surrealism was a perfect outlet for Carrington, who fled not only the prison of her suffocating family and tyrant father, but the whole world she had been born into, leaving behind English bourgeois society. Her departure from England was only the first step in a sequence of moves and unconventional decisions leading to her liberation and autonomy—as a woman and an artist. Eventually she denied belonging to any movement or school (including surrealism) and to any nation state, claiming instead to be a ‘citizen of the world,’ although she was recognized in Mexico as a Mexican national artist.

As a child, Carrington lived in a mansion in Lancashire and was raised to be a girl comme il faut, learning French with a French governess and riding horses. Horses were her favorite animals and would become characters in her paintings and stories. She was a literal and metaphorical enfant terrible, expelled from every boarding school she was sent to. The young Leonora begged her nouveau-riche father to send her to study art, only to be denied that wish because, in his opinion, “painting was horrible and idiotic,” but finally he conceded, and she was sent on a short trip to Italy and then to Amédée Ozenfant’s art school in London, where she learned the basics of painting. Carrington met Max Ernst, a German who lived in France and already a prominent artist, at a party in London, and it was a coup de foudre for both and the beginning of a new life. She discovered surrealist art, a magic and liberating force, made friends with Pablo Picasso, Luis Buñuel, Paul Éluard, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Tanguy, and spoke and wrote in French—the language of rebellion, freedom, and love. It was the language that she and Max Ernst spoke to each other.

As in popular novels of Carrington’s day, in which disobedient daughters elope and tyrant parents pursue, Leonora’s father chased her and initiated a police investigation against Max Ernst, accusing him of making pornography. The couple fled to Paris and then to a village in Provence, St. Martin d’Ardèche, where Carrington and Ernst created their nest in an old farmhouse, complete with surrealist paintings, decorations, and sculptures (he—of human-bird hybrids; she—of a plaster horse head), and where they fiercely painted and entertained guests.

It is during that period, between 1936 and 1939, that Carrington wrote (in French, her adopted tongue) and published some of her most famous stories, “La maison de la peur” (1938), “La débutante” (1937), and “La dame ovale” (1939), projecting her autobiographical reflections into her fiction. These fairy tales, ‘translated’ into her paintings, marked the beginning of her versatile, multilingual identity.

Her passionate relationship with Ernst, which fed her creativity, and the connections she made through him helped build her reputation in surrealist circles. Carrington’s status as a heroine of the surrealist movement was later amplified by another event in her life, described in her memoir Down Below (1988). During the chaos of World War II, Max Ernst was repeatedly arrested and interned in France (first, as an ‘enemy alien,’ later by the Nazis), and Carrington attempted to liberate him. She fled France to Spain and, catatonic from grief, suffered hallucinations and was apprehended by Spanish police. Then (once again) with the help of her father, she was committed to a Spanish mental institution in Santander where she was subjected to forced Cardiazol convulsive treatments, with an effect similar to that of electric shock therapy. 

Down Below, the ‘memoir of madness,’ had been written in English and was lost. It was then much later retold to a friend in French, translated again into English, and published in 1944. The narrative takes a rational tone and follows a lucid recollection of her (temporary) insanity during the treatment at a mental asylum, while the description of the reality of her mind creates a totally ‘fictional’ feel. (“I am afraid I am going to drift into fiction, truthful but incomplete,” she says in Down Below.) According to her “truthful” account (the account of the reality in her mind), people in Madrid were hypnotized by evil forces (possibly by Papa Carrington), and she was there to save the world from inter-galactic war.

In Carrington’s memoir—which we would now call ‘creative nonfiction,’ the genre in which fiction and nonfiction blur—we learn that her omnipotent father, intending to ‘rescue’ her, sent her childhood nanny to Santander, supposedly on a submarine. Eventually, Carrington plotted a cinematic escape and ran away from a backdoor of a Lisbon restaurant, seeking refuge at the Mexican embassy, where she found her old friend, a Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc, a friend of Picasso. To save her from Nazi-occupied Europe, Leduc married her, and they fled to Mexico, where she lived and worked for the next sixty years, adding Spanish to her languages (she also frequently stayed in New York and Chicago). Most facts in this story are true, except for the nanny’s means of transportation to Spain, a detail that Carrington, when asked, never confirmed—but never debunked either.

Art critics and biographers define Carrington’s art and writing as a creative expression of her rebellion, but the force underlying that revolt was that of a primordial outsider, the ‘pre-existing condition’ of multilingual creativity—a condition affecting groups or individuals suffering the effects of ‘internal exile’ in a diaspora or in an adverse personal situation. Consciously or unconsciously, Carrington’s family had passed on to their growing daughter the status of a misfit through their own struggle to fit into the impenetrable upper-class English society, and the frustration that comes with inferior status; her father was a grandson of a station master and a self-made millionaire who was married to an Irish Catholic, the daughter of a doctor. His struggle to ascend to upper-class British society—accompanied by pain, humiliation, and tremendous effort—translated into total control and tyranny, as reflected in Carrington’s story “La débutante” (1938), as we shall see below. She experienced humiliation from an early age, especially as the only girl among her male siblings. She was always jealous of her brothers’ freedom, opportunities, and education, which made her painfully aware of her own limited possibilities as a female.

The rebellion against her father and the suffocating atmosphere at her home, as described by her biographers, predisposed her for ‘otherness,’ i.e., for the need to become someone else, outside social and familial imprisonment. Speaking and writing in French, becoming a free artist, a writer, and an independent woman allowed for linguistic and ludic reenactment of escape. Shape-shifting and skin-changing marked Carrington’s personal and creative life as a trickster.  

*** 

In mythology tricksters embody ambivalence, duplicity, and paradox, subvert patriarchal structures, and create new boundaries. Their modus vivendi is on the road, at border crossings and thresholds, where they are "the spirits of ‘the doorway leading out,’ ‘traveling at dusk,’" says Lewis Hyde. A trickster character or narrator (as well as the trickster author) disturbs and confuses dichotomies (life-death, male-female) and becomes “the god of threshold,” the mythic embodiment of ambivalence and ambiguity, duplicity and paradox. Such is Hermes, the Greek polytropic god of transitions, boundaries, travel, and creativity, the patron of commerce and gods’ messenger wearing winged sandals and a winged cap. Hermes was born in a cave, as an illegitimate son of Zeus and a nymph, Maia, and as soon as he was born, he began the double motion, in the underworld or out of it, in foreign countries or back home, as “an enchanter and a disenchanter.” 

Trickster characters, culture and anti-culture heroes in mythology, fairy tales, and literature, were planted in our cultures as “archetypal characters with disruptive imagination,” as precursors and creators of social and cultural change. Hyde describes the cases of modern artists such as Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and, not coincidentally, ‘translingual’ writers[1] and immigrants Maxine Hong Kingston and Richard Rodriguez.

Referring to her art, Carrington herself called the sense of suspended time and magical play “liminal.” The art critic Susan Aberth, who studied Carrington (2004), refers to structural anthropologist Victor Turner’s article “Frame, Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality” (1977) to discuss rituals which are instrumental in forming communities that exist “betwixt-and-between the normal, day-to-day cultural and social states and processes. [...] Since liminal time is not controlled by clock, it is a time of enchantment when anything might, even should happen.”[2] Carrington biographer Whitney Chadwick adds that her images “belonged to a magical realm between sleep and waking, conscious and unconscious.”[3] This is especially apparent in her paintings from 1937-1939.

The artist rarely discussed her enigmatic paintings or stories and usually refused to explain them. The famous art collector and connoisseur of surrealism Edward James, a big fan and friend of Carrington, wrote on the door of her house in Mexico City: “This is the house of the Sphinx.” In Greek mythology the Sphinx is a treacherous hybrid creature with a human head and the body of a lion, who, like an appropriate trickster, asks travelers to answer a riddle in order to allow them a passage—in this case, a passage into a mysterious world of Carrington’s art.  

On the Threshold: “La maison de la peur”

“Sait-elle lire? Sait-elle écrire le français sans fautes? [...] C’est qu’elle lisait La maison de la peur, […] cette histoire écrite dans un langage beau, vrai et pur.” (“Can she read? Can she write French without mistakes? [...] For she was reading The House of Fear, this true story you are now going to read, this story written in a beautiful language, truthful and pure.”)

“La maison de la peur,” 1938.

This is an excerpt from Ernst’s preface to Carrington’s story, which he illustrated with his drawings. This first version of the piece appeared in 1938 in a tiny print run of 120 copies in the series Un divertissement. The story is narrated by a lonely and reclusive protagonist who is invited by a friendly horse (horses are her only friends) to a party at the House of Fear, where she has to face the hostess, Fear herself. (Fear is female since nouns are gendered in French, and la peur is feminine.) She is so intimidated by Fear’s only enormous eye, like the one of the Cyclops Polyphemus, and by her dress sewn of bats that she cannot find the courage to face her. Was the protagonist, together with the author, able to stand up to Fear—of her father, of leaving behind her comfortable life, her mother and siblings, her country and language? Was she able to accept her new role as a mistress and outcast? Although we know that in real life she was, the story ends with an ellipsis, and the trickster protagonist/narrator/author remains in the liminal space, on the threshold.

In Morphology of the Folktale (1969), Russian Formalist Vladimir Propp identified thirty-one “narratemes”—as configurations or variations of folktale elements, and many of these patterns are ‘trickster plots.’ For instance, the story is driven by ‘misfortune and lack’ (the princess turned into a frog), which leads to a quest to resolve this trouble (by finding a magic key to open a magic door in a forbidden room in a castle). This quest is often carried out by a mischief-maker-trickster (the third son, e.g. Ivan the Fool), who moves the story forward and at the end either becomes domesticated (marries the princess), moves toward exile or death, or stays on the threshold (on the road). Carrington’s protagonist in the “La maison de la peur,” as in many of her other stories, chooses the liminal option and stays on the elliptical path, an open ending with invisible possibilities.

According to witnesses, Carrington spoke French fluently but with a strong English accent, which seems to correlate with her writing. To the surprise of a scrupulous French reader, the text appears published ‘as is,’ as a spoken flow, an accented, ungrammatical rough draft, jotted down by a learner who may have acquired the language phonetically, by speaking it, and has not had enough exposure to reading and writing, so that her linguistic performance became ‘fossilized.’ Here is an excerpt:

En rentrans j’ai pensez que j’aurais dû demandé le cheval de venir dîner. « Tant pis », que je dis. J’achète une salade et des pommes de terre pour mon dîner, arrivée a la maison je fais un peu de feu, je faire cuire mon dîner. Je boire du the, je pense a mon journé, et surtout au cheval, qui, malgré notre courte connaissance, j’appelle mon ami. J’ai peu d’amis, je suis heureuse d’avoir un cheval pour mon ami. Apres d’avoir mangé je fume une cigarette et je pense au luxe de sortir au lieux de bavardé a moi-meême et de m’ennouyer avec les mêmes histoires que je me raconte sans cesse… 

 

Despite some colloquial fluency and the sophistication of the vocabulary, the syntactical structures are entirely off (“Tant pis,” “que je dis”), and verb forms and tenses are inconsistent (e.g. “je boire,” “au lieux de bavardé”). Like all learners of French, Carrington is hesitant about French nouns’ genders and their agreement with articles and adjectives; she confounds prepositions, conjugations, and participles, mixes up verb forms, uses incorrect forms of pronouns, and omits the ‘s’ for plurals, the mute ‘t’ or ‘s’ in the endings, as well as the accents aigus and accents graves.

The answer to the question asked by Ernst—“Sait-elle lire? Sait-elle écrire le français sans fautes?”—is that Carrington cannot write in standard French—possibly because her formal French is insufficient or for some other reason (hypothetically, dyslexia: see below). However, her literacy in French doesn’t seem to matter because “Elle n’a rien lu, mais elle a tout bu […] Elle se chauffe de sa vie intense, de son mystère, de sa poésie.” (“She has read nothing but has absorbed everything […] She warms herself with her intense life, her mystery, her poetry”. Carrington was forever grateful to Ernst, whom she considered not only her lover, but brother, father, and mentor. He introduced her to new art, poetry, and philosophy (and apparently French, too)—and opened to her the exciting new world of surrealism, into which she plunged headfirst, away from the limitations of her stiff philistine family. 

Therefore, perhaps, Carrington’s ungrammatical French in “La maison de la peur” can be seen not only as natural and spontaneous, but also intentional, signifying the freedom from all rules, including the rules of grammar. According to her translator Jacqueline Chénieux, it is  “l’évidence de la toute première prise de création—prise comme on dit du ciment—, dans une langue qui tantôt choisit le français, tantôt l’anglais, plus tard l’espagnol, en une orthographe non fixée, parce que Leonora ne relit guère les dactilographies…” (“the evidence of the first spontaneous creative effort, like the initial moment of hardening of the cement, in a language which sometimes chooses French or English, and later Spanish, using some amorphous spelling, because Leonora never proofreads her writing…”). This “prise de création,” the spontaneous creative moment, more natural in a foreign language, captured by the text in defiance of standards and norms, came out in French without any justification or apology, signifying authentic ‘foreignness’ and aligned with the methods prescribed by surrealism. Her prose rejects bourgeois oppression, offering a surrealist tour de force not unlike Duchamp’s shocking toilet exhibited in an art gallery (l’objet trouvé) or Magritte’s ubiquitous pipe which is not a pipe (“Ce n’est pas une pipe”).

Carrington serendipitously emerged in the ‘right’ era to borrow surrealist symbols, ideas, and forms to investigate her family history and social circumstances, using her accented French to shake off her bourgeois English imprisonment. surrealist attributes visibly manifested themselves not only in her visual art but in her writing, such as a fascinating detail in “La maison de la peur”—“the game of simultaneity.” Surrealism proclaimed simultaneity of memory, time, reality, and lived experience and was famous for its tendency to generate creativity by various mind games (such as the famous “Exquisite Corpse”). After dinner, Fear incongruously yet playfully entertains her guests the horses in the midst of a gloomy scene: “…they must count backward from a hundred and ten to five while thinking of their own fate and weeping for those who have gone before them; they must simultaneously beat the rhythm of the tune of Barge Haulers on the Volga[4] with  their left foreleg and the Marseillaise with their right foreleg and Where Have You Gone, My Last Rose of Summer with their two back legs.”

Playing mind games in the spirit of surrealism was natural to Leonora, who, according to her biographers (Chadwick 1988, Aberth 2004, Moorhead 2017), practiced rare ‘mirror writing,’ habitually used by Leonardo Da Vinci. Neuroscience attributes the ability to write backwards to a peculiar flexibility of cognitive and linguistic processing. Carrington could write forward with her right hand and backward with her left and she painted ambidextrously, sometimes with both hands at the same time. This peculiarity was one of the reasons she had been expelled from a boarding Catholic school when a child, because the nuns could not make sense of it and considered her “uneducable.” Her rebelliousness notwithstanding, it is possible that she may have had dyslexia, which could explain her peculiar backward writing and poor spelling, as well as her literal and metaphorical need to be both inside and outside: “…dans ce jeu de l’envers et l’endroit […] contourner la langue, contourner les limites des choses dans l’inquiétante magie dont témoigne la peinture de Leonora…“[5]  (“…in the game of inside-outside [...] getting around the language and the limits of things with the magic disquiet emanating from Leonora’s art.” Translation is mine.) Carrington’s cognitive predisposition for simultaneity might be a contributing factor for her natural fluidity between visual and verbal creative expression that she herself called “fusion” of art forms—writing and painting.[6]

Carrington’s fairytales written in French—“La maison de la peur” (1938), “La dame ovale,” written in 1937-38 and published in 1939, “La débutante” (1938), “l’Amoureux” (1938), “L’Ordre royal” (1938), and “Les soeurs” (1939)—have never been reprinted in their original version and only a few copies are stored at rare manuscript libraries (e.g. Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and Morgan Library in New York). However, in 1976-78, these texts were re-published in a revised format in standard French in Editions Flammarion by Henri Parisot, who calls the revisions “repris” and “revus,” perhaps sounding less intrusive in French than ‘revised’ and ‘edited’ in English. The stories were subsequently translated into (standard) English.

Parisot’s edited versions successfully removed the ‘foreignness’ and the effect of linguistic rebellion from Carrington’s French, ‘nativizing’ it and converting it into a smooth, fluent, ‘literary,’ and literate version, with standard grammar, diction, syntax, and phraseology. Although not technically ‘translations,’ Parisot’s revisions of Carrington’s French stories appeared along with her other stories written in English and translated into French by Jacqueline Chénieux and Yves Bonnefoy. Yet one wonders how these corrected, palatable French texts convey the dramatic complexity of Carrington’s creative translingual identity, and it remains unclear why she sanctioned revision/standardization of these later publications. Curiously, the subject has never been addressed, not even in her latest interviews given to her re-discovered British cousin, the journalist Joanna Moorhead (2017). One can almost imagine her father Harold Carrington’s disdainful glance as he hired a copyeditor to correct his daughter’s poor French in order to make her appear ‘a proper English girl.’

***

“La débutante,” written and first published in French in 1938, then edited by Henri Parisot and republished in a collection under the same title in 1978, is a surrealist story of rebellion, a spoof mocking London high society and demonstrating Carrington’s contempt of it and her first steps to independence.

In 1935 Leonora had to ‘come out’ to the high British society (the expression used at the time for young ladies from aristocratic families who had to be presented to the court). Perhaps because the Carringtons were not real aristocrats but nouveau-riche, it was even more important for her parents to break into the inner circle and adhere to all the rituals and rules of high London society. Her family made her go through tedious preparations for the ceremony, including lessons in making a curtsy, and she had to wear ostrich feathers and a tiara. She went through with it despite her reluctance, anger, and resentment. However, three years later, during her romance with Max Ernst, a true débutante ‘came out,’ the one who defied all social rules and leapt for freedom, like a hyena “with one great bound.”

“Quand j’étais débutante,” she begins her story: “When I was a debutante, I often went to the zoo. I went so often that I knew the animals better than I knew girls of my own age. Indeed, it was in order to get away from people that I found myself at the zoo every day.”[7] The girl befriends a hyena at the zoo, teaches her French, and learns her language. Before the girl is to be presented to the court and appear at the ball, she makes a pact with the hyena to go in her place. In order to disguise herself and look human, the hyena puts on the girl’s gown and high heels, which miraculously fit her, and (very casually, as is often the case in surrealism) eats her housemaid in order to wear her face like a mask. While the hyena with the maid’s face makes her appearance at the ball, the girl enjoys peace and quiet and reads Gulliver’s Travels in her room. This fantastical gothic story of role reversal (woman-hyena) ends with the hyena’s self-revelation, caused by her strong animal smell. The hyena eats her mask/human face and leaps out the window.

Most of Carrington’s characters, both in her fiction and paintings, resemble archetypal shapeshifters from fairytales, such as werewolves, vampires, demons, giantesses, and some undefined monsters and hybrids, created in defiance of any rational interpretation and symbolizing power and ambiguity in the magical world. They operate in plots similar to Hieronymus Bosch’s anxious narratives and Bruno Schultz’s illuminated metaphysical stories, often reflecting images of humanized objects (e.g. chairs), androgynous and mythological creatures, centaurs in reverse (humans with horse’s heads or turned into horses), or hyenas ‘speaking Human’ (yet eating human, too).

The hyena in “La débutante,” who substitutes for the protagonist/narrator/author at the detested ball, is a fierce but free animal. In Carrington’s story, “Little Francis,” published later in French translation but written during the same period, Francis grows a horse’s head as an act of connection with a free and friendly animal. Originating in Celtic mythology, many of these trickster tales were retold to Leonora by her Irish mother and grandmother, whose ‘alchemical kitchen’ in Ireland would appear later in Carrington’s Mexican iconography. Like Mexico, which in a later period provided the context for her esoteric interests, Ireland was a naturally surreal world. The reappearance of mythological creatures—humans turning into animals or, in most instances, into hybrid animals—was common in symbolist and surrealist art and narratives (see, for example, Marc Chagall’s benign hybrid creatures: a human donkey and a cat with a smile, allegedly born out of the painter’s connection to Hasidic mysticism). Ernst had painted his famous Bride of the Wind (1927), the stallion as a cloud in movement, as he later would call Carrington (La mariée du vent), to which she responded with her Portrait of Max Ernst (1939), where she depicted him as a bird-fish.

The French language in which “La débutante” was originally written, the language of love and freedom that she spoke with Ernst during the period of her escape from home, is borrowed by Carrington to completely separate herself from her courtly duties, from being a daughter, from being human, and most importantly, from being submissive. Writing in French and living in France, distancing herself physically, geographically, socially, emotionally, and linguistically from her English family, helped Carrington make that first ‘leap’ toward art and free creativity, which was her salvation.

***

The motive of liberation that we see in Carrington’s short stories emerges in her artwork created during the same period. One of them, Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) (1937-38), can be considered an “intersemiotic translation” of her stories written in French. This term was coined by Roman Jakobson, who pioneered the concept of multimodality or multimodal hybridity, when artists/writers switch creative ‘instruments’ in their repertoire, verbal and non-verbal genres and art forms.[8]

It is with equal ease and fluidity that Carrington seemed to switch languages in her writing and transitioned from one art form to another. Like her fairytales of this period, her Self-Portrait was a manifesto of independence, the visual reflection of the same feelings that marked the rite of passage to surrealism. On the canvas, the androgynous Carrington, with a mane-like shock of hair, is dressed in a riding costume and sits in a masculine pose next to a lactating hyena, with a rocking horse suspended behind her. The horse is a toy without mobility, symbolizing her childhood entrapment, while a real white horse is galloping away through the window. As in her ‘verbal’ stories with fantastical trickster plots, Carrington is painted in a liminal world, perched in an anthropomorphic boudoir chair, with human arms as armrests and tiny feminine boots on its legs. Like the artist herself, the lactating feminine hyena next to her is a wild creature that cannot be domesticated and, as in “La débutante,” the act of magical transformation is conjured by Leonora’s gesture. The mist rising from the otherwise geometric floor indicates that we are in a magic ‘trickster tale’ where the rocking horse turns into a real horse and leaps out the window.

The full title of the Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) refers to Eohippus, a small-size horse which hypothetically lived on Earth millions of years ago and is the ancestor of the modern horse. The reference alludes to the 'dawn' of Carrington’s liberation, to her own evolution from an abused and humiliated English girl to a free woman and artist. As in her stories, horse characters are significant: during her childhood with her abusive father, they were her only friends. Carrington once said about her affection for horses, “A horse gets mixed up with one’s body…it gives energy and power. I used to think I could turn myself into a horse.”

In “La dame ovale” and “Little Francis,” the protagonist’s favorite toy horse named Tartar, her best friend, is destroyed by her tyrant father as a punishment. And just like the hyena in “La débutante,” the real horse in the painting is leaping out through the open window, emphasizing “l’envers et l’endroit,” the inside of her room, her prison, vs. the outside world of freedom.

“La dame ovale,” also in French, features a giant oval lady named Lucretia. Living in a chateau, she suffers from severe depression and starves herself to death in rebellion against her tyrant father. Echoing other stories and paintings by Carrington, the protagonist Lucretia is transformed into a horse in the process of resisting her father: “She was beautiful […] with four legs as fine as needles, and a mane which fell around her long face like water. She laughed with joy and danced madly around in the snow.”  To punish Lucretia, the old father, “looking more like a geometric figure than anything else” says he will burn the toy horse Tartar because his daughter is too old to play with him. Lucretia begs him to stop. During this scene the invisible traumatized narrator is hiding behind the door, hearing it all, including “the most frightful neighing sounded from above, as if an animal were suffering extreme torture.” 

This is what Hyde called the “double motion across the threshold,” “the crepuscular, shady, mottled, ambiguous, androgynous, neither/nor space of Hermetic operation” ,[9] in which Carrington creates her parallel worlds of verbal and visual trickster narratives. As often happens in surrealist stories, the narrator, author, and protagonist (who can turn into a horse) follow the double or triple motion of ‘translation’ or transmutation into Carrington’s visual narrations created during the same period. In Self-Portrait, while the rocking horse is hanging on the wall above the immobile Leonora sitting on a chair dressed in a riding suit with the hair wild from the motion, the real horse in the window is galloping away from the warden father and the imprisoning stifling home, like the hyena in “La débutante” and the narrator in “La dame ovale”—and like the author, Leonora Carrington herself.

Another variation of a similar subject painted in 1938, The Meal of Lord Candlestick, 1938, depicts a dark cannibalistic meal that evokes Carrington’s Catholic school memories of the Eucharist. In the spirit of Hieronymus Bosch’s nightmarish realm (Carrington will later discover and admire his paintings), hybrid phallic-like horses sit at a table covered with animated dishes (flamingo, a duck skeleton sitting upright, and a live baby). She gave the code name of Candlestick to her family and Lord Candlestick specifically to her father, representing him as a bloated head in the left of the painting, the “geometric figure” described in the “La dame ovale,” with enormous eyes but no mouth to partake in the feast or to spit out judgment. The sacrificial child in the painting calls to mind the scene of nativity, and the ritualistic dinner mocks the religious theme of the Last Supper.

Later in Mexico, Carrington continued and amplified the theme of food and cuisine and developed a special interest in the culinary occult and alchemy. She became active in the immigrant community of artists, especially women artists, who had fled the war and found a hospitable refuge in Mexico. She formed a special friendship and partnership with the artist Remedios Varo, with whom she shared stories of magic potions, alchemy, dreams, and fairytales. In Mexico, Carrington painted, created murals, sculptures, and tapestry, and continued writing (e.g. the play Penelope, in English, 1969, and the novel Hearing Trumpet, 1977).

Carrington tried to return to her roots and once traveled to England for a visit. She had not been forgiven by her father ; nor had she reconciled with her brothers. She never received any share of her father’s estate and never returned to England for good. Her fortune finally changed when her art started being exhibited and sold. In 1963 she was commissioned to paint the mural El Mundo Mágico de los Mayas by the Anthropological Museum in Mexico City. The painting represents the country’s indigenous history and identity, and also represents her own, evoking legends and witchcraft from Celtic mysticism and Lancashire where she was raised. Her bronze sculptures of strange hybrid creatures are exhibited as public art in Mexico City streets, and a new museum of Carrington’s art opened in the prison cells of an old state penitentiary in San Luis Potosi, marking the symbolism of her escapist life. The house where she worked and lived in the bohemian neighborhood of Colonia Roma in Mexico City is being converted into a national museum. And yet, although Mexico gave her a home when she needed one, Carrington never considered it home. Her emotional ambivalence may have been reflected by the phonetic one: she spoke Spanish (just like she spoke French) with a heavy English accent. As Hyde notes, in a post-Babel world, “various gods no longer speak each other’s languages and so need the trickster to move among them, translating.”[10] 

[1] ‘Translingual’ writers are authors who write in their non-native language or in a mix of languages (term coined by Steven Kellman). Translinguals are among the most prominent contemporary writers in the United States: an abbreviated list might include André Aciman, Rabih Alameddine, Daniel Alarcón, Julia Alvarez, Louis Begley, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Ariel Dorfman, Cristina Garcia, Olga Grushin, Ursula Hegi, Aleksandar Hemon, Ha Jin, Andrew Lam, Li-Young Lee, Yiyun Li, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Dinaw Mengestu, Bharati Mukherjee, Luc Sante, Gary Shteyngart, Charles Simic, and Lara Vapnyar.

[2] Turner, Victor. 1979. “Frame, flow and reflection: Ritual and drama as public liminality” in Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, p. 33.

[3] Chadwick, Whitney. 1992. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. London: Thames and Hudson, p.2.

[4] Barge Haulers on the Volga is the famous Russian folk song sung by barge haulers on the Volga and popularized by Fedor Shaliapin, a famous Russian singer; see also the well-known realistic painting by Ilya Repin.

[5]Chénieux, Jacqueline. 1978. Avant-propos, La débutante (contes et pieces). Paris: Éditions Flammarion, p. 10.

[6] Wagstaff, Sheena. 1990. “Surrealist in the Mid-West” in Interview Magazine, p. 20.

[7] Carrington, Leonora. 1978. La débutante (contes et pièces). Paris: Éditions Flammarion, p. 44 .

[8] Jakobson, Roman. 2006. “Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” In M. Snell-Hornby (Ed.) The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints? Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

[9] Hyde, Lewis, 1998. Trickster Makes this World, North Point Press, p. 208

[10] Hyde, Lewis. 1998. Trickster Makes This World, North Point Press, p. 299.

Natasha Lvovich is a writer and scholar of multilingual creativity. She teaches at CUNY and divides her loyalties between academic and creative writing. Her autobiographical book, The Multilingual Self, has been followed by creative nonfiction pieces and interdisciplinary essays. Among her latest publications are the mixed-genre pieces on the exile Russian painter Nicholas Roerich and on the multilingual identity of Marc Chagall. Lvovich is the founder and editor of the Journal of Literary Multilingualism published by Brill.