This fierce fable of childbirth by German Surrealist Unica Zürn was
written after she had already given birth to two children and undergone
the self-induced abortion of another in Berlin in the 1950s. Beginning
in the relatively straightforward, if disturbing, narrative of a young
woman in a tower (with a bat in her hair and ravens for company) engaged
in a psychic war with the parasitic son in her belly, The Trumpets of
Jericho dissolves into a beautiful nightmare of hypnotic obsession and
mythical language, stitched together with anagrams and private
ruminations. Arguably Zürn's most extreme experiment in prose, and never
before translated into English, this novella dramatizes the frontiers of
the body--its defensive walls as well as its cavities and
thresholds--animating a harrowing and painfully, twistedly honest
depiction of motherhood as a breakdown in the distinction between self
and other, transposed into the language of darkest fairy tales.
Unica Zürn (1916-70) was born in Grünewald, Germany. Toward the end
of World War II, she discovered the realities of the Nazi concentration
camps--a revelation which was to haunt and unsettle her for the rest of
her life. After meeting Hans Bellmer in 1953, she followed him to Paris,
where she became acquainted with the Surrealists and developed the body
of drawings and writings for which she is best remembered: a series of
anagram poems, hallucinatory accounts and literary enactments of the
mental breakdowns from which she would suffer until her suicide in 1970.
