Category Archives: literature

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.”

Duration is that which decomposes

Via Methods and Black Squares comes this lovely multimedia poem by Deleuze who states:

“Who introduced duration to the novel before cinema? It was Flaubert with Mme Bovary.”


Gilles Deleuze, photo credit unidentified

La durée c’est ce qui se décompose

Ha!
La durée c’est une
défection . La durée c’est,
tomber en poussierrrrrrrrrrr.
Oui, oui.
C’est Flaubert. C’est Flaubert.
Et. Et.
Si ça dure, ça se décompose.
[silence]
Ce n’est pas du tout Bergsonien.

Muybridge’s Complete Human and Animal Locomotion

 

And the world will come from your mouth

Dennis Cooper celebrates Alexandro Jodorowsky day.

As always, Dennis spends a considerate amount of time on the artists he celebrates. Here is a list of subtopics:

Jodorowsky is primarily know for directing the midnight movie and cult classic El Topo (1970), a kind of spaghetti western with Buñuelian overtones. Through the Panic Movement he was connected to two other cult figures: Roland Topor and Fernando Arrabal. Most recently Jodorowsky made headlines news by officiating the non-denominational marriage ceremony of rock singer friend Marilyn Manson and burlesque performer Dita Von Teese.

El Topo (1970) – Alexandro Jodorowsky [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Jodorowsky:

“And I imagine…with great pleasure…all the horrible stirrings of the nonmanifested to bring forth the scream which creates the universe. Maybe one day I’ll see you trembling, and you’ll go into convulsions and grow larger and smaller until your mouth opens and the world will come from your mouth, escaping through the window like a river, and it will flood the city. And then we’ll begin to live.” — A. Jodorowsky, 1971.

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.

Coffeetablishness

GillesNeret

Gilles Néret (1933 – 2005)

In answer to my recently asked question regarding the publishers of 20th century counterculture Taschen came to mind, an international publishing powerhouse with its roots in 1980s Germany. Taschen started out by publishing Benedikt Taschen’s extensive comic book collection and then basically conquered the world with its ‘coffeetablishness’.

Taschen is the best alternative to countless hours of internet browsing and a much better reading experience than the web itself, but buying the books remains more expensive than the internet.

Taschen also illustrates the lack of political subversion in contemporary culture. Countercultural publishers such as Grove in the 1960s also published pamphlet-like tracts. Taschen does not have a politics section; however I like to think that Benedikt and Laure have opinionated views on these matters.

That the eleven thousand virgins punish me if I lie

“If I had you in bed with me, twenty times in a row I would prove my passion to you. That the eleven thousand virgins punish me if I lie.”

The Eleven Thousand Rods (1907) – Guillaume Apollinaire
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

The Eleven Thousand Rods (French: Les Onze Milles Verges) is a 1907 erotic novel by Apollinaire. The title is a pun on the legend of Saint Ursula and her eleven thousand handmaidens. The pun works better in French where vierge means virgin and verge means rod. The painting on the cover of the French edition shown above looks like something by Ingres, but is it?

The best library in the entire multiverse

Excellent post by fellow Belgian Borsky and ‘pataphysician on his book shopping trip to Paris. He got to visit Un Regard Moderne, which was closed last time I was there.

I found the bookstore ‘Mona Lisait’ (Mona did read) at rue Danton #6. All old unraid books from stocks. I discovered a real treasure in the basement: two numbers of ‘Bizarre’ in minted condition. Some people would commit a murder for those, published by one of two revolutionary editors in the french language: Jean-Jacques Pauvert (the other one is Swiss Eric Losfeld). This legendary magazine from the fifties was the soil from which many pataphysicians realized their life purpose. Surrealism, dadaism and a thick layer of serious humor, with special issues about strange literature, naive art, literature studies etc. made Bizarre [1], [2] a holy grail to me. I only owned one copy for which I had paid a lot ten years ago. Now I tripled my collection for just a few euros (the poor librarian had no idea what she sold me).

Apparently Bizarre magazine was started by Losfeld and then taken over by Pauvert in 1955. From the French Wikipedia: “Il reprendra à son compte en 1955 la revue Bizarre crée par Éric Losfeld. ”

Losfeld had only edited two issues when Pauvert took over:

Revue BIZARRE N° 02- ( Seconde série )- Thomas Owen, Jean Ray, Jean Mayoux, Michel Carrouges, Jean-Hugues Sainmont, Camille Renault, Jacques B. Brunius, Paul Gibson, Jacques Yonnet, Michel Morphy, René de Obaldia, Philippe Soupault, Nick Carter, Claude Ernoult, R. Chomet, G. Klein, Mayo, Agnese, Henri Bouché, Michel Bonno, Guy Jumeau Revue BIZARRE N° 02- ( Seconde série )- Ed. J.J. Pauvert, Octobre 1955. In 4°, br, 95 pp.+ 6 feuillets gris-vert, Rédacteur en chef : Michel Laclos- Au sommaire : Thomas Owen, Jean Ray, L’ insaisissable- Jean Mayoux, Les machines célibataires de Michel Carrouges ( Fin )- Jean-Hugues Sainmont, Camille Renault, créateur du monde ( Photographies )- Jacques B. Brunius et Paul Gibson, Un peu moins de bruit- Jacques Yonnet, Univers virgule cinq- Michel Morphy, Canaille en soutane- René de Obaldia, L’ Heure qu’ il est- Philippe Soupault, Mort de Nick Carter- Claude Ernoult, Science-Fiction et réthorique des idées- R. Chomet et G. Klein, Bestiaire ” Digest ” de la S.F.- Illustrations de Mayo, Agnese, Henri Bouché, Michel Bonno, Guy Jumeau, J.-H. Sainmont- Annonce page 53: Bizarre publiera dans ses prochains numéros J.-L. Borges- ( Note personnelle: ?- )- Très bon état- Une première série a paru auparavant, édité par Losfeld, avec seulement 2 numéros : Gaston Leroux N° I – Granville N° II- La seconde série est éditée par J.J.Pauvert (46 numéros )- —source

More on the dis/similarities between Pauvert and Losfeld:

Eric Losfeld, the original publisher of the work translated here (THE NUN (Count D’Irancy)) for the first time, was a horse of a different colour altogether. It’s difficult to say whether Losfeld and Pauvert were rivals exactly, since despite their beginnings in clandestine publishing, their approach to it was quite dissimilar. Sarane Alexandrian,who does see the pair as rivals, summed up the differences rather well: “Jean-Jacques Pauvert. a eu une carriere bien differente, mais non moins interresante. Losfeld fut un surrealist editeur, Pauvert un editeur du surrealism; voila ce qui les distingue.”

Losfeld gives a good indication of his surrealist approach to life early in his memoirs. When on his military service in the 1930’s, he writes to Adolf Hitler:

“Monsieur, Je suis un soldat belge qui s’ennuie dans une ville de garnison qui s’appelle Namur . Je vous en rends personnallement responsible. En consequence, j’ai l’honneur de vous declarer la guerre.”

There is no record of what reply, if any, was received from Berlin . —Patrick J. Kearney via here.

To conclude, some additional info on Pauvert’s publishing and extra Bizarre covers here.

Il me semble avoir une dette personnelle à l’égard de Jean-Jacques Pauvert, comme tous ceux à qui ses livres apportèrent autant de bouffées d’air frais dans un monde trop policé. Le temps où l’on ne pouvait lire Sade, Pauline Réage ou Bataille semble bien éloigné. Mais je ne peux m’empêcher d’avoir une affection particulière pour certains livres de ma bibliothèque où son nom apparaît : Hollywood Babylone de Kenneth Anger, la revue Bizarre, la première monographie de Clovis Trouille, et beaucoup de titres de la « Bibliothèque Internationale d’Erotologie » qui n’ont pas tout à fait perdu leur goût sulfureux : Les « enfers », Le vampire, Métaphysique du strip-tease, Mythologie du sein, Eros du dimanche…

Borsky also informs us that Robert Anton Wilson has died.