Apocalypse and self-renewal in a Leonora Carrington novel

An excellent question about Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974) is this: Why the title? The story told here has Marian, an elderly woman, committed to a sort of cult, sort of retirement home. There is an apocalypse in the last fifth of the novel, and she and a few of her friends at the cult-home survive. Along the way we learn about an alternative history of gods, the Holy Grail, that sort of thing, and these end up getting ‘cashed out’ in the apocalpyse narrative—fine, we’ll get to all that in due course. But why The Hearing Trumpet?

The title

Marian’s friend, Carmella, gives Marian the hearing trumpet in the opening few pages, it’s true, and Marian uses the hearing trumpet throughout the book, okay. But there is nothing obviously linked to the hearing trumpet in any substantive way; there is nothing at all that happens in the book, other than getting and occasionally using the hearing trumpet, that has anything to do with the hearing trumpet as such—nothing. Why the title?

One good answer, I think, begins from a four-page interlude (19–23) that channels Marian’s experience without the hearing trumpet. It is, basically, nonsense. Now, it is (mostly) grammatical, and it is littered with interesting tidbits and wisdom and revelations of Marian’s character and so on, but it is basically nonsense. Here’s the beginning of it:

Still feeling crushed with despair I hobbled back home. How I would miss Carmela and her stimulating advice, the black cigars, the violet lozenges. They would probably make me suck vitamins in an institution. Vitamins and police hounds, gray walls, machine guns. I could not think coherently, the horror of the situation floated, tangled masses in my head, making it ache as if it was stuffed with horny seaweed. (19–20)

So, in case it gets unclear in the following pages what’s going on, we’re here being warned Marian can’t “think coherently.” In case we weren’t going to be prepared for that, too, Marian already warned us seven pages ago: “Recently I do not go in for much coherent thought” (12).

While thinking incoherently, Marian wanders home (where she lives with her son Galahad and his family), sits in the garden, and there her thoughts ramble on about a whole bunch of stuff, less a stream of consciousness than a torrent of confusion. Finally she is called in from the storm, as it were: Her son is shouting at her. “No, I am not inviting you to play tennis,” he shouts, answering a question she asked of no one in particular two pages ago (21); “I am trying to tell you something agreeable and important” (23). And what is it? That they’re putting her in a home.

Now, as it happens, she has already learned this ten pages ago (13ff.)—when she made her first use of the hearing trumpet.

This opening sequence gives us a pretty good idea, then, of what the hearing trumpet is. It doesn’t just heighten Marian’s aural perception. It anchors her perceptions to the world in a way that affords them a coherence they otherwise lack, but not just that: It fundamentally changes her relationship to her environment and the people around her. Most importantly, it clues her into a conspiracy happening right in front of her.

Speech and sense

In this respect, it’s important that the hearing trumpet throughout is always used to listen into conversation—in other words, to hear not just anything at all, but human speech in particular. In this opening instance, human speech is a means of plotting, of secrecy, of deception. The hearing trumpet that Marian receives in the beginning of the novel—which is told in the first person—thus clues her into sounds, yes, but also makes the secret machinations of others intelligible. The hearing trumpet is a metaphor for the empowerment of an elderly woman.

I think it’s worth emphasizing, to Carrington’s credit, two things about the three-page reverie. First, it has an actual reason. It isn’t just stylistic pomp. It is intended to capture Marian’s experience (in the alien atmosphere of her ‘home’) without her hearing trumpet. And, second, leaving aside questions about secrecy and conspiracy and so on, it’s important to emphasize that, although Marian is old and her hearing isn’t so sharp, she isn’t crazy; she is lucid, insightful; her experience is human experience, not a deviation from it. Marian thus doesn’t report her experience poorly in the reverie; she reports it directly. It is like that.

The hearing trumpet affords Marian the sort of coherent thought that makes Marian’s telling the remainder of the story possible—with perhaps one caveat I’ll mention in a moment. The gift of the hearing trumpet, in other words, serves as an intra-novel justification for the possibility of the novel. Marian herself touches on this question of justification as she is packing to get ready for the cult/retirement home. Thinking about time, she is reminded of a friend of hers who is a writer, and she then mentions she might like to write something (poetry, perhaps).

If I remember correctly, writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don't know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody. (27)

Digression

One interesting formal quirk of The Hearing Trumpet though is that Marian’s predilection for digression, which she insists is controlled (see 5), persists well past her use of the hearing trumpet. In other words, it is not eclipsed by the new relation to reality that the hearing trumpet affords. Her digressive tendency has both negative and positive aspects: negative, in that she will sometimes simply depart from a thought, and its no longer being present to her renders it unthinkable; positive, in that she will follow one thought with another, more or less as she pleases.

Both of these facets are on display in the consideration of her writer friend, incidentally, “who I did not mention up till now because of his absence” (27; negative digression; the fact that she isn’t thinking of him makes him unthinkable), but reflecting on whom leads her from the concept of time to the profession of writing (positive digression, from one unrelated thought to another).

While in conversation with Mrs. Van Tocht, one of the other residents of the home, she relates a story of telling “fourteen Parrot stories without forgetting the ending of more than six” (50). She decides she is going to tell “the Yorkshire Parrot story,” but when Mrs. Van Tocht talks over her and leaves in the middle of the story, Marian—who, again, was herself in the middle of telling the story—“[wonders] how the Yorkshire Parrot story ended” (ibid.). No longer being told, the story simply drops out of her consciousness, becomes untellable.

One of the ways in which we find ourselves confined to Marian’s wandering mind is in cases where she summons mystery and then simply, as it were, walks away from it. Thus, in a later episode (149–50), Marian wants to know who lives in a certain tower in the home, and she asks a certain Christabel. Christabel quotes three riddles, saying if Marian can solve them, she’ll know. Marian simply goes back to what she was doing, doesn’t mention the riddles at all. They simply hang out somewhere in the back of her mind for a few pages, then suddenly, having nothing to do with anything: “A great light flashed in my mind. The riddle, of course” (154).

So, while it is true that the hearing trumpet affords Marian access to the world of others’ secret machinations, and creates for the sort of continuity of experience that is a condition of the novel itself, it is also true—and Marian’s digressive tendency makes this persistently clear—that we remain constrained by the narrator’s perspective.

The abbess and the apocalypse

Marian becomes interested in the subject of a painting that hangs in the dining room, “the winking nun,” and Christabel gives Marian a book on the nun, which is then quoted in its evident entirety (90–126).

The substance of the story is that a sexually liberated, sometimes cross-dressing abbess of the eighteenth century (the subject of the painting) discovers that the Holy Grail in fact predates Christianity, and it needs to be returned to Venus. To unpack the obvious metaphor: The church, and perhaps patriarchy in general, has stolen its power from a goddess, and perhaps from a natural, or rather supernatural, matriarchy in general, perhaps from women in general.

When we are returned to the present, it happens that a certain “Maude” has died, and is revealed in her death to have been a man. (Obviously this episode on its own is worth a few thousand words of analysis, which I will not even attempt to allude to.) A group of the residents, including Marian, stage a hunger strike, fearing Maude has been poisoned, and that any of them might be at any moment.

Then apocalypse. An atomic bomb turns the earth on its side, inaugurating a new ice age. Significantly, the women seem to do fine.

I think it doesn’t matter whether we think of the ending of the book, or really of any part of the book, as ‘real’ (whatever that means in reference to a novel) as opposed to Marian’s imagination. Certainly it is possible to read The Hearing Trumpet from one end to the other as entirely Marian’s fabrication, for example, or the slow but determined turning of her mind away from reality. Whether we take it to be something actually happening or simply an effect of an extremely elaborate coping strategy, in either case, the underlying point is about the same: Apocalypse is good.

In the event it’s unclear that all this is a metaphor for liberation, Carrington has a chorus of voices claiming it is: Georgina insists she and the others will never be under the yoke of men again (152); Carmella praises political revolution (157); Anna complains of the past mistreatment of animals by humans (183). Injustices vanish at the apocalypse. In their place: a grand renewal of our relation to animals, to nature; a renewal of our relation to each other. In the end of The Hearing Trumpet, the world is over, and it is better.

The good apocalypse

In reflecting on the good apocalypse of The Hearing Trumpet, I’m reminded of a moment in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds. In case you were inclined not to notice him, Spielberg has a guy dressed in a bright orange vest walk on screen between the camera and Tom Cruise. The guy in the vest is holding a camcorder, pointed at the aliens. When the aliens attack, the orange vest guy is gone; he’s dropped his camcorder, and we watch a few seconds of the aliens shooting lasers through the oversized viewfinder.

It’s just a gimmick intended to heighten the destructive intimacy of the event and, through the claustrophobia of the small device, the relative intensity of the moment. But it is also interesting because of what it conveys about its absent owner: that, in a moment of total annihilation, he is, as it were, purified of his attachment to consumer electronics. Inversely, it dramatizes that fear for the viewer, too: Imagine being so scared you drop your $500 camcorder on the street. Of course, it’s a common trope, but maybe it works especially on owners of camcorders or on middle- and upper-class people who know approximately the dollar value of a camcorder. I’m not saying that to be flip.

Depictions of apocalypse often hew to generalizations about their audience, and in ways that further normalize those generalizations. A prominent way in which they do this is through their representations of loss (beyond the obvious loss of life). A common trope, for example, is the breakdown or loss of a nuclear family unit. The pathos of a mother or father trying to find their kid or partner in the midst of a global storm, for example, feeds on and reinforces norms about familial emotional bonds, that is, about the family in general.

For her part, Marian doesn’t seem to have the usual tethers to the world. In a stark departure from the contemporary apocalyptic genre, she seems to despise her family, for one thing. Losing them in the apocalypse has no effect on her. If anything, it is freeing. Indeed, the death of most humans, the wholesale destruction of all human society—none of it affects her much at all. To her the apocalypse is not a cataclysm; it’s a girls’ retreat.

One of the ways Carrington conveys Marian’s different ties to the world is with her packing to leave for the home. In addition to a sleeping potion and the hearing trumpet, she packs:

a screw driver, hammer, nails, birdseed, a lot of ropes that I had woven myself, some strips of leather, part of an alarm clock, needles and thread, a bag of sugar, matches, coloured beads, seashells, and so on. Finally, I put in a few clothes to prevent things rattling about inside the truck. (26)

Marian doesn’t ‘have’ the usual things; she doesn’t care for the usual things (clothes, socks, underwear, toiletries). What she stands to lose, then, is quite different from what others lose.

Moreover, when her friend Carmella shows up after the initial cataclysm, her car is full of:

sheepskin cloaks, top boots, oil lamps, oil, umbrellas, caps, jerseys, flower pots with plants, and twelve agitated cats (163)

and in addition Carmella mentions:

“Mushroom spore. Beans, lentils, dried peas and rice. Grass seed, biscuits, tinned fish, miscellaneous sweet wines, sugar, chocolates, marshmallows, tinned catfood, face cream, tea, coffee, medicine chest, flour, violet capsules, tinned soup, sack of wheat, work basket, pickaxe, tobacco, cocoa, nail polish, etc. etc.” (Ibid.)

What belongs to Marian and the others; what they stand to lose; what Marian and the others need to get by—these things pick Marian and the others out as unique, and situate them differently in the context of apocalypse.

Indeed, for Marian, the apocalypse becomes not just a time to be with friends but an occasion for self-renewal. At the climax of the novel, she descends a tower, finding a version of herself making a stew (171). This version of herself tells her to jump into the stew. She jumps in and simultaneously drinks herself, becoming the version of herself that was making (and then drinking) the stew.

The Hearing Trumpet is a novel that celebrates the marginalized. It’s not inevitable a celebration of the dispossessed should require wiping out the rest of humanity, but it is telling that it does; it reveals something of the antagonistic nature of the divide between the marginalized and their captors. Marian is the proverbial fish in a flood. While mayhem and destruction swirl about the surface, Marian paddles along peacefully below. The hearing trumpet is her periscope on the insidious world above. The Hearing Trumpet is a window on the redemption of the dispossessed.

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The Hearing Trumpet is widely available in a 2021 reprint by NYRB.