Acceso usuarios
Maria Esperanza Miranda Medina
In this article, I will analyze the autobiographical text Down Below that Leonora Carrington —English painter and writer who later became a naturalized Mexican citizen— narrated orally to Pierre Mabille, recounting her experience of confinement and madness. Through the surrealist symbols of the mirror and the map that the author borrows from Mabille, I will examine the two main parts of her experience: her journey, after the arrest of her lover Max Ernst, from Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche to Madrid, and her stay at a mental facility in Santander. In terms of her escape to Madrid, I will focus on how Carrington understands her body as the mirror of the world, reflecting and reacting to her surroundings. The reciprocal relationship between her body and the global crisis of World War II will reach its breaking point when the protagonist’s body is assaulted and, therefore, fragmented. Regarding her involuntary commitment at the institution, I will focus on how the use of space shapes her narration. Unlike the first part, the author thinks in terms of space by drawing a map of the sanatorium, where she represents herself in multiple places. This will trace a parallel route through which the narrator can understand her experience. The objective of my analysis is to understand how Carrington inverts the conventional use of the mirror and the map to create a narration capable of reflecting her disconcerting experience and simultaneously subverting the normative parameters of autobiography. The result is a completely sous-realist text that explores what lies beneath the real, placing the reader in the position of questioning his/her perception of the self and History.
