Unica Zürn, The Man of Jasmine & Other Texts, Trans. by Malcolm Green (Atlas Press, 1994)
"In 1970, Unica Zürn, the companion and lover of the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, threw herself from the sixth floor window of their apartment in Paris. Her suicide was the culmination of thirteen years of mental crises which are described with disarming lucidity in
The Man Of Jasmine, subtitled
Impressions from a Mental Illness.
Zürn’s mental collapse was initiated when she encountered in the real world her childhood fantasy figure “the man of jasmine”: he was the writer Henri Michaux, and her meeting him plunged her into a world of hallucination in which visions of her desires, anxieties and events from her unresolved past overwhelmed her present life. Her return to “reality” was constantly interrupted by alternate visionary and depressive periods. Zürn’s compelling narrative also reveals her uneasy relationship with words and language, which she attempted to resolve by the compulsive writing of anagrams. Anagrams allowed her to dissect the language of everyday, to personalise it, and to make it reveal hidden at its core astonishing messages, threats and evocations. They formed the basis of her interpretation of the split between her inner & outer lives and underpin the texts included in this selection
The Man of Jasmine is certainly one of the greatest descriptions of mental collapse, but it is much more. Zürn’s familiarity with Surrealist conceptions of the psyche, and her extraordinary self-possession during the most alarming experiences are allied to vivid descriptive powers which make this a literary as well as a psychological masterpiece."
Unica Zürn, Dark Spring, Trans. by Caroline Rupprecht (Exact Change, 2008)
"
Dark Spring is an autobiographical coming-of-age novel that reads more like an exorcism than a memoir. In it author Unica Zurn traces the roots of her obsessions: The exotic father she idealized, the "impure" mother she detested, the masochistic fantasies and onanistic rituals which she said described "the erotic life of a little girl based on my own childhood." Dark Spring is the story of a young girl's simultaneous introduction to sexuality and mental illness, revealing a different aspect of the "mad love" so romanticized by the (predominantly male) Surrealists. Unica Zurn (1916-1970) emigrated in 1953 from her native Berlin to Paris in order to live with the artist Hans Bellmer. There she exhibited drawings as a member of the Surrealist group and collaborated with Bellmer on a series of notorious photographs of her nude torso bound with string. In 1957, a fateful encounter with the poet and painter Henri Michaux led to the first of what would become a series of mental crises, some of which she documented in her writings. She committed suicide in 1970--an act foretold in this, her last completed work."
"Preadolescent sexuality merges with depressive fantasy - to devastating (if ineffably morbid) effect in this once-notorious novel by a German writer and artist (1916–70) who, like this novel's young protagonist, took her own life shortly after its (1967) publication. She's a nameless suburban girl who's provoked, by her slovenly mother's indifference, her beloved father's long absences from home, and her own claustrophobic self-absorption, into masturbatory daydreams and tentative baby steps toward adult sexual expression. The story's (expertly caught) tone and rhythm are indeed hypnotic (though one nowhere senses the complexity attributed to it by translator Rupprecht's labored introduction), and Zürn caps it with a marvelously bleak, brisk final scene. Unusual and memorable fiction." -
Kirkus Reviews"One of the things that always troubled me about the fascination with madness and the intertwined eroticism and death that always pervaded the Romantic and Surrealistic sensibilities was that they were almost always expressed by people who seemed to be celebrating those things without having known their cost in personal suffering. I’m not trying to apply some kind of politically-correct standard to the appreciation of such works, just pointing out that while some were idolizing the dark underbelly of the human psyche, others were helpless to it, and found nothing remotely romantic about the experience.
Unica Zürn seems to have been one of the victims. From 1953 until her death in 1970 she was close to one of the most important Surrealists, Hans Bellmer, living with him in Paris and posing for some of his notoriously disturbing pictures. She came to become dependent on him, and not long after he was hospitalized for a stroke and broke off their relationship (he believed he could no longer care for her in his condition), she threw herself out of the window of the sixth-story apartment they shared. She had been suffering from her own decline for some time: not long after meeting fellow artist Henri Michaux in 1957, she began to experience one shattering episode of mental upset after another that culminated in her self-destruction.
Michaux himself played a central part in these breakdowns: there was something about him which reminded her of a childhood fantasy that she had entertained, and his presence fueled the writing of two works:
The Man of Jasmine, most explicitly about the Michaux-image, and
Dark Spring. The latter has been described as a kind of erotic autobiography: a portrait of the artist as a young girl, and also a young corpse. Zürn killed herself not long after writing it, and in a manner so strongly redolent of the death of the girl within it that it became hard to see the story as little more than a kind of fictionalized suicide note. And yet at the same time it is more than that: it can be read entirely outside of the context of her life, and it has a stark power that stays with you even when removed from that context.
What makes it work, oddly enough, is that it is a remarkably short and compact story — barely 115 pages of large type — but the details that make up the story are so sharp and well-chosen that there scarcely seems to be anything more to add. It presents us with the life, and death, of a young girl — barely pubescent but with an erotic haze suffusing everything in her life, including her obsessive devotion to her father. Her mother is insufferable; her brother subjects her to various sexual torments and eventually rapes her; gradually, she recedes inwards and finds greater satisfaction in fantasy worlds than in her daily life. The fantasies themselves reek of depravity and torment — but at least a kind of depravity and torment that are of her own creation.
When she finally does turn her erotic obsessions back outwards, they fixate on a handsome young man — an adult, where she is still really only a child to the rest of the world — whom she encounters at a public swimming pool. There is nothing outwardly sinister about him, but again, he is an adult, and she is not, and from that comes a wall that she finds impossible to surmount. And from that rebuff her thoughts turn inwards once again, to find what consummation she can in fantasies of enacting her death for real. The last scene in the book has been widely compared to Zürn’s own suicide, although she seemed less to be “rehearsing” anything than admitting she was helpless in the face of what was, in her mind, a foregone conclusion about her life.
If the book is so relentlessly bleak and ends on such a phenomenally closed-ended and nihilistic note, why read it at all? For one, the compactness of the story alone makes it into quite an achievement: it’s a little exhilarating to see Zürn pack so much about her character into so few words, to make one sentence do the work of a paragraph, and to evoke this girl so sharply without needing more space than she does. The other reason is more general than that: we might want to read such things for the same reasons that people are compelled to write them — because places like this do exist within us, and if someone can not only talk about them but do justice to them, then the results are aesthetically exhilarating even if they imply ghastly things. That was after all a large component of what the Surrealist mission was: to dive into the unconscious, rescue the things that might normally be thrown away by the waking mind, and make them into the substance of their art. What makes
Dark Spring so hard to put out of mind is that it shows Zürn diving into her dreamworld and coming up with nothing less than her own cenotaph." -
Serdar 
Unica Zürn, The House of Illnesses, Trans. by Malcolm Green (Atlas Press, )
"A remarkable illustrated text produced during one of the author’s stays in a mental institution.
After a childhood which she describes as “wonderful,” a 7 year marriage and the birth of her two children, a carreer at the Ufa film studios in her home town Berlin when she also began to write and paint, Unica Zürn’s life changed abruptly following a series of chance meetings with the painter Hans Bellmer in 1953. She left at once for Paris with Bellmer, who had already established himself in Surrealist circles there. He encouraged her to make automatic drawings and to write the anagram poems which later brought her much acclaim. Although the two lived together in growing isolation from their outside surroundings, Bellmer introduced Zürn to many of his contemporaries: Brauner, Arp, Man Ray, Ernst, Waldberg, and above all Henri Michaux. This meeting precipitated the mental illness that was to hound the last thirteen years of her life, Zürn believed him to be the incarnation of a childhood fantasy figure, which she described lated in The Man of Jasmine: “A few days later she experiences the first miracle in her life: in a room in Paris she finds herself standing before the Man of Jasmine. The shock of this encounter is so great that she is unable to overcome it. From this day on she begins, very very slowly, to lose her reason.”
The House of Illnesses was written shortly after this meeting, during a bout of fever induced by jaundice. It was originally included in the book The Man of Jasmine but without the illustrations which accompany it here. With its sometimes wistful, sometimes humourous and ultimately hopeful mood, this text contrasts strongly with many of the other texts in that book, which bear harrowing testimony to her mental crises and her dizzying descent into her own self and a world of hallucinated images."
"The last "notes" of German author and painter Unica Zurn, written in 1970 some months before her suicide, confront the "family curse." Already in childhood she seemed to know that she too would end her life like her mad uncle Fallada and her adored stepmother Orla Holm. Writing, in "The Whiteness with the Red Spot" (1958*), "This life has not become my life," she formulated a motif of both her drawing and writing. Her autobiographical texts are never written in the first person, but always in the third. Like a camera, she takes a picture of her actions, writes about herself as though about some nameless, enigmatic, other woman. Always loyal to the inner difference between "I" and "she," Zurn never attempted to smooth over her strange, singular distance regarding herself and her life. "Impressions From a Mental Illness," an account of her illness and sojourns in psychiatric hospitals published in 1967, is recorded in the tone of a distanced witness. At the same time, she claimed not to have written one sentence that did not correspond to her life. In the end, in 1970, she wrote: "How poor has her life become" (5:19). At this point, after the separation from Hans Bellmer, her companion since 1953, and after she decided to separate from a life that had become resolutely aimless, she nevertheless seemed to catch a glimpse of the possibility of a final breakthrough. Faced with a self-imposed deadline of several months, she succeeded in producing a narrative that broke with her former concept and proceeded to follow another order, one born of poverty. She goes back to untold coordinates in a language that documents her ever-beckoning erasure. The last notes, which leave off with her voluntary death, before extension and interweaving could take over, reveal memory to be a seldom functioning machine that, faced with a deadline, wants to tell the untold in the form of intransitive images. These images seek to cross over into oblivion or toward the prospect of yet being experienced in the future.
Zurn's body of work opens up the interior of a perceptual system of madness. The texts are located at an intersection, a point of transfer. Madness becomes the supplier of literature, literature transports madness. Both drawings and texts show the "image processes" (Zurn) or hallucinations haunting her. "I'm haunted as though I were the only home for something unknown" (4/1:36). It is not she who writes or draws, as images "stream in" or "arise" (4/1:53). A dictation she feels compelled to take down circumvents "sublimated elaboration" (Kristeva). For Zurn, some thing or other--what Lacan calls extimacy ("extimite," a foreign body, composed of what is intimate)--seems to take charge in the missing place of authorship and sublimation. She is remote-controlled and the rote observer of a delirium that runs on ahead like a movie. She writes down what can be caught. The notes resist, as pure record, the inaccessibility of madness.
There can be no doubt, however, that madness has a method. Even the smallest task becomes cryptography.
'
She asks the daughter to get the box with the money
and to count the money; she herself is not able. One
looks at her in amazement. In the meantime the nurse
comes back and she goes into the kitchen and looks at
the enormous, fat leeks rising up from a casserole
dish that's too small, in which there is only a little
water. This meal will never be ready and she feels herself
incapable of cutting the vegetable into pieces. This problem
grows so monstrous and is so unsolvable that she, overwhelmed
by vertigo, goes back to the bedroom, starts to stagger and falls
to the ground.' (5:93)
In other words, changes of dimension foreground inconspicuous things. The world of things spreads out. Proportions distort themselves in a surreal way. The transformation of material reality serves to close the narrator off from her surroundings.
The texts preceding her last notes move along the edge of a psychotic discourse, and can be described, following Kristeva's Pouvoirs de l'horreurs (1980), as speech based on foreclosure, the virulence of which dislocates the opposition between consciousness and the unconscious. "The unconscious contents remain locked out here but in a bizarre manner: not radical enough to allow a solid differentiation between subject and object and not with sufficient selectivity for the unfolding of a position of defense, refusal, but also sublimating elaboration. The contents, which are normally unconscious for the neurotic, become explicit now."
Madness constantly deciphers itself within a realm of unintelligibility. Although Zurn's writing and drawing border conceptually on automatic writing and drawing, she nevertheless also developed a certain competence for selection. Cutouts of inner images are edited from a continuum we will never get to know. A natural metonymy is replaced with an artificial montage. With the montage, there appears attribution of meanings. But no pure, immediate mimesis results, but rather a simulation and translation of inner "image processes." Zurn's alleged female "non-authorship"--the conversation of another agency through her, the dictation of her illness--is also a rhetorical trick that is supposed to withhold from the reader the difference between madness and literature. Madness is neither told from the perspective of rationalism nor does it speak with its own voice. As the manuscripts show, there are decisions made in advance, revisions, deletions, several versions, as well as a general orientation toward the program of surrealism. Regarding the best pages, one gets the impression of an unfolding signifying chain, a mad externalization of memory, without any obstacle getting in the way.
In contrast to Zurn's best-known texts from the 1950s and '60s (The Witches' Texts, the "Anagrams," and The Man of Jasmine), the last notes perform a realization of separation. Zurn seems in the end to break with the surrealist concept of a blending of boundaries between madness and reality. The prospect of their amalgamation has been withdrawn. The posthumously published leftovers bear the marks of a violent erasure that will not be ignored. Whatever is able to grab us as hallucination, promise, fiction, has vanished. With the separation from Bellmer, her "other" or "symptom," and with the decision at the same time to end her life, the (Lacanian) real as the nothing of the other becomes manifest, one of whose signs is the separation of tenses and times. Present, past, and future, which were once used interchangeably in the world of hallucination, are assigned different places. It is this process of separating out that distinguishes the last notes from all preceding texts. Now the emptiness can be represented, not sublimated. The former delusion of signification, which functioned to screen this emptiness, leaves off. What is registered now is what was missing before: the empty reality that is no longer modulated by any fiction or alienation. But in Zurn's late, nearly dispassionate narrative style, which departs both from the art of interpretation and from madness, there remains a kind of consolation.
They smoke - the smoke becomes thicker and thicker around them. The surroundings disappear, only their two pale, tired faces are still visible. Suddenly they are the only two remaining in this world of pain. Nobody is there - the house, the world - everything is emptied out, gone are the living and the dead. An endless solitude and probably an eternal night without a morning to follow. They are silent and smoke. It is deathly still in the house, in the world. What sadness life - what solitude - death. (5:229)
She has left the space of madness and accepted instead the place of the dead.
In the process she comes up with divisions that she had previously rejected. She cuts her life into pieces--her time in Paris, her time in Berlin, her encounter with Bellmer - and attempts to maintain a simple verbal construction of life and time. She resists the dictation of madness, the hallucinations and paralysis, and permits herself access to individual memories, which, once again but from a different standpoint, refer back to the origins of her system of madness.
The last fragments return to particular situations in her life that signified an original break. A few untold memory-images detach themselves from the emptiness that encloses the memories. With the deadline, tightening condensation sets in. "At the end of one's life"--as Benjamin writes in "The Storyteller" (1936)--"a sequence of pictures is set into motion, unfolding views of oneself, in which one has, without knowing it, encountered oneself." Benjamin conceived the emergence of memory-images as a form of "self-encounter." "To the highest degree, it bears the stamp of the critical, dangerous moment" (
Gesammelte Schriften, II:449).
Without question, the memory of the sight of a five-month-old "embryo" is this image of horror. In the early 1960s, after a series of failed attempts to abort the far too developed fetus, a physician in Berlin gives her "a box of quinine."
'
At the climax of pain, she goes to the
toilet and gives birth at this sad place to
a big embryo. No blood flows. She holds
with horror and at the same time with
admiration this unfinished being in her
hand that looks like a very old, nearly
Aztecan object. Horrible picture how
this solemn and strange-looking being
sinks into the darkness of stinking,
subterranean canals.' (5:89)
What is nearly impossible for her to narrate - the unnamable violence against bodies--comes to be told in one of the last possible moments. The dynamics of the writing process is, in the end, a "retouching" of irreversible separations, here in sight of the "incomplete," "solemn and foreign-looking being." In the end she seems to cease merely receiving dictation and works with her own suffering, grants it discourse. No longer in an autoerotic or self-enclosed way as during the phases of recording hallucinations, her discourse reaches another type of image, another psychic layer. It seizes a moment of crisis and emphasizes the separating line as a leftover set aside for writing.
For Zurn, there is one motif that always returns. It refers back to the origin of her system of delusion in her most fundamental operation: the splitting apart of face and body. In the context of her individual mythology, she dates or mystifies the "beginning" of her system of madness back to the fixation on the "solemn and foreign-looking," yet beautiful face of a man. She calls this apparition the "man of jasmine." The first time she sees him, in a "vision," she is six years old, and she will go on encountering him again and again, now in a movie (Jean-Louis Barrault in the 1945 film Les enfants du paradis), now in reality: it is the face of Bellmer, the face she follows to Paris. As she remarks, she has grown ever more like this face herself. In "Dark Spring" (1967), Zurn relates how she, as a twelve-year-old girl, eats the photograph of a young man to keep the grownups from discovering it.
"She puts the photograph in her mouth, chews it up carefully and swallows it" (4.2:199). She incorporates the man as her imaginary double image. Bellmer followed this curve:
"She carries the picture of Hans in her eyes, ears, hair, and in her body and in her soul: he was omnipresent to her - she was under his spell - wherever she walked" (5:126).
In Paris, she meets the mystery man also in the incarnation of Henri Michaux: "
Later she experiences the first miracle of her life: in a room in Paris, she faced the man of jasmine. The shock of this meeting was so powerful that she could not recover from it. From that day on, she begins ever so slowly to lose her mind" (4.1). It is a face associated with something inscrutable, an image with a staying power that can't be exhausted. As Benjamin once put it, "
For everyone there exists an image over which the whole world disappears... for how many does it arise out of an old box of toys?" (
Gesammelte Schriften, III:132). The evocation of many images gives way to their condensation in one inscrutable image that replaces all the others and lets them go. The mystery of the face in Zurn's poetic system--twice identified as a "Chinese face" (4.2:188) -signals the narrator's preferred mode of love: adoration, love at a distance, that of the bodiless kind. The man of jasmine is paralyzed; he sits in a wheelchair. His image always arises in a specific constellation that repeats itself in a nearly somnambulist manner. The mask of the esoteric love is a screen image, a screen memory, which points to something behind it or invisibly connected to it. "Object" and "abject" are inextricably entwined. On the first page of
The Man of Jasmine, the narrator, immediately before mentioning the "vision," recounts a dream involving a well-known surrealist motif: the dreaming woman walks through a mirror on the wall. She passes through and finally stands in front of a table. On the table is a small white card. "As she picks up the card to read the name on it, she wakes up" (4.1:137). The dreamer knows that there is a name written on the card, but this name, this attribute, stays inaccessible to her. The decipherment fails. Shortly afterwards, we read:
'
Filled this morning with an inexplicable loneliness, she enters her
mother's room in order to get into her bed and return, if possible,
to the place where she came from--so as to see nothing more.
Suddenly, a mountain of lukewarm flesh, enclosing this woman's
impure spirit, rolls over on the horrified child, and she flees
forever from the mother, the woman, the spider! She is deeply
wounded. 'The next sentence:
'Then her vision appears to her for the first time: the man of jasmine! Never-ending consolation! Sighing with relief, she sits down opposite him and studies him. He is paralyzed. What luck! He never leaves his seat in the garden where the jasmine blooms even in wintertime.'The violation of boundaries identified with the mother immediately precedes the first appearance of the hallucination. From this point onward, the "screen" with the face of the other will always be called up whenever an unbinding of affects breaks through the protective layers. The visual sense protects against the memory of the body and the affects it holds in store. The "face" occupies the threshold between image space and body space, and splits them apart. The screen solution is activated whenever there is a repetition of the sense of being overwhelmed. Although the two scenes always follow one another, the gap between them and their necessary connection is suspended, disassociated. There is no passage to the zero degree of meaning. Through the symbol of the face, the text gains a figure, a facade--and hides a radical moment of loss, the eclipse of signification.
One of Zurn's psychiatrists, Rabain, who worked at St. Anne in Paris, remarks likewise:
"Violent breaking into a body, which is under attack by a bizarre object, invested with intolerable emotions - an obscene and dangerous object like the mother tongue." The transgression, traced by the protagonist to her sixth year, destroys and contaminates the body's frontiers - at the level of incest - and becomes the catalyst for biography, work, and the system of delusion. One will never know if this scene is the "origin" of schizophrenia or already part of the system of madness (as an inner image). Traumatization is often missing its origin in time. One finds oneself constantly before or after the beginning. What happens, or is said to, can also always be a consequence, and again a consequence of consequences, until the chain loses itself in the horizon of the "too early." Even if the violation, as reported in the text, took place "in the sixth year," it is already mediatized in passing through the memory. And so the question remains: how could this event take on such importance, such doggedness?
For her, there remains the saving clause of a distant father, who travels a great deal. The adoration of an inscrutable face remains in her imagination, like the body bound to a wheelchair, unchangeably situated in the same place, in white jasmine. A delegate of the father without a body, someone whose face counts for her - who cannot leave her, dependent as he is, like herself, on assistance--becomes the model of love she holds up to the diffuse body of the mother, a model that won't permit the regression. This image is always called forth whenever a return to the merger with the mother's body, which has never completely broken away, takes place. The advantage of this inner splitting is that another solution doesn't have to take place: the slow, step-by-step separation from the mother. The connection as well as the break with her couldn't be integrated; the mother survives, internalized, as an overpowering, contaminated being, as the one who dictates. The logic of this traumatic "break-in" determines the quality of Zurn's psychiatric institutionalizations. In the hospitals she is surrounded by the polymorphous-perverse female bodies she always described in her texts about her hospital stays, and which she drew (with Chinese ink) as overlapping, interchangeable bodies. The hospitals connect her atmospherically with the unconscious image of the mother. The corridors are lined with the openings of a memory-less memory. In one of the last letters to Herta Hausmann (May 1970), she writes from Chesnailles: "
Weather fine - [in French] as for me, the melancholy resulting from that dismal sojourn in the belly of Helene Helly-Zurn, my mother, still remains ..." (5:263). She spends her last ten years divided between two places or scenes, the contour-less, regressive place of the mother (Wittenau, St. Anne, Maison Blanche, Chesnailles) and Bellmer's Parisian apartment, home to one of the many bearers of the "Chinese face."
The singular image of this face would seem to be without history. That would be its protective function. But the texts show that the timelessness of the face is marked from the beginning by withdrawal. It is the discrete sign of the destruction and of the wish for destruction that has inscribed itself in Zurn's body. Overwhelming, excessive, overlapping, never graspable by the one thus seized, the body is disturbed or destroyed at its borders, which never seem functional or protective. To the very end, Unica Zurn's memoirs (for which she contrived the neologism "Memorien") represent a solitary attempt to re-inscribe her own bodily contours with repetition, narration, and drawing--but the countervailing forces were so much stronger." -
Rike Felka
Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma, & Jacques Vaché, 4 Dada Suicides; Trans. by Terry Hale, Paul Lenti, Iain White, &c.. Introduced by Roger Conover, Terry Hale, & Paul Lenti (Atlas Press, 1995)
