Temptations of the Flesh - Warren F. Motte Jr. L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 31, Number 4, Winter 1991, pp. 51-58 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins ...
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Temptations of the Flesh
Warren F. Motte Jr.
L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 31, Number 4, Winter 1991, pp. 51-58 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.1991.0023
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/526775/summary
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]Temptations of the Flesh
Warren F. Motte, Jr.
O READ ALINA REYES’S L E BOUCHER is to penetrate into a
T world of meat, following the incision of the knife described in the
first sentences of the text: “ La lame s’enfonça en douceur dans le
muscle, puis le parcourut en souplesse d ’un bout à l’autre. Le geste était
parfaitement maîtrisé. La tranche tomba en fléchissant mollement sur le
billot.” 1 Le Boucher is a trenchant first novel, an erotic fable whose in
itial hero will be raw meat itself, meat animated only by the stroke of the
knife: “ La viande noire luisait, ravivée par l’attouchement du couteau”
(9).
Meat is primordial in the world that Reyes creates. It will generate
and mediate all other considerations in the text, particularly the relation
of the narrator, a young woman working as a cashier in a butcher shop,
and the butcher to whom she is drawn. The erotic tension in the story
arises in meat, and it is nourished thereby. Meat is the force that attracts
the narrator and the butcher; it is the locus upon which they correspond.
I should like to examine that correspondence, in order to offer a car
nivorous reading of Le Boucher.
Early on in the novel, the narrator explicitly inscribes her relation
with the butcher within the framework of the game: “ Comme chaque
fois que nous étions tous les deux seuls, le boucher et moi, le jeu revenait,
notre jeu, notre invention précieuse pour anéantir le monde” (17).2
Although most erotic texts are, I think, significantly playful,3 it is rare
that the ludic contract be as overt as it is in this case. As the terms of that
contract become clear, a recreational space appears, one where the game
the narrator announces will be played out, progressively, upon three
levels.
The first o f these is located firmly in the stuff that furnishes the
materiality of both the butcher shop and the novel, meat. This game in
volves the projection of desire upon dead flesh, and the consequent
animation of the latter as the mediator of the living flesh of narrator and
butcher. Thus, the meats in the shop window strike the narrator as living
jewels. The skinned rabbits, slit open to reveal their livers, are images of
a double nakedness; they are described as exhibitionists. The chicken’s
rump is fantastic, compared by the narrator to a false nose on a clown’s
VOL. X X X I, N o. 4 51L ’E s p r it C réateur
face (12). The abats, the so-called specialty meats, are the objects of par
ticular attention. They are magnificent, in the narrator’s view, because
they are at once the most intimate and the most authentic of meats, evok
ing most faithfully the living animal that carried them:
foies som bres, sanguinolents, tout en mollesse, langues énormes, obscènement râpeuses,
cervelles crayeuses, énigm atiques, rognons lovés dans toutes leurs rondeurs, coeurs entubés
d ’artères—et ceux qui restaient dissimulés dans le frigo: le m ou pour le chat des mémés
parce que trop laid, poum on gris et spongieux; les ris de veau, parce que rares et réservés
aux meilleurs clientes; et ces couilles de bélier, ramenées to u t exprès de l’abbatoir et to u
jours livrées tout emballées, dans la plus grande discrétion, à un certain m onsieur trap u qui
en faisait son régal. (13)
As she surveys and catalogues her fleshy décor, the narrator’s glance
becomes that of the reader. The latter is encouraged to play the same
game, to attribute animate quality to the dead meat. For this will
facilitate the passage to the radical objectification of human flesh, upon
which the primary force of this novel depends. That dynamic is engaged,
for instance, when the narrator spies upon the butcher, copulating with
his employer’s wife in the cold room (28-29). They are suspended there,
carcasses among carcasses; there is no distinguishing between dead
animal flesh and living human flesh; all, in short, is meat.
Clearly, just as the narrator’s voyeurism is projected onto the reader,
the reader is also asked to suspend distinctions between carnal categories.
This prepares the narrator’s avowal of her desire for the butcher. For the
recognition and expression of her desire depends on the essential analogy
of meat and meat, as the butcher’s carnality (and her own as well) is
revealed to her through the stuff upon which he practices his trade:
E t le boucher qui me parlait de sexe toute la journée était fait de la même chair, mais
chaude, et to u r à to u r molle et dure; le boucher avait ses bons et ses bas m orceaux, ex
igeants, avides de brûler leur vie, de se transform er en viande. E t de même étaient mes
chairs, moi qui sentais le feu prendre entre mes jam bes aux paroles du boucher. (11)
Here, Reyes founds her rhetoric of eroticism squarely on the word
chair, playing upon the indeterminacy of that term as she has constructed
it. It is patently the butcher as flesh that interests the narrator. That no
tion, however, is difficult to locate with precision. The narrator is not
conspicuously enamored of the butcher’s body as such. Indeed, she
describes him as fat, ugly, and stained with blood; “ mais sa chair était
aimable” (42). It is, then, the very concrete carnality of the butcher that
52 W i n t e r 1991M o tte
the narrator eroticizes, his body considered not as a signifying whole, but
rather as a loose aggregate o f parts, of specialty meats as it were. Thus,
later in the novel, when the narrator soaps the butcher in the shower, she
studiously catalogues those parts, detailing his anatomy as one might a
fresh side of beef (58-60).
Once again, as in the text’s incipit, the glance is incisive. As is that of
the butcher: he regards the narrator with a professional eye, evaluating
her as flesh. There is no innocence, moreover, in the appelation ma
chérie (15-16). When the narrator realizes her desire, she initiates a proc
ess through which she will be transformed into flesh, at the end of which,
as she puts it, “ je n ’étais plus que cette chair à vif” (65). It is logical,
then, that the sexual act should be cast as an act of butchery: “ le boucher
avec sa lame bien aiguisée le boucher avec sa lame fendra mon ventre”
(47). After all, that’s what the butcher does best.
Unless it’s his speech, notably m ordant, through which he continual
ly manifests his desire: “ Mais ce qui maintenait le boucher en vie, c’était
son désir, la revendication de la chair constamment entretenue et de
temps en temps matérialisée par ce souffle entre sa bouche et mon oreille”
(22). Through the butcher’s discourse, the flesh is made word in effect,
and words are invested with tangible sexuality. This phenomenon consti
tutes the second level of ludism, as narrator and butcher play at eroticiz
ing the word. Therein are bound up Reyes’s most crucial narrative strat
egies, and perhaps those most characteristic of erotic literature as a
genre.
The butcher’s words incarnate his sexuality, and his discursive act is
staged unequivocally as a sexual act: “ Il sourit, planta ses yeux dans les
miens. Ce regard était le signal. II s’enfonçait bien au-delà de mes
pupilles, parcourait tout mon corps, se fichait dans le ventre. Le boucher
allait parler” (15). It is important to note the butcher’s striking
monotony of theme: he can speak only of sex. Indeed, on one occasion
when he tries to make small talk with the narrator, telling her about his
halcyon days as a young apprentice in the slaughter house, his eloquence
fails him, and he is struck dumb.
So, in the butcher, sexual and verbal potency are indissociable. His
words are the vital, material substance of his desire; and they are received
by the narrator precisely as such: “ Il soufflait plutôt qu’il ne parlait. Ses
mots venaient s’écraser contre mon cou, dégoulinaient dans mon dos, sur
mes seins, mon ventre, mes cuisses” (16). The butcher recognizes the per
formative power of his discourse in the narrator’s reactions. She is
Vo l . X X X I, N o. 4 53L ’E s p r it C r é a t e u r
moved by his words, and her reaction spurs the butcher to new rhetorical
heights: “ Tu aimes que je te parle, hein? Ça te plairait de jouir rien
qu’avec des mots . . . Il faudrait que je continue, tout le tem p s.. . Si je te
touchais, tu vois, ce serait comme mes paroles. . . Partout, doucement,
avec ma langue. . .” (17; ellipsis in original).
The butcher’s whispered monologue, intended to seduce the narrator,
is a long, insistently iterative description of sexual acts. Cast in the future
mode, it constitutes a series o f promises. But it is also incantation, in
sofar as it is intended to make real what it represents:
Ce que j ’aime surtout, c ’est bouffer la chatte des petites filles com m e toi. Tu me laisseras
faire, dis, tu me laisseras te brouter? J ’écarterai tout doucem ent tes jolies lèvres roses,
d ’abord les grandes, ensuite les petites, j ’y m ettrai le bout de la langue, et je te lécherai du
trou au bouton oh le gentil bouton, je te sucerai m a chérie tu m ouillera s tu brilleras et tu
n ’en finiras pas de jo u ir dans m a bouche comme tu en as envie hein je m angerai ton cul
aussi tes seins tes épaules tes bras ton nom bril et le creux de ton dos tes cuisses tes jam bes tes
genoux tes orteils je t ’assiérai sur m on nez je m ’étoufferai dans ta raie ta tête sur mes
couilles m a grosse queue dans ta m ignonne bouche laisse m a chérie je déchargerai dans ta
gorge sur ton ventre ou sur tes yeux si tu préfères les nuits sont si longues je te prendrai par-
devant et par-derrière m a petite chatte on n ’en aura jam ais fini jam ais fini. . . . (18-19)
The logic of the butcher’s speech, as he enumerates a series of sexual
acts, is that of the catalogue. More pertinently, perhaps, it should be
remarked that the force of the butcher’s language relies upon the enun
ciation of a seemingly inexhaustible list of bodily parts, male and female.
It demonstrates the same anatomical precision and will to detail as the
narrator’s gaze, when she surveys, on the one hand, the meats in the but
cher shop window; on the other, the butcher’s body in the shower. That
is, once again, the human body is assimilated to meat and thus objecti
fied and, moreover, the words denoting fetishized parts of the body are
invested with an astonishing materiality.
Viewed in a certain light, however, this materiality is in fact in
evitable: words are, after all, the meat of this text. Just as meat is sex-
ualized, so words must be. The third level of the game in Le Boucher in
volves a further step, whereby that process of sexualization will pretend
to subsume textuality itself. Here, the crucial consideration is the iden
tification of the reader with the narrator, one o f the key clauses in the
novel’s ludic contract. The narrator constantly affirms the erotic effect
of the butcher’s discourse, even suggesting that she is moved in spite of
herself: “ Et je savais que, malgré moi, il voyait sous ses mots monter
mon désir” (17). That repeated affirmation suggests the new game: the
54 W i n t e r 1991M otte
adoption of the playful pretense that the butcher’s words have the same
effect upon the reader as they do upon the narrator. In this perspective,
the narrator’s descriptions o f her reception of the butcher’s discourse
may be read as injunctions upon how to read this text: “ Dans ma semi
conscience, je me demandais s’il n’allait pas jouir, m ’entraîner avec lui,
si nous n’allions pas laisser couler notre plaisir avec ce flot de paroles”
(18).
Now, if “ ce flot de paroles” designates the butcher’s whisperings, it
also nicely encapsulates Alina Reyes’s narrative strategies. For the rela
tion of the butcher’s discourse to the textuality in which it is embedded is
specular in character. Just as the butcher can speak only of sex, so the
novel named for him is obsessively monothematic. The indissociability
of sexual potency and verbal eloquence in the butcher is recapitulated
(and indeed amplified) in L e Boucher. And the butcher’s language is
clearly that of the novel as a whole.
The butcher’s discourse is deliberately cast as a forbidden language, a
language of radical taboo and power. Here, the butcher officiates as high
priest, dominating all who come within his sway, even his employer. The
latter, being himself a butcher, and thus privy to the secret world of
meat, also speaks a secret language, the fallen, inverted parody of or
dinary language known (serendipitously enough) as louchebèm.4 “ La
lam’dème, elle a un beau luqué que je lécherélème lienboc” (39), he says
to his female customers, but his words have neither the amplitude, nor
the incantational force, nor the rhetorical elegance of the butcher’s
whisperings.
In short, as the narrator suggests, the butcher is a poet. His whisper
ings are, for her, “ poèmes interdits” (39). As such, and bearing in mind
Johan Huizinga’s description of poetry as play,5 they furnish a signifi
cant ludic field for the butcher, the narrator, and indeed the reader. For
if the narrator takes pains to define these whisperings not only as poetry,
but also as forbidden poetry, she is playing out one of Reyes’s most
savant strategies, whereby the reader progressively will be brought to
consider L e Boucher itself as scandalous eloquence, vicious language; as,
in fact, a poème interdit.
“ Qui dit que la chair est triste,” asks the narrator rhetorically, as she
locates her discourse, and that of the butcher, with regard to Mallarmé
and the grand poetic tradition (10). The stance she adopts here is from
the outset oppositional in character, and she will define her poetry as
distinctly different from the canonical norm, a language transubstan
VOL. X X X I, N o. 4 55L ’E s p r it C r é a t e u r
tiated through a mysterious dynamic whereby the verbal becomes carnal:
La chair n ’est pas triste, elle est sinistre. Elle se tient à gauche de notre âme, nous prend aux
heures les plus perdues, nous em porte sur des mers épaisses, nous saborde et nous sauve; la
chair est notre guide, notre lumière noire et dense, le puits d ’attraction où notre vie glisse en
spirale, sucée ju sq u ’au vertige. (10-11)
The continual insistence upon flesh as a totalizing concept constitutes
the common theme of the three levels of play in L e Boucher. For Reyes
suggests in turn the sexuality of meat and the eroticism of the word in
order finally to persuade her reader of the carnality of the text. In this
light, the narrator’s characterization of her situation, and the butcher’s,
becomes exemplary of that o f the reader. “ Nous étions pris dans un
réseau de chairs comme des mouches dans une toile d ’araignée” (38), she
says, and her remark can be taken as an emblasoned image of the ideal
reader’s position, as the novel constructs the latter. The “ réseau de
chairs,” like, earlier, the “ flot de paroles” used to describe the butcher’s
whisperings, is a figure whose tenor is multiple. Literally, it designates
the butcher shop where events are played out upon meat. Clearly, it also
refers to the erotic tension between the narrator and the butcher. Most
crucially, however, it evokes the character of textuality itself, a textuality
wherein play, sex, and poetry are intertwined in a living flesh.
For the narrator, this carnality is both a totalizing construct and the
key to creating the order that she seeks throughout her narration. “ II
aurait fallu que tout soit sexe, les rideaux, la moquette, les sandows et les
meubles, il m ’aurait fallu un sexe à la place de la tête, un autre à la place
de la sienne” (71). Huizinga postulates the creation o f order as one of the
primary characteristics of play, arguing that it brings a temporary,
limited perfection into an otherwise imperfect world (Huizinga 10).
Reyes’s narrator deploys eroticism in the same manner, as an organizing
principle of existence. And, granted the mutual affinities of play, sex,
and writing that Reyes elaborates throughout L e Boucher, it becomes
evident that the butcher’s forbidden poems and, by extension, the nar
rator’s account of her erotic itinerary, serve the same organizational
function.
Briefly stated, Le Boucher must be read as a Kiinstlerroman, for the
real story it tells is that of a young woman coming to terms with the craft
of writing. Or perhaps, as Reyes seems to suggest, her novel should be
consumed, rather than read. This suggestion involves a curious displace
ment of the writing act through figuration. Reyes’s narrator writes very
56 W i n t e r 1991M otte
little, in fact, chiefly letters to her former boyfriend, a pale, wilting
fellow named Daniel largely overshadowed by the hairy, grunting, manly
butcher. She does, however, paint. But, just as the butcher’s poems
define themselves by their difference, openly questioning the poetic
tradition, so the narrator’s paintings are not quite like those of her
fellow-students:
La plupart des étudiants des Beaux-Arts aim aient à peindre sur des toiles immenses, qui oc
cupaient parfois to u t un m ur. Moi je voulais concentrer le m onde, le saisir et le tenir tout
entier dans le plus petit espace possible. Mes oeuvres étaient des m iniatures q u ’il fallait
regarder de près, et dont les détails m e coûtaient des nuits et des nuits de travail. (25)
The narrator’s minimalist paintings are, again, embedded images of the
textuality that surrounds them. For a minimalist aesthetic is clearly at
work in the narrator’s accounts of her affair with the butcher, and in the
manner in which Reyes structures her novel.
The narrator speaks of the difficulties she encounters in her art; a
bouquet of roses proves to be significantly resistant to her painterly ef
forts. She is led to reflect upon the problem of representation and in
deed, at one point, suggests that any representational act is inherently
vain: “ Ne sommes-nous pas ridicules de vouloir attraper le monde avec
nos stylos, nos pinceaux au bout de la main droite?” (43). It should be
noted that, just as the narrator’s paintings may be compared to Reyes’s
novel, the narrator’s remarks about her painting also may be read as a
gloss on Reyes’s writing. This seems evident in the analogy of stylos and
pinceaux. It is also suggested by what the narrator offers as the privileged
subject of her art: the rose is, undoubtedly, both the most poetic and the
most erotic of flowers.
It is in such a perspective that the novel’s end may be interpreted.
Having left the butcher, having picked up a boy at the beach and made
love with him in a forest, the narrator finds herself alone, approaching a
house:
J ’arrivai à une première m aison, entourée d ’une haie d ’où débordaient des roses. J ’en
coupai une, lui arrachai ses pétales p a r paquets, les m angeai. Ils avaient beau être fins et
délicats, j ’en avais plein la bouche. Le chien de garde se précipita derrière le portail, en
aboyant et en grognant de toutes ses dents. Je finis par déguster la fleur, et lui jetai la tige
épineuse. (90)
This is where the narrator ends her story. Faced with the problem of
V o l. XXXI, No. 4 57L ’E s p r it C r é a t e u r
closure, her solution is to eat the clôture. It is a solution of astonishing
elegance, and an act which is in fact a statement: having elsewhere pro
posed the rose as a figure of the difficulty of the aesthetic project, her
consumption of that rose speaks most forcefully o f difficulté vaincue
and of the success of her artistic apprenticeship. For through her act the
rose, like the other overdetermined figures in this text, is transubstan
tiated. Like the rabbits in the window of the butcher shop, like the but
cher himself, like the word, like the textuality that the latter erects, the
rose is meat.
The narrator’s final gesture, then, is carnivorous. It is eloquently ap-
propriative and powerfully suggestive. It points the reader, moreover,
toward an equally carnivorous stance, one where the novel, serving up as
it does a meal concocted of play, sex, and writing, must be devoured. For
such, Alina Reyes argues, are the temptations of the flesh.
University o f Colorado
Notes
1. Alina Reyes, L e B oucher (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 9. All further references to this text will
be interpolated into my essay, within parentheses. A first version o f this essay was
presented at the Eighth International Colloquium on Tw entieth-Century French
Studies in A ustin, Texas.
2. In form ulating my notion o f the game, I rely principally on Jo h an H uizinga’s seminal
H om o Ludens: A Study o f the P lay-Elem ent in Culture (1938; Boston: Beacon, 1955);
on Roger Caillois’s Les Jeux et les hom m es: L e m asque et le vertige (Paris: Gallim ard,
1967); and on Jacques E hrm ann’s revision o f those two models in “H o m o Ludens
R evisited,” trans. Cathy and Phil Lewis, in E hrm ann, ed., Game, Play, Literature
(Boston: Beacon, 1971), originally published as Yale French Studies, 41 (1968).
Following E hrm ann, I conceive play as an econom y which excludes neither “ reality”
nor eventual seriousness o f purpose, a com m unicational dynamic whose fundam ental
movement is th at o f articulation.
3. See, for instance, Huizinga’s rem arks about the erotic connotations o f the word
“ play” (43); and Frank W arnke, “ A m orous A gon, E rotic Flyting: Some Play-M otifs
in the L iterature o f L ove,” in G. Guinness and A. Hurley, eds., A u c to r Ludens: Essays
on Play in Literature (Philadelphia and A m sterdam : Benjamins, 1986), 99-112.
4. The word is a transform ation o f boucher, and designates a jargon which consists in
phonetic inversion and substitution, a variation o f largonji, or jargon in I, once
popular am ong Parisian slaughter house apprentices. See J. Cellard and A . Rey, D ic
tionnaire du français non-conventionnel (Paris: H achette, 1980), 487 and 470-71. The
em ployer’s enunciation m ay be translated as: “ La dam e, elle a un beau cul que je
lécherais bien.”
5. See Huizinga, 119: "Polesis, in fact, is a play-function. It proceeds within the play
ground o f the m ind, in a world o f its own which the m ind creates for it.” See also
Michel B eaujour, “ The Gam e o f Poetics,” in E hrm ann, ed., Game, Play, Literature,
58-67.
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