The Man of Jasmine/& Other Texts

Rating:
Summary: Dizzying Heights of Madness
Review: "The Man of Jasmine" is the most imaginative (without losing it's objectivity) account of one woman's descent into insanity ever written. It opens innocently enough, with budding artist Unica Zurn describing her childhood visions. By turns ecstatic, horrific, depressing and extremely strange, the clash between imagination and reality which Zurn experiences first hand is riveting. Her delusions (the Dadaist poets planning to liberate her from a mental ward, for example) are so manically inspired and magical that they genuinely achieve what so few of the surrealists could: the destruction of the boundary between fantasy and the world as we know it.

Zurn walks the tightrope of delirium with alarming grace, at times unwittingly raiding the hazardous realms of deramgement which Breton and the gang could only admire from the outside: "As she returns to her hotel she allows herself to be directed once more by the voice within, telling her the way. She lies down on the bed in her room and, as already for several nights, is unable to sleep. Suddenly the stove starts to emit smoke--the smell gives her the impression that a shady, dubious unknown surgeon is preparing to conduct a hideous operation which she must escape at all costs. She leaves her room, closing the corridor and opens the first door. The room is empty" (pg 53). Wow.

In the course of the narrative Zurn quite literally LIVES the surrealist manifesto as very few of the group ever did--casually pouring a cup of water on a policeman's hat, relying on an invisible Henri Michaux for support while witnessing the horror of life in the numerous mental hospitals she is forced into, and allowing the mathematical anagrams she is constantly writing to make many pivotal decisions in her life. Unlike many surrealist pieces, however, this is not all word games and defiant pretension; Zurn's frenzied exaltation is taken apart piece by piece.

Zurn peers out from the veil of convulsive beauty with the fortunate or unfortunate aid of psych meds and the result is tragic disillusionment. She becomes a mere mortal, no longer wishing to see hallucinations. Zurn's leap from a sixth floor window is as much a challenge to the surrealist quest as Nadja's psychosis and Nerval swinging from a lamppost. It seems that the degree of ferocity with which the surrealist pioneers and legends embraced the fantastic at the cost of the mundane an equally ferocious psychical toll is suffered when they return to earth. Still, this is a masterpiece which should be right up there with "Paris Peasant" and "Liberty or Love!" I read this in one night and could not get over it. Deliciously nutty and gone too soon, Zurn was not the kind of chick one takes home to mom and dad.

Rating:
Summary: a moment in madness
Review: The Man of Jasmine works completely as a spell inside the mind of someone in the throes of psychosis: the obsessions, the delusions, the hypno-poetics; all the mental movements with which Surrealism only experiments. Unica Zurn is the real thing! If you like this, try her other difficult-to-find volume, The House of Illnesses, Leonora Carrington's Down Below, or Janet Frames' Faces In The Water.

Rating:
Summary: a moment in madness
Review: The Man of Jasmine works completely as a spell inside the mind of someone in the throes of psychosis: the obsessions, the delusions, the hypno-poetics; all the mental movements with which Surrealism only experiments. Unica Zurn is the real thing! If you like this, try her other difficult-to-find volume, The House of Illnesses, Leonora Carrington's Down Below, or Janet Frames' Faces In The Water.