Leonora Carrington
Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) escaped a mental hospital in Santander, Spain, where she was involuntarily institutionalized, fled to the Mexican embassy in Lisbon, and settled first in New York and later in Mexico. Carrington spent much of the rest of her life in Mexico City, moving in a circle of like-minded artists that included Remedios Varo and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Among Carrington’s published works are the novels The Hearing Trumpet and The Stone Door; two collections of short stories; and a memoir of madness, Down Below. The Hearing Trumpet, Down Below, and The Milk of Dreams, an illustrated group of stories she originally wrote for her children, are also available from New York Review Books.
Leonora Carrington wrote The Stone Door in the early 1940s in Mexico City, but the novel wasn’t published until 1977. This month, NYRB Classics brings the Surrealist dream logic of Carrington’s vision to a wider audience. Reading this work requires suspending one’s own vision—just as a reader can’t really read The Red Book without first putting on Carl Jung’s spectacles. Where Carrington swerves from Jung is in attempting to dismantle the one-to-one correspondence of symbolism and move into a stranger space. For example, a stone door presents a paradox of symbolic meaning: the stone (solid, immovable, foreclosing, masculine) versus the door (liminal, fluid, latent, feminine). In this way, Carrington’s novel feels more like a dream that’s been fed a diet of dreams, a second-order interpretation of the world, perfect for reading aloud on a humid summer night.