Sunday,

1978

<p><em>Student Essay for CWR 209 / ART 223 / COM 240 / GSS 277 Along the Edge: Leonora Carrington</em></p><p> <p> When I first encountered <em>Sunday</em>, I thought of a spaghetti western. The aspects of <em>Sunday</em> that lend themselves to this connection—chickens in a dusty, desolate room; the outline of a sombrero-wearing man crossing his arms in the doorway—belong to an American’s tourism in the storytelling world of Mexico. Printed in 1978, <em>Sunday </em>was already well into Carrington’s life in Mexico, and she had drunk its imagery deeply. She was more than a tourist and she was not an imperialist; rather, she celebrated the stories and people of the place that André Breton had called “surrealism itself.” The bizarre architecture of the room; the impossible shadows; the chicken with an aged human head—these elements root themselves in the dreamlike world of Latin American literature, an opus that is somehow located between the whimsical and the deeply cerebral. Carrington strikes this balance with the uncanny: one notices that the shadows are never “accurate,” but rather mixed or flipped. It is the defamiliarization of something as intimate as one’s own shadow that is a source of both terror and joy. To look at one’s shadow is to look into a mirror for the first time: the joyful moment the self and the self’s image detach.</p><p> <p>With Carrington, this detachment is a literal one across language. I, along with many other white Jews of my age and class, grew up speaking Spanish because of a Spanish-speaking baby sitter. We were raised on Latin American Spanish and its stories as we were separated from its cultures, its tragedies and its wealth. Carrington grew up with an Irish mother and nanny—but an Englishwoman herself, she returned again and again to her Irish roots and semi-apocryphal Roma ancestor. She sought after what had been sublimated.</p></p><p><p>Perhaps this quest motivates not only the presence of shadows in <em>Sunday</em> but their inversions as well. The sombreroed man takes up his own empty space; the chickens are strewn about where their shadow is like a fist; the chicken-woman or woman-chicken smiles at us from her wall; all of this to say, the shadows seem to cast the figures. It is not just the unconscious but the unsaid and the sublimated, the indigenous languages and their stories quashed by the Spanish- and English-speaking colonizers, that prop up the visible and the heard. The absolute terror the colonizer feels when confronted with his colonized subject’s past—and the joyful resistance of the colonized. In my personal case, it is the Spanish-speaking murmur in the very back of my head, underneath the English, and the Quechua behind that, the Quechua that is off-limits to me, that I return to again and again. But all one finds is more empty spaces, more lacunae, more shadows. </p></p><p> <em>Marc Schorin, Princeton Class of 2022</em></p></p>