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