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In the early 1960s and into the 1970s, Leonora Carrington was active in the women’s liberation movement in Mexico. She was notorious for designing a poster depicting Adam and Eve offering an apple to each other. Similarly, in The Hearing Trumpet, Carrington reclaims and inverts traditional, foundational stories, in the process creating one of the most original feminist texts ever written. The book contains the quintessence of feminism in a narrative that is subversive and surrealist in its invocation of an unconventional metaphysical order. The Hearing Trumpet forthrightly introduces eccentricity into the feminist debate as a perspective that’s a legitimate alternative to the patriarchal one: whatever is eccentric is Goddess-like in spirit.
In our age, the Goddess was expelled from the center long ago by her “Sterile Brothers” (as Carrington calls them); her kingdom is now in the provinces of perception. Nevertheless, the Goddess will always be present wherever the binaries—either/or, native/foreigner, black/white—beloved by the Sterile Brothers are exposed as limited. Theirs is the simplest and crudest way of organizing a complicated world, of achieving power over it. By their logic, to fit a too-tall patient to a too-short bed, one should cut off his feet, not seek a longer bed.
I consider Goddesshood to be womanhood deepened and expanded by the manifold treasures of culture and nature. The Goddess is a powerful archetype, and her very existence is pure provocation to a patriarchal structure. No wonder that in many parts of the world women are made to cover their faces and bodies. Women’s physiology—which would seem to be the most natural thing in the world, like their corporeality—is always a problem, something not to be discussed. Civilizations might be described by the mechanisms they have invented and implemented to control Goddesshood.
When womanhood demands what it is owed—recognition of its strength and power, of its very Goddesshood—it is banished to the cellar, imprisoned in the dungeon. Deprived of contact with consciousness, it loses its ability to speak and can only “murmur”—as the Grail murmurs in The Hearing Trumpet. It becomes imprecise and blurred. It is unable (or unwilling) to use the awkward, refined patriarchal diction, essayistic flights, virtuoso sentences, and nonchalant musings on art so prized by the arbiters of culture, high above the dungeon of the despondent Goddess. Its language is coarse and irreverent, not at all adapted to people’s typical perceptions but wild, laughable, eccentric, untamed. It is often perceived as incomprehensible, and as a result it is sometimes judged as kitsch. Kitschy and lacking taste—a charge that is so often flung at women. Apparently Joseph Conrad said that the best criterion for the quality of a book is that women don’t like it—because women can only like bad literature. Well, I have to admit that I like what Conrad wrote very much. Sincerely.
All right. So be it. Kitsch is our ocean. All those cyclical processes, menstruations, and recurrent migraines. Mumbo jumbo, healing herbs, and infantile trust in the power of nature. An unhealthy love of animals, sentimentality, the feeding of stray cats. Being overprotective, poking one’s nose into everything. All those flowers in little pots, all those little gardens, the hollyhocks, the rags, the lace, the stitching, the knitting, the romance novels, the soap operas, “women’s literature,” “emotionality,” the accusation of mental weakness that has been pressed on us for centuries. The reservoir of misogynist scripts is immense and seemingly bottomless. In modern times, in a thoroughly patriarchal world, we can only talk about the Goddess ironically, winking like the Abbess in the painting that hangs in the Gambits’ dining room, and with a hidden smirk, half serious, half mocking. Having been actively displaced and ridiculed for thousands of years she can only express herself in this covert way. It’s worth pondering how many subjects related to women’s experience have been marginalized, derided, ridiculed, or altogether displaced. For hundreds of years women have been raised within misogynist, patriarchal religions that openly discriminate against them to some degree. They take part in cultures that are never fully theirs, or that are even in outright opposition to them. From youth, women are drip-fed doctrines that position them as inferior, weaker, less capable, or in some other way handicapped. They grow up in a mist of ubiquitous misogyny, often veiled and not fully self-aware, which is intrinsic to culture, language, images, interpersonal relations, history, and economics. It is only in the last few decades that the real story of women, marginalized into near nonexistence, has patiently tried to break free. And when it emerges into the appropriated world, it can find itself at a loss for words.
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Leonora Carrington recognizes this subversive, eccentric position of womanhood. In both her painting and her writing she has a marvelous way of subscribing to André Breton’s belief in the need to align art with alchemy or occultism. She makes liberal use of our European esoteric imaginarium, while avoiding the pompous solemnity that often accompanies it.
The Hearing Trumpet is a hermetic text; it refers to things that are hidden, displaced, and forgotten. In order to be fully interpreted it requires from the reader a certain familiarity with its allusions, even as it mocks this sort of competence by pulling all sorts of striking and astonishing tales from its trunk of wonders.
The Abbess’s winking eye should be immortalized on every future cover of this book; it should become its hallmark, as should Marian’s deafness. Together they comprise a set of instructions for approaching the novel. At the very beginning of the book, Carmella gives Marian a hearing trumpet, which miraculously allows her to be selective about what she hears. The winking eye is telling us to place everything in inverted commas and to trust the “as if” on which myth and literature rely. From here on we shall follow after Leonora like this—with one eye winking, mischievously, kitschily, taking everything that she serves up to us at face value.
And she serves up a lot—the book is a true carnival. At the moment the Winking Abbess is identified as Doña Rosalinda Alvarez Cruz della Cueva from El Convento de Santa Barbara de Tartarus—onto the stage of The Hearing Trumpet steps the Goddess. From this point on, the borders between reality and fantasy, the solemn and the absurd, the sublime and the ridiculous dissolve into the surrealist tissue of the novel. History opalesces with pastiche, and the book meanders down multiplying paths of references to esoteric pop-cultural texts, stories about the Holy Grail, the Knights Templar, and Mary Magdalene, and to a whole host of alternative histories of mankind that folk strains of religions have been playing with for a long time.
The story of the Winking Abbess is the story of the Holy Cup containing the elixir of life, which has been stolen from its rightful owner, the Goddess (who appears here under various guises), by “sterile” monks and hidden by the Templars in the cellar of their monastery. Only a woman is capable of extricating this genuine treasure, though the Templars do not seem to know this. Generally speaking, the chief adversary of both the Winking Abbess Doña Rosalinda and Marian Leatherby is Christianity—for the former it is represented by the Templar order and the ruthless bishops, and for the latter by an oppressive New Age Christian mentality of pointless self-denial and external control.
The tale of Doña Rosalinda’s mission to rescue the Grail is a series of fantastical and unexpected adventures. It is at the same time a story of repossession, of an anti-Crusade that restores the correct order in a fraudulently appropriated world. In this story within the story, Carrington produces a wonderfully comical parody mimicking those mysterious texts found in jars in the desert, such as the discovery at Nag Hammadi in 1945, which undoubtedly reinvigorated the religious imagination of secularized twentieth-century man. She makes copious reference to figures and names from the Gnostic treatises, including the Pistis Sophia.
The curious and patient reader will detect some surprisingly erudite references not only to Gnosticism but to esoteric religious syncretism of all sorts, both ancient and contemporary. Such a reader will take note of the name of our abbess: Doña Rosalinda della Cueva (from the cave), Abbess of the Convent of Saint Bar
bara of Tartarus, is associated (fittingly in the light of her further adventures) with the mysterious, powerful figure of Barbarus or Barbelo, who resides in—naturally!—“the depths of Pleroma” (to use the Gnostic term mentioned in the Apocryphon of John). Barbelo is the first creative force, hers is the womb of the world, she is the prototype for the Shekhinah and Sophia in one. She appears as a bearded female figure, the Mother-Father, and as Anthropos, the first hermaphrodite. As if in answer, Carrington seeds The Hearing Trumpet with characters of fluid gender—a bearded woman, a cross-dresser, a transsexual. Amid the several bizarre figures of earthly provenance in the book the reader will also find the character Taliessin, a figure taken straight from Welsh mythology. He is the Goddess’s messenger and the first man to be endowed with the gift of prophecy; here we meet him as an immortal postman.
What’s more, The Hearing Trumpet is a thoroughly surreal work, written oneirically—in other words, quite devoid of consistency or strong connections between cause and effect. There is certainly no gun hanging on the wall here, so there’s no reason to expect it to go off in the final scene. Things happen rather as they do in a dream, with sequences of events emerging subtly, arising from remote associations. When she is first mentioned, the sister of Marian’s friend Marlborough is a cripple; later it is suggested that she has two heads, and when she finally appears at the end of the book, she is neither a cripple nor two-headed, she simply has the head of a wolf! This kind of alternative causality doesn’t detract from our experience of the book one bit; instead it illustrates the process by which Carrington produced the novel, layering successive ideas, one on top of the other. As the narrative self-corrects, it is a sheer pleasure to follow the mysterious flow of the unfolding story.
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In old age a person becomes eccentric. This appears to be a natural law of development, once adapting to society is no longer essential, and the paths of the individual and the community start to diverge. Perhaps old age is actually the only time in life when we can finally be ourselves, without worrying about the demands of others or conforming to the social norms that we have been constantly instructed to follow. At last the adolescent obligation to belong to one group or another ceases to apply.
That is why the philosophy of eccentricity expressed in The Hearing Trumpet is connected with age. It can be treated as a special message from the old to the young, going against the current of time. We must do eccentric things. Where everyone is doing This, we must do That. While the whole center is noisily establishing its order, we shall remain on the periphery—we won’t let ourselves be drawn into the center, we shall ignore it and surpass it.
Thus eccentricity is posited as a spontaneous, joyful rebellion against everything that’s established and regarded as normal and self-evident. It is a challenge flung in the face of conformity and hypocrisy.
Ultimately, The Hearing Trumpet is a book that brings great delight. Let us enjoy the opportunity to share in this wild tale about an old lady who couldn’t go to Lapland, so Lapland had to come to her.
—OLGA TOKARCZUK
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
The Hearing Trumpet Page 18