The Woman in the Dunes (1964), dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara
I've always been fascinated by the thought of desert sands and the radical indifference of shifting dunes to any form of moist life, including human life; an unceasing flow of countless particles overwhelming everything in their path.
Baudrillard has provided some lovely descriptions of the desert as an ecstatic form of disappearance and pure geometry. He speaks of their grandeur deriving from negative aridity; places where all high hopes evaporate and the artificial scruples of culture are rendered null and void, leaving only silence.
For other writers, the desert is intrinsically feminine and to be fatally lost in the sand is like being sexually enveloped and suffocated by the love of a good woman. The Japanese author Kobo Abe, for example, explores this erotic-fetishistic theme in his short novel The Woman in the Dunes (1962).
This strangely beautiful and disturbing book tells the tale of an amateur entomologist, Niki Jumpei, who goes on a brief holiday to collect insects that live among the sand dunes, but ends up quite literally trapped in a deep hole alongside a woman whose only task in life is to dig sand. His attempts to escape end in failure and so he learns how to love the woman and accept his fate as a type of human sand-bug. In other words, he learns how to go with the flow and transform a hole into a home.
Abe provides some nice descriptions of the woman, a young widow, the surface of whose skin "was covered with a coat of fine sand, which hid the details and brought out the feminine lines; she seemed a statue gilded with sand ... attractive to look at but hardly to touch."
That said, of course the man does eventually touch her; sometimes with savage violence and at other times with tenderness, as he helps brush or wash the sand from her naked body, from under her breasts, from her buttocks and thighs, and from the dark lips of her vulva. The sex between them is mostly impersonal and as crushing, shapeless and merciless as the desert. As Andrea Dworkin notes:
"The sand, because it is relentless and inescapable, forces an abandonment of the abstract mental thinking and self-involvement that pass for feeling, especially sexual feeling, in men in civilization. It forces the person to live wholly in the body, in the present, without mental evasion or self-preoccupied introspection or free-floating anxiety. ... What [Niki Jumpei] feels, he feels physically. The sand is so extreme, so intense, so much itself, so absolute, that it determines the quality and boundaries of his consciousness ..."
It even gives him an erection, as it trickles in a little stream over the base of his penis and flows along his thighs.
Towards the end of the novel, the man attempts to rape the woman whilst the villagers who have imprisoned and enslaved them both in the pit watch from above. But just like his attempts to escape, his attempt to publicly violate the woman (and thereby secure a promise of freedom made by his captors) fails. She physically not only fends him off, but, like the sand, she overpowers him and obliges him to make a final capitulation:
"The man, beaten and covered with sand ... abandoned himself to her hands ... It seemed that what remained of him had turned into a liquid and melted into her body."
Dworkin again provides the best (somewhat romantic and profoundly Lawrentian) reading of this scene:
"In this vision of sex, while the man is by contemporary standards emasculated by the failed rape, in fact rape is supposed to fail. Men are not supposed to accomplish it. They are supposed to give in, to capitulate, to surrender: to the sand - to life moving without regard for their specialness or individuality, their fiefdoms of personality and power; to the necessities of the woman's life in the dunes - work, sex, a home, the common goal of keeping the community from being destroyed by the sand. The sex is not cynical or contaminated by voyeurism; but it is only realizable in a world of dangerously unsentimental physicality. Touch, then, becomes what is distinctly, irreducibly human; the meaning of being human. This essential human need is met by an equal human capacity to touch, but that capacity is lost in a false physical world of man-made artifacts and a false psychological world of man-made abstractions. The superiority of the woman, like the superiority of the sand, is in her simplicity of means, her quiet and patient endurance, the unselfconsciousness of her touch, its ruthless simplicity. She is not abstract, not a silhouette. She lives in her body, not in his imagination."
See The Woman in the Dunes, by Kobo Abe, trans. E. Dale Saunders, (Vintage Books, 1964), pp. 44-6 and 232. And see Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin, (Basic Books, 2007), pp. 33-4 and 36.
This strangely beautiful and disturbing book tells the tale of an amateur entomologist, Niki Jumpei, who goes on a brief holiday to collect insects that live among the sand dunes, but ends up quite literally trapped in a deep hole alongside a woman whose only task in life is to dig sand. His attempts to escape end in failure and so he learns how to love the woman and accept his fate as a type of human sand-bug. In other words, he learns how to go with the flow and transform a hole into a home.
Abe provides some nice descriptions of the woman, a young widow, the surface of whose skin "was covered with a coat of fine sand, which hid the details and brought out the feminine lines; she seemed a statue gilded with sand ... attractive to look at but hardly to touch."
That said, of course the man does eventually touch her; sometimes with savage violence and at other times with tenderness, as he helps brush or wash the sand from her naked body, from under her breasts, from her buttocks and thighs, and from the dark lips of her vulva. The sex between them is mostly impersonal and as crushing, shapeless and merciless as the desert. As Andrea Dworkin notes:
"The sand, because it is relentless and inescapable, forces an abandonment of the abstract mental thinking and self-involvement that pass for feeling, especially sexual feeling, in men in civilization. It forces the person to live wholly in the body, in the present, without mental evasion or self-preoccupied introspection or free-floating anxiety. ... What [Niki Jumpei] feels, he feels physically. The sand is so extreme, so intense, so much itself, so absolute, that it determines the quality and boundaries of his consciousness ..."
It even gives him an erection, as it trickles in a little stream over the base of his penis and flows along his thighs.
Towards the end of the novel, the man attempts to rape the woman whilst the villagers who have imprisoned and enslaved them both in the pit watch from above. But just like his attempts to escape, his attempt to publicly violate the woman (and thereby secure a promise of freedom made by his captors) fails. She physically not only fends him off, but, like the sand, she overpowers him and obliges him to make a final capitulation:
"The man, beaten and covered with sand ... abandoned himself to her hands ... It seemed that what remained of him had turned into a liquid and melted into her body."
Dworkin again provides the best (somewhat romantic and profoundly Lawrentian) reading of this scene:
"In this vision of sex, while the man is by contemporary standards emasculated by the failed rape, in fact rape is supposed to fail. Men are not supposed to accomplish it. They are supposed to give in, to capitulate, to surrender: to the sand - to life moving without regard for their specialness or individuality, their fiefdoms of personality and power; to the necessities of the woman's life in the dunes - work, sex, a home, the common goal of keeping the community from being destroyed by the sand. The sex is not cynical or contaminated by voyeurism; but it is only realizable in a world of dangerously unsentimental physicality. Touch, then, becomes what is distinctly, irreducibly human; the meaning of being human. This essential human need is met by an equal human capacity to touch, but that capacity is lost in a false physical world of man-made artifacts and a false psychological world of man-made abstractions. The superiority of the woman, like the superiority of the sand, is in her simplicity of means, her quiet and patient endurance, the unselfconsciousness of her touch, its ruthless simplicity. She is not abstract, not a silhouette. She lives in her body, not in his imagination."
See The Woman in the Dunes, by Kobo Abe, trans. E. Dale Saunders, (Vintage Books, 1964), pp. 44-6 and 232. And see Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin, (Basic Books, 2007), pp. 33-4 and 36.
