Read Online Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions by Regina Barreca - Free Book Online Page B

like the handle of a razor. And at that time he was thirty-five years old or thereabouts, a youth as gilded as a leaden dagger, a very gallant man in his person, save that he was somewhat horny, and subject by nature to a malady which folks in those days called "Lack of money, a pain without equal." But he always had sixty-three ways to find what he needed, of which the most honorable and the most common was by act of larceny furtively carried out ...
Here is a passage of description from (early) Weldon:
Victor is six foot two and weighs fourteen stone. He is a powerful man with a high domed head, and a smooth bald patch, flanked by downy hair, running up and over it, like some spiritual landing strip (Elsa's fancy) for flights of mature imagination. His soft brown eyes are deep set; his nose is long and hooked; his penis is long and sturdy, easily moved to stand erect. No trouble there. No trouble anywhere, except for the occasional cold in the nose or a white-capped pimple erupting on his chin, the better to display his inner juiciness. ( Little Sisters, p. 8)

 

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Rabelais at the beginning of the modern age of Realism uses realism perpetually and perpetually discards it in a buoyant play of classical and medieval literary techniques. The scrupulous exactness about detail, the modest reality of Panurge's middlingness, is counteracted by the gay contradictions: to be as gilded as a leaded dagger is not to be gilded at all, and a leaden dagger is a cheap and fairly useless article. The statement matches Chaucer's "she was as digne as water in a ditch." Rabelais's pretended-scruples create comic qualifiers, modest vaguenesses that confuse: we see how somebody can be " about thirty-five years old" but how can a nose be " a little aquiline"? The combined notions of realism, modesty, masculinity, and good looks are overthrown in the slang phrase ''un peu paillard." Again, the qualifier is uselesshow can one be a little horny, somewhat raunchy? Clichés of style are exploded. This passage of Rabelais is atypical only in that it does not move as forcefully as usual into the physical, for references to penises and physical eruption are found almost everywhere in his works.
Weldon exhibits the penis and the erupting pustule in a description which becomes more mocking as it proceeds. Victor is done in by his author, as the ostensible narrative realism is done in by her procedures. Factual description becomes troubled by the "spiritual landing strip" of Victor's head. The next sentence gives us the nice clichés again: "His soft brown eyes are deep set"the sort of phrasing one might find in a description of a romantic hero. But this sweet image is crossed by "his nose is long and hooked," a description resembling that of the aquiline nose of Panurge. Weldon too connects nose and penisa connection she makes overt in the next phrase. The reader is surprised, for descriptions of a character's penis are not common in literature, certainly not part of the modified realistic blazon describing a novelistic "character," at least as we have come to understand that entity through the guidance of the nineteenth century. The "white-capped pimple" is another confusing item, for the modifying adjective is rather pleasant, standing as it usually does for the sea. Pimples, if mentioned in literature, indicate the diseased or adolescent state of a person, and are overt, emblematic negative signsyet this one is used as if it were a positive sign, becoming associated with "inner juiciness," a term feminizing Victor into a fruit. This "juiciness" relates to Rabelais's medlars, "ce beau et gros fruict" eaten with such gusto by mankind at the beginning of Pantagruel, with such various physical effects, including swellings of belly, virile member, and the nose:
Et l'autres tant croissoit le nez qu'il sembloit la fleute d'un alembic, tout diapré, tout estincelé de bubeletes, pullulant, purpuré, à pompettes, tout esmaillé, tout boutonné et brodé