Oct 13
Negotiating Apocalypse with Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet: A Talk with K A Laity
Date and time
Thu, 13 October 2022, 20:00 – 21:30 BST
Location
Online
About this event
Negotiating the Apocalypse with Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet – K A Laity
While she’s best known as the genius of surreal painting, Carrington’s fiction is lively, wild and full of mythic and magical resonances. She wrote The Hearing Trumpet when still quite young though her heroine Marian Leatherby is a 92-year-old woman with bad hearing and a small beard. In a bizarre retirement home Marian discovers a centuries-long plot to free the Holy Grail and return it to the goddess — just as the apocalypse is about to be unleashed.
From bees to werewolves each turn in the narrative is impossible to predict, but Carrington writes with mordant wit, effortlessly weaving together magic, myth, and lore from the Irish tales of her childhood, Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, her adopted Mexican home, and so much more. This too-often overlooked classic offers insight on ecological disaster, spiritual pursuits (as well as spiritual charlatans) and the timeless appeal of a really good stew. In contrast to many power fantasies of a post-apocalyptic world, Carrington suggests that the real strength comes from community — one that includes all creatures.
K. A. Laity 