Anagram play meets psychic crisis in Unica Zürn's acclaimed Surrealist
document of mental precarity
In the 25 years since Atlas Press first published this account by Unica
Zürn (1916-70) of her long history of mental crises, she has come to be
recognized as a great artist at least the equal of her partner, the
Surrealist Hans Bellmer. Yet her work is barely comprehensible without
the texts printed here--now revised by translator Malcolm Green--in
which she demonstrates how Surrealist conceptions of the psyche allowed
her to welcome the most alarming experiences as offering access to an
inner existence that was the vital source for her artistic output.
Green's introduction to this volume was the first study to consider her
life and work from this perspective.
Zürn's first mental collapse was initiated when she encountered her
fantasy figure, "the Man of Jasmine," in the person of the writer and
artist Henri Michaux. This meeting plunged her into a hallucinatory
world in which visions of her desires, anxieties and events from her
unresolved past overwhelmed her present life. Her greatest works were
produced during times of mental crisis, often when confined in asylums,
and she tended to encourage the onset of these crises in order to
provoke intense creativity. Her description of these episodes reveals
how language itself was part of the divinatory method that could aid her
recovery or predict a new crisis. Her compulsion for composing anagrams
allowed her to release from everyday language an astonishing flood of
messages, threats and evocations. This method, and Zürn's eloquent yet
direct style, make this book a literary masterpiece, while providing a
rare insight into extreme psychological states.
