on April 7, 1970, that he could no longer be responsible for her. She was discharged from the asylum at la Chesnaie de Chailles, a chateau with “open doors,” on October 18, 1970, and, the following day, jumped to her death from the sixth-floor balcony of Bellmer’s apartment, at 4 rue de la Plaine. L’Homme-Jasmin would be published by Gallimard the following year. H AUNTING A ND SPLITTING
Life, this bad dream: Night! Courage! ...cut everything in two: nose, stomach, right arm.5 For this haunted artist/writer, everything was already cut into two, three—for language was coincident with identity and a multiplicity of beings was already inhabiting her fragile frame. As she wrote and thought, the pronominal splitting was predominant from the beginning: “Sie ist Ich”, “Ich bin Du”, “DreiDinge/liegen in Dir: Du, Er, Es”6 (You are me, I am you, three things/lie in you: you, him, it…)
What we find in her drawings is indeed that kind of courage she called upon herself to demonstrate—the severing of self from self, the conscious extrusion of part from whole, the cutting, jabbing, spearing of the surface by the pen. If she calls for a “day of revenge on the object,”7 that day turns out to converge with the night of the bad dream of life, and to necessitate the same violent acts. Written or drawn, the very expression of her mind in its lucidity and its madness is inescapably terrible to contemplate. Terrible in the sense that Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “terrible sonnets” are terrible: worked from, and in, mental terror, they strike the attentive observer with a kind of terrible force.
5
6 7
46
Quoted in Victoria Appelbe, “L’anagramme dans l’oeuvre d’Unica Zürn,” in Unica Zürn (Paris: Editions du Panama, 2007), 29. Ibid, 30. Ibid, 39.