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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. John Taylor: Remembering Pierre Chappuis
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What are perversions?
A Fortnightly Review of
What Are Perversions? Sexuality, Ethics, Psychoanalysis
by Sergio Benvenuto
Karnak Books | 240pps | $42.95 £24.99
By ANTHONY HOWELL.
Benvenuto’s question is hard to answer because, as he points out, it’s one which keeps changing as customs and opinions change.
Almost before I had turned the first page I was at it: for me, I thought, a perversion is a fixation. One could have a fixation on slugs, as a doctor might have a fixation on applying leeches. Could there be such a thing as an approved fixation – getting your nails “done”, for instance? Benvenuto points out that the term ‘perversion’ has largely been done away with:
TODAY ONE NO LONGER speaks of perversion but rather of paraphilia, a term first proposed in 1903 by the German psychiatrist S. F. Krauss. Paranoia is to believe in the wrong things, paraphilia is to covet the wrong objects. But even this reference to para, literally “aside”, to the strange, tends to be deleted from more libertarian formulations.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) regards perversions as disorders: exhibitionism, voyeurism, frotteurism (groping), paedophilia, masochism, sadism, transvestism, making obscene phone calls, necrophilia, partialism (erotic interest in certain parts of the body), zoophilia, coprophilia, klismaphilia (a passion for enemas) and “watersports”. For myself, I would add arms-dealing and dentistry, especially of the amateur variety in the latter case. Surely it was perverse of Peter the Great to extract the tooth of any courtier so stupid as to profess an ache – and to keep the teeth extracted in rows in a velvet box on view in the Kunstkamera in Leningrad?
Huysmans might have appended the actions of a frôleuse (a woman who rubs herself against a man), together with certain manifestations of heresy (the contamination of the host, for instance, with bodily fluids, faeces and the blood of murdered mice or children). Since the main character of Là-Bas, Durtal, is researching a book on Gilles de Rais (the supposed “Bluebeard of the fifteenth century), he might have appended several perversions fashionable in the middle ages – copulation in the entrails of a disembowelled child, for instance.
It has all been very much watered down in our own day. Even incest,” Benvenuto writes, “can now be seen in “not a bad light, with many novels and films showing the good side of the incestuous adults” and he supplies an IMDB list to prove it. The salient admonition might be to wear a condom! Benvenuto points out that the DSM says nothing about why “we should consider these paraphilias as mental disorders, as behaviour that upsets the order.”
Benvenuto goes on to analyse possible causes for certain behaviours that might be labelled perverse, which is fair enough. Whether you call something a perversion or not, it is still of some interest to ask why one may be compelled to do what one does – and why society may disapprove. However, it appears that both motivation and social response are in a state of flux. Homosexuality was a despicable offense that got Oscar Wilde sent to jail back in the nineteenth century (though it would not have happened in antiquity), however sending off a child to a school where he was likely to be interfered with by a schoolteacher or a cleric evinced little more than a shrug – even when I was growing up in the fifties – “these things do go on,” might have been the response – the tampering seen as a learning experience, part of education.
As Benvenuto points out:
True, but I note that the ever-ingenious Japanese, who seem to have a vested interest in a romantic notion of the schoolgirl – and romantic it is, surely? The hordes of ungainly, ill-dressed, uncouth examples pouring onto the streets at four o’clock testify to that – have come up with a solution: dolls for the paedophile – beautifully formed female ephebes in the appropriate uniform, guaranteed to keep potential offenders from applying for jobs as lollipop men at the relevant zebra crossings.
According to the DSM, an act is perverse if it takes place with a non-consenting adult. But Benvenuto throws doubt on this ruling:
Benvenuto maintains that, in order to achieve respectability, today’s Freudians may have overcooked Freud, and that “over time the references to erotic and bodily functions have more and more been assumed as pure metaphors.” He suggests that contemporary psychoanalysis has become “spiritualised”, its practitioners – liberal libertarians who wish to distance themselves from the redneck vulgarities of the working class without seeming to do so – tend to feel “almost ashamed” of Freud’s vision of sexuality which included pleasures connected with defecation, urination, flatulence and gluttony. Thus the penis becomes the “signifier phallus” – a species of spiritual symbol.
I CONCUR, BUT EVEN Benvenuto maintains that anorexia concerns a distorted denigration of one’s body image, which mentalizes the issue, whereas I have met anorexics who know perfectly well that they are beautiful; however, they have a horror of shitting, and try to avoid it for as long as they can.
As Benvenuto points out:
Benvenuto suggests a variety of analyses for some of the more common aberrations, happy to provide readings from rival schools of psycho-analysis but focussing ultimately on interpretations by Freud, Masud Khan, Jacques Lacan and Robert Stoller. He sees jealousy of the mother (who has rejected the child to enjoy intercourse with the father) as a root cause – of masochism, for example, where “I, as a subject, take the stage as a humiliated object, discarded by the woman.”
“Remember that a mom is a woman!” he points out. And he suggests that we dodge the rage and jealousy of our frustrated love by turning what we perceive as rejection into the “pleasure” of being chosen as the rejected one – it’s a language trick, an oxymoronic figure.
While I can understand the reversal that… turns what is a pain into pleasure, I have a problem with the Oedipal back-story.
Here my own subjective view kicks in again. While I can understand the reversal that, like some Moebius strip, renders what is inside outside, and turns what is a pain into pleasure, I have a problem with the Oedipal back-story. Psychoanalysis relies far too much on assumption – that there was a father, for instance. Perhaps the “nuclear” model of the family was true for Freud’s Vienna, though I doubt that it was ubiquitous. As an only child, the son of a widow, I never witnessed a primal scene, though I watched plenty of animals being mated, without much envy on my part. I suffered from parental claustrophobia, rather than jealousy, and I feel that there are far too many varieties of upbringing to be accounted for by the catch-all of the aforementioned complex. Children are orphaned, abandoned, looked after by a single parent, by homosexuals, religious maniacs and divorcees, so the Oedipal triangle only applies to a section of the populace – if it applies at all in an age where incest is no longer quite the taboo that it once was.
Elaborating on the notion of “dodging the pain”, Benvenuto suggests that “the masterpiece of perversity consists in transforming the trauma of jealousy into an exclusive way of sexual enjoyment.”
This holds true for the version of Gilles de Rais imagined by Huysmans:
This is a fine example of a pervert being proud of his art, though I hasten to remind my readers that it’s purely a literary conception (as Huysmans may or may not have realised). Margot K. Juby has pointed out that far more research has been completed on de Rais since the eighteen-nineties, when the first instalment of Là-Bas appeared. She is currently writing a book to clear his name. As she says on her website:
In the mid-1920s he was even put forward for beatification, by persons unknown. He was certainly not the basis for Bluebeard, this is a very old story which appears all over the world in different forms.
SO, HERE WE HAVE a prime example of “fake news” – promoted and promulgated by the authorities, as is customary, even today. However the quote from Huysmans does bring to the surface the baroque nature of perversion, its elaborate sense of decorum almost, of procedure, which Benvenuto points out. I find the Italian author at his most illuminating when he discusses the notion of the law and what might be termed “anti-law” in relation to perversion. He observes that Lacan “brings to light the truly ethical dimension of perversions.”
The law is the large Other’s prerogative, amounting to whatever domineering concept has mastery over the pervert. The law is not ethics. “Of course, the managers of Nazi concentration camps acted legally,” notes Benvenuto, “but could anyone say they were ethical?”
ELSEWHERE, BENVENUTO SAYS, “For the rapist, the woman is guilty of innocence.” This is clearly borne out by the sufferings of the innocent Justine, at the hands of sadistic libertines – in the eponymous novel by de Sade – in contrast to the riches and success lavished upon her depraved, and far more alluring, sister, Juliette – alluring from a reader’s point of view, that is. For there is an ethical dimension effecting the law here. I am mindful of Wittgenstein’s notion that “ethics is aesthetics” – as he states in the Tractatus. It’s a statement I take as an article of faith, since I interpret aesthetics as the discipline of doing the best possible job – so the poet does the best possible job on the poem he is writing, just as the brain surgeon does the best possible job with the operation he is performing; the same obligation applying to care workers, tank commanders and politicians. Now the cardinal “sin” of aesthetics, overriding sloppiness of style or bombast, is for a work to be a cliché. So if ethics is synonymous with aesthetics, Justine’s decency, her innocence, can be vilified as just that, a dull conformism to the platitudes of her day – so unlike the lion-hearted individuality of her violently promiscuous sibling. Justine deserves what she gets.
“Sin” seems a far-off word these days, and perversion appears to have evaporated into clubs for consenting adults to show off their leathers.
There I go, getting subjective again about psychoanalysis. “Sin” seems a far-off word these days, and perversion appears to have evaporated into clubs for consenting adults to show off their leathers. It’s refreshing to turn back to Là-Bas, where case histories not dissimilar to those of psycho-analysis abound. Doctor Johannès, for instance, who “formulates his own treatment for illnesses which are the result of sorcery.”
‘What exactly does he do?’
‘He claims that whenever a particular stone is placed in the hand or on the affected limb of someone who has been bewitched, a fluid escapes from the stone into his hands which he can then examine. On this subject, he once told me that a woman whom he had never met came to see him for a consultation about a malady, claimed to be incurable, from which she had suffered since childhood. He could not get any precise answers to his questions but, in any event, he could find no signs of venefice. After trying out his entire array of stones, he placed in her hand the lapis lazuli, which, he claims, corresponds to the sin of incest. He then felt the stone.
“Your sickness,” he told her, “is the consequence of an act of incest.”
“I did not come here in search of a confessor,” she replied. But she finally admitted that her father had raped her before she reached the age of puberty. All this, of course, is completely contrary to good sense, almost insane; but there is no getting around the fact that this priest cures patients whom we doctors have given up for lost!’
The same doctor is reported to have cured paralytic hysteria by deducing that the patient is the victim of “consanguineous sorcery.”
WHEN IT C
OMES TO these arts, Huysmans is a delightful tease, and being an absolute sorcerer when it comes to fiction, he can turn this body of invocations and enchantments into the purest comedy. For while Là-Bas purports to delve into black magic and horror, it is in no way supernatural and more a compendium of the ridiculous (as might be said for psychoanalysis). Huysmans “applies” his rich vocabulary as an impressionist painter applies paint, there is a matière to his writing, a surface texture – he wrote probably the first essay on “Modern Art” – championing the innovative painters of his time. As capricious as it is grotesque, it is writing for writing’s sake, and he understands contrast as well as any painter, very often with tongue in cheek results. Unsavoury details of atrocities and heretical practices are recounted over the dinner table, punctuated with offers of a little more salad or a brief dissertation on how to eat gingerbread. Là-Bas is as discursive and conversational in its own way as A Nest of Ninnies by John Ashbery and James Schuyler. Both works are masterpieces of modernism, though nearly a century lies between their publication.
Literary merit aside, this novel by Huysmans does look at phenomena such as fetishes in what reads as a refreshing way; as when Durtal discusses “the abominations of Ségarelli of Parma, who, under the pretext of becoming a child so as to better symbolise the simple, naïve love of the Paraclete, had himself swathed in nappies, slept by the side of the nurse who breast-fed him and wallowed in all the evil the underworld had to offer.”
But getting back to the law, and the emphasis that Benvenuto places on it, rightly I feel, it appears that there is a piety to perversion, which one senses in Huysmans also. Sade, the Divine Marquis, “identifies nature with the obligation of enjoyment.” Benvenuto elaborates:
For Huysmans, the pervert is a believer turned inside out.
To feel this, however, you have to have faith in it, and perhaps (in a splitting of one’s personality where the halves are kept hermetically sealed), aspire to believe in its opposite at the same time. For Huysmans, the pervert is a believer turned inside out (and as Benvenuto points out, turn a glove inside-out and there is still an inside). In order to complete his research into his “Bluebeard”, Durtal attends a Black Mass – which turns out to be a distinctly shoddy affair – Durtal is appalled by its seediness as much as anything. The mass is described in forensic detail, with soiled communion wafers and with the image of Christ above the altar, naked and equipped with a massive erection (which is fairly common in certain mystical representations which compare physical with spiritual ecstasy, just as images of Saint Theresa may appear to show her at the height of some masturbatory orgasm). What is clear throughout the scene is that the worshippers are in a Catholic sense devout. It is only a believer who is going to get anything out of a mass, whether it’s black or white. So this bears out the feeling that I get from Benvenuto’s observations concerning perversion that one would need to believe in charity in order to be resolutely uncharitable.
I HAVE ALWAYS FELT that if we were to accept the perfidy of Gilles de Rais, we would have to admit his absolute zeal for Jeanne d’Arc and her cause. I sense that to have witnessed her burn could upset all one’s aspirations to be a warrior for what is right. In a similar way, Richard Lovelace witnessed the complete inversion of his world. From wearing cloth of gold and silver as a Royalist colonel he was obliged to eat the soles of his shoes, and, in order to “dodge” the pain of being thrown from the Cavalier saddle, he became the poetic master of the oxymoron, as is shown, for example, by these images of sowing:
—The Ant, Richard Lovelace, from Lucasta Posthume Poems 1659-1660
The pervert is a living oxymoron, and this is grasped by Benvenuto, who explains it well.
Apart from occasions where the syntax seems involuted, perhaps as a result of there being more than a single translator involved in the project of getting it into English, his book is written in an almost racy style that renders it devourable by the non-specialist. The text is appropriately supplied with examples from films, and Benvenuto makes interesting points about our propensity to seek out and happily identify with the perverse vicariously via fiction – drama and film enabling a catharsis similar to a positive outcome from analysis, though it appears that analysis has no obligation to come to a conclusion: one can go on seeing one’s analyst as one might any confessor. The devil ensures that temptation is an ongoing affair.
Freud considers normal sexual behaviour a bricolage of inclinations, several in all likelihood perverse…
Freud considers normal sexual behaviour a bricolage of inclinations, several in all likelihood perverse; and just as it is a commonplace to consider that our sexual identity is always partly composed of the gender we consider ourselves not to be, so the perversions accompany our vaunted normality, suggesting that we are all freakier than we think we are, especially when we find our mouths watering, as mine did, I confess, on reading the details of some of the seriously juicy case histories included in this book – those captivating fairy tales of our time.
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Publication: Saturday, 4 February 2017, at 08:51.
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