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The Innocence of Evil Eroticism is different from animal sexuality in that for a man aroused clear images surge up with the distinctness of objects; eroticism is the activity of a conscious being. --Georges Bataille If the erotic literature of a nation may be said to reveal its sexual imagination, sexuality in Victorian England must be judged dull and brutish. Despite its exotic fantasies and romantic prose, despite its flowery euphemisms for the genitalia and for intercourse, Victorian erotica was reductive. At bottom, its writers saw sexual activity as a "natural," if secret, function--which may be why the erotic novels of the period seem so anti-human; to be fully human in all the meanings of the word is to be unnatural. Intelligence and imagination civilize every area of the natural world, including the sexual. What makes our lovemaking different from that of other animals is that we think about it; for human beings, the most important sexual organ is above the neck, rather than below the waist. One of the accomplishments of erotic literature is the literary transformation of an act which is innately mechanical into meaningful individual experience. By encrusting sexuality with symbolic meaning, erotic literature helps reclaim it for civilization. The writers of Victorian erotica were unable to achieve this transformation because of cultural limitations. Significantly, there has not been an erotic literature in England since the close of the nineteenth century. If it had not been for certain French writers who took up the challenge of transformation in the first decades of the twentieth century, there would be no modem erotic literature. In France, the decade from 1925 to 1935 was a period of intense activity in erotic literature; for a time, the field held the attention of writers as notable as Andre Malraux, Georges Bataille, Louis Aragon, Jean Cocteau, Maurice Sachs, Robert Desnos, Pascal Pia, Benjamin Peret, and Louis Perceau. Of course they had a tradition to draw upon: In that decade Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil was being published, with the banned poems, in its entirety for the first time; and Sade, Apollinaire, Theophile Gautier, and Pierre Louÿs were available in beautifully bound and illustrated limited editions. An erotic novel entitled Gamiani, attributed to Alfred de Musset, was the most popular erotic novel in the French language up until 1930, by which time it had gone through forty-one editions. Gamiani is a romantic novel about lesbianism, in which the author--like John Cleland--attempted to describe erotic activity without using obscenities. A later romantic writer, Pierre Louÿs, wrote erotic novels which are somewhat more interesting eight decades later. Louÿs is best known for a novel set in pre-Christian Alexandria called Aphrodite. Aphrodite would be classified as "soft-core" these days because it achieves its highly erotic atmosphere by suggestion rather than by statement. An explicitly erotic novel. Mother's Three Daughters, has also been attributed to him. Whether he wrote the second novel or not, a comparison of the two will be useful because between them we can see illustrated the kind of erotic writing that appeared in France up until 1925. Louÿs is the most important French erotic novelist up to that point. Aphrodite is the story of Chrysis, a spoiled, much sought-after Alexandrian courtesan who makes the mistake of falling in love with the sculptor Demetrios. Chrysis asks Demetrios to prove his love for her by committing three crimes, and then discovers too late that it is she who will be punished for his crimes. Louÿs successfully re-creates the pagan ambience of ancient Alexandria, particularly in his descriptions of the Temple of Aphrodite, where women from all over the world spent their lives as temple prostitutes. Louÿs' lush prose avoids the worst excesses of romanticism while presenting the case for the Dionysian approach to life simply and evocatively. He explains his view of the pagan attitude about sex in an author's preface:
Love, with all its consequences, was, for the ancient Greek, the sentiment most virtuous and most fecund in grandeurs. They did not attach to it those ideas of shamelessness and immodesty which Israelite tradition, along with the Christian doctrine, has handed down to us.... As for me, I have written this book with the simplicity an Athenian would have brought to a relation of the same adventures…
Aphrodite belongs to the French Romantic tradition of literature; its antecedents may be found in the work of Gautier, Baudelaire, and Flaubert. Mother's Three Daughters, on the other hand, fits only into the line of erotic literature. Aphrodite seems chaste in its sensuous evocations of the ancient world when placed next to the detailed descriptions of sexual activity found in Mother's Three Daughters. That novel contains some of the most powerfully obsessive characterizations of prostitutes ever realized in the genre. The protagonist is an unnamed young man of twenty who moves into a boarding house and finds that his next-door neighbors are a mother and three young daughters who are sexually insatiable. The action of the novel consists of chapter-by-chapter accounts of the young man's sexual encounters with the four women. What is memorable about Mother's Three Daughters is the appetite for sexual variety the author ascribes to the female characters--a voracity which is made more powerful by his skill with dialogue and characterization. These different approaches to erotic writing, one soft and evocative, the other harsh, explicit, and obsessive, represent between their extremes the kind of erotic novel that was being published in Europe between the late nineteenth century and 1925. In this period there is only one other author of erotic novels whose work must be mentioned: the poet GuiIIaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire's status as a major figure in French poetry is secure. Although he died in 1918 of injuries suffered earlier in the First World War, it was he who first used the world surrealist (a literary method by which the automatic, uncensored responses of the unconscious are employed to create a dream world and transform ordinary reality) and his influence on later writers has been considerable. Yet this poet of delicate lyrics and avant-garde formulations had another career: He wrote two erotic novels, one so brutal it is pseudoSadean, The Debauched Hospodar; the other, Memoirs of a Young Rakehell, bucolic and almost certainly autobiographical. In addition, he was something of a scholar in erotic literature. He wrote prefaces to erotic books, assisted in their publication, and compiled bibliographies in the genre, a French Pisanus Fraxi. The sadism of The Debauched Hospodar is casually excessive, so quick and gruesomely comic it is a parody of Sadean fiction rather than a sadistic novel. Mony Vibescu is a Roumanian "Hospodar" (equivalent to the title of subprefect in France) who becomes bored with the pleasures of Bucharest and decides that he must have a woman of Paris. He goes to say good-bye to a friend and finds him with two pretty girls. An orgy follows, in which Mony is buggered at pistol point by his friend. The pace is frenzied from the start, increasing in tempo as Mony arrives in Paris and immediately becomes involved with two women who urge him to beat them with a coachman's whip. As an indication of the degree of sadism in the novel, this flagellation scene comes to seem mild when compared with the range of debauchery Apollinaire depicts: murders, necrophilia, cannibalism, impalements, the rape of a child by her father, even a black mass. Apollinaire deliberately set out to violate every moral convention, in order perhaps to demonstrate--by exaggeration to the point of mania--that nothing is out of bounds in literature. Unfortunately, although this demonstration succeeds as a tour de force, the novel suffers from a lack of characterization and a haphazard plot. Memoirs of a Young Rakehell, the brief narrative of a boy's sexual awakening, is as different from The Debauched Hospodar as black is from white. As the boy learns about sex from spying on his sister and timidly attempting to seduce the family maid, an atmosphere of highly charged adolescent sexuality is slowly developed. Although obscenities are used freely, there is something sweetly innocent about the novelist's use of fanciful imagery in describing sexual acts:
I grabbed the lovely, prettily dressed peasant girl's sturdy buttocks and as I fondled her breasts, planted a pair of savoury kisses full on her mouth. She took it in the right spirit, but when I reached her love lips she said, blushing: "It's my period." Just my luck! I was as erect as a barefooted friar, and she was looking at my prick good-naturedly. She played with it prettily. At least I could amuse myself with her hanging gardens. I opened her jacket and her breasts slipped into my waiting hands. Like the girl herself, they were freckled, but aside from that I saw nothing to reproach them for.
Memoirs of a Young Rakehell is as conventional an erotic novel as The Debauched Hospodar is unconventional; like Louÿs, Apollinaire was capable of both extremes. The Innocence of Evil continues... |
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