Intimacy Issues

After a recent presentation at the 6/20 Club in which I discussed the seductive and disturbing character of Kawabata's sleeping beauties, I was informed by a woman who believes passionately in love, humanity, and her rights as a sexual subject, that my interest in object-oriented ontology and objectum sexuality betrays the fact that I have underlying intimacy issues. 

This has amused me all week: for the fact is that rather than manifesting an all-too-familiar psychological disorder, I'm advancing a far more radical philosophical objection to the very concepts of interiority, depth, and essential being, of which intimacy is but one aspect.

In brief, Vivienne, I don't think we have an authentic inner self in need of discovery, expression, or liberation; I don't think we have a soul to be saved, a sex to be proud of, or a psyche that is mysteriously unconscious and revealed only in dreams and secret desires in need of analytic interpretation by a therapist. 

To put this in even briefer Nietzschean terms, I remain, madam, superficial out of profundity ...

 

The Case of Old Eguchi

Photo by Akif Hakan found on artclit.tumblr.com

Back - once more - in the House of the Sleeping Beauties and the case of old Eguchi ...

What is he hoping to find in bed with drugged and naked teenage girls and why do his fantasies invariably involve violence and a desire to physically abuse the young bodies that stimulate such sweet memories, rather than treat them with tenderness and affection?

Is it because male sexuality is inherently aggressive? Do all men dream of rape and incline towards tyranny as soon as they have a hard-on? I don't think so. Nor do I believe that Eguchi's anger towards the sleeping beauties is born of impotent frustration, or the ugly resentments of age (though he is acutely aware of his declining powers and his lust is doubtless driven to some degree by the approach of death).

Rather, I think we must look elsewhere for why it is Eguchi repeatedly thinks of strangling the girls, or placing his hand over their mouths and noses and so preventing them from breathing. He is aware that such acts constitute evil, but he can't help contemplating them; of sacrificing virgins, rather than merely deflowering them.

His thoughts, in other words, are atrocious rather than sensual; Eguchi wants to leave his mark on the girls and - above all - he wants to waken them and imagines that he might have a better chance of doing so were he to tear off a limb or stab with a knife, rather than place kisses on a breast or his flaccid penis between soft lips.  

Ultimately, it's not the astonishing beauty of the young women that drives Eguchi mad; it's their radical passivity. He cannot bear the fact that not only do the sleeping girls not speak, but they do not know his face or hear his voice either. In other words, the girls - who have volunteered to become perfect objects - negate his subjectivity so that not even the smallest part of his existence is acknowledged.   

It's the desire to still be recognised as a man and a living being in the eyes of the world that is uppermost in his heart - and this is precisely what is denied him. And so, even when sandwiched between the naked bodies of two women, Eguchi knows himself to be fatally isolate and alone - just like the rest of us at last.     



Note: 'House of the Sleeping Beauties', by Yasunari Kawabata, can be found in House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories, trans. Edward Seidensticker, with an introduction by Yukio Mishima, (Kodansha International, 1980).     

In the House of the Sleeping Beauties

 Emily Browning in Sleeping Beauty (2011) dir. Julia Leigh

House of the Sleeping Beauties (1961) is a short, surreal novel written by the brilliant Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata. 

It tells the story of a lonely old man, Eguchi, who frequents the above establishment in order to enjoy the exquisitely poignant pleasure of touching young flesh and sleeping besides a naked girl, sharing her drug-induced dreams and reflecting upon his own memories and mortality.

Whilst he, like other elderly clients, is free to enjoy the body of the sleeping beauty as he will, there is a house rule which dictates no penetration. Thus violent fantasies of rape and necrophilia must give way to an almost chaste ideal of female worship; religious veneration of purity is the name of the game rather than sexual violation and the vagina is posited as a temple off-limits even to worshipers. Of course, we know that the fetishization of virginity is itself a fatal form of perversion and abuse.

The novel was adapted for the cinema by German filmmakers in 2008. Unfortunately, Das Haus der Schlafenden Schönen, dir. Vadim Glowna, was not entirely successful; it certainly wasn't well received by the critics who dismissed it as pretentious art-house pornography that dramatized impotent male self-pity and decrepit perviness in a sordid, soporific manner that threatened to send even the audience to sleep.   

A far superior cinematic adaptation was made in 2011 by the Australian novelist, director and screenwriter Julia Leigh and starring Emily Browning, who gives a near-perfect performance in the role of Lucy. 

Whilst Sleeping Beauty retains the central premise of Kawabata's novel, Leigh crucially reverses the viewpoint thus creating an intelligent and disturbing feminist film, rather than merely another exploitative and misogynistic movie designed to titillate.

Leigh knows that at the heart of every fairy story, every religious myth, and every sleazy male fantasy about women (on whichever side of the virgin/whore dichotomy they're placed), is a kernel of the real: i.e., real bodies, suffering real abuse, experiencing real pain at the hands of those who wield real power.