The word obsession is important to the unnamed narrator of Theatre of Incest, because without his fixated passion for mother, daughter, sister (taken in that order of him, by him, and finally by mutual desire), the novel fails. Yet Theatre of Incest does no fail. Instead, author Alain Arias-Misson presents an existential story whose progression from hazy childhood memory to balanced lucidity at mid life draws away the reader's initial disgust (and, one can hope, prurient quick-reading) so that the key element of the story - obsession - can be understood.
If viewed as allegory of filial love gone amuck, Theatre of Incest is a dream-telling that Kafka might have written in his notebook as a young man - then expunged through fire. Yet it exists here, a document, a story, a confession, a sometimes - opaque sometimes - translucent diary of psycho-sexual obsession. The story has little plot. Broken into three sections, the narrator relates through fast vignettes his role as recipient or provocateur of incestuous sex. That he is sexually precocious is a given to the needs of this dramatic story: the opening paragraph finds him seeing in full horror his mother having sex with his father, a seminal (and primal) moment given fast description and psychological scarring. Straight out of Freud's notebooks, if you will. Off putting, too, because Freud's work on mother-lust desires in sons has been critically damaged to the point of making his pseudo-clinical claims fraudulent (see 'Follies of the Wise' by Frederick Crews).
Nonetheless, the narrator has found himself trapped between the intriguing lure of sex (not yet fully understood) and a mother bent on snaring her boy into a web of deceit. The "trap" the unnamed narrator (all characters work without names: an equally important note) has entered - through Freudian mother - lust/obedience initially - is theatre. When, years later, this relationship ends, he finds himself at the perfect nexus to acquire a new obsession: his teen daughter. When she ends their relationship upon achieving "womanhood" (a term defined by the narrator as his daughter growing up and having had enough of his pawing at her), he meets again his sister, lost to him for many years because of his mother's obsessive regime demanding strict obedience (and raunchy sexual need). Now in middle age, brother and sister sense mutual desire, and couple for the final act to complete Arias-Misson's theatrical trilogy.
By gradual understanding, the narrator learns about himself and his lovers:
I only understood much later that what had shattered was my sense of self. Of course as the years went by it became impossible to discover new tones, new indices, in the recital of sins, and so as the "child's" inventiveness flagged but the mother's cross-examination never did, it took on a dull sameness, a repetitiousness which was even more exhausting than the previous moral research, not merely the recital but the relations it fixed between us; she the accuser, I the defendant, I the aggressor, she the wounded, and I the child, she the mother: rigid ratios, a constellation we are set in. It wasn't bitterness that drove this wheel around, but frustrated love.
* * *
I realize that to the outsider, my relationship with my sweet girl might appear 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. But I beg you to believe me when I say that while I fucked my girl I thought of nothing: not of fucking, not even of not thinking; my mind was focused uniquely on the physical penetration. There had been no other occasion of my life in which I was so single minded. For those minutes the mental chatter had died down.
* * *
It occurs to me now that, although we relate very exactly in our brother-sister roles as comrades and accomplices, and while she could play every kind of character with equal delight and lubricity, she always waits for me to suggest which of her characters I want her to assume, what staging we should prepare, what props and which scene we should play each night. So the underlying role which appears to be fundamental for her is that of the woman-as-recipient. In fact, it's in these inventions, our familial theatre, that the clearest projection of our brother-sister collaboration lies.
Theater is the act of taking yourself away from your mind to put yourself in the mind of another. As a performer in theater, you become a character. Arias-Misson succeeds in finally making the reader see the narrator's life as a character in a "theatre of desire" through existentialist themes: Mother = threat, obsession, obedience; Daughter = truth, the light; Sister = partners in lust, equals in temperament, trust in who you are. Within the vignettes lie hazy memory, simplified feelings (anger, lust, fear, despair), the disconnect with outside/societal influence, and creating for themselves the meaning of their lives. Such existential themes allow people (and surely these characters) to commit what society otherwise considers unspeakable - or at least reprehensible - acts.
If you look for eroticism in Arias-Misson's story, you will find it; this is beside the author's intention, however. Here, the author has written an adult-oriented fairy tale - without the moral written at the end to instruct/educate a needful society.
Theatre of Incest, by Alain Arias-Misson
Dalkey Archive Press
136 pages; $12.50
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