THEATRE OF INCEST

"I would always love her like a daughter. After all, how else could I have had such a daughter whom I had always desired? I could only have dreamed her. This story could have been told quite differently."
—page 90, Theatre of Incest by Alain Arias-Misson

Yes, this story could have been told quite differently, and it would have been a much better story. As it is, the story has no soul. It collapses under its own pretense.

The concept behind the story is that the tale is that of an unnamed protagonist who is seduced by his mother, which begins a life of incest with various female relatives. The three parts are "My Mother My Lover," "My Daughter My Other," and "My Sister My Sweet Witch." The problem is that each of these three relationships—son to mother, father to daughter, brother to sister—is only defined by the incestuous sex that is endured. And, I use the word endured deliberately, because the sex is less than titillating. It is dry, barely described, and "academic." In fact, the only redeeming quality of the book is trying to build a story around a framework of French psychoanalytic theories of sexuality—Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard. That alone could be applauded, except that it also ultimately fails.

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"Today, the most crucial task for any theory of sexuality remains how to get away from Freud. We are tired of endless discussions of the phallus, the castration complex, and the problematics of sexual representation. Psychoanalytic discourse, even at its ostensibly most critical, does nothing but reinscribe a universal history of lack and oppression."
—page 67, The Cinematic Body by Steven Shaviro

"I realize that to the outsider, my relationship with my sweet girl might appear to exclusively sexual or physical. And that would be a mistake. What appeared to be purely sexual was in reality, beneath the surface, intensely emotional, and, what may be more disconcerting to the prurient onlooker, spiritual."

—page 73, Theatre of Incest by Alain Arias-Misson

The protestation of the protagonist points out the problem. The novel is dealing exclusively with the "characters" and the "plot" in a sexual manner. The characters are simply objects of fantasy. In fact, there are many times during the book when the protagonist alludes to the fact that what has come before in the chronology may be false. "I could only have dreamed her." If the incestuous relationship with the mother is false (viewed in/through chapters named after windows of the house of his parents), then the incestuous relationship with the daughter (viewed in/through chapters named after doors of the protagonist's house) and the incestuous relationship with the sister (viewed in chapters named for conventions of theatre or storytelling) are also false.

The house imagery of windows and doors, which could also be parts of stage scenery, also fails. Instead of "providing" the story a soul, as the house does for Roderick and Madeline in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," the psychoanalytic framework of windows, doors, scenery, and structure is static. It frames the uninspired "erotic" scenes that are really non-scenes. Using the words "cock," "mound," and "pudenda" incessantly doesn't create a sensual scene. It bores. If you want to write about sex, then sear it into the reader's mind, like Henry Miller or William S. Burroughs or the Marquis de Sade do. If you are going to write about sexual taboos, then you better "go all the way."

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"Was it because I wanted to render her passive, an object of my desire? To do with her what was my pleasure? No. She easily defused that. By going limp. By becoming a “doll”—“One of those inflatable dolls, baby!” She just lapsed into inert flesh, and I could take no more pleasure."
—page 68, Theatre of Incest by Alain Arias-Misson

I also could take no (more) pleasure in the story. I almost put this book down a number of times. The only reasons that I completed it were (1) it was short, and (2) even though the psychoanalytic theory was butchered, horribly explored, and poorly presented, it provided hope that something would shine forth at the book's conclusion. It did not.