Chapter 15 - Animals and Ecology in the Surrealist Novel

Summary

Surrealism’s disdain for Western civilization has increasingly come to encompass its mistreatment of animals and the environment. The surrealist critique of the exploitation and domination of other species and the planet frequently recognizes the way in which these are bound up with repression along the lines of both gender and epistemology. This chapter examines how two novels by women surrealists from different generations thematize the nexus of environmental destruction, animal exploitation, and the triumphal march of scientistic rationalism. The British-born, naturalized Mexican artist and writer Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974) and the American artist and writer Rikki Ducornet’s Phosphor in Dreamland (1995) are caustic, humorous, and wildly adventurous interrogations of ecological catastrophes and conjurations of new modes of being that may be able to counteract them. This chapter reads The Hearing Trumpet and Phosphor in Dreamland in relation to a broader surrealist critique of environmental destruction and exploitation, and as at one and the same time eulogies of extinction and tributes to the magical potential of transformation.