The Brooklyn Rail

In Leonora Carrington’s The Stone Door, the unnamed narrator traverses Mesopotamia in search of the cryptic King of the Jews. As she walks across the land of the dead, she meets an ancient elf-like being who is made almost entirely of clay. He retreats from a mass of “human pottery” that is not quite dead but not completely undead and as he runs towards her, one of his feet falls off “like a dry leaf from a tree.” The mystical being asks the narrator if she is a slave who has come from “Bagdad.” Somewhat insulted, the narrator responds, “Why, no… I am a beggar.”

Recently reissued by NYRB, Carrington’s first novel is replete with parables, images, and epigrams that amount to thought-provoking puzzles, resulting in a kaleidoscopic adventure that curlicues and unfurls unto itself, not unlike shuffling a deck of painted tarot cards or toying with a seemingly endless Matryoshka doll. As such, The Stone Door does not follow a conventional plot, but blends genres like autofiction, fantasy, and magical realism in search of the enchanted portal at the heart of the novel: the stone door of kescke. Guarded at turns by a crucified giant parrot, and later trapping a mysterious, spritely woman with long hair, the illusive stone door gives the narrative its unifying throughline, brimming with a prophecy that spurs its zigzagging plot. But in the rare instances the stone door does appear, it materializes like a dreamlike image. Flickering from the shadows, it always begs more questions than answers: “The stone door is closed against me, let me in, Oh my Love, let me in.”

For Carrington, the inspiration behind her surrealist paintings and fantasy novels—including the better known and more satirical The Hearing Trumpet—sprang from the gray area between the sleeping subconscious and wakeful knowledge. The notion that dreams are a site of witness, or a point of access to another reality, appears in the beginning of The Stone Door, when Amagoya, a young woman living in a house in Mexico, comes across the diaries of the narrator who has visited the land of the dead. Amagoya learns that the nameless narrator walked through Mesopotamia in a “dream, memory or vision,” implying that commiseration with ghosts or astral projection into netherworlds lies in the subliminal consciousness.

As such, The Stone Door is roughly divided into three parts: Amagoya’s journeys with and learning of the occult, the stream-of-consciousness narrative of the mysterious woman trapped in the land of the dead behind the stone door, and a bildungsroman recounting the story of Zacharias, a young Jewish child who is dropped off by his mother to a boarding school in Budapest, where he and other students are identified by a number. A fascinating interval midway through the novel focuses on Phillip and Michelle, a couple who are Amagoya’s friends and neighbors. As they cook dinner, Phillip recalls the time he cooked a pest-like baby dragon after it jumped out of a book in the library of the British Museum. “I cooked it in a cream sauce and the taste was rather like that of a squid,” Phillip said. “A squid is really more of a reptile than a fish.”

Sensuality, even in its weird, repulsive, and borderline horrifying vicissitudes, imbues Carrington’s novel, which relies on feeling and evoking the senses as much as it does in its resonance of poignant and colorful images of the supernatural. Whether it is the scent of musk and cinnamon permeating the land of the dead, the visual of a dead human body boiling in the watery stew of a giant, or a witch called the Artisan pouring silver mercury into a glass instrument, reading The Stone Door means feeling the life-like vigor of Carrington’s words and being totally transported to the fantastical world she has drawn in her writing. Sensory experience, an inevitable initiation ritual to being alive, only intensifies hunger and desire—and as a result, dissatisfaction. Carrington enjoys dangling this paradox, and its barefaced unknowability in the scenes and plots she penned, critiquing the rational, Enlightenment knowledge paved by white men. “No philosopher ever told me if one could catch up in taste the aroma of roasting coffee,” the nameless narrator reflects, sitting alone at the kitchen table.

This mystery and unknowability forms the crux of the novel, an intuitive knowledge that Carrington associates with alchemy, magic, and womanhood. At one point, Amagoya asks the Artisan, who has devoted her life to the practice of magic to the point her womb is shriveled to a grain of rice, whether she regrets not pursuing the more common path of marrying a man and bearing children. The Artisan’s answer entails the cryptic but poetic proverb-like lines that inflect the novel: “If I passed through the pleasure and suffering of a female animal I would have become a different creature. Pleasures and pains can be lived in the past or future. The knowledge of them is already here.”

It’s this same war between men and women, the push-and-pull tension between the sexes, that animates the storyline, which climaxes when Zacharias, who is based on Carrington’s second husband, Chiki Weisz, finally opens the stone door to be united with the mysterious woman trapped on the other side. “The sacrifice of the Ram is over; Ram must become woman, and Air must become Man,” Carrington writes. In real life, Leonora Carrington’s zodiac sign was Aries, a fire sign traditionally represented by a ram, and her husband—a Holocaust survivor who was sent to an orphanage by his penniless mother—was a Libra, an air sign represented by a pair of scales. Zacharias opening the stone door to be with a lost, predestined love provides an exultant parable for the author’s marriage, but it also hints at something far deeper. The synthesis of men and women’s knowledge can overturn the “plan” solidified by the cosmic forces of the universe, and birth “a new chaotic order never dreamed before by man.” While Zacharias is ultimately diverted from his path, never embracing the woman on the other side, it’s hard not to dream of the futuristic potential of what such a world could look like. And even if the ending of the novel withholds resolution, never solving the mystery of the stone door, Carrington’s proposition that ambiguity and not knowing provide fertile ground for meaningful knowledge is convincing.