the death of innocence: a book review of unica zurn’s dark spring
by Dylan Desmond
If memories and dreams are not of the same part of the mind, they still share the same wardrobe. Each could be said to fit different parts and periods of life with different colors, designs, and styles. There will obviously be different sizes in this wardrobe, as clothes must physically change to adjust to the changes in the growing bodies that wear them. In addition to the moment, the wardrobe must dress both the future as well as the past. Neither of these conceptions of time is tangible in the sense that one could reach out and touch them, unlike the clothing itself, but nevertheless real and powerful in that each can determine the course of action. Or better said, each will determine the future.
The further back a memory was formed the more clouded the details will become. This is why police investigations are most effective when the investigators can extract as much information from victims and witnesses as soon as possible. Each occurrence in life is a distraction which clouds a memory and there are no moments in life without these occurrences and distractions. With this in mind, investigators know that witness accounts will become cloudy as time passes and therefore must aim to get a statement as soon as possible after an event. Perhaps the witness or victim could begin to doubt what they saw as their conscious mind reasons and applies empathy, cultural bias, and moral or social consideration to the event. Diaries and journals can be helpful to an individual to keep account of events for future reference.
Likewise, to keep a dream journal one must commit to the practice of recording their dreams as quickly as possible after waking, as the bizarre images of dreams and interactions will quickly fade as the conscious mind positions itself back in the reality of waking life. This happens much faster than the fading of memories because they occur in a different part of the brain, the subconscious, operating like machinery in a sub-basement of the mind that is not conscious or operating in the conscious world on the ground floor. Instead, dreams occur in a something of a surreality that uses neither logic nor reality to communicate. The two could be said to overlap in the bizarre moments of life when the dreamworld manifests itself in the waking world. These moments, rare but consistent in us all, combine the uncanniness and impossibility of the dreamworld and the linear time of the waking world. It is here the characters of dreams manifest themselves in real life.
In Unica Zurn’s book Dark Spring, a young girl’s account is given with the dreamlike cloud of childhood emotions and experiences. The third person narration further separates the story from the character, coloring the events with an anxiety of surrealism and unpredictability. The protagonist observes her own and other’s initiation in the sexual elements of the human animal that are often swept under the rug in conscious, societal life. The brutality in the worlds of both lived and fantasized experiences is a broad theme.
For years, I’ve been curious about this book and Zurn, as most of the surrealists from the post WW2 period are awkwardly men. There are multiple exceptions, such as Leonora Carrington, Dorthea Tanning, Joyce Mansour, Kari Horna, and Simone de Beauvoir, to name a few, but they are often overshadowed by the movement’s men. While I find no fault in the men of surrealism being well known, I am endlessly curious about the other people that shaped and explored the movement that has revealed so much about our shared humanity through history. It is a shame these people are not more well known!
Zurn lived in Germany through much of the war and spent multiple periods hospitalized in asylums and supervision centers. After the wars end, living in Paris, she experimented with automatic drawing and anagrams while interacting and collaborating with other figures in the surrealism scene. These figures, now historic, drew attention to the strange and uncanny overlaps between reality and dreams that is ever present in our lives. These areas are notoriously difficult to pinpoint, as evident in the early writings of Freud, Jung, and other psychoanalysts that approached the subject with an eye towards science. In artistic endeavors of many mediums, the surrealists set out to document the strange terrain of humanity where myth, dreams, reality, and shared/individual memory combine somewhere deep in the human psyche that operates outside of the confines of logic and reason.
The act of falling in love can also share the same wardrobe as dreams and memories. Surely every experience is unique, and one could be considered lucky to encounter an uncanniness in the experience. That uncanniness could manifest in any possible way, but often in a seemingly fateful overlap of lives after which the future becomes observably altered. Time can pass differently to those falling in love and it similarly clouds one’s judgement and sense of reality for a period like that of a dream. The protagonist in Dark Spring experiences this sensation as she dreams, fantasizes and imagines interactions with a man she soon encounters in real life. Still a young child, she comes to understand that she is falling in love with him. The man himself is a character from her dream, first arriving with a gang of men who plan to kill her.
It is possible this fictional character was one Zurn experienced in real life in that of the poet Henri Michaux. She described her first introduction to him as identifying the man she had fallen in love with as a youth in her daydreams and imagination. In waking life, he was regarded as a striking figure with unique approaches to art and poetry. Michaux stood out to many who encountered him. The two spent significant time discussing and exploring such themes together and began to experiment with mescaline. These experiments directly preceded Zurn’s first visit to a mental health asylum.
An underlying theme in any “coming of age” story is innocence, or loss there-of. Dark Spring goes further than many, exploring sexual themes of masturbation, rape, and masochism from the point of view of an innocent child. It asks questions of the reader of their own ever-changing understandings of sexuality and the origins therein. No one is born with these understandings but instead must come to form them through experiences both real and surreal. These experiences are often uncomfortable when recalled, if not outrightly traumatic. They also shape the path of life that comes afterwards.
The understandings of sexuality can often come to be from strange associations. In a memory, the book’s protagonist observes a windowpane in her room while falling asleep. Her mind, perhaps drifting somewhere between sleep and awake, imagines the crossing vertical and horizontal beams in the window frame to represent male and female poles of a spectrum of gender. The protagonist is shown, in her innocence, to observe “The point where they meet is a secret” (pg 38). The story’s ultimate message is the exploration of this secret from the young girl’s lived experience towards her fateful end.
Having observed the man from her dream in real life, the girl understands she must pursue him. She watches him at a public pool as he interacts with others. He is older than she and shares characteristics she appreciates in her father, who’s absence is notable. Like her father, he is sweet-natured and appreciates the innocence of children. His appearance marks an illumination of meaning to the girl who understands her life as changing in reaction. His presence acts as an illumination of many of the occurrences in her dreams before, making the intangible experiences of dreams observable in waking life.
The overlap of life with death is ultimately at the root of every story. In essence, the telling of any story could be said to be the act of worshipping life in that the storyteller endeavors to examine and articulate the occurrences of a path to be told in a fashion another can identify with. The protagonist’s death at the end of Dark Spring, foreshadowed in her dreams throughout, is an overlap in which the loss of innocence is directly correlated with death. The death of innocence could similarly be said to coincide with growth and a dilution from the purity of youth. In this regard, the death of innocence is ultimately the same outfit as coming of age. The body wearing either might appear different to the unexamined eye, but on closer inspection the two share the same material and craftsmanship. Truly, the only difference is in the lighting, which is outside the outfit altogether.