A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning's Chasm

Catriona McAra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315390567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

In A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning 's Chasm, Catriona McAra offers the first critical study of the literary work of the celebrated American painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012). McAra fills a major gap in the scholarship, repositioning Tanning's writing at the centre of her entire creative oeuvre and focusing on a little-known short story "Abyss, " a gothic-flavoured, desert adventure which Tanning worked on intermittently throughout her creative life, finally publishing it in 2004 as Chasm: A Weekend.

McAra performs a major reassessment of the visual and literary principles upon which the surrealist movement was initially founded. Combining a groundbreaking methodological approach with reference to cultural theory and feminist aesthetics as well as Tanning's unpublished journals and notes, McAra reveals Tanning as a key player in contemporary art practice as well as in the historical surrealist milieu.

1Unpacking Tanning’s library

“If there was anything at all that troubled my certain destiny as a painter, it was the Galesburg Public Library…”

– Dorothea Tanning (1986)¹

Figure 1.1 Dorothea Tanning, Premier péril (First Peril) from Les 7 périls spectraux (The Seven Spectral Perils), 1950. Lithograph, 36.8 × 27.6 cm.

Literary nostalgia and intertextual practice

Tanning’s persistent rewriting of her novel Chasm surely finds its foundations in her childhood obsession with literature. In ‘Unpacking My Library’ (1931), Walter Benjamin discusses his book-collecting hobby, and articulates the collector’s “dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order.”² Similarly, Georges Perec points out: “A library that is not arranged becomes disarranged,” and he likens the process to the geological phenomenon of “entropy.”³ Such tension underlies Tanning’s novel. An in-depth excavation of a novella like Chasm might best begin by quarrying its author’s own literary interests. In 1927, three years after the inauguration of the surrealist movement in Paris, sixteen-year-old Dotty Tanning was working as a library assistant in the small town of Galesburg, Illinois, reading the books whose titles, narratives, and characters would later shape her art and literature, and propel her towards surrealist techniques, especially juxtaposition, a conflation of disparate realities, and an infusion of the literary fantastic. This idea is further represented in Tanning’s paintings such as Portefeuille (Pocketbook) (1946), Fatala (1947), and lithograph Premiere Peril (First Peril) (1950), which each feature the recurrent image of a child-woman feeling her way into knowledge represented through the book cover as door.

This chapter lays the literary and tactical foundations for the emergence of Tanning’s novel and related visual oeuvre, with the local library of her childhood serving as the bedrock for her literary desires, fortified still further by her association with the avant-garde. I argue that her reading practice as an adolescent fuelled her use of artistic quotation in Chasm and beyond. I begin with an exploration of her hometown library as a collage of her literary interests, before repositioning Tanning within the context of modernism (and postmodernism), showing how her commitment to literary art emerged against the odds, and how surrealism helped her view painting and sculpture as texts. Here the bibliographic is metaphorically stratigraphic; the pages of a book are stratified, as are the lines on a page. As Tanning used the library to prompt her visual work, in turn her visual narratives became a collective museum or visual repository for the continual re-envisaging of her novel.

Figure 1.2 Postcard of Galesburg Public Library, 14 × 9 cm.

Commissioned by the Scottish philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), and built in 1902, Galesburg’s municipal library was located on Simmons Street, with the names of white male literary giants Homer, Vergil, Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, Darwin, Dante, and Aristotle inscribed on its stones. Like many of America’s Carnegie libraries, Galesburg’s conformed to the sturdy, monumental, neo-classical style of architecture, purposely built for public accessibility and annual expansion.⁴ It became the site of Tanning’s “corruption,”⁵ an erotic and exhilarating labyrinth of stacks – a secret lair she could mine. Susan Stewart reminds us that the book itself is a metaphor for such eroticised stratigraphy – the pages arranged in layers with a wealth of literary treasures to be discovered between them.⁶ Methodologically, access to those primary documents and the exact editions which Tanning would have read has long since been compromised. On the 9 May 1958, at approximately 7.30 p.m., Galesburg Public Library suffered a devastating fire, the building and its contents perishing in the flames.⁷ Miraculously no one was hurt, but most of the population of Galesburg turned out to watch the tragedy unfold. Tanning recalls her relief that she was not there in person to witness the obliteration of her adolescent refuge.⁸ At least, her extensive autobiographical writings begin to fill in many of the gaps for the researcher unable to access the extinct library resource itself.

Tanning was interested in literature from an early age, no doubt due to the rise in popularity of the illustrated gift book and new forms of colour printing which were contemporaneous with her birth and childhood from 1910 onwards.⁹ A cursory look over her autobiographical writings reveals that she was a very well-read individual, and her many lists of cultural touchstones are potentially revealing when it comes to interpreting her work. On several occasions Tanning listed her favourite writers, illustrators, and book titles:

Every day sees her at the public library, as employee. There she makes some friends: Lewis Carroll, Madame d’Aulnoy, Andersen, Oscar Wilde. And the pictures! Tenniel, Rackham, Parrish, Beardsley. A year later, promotion to the adult section, second floor; a veritable escapade, reading. The Red Lily, Mademoiselle de Maupin, Salammbô, Madame Bovary, all read in Galesburg, Illinois at the library […] Poe, Coleridge, de Quincy, Dowson […] The Brontës, Radcliffe, Walpole…¹⁰

Her uses of some of these novels and their authors are discussed in greater depth below. Another list appears in her first book-length autobiography: “Erewhon, Leaves of Grass, Tristram Shandy, The Scarlet Letter, The Red Lily – dozens and dozens of them,”¹¹ in turn added to yet another list in her second book-length autobiography and described as “those spellbinding revelations, those delicious hymns to decadence.”¹² Elsewhere again, she notes the secretive act of reading, and questions what it might mean for interpretations of her work to admit that at age sixteen she read the horror fiction and ghost stories of Welsh writer Arthur Machen.¹³ A hunger for the subversive is apparent in her reading preferences: “We can become fond of, nay, dependent on, Kafka who found our cracked mirror under the bed; we can gorge ourselves on Nabokov and sober up with Trollope.”¹⁴

In plumbing the historiography on Tanning, existing scholarship has often found it necessary to touch on her literary interests in order to understand the sources for her enigmatic visual narratives. John Russell captures the sense of belated escapism which the reading of library books gave Tanning:

For the first time she experienced to the full something of which circumstances had largely deprived her; the imaginative thrust of childhood. From Tenniel to Arthur Rackham, the illustrated books of the [nineteenth] and early [twentieth] century suggested to her that the only true life is the life of the poetic imagination. They also suggested to her that the best pictures are the ones that tell stories […] reparation lay not only in the precocious perusal of Erewhon and Salammbô and The Scarlet Letter but in the many imaged classics of the English imagination, with their assurance that life could be quite other than it was lived in Galesburg…¹⁵

Figure 1.3 Max Ernst, ‘Max Ernst’s Favorite Poets and Painters of the Past’ in View Magazine, Special Max Ernst Edition, edited by Charles Henri Ford, Series II, No. 1 (April 1942): pp. 14–15. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016.

Max Ernst similarly revealed his literary and artistic sources, most notably in ‘Max Ernst’s Favorite Poets and Painters of the Past’ in his special issue of View magazine (April, 1942).¹⁶ Arranged on either side of a double-page spread, poets on the left, painters on the right, he seems to be declaring the intermedial “parallels in words and pictures,” which Tanning would later touch upon in her critical essay of 1989. The page as a compact exhibition space is important here. Ernst’s lists of names are scattered across each page in a playful variety of typographic fonts and text sizes, perhaps denoting their relative importance to him.¹⁷ On both pages, there is an interesting juxtaposition between modern and historical figures, ranging from the canonical to the more obscure. Later Tanning wrote a short essay discussing Ernst’s extensive collection of books and what they meant to him, claiming that he “began to re-read the books of his youth around 1965,”¹⁸ incidentally the same year in which the bulk of Chasm is set. Entitled Worlds in Miniature: Max Ernst and His Books (1983), Tanning suggests that the format of the book itself opens onto a microcosmic domain, no doubt encouraging the kind of imaginative landscapes encountered in their paintings. Again Tanning’s talismanic image of the young girl escaping into a literary domain, in the manner of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in the hall of doors, is noteworthy (see p.28). Elsewhere, Tanning highlights the language barrier between her English and Ernst’s German books, meaning “only the French ones were shared.”¹⁹ Without overstating the dialogue with Ernst, such sharing of books is important to acknowl...