Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Narratio

“Woman is the sin of man. He tries to pay the debt by love. It should come as no surprise that woman was nothing before the Fall and yet she cannot be understood without it: man does not rob her of anything she had before. The tragedy man has committed in creating woman, and still commits in assenting to her purpose, he excuses to woman by his eroticism, for of all the paths that lead to a woman’s love guilt is the straightest! (Whence comes it, by the way, that a child cannot love until love coincides with sexuality, the stage of puberty?) Figuratively, woman is nothing but man’s expression and projection of his own sexuality; man merely creates himself a woman in which he embodies that disposition to carnality and guilt at being incomplete she initially caused. The woman who resembles us is always antipathetic — what we seek in the opposite sex is indeed the opposite of ourselves, a quasi-electrical phenomenon in which to find satisfaction we’re attracted by resistance, driving away, at the same time, the things we truly need. And thus remorse follows. The vagina is a human denunciation box, I tell you, into which men drop then- grief, their complaints, their guilt.

“You say you love. Let that stand, momentarily. First, however, tett me, in relation to that falsehood iterated succinctly in the famous Eclogue X of Vergil’s—’ Omnia vincit amor ’—what has ever worked, won, conquered, or in your behalf called up recompense that you’d still swear it true? Or shall you let it serve a Dutchman just to keep that oath? And yet, wooh! — the thing does conquer, for there you lie to copartner the assault where’s suborned your very own defeat! Feign love, would you? It’s all very well if you’ve a mate to feign co-equally. But where is she? I’ll tell you, Al Amin, that hybrid, ambiguous, and scheming shape — strutting in the vizard of the very Queen of Sorrows — is wedding her perishable breath to another’s and making overpoli-tic fetches with her tongue at the very minute you see fit to chafe and pine over her with your beggarly love! Whispering impudence! And paddling in his hands! You speak as if forsooth you knew not the facts! A woman is like your shadow: follow her, she flies; fly from her, she follows. Resistance, man? Why, resistance is proof of her experience , not proof of her virtue, and the pity of it all shall never be otherwise despite whatever despicable little frauenlobs you may hale in to shake their heads and mutter, ‘Jub, jub!’ You need only look under this head at the Homeric epics behind the action of which in both, notice, is to be found the question of fidelity: what are the women doing — it’s implicitly asked — while we’re here? And all the fighting, adventure, and sex with goddesses in distant lands is pitted against the potential betrayal by women of the male world. (All religion, I suspect, is created to minimize the fear men have of being betrayed.) When Odysseus and Penelope go to bed — Book XXIII, line 296—it’s the real end of the song. Give the woman no credit, however. The loyalty got lax. Penelope was only Helen hounded by a son.

“Love strives to cover guilt, instead of conquering it; it elevates woman instead of nullifying her. In women love becomes an importunate superstition that will not hearken to the fact that they have no comprehension of paragons, and with no sense of a man’s love as a superior phenomenon they only perceive that side of him which unceasingly desires and appropriates — the more brutally, I’ve heard, the better they like it: an instinct, nevertheless, I can’t hope to think you’d share. The pathetic creatures are always happier in the love they inspire than in that which they feel — that is if they feel anything at all! But, oh my yes, women do often imagine that they love, and with all that faded and pettifogulizing ammunition of theirs — lipstick, rouge, pomade, and no end of swabbings from the stybian pot — pointedly set out to do so. But what? I can’t think of a more desperate attempt, funerary sculpture excepted, at the gratification of vanity! The joke lies in what they are, doesn’t it, in the very act of what they’d cover up? Why, at the very minute a woman vows she’ll never flirt, she’s flirting not only in the mention of it but with the very painted mouth by which simultaneously she denies it — only another one of those so-called ‘secrets,’ miracle only to the ignorant, on which they pride themselves and to which, although they don’t know it themselves, they must give the alluring impression it’s possible to discover the key! And yet how these creatures, built strongest where the strain is greatest, wish to appear to give unwillingly what in fact they’re ravenous to give! The occupation of an intrigue, the emotional charge gallantry gives them, the natural bent for needing affection and the fear of its refusal, all persuade these sectaries of the god Wunsch that they have passion, when really they have only coquetry, a sexual hyperaesthesia that wanders singly up and down the town without pale or partition like a biologically hampered she-pope or some indefatigable sectary in the rank and borrowed garb of Anteros, female in sex, mortal in condition! Darconville, Darconville, here below in this dark region is not love’s proper sphere — wasn’t, isn’t, and never shall be!

“What is love? We meet someone we paradoxically want to need, call this bum little blueprint ‘love’ and hoping such a thing means something when it doesn’t are trapped into the fallacy of believing that irony has meaning. All expectation is temptation! It’s a pity at the heart of life itself, I tell you. A lover is a gambler reciting ‘ Morituri te salutamus ’ before his chips. We’ve all jumped out of a rotten potato!

“Womanishness! Look at this mother-right society of ours — witches, woe-men, windigos painted in wode! Universal inchoate sexuality, the source of all irrationality and chaos in the world! The battle of the sexes is hardly a battle anymore. It is not even a rear-guard action. It is a rout. I tell you, degree, priority, and place went out of fashion with personal privacy and the runcible spoon, and all the brass-titted Thermodontines in the ascendance now are not simply satisfied to lean their backs against their marriage certificates and spit defiance at the world, no, for they haven’t appropriated one thing with the spare cutlery of their loving fingers before they’re looking around for more— and, taking everything, they’ve set their pugging teeth on edge to consolidate their gains and move man to the downside! The bitches are marching to Spaneria! Have you never heard of the foolish Wanzo peoples and their women who, frustrated, tied woodpeckers to their twats and pretended to have phalluses?

Concessio

“I say they’re everywhere. You say they’re a minority. Women are only a minority, my friend, when they are treated as one! Oh, but you will call them kind, won’t you, for thinking them frail, gentle because having no defenses, and nicer than the fruit of sweetsop, for in the unwinking vigilance of gentlemanliness what solicitude, I think you suppose he, she, or it feels, can be too great in the preservation of meekness to refine, exalt, and perpetuate affection? O excellent falsehood! Kind? You mean ig-nivomous. Nice! It could apply to a dog, a sermon, or a jam-tart! Gentle, I agree, when their piss doesn’t etch glass and defenseless utterly when they’re not veneered and secretive as a Venetian demirep with domino and spiked ring. But frail? Frail , sir? Then you admit to knowing nothing of the female turnix, phalaropus, cassowary, emeu, and other monstrosities of nature whose maliciousness and size point to, and are certainly best allegorized by, the sexual turns of habit observed in the black widow spider? And how widows, peradventure? Why, they are widows in the same context, by the very reason, and at the explicit moment that they couple — he fucks her, she bites off his head — and for this and similar reasons I must here plead and adjure you never to love if only to tell you never to marry! Jobs cost money to keep, can’t you see? There’s scarce a thing both loved and loathed. When loved, satis, satis . But if loathed, my dainty duck, my dear-a? O me! O me, O my!