Theatre Of Incest. Alain Arias-Misson. Dalkey Archive Press 2007.
Posted by Steven Trull
Theatre Of Incest consists of three parts, each part providing a short history of a different kind of incest enacted between the narrator and his mother, his daughter, and his sister respectively. When taken together in its entirety the parts comprise a kind of pornographic dialect of incest that begins with the narrator's masochistic relationship with his mother - interrupted by his sadistic relation with his daughter - and that seeks an endless resolution of the narrator's sadomasochistic tendencies and hermaphroditic desires in a relationship with his sister in the final part of the book.
The book does not spare the reader any of the pornographic details of the ritualistic scenes described within it. However, euphemisms are employed, and sometimes they detract from the intensity of a scene. Furthermore, it takes Arias-Misson almost all of part one to begin to write about his mother in a language that is more honest, more sparse, clear-cut. Most of the first part is written in a style that is lofty, rich, and fantastical. The actions take place in a mansion with each section title making reference to one of the windows in the mansion. A clever device that permits the narrator to reflect on the nature of the mother-son relationship with an intense, and almost suffocating, introspection. (The same device is used to section part two only the titles of each section refer to various doors in the mansion. Still, the device is used for the same purposes i.e. to provide insight into the incest relationship described.) Nevertheless, one doesn't have to sound like a snot to fuck one's mother while living in a mansion. This style of writing is not erotic. Nor are conventional settings. The mansion being one of them, the chateau the other. Both have lost the capacity to attract - they are fantastic spaces and they belong to fantasy, the kind of fantasy one might find in romance novels.
The style shifts, however, after the death of the mother. Although still written in the past tense, the writing becomes concise, honest, assertive - and almost mirrors the kind of relationship the narrator will cultivate with his daughter and, ultimately, with his sister, Of course, the relationship with the mother is never forgotten, and like a simple, elegant pop song the emotional, sexual, and fetishistic motifs constructed in the first part of the book are replayed to provide stark comparisons that clash with one another during the scenes between the father and his daughter. This strategy is redeployed again using these same motifs from the previous parts to inform the endless, and paradoxically theatrical, sexual acts between the brother and sister, most of which happen to take place in the narrator's low-rent apartment after his inheritance has been denied him.
The pornography of Theatre Of Incest does not lack philosophical and psychological assumptions. It describes each woman's tendency for emotional and/or sexual exclusivity with the narrator as something rooted in a 'universal female nature' which sounds haughty and just plain silly. Later it makes some grand statements about the soul, and 'its inability to be touched by pleasure' - the soul being emptied a little more into the body with each experience of pleasure - that is graced with a certain kind of poetry, albeit a certain kind of Christian poetry that sounds melodramatic while at the same time it reenacts the critical drama of an anti-Cartesian scene, which could have been explored. The brief examination of identity and difference, and each concept's connection with love and sex respectively, constitutes another platitude the text could have done without. And let me reveal a secret: Anal sex reveals no secrets (except in pornographic texts that still advocate that the mysteries of life may be found in acts of sex).
However, Arias-Misson's descriptions of fetish wear, garments, and other articles of clothing - his passion for costume play and erotic scenarios - gives the text its scintillation. And when he stays clear from using conventional metaphors and an abundance of adverbs to describe certain erotic-emotional conditions, and provisional states of being, it makes the pornography smoke, really, like a house on fire. There are several scenes made more intense by the knowledge we have of the characters. And sometimes this knowledge is imparted by glimpses, a stare, a facial expression, clothes, or an unusual emotion that Arias-Misson captures like a bizarre photographer, whom, with some editorial courage, could become a terrifying pornographer.