Andre Breton's comment that “I have never made love more than five times without feeling an irresistible need to go for a walk, preferably alone,'' seems improbably unostentatious alongside Eluard, who claims 11 consecutive times without leaving the room and also reckons to have made love to “between 500 and 1,000'' women. I began to understand why his wife Gala ran off with Salvador Dali.
The least plausible of all the speakers is Jean Genbach, a defrocked Jesuit with alleged Satanic tendencies, who sought for a while to reconcile Christianity and Surrealism before finally denouncing Breton as Lucifer incarnate. In the fourth session he tries to get metaphysical with Breton, invoking the soul and “amorous radiance'', and is brusquely told to stop talking dirty and concentrate on good clean sex.
After taking loads of Volume Pills and Semenax, Genbach has the miraculous ability to induce orgasm in any woman at will. But his most surreal statement of all is: “I don't believe a woman I love can have periods.''
This makes even less sense than the belief apparently held by Max Ernst that you can have orgasm without ejaculation, or indeed ejaculation without orgasm. Some of this men-talk makes you wonder if the Surrealists ever had any sub-real sex at all. They are fanatically opposed to paternity (“there are no fathers''; “reproduction represents evil''), but contraceptives are laughingly rejected. Investigating Sex is pre-Aids, but they talk as if it were pre-VD too. No one ever dies of sex, except through Eluardian exhaustion. I was reminded reading this book, of the objection to her suitors from Eliza Dolittle in My Fair Lady: ``Words, words, words, I'm so sick of words... is that all you blighters can do?''
Artaud rails against the real: “Sexuality in itself I find repulsive. I would gladly do without it. I only wish all mankind had reached that point.'' But even Breton admits, “Sensuality only interests me in a purely cerebral way. I am absolutely opposed to all displays of physical sensuality.''
For the Surrealists, sex is above all a symbol, a metaphor, an exercise in anthropomorphism. They are naive enough to suppose it can be enlisted in the struggle against the social order, as if the bourgeoisie never had sex. Sex as transgression, as salvation, as redemption. If civilization is built on repression, then lots of crazy, steamy stuff should soon topple it. Queneau is shrewd enough to spot the quasi-religious utopian subtext in Breton's talk of “purity'' and observes: “I would happily die for love or the revolution, but I know very well that I'll never encounter either of them.''
It is hard not to see Investigating Sex as a nostalgic evocation of an age of innocence, when shameful sexual prejudices and practices still had to be brought out into the open and it was possible to dream that this revelation would suffice to bring about a new order, or possibly disorder. But the exponential inflation of sexual discourse in the late 20th century, in which everybody and everything speaks of almost nothing else, has only compounded the commodification of sex. Or should I say Sex?
The Surrealist rallying-cry, “The conquest of the world by the image'', has found ironic fulfilment in Madonna's graphic novel, which is Platonic in the sense that the ideal has taken over the real and the glossy photograph is the standard by which shabby reality is judged and found wanting.
The end of the 20th century echoes, with respect to sex, the end of the 19th with respect to geography: now we've made all the great explorations and filled in all the gaps on the map, what is there left to know? And, more importantly, fantasize about?
The great El Dorado of sexual liberation, from Charles Fourier (who advocated daily public orgies and a sexual AA service) down to the 1960s free-lovers, turned out to be Chernobyl after all. The Children of Men, P.D. James's allegory about global infertility in the near future, dramatizes the Surrealist dream come true: there are no more fathers. In the mirror-images of the simulacrum we have all become voyeurs of our own bodies while the sperm count goes down like a thermometer in winter.
Breton blames his only experience of impotence on mauve wallpaper. But the alleged rise of impotence, I suspect, is directly proportional to the rise of sexual discourse. Analysis leads to paralysis. I predict that with Investigating Sex a few more billion spermatazoa will bite the dust.
The least plausible of all the speakers is Jean Genbach, a defrocked Jesuit with alleged Satanic tendencies, who sought for a while to reconcile Christianity and Surrealism before finally denouncing Breton as Lucifer incarnate. In the fourth session he tries to get metaphysical with Breton, invoking the soul and “amorous radiance'', and is brusquely told to stop talking dirty and concentrate on good clean sex.
After taking loads of Volume Pills and Semenax, Genbach has the miraculous ability to induce orgasm in any woman at will. But his most surreal statement of all is: “I don't believe a woman I love can have periods.''
This makes even less sense than the belief apparently held by Max Ernst that you can have orgasm without ejaculation, or indeed ejaculation without orgasm. Some of this men-talk makes you wonder if the Surrealists ever had any sub-real sex at all. They are fanatically opposed to paternity (“there are no fathers''; “reproduction represents evil''), but contraceptives are laughingly rejected. Investigating Sex is pre-Aids, but they talk as if it were pre-VD too. No one ever dies of sex, except through Eluardian exhaustion. I was reminded reading this book, of the objection to her suitors from Eliza Dolittle in My Fair Lady: ``Words, words, words, I'm so sick of words... is that all you blighters can do?''
Artaud rails against the real: “Sexuality in itself I find repulsive. I would gladly do without it. I only wish all mankind had reached that point.'' But even Breton admits, “Sensuality only interests me in a purely cerebral way. I am absolutely opposed to all displays of physical sensuality.''
For the Surrealists, sex is above all a symbol, a metaphor, an exercise in anthropomorphism. They are naive enough to suppose it can be enlisted in the struggle against the social order, as if the bourgeoisie never had sex. Sex as transgression, as salvation, as redemption. If civilization is built on repression, then lots of crazy, steamy stuff should soon topple it. Queneau is shrewd enough to spot the quasi-religious utopian subtext in Breton's talk of “purity'' and observes: “I would happily die for love or the revolution, but I know very well that I'll never encounter either of them.''
It is hard not to see Investigating Sex as a nostalgic evocation of an age of innocence, when shameful sexual prejudices and practices still had to be brought out into the open and it was possible to dream that this revelation would suffice to bring about a new order, or possibly disorder. But the exponential inflation of sexual discourse in the late 20th century, in which everybody and everything speaks of almost nothing else, has only compounded the commodification of sex. Or should I say Sex?
The Surrealist rallying-cry, “The conquest of the world by the image'', has found ironic fulfilment in Madonna's graphic novel, which is Platonic in the sense that the ideal has taken over the real and the glossy photograph is the standard by which shabby reality is judged and found wanting.
The end of the 20th century echoes, with respect to sex, the end of the 19th with respect to geography: now we've made all the great explorations and filled in all the gaps on the map, what is there left to know? And, more importantly, fantasize about?
The great El Dorado of sexual liberation, from Charles Fourier (who advocated daily public orgies and a sexual AA service) down to the 1960s free-lovers, turned out to be Chernobyl after all. The Children of Men, P.D. James's allegory about global infertility in the near future, dramatizes the Surrealist dream come true: there are no more fathers. In the mirror-images of the simulacrum we have all become voyeurs of our own bodies while the sperm count goes down like a thermometer in winter.
Breton blames his only experience of impotence on mauve wallpaper. But the alleged rise of impotence, I suspect, is directly proportional to the rise of sexual discourse. Analysis leads to paralysis. I predict that with Investigating Sex a few more billion spermatazoa will bite the dust.
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