Leonora Carrington’s Poetics of Listening

This chapter traces a poetics of intimate listening in Leonora Carrington’s surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet (written in the 1950s and published in 1974). Carrington was part of the circle of surrealist artists and writers gathered around André Breton in the mid-1930s, and the rupture caused by the arrest of her lover Max Ernst at the outbreak of World War II resulted in Carrington’s psychotic breakdown. She subsequently recounted the experiences of her psychosis in the autobiographical Down Below, a harrowing text dramatising a search for self-knowledge doomed to fail, in which violence and alienation in the context of the rise of fascism and Nazism dominate both inner and outer reality. About a decade later, Carrington revisited and rewrote her journey ‘down below’ in the fictional The Hearing Trumpet. This chapter shows how the novel is ‘at once a parodic quest narrative, […] an intimately personal exploration of subjectivity and self-knowledge’, and ‘a utopian vision of an ethics of being and knowing’. A symbol for the novel’s poetics of listening, the protagonist’s eponymous hearing trumpet guides Watz’s exploration of Carrington’s surrealist-feminist text via the philosophy of love and intimacy underpinning Luce Irigaray’s twenty-first-century writings.