Leonora Carrington

This article analyses Leonora Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet through the lenses of autotextuality, mise en abyme, and recursion. Inspired by the poetics of Radosvet Kolarov, the study traces how recurring visual and narrative elements construct a self-reflexive structure in which each new meaning emerges through the transformation of already familiar motifs. Mise en abyme functions not only as a device for embedding a story within a story, but also as a mechanism for unsettling the boundaries between different layers of the text, while recursive structures generate a fractal sense of a world that continuously creates itself. In this context, The Hearing Trumpet is approached as a microcosm of Carrington’s broader autotextual practice, evident across both her literary and visual works. The study argues that repetition in Carrington’s oeuvre is not mechanical but productive—a form of discursive desire through which texts unfold new meanings and interrelations.

The current paper aims to point out three points of intersection between the gothic tradition and surrealist art by drawing comparisons between some of the works of Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo and some key gothic fiction traits. The work of Max Ernst is represented by his three collage novels, while the text also focuses on Leonora Carrington’s fiction and some of Remedios Varo’s paintings. The paper examines the ways in which the three artists’ works relate to reality and dream and how the convergence of the two states forms surreality. The relationship between reality and surreality is examined through the lens of alchemy, madness and mystification, which are inseparable parts of the work of Ernst, Carrington and Varo, as well as key elements of the gothic cannon. Additional examples are drawn from the works of Vítězslav Nezval and China Miéville.