Oh, to be in India ...

G.C. Scott, His Mistress's Voice: An Erotic Novel (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994).

"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought."

Among the pleasant surprises available to readers in Manhattan is discovering a good novel or fine book where one least expects to make such a discovery.

At a sidewalk table filled with books, most of which were absolute junk -- Robert Ludlum, for example, or Barbara Cartland -- I found (this may surprise you) a Jamesian literary work exploring a set of triadic relations only superficially concerned with persons enjoying unusual forms of sex. In other words, this novel looks like a "dirty book" but is a lot more interesting than such books normally are.

Please see Henry James' "The Golden Bowl" where explicit sex is repressed and moved offstage to allow for the symbolizing of eros in a "cracked" golden bowl, which is vagina and uterus, or the feminine vessel of life. See Gore Vidal's essay on "The Golden Bowl" then his novel, Myra Breckinridge and Rambling Rose by Calder Willingham. ("'The Da Vinci Code': A Movie Review.")

In James' The Tragic Muse each of "four characters begins at the farthest extremity of an 'X.' They cross. Each ends in an opposite position. One wonders: does a living pulse beat, or is it only a metronome?" Gore Vidal, "A Note on 'The Best Man,'" in Rocking the Boat: A Political, Literary and Theatrical Commentary (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), p. 274.

Mistress's Voice is a study of power as fluctuating energy that is always political, aesthetic, religious and erotic. Plot elements are surreal and secondary to the ideas in the novel. A man, Tom, meets a woman, Beth, who initiates him into the rigors and delights of sexual play as the drama of identity forged through power-rituals unfolds. The circle is complete when Harriet enters the scene as "Lucifer" to this "Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained" drama of sexual ecstasy.

Harriet, the "Mistress," serves as the metaphor for liberation and self-realization through self-giving or yielding of the body of the "submissive" (Tom) to be used in sexual play. Neophytes are transformed and pain inflicted is supplemented by pleasure received.

John Fowles "The Collector" and "The Magus" are obvious sources for this gifted writer. Edith Wharton's "Lilly Bart" may be seen as the "submissive" subjected to sexual cruelty in The House of Mirth. Another title for Mr./Ms. Scott's novel is "The House of Mirth." ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Movie Review.")

The Marquis de Sade's Justine and Philosophy in the Bedroom are works to read alongside this novel which is as good or better than much of the erotica churned out by Henry Miller in Paris during the thirties. Henry Miller, Under the Roofs of Paris (New York: Grove Press, 1983) is less well-written than Scott's novel and highly misogynistic, unlike much of Miller's other work that I like a great deal.

Scott's prose is on the same level with the best erotica of the twentieth century, Anais Nin for example, or Lawrence Durrell and D.H. Lawrence. Most of the novels reviewed recently in The New York Times are far less interesting than this erotic fiction. ("Manohla Dargis Strikes Again!")

Erotic themes have certainly been of concern to artists since antiquity. For instance, among pagans one thinks immediately of Virgil's Ars Amoris and Petronious Satyricon is a much immitated narrative that would make a great porn movie. Mistress is a satyr play. ("This is a form of grotesque Greek play dealing with an absurd part of a myth or treating a serious part in a burlesque or [sexual] fashion.")

What is more -- like His Mistress's Voice -- the Satyricon dramatizes philosophical issues concerning the nature of love and power at "Trimalchio's" banquet, an obvious reference to Plato's Symposium, where the process by which the initiate learns from the Master -- not Socrates but Diotima, a woman! -- is a kind of "eros" achieved through the body contemplating the eternal forms beyond the earthly dross of matter. Dialogue is always a kind of sex. ("The Allegory of the Cave.")

Philosophical initiation is likened to the loss of virginity for the student, by Plato, who regards sexuality (across gender lines and sexual-orientations) as yielding secret knowledge or wisdom, just as philosophy must relate us to the eternal forms beyond the flux of earthly sensations.

Sex and philosophy are dialectics of effort and achievement, pain and pleasure, fire and ice, "Violante Placido." ("'The American': A Movie Review.")

As we have reason to know thanks to recent events (the Lewinsky scandal) sex and philosophy are always political. Pleasure and pain define the life of power and law. On one level, these literary characters are aspects of a single psyche; on another level, they symbolize the dance of power in society; on a third level, they reveal a theory of adjudication (Equity over Law) as rules are created, interpreted, applied, broken and penalties are imposed, rationally, by Harriet as chief player of the "godgame." We are obedient slaves. There is no right to appeal. Georges Bataille, L'Erotisme (Paris: Editions Minuit, 1957), then David Farrell Krell, Nietzsche: A Novel (New York: SUNY, 1996).

"As he was contemplating the uses of all this gear, her voice drifted down from above: 'Eh, la-bas! Are you getting on all right down there?" His Mistress's Voice, p. 124. (I detect a referrence to J.K. Huysman's decadent novel, La Bas.)

As Lon Fuller likened the administration of power in the home to "judicial creativity" so Harriet's judgments reveal the dialectic of politics and law in the experience of sexual pleasure which is like mystical bliss. This notion may be traced to the ancient world and, most recently, to Foucault's discussion of the "technologies of the self" in The History of Sexuality.

 "Truth and enlightenment at Pergamon must be enforced or tested by cruelty, torture, slavery and death. The latter are indeed necessary for the former to exist; thus even suffering and torture -- basanos -- is beautiful and must be represented as such. 'In the parts where the greatest pain is placed,' wrote Winckelman about the Laokoon, [sic.] 'he shows the greatest beauty.' ..."

Stephen F. Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), pp. 52-53. (Please see Oscar Wilde's "The Nightingale and the Rose" then "The Soldier and the Ballerina" and Mel Gibson's "The Passion.")

Friedrich Nietzsche speaks of "passionate suffering" in savage rituals of Dionysian exuberance:

"It is in the region of orgiastic mass seizures that we must look for the original dye which stamps upon the memory the expressive movements of the extreme flights of emotion -- as far as they can be translated into gestural language -- with such intensity, that these 'engrams' [imprints] of the experience of passionate suffering persist as a heritage stored in the memory."

The Abu Ghraib Effect, pp.53-54 (emphasis added). ("What is Memory?")

Compare Lionel Rubinoff, The Pornography of Power: An Inquiry Into Man's Capacity for Evil (New York: Ballantine, 1967), pp. 185-216 with Agehananada Bharati, The Tantric Tradition (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 228-279.

The most frightening exploration of the will to dominance and enslavement or control of others, as the expression of a repressed sexual delight in cruelty, is found in the depiction of the psychiatrist in Patrick McGrath's brilliant novel, Asylum (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 222. ("I had more than once imagined her in my house, as she once so frequently had been, among my furniture, my books, my art.")

I am sure that the person inserting "errors" in this review is similar to the psychiatrist-torturer in Mr. McGrath's novel. She must be consumed by a kind of insatiable desire for possession of what she cannot have. Alain Badiou, "What is Love?: The Sexes and Philosophy," in Conditions (New York & London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 179-197. ("... contemporary philosophy is, as we see every day, addressed to women. It may even be suspected, as I lay myself open to this, of engaging, as discourse, in strategies of seduction.") (Steven Corcorran, translation.)

Shakespeare's "Sonnets" enact a similar drama -- "enacting and drama," imagination and play, are key terms in appreciating these works -- where sex is a performance complete with costumes and "dance." A homoerotic text is placed by Shakespeare alongside a celebration of heterosexual lust that lapses into a lamentation at the punishments inflicted by the unfaithful lover -- "whore" is a term Shakespeare reserves for himself (quite correctly!) -- then returns to the poet's sexual appetite and energy, alternating feminine and masculine "roles" and "performances" in a manner that may well distress feminist Puritans like Catherine McKinnon. Angela Carter, The Sadean Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Pantheon, 1978), pp. 116-137. ("The School of Love: The Education of a Male Oedipus.")

Shakespeare lusts after and clearly experiences a sexual relationship with the Earl of Southampton and Lucy Dark, his prostitute-mistress and (I suspect) also Emilia Lanier who is his musician-courtesan who probably got it on with Ms. Dark together with several courtiers of both genders. Anthony Burgess entitles his chapter dealing with these matters "Mistress" and suggests an analogy between the poetic "voice" and the call of eros: Anthony Burgess, "Mistress," in Shakespeare (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1970), pp. 120-131 then Anthony Burgess, Enderby's Dark Lady (New York: McGraw Hill, 1984), entirety.

Harriet, Tom, Beth are comparable to William, Lucy, Southampton. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")

"When thou my music, music playest."

I suspect that this may be a perfect "Masterpiece Theater" moment in which we may indulge in high culture by quoting an utterly filthy poem which appears entirely innocent to modern readers taught in high school that Shakespeare is, "like, really good and everything, similar to the Pope and stuff."

In fact, Shakespeare was one of the horniest poets in English literature burdened (or blessed!) with any number of erections before breakfast. Fortunate man and kindred spirit.

How oft, when thou, my music, music play'st,
Upon that blessed wood [his penis] whose motion sounds
With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently sway'st [she's on top]
The wiry concord that mine ear confounds, [moan]
Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap [all the other idiots she screwed]
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand, [not her hand!]
Whilst my poor lips, which should that harvest reap, [Guess what he wants to kiss?]
At the wood's boldness by thee blushing stand: [yes, it does!]
To be so tickled, they would change their state
And situation with those dancing chips, [they're dancing all right]
O'er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait, [let your fingers do the walking!]
Making dead wood more blessed than living lips: [a second erection?]
Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,
Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss. ["lips" indeed, Master Shakespeare!]

Burgess, Shakespeare, pp. 128-129. (Quoting from the Sonnets.)

I suggest a novel by Anthony Burgess focusing on the love triangle described in the Sonnets Nothing Like the Sun (New York: Ballantine Books, 1964).

Having disposed of the hypocrisy that says that a book about sex cannot be literature let us dwell on Mr./Ms. Scott's novel.

I suspect that G.C. Scott is a pseudonym used by a writer or writers (I think a woman) with feminine and masculine sides of her personality in enviable balance. One candidate to have written this book is Rupert Everett. Another may be Helen Mirren. Boris Johnson?

The narrative placed on the page is dream-like or surreal, as I say, so that focusing on plausibility of plot and setting is irrelevant to what the author is trying to accomplish in this story. Like Philip Pullman and Neil Geiman, this author has a genuine gift for conjuring alternative realities or dream worlds that have the "feel of the real." Scott should write more novels like this one. Distinct themes surface, converge, separate. A powerful analogy is available to the role of dominatrix (author) and slave (reader) for those into postmodernism. ("What you will ...")

References to the child's imagination and play also abound in the text with allusions to Peter Pan in search of shadows and, of course, Alice in Wonderland:

"As he spoke Tom noticed another note above Katrina's bed. It too was in Harriet's distinctive handwriting and said simply Take me. It reminded Tom of the label on the bottle Alice was adjured to drink. Katrina must have seen and understood the note already, so she knew what to expect. When Tom looked back at her she looked either alarmed or anticipatory, it was hard to be sure which."

His Mistress's Voice, p. 185 (hereafter cited by page number only). ("'Finding Neverland': A Movie Review.")

There is no child molesting of any kind described in this book. The text and textuality are analogized to "Never, Never Land" which is also the place where coitus takes place.

Gender is play, costume, theater or a "text" that is deconstructed in this novel with a bow to Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida who would have loved the book. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory" and "Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" then, again, "What you will ...")

Feminine and masculine are parts in a story, a "philosophy of the bedroom," created by every one of us with stages for initiation, seduction, release, punishment.

"Normal" is transformed into another pose; sex is ballet, a "dance of the hours":

"He wondered briefly why Tchaikovsky had called it 'The Dance of the Hours.' They didn't dance. They merely passed. Now he was unable to measure even their passage." (p. 148.)

The measurement problem in quantum mechanics and non-linear time provide an analogy to these entangled particles -- Tom, Harriet, Beth and Katrina.

The loss of speech disconnecting readers and characters from the "world" suggests that this novel is map and territory: "There is nothing outside the text." (p. 148.)

The novel has a revolving door aspect which invites readers to rearrange the chapters to suit their interests. We are about to be instructed as we are "penetrated" by the "voice" of this author. Like partners in sexual games, or the characters in Shakespeare's Sonnets, we collapse from a happy exhaustion. My loves "enter" me; I "enter" them.

My self or identity reflects the power to which I am drawn or which I exert.

There is desire to dominance and subservience in everyone.

What is rightly challenged by this author is the limitation of the power-role to the masculine "mask" while the subservient-role is necessarily "female" as in most Western erotica or porn. I like and admire the reversal of this traditional format by Scott in this novel. Derrida encounters Foucault: Christopher Norris, "Derrida and Kant," in What's Wrong With Postmodernism? Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1990), pp. 194-208 and James Miller, Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), pp. 292-293, pp. 364-365:

"Rendering his own tribute to Asclepius, [Foucault gestures towards Socrates' "Apology"] he would then talk at last about what Beckett had called this 'wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage.' ...." (Miller, p. 364.)

Tom and Beth as well as Katrina are placed in "cages" in lower floors which are the deep levels of the subconscious of our author, also of Harriet and the reader, realm of the id and Carl Jung's "collective subconscious":

"('Modern society is perverse,' writes Foucault with understandable emphasis. 'Not in spite of its puritanism, or as a consequence of its hypocrisy; it is truly and directly perverse.') The effort to outlaw certain sexual acts as unnatural has similarly backfired, producing still odder new forms of bodily delight. (As the rituals of S/M illustrate, even the most viciously repressive practices can be turned into erotically charged games, opening up unforeseen new possibilities of pleasure.)" (Miller, pp. 292-293.) ("Good Will Humping.")

Michel Foucault -- homosexual, philosopher, and man of genius -- was devoted to S/M and bondage games and would have loved this novel by G.C. Scott.

John Stuart Mill was torn between philosophy as opposed to "tiddlywinks and pushpin" -- neither of which are sexual.

Here we see the difference between analytical and Continental thought. I am best classified as a Continental thinker among other things. ("G.E. Moore's Critique of Idealism.")

"And so in its measurement of sex difference, every form of passivity and aggression in sex-linked behavior is tested continuously, yet little thought is given to the causality of such phenomena, either as learned behavior, or as behavior specifically appropriate to patriarchal society. When the differentiation of roles is regarded as functional, no serious explanation of the political character of such function is given: any set of complementary roles may be called functional to the extent they promote stable operation within a system."

Kate Millett, "The Counterrevolution" in Sexual Politics (New York: Ballantine Books, 1969), pp. 310-311 then Norman Mailer, The Prisoner of Sex (New York: New American Library, 1971), p. 166. (" ... their laws would be founded on sex.")

"All's well that ends well."

" ... 'It's a heavy responsibility.' Again the ironic smile. 'You'd be surprised how many people want someone else to take responsibility, out of their hands. Actually deprive them of choice.'

Tom wasn't sure where all this was leading. It sounded like a confession or an apologia, and seemed out of place coming from someone he didn't expect to explain things needlessly. His perplexity must have showed, because Harriet abruptly changed tack.

'Yes, I imagine all this is a bit abstract. I tend to go on and on when I'm not careful. Too much philosophy and not enough practicality. [Is that me?] Perhaps I should make things more concrete.' She stood abrubtly. 'Come with me.' ..." (pp. 119-120.)

We will accompany the author down this rabbit hole not all that distant from certain social situations in the twentieth century:

"None of that now. It is a far cry from the excesses of our German friends during the war to the thoroughly scientific training regime I administer." (p. 97.)

Existentialist themes are anounced and underlined for dim-witted readers making it crystal clear that this novel is about freedom as sexual liberation in feminist terms.

"Tom wondered idly if he was becoming the 'new man' that the feminists were always on about. No, he concluded, he was pretty much the old man but was being introduced to a new mode of sexual reality." (p. 103.)

Again:

"If I were an existentialist, Tom mused, I would be pondering on the interrelationship of freedom and compulsion. But as I'm not I just have to take whatever comes, which is exactly what everyone else, whether existentialist or not, has to do." (p. 141.)

I conclude with an image that recurs in the novel and in much Western Romance literature from the troubadors to the symbolists: the rose as female icon is the "unfolding" of warm vaginal lips, "allegedly."

Dr. June Singer's discussion of "lingam" and "phallus" is recommended for those with flashlights under your covers: June Singer, Androgyny: Toward a New Theory of Sexuality (New York: Anchor, 1977), pp. 178-179, p. 193.

Curiously, this image and the central importance of oral stimulation, lips upon lips, is part of Hindu religious worship. Passages of the Kamasutra are devoted to this celebrated form of worship of feminine divinity and power that is so disturbing to some Americans:

"To lick a lotus blossom,' in Sanskrit, is to enact cunilingus; and padmachati (lotus blossom licking) is common and customary throughout India. [Oh, to be in India.] The Hindus have several words coinciding with 'licking of the lotus bud' to express the act of [female oral pleasuring]. Perhaps the most scientific are mukhamethuna (oral churning) and oparishata (mouth congress), while the literary appellation for fellatio is ambarschuti (mango fruit sucking). [What about the pit?] It is so named because the ripe mango fruit closely resembles the glans penis, which the ambarchusa (mango sucker) mouths, in both shape and color. The feminine counterpart of this word is vambhagabhachusi (sucking a bamboo sprout) or padmakompalachati (licking a lotus stamen), signifying oral excitation of the clitoris."

Allen Edwardes & R.E.L. Masters, The Cradle of Erotica: The Definitive Study of Afro-Asian Sexual Behavior (New York: Lancer Books, 1962), p. 312.

This form of worship by sexual adoration of the feminine (not just by females) is not limited to one gender in Hinduism. Men and women may celebrate and participate in female sexuality in this way. I am very interested in Hinduism.

What I find disturbing and fascinating in the rage that greets my review of this novel, probably also in the novel itself and continuing efforts to alter paragraphs and spacing of my text, to destroy or suppress, censor and deny what is obvious about human sexuality -- all of this absurd hostility on display at these blogs today is a tribute to Scott and, in a minor way, to me.

We have struck a nerve. Continuing computer crime against me is also, obviously, a sadistic sexual thrill for a sick person somewhere in New Jersey.

I will close by trying to be clear about what this "struck nerve" or vital core of sexual meaning in contemporary America is and may yet become. Incidentally, it is sadistic cruelty or violence that is truly obscene and not passionate eroticism.

The sexual behavior and (much more) the erotic imagination of every society reflects its mores and heritage.

There is simply no way that America's sexism and suppression of female sexuality could not be a part of our erotica because it is part of ALL of us.

Porn is one of the areas of the culture where people are most liberated and equal. However, even porn is made in a particular culture and reflects that culture. If you object to porn because you interpret much of the imagery in erotic films as "demeaning to women" then the answer may be to demonstrate to men and women what is objectionable by creating more porn -- your erotica -- turning some of the sexist iconography of America's sexual fantasy world upside down as it were.

Scott's novel does exactly that. For this reason, I describe His Mistress's Voice as a feminist and revolutionary literary work which is raunchy and fun to read. ("Good Will Humping" and "Genius and Lust.")

I suggest to women interested in erotica in cinema the films of the late Candida Royale. Several novels of explicit sexuality from the eighteenth century would have served as perfect subjects for Ms. Royale's canvas or cinematic imagination including Voltaire's Candide or "The Memoirs of Casanova." Has anyone "seen" Ms. Moll Flanders? (See "Quills" and, once again, "Something Wild.")

"Sadism is not a name finally given to a practice as old as Eros; it is a massive cultural fact [on display at these blogs every day!] which appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century, and which constitutes one of the greatest conversions of Western imagination: unreason transformed into delirium of the heart, madness of desire, the insane dialogue of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite."

Michel Foucault, from Madness and Civilization, quoted in The Sadean Woman, at p. 3 (emphasis added).