Leonora Carrington: Alchemy, the Underworld, and the Goddess

Abstract

Leonora Carrington’s novels—Down Below, The Hearing Trumpet, and The Stone Door—offer extraordinary revisionings of the myth most central to the modernist movement of the 20th century: that of the nekyia, or descent to the underworld. In her surrealist memoir, Down Below, the descent to the underworld catalyzes the revelation of alchemical configurations of mythical archetypes. This little surrealist classic of 1943 has much in common with late works of modernism produced during the Second World War, such as Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, The Death of Virgil by Herman Broch, Joseph and His Brothers and Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, or Trilogy by H. D. In all of these works, the descent to the underworld leads to the revelation of those archetypal forms of the imagination that give them “shape and significance.” For Carrington, the forms revealed by the psychotic breakdown recorded in the novel are alchemical as well as mythical.