Sexing the Surreal (...NSFW)

I recently read George Bataille's "Story of the Eye" (available for download w/in link), which was hailed by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes as a masterpiece of pornographic literature. While I don't generally find descriptions of teenagers pissing on each other and inserting eggs and eyeballs into their various orifices all that erotic, the symbolic and almost dreamlike imagery of the book was rather fascinating to read, like watching a train wreck. It is almost easy in this hyper-sexualized age to forget that even a hundred years ago, when this book was written, such intense and idiosyncratic fetishizing was actually taboo and unheard of, and I suppose it attests to the power of Bataille's twisted imagination that his imagery still has the power to shock. For every somewhat vanilla person like myself who thinks that the over-pornigrafication of sex is getting boring, there are certainly countless kids waiting to be turned on by this kind of thing.

When I had put the book down however I couldn't stop thinking about my own admittedly little-explored sexual proclivities, and realized that they have remained somewhat shadowed because when I was young and forming such appetites my desires mainly focused on mermaids, superheroines, and other unattainable fantasy figures, who held out a promise of sexual relations in impossible and therefore more erotic ways. Who did not read Douglas Adams' "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish" and fantasize about making love while flying thousands of feet in the air? During this reverie I recalled one art book that held particular interest to my young, romantic imagination- the odd and almost morbid paintings of Leonor Fini, who it turns out was one of the surrealists, and whose nudes, with their feline features, impossibly long legs, and mineral and vegetable bodies grabbed me when I was too young to "know better."





The erotically surreal often comes up in the work of some of my favorite writers, Bruno Schulz's "The Street of Crocodiles" (particularly in the Brothers Quay adaptation of it, parts one and two where it really gets good), or Felisberto Hernandez's "The Daisy Dolls," in the guise of mannequins, dolls, or otherwise sexualized but non-living torsos. Even modern photographers like Joel-Peter Witkin understand this fascination and desire for the outre and irreal.