UNICA ZÜRN, WHITE WITH A RED DOT FOLLOWED BY IN AMBUSH

Review par Andrea Oberhuber

With the collection White with a Red Dot followed by In Ambush, Ypsilon éditeur welcomes for the second time texts by Unica Zürn within its very original catalog that the Parisian publishing house has been building since September 2007. One finds there writings by Stéphane Mallarmé, Hans Bellmer, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Yannis Ritsos and Djuna Barnes, among others. In 2008, the publisher offered the French public, under the title MistAKE and Other French Writings, all the texts written in French by the author and artist of Berlin origin and appearing as such in the very beautiful German edition of Unica Zürn's complete works. Three of the five texts had already been integrated in 1977, in excerpt form, into the double issue (14-15) of the review Obliques devoted to "The Surrealist Woman." The two other brief narratives, dating from the 1960s, constituted Zürn's very first attempts to express herself in the language of her adopted country since 1953: these are "MistAKE," a notebook composed of nine pages, and "On est fou," written on two pink sheets pasted on a music score and augmented with one of those famous "automatic" drawings by Zürn. This work is accompanied by an instructive preface by Rike Felka.

The texts gathered in White with a Red Dot followed by In Ambush are of more traditional making; they are moreover devoid of drawings. In a "Note on the edition," one explains to the reader that the two texts "are part of the first prose pieces written by Unica Zürn after the marvelous discovery of 'her favorite pastime – finding ANAGRAMS'" (p. 75). We are also informed about the publication of the two narratives in German publishing houses, always alongside other texts by Zürn: White with a Red Dot was published for the first time in 1977 by Ullstein in Frankfurt, while In Ambush appeared in 1981 at Lilith editions in Berlin.

The first brief narrative, divided into two parts and dated February 1959, belongs to the auto(bio)graphical regime. The dedications: "To my son Christian / and to the multiplication table by 9" and "to / Christian my son / to / H M Hermann Melville," immediately suggest this reading path. Several of these memorial fragments indeed evoke rather happy memories that the first-person narrator links to a mother and son past where the "I" amused herself making a kite with the child. But in the major part of the fragments, it is a question of "sadness," of "madness," of the "[I's] predilection for distance" (p. 13) which seems to have characterized the narrator for a long time, of the desire to commit suicide already at the age of twelve by jumping from the window. One recognizes here the half-dramatic, half-distanced tone of Dark Spring, a childhood narrative disguised through an ironic reflection on Freudian theories, and of The Man of Jasmine, an autographic narrative where Zürn relates from an interior point of view the impressions of a mental patient and which established her notoriety. To these melancholic ideas, interrupted in the second part by the dream of the white man "paralyzed, forever chained to his wheelchair" (p. 21), which Zürn will take up again in The Man of Jasmine, and the reminder of Andersen's The Little Princess and the Pea, are added digressions on the quest for the neutral – between feminine and masculine – and, especially, on the desire to "[s]wim in white, to finally the White Image... see it" (p. 33). One understands at the very end of this first narrative that "white" is the only space where the narrator could stop brooding.

What one does not understand, on the other hand, is the choice of the text In Ambush which occupies the second part of the collection and whose link with the first part remains mysterious. If it is true that White with a Red Dot and In Ambush (written in March 1963) are part of volume 4.1 of the Gesamtausgabe of Zürn's literary works at Brinkmann & Bose in 1991, as the "Note on the edition" recalls, everything seems to separate the two texts, and this, on thematic, generic and scriptural levels. Im Hinterhalt / In Ambush resembles an adventure story certainly poetic, but which offers the reader a plot endowed with a red thread (!) that he is able to entangle as he advances in "the forest of Rashomon" occupied by a brigand, the black baron and all sorts of strange figures. Unica Zürn happily mixes with this main narrative a certain number of intertexts, including those of Moby Dick (one knows the admiration that Zürn devoted to the author of the novel) and The Threepenny Opera.

The question arises again: why want to bring these two texts together within the same collection? Perhaps it was a matter of making the French reader discover the indisputable gift of prose writer that one obviously ignores if one does not read German. Let us recall that, in her Zeitungsgeschichten published from 1949 in various Berlin newspapers, as well as in the Hörfunkgeschichten, radio plays written between 1950 and 1954, Zürn shows great capacity to tell stories, to put into words an unbridled imagination that is situated far from the autobiographical writing so long associated with the author. Although the confessional tone intrudes occasionally, as on page 50, in the middle of the adventure story: "I seek you everywhere and I would have liked to meet you to stay near you forever. But you avoid me. [...] You cultivate your solitude like an incurable disease," In Ambush openly privileges fiction to the detriment of self-narrative. What emerges then from reading this text is another Unica Zürn capable of distance from herself.

One can only hope that the work of publication and translation of other German texts by Unica Zürn will be continued by Ypsilon éditeur.

University of Montreal