Incest, Adultery, and How It Relates to Me (part 3 of 9)
a weekly serial in Stories That Are Hard to Sell
…A man’s sex penetrates radically. I like what’s radical. Other kinds of penetration are possible, borders, journeys…___Incest by Christine Angot
Like a Leaf That Has Loosened from the Tree
A book I am currently reading is titled Incest. In its opening pages the author describes her homosexual affair and how she does not herself identify as gay. The protagonist states that she was homosexual for only three months. Her aversion to licking a woman’s vagina was apparently her downfall. Of course, it is important to note I am only one-third of the way into this short novel written by Christine Angot. But what is keeping me disturbingly engaged is my own frustration for the author’s stubborn reluctance to get to the meat of her story. Why title your book Incest and refuse to surrender the sordid details? All she reveals is that her father sodomized her. How often and the ways it occurred is never clear. She also promises to connect the confusing primary homosexual relationship she is engaged in with Marie-Christine to this prior sodomizing event. But so far she is not telling. Her entire adult life has been affected first by her father’s sodomy and then this homosexual relationship she cannot seem to disengage from totally. In addition, her ex-husband is gay and our protagonist must explain the complicated as well as convoluted behaviors of all these characters to her young daughter she is attempting to raise. Angot’s motive for writing the book appears to be a need to frustrate her readers to a degree her own confusion exists as an impediment to her personal evolution. At times it feels she has this cross to bear and is looking for somewhere she might swing it like an ax. And I am okay with that if she would just get on with it, sharpen up, and begin wildly flailing. But instead we suffer through this awful angst and pressure coming down on all sides of her. The demands are felt from within and without as she struggles moment to moment with the psychoanalytic training she has learned through reading as well as her personal experience with her therapist. Even the opening vaginal licking scenes have ended and by all counts now seem unnatural. The tautness is becoming unbearable and something has to give. From the very beginning of the book Angot insists on maintaining her aversion to homosexual lovemaking and her own identification as being heterosexual. But never is a penis mentioned as being inside her, but rather a woman’s tongue, which now it seems, has finally been rejected for good. But as it is, this comes to no fitting end either.
Part 4 of “Incest, Adultery, and How It Relates to Me” can be found and read here.
Parts 1 through 9 of “Incest, Adultery, and How It Relates to Me” can be found and read in chronological order here.
I love your frustrated analysis here!
Thanks. Haven’t seen you around lately. Glad you took a look.