Surrealism's banging door

Abstract

In drawing out the uncanny relationship between André Breton's Nadja and Leonora Carrington's Down Below , this essay examines surrealism's ideological and aesthetic construction and representation of madness. In leaving behind his experiments with automatic writing, inspired by his early psychiatric training with shell-shocked soldiers, Breton turned to the "outmoded' figure of the hysteric to define surrealism's revolt against the Cartesian subject of bourgeois, liberal ideology. But although Nadja's madness fuels the creative and revolutionary significance of Breton's project, her real-life incarceration haunts the sublime nature of his project, serving to unearth the ghosts of his own past. By the time Carrington came to write of her own experience of psychosis over a decade later, Nadja had already become the iconic surrealist text on madness. While Down Below is framed within the rubric of surrealist investigation, it nevertheless interrogates a male modernist reading of the madwoman, an image descended from Charcot's highiy fetishized display of the hysteric and reified in Breton' s innovative self-portrait. In mimetically reproducing the paranoid and psychotic voice and experience, Down Below writes against Breton's clinical detachment, restoring "the details' of Nadja's experience to surrealist experimental prose.