« Am I really so different from my fellow man? »
On Elegance While Sleeping, Viscount Lascano Tegui, 1925. Tr. Idra Novey (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010)
The Necrophiliac, Gabrielle Wittkop, 1972. Tr. Don Bapst (ECW Press, 2011)
Pharricide, Vincent De Swarte, 1998. Tr. Nicholas Royle (Configo, 2019)
On the face of it, what connects On Elegance While Sleeping [1], The Necrophiliac and Pharricide, is obvious: they share form, being diaries, geography, each set in France, and a focus on, if not outright celebration of, the morbid, vile and disturbing. However, much as the fixed mien of a corpse will betray its putrefaction through the leak of black rot, the longer spent in visitation with the narrators of these works, the deeper their stickier and more pungent connections seep into the reader’s consciousness. Reveling in some of the most extreme subject matters imaginable, these short novels confront the reader with protagonists whose perverse concerns extend far beyond the brute facts of their violence and paraphilias. In doing so, they reveal characters so well realised that it is possible not only to sympathise but even find oneself beguiled. Far from mere provocation, what these novels best manage to convey is the resilient humanity in the gloomiest, most remote and menacing reaches of the imagination.
The most recent of the novels, Pharricide is also the most conventional. Written over the course of six months as keeper of the monumental Cordouan lighthouse, the reader is presented with diary of Geoffroy Lefayen and a record of his descent into hellish depravity. Exploiting the direct intimacy offered by the diary form, in short order and, in instructive contrast to Elegance and TheNecrophiliac, rather artlessly, the reader learns a great deal about his personality and background. Geoffroy’s childhood was marked by death, madness and poverty, his adulthood by solitude – somewhat leavened by professional approbation – and an apprenticeship in taxidermy in “a veritable floating necropolis” (p51). He is, he tells us, kind, deep down “a big soft doggie” (p20). As an introduction, it disarms with its directness and naivety, but it isn’t long before hints of Geoffroy’s troubled mental state appear. Within days of beginning his stint as keeper, he can feel “the faintest trace of madness in the air” (p29). When he is visited by an English couple looking to stage their wedding at Cordouan, the tenuous grasp on his most vicious impulses breaks down completely. Soon tied to stakes on the beach to drown, the couple are taken back to the lighthouse for stuffing, posing, and the odd moment of “over-familiarity” when Geoffroy can’t help himself.
As in each of the novels, there is a sense that Geoffroy’s fate is sealed long before he kills the English couple, but it is this act which sets the compact and dynamic plot in action. The couple’s disappearance provokes suspicion and police interest, exacerbating Geoffroy’s violent manias and precipitating his demise. As Geoffroy doesn’t seem to have acted in this way before (we are told that he is highly regarded by his employers and has spent long periods in similarly isolated situations apparently without succumbing to such desires) his Cordouan experience appears uniquely deranged. To that end, Geoffroy repeatedly attempts to avoid responsibility for his actions, first blaming the lighthouse itself (“[it] has woken me up […] striped my soul naked […] saved my knives from retirement.” (p27)) and later Lise, an engineer with whom he enters into a damned relationship (p125). The horrors escalate: a crew of Spanish smugglers are mercilessly dispatched, Lise burns down her house, husband and child inside, then dies in a willful diving mishap; Geoffroy puts out an eye and, having doused everything in fuel, prepares to set himself alight. A postscript informs us that he was shot by the police (p151).
Lescano Tegui’s Elegance sits at the opposite end of the scale, both chronologically and in terms of narrative drive. Rather than the propulsive happenings of Pharricide, the unnamed narrator’s diary offers a series of vignettes. It is a text of diversions, fragments and recollections. There is little interest in keeping track of actual events, as Pharricide and The Necrophiliac do (trustworthiness of all three narrators notwithstanding), or in crafting a conventionally structured story. There is no clear or grounding chronology, the entries offering little sense of either cause and effect or consequence [2]. At least until the final sections, there is scant plot. This mirrors the protagonist’s own failure to write a novel, a failure which, as the text concludes, pushes him to commit an otherwise unmotivated and random act of slaughter. Nevertheless, despite the meandering entries that precede it, this ending feels no less fated than that of the Cordouan lighthouse keeper. Intimations of the narrator’s crime are present from page one: “I heard a woman standing nearby say in Spanish: “He cares for his hands like a man preparing for a murder.””(p3)
Instead of plot, Elegance is a work that coalesces around an intangible energy, a narrative magnetism that works at dark frequencies attracting fables, reflections and memories. Many of the episodes revolve around sexual deviancy, including rampant onanism, pederasty, voyeurism and bestiality. There are ample explorations of cruelty, brutality and disease. The world, we are told “is slowly committing suicide.” (p68) And yet, these topics are treated with a degree of lightness, a peculiar humour and joie de vivre, which precludes self-seriousness and, even in its bleakest moments (“The triumph of the fetus can never be more than melancholy.” (p32)), rescues the from text lugubrious brooding.
If Pharricide’s Geoffroy identifies as a “big, soft doggie”, the protagonist of Elegance is distinctly childlike. Rather than naivety or innocence, however, this childishness is marked by a strain of sociopathy, a general insouciance in the face of the world’s ugliness and lack of concern with the propriety of the actual: “leave us not concern ourselves with the incredulity of those men who have never been children” (p61). The narrator’s concern is his happiness alone. Happiness, he states, cannot be found through the logic of men (p24), but instead exists in the “elegance […] possessed as children when man – that obese monster – slept” (p39).
A key feature of this elegance is mutability. The narrator continually transforms, casually adopting costumes and characters, his inner self “forever unstable, easily jangled” (p8). He often ricochets abrasively between conflicting and contradictory opinions and displays a petulant disregard for any demand of consistency. But the exuberant variety contained within the diary nonetheless coheres, and it does so in the narrator’s hand, a highly fetishized appendage throughout, and in the form of his pen.
From the outset, On Elegance While Sleeping is an explicitly self-aware piece of writing. “With the same sense of self-consciousness one feels when posing for a photograph,” we are told, “I picked up a pen and began to write” (p3). That a singular consciousness, in all its variety and confusion, commits to the task of writing is, in part, what imbues the novel with its tangible humanity. The book as we hold and read it is revealed not to be a story, treatise or document of particular events, but rather a vessel of personality. In all its inconsistency and contradiction, the novel is alive, insistent with life and bristling with the active desire for more, for further connection, for greater sensation, for love. Significantly, it is the only of the three novels whose protagonist survives the text.
As Wittkop’s The Necrophiliac reaches its climax, we understand that Lucien, the elegant antique dealing narrator and eponymous necrophiliac, will end his own life. This brief and immaculately realised account of the heights of morbid desire, a remarkable debut [3], lies somewhere in between Tegui’s exuberant miscellany and De Swarte’s more straightforwardly plot-driven tale.
Wittkop spares no discomfort, and so in the very first diary entry we are presented with the “transparent […] pale mauve” lips of a dead girl’s vulva (p7). Following this striking introduction, the novel portrays Lucien’s various encounters with the dead over the course of fours years. There’s little regularity to the entries and, unlike Elegance and Pharricide, no explicit reason for it having begun (wanting to write a book in the former, taking up a new post in the latter). As the entries presented focus exclusively on his necrophiliac activities, periods of months often passing between them, there is a delectable current of control, a sense that we are being granted access to only the choicest moments. This play of restraint and revelation introduces an erotic to charge to the novel that can be felt even when the scenarios described are profoundly, unequivocally revolting. It is in manner and style, not grotesque factuality (and hence not through mere provocation), that The Necrophiliac, with its offer of transcendent-abject intimacy, casts its potent spell.
Freer, through aptitude and standing, from the impositions of social consequence than Pharricide’s Geoffroy, and less anxiously self-consciousness than Tegui’s protagonist, Lucien’s diary seems to exist as a pure luxury, an indulgence undertaken solely for the pleasure of writing beautifully. The vocabulary is sensual, expert and distinct. It is never florid, nor does it ever succumb to the flabby, knowing quirks that often characterise prose overly enthused by language in and of itself, or overly enamoured with writerly pose. Almost chilly in its precision, Wittkop is less concerned with the accuracy of the realist than she is with the detail of the true gourmand, one for whom every specificity accumulates pleasure, even when the pleasures described are unquestionably niche:
“Tonight, I went to look for cypripediums at the florist, and with them decorated my friend Jerome, whose flesh already complements the subtleties of their orchid-green, brown, and violet sulphurs. Both have the same plump brilliance – as if sticky – both achieve that triumphant state of a substance as its peak – at the extreme accomplishment of itself – that precedes effervescence and purification. Jerome seemed to be sleeping, his sex introduced into the calyx of a cypripedium, whose liquor inundated him, while a cascade of flowery odours escaped from the swarthy bruises that marbleised his rose-coloured secret.” (p60-61)
A far more concentrated and polished work than either Elegance or Pharricide, The Necrophiliac is an unabashedly adult. This is apparent explicitly in the text, Lucien drawing a clear distinction between himself and “eternal little boy” Gilles de Rais, who he deems of “deficient sexuality” (p64), and in the settled sophistication of its voice. Lucien suffers no anxiety over his proclivities (“Necrophiliac love: the only sort that is pure” (p44)) even while his activities demand prudence to the point of paranoia. He is at pains to distinguish himself from the more vulgar and opportunistic practitioners of his art (p20, 42) (he would doubtless chafe at being arraigned alongside the other characters mentioned here) and doesn’t care that he’s considered unusual by the likes of the concierge or his, frequently replaced, cleaning women. Despite this reserve and disconnection, however, he is in no way unfeeling. An expert in softening up the stiff and unyielding, Lucien’s swells of longing melt through defences of shock and aversion to press at the reader’s most tender spots. There is an undeniable romance to his horrific couplings, often described as marriages, and a deep sorrow in his goodbyes – even when “goodbye” means the dumping into the Seine of a rotting corpse he’s fucked.
Unsurprisingly, Lucien’s attitude to death is similarly refined. Having found a space to exist, both physically and spiritually, in the interval between the end of life and material putrefaction, he has no fear of it. Death is something for which he is prepared (p91) and that he does not resist. He embraces the deceased full in the knowledge that his opportunity for love is fleeting (“As he is, unfortunately, quite advanced already, I don’t know if I will be able to keep this child much longer.” (p29)) and seeks satisfaction in its ephemerality without demanding more. This sets him in direct contrast with Pharricide’s Geoffroy whose passion, taxidermy, is that of defying death and fixing the departed in a ghoulish approximation of life: “set[ting] magnificent eyes in revivified faces and little golden tongues in their mouths that will henceforth be able to utter an eternal ‘Yes’” (p54). Tegui’s protagonist, meanwhile, treats death with the ambivalence of youth. Its presence is constant, though it is mostly depicted as a coarse and absurd curiosity – “children broke off little tree branches and played at who would have the courage to poke the cadaver” (p23) – and it is viewed with the ruddy flippancy of someone who has yet to develop a rounded understanding of their own mortality.
A further example of Lucien’s “maturity” can be found in the contemplation of the three protagonists’ artistic endeavours. Though expressed less directly than in Elegance or Pharricide, the titular necrophiliac can be read as the artist-aesthete working at the height of their powers, particularly in contrast to Tegui and De Swarte’s narrators. Lucien is assured in the more practical elements of his endeavours, though no less capable of being overwhelmed by inspiration for it (p53-56). He has integrated and acknowledges his influences (Poe and Bosch (p51, p66) are referenced, amongst others) and, foregoing recognition or self-definition, has committed to an aesthetic mode which “transcend[s] into the inexpressible” (p18). Relishing the recently dead for their “internal movement and fresh metamorphoses” (p67) his involvement with cadavers is explicitly creative and, in the brief window granted before decay takes hold, generative, producing tableaux of vivid and shifting colour, performances of the most rarefied lust and supreme expressions of love’s charged interplay with death.
In contrast, the narrator of Elegance is only just embarking on his artistic path. Full of vitality and the will to create, he is explicit in his desire to write and yet frustrated in his attempts. He is scattered where Lucien is focused, chaotic where Lucien is calm, and overwhelmed where Lucien retains control. Though the material at his disposal is abundant, the narrator remains too petulant, inconsistent and undisciplined to wrangle it: “If I wrote a book about Don Juan’s syphilis, I’d worry about acquiring the habit or weakness of writers […] whose days have become the monotonous pages of a novel” (p150). The shift towards committing murder at the end of the diary (“wouldn’t my book be a result of my desire to commit a crime ..?” (p151), furthers the comparison with Lucien’s fully realised artistic criminality. Tegui’s narrator is a debutante and murder his initiation. After a lifetime of dislocation and alienation, that this act of becoming an artist-writer brings the character into closer contact with the rest of society than he has ever been before (p172) is of tremendous significance.
As the most conventional novel of the three, it is no surprise that the creativity on display in Pharricide is also the most prosaic. Focusing on process (p31, 100), Geoffroy is more craftsman than artist. In a text full of bathos (“The waves are in the grip of the moon, throwing themselves at the rocks, and the rain has been relentless […] So I’m watching more TV than usual.” (p38)) it is rarely more pointed than in his attempts to decorate his “House of Perfection” (p85) with fishing nets, in the style of seafood restaurant (p126) – a far cry from the sublime and queasy delirium of Lucien’s Neapolitan “temple of the Dead” (p90) at the climax of The Necrophiliac. That Geoffrey is repeatedly called an artist by his colleague Joël, and the pride he takes in being so, only makes his kitschy and naïve creations more poignant. His attempts at artistic transcendence are workmanlike, viewed through the context of labour and, ultimately, curtailed by a society in which he can neither integrate nor locate a secure niche. The contrast of Lucien’s self-willed act of termination – arguably an act of self-actualisation: “sens[ing] his life escaping him as sweetly as it had once come to him. That’s how death should be.” (p73) – and Geoffroy’s execution at the hands of the state is also instructive. Geoffroy’s striving is denied realisation, the last pages of his diary, the postscript says, are indecipherable (p151), whereas Lucien, the true artist, able to delineate the “work area” from his putrid love nest, escapes the forces of the living (p91).
If Elegance builds to an initiatory act of artistic depravity, Pharricide descends to one of failure, while The Necrophiliac arguably concludes in the ultimate artistic apotheosis. Yet what links these three outcomes, and what, in its murky essence, connects these three texts more profoundly than their surface level similarities, is the reach that undergirds them.
“I’ve always wanted to be happy” (p24), “I wanted to live my own life” (p50), “I’ve always searched for the love I didn’t possess.” (p148), says Tegui’s narrator. Geoffroy describes his idea of love as “being with the other, the feeling of belonging, giving yourself over” (p26), later clarifying his hope for a happiness that seems in reach as a “sense of calm you feel in every inch of your body. The sense that you are, after all, a little bit like everyone else” (p124). Even Lucien, who has most fully integrated his outsider status, committing to “incommunicability” (p18), expresses a loneliness whose desperate pangs break the cover of his decadent isolation: “The moment I let her slip into the Seine, I let out a cry that I heard resonate as if it had come from another planet […] My life, my death, mixed with Suzanne” (p39).
For all their outré perversity, their repulsive thoughts and deeds, what drives each of these narrators are needs which are instantly, if unsettlingly given the contents of the diaries, relatable and recognisable: they are united in how a creative impulse consolidates their bids for satisfaction and cravings for love. To paraphrase the unidentified protagonist of Elegance, are they really so different from the rest of us?
Félicien Rops - Le Vice suprême, 1884
[1] Referred to throughout as Elegance
[2] The translation keeps in place an apparently mistakenly out of place entry from the original edition without it making any difference to the reading experience.
[3] Wittkop, however, had previously been published in both French and German, writing short stories, essays, biographies and translating, among others, Peter Handke’s first novel.