Showing posts with label pony play. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pony play. Show all posts

4 Nov 2016

Naomi (Notes on a Japanese Novel)



I.

Sadly, I have to confess my slight disappointment with Tanizaki's novel Chijin no Ai, often translated into English as A Fool's Love, but more commonly known as Naomi (1924). 

For ultimately, talented though he is, Tanizaki is no Nabokov and the book pales in comparison to the latter's tragi-comic masterpiece, Lolita (1955). Joji isn't a fascinating monster of depravity like Humbert and, unlike poor Dolores Haze, the teen waitress Naomi - object of Joji's erotic obsession - fails to capture our hearts (by which I mean arouse our compassion, not just our affection or illicit desire). 

At the end of Tanizaki's book, we are left mildly amused; we are not ravished or made to feel complicit in corruption as readers. There is no dark perversity present in Naomi, no great cruelty or crime. And there is no death.

Having said that, Naomi remains a novel of some import - not least for what it tells us about Japan during the interwar years, as it struggled to come to terms with modernity and the encroaching influence of Western culture. For Naomi is not simply a greedy and manipulative good-time girl with Eurasian features who likes to dance and take lovers, she's the future made flesh come to challenge old conventions, institutions and values with her high heels and hedonism.

Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, the book was received enthusiastically by young, progressive readers who dreamt of the appearance of emancipated women with chic Western hairstyles smoking cigarettes on the cosmopolitan streets of Tokyo unencumbered by centuries of tradition; they even termed this Naomi-ism. But more conservative readers weren't so pleased and the government censors were soon alerted to the existence of this less than wholesome work.


II.

The story, in brief, is that of a rather dull 28-year-old electrical engineer, Joji, who falls for a stylish 15-year-old girl, Naomi, working at a local café. She accepts his offer to place herself under his care and guidance and, eventually, to become his wife. But she doesn't accept that this should in anyway restrict her freedom to come and go as she likes - or, indeed, to love whom she wants. When this invariably results in conflict, it is Naomi who emerges triumphant and Joji who must submit.

From the first, it's obvious what Joji finds attractive about Naomi: her sophisticated-sounding name and the fact that she has something exotically Western about her appearance: "And it's not only her face - even her body has a distinctly Western look when naked", he tells us.

Indeed, despite a certain playful innocence in their relationship, Joji is not blind to the beauty of Naomi's flesh and the wonderful proportion of her limbs; the graceful arms and long straight legs. He derives much pleasure from habitually bathing his young mistress in the washtub and observing how her figure grows strikingly more feminine over time.

Joji's ablutophilia isn't his only kinky method of finding physical satisfaction from his relationship with Naomi, however. He also enjoys engaging in a spot of pony play and having the girl ride on his back whilst he crawls round the room on all fours; giddy-up! she'd cry, and for reins she'd make him hold a towel in his mouth.

Essentially, however, Joji's a foot fetishist and likes most of all to caress, kiss and lick Naomi's lovely soft, white feet (particularly the toes, heels, and insteps). Even after he discovers that she's been deceiving him, Joji can't resist the temptation of Naomi's bare feet. For the opportunity to once again glimpse them peeking out from beneath her kimono, he can forgive her anything and overlook the fact that she was a born prostitute and prick tease:

"Naomi was always whetting my desire ... and luring me to the brink, but then she'd throw up a rigid barrier beyond which she wouldn't step ... no matter how close I thought I'd gotten, there was no penetrating that final barrier."

This continued teasing with which the novel culminates, results at last in a form of male hysteria. Joji grows more and more exasperated and obsessed by the thought of the woman, recalling the tiniest details of Naomi's anatomy: "the shape of her nose; the shape of her eyes; the shape of her lips; the shape of a finger; the curve of her arm, her shoulder, her back, or her leg; her wrist; ankle; elbow; knee; even the sole of her foot ..."

These memories of her flesh have a terrifying capacity to arouse his carnal feelings and seemed in some sense even more vital than the real body parts. Thus it is that this masturbatory fantasia of mental images - supplemented by the many photographs he took of the girl back in happier times - makes Joji dizzy and delirious with desire:

"I saw Naomi's red lips everywhere I looked ... Naomi was like an evil spirit that filled the space between heaven and earth, surrounding me, tormenting me, hearing my moans, but only laughing as she looked on."

In the end, all of Joji's fetishistic pleasures come together and ironically result in his absolute submission. Looking at Naomi fresh from her morning bath, he admires her delicate, pure, vivid white skin. She asks him to shave her body, including her underarms, but without laying a finger on her skin. It quickly gets too much for poor old Joji and he begs her to stop teasing; throwing the razor aside, he then throws himself at her feet and cries: let me be your horse.

For a moment, Naomi hesitates. She stares at him in silent, unblinking astonishment and with an element of fear (worried that he's gone insane): "But then, with a bold, audacious look, she leaped savagely onto [Joji's] back" and forces him to concede to all of her demands; he'll do whatever she says; he'll give her as much money as she needs; he'll let her do whatever she wants; he'll stop calling her Naomi and call her 'Miss Naomi' instead.

These things agreed, she shows him mercy and let's him fuck her: soon, both were covered with soap.


III.

Several years later, Joji in his role as slave-narrator concludes:

"I've known all along that she's fickle and selfish; if those faults were removed, she would lose her value. The more I think of her as fickle and selfish, the more adorable she becomes, and the more deeply I am ensnared by her. I realize now that I can only lose by getting angry.
      There's nothing to be done when one loses confidence in one's self. In my subordinate position, I'm no match for Naomi ... She seems strangely Western as she goes around spouting English ... Often I can't make out what she's saying. ... Sometimes she calls me 'George'.
      The record of our marriage ends here. If you think my account is foolish, please go ahead and laugh. If you think that there's a moral in it, then, please let it serve as a lesson. For myself, it makes no difference what you think of me; I'm in love with Naomi." 


Junichirō Tanizaki, Naomi, trans. Anthony H. Chambers, (Vintage, 2001). All lines quoted are from this edition.

This post is dedicated to my friend and fellow philosopher, Naomi G.


21 Aug 2013

Equus Eroticus (2): The Case of Alan Strang

Daniel Radcliffe: Photo by Uli Weber (2007)


If the combination of sex, religion, and horse-mania comes together even more disturbingly than in Lawrence's short novel St. Mawr, it is in Peter Shaffer's play Equus (1973). Shaffer claims that he was inspired to write the work after being told by a friend of an apparently senseless and horrific act of horse-ripping. Without knowing any of the specific details of the case, he set out to imaginatively interpret the event.

The play opens with seventeen-year-old Alan Strang being admitted to a psychiatric hospital following his conviction for the blinding of six horses with a metal spike. This act of zoosadism obliges us to examine the human capacity for cruelty and sacrificial violence. It certainly forces the middle-aged doctor who is treating Alan to confront his own spiritual atrophy and question the value of a life lived in a world from which all gods are absent. At the end of the play Dr. Dysart shamefully confesses that he envies the ferocious passion and religious frenzy experienced by his young patient.

However, his friend Hesther Salomon, the local magistrate who sent Alan to him, isn't having any of this. She points out that the boy is in fact mentally ill and clearly suffering from delusions. Further, she makes the perfectly valid point that one does not need to gallop naked on horseback at midnight or indulge in grotesque acts of Dionysian madness in order to live a rich and fulfilling life: failure to torture and kill animals or children does not make one 'pallid and provincial' despite what religious lunatics like to believe.

There are certainly other ways in which one might experience intensity and become-centaur without engaging in sex with horses, or slashing them with a knife. The popular form of BDSM known as pony-play is one such method. It remains an erotic and ritualistic activity, but is far more refined and philosophically of interest. If only Lady Carrington and her husband could have followed a programme similar to the one set out by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, then maybe she wouldn't have needed to run off with St. Mawr. And if only Jill the stable girl could have seduced Alan Strang into the world of pony-play, then perhaps he would never have committed his terrible deed.

Just to be clear on this for those unfamiliar with pony-play: it's not a question of simply imitating a horse and submitting to the authority of a mistress or master. It is rather a question of exchanging forces. To be more precise, it's a question of destroying instinctive forces in order to replace them with transmitted forces. The equestrian ensures this conversion of forces and the inversion of signs. Deleuze and Guattari quote the following rather beautiful passages in which a masochist in the process of becoming-animal speaks to his mistress:

"'At night, put the on the bridle and attach my hands more tightly ... Put on the entire harness right away also, the reins and the thumbscrews, and attach the thumbscrews to the harness. My penis should be in a metal sheaf. Ride the reins for two hours during the day, and in the evening as the mistress wishes. Confinement for three or four days, hands still tied, the reins alternately tightened and loosened. The mistress will never approach her horse without the crop, and without using it. If the animal should display impatience or rebelliousness, the reins will be drawn tighter, the mistress will grab them and give the beast a good thrashing.'" 

"'Results to be obtained: that I am kept in continual expectancy of actions and orders, and that little by little all opposition is replaced by a fusion of my person with yours ... Thus at the mere thought of your riding boots ... I must feel fear. In this way, it will no longer be women's legs that have an effect on me, and if it pleases you to command me to receive your caresses, when you have had them and if you make me feel them, you will give me an imprint of your body as I have never had it before and never would have had it otherwise."
- Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1996), pp. 155, 156.

Doesn't this sound far lovelier than the all-too-literal understanding of zoophilia we find in bestial pornography which continues to fixate on organs and acts of penetration? And surely fetishistic joy is better too than religious ecstasy which invariably results in horror and vile atrocity, rather than a new form of love.