Deviant Games
1991; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/esp.1991.0043
ISSN1931-0234
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis
ResumoDeviant Games Gwendolyn Wells E ARLY IN HELEN’S Mémoires d ’une liseuse de draps,1 there occurs what might be called—literally, for once—a seminal scene. The narrator/heroine, abandoned in infancy by her mother and raised aboard the ship Sperma by her father, the vessel’s captain, and five worthy seamen of various ethnicities, recalls from her adult perspec tive the glorious day of her baptism, when she was eight years old. The young girl watches, wonderstruck, as each of the five sailors, Szuma, Doudouk, Olaf, Baklava and Circuncisión del Señor, ejaculates a spec tacular arc of seminal fluid which, propelled through the air by objective chance, forms a letter of the alphabet when it lands upon a giant sheet of red waxed paper. Her name, “ Belen” receives as its final, legitimizing flourish her father’s seminal “ trait paternel” (28), emitted accidentally at the end of the ceremony. The heroine is anointed with “ quelques gouttes dispersées de leur liqueur deflux charnel, sur le front, derrière les oreilles, sur les lèvres, sur les seins que je n’avais pas encore, sur la toison que j ’aurais un jour . . .” (29). The toasts offered by the sailors during the post-baptismal feast prove to be prophetic: Belen will indeed become “ scandaleusement belle” (31); her intelligence, courage and occult powers, in combination with the friendship of the sailors, will be her arms in the service of the M.R.P. (Mouvement des Révolutions Propagées), and will safeguard her against her enemies, José Acero (a.k.a. Joe Steel, Joseph Acier, Stalin) and his pitiless band of imperialist oppressors, the C.I.A. (Compagnie des Indes Américaines). The final toast, offered by Belen’s father, combines Bretonian lyricism with the aspirations of every capitalist Sugar Daddy: he promises his daughter mad love and the most valuable gift of all, humor, in the form of “ un manteau de fou rire!” (32). The sailors’ display of seminal prowess during the baptismal ceremony is by no means pulled off singlehandedly. Their silent ac complice in their exercise in “ écriture spermatique” is Dolly Lastex: a life-sized inflatable sex doll, equipped with a variety of interchangeable wigs, orificial adaptors, battery-operated, erectile nipples, and an inter nal music-box, programmed to moan on cue. Dolly, with her “ charmes caoutchouteux” (19), is more than a mere accessory to the seafarers. Vo l . XXXI, No. 4 69 L ’E s pr it C r éa te u r Given the surrealist vein of the novel, she might figure Hans Bellmer’s violently disjointed Poupées, or perhaps the inflatable woman who presided over the avant-garde experiments at the Centrale Surréaliste during the 1920s.2 More importantly perhaps, Dolly Lastex is a risible “ embodiment” of various aspects of the phallocentric order which will be lampooned in Belen’s novel—a rubbery reification of the process through which male desire constructs (and by extension, writes) its own (female) object. In a sense, Dolly Lastex concretizes the body of philosophical and psychoanalytic lore created around that notoriously enigmatic figure, “ Woman” ; she metaphorizes, as well, the literary corpus in which this phallic lore has been inscribed. The inflatable doll is also an eloquent commentator on Belen’s devious/deviant writerly games in her Mémoires, for her contribution to the domain of erotic writing—which domain itself can be conceptualized as an illicit literary sex-toy, located at the margins of the canon—involves a ludic rescripting of what might be called the hard core of the erotic tradition, pornography. In fact, as I will suggest here, Belen’s Mémoires may be read as a sort of feminist perversion of an already “ perverse” genre. Pornographic texts have been described as highly codified and for mulaic. The restricted (and therefore challenging) terrain of the pornographer ’s playground has not failed to attract the experimental efforts of a number of “ stars” on the twentieth-century French literary scene; Alain Robbe-Grillet and Georges Bataille, among others, have toyed with pornography’s conventions. While work in the way of formal description of these conventions remains to be done, available analyses suggest that the...
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