Do You Remember Leonora Carrington?

Leonora Carrington passed away last week, one of the last great surrealist painters. She was also an important surrealist writer, whose influence extended to writers like Angela Carter and many others. I discovered because Carter included her in a fiction anthology, and it was fascinating to see the connection between those two writers---and between Carrington and others like Rikki Ducornet. Because Carter was an influence on me, Carrington became an influence as well. (Who is Rikki Ducornet? If you don't know, I can't help you--google it.)You could, in fact, say that Carrington was an important link between surrealism and some types of modern fantasy---even if surrealism, like Decadent writing, remains less utilized today than it perhaps should be. You see glints and glimmers of that influence, but as with the contrasts drawn between the work of Mervyn Peake and J.R.R. Tolkien, surrealism represents, in some ways, the road less taken. (Others will argue that surrealism has been fully integrated into fantasy, to which I'd reply that may apply, but only to its arsenal, not to its heart or its politics.)Carrington is an under-appreciated writer. In genre circles, it's in part because she wrote most of her fiction decades ago but also in part because she's not identifiably a genre writer. Yesterday, Cheryl Morgan wrote eloquently about the invisibility of female writers. Well, a related phenomenon relegates writers not associated with genre imprints or the genre subculture to being a lesser part of the discussion---unless, of course, the writer in question courts the subculture, makes it clear s/he is actually part of the subculture in some way. This is the main reason why Michael Chabon is acceptable to the subculture but not Cormac McCarthy or Margaret Atwood.So we tend, at times, to separate and keep apart writers and fictions that share similarities and affiliations out of a kind of tribalism that swears fidelity to the idea of marketing categories over like-minded impulses. We make outcasts of writers who are, in fact, our siblings---and in doing so we can render invisible or marginalized what ought to be closer to the center of our thoughts. There's a whole essay in this subject, but I'll stop there for now.Today, the Amazon book blog posted my short appreciation of Carrington, which is informed at least in part by my and my wife's reading of her fiction for our anthology The Weird. To give you some idea of chronological context, here is how Carrington fits into our table of contents:

Clark Ashton Smith, “Genius Loci,” 1933Hagiwara Sakutoro, “The Town of Cats,” 1935Hugh Walpole, “The Tarn,” 1936Bruno Schulz, “The Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass,” 1937Robert Barbour Johnson, “Far Below,” 1939Leonora Carrington, “White Rabbits,” 1942Donald Wollheim, “Mimic,” 1942Fritz Leiber, “Smoke Ghost,” 1943Ray Bradbury, “The Crowd,” 1943William Sansom, “The Long Sheet,” 1944Olympe Bhely-Quenum, “A Child in the Bush of Ghosts,” 1950Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” 1950Shirley Jackson, “The Summer People,” 1950Margaret St. Clair, “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles” 1951

As I wrote in the feature, "I was particularly struck by Carrington’s willingness to let image dictate sense, and in doing so to get to an underlying truth rarely uncovered by surface logic. Such an approach requires confidence and a brilliant imagination. It also results in a kind of essential purity." Of course, the value of this will be lost to some, as we've largely metastasized into a plot-driven reading culture.So my question to blog readers is pretty simple: Do you remember Leonora Carrington, and in particular her writing? Please feel free to share whatever strikes you as relevant or interesting. Thanks.