The Debutante and Other Stories

"Carrington was aligned with surrealism because of her paintings, and because she became a writer and painter while she was living in the south of France in her early twenties with the surrealist artist Max Ernst. She had kind of a long-distance relationship with surrealism, as many of the female artists at the time did, partly because they were not invited to be involved in the construction of its manifestos, but also because they often occupied an ambiguous position as both muse and artist. The role of the muse was particularly powerful in surrealist ideology and was both enabling and limiting for women because it put them at the centre of the movement, but it also put them in a certain place. Some surrealist writing describes women as conduits of the subconscious but incapable of manipulating, and turning this into art. Carrington was very sceptical about all of this. She said, in one of her few interviews, towards the end of her life: ‘I was not a surrealist, I was just with Max.’ “I keep coming back again and again to this idea: how much can language be applied to the external world?” Surrealism has a direct link to psychoanalysis and to Freudian and Jungian ideas of the unconscious, whereas Carrington’s work also contains social critique – so I quite confidently place her as an absurdist writer. Carrington liked to think through totems: in her later life in Mexico she became interested in Mayan mythic figures, but she began with her nursery rocking horse, which appears in a number of her early paintings and self-portraits. She identifies with the figure of the horse throughout her stories. It might be to do with the idea of fragmented-ness, that violence and clashing within the absurdist style which, can be difficult to sustain at longer lengths (though Finnegans Wake gives the lie to that of course). Ben Marcus’s Age of Wire and String (1995), which is, I guess, a novel, is set out in little sections, too. That constant sense of self-fragmentation and narrative deconstruction can be taxing, for the reader as well as the writer."