On her birthday in May 1962, Kati Horna took a series of
photographs of Edward James in the Francis Hotel in Mexico City.
The images depict a slightly dishevelled looking James, wearing a
brocade dressing gown in a rather dimly-lit room, festooned with
what appear to be electricity cables that pass into or behind large
glasses, some of which contain fish. This scene of introspection
and claustrophobia contrasts sharply with better-known photographs
of James in Mexico that situate him, frequently surrounded by
macaws and full sunshine, in the lush undergrowth and elaborate
structures of his gardens in Xiltla.[1]
One photograph from Horna's series was used to illustrate an
account James wrote of his visionary experiences whilst taking
hallucinogenic mushrooms on a hot August evening, his fiftieth
birthday, in a hotel room in Mexico City in 1957. This was
published in the seventh and final issue of the little magazine
S.NOB (October 1962), edited by the Mexican film-producer,
writer and translator, Salvador Elizondo. In this image James
crouches in the lower-left of the photograph, head bowed and eyes
downcast, with his hand resting on a piece of furniture as though
for support. The radical little magazine S.NOB featured an
eclectic portfolio of interests, including literature, music, film,
photography, ethnography, and science fiction, drawn from
transnational sources across the twentieth-century, which were
pressed into the service of invigorating a Mexican avant-garde that
ran counter to discourses of cultural nationalism in the early
1960s. S.NOB seems, perhaps, an unlikely forum for James
to be affiliated with, yet he and Horna are listed as members of
the editorial committee for this special issue devoted to exploring
narcotics. James also provided financial support for the issue,
perhaps one of the 'fortuitous circumstances' alluded to in the
editorial, which enabled the magazine's unexpected release as well
allowing the editor to entertain plans, albeit unrealised, for
subsequent publications.[2]
James's text is multimodal, intertextual, and self-consciously
syncretic in its recourse to a variety of visual and verbal
sources, both high and low, new and old, that help him make sense
of his visionary experiences. He specifies that 'most of the
hallucinations had worn a definitely Renaissance or pre-Renaissance
guise', referring to two works by Arcimboldo in his collection,
Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Breughel, as well as to Andrea Mantegna's
The Lamentation of the Dead Christ (c.1475-8), whose
technique of foreshortening he recalls when speculating on his
awareness of the apparently vast distance between his head and his
toes.[3] But Surrealism is also called upon, post-facto, to provide
visual corollaries for his visions. Horna's photograph was one of
several images accompanying James's account, which included two
drawings by Leonora Carrington and one by Jose Horna. Horna's
drawing of elongated legs provided another figuration of James's
sense of dislocation from his feet. Rather than use foreshortening
like Mantegna, whose example constitute one of the 'earliest' and
'greatest achievements in perspective' according to James, Horna
adopts an elevated vantage point so that the sketch of the
extraordinarily long limbs and the waving lines they bisect
resemble the outline of a shore and a river on a map, recalling the
out-of-body experience that James's text is grasping at.[4]
Carrington represents two of the most frightening of his visions:
an 'enormous blackish green octopus' and 'a black-robed featureless
Inquisitor'.[5] Though frequently invoking animals in her visual
and verbal practice, Carrington's depiction of the octopus,
complete with eyes in between the lower tentacles, recalls the
particular iconography and fractal patterns associated with
psychedelic art. Similarly, robed figures recur in Carrington's
work, often interpreted as indicative of her interest in the
occult, alchemy and myth, but in this context the figure serves a
different function; it substantiates James's visions of
'self-conscious entities, absolute individuals', whose existence
'exterior to myself' during the hallucination he struggles to
convey in his prose.[6]
We are also invited to read Horna's undated and unattributed
photograph as an illustration of James's text. Both depict James in
a hotel room in Mexico City and are presented as though
corresponding thematically and temporally with each other. There
are other clues in Horna's image that, like Carrington's drawings,
render it congruent with text it accompanies. The multiple
transparent vessels atop a variety of flat surfaces in the room
contain fish and vegetation, into which a lattice of electricity
cables pass. The composition refuses customary distinctions between
the man-made and the natural, the visible and the invisible,
surface and depth, which recall the rhetoric in James's account.
The different sizes of the glasses, many of which appear larger
than James's head, correspond to the confusion of scale and
perspective that James outlines, and suggest a densely-populated
room echoing his visions of swarms of imps and cascades of
vegetables (from an apparition of Arcimboldo's Winter)
even if he (and his parrot) were the only occupants of the room.
The distortion and reflections resulting from the water and the
transparent vessels also suggest the confusion of empirical
experience that his text strains to articulate. Horna's image
appears on a page opposite photographs of a gaunt and wizened
Antonin Artaud that date to his release from the Rodez asylum in
1947. These accompany his text 'Aphorisms and three marital
letters,' which directly precedes James's in this issue of
S.NOB. Artaud and James, customarily held apart by time,
class and nation are here presented as allied veterans of extreme
psychic states.[7]
S.NOB has been largely overlooked in histories of
Surrealism's presence in, influences from, and impact on Mexican
culture, which tend to focus on dialogues and activity during the
1930s and 40s, a period which encompasses André Breton's encounter
with Diego Rivera, Frieda Kahlo and Leon Trotsky in 1938, the
International Surrealist exhibition in Mexico City in 1940, and the
formation of the close circle of Surrealist emigres centred around
Carrington, Horna, Benjamin Péret and Remedios Varo, as well as
James.[8] Accounts of James's activity in Mexico, however, usually
prioritise the elaboration of his 'vision of Eden' in the gardens
at Xilitla. His participation with the vedanta movement whilst in
Los Angeles during the 1940s, a drug-cult informed by Hinduism,
with fellow participants including Christopher Isherwood and Aldous
Huxley, provides some context for his interest in the
hallucinogenic mushrooms, but of the many avant-garde ventures
benefitting from his financial and artistic input, S.NOB
is all but off the radar.[9]
S.NOB is best known, in Anglophone scholarship at
least, for publishing a section of Elizondo's translation of James
Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, coming to the attention of
scholars exploring the transnational reception of Joyce's work.[10]
The publication has also been picked up as evidence of Elizondo's
interest in the transgressive eroticism of the dissident Surrealist
Georges Bataille, which was most fully articulated in Elizondo's
novel Farabeuf (1965), a direct response to Bataille's
outré novella The Story of the Eye (1928).[11] The
photograph of the Chinese sacrificial victim originally published
in Bataille's magazine Documents appeared in issue seven of
S.NOB, although this appears to be the only direct
invocation of Bataille in the publication. Given S.NOB's
interest in dissident Surrealism, Artaud was perhaps a not unlikely
inclusion in the same seven. His text 'Journey to the Tarahumaras'
(1936), an account of his experience of the peyote ritual whilst
amongst the Tarahumaras people, was frequently excerpted and
translated in the decades following its composition. Artaud had
accrued a reputation amongst new avant-garde audiences in the 1950s
and 60 as an excoriating critic of the impoverishment of Western
bourgeois culture. Foremost amongst these were Beat Generation and
countercultural artists and writers who shared his fascination with
shattering established patterns of perception and consciousness,
and the desire to reach behind, beyond or beneath this erroneous
veneer. Of this new generation, with both a lay and scientific
interest in narcotics, William Burroughs is represented in issue
seven S.NOB in the form of an appendix to his notorious novel
Naked Lunch, 'Testimony Concerning a Sickness' which
advocates the substitution of apomorphine for heroin as a means of
overcoming addiction. James finds company in this issue of
S.NOB with a decidedly transnational and transgenerational
avant-garde, characterised by more than a passing interest in
hallucinogenic drugs.
There is, it should be noted, no discernible element of social
critique emanating from James's exploration of altered states of
consciousness. And yet his account of his solitary experience of
ingesting mushrooms in a hotel room in Mexico City does not reach
us as an exclusively private affair: the questions prompted by his
experiences explicitly open out onto issues of representation and
ontology as they play out in art history. Moreover, the text was a
profoundly collaborative effort, the product of James communicating
his experiences to Jose and Kati Horna, and to Leonora Carrington.
Its production was not coterminous with the experience, as was the
case with Surrealism's early experiments in altered states of
consciousness, traced through automatic drawing and writing. The
past tense is absolutely foregrounded in the text: 'It was a
birthday present-the mushrooms were'.[12] The text as published in
S.NOB is necessarily a product of the experience exceeding
and outliving that August evening in Mexico City, through its
correspondence with the later production of his Surrealist
interlocutors and their readiness to provide visual evidence for
his account.
As befitting the introspection prompted by passing a milestone
birthday, James opens his text by remarking that he's 'no young
cockerel any more. Though I can still crow'.[13] In a publication
indebted to pre-second world war avant-garde precursors, such as
Bataille and Artaud, youth was not a perquisite for inclusion, or
for alignment with cultural radicalism. Living, dead, or 'other' in
the case of the visions conjured by his text, all planes of
existence might make a claim to significance. Chronological, linear
time that marks this birthday as his fiftieth is already eschewed
by the time-travelling gymnastics of his visions, in which bodily
experience is conflated with extant works of art, as well as
illustrated, post-facto, by future ones. S.NOB has been
referred to as a publication that is trying to 'revive' European
Surrealism, as if to breathe life into an old corpse. And yet the
complex spatial and temporal politics of the publication, and of
articles like James's, play fast and loose with stable oppositions
between now and then, before and after; the dead and the living are
not always so different. Young cockerels and old roosters are heard
alike in S.NOB.
[1] See Margaret Hook, Surreal Eden (Princeton
Architectural Press, 2006).
[2] In S.NOB, facsimile re-print (Aldus, 2004),
p.1.
[3] Edward James 'My Fiftieth birthday', (trans. Dr. David
Stent) in Edward James in Mexico (West Dean College of
Arts and Conservation, 2015)
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Antonin Artaud, 'Aphorisms and three marital letters', S.NOB
(October 1962).
[8] The exception is Jonathan Eburne's 'Leonora Carrington,
Mexico and the Culture of Death,' Journal of Surrealism and the
Americas 5.1 (2011). For a sample of this literature, see Dawn
Ades, Rita Eder, Graciela Speranza (eds) Surrealism in Latin
America: Vivisimo Muerto (Getty Research Institute, 2012) and
Melanie Nicholson, Searching for Breton's Ghost: Surrealism in
Latin America (Palgrave, 2013).
[9] See John Lowe, Edward James: Poet, Patron, Eccentric: A
Surrealist Life (Harper Collins, 1991).
[10] See TransLatin Joyce: Global Transmissions in
Ibero-American Literature, eds Brian L. Price, César A.
Salgado, John Pedro Schwartz (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
[11] Juan Carlos Ubilluz, Sacred Eroticism: Georges Bataille
and Pierre Klossowski in the Latin American Erotic Novel
(Bucknell University Press, 2006)
[12] Edward James 'My Fiftieth birthday', (trans. Dr. David
Stent) in Edward James in Mexico (West Dean College of Arts and
Conservation, 2015)
[13] Ibid.
