Category Archives: fiction

Taxidermia (2006) – György Pálfi

Taxidermia (2006) – György Pálfi

It’s difficult to write much about Taxidermia in a blog that my parents read! The film, directed by György Pálfi, is visually and thematically grotesque. It’s full of startling, transgressive images. (Even the original poster had to be obscured, though the poster used for the Cannes Film Festival premiere is uncensored.) www.matthewhunt.com/blog

György Pálfi’s grotesque tale of three generations of men, including an obese speed eater, an embalmer of gigantic cats, and a man who shoots fire out of his penis. www.imdb.com/title/tt0410730/

Taxidermia is a 2006 film about three generations from Hungary, including a taxidermist, starting during the Second World War. The film is surreal in nature with dark comedy. The director is György Pálfi. The film is a Hungary / Austria / France collaboration and the language is Hungarian. The film is based on short stories by Lajos Parti Nagy. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxidermia

Aside from his albums and collaborations, Amon Tobin has also produced the composition to the Hungarian film, Taxidermia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amon_Tobin

György Pálfi est un réalisateur et scénariste hongrois né le 11 avril 1974 à Budapest. fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C3%B6rgy_P%C3%A1lfi

German language trailer at YouTube:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMODCtHZmJo]

Hungarian trailer at YouTube

French trailer at YouTube:

Amon Tobin soundtrack excerpt of same

My name, I believe, is Robert Jones

I am, that is to say I was, a great man, but I am neither the author of Junius nor the man in the mask, for my name, I believe, is Robert Jones, and I was born somewhere in the city of Fum-Fudge.

The first action of my life was the taking hold of my nose with both hands. My mother saw this and called me a genius:—my father wept for joy and presented me with a treatise on Nosology. This I mastered before I was breeched. ..

Who else but Borges could start a story by introducing a character who is unsure of his own name? The answer is Poe, the story is titled Lionizing (1835). It makes you wonder if there are any precedents of stories with characters who are unsure who they are.

I am currently reading Poe for the first time in my life. I’d written about Poe without ever having read one of his stories. Much like I had written about Baudelaire and Borges (and decided I was going to like them) without ever having read them. Recently, I found a rationale for my behaviour. It came by way of Oscar Wilde who supposedly said: “I never read a book I must review, it prejudices you so.”

I am reading Poe in Dutch, my native language. Poe is really too difficult for non-native speakers. I mean, how many native speakers know what vituperate means? In Dutch this translates as beschimpen, and while not a word I use every day, nor every month, maybe once every year, I do know what to make of it. Nevertheless, I enjoy difficult words and I learn every day. My main site Jahsonic helps me in this by providing context. Yesterday I came across arcane, I look it up at my place and at Wikipedia and at Answers.com. Roughly it means esoteric.

Then I remember Eric Losfeld and his Editions Arcanes:

Losfeld began secret publishing about 1949, and openly in 1952 when he established Editions Arcanes. For the following ten years or so his feet were planted firmly in the fields of both clandestine and open publishing. His open publications were certainly avant-garde and included works by Nelly Kaplan, Claude Seignolle, Boris Vian, Francis Picabia, Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues amongst others. —Patrick J. Kearney more…

Back to Poe. Please check this post with a very good illustration of Lionizing. And the superb The Nose by Gogol.

Totally unrelated is a Horace Andy track over at Sly and Robbie’s MySpace.

Excuse the rambling post. My name, I believe, is Jan Geerinck.

American Psycho redux

Patrick Bateman: Do you know what Ed Gein said about women?
David Van Patten: The maitre ‘d at Canal Bar?
Patrick Bateman: No, serial killer, Wisconsin, the ’50s.
Craig McDermott: So what did he say?
Patrick Bateman: “When I see a pretty girl walking down the street, I think two things. One part wants me to take her out, talk to her, be real nice and sweet and treat her right.”
David Van Patten: And what did the other part think?
Patrick Bateman: “What her head would look like on a stick…”
[laughs]

It’s American Pyscho Day over at Dennis Cooper’s blog courtesy of SYpHA_69. Patrick Batemen would, I believe, be proud, says The Laughing Bone, who adds:

“After many years working in bookstores, I found there were a few titles that inspired a certain “persistent interest”: Naked Lunch, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Secret History, Perfume and Gravity’s Rainbow, … “obsessive fanaticism” such as Catcher in the Rye, Dune and Lord of the Rings. American Psycho, perhaps endemic to the current cultural climate, holds a tenuous middle ground between such interest and fanaticism. In the late 90s, I met quite a few budding Patrick Batemans who would use lines from the book like a secret language for the initiated. Little Holden Caufields gone all the way through the rye.”

My first exposure to American Psycho was a newspaper article mentioning that the original publisher had declined to publish the book after reading the manuscript. Enough to pique my curiousity and read it as soon as it came out. I haven’t re-read the book since but once started reading the 19th century version of it, Against the Grain by French writer Huysmans; which I stopped reading because of the overly long description of material goods — just like in American Psycho.

Here are links to all Cooper’s posts:

The 2000 film

I haven’t seen the film yet, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever see it unless catching it on television. In the meanwhile here is the trailer and here is a mash-up of the same. In case you’re wondering what a mash-up (actually a détournement in this case) is, it’s a musical genre which, in its purest form, consists of the combination (usually by digital means) of the music from one song with the a cappella from another. Technically a mash-up is a remix. Video can also be ‘remixed’, only it’s usually called ‘re-edited’ or ‘re-cut’. Another video mash-up is this version of Scarface, with only the fuck segments. Pulp Fiction underwent the same treatment.

Easy access to id material without being overwhelmed by it …

‘Groovy Age of Horror Curt”s third post in a series Horror, High and Low on the merits and theory of genre fiction comes just in time as he is about to delve into the depths of Nazi exploitation fiction in a series he announces as The Nazis Are Coming. Needless to say, I am a bit of a fan of this guilty pleasure genre myself and I am happy that he introduces this chapter (other chapters have included vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein, nurses) with the cautionary words: as long as it firmly remains fantasy.

“I hope this goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: I, a hardcore liberal, no more endorse Nazism politically than I, a hardcore atheist/naturalist, endorse belief in the supernatural elements in the horror novels I review here. Nazis are bad for real life, but they obviously resonate powerfully in the imagination as embodiments of evil, sadism, and power. Like so much else, they’re good for fantasy–as long as it firmly remains fantasy. “

The emphasis on fantasy reminds me of the cathartic theories on gruesome fiction and the aestheticization of violence that were en vogue in the sixties and seventies.

Contrary to the cathartic theory, Curt’s current piece recognizes — by way of the theories of Ernst Kris, presumably from Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (1952) — the possibility of being overwhelmed by id material, of not being able to distinguish the line between fact and fiction. This shines a particular light on media effects studies where for several decades, discussion of popular media was frequently dominated by the debate about ‘media effects’, in particular the link between mediated violence and real-life aggression.

An excerpt:

A more mature critical attitude, one that has made that reconnection, rather manifests a healthy flexibility described by Ernst Kris as,

The capacity of gaining easy access to id material without being overwhelmed by it, of retaining control over the primary process [i.e., while indulging it], and, perhaps specifically, the capability of making rapid or at least appropriately rapid shifts in levels of psychic function . . .

I think this truly positive account of genre fiction is what’s needed to put Jahsonic’s “nobrow” position on its firmest footing. I’m no more interested in Danielle Steele than Jan is, but now we’re in a position to say something about her–at least to the extent that we’re in a position to say something about genre fiction in general. Likewise, when Jan likens exclusively highbrow critics to someone who “only know[s] two colors, let’s say green and blue,” we’re now in a position to complete that metaphor by filling in the blanks of what the other colors represent that are missing from that palette–the warm colors, appropriately enough! —source

On a more personal note, Curt’s post above is the most articulate response so far since I started posting in the nobrow category. Curt’s blog Groovy Age has reinforced my position that one can only come to the nobrow if you know both ‘brows’.

Groovy Age is the only horror blog I read precisely because it knows its way around in ‘high theory’, referencing Freud and Ernst Kris. Fortunately Curt’s high theory does not detract from the sheer fun and excitement that oozes from its pages. I am already on the lookout for his 2008 nunsploitation chapter.

Three immoral tales

A 1833 novel by Petrus Borel: Champavert, contes immoraux

Champavert : Contes immoraux (1833) – Pétrus Borel [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK] – more …

A 1974 film by Walerian Borowczyk. Tagline: “You don’t have to go to a museum to see an X-rated Picasso”.

Immoral Tales (1974) – Walerian Borowczyk [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK] more …

A 1994 non fiction book Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956-1984 by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs, that won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Non-Fiction. The book covers European Cinema with profiles of Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, José Larraz, José Bénazéraf, Walerian Borowczyk and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Immoral Tales: Sex And Horror Cinema In Europe 1956-1984 (1994) – Cathal Tohill & Pete Tombs [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK] more …

Immorality is poised on the brink of good/evil, psychopathology and morality.

To the creator of films as well as other forms of literature, the dark side of human nature has often proved more rich and interesting than the bright. Films and books on the lives of saints have not been as popular as murder mysteries and works of horror. While we may have no desire to experience them in our own lives, terrible deeds and evil people exert their perverse attraction on our psyches. We who consider ourselves moral and upright are often fascinated by the behavior of the pitiless, merciless, and guiltless psychopath. Like a magnificent black panther: powerful, dangerous, and alien, the psychopathic character can have a dark, perfect beauty that simultaneously attracts and repels us. –Gordon Banks [1]

The last quote by Gordon Banks reminds me very much chapter four in Aristotle’s Poetics which explains our attraction to the horrific when fiction is concerned. Why we like things which are painful.

Depending on the translation Aristotle states:

Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. –sourced here. [Aug 2005]

for we enjoy looking at accurate likenesses of things which are themselves painful to see, obscene beasts, for instance, and corpses. –sourced here. [Aug 2005]

See also: ambivalence – art horror – representation

Al haar vleesch wilde hem

Lodewijk van Deyssel (1864-1952)

Excuse us for this Dutch post on Dutch naturalist writer Lodewijk van Deyssel. The excerpt below is from a first ongekuiste (unexpurgated) version of Een Liefde (A Love) (1887).

Fragment uit “Een liefde” (Uit de ongekuiste eerste versie)

pag. 188:
“Zij zag weer Jozefs twee bruine oogen, twee lichtpunten die naar haar toe schitterden, maar oogen van vroeger, de oogen van den doode, die niet óok waren in dien man hier in huis.
Zij ging weer op bed liggen, met haar bonzende hoofd, in haar koorts van wild begeeren. Haar beenen lagen wijd van elkaâr, met opgetrokken knieën. Haar oogen hingen zwaar en heet. Nu zou hij komen, nu zou hij komen, de zachte groote man, al haar vleesch wilde hem, haar heete mond, haar levende geslachtsdeel. Zij was hier, met haar armen, met haar beenen, om hem te ontvangen en hem aan haar vast te klemmen. Waarom kwam hij niet? Zij voelde hem niet in haar bed, zij voelde hem niet in haar lichaam komen. Zij richtte zich op en luisterde, als moest zij hem van ver hooren naderen. Maar alles bleef stil, totdat zij éens Jozef hoorde bewegen en hoesten, die achter den wand in zijn bed lag. Was hij dat, was hij daar? Neen, dat was de andere, het namaaksel van haar man. Dien moest zij niet hebben. En de heelen nacht eilde zij door, in een half-wakenden, half-slapenden toestand, in verschrikkingen, die het bede deden kantelen en de kamer instorten over haar hoofd, in droomen van zware blokken, die over haar lijf vielen, en van een God den Vader, een grijsaard met een langen baard en een kroon op zijn hoofd, die zachtjes tot haar afdaalde, maar dan onvoelbaar werd als een geest en in rook verwolkte om haar heen.”

Commentaar:

Een fragment als dit kan naturalistisch genoemd worden door de overmaat aan uiterst precieze beschrijvingen van alle gevoelsnuances, het impressionistische taalgebruik vol neologismen en bijvoeglijke naamwoorden; maar ook door de ongekuiste (voor die tijd dus schokkende) beschrijving van het lichamelijke.

Lodewijk van Deyssel heeft in de tweede uitgaven van zijn boek passages als deze vrijwillig gekuist, omdat er een storm van protest losbarstte. —source

Yet it is precisely this morning mood that is intolerable

German cover of Marcellus Emants novel Posthumous Confessions. [1]

I am currently teaching romanticism, realism and naturalism in literature. I’ve been studying literature for the last 2 years, but mainly from an anglocentric point of view so I was glad to find somewhat transgressive literature in my mother tongue. Marcellus Emants’s novel, Een Nagelaten Bekentenis (1894) is categorized in Belgium as naturalistic literature, but as is evident from the German translation shown above (Bekenntnisse Eines Dekadenten) it is categorized in Germany as decadent literature. The novel was translated by J. M. Coetzee in 1976. Another transgressive Dutch-language work of fiction to check out is L. P. Boon’s De paradijsvogel (1958), for a good article on Boon, see here.

From the opening:

My wife is dead and buried.

I am alone in the house, alone with the two maids. So I am free again. Yet what good is it to me, this freedom? I am within reach of what I have wanted for the last twenty years (I am thirty-five), but I have not the courage to grasp it, and, besides that, would anyhow no longer enjoy it very much.

I am too frightened of anything that excites me, too frightened of a glass of wine, too frightened of music, too frightened of women; for only in my matter-of-fact morning mood I am in control of myself, sure that I will keep silent about my act.

Yet it is precisely this morning mood that is intolerable. To feel no interest – no interest in any person, any work, even any book – to roam without aim or will through an empty house in which only the indifferent guarded whispering of two maids drifts about like the far-off talk of warders around the cell of a sequestered madman, to be able to think, with the last snatch of desire in an extinct nervous life, about only one thing, and to tremble before that one thing like a squirrel in the hypnotic gaze of a snake – how can I persevere to the end, day in, day out, in such an abominable existence?

Whenever I look in the mirror – still a habit of mine – I am astounded that such a pale, delicate, insignificant little man with dull gaze and weak, slack mouth (a nasty piece of work, some people would say) was able to murder his wife, a wife whom, after all, in his own way, he had loved. —source

A daringly frank novel

I’ve updated my page on adultery, and especially adultery in literature and happened upon this picture of a 1956 Signet edition of Alberto Moravia’s novel Conjugal Love, which I’ve sort of reviewed here. Signet is an imprint of the American paperback publisher New American Library.

Some comments on the wording on the jacket by antydiluvian:

Note the puffery from 1956: “A daringly frank novel.” This meant that if there was an adulteress in it, she didn’t die at the end. Or if she did it was from something not directly related to sex. What the woman did with her lover(s) was left to the imagination, of course — no “frankness” there. Any book that was translated from the French, Swedish, or (as in this case) Italian might be called “daringly frank” simply because anything written in those languages was automatically regarded as racy. And “complete and unabridged” meant that any scenes of actual European “frankness” in the novel were left intact for its American readers — which wasn’t always the case in those days.

I don’t know if any of you have checked IMDb keyword tool, but for Moravia you get this, which explains why Moravia’s work is classified as naturalistic, and also why I have come to like his work over the years.

Bill Marx writes in Alberto Moravia’s kinky, subversive realism is back in print:

“In the 1940s and ’50s, Italian novelist Alberto Moravia achieved international acclaim as a kinky realist whose Marxist-inspired moralism detailed the paralysis of the middle-class ego in the face of cultural and political collapse. Before and just after World War II, Moravia analyzed the blight of fascism; during the Cold War era he explored the spiritual costs of capitalism. What distinguishes Moravia from most other writers of politically inspired fiction, however, is that he was a popular novelist, his wide appeal rooted in his frank depictions of love and sexuality. Like Ignazio Silone, Moravia bore historical witness to the century’s horrors, but his fiction’s sleek dovetailing of Marx and Freud exposed the West’s inertia through the tortured curbs and caprices of the libido. The marketability of sex made the subversiveness of his critique palatable: Moravia’s books sold more than one million copies in the United States during the buttoned-up 1940s and ’50s.” —source

Incidentally Moravia’s work came to my attention in the early 2000s via Cédric Kahn’s excellent film L’ Ennui (1998). If you read more of Moravia — he is often considered the most popular Italian novelist outside Italy and his novels have been filmed lots of times in cinematic modernism — , you get the impression that there is nothing as exciting as an unfaithful wife, I tend to agree. It reminds me of a quote I read in one of the early issues of Mondo 2000 magazine. It went: “when you come to realize that safe sex is boring sex.”

Sir Stephen gave her his consent

L’Histoire d’O / Story of O (1954) – Pauline Reage [Amazon.com]

I’d never paid attention to it, but Pauline Réage’s 1954 novel Story of O betrays its ‘literary fiction’ (as opposed to genre fiction) antecedents by a metafictional streak; the novel has two alternative beginnings and endings. Postmodernism avant la lettre.

After the novel is two pages underway the narrator steps in and announces:

“Another version of the same beginning was simpler and more direct: the young woman, dressed in the same way [as in the first opening of the story], was driven by her lover and an unknown friend.”

Likewise, the author provides an alternative ending which is rather macabre:

“In a final chapter, which has been suppressed, O returned to Roissy, where she was abandoned by Sir Stephen.

There exists a second ending to the story of O, according to which O, seeing that Sir Stephen was about to leave her, said she would prefer to die. Sir Stephen gave her his consent.”

Notice the secretive “a final chapter, which has been suppressed”. Very Borgesian.

P. S. I am currently reading the Dutch translation by Adriaan Morriën who adds an interesting afterword to his translation of this classic, which was written before the true identity of the writer of O was known. He notes that the women in Story of O are not slaves without rights but that their permission and consent is sought for everything they undergo. He also notes that apart from the first 10 pages the narrator steps out of the way to give an account seen through the point of view of O herself. The novel, he says “does not provide a philosophy nor a way of life but rather a description of human relations that are conceivable.” But this reminds me very much of what Poe said in 1850: “The mind of man can imagine nothing which has not really existed.” Aury could not have written this novel without living the story first.

Sort of off-topic: staying with the subject of sadomasochism in fiction, Il Giornale Nuovo has a nice post on the graphic work of Bruno Schulz, a man primarily known for his modernist fiction. This image tells most of the story.

Of human hunting

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

The French title to the film adaptation was Les Chasses du comte Zaroff , as depicted here on the cover of French magazine Midi- Minuit Fantastique, issue 6 of June 1963

Excerpt from the story, where the protagonist finds out what general Zaroff actually means:

“I wanted the ideal animal to hunt,” explained the general. “So I said, `What are the attributes of an ideal quarry?’ And the answer was, of course, `It must have courage, cunning, and, above all, it must be able to reason.”‘

“But no animal can reason,” objected Rainsford.

“My dear fellow,” said the general, “there is one that can.”

“But you can’t mean–” gasped Rainsford.

“And why not?”

“I can’t believe you are serious, General Zaroff. This is a grisly joke.”

“Why should I not be serious? I am speaking of hunting.”

—–The Most Dangerous Game (1924) is a famous short story by Richard Connell