A Sensory and Sexual Smorgasbord: Dark Spring

The shifting narrative voices in Unica Zurn’s Dark Spring are bombarded by an endless assault on the senses, and it is through these sensual images that the characters emerge. The sensory barrage begins with the primary protagonist’s sense of her father as he greets her infant self in her cradle, “He smells of cigarettes, leather and cologne. His boots make a creaking noise and his voice is dark and warm” (35).  Senses are then evoked throughout the story in almost every human encounter, and even envisioned in the absence thereof. “His smell, his powerful large hands, his deep voice!” (35), laments the child, a bit more grown, as she recounts how much she misses her absent father. Touching, tasting, feeling, seeing and, particularly, smelling their way through the book, the narrators are surrounded by a tactile orgy of sensual delights and foreshadowed disillusionment. 

The mother is described by the heaviness of her body and “her wet open mouth, out of which slithers a long naked tongue” (40), her father’s absent mistress with “the scent of her perfume lingers” (43), and most of all the exotic, sensual young maid Frieda Splitter, who “smells of lilac” (44).  Frieda is all things sensual, from the smoke that escapes from her lips as the child kisses her to taste it, to the chocolates she eats, to the blacks and purples of her alluring lingerie. When the omnipresent and stimulating maid is angrily dismissed by an inexplicably jealous mother, the child is devastated that her “fragrances no longer fill the room” (46).  Finally, when the child narrator finally meets the man of her dreams, she shares the taste of juicy, evocative peaches with him, “He gives another peach to her and they eat, slowly and silently “(101).

It is through these sensual images that the child’s sexuality is aroused, her heightened awareness beginning with the lines intersecting on the panes of her bedroom window and quickly accelerating to what hides beneath her father’s pants. Soon she is exploring arousal in all aspects of her life, from implements in her bedroom to stairway banisters and the family dog. But the pivotal focus of her sexual desire remains, in classic psychological form, her unattainable father. Only when an exotic stranger appears in her life does she transfer her sexual desires completely, and that transference inadvertently ends her life.

The book is essentially a litany of sensory experiences, with a few childish diversions tossed in rarely now and then. Everything is sensual, and through vivid imagery becomes sexual. Even the child’s reading selections from her father’s library are erotic – from the illustrations of “Fuchs’ History of Morals” (59) to her phallic fascination with Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea where “giant octopus tentacles…force their way into the submarine, the ‘Nautilus’, where they are hacked off by the men inside” (49). The games of children are even eroticized, as small boys tie her tightly to a totem, pinching and punching her, “She suffers silently, lost in masochistic daydreams and free from any thoughts of retaliation. Pain and suffering bring her pleasure” (48).  In the gap left by her absent father and abhorrent mother, the child seeks little more than sexual pleasure, and her quest for the fulfillment of her internal emptiness, literally and metaphorically, is futile. She sadly realizes that “In an eternal circle, everyone’s thoughts seem to be focused exclusively on questions of sexuality. For her…there are no secrets left” (70).

In a final nod to the senses, the devastating emptiness that fills the voices in the book, from the child to all of the characters she encounters, is expressed (ironically) by Antonin Artaud as a “compelling force…identical with that of hunger” (1).  Once again the connections between the physical sensations of the body and the manifestations of the mind are evoked, in an echoing emptiness experienced by Zurn both through her protagonist and her life. Both character and author tragically discover that their hunger is insatiable, and conclude the only way to appease their internal void is to leap out of this world.