The House of Illnesses

by Unica Zürn

A complete facsimile of the manuscript and illustrations, interleaved with a translation by Malcolm Green.

It is 25 years since Atlas Press first published Unica Zürn’s autobiographical account of the commencement of her long history of mental crises (The Man of Jasmine, soon to be republished). In the meantime she has come to be recognised as a great artist at least the equal of her partner, the Surrealist Hans Bellmer. Zürn’s initial mental collapse was initiated when she encountered “the Man of Jasmine” in the real world in the person of the writer Henri Michaux. Her meeting with him plunged her into a world of hallucination in which visions of her desires, anxieties and events from her unresolved past overwhelmed her present life. “The House of Illnesses” was the first of her notebooks to confront this oncoming catastrophe which, paradoxically, she in part welcomed, since it gave her access to an inner existence essential to her artistic output.

In 1970 she committed suicide by throwing herself from the sixth-floor apartment that she shared with Bellmer.

Genres: Surreal, Fiction, Mental Illness, Germany, German Literature

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Unica Zürn was a German author and painter. She is remembered for her works of anagram poetry, exhibitions of automatic drawing, and her photographic collaborations with Hans Bellmer.

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally published in incomplete form as a limited-run Printed Head pamphlet, this is the complete facsimile edition of The House of Illnesses interleaved with Malcolm Green's new English translation and illustrated with the original drawings (as directed by Zürn herself, if the work ended up being published, which it was not during her lifetime). A fully realized symbolic journey of Zürn's experience living through a jaundice-induced fever, it is a work marked by haunting beauty, sly humor, and poignant moments of hope. Order it before it disappears again, and immerse yourself in Zürn's visionary genius as preparation for The Man of Jasmine to reappear in a new Atlas edition later this year.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

The house of illnesses is a body we can enter and leave, though not necessarily at will. It is “our” body but it feels like a house, more exactly a hospital, where we involuntarily reside for a spell. It is also the world, or at least the land surrounding the house to the limits of our seeing, where the hearts of our eyes are shot out. We can walk in and through this house, and birds – real birds with lives of their own – sing in it and build nests; but there are also trappers and shooters which we must be wary of. In this house we can walk into the room of our eyes, gaze into the chambers of our hands, and rest in the cabinet of our solar plexus (the quiet heart of the house and the world). The house of illnesses is a fraught and fragile place teeming with menace but also wonders. I would say that it is a fairy tale gone awry, but all real fairy tales go awry at some point, even when they end flooded by happy sunlight. The house of illnesses is a place that is ever shifting its position as the seismic needle of our consciousness skitters across the pages of our awareness. It is a place where the stories we tell ourselves become the lives we live as we wander just beyond all that is actually happening to us. The house of illnesses is a crevice, or crease, or folded spot, in the shifting terrain of our consciousness which endlessly opens and unfolds as we look into it, as we walk into it, until it envelopes us and becomes the window we look into and out of onto the shifting terrain of our world. Place becomes placeless here, and time timeless, so we make notes and note the days so we have some idea where (and when) we are.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been enjoying this, and thinking all morning about how Zürn has been one of my favorite artists for years. Then I see this at lunch:



[Later...]
Zürn's drawings really pull me into her world. These are maybe a bit more child-like and informal than for example the ones in the Drawing Center catalog. I love the tension between representational and abstract elements, the evolving, almost fractal-like patterns, the unstable and constantly moving forms. There's a fair amount of (German) text embedded in most of the drawings. I really like how they solved the tricky problem of the presentation: what I believe is the original in color is shown, with all the color gradations and Zürn's handwriting; then on the facing page, the grayed-out drawing, with the translated English text embedded roughly where the original swirled.

Thanks to S̶e̶a̶n̶ for the tip for ordering this directly from Atlas.

[B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Unica Zürn's notebook, which she wrote during her stay in an asylum while recovering from mental illness. It is a bilingual, facsimile edition with her handwriting in German on one side and a translation on the other, and it also includes some of Zürn's surrealist drawings that capture her mental state and aid to tell her story. Atlas Press have done an amazing job on this. Even taking into account all of my first editions, this one here is one of my favourite books in my collection. It's a truly beautiful book. I probably bumped this an extra star solely because of the drawings.

[Mandel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first encountered Zürn through Wakefield Press's edition of The Trumpets of Jericho, which begins as a dark fairy tale about pregnancy and motherhood, and drifts into a thicket of surreal vignettes and observations. From there, I read her novella Dark Spring, a harrowing but poignant story of a little girl's suicide. Both are utterly remarkable: little-known but to my mind essential works of modernist literature.

Zürn's writing is so intimate. I don't know if I've ever encountered a writer who achieves the degree of vulnerability and insight that she does in these texts. Danielle Collobert's It Then comes to mind. Here in The House of Illnesses, which Zürn wrote in just two weeks while she was recovering from a bout of jaundice, she perfectly captures the strangely voluptuous comfort of being sick in bed - the silence, the stillness, the vivid sense one has of one's animal embodiment.

Even better, this edition from Atlas Press contains a complete facsimile of her original manuscript, including all of her lovely drawings and maps of the titular House of Illnesses and its environs, along with English translations on the facing pages. Zürn is such a little-known writer, but thankfully her small output has, in recent years, been released little by little in English by Atlas and Wakefield presses. Very soon, I will be reading her The Man of Jasmine & Other Texts, which recounts the descent into mental instability she suffered in the final years of her life, all prompted by meeting Henri Michaux (one of my favorite writers of all time), and becoming convinced he was the living embodiment of an imaginary companion from her childhood, the 'man of jasmine'.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have (and have read) the earlier Atlas Press edition, but this new one with the full reproductions of her drawings (and the translated text within) is really excellent. A small and more lighthearted book than her later works, though it prefigures many of them.

[Maddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very specific systems that fall apart by gazes.

[Side Real Press · Rating 2 out of 5]

This review should best be read after my comments of another Atlas Press Zurn volume ‘The Man of Jasmine’ as the themes of that book are similar to this (lesser) volume and I am more fulsome in my thoughts upon Zurn.

‘The volume here is a more ‘visionary’ /fantastical account of mental illness and although with what seems like elements of autobiography within it, is set is a 'fictional' hospital where various areas are parts of the human body for example ‘the cabinet of the solar plexus’, ‘The Suite of the Hearts’, ’The Room of the Eyes’ and the more sinister ‘Hall Of Bellies’ and ‘Bosom Parlour’. The book is a lot looser and more dreamlike than ‘The Man of Jasmine’ and although it has some good moments and is well written, it is a far less satisfactory book than ‘…Jasmine’ because it is more allusive/elusive in what it sets out to be.

The book as an object is also strange. It is a facsimile of Zurn’s original manuscript notebook (which includes some drawings/sketches), the German text on one page and the English opposite. Most of the drawings have text on them and these are also reproduced as the original and again with the German words replaced by the English. The book is short, 96 pages in total ie 48 English, 48 German. I don’t quite see why we need to see Unica’s handwritten text (although sometimes there are a few obvious layouts of text), but in any case, it would have perhaps been better for the reader to have reproduced one version in full, in sequence, followed by the translation. The translation is actually NOT taken from the manuscript but instead based on a typewritten draft (which has ‘marginal differences’ prepared by Zurn herself for publication as it “seems closer to her wishes”. This I can accept, but then why when she states “the book has been put together incorrectly, the illustrations ‘Plan of the House of Illnesses’ and ‘An Ace Shot’ should be at the front” is this not done? This is a VERY poor show indeed and almost cost the book a further star. Poor Unica!

A word on the illustrations. These are quite sketchy in substance and should not be taken a typical Zurn work, which is actually a lot better than those shown here. Google her!

I think Atlas would have done better to a) respect the artist's wishes with regard to the book and b) to have integrated this volume into ‘The Man of Jasmine’ as they are complements to each other and would benefit from being together. As it stands, ‘…Jasmine’ is the one to go for if you want to sample Zurn as it covers similar territory to ‘The House..’ and this one for those who want more.