I just finished reading Gabriel’s Inferno, by Sylvain Reynard and gave it a rather scathing review on Goodreads. One of the reactions this solicited was the question of why the “Bella and Edward” trope is so popular at present. I’ve given this some thought. The “Bella and Edward” trope is, essentially, a Beauty and the Beast story, and it has always been popular. It perpetuates the pleasing social myth of women as virginal innocents and men as bestial monsters who require soothing, saving and redeeming. This binary survives and thrives because distracts us from more murky realities of who we are.
I found it interesting that this binary is characterized, in Gabriel’s Inferno, by the concept of making love vs fucking. And the song ‘Closer’ by Nine Inch Nails is used as a symbolic device to signify the ‘fucking’ variety of sex. The only lyric quoted – over and over again – in the novel is ‘I want to fuck you like an animal”. It’s ironic in the extreme that the song, if you actually listen carefully to the lyrics, is actually quite complex and speaks to a behaviour that is quite the opposite of what animals do. The first and most important complexity in that particular lyric is the question of WHO is being likened to an animal. Is it ‘I want to be like an animal when I fuck you‘? or is it ‘I want to fuck you as if you were an animal‘? It is never clear whether it is the desirer or the object of desire who plays the part of the animal. And certainly it is worth noting: animals don’t fuck to get closer to God. They simply do it instinctively and in order to perpetuate the species.
So this characterization of the human sexual urge as being animalistic or men who have erotic appetites as being like animals / beasts, is absurd. We don’t only want to mate when females are in estrus. We seldom mate with the express intent to reproduce. Humans have, as George Bataille pointed out, a vast excess of sexual energy which requires spending. How we cope with it, out we seek out ways to expend it is eroticism. [1. Bataille, G. (1986). Erotism: Death and Sensuality (M. Dalwood, Trans.). City Lights Books] Moreover, that desire is a fully conscious one. No matter how much, historically, we have insisted on characterizing lust as a mindless and bestial thing, it simply isn’t. Anyone who has lost an erection or dried up mid-coitus, due to an errant, problematic mental image, memory, or interfering thought knows this. The writer, poet and critic Octavio Paz agrees: “Nor is eroticism mere animal sexuality; it is ceremony, representation. It is sexuality transfigured, a metaphor.” [2. Paz, O. (1995). The double flame: love and eroticism (H. Lane, Trans). Harcourt Brace, New York] As humans, we have transfigured this excess of biological energy and. over the history of our evolution, crafted something entirely complex and unique to our species with it. (Yes, I know there is some research to support the theory that Bonobos mate unnecessarily to strengthen social bonds, but human eroticism goes way past that kind of cause and effect paradigm).
We are, essentially, a perverse species, in that we have perverted/ subverted a purely biological function into an entire universe of symbols, rituals, goals, projections. The act of ‘civilizing’ or ‘ritualizing’ our sexuality is a perversion of it. How on earth does a pair of legs in fishnet stockings wearing high heels have anything at all to do with procreation? And nothing is more perverse than the way we have bound the concept of sexual desire to love. These are human-generated, culture-generated associations in the extreme. And at its extreme, we believe that this ecstatic sojourn in the realm of eroticism changes us somehow, helps us shrug off the layers of individual isolation that have accreted through our immersion in social structure and experience a sort of momentary death of the self. Hence the part of the Nine Inch Nail ‘Closer’ lyric that Reynard conveniently doesn’t quote “You get me closer to God.”
I’m not using the term ‘perversion’ in a negative way. I’m not suggesting that genetically pragmatic animal behaviour is better or purer. This is who we are. This how we deal with the excess – we mythologize, metaphorize, ritualize, embellish and fictionalize. We are creatures of imagination of language and we have created, out of the excess of our desire, an entire language system of the erotic. The full curve of the breast, the glimpse of happy trail, the redness of lipstick, the flick of the tongue, the ‘look of love’, the wanton sigh, the wedding ring, the studded metal cock ring. A universe of signs and meanings orbiting around the reality of our sexual desire.
“Eroticism and sexuality are independent kingdoms belonging to the same vital universe,” says Paz. [3. Paz, O. (1998) An Erotic Beyond: Sade. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. New York] And so the story of the Beauty and the Beast, is one of the many allegories we have evolved to tell the story of our struggle between this excess of desire and the society that seeks to control it, pacify it, force it into a workable paradigm in the context of human society.
The problem for me is that this particular allegory, in its original form, only serves to lull is into a false sense of security. It doesn’t delve any deeper into our understandings and constructions of either the Beauty or the Beast. King Kong is another version of the Beauty and the Beast myth, and one in which some of the fundamental falsehoods of the myth are explored. In King Kong, we see Kong in his own setting, in the majesty of this primeval environment. We see it ‘colonized’ by superficially more ‘civilized’ forces, who are in fact hell bent on exploiting their discovery financially. ‘Tis’ beauty killed the beast,” is the iconic line at the end of the movie. And this is what makes it a far more intelligent retelling of the story. Because in King Kong, the myth is flipped. Beauty becomes the lure, the trap, the murderous force. The beast remains the ‘innocent’.
Angela Carter has taken many of the fairy tales and myths that metaphorize our relationship with eroticism and forcefully, critically interpreted them. In ‘The Company of Wolves,’ Red Riding Hood becomes the girl child on the cusp of the sexual maturity of menstruation. The wolf is a lycanthrope who offers her submersion into the underworld of sexual desire. [4. Carter, A. (1979) The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, Gollancz, London ] There is an online version of ‘The Company of Wolves’ here, if you’d like to read it.
I’m not sure how we benefit from retelling the original tale of Beauty and the Beast over and over again to ourselves. Perhaps after the deeper and more complex examinations of the story, I just find the unexamined reiteration of the original – Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, Bared to You, Gabriel’s Inferno – a bore. For all the supposedly ‘adult’ content, they simply echo the original children’s story.
I want something juicier and for grown-ups. I want to see the story inverted, deconstructed. I want to see Beauty’s nature exposed for the controlling, castrating force it is. I want to see the honesty of the desires that drive the Beast contemplated. I want to read stories that acknowledge the violence of such taming. I want to examine the sterility and the manipulative nature of what we constantly represent as innocence. The eroticism of destruction. I want to explore the possibility of Beauty being subsumed into the Beast’s world, instead of the other way around. I want to see us evolve these stories into more complex tales of ourselves instead of simple panaceas of our fears of ourselves.
Leave a Reply