The Anus of Tiresias: Sodomy, Alchemy, Metamorphosis

FLS, Volume XXXIV, 2007 Queer Sexualities Ed Madden University of South Carolina The Anus of Tiresias: Sodomy, Alchemy, Metamorphosis In Western literature of the twentieth century, the mythical figure of Tiresias often functions as a cultural shorthand for non-normative sexual identities and pleasures. In Marcel Jouhandeau’s 1954 erotic novel, Tiresias, a bisexual man, renames himself as Tiresias after being anally penetrated by a young male hustler. While the novel has been noted as a celebration of anal sexual pleasure, I argue further that penetration is part of a larger metaphorical language of cross-gender sexual transformations, located in the assumption of a Tiresian identity and in the related esoteric language of alchemy. Sodomy, in the novel, creates a transformed and very queer sexual identity that is emphatically not male. ________________________ ...que je ne sois plus seulement un homme. Tirésias! Tirésias! Marcel Jouhandeau, Tirésias Fucked for the first time, an aging bisexual man announces to the young male hustler he has hired: since you have done this to me, I am no longer a man. Well, I am a man, he says, but now I am a woman, too. And he renames himself: Tirésias. Early in Marcel Jouhandeau’s erotic novel Tirésias — the third and final volume of his autobiographical Écrits secrets — the aging narrator undergoes this Tiresian metamorphosis. In a scene of sexual initiation filled with language 114 FLS, Vol. XXXIV, 2007 both erotic and sacramental, the young man tells the older, “Reçois-la comme si je te douais par la vertu de ma baguette d’un second sexe” (14), the young man’s phallus the magic wand that will transform his partner into another sex. After this act of anal sex — fictionally represented as initiatory for the narrator, though Jouhandeau had been having homosex well before — the narrator says, “Ainsi… tu as fait cela de moi que je ne sois plus seulement un homme. Tirésias! Tirésias,” (14), and he later admits, “Je suis certes un homme mais une femme aussi” (23). For this Tiresian narrator, in a novel that is a celebration of sodomitical pleasures, to be penetrated is to be feminized. The pleasure he experiences in being penetrated releases within him a phantasmatic feminine identity. “Sa forme est en moi,” he later insists, “ce n’est pas une métaphore” (22). And the name for this — this experience of anal sexual pleasure, this queer body, this phantasmatic form, this transgender identification — is Tiresias. In Western literature of the twentieth century, the mythical figure of Tiresias often seems to function as a kind of ambiguous cultural shorthand for variant or deviant sexualities. Gilbert Herdt ties the figure of Tiresias to the “folk ideology of homosexuality”; the representation of androgynous figures in a culture, he states, is critical to “understanding the emergence of culturally-constituted third-sex and third-gender roles” (61-62). Tiresias has long been a figure for visionary liminal identity, representing the special knowledge attributed to — or acquired as the result of — the crossing of epistemological and ontological boundaries. In the twentieth century, the boundaries crossed or embodied by Tiresias are more often than not sexual boundaries, and the liminal or visionary knowledge integral to Tiresian mythologies is predicated on some form of sexual knowledge. In the Ovidian tale, the origin of such figures, Tiresias lives sequentially as a man, then a woman, then a man, but Tiresian figures of the last century have their origins in late nineteenth-century sexology as much as they do in classical literature. Sexology imagined the homosexual man as a female soul or sensibility trapped in a male body, a figure that equated sexual difference with gender difference, even as it registered the cultural fantasies and fears of a penetrated male body. Because Tiresias knows, to some extent or in some way, what it means to be sexually penetrated, he is often portrayed as a feminized Madden 115 man, morphologically or psychologically, in sexological and literary fantasies of the last century. 1 In the early 1920s, though T. S. Eliot doesn’t explicitly queer his Tiresias in The Waste Land, he puts breasts on him and offers him as a contradictory fantasy, a voice of poetic and prophetic power shot through with the poem’s repeated threats to male psychological and sexual integrity, a man who imagines himself in the position of the raped female.2 In 1942, American modernist Glenway Westcott wrote to Katherine Ann Porter about the special human empathy of gay men — a capacity he tied to his sexual experience as a “somewhat Tiresian man,” both penetrator and penetrated. 3 Jouhandeau’s Tirésias falls clearly within this cultural tradition — his Tiresias a sexually penetrated man, both feminized and homosexual. Jouhandeau depicts anal penetration as transformation — epistemological and ontological transformation — and nonnormative sexual pleasure as mystical. Both senses — transformation and mystical knowledge — combine in a central figure of Tiresias, the penetrated prophet, as well as in Jouhandeau’s representation of homosexual sex as an alchemy of pleasure, “l’alchimie du Plaisir” (19). Jouhandeau’s Tiresias — relies on sexological and folk morphologies of sexual inversion (the female soul in a male body), and it echoes sexological obsessions with symptomatic morphologies and etiological narratives; however, Jouhandeau queers this figure by revising the pathological narratives of cause and effect and by multiplying both the Ovidian metamorphoses and the sexual morphologies. While in sexological literature a transgendered soul is presumed to be the –––––––––– 1 Tiresias less frequently represents female-to-male transgender identifications — in Apollinaire’s Thérèse, from Les Mamelles de Tirésias, who releases her breasts as balloons, grows a beard, and renames herself Tiresias, or more recently the lesbian transsexual performance artist Kate Bornstein, named in an interview a “transgender transsexual postmodern Tiresias.” The transsexual use of Tiresian metaphors makes sense, given the Ovidian tale of Tiresias’s sex changes. 2 An extended analysis of Tiresian figures can be found in my forthcoming book, Tiresian Poetics, which traces the transformations of Tiresias through the work of late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century writers. 3 Quotation from Wescott’s letter to Katherine Anne Porter, 3 April 1942, from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Wescott collection, Box 57, Katherine Anne Porter correspondence, 1938-42, ZA MS 70. Porter’s side of the correspondence may be found in the published edition of her letters (231). 116 FLS, Vol. XXXIV, 2007 ontological grounds for sexual inversion, Jouhandeau transforms cause into effect, a feminine soul not the origins of homosexual behavior but instead the result of his being penetrated. And through a sequence of mythical transformations, he puts into play a number of sexual morphologies — some spectral, some physiological, some queerly metaphorical. As a result, Tiresias become a figure for the pleasures of being penetrated, and a name for a queer identity — a sexual identity that is emphatically not male. *** Jouhandeau published Tirésias anonymously in 1954 (in a small private edition of 450 copies), the last in a series of three autobiographical novels, the Écrits secrets. It was republished in 1977 under the penname Theophile, by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, a publisher of controversial erotic texts, and republished posthumously under Jouhandeau’s name in 1988. In Scandal in the Ink, a study of homosexuality in twentieth-century French literature, Christopher Robinson calls the novel an “apologia for anal sex,” a text that celebrates homosexual anal sex “as the release of the feminine element within the male” (69, 80). The novel includes four sections, each structured around a sexual relationship — three with young men, the male hustlers Richard, Philippe, and Pierre, and one a sexual encounter with a dwarf. Robinson notes that the male-male sexual dynamics repeatedly destabilize heteronormative operations of power and value — especially the gendered structures of vision, possession, and action (gaze and object of gaze, possessor and possessed, activity and passivity). I argue further that the Tiresian metaphors of transformation that suffuse the text are rich with further mythical and morphological instabilities. Richard, the first lover, inducts him into the pleasures of receptive anal sex, the critical transformation that requires his renomination as Tiresias. Despite Robinson’s emphasis on the destabilization of heteronormative structures, Jouhandeau figures the act of anal sex in explicitly gendered terms, the penetrated male feminized — taking a feminine role, experiencing female sexual pleasure. Not only does the narrator rename himself Tiresias, but he admits to Richard that he had anal sex before, at age 23, with a lover whom he describes as a “mistress,” and who always took, he says, the receptive role, “le rôle d’une Madden 117 femme” (15). The man’s one attempt at reversing roles was an act of force that left the narrator filled with horror rather than pleasure — a scene that clearly maps domination onto sex, replicating heteronormative themes of possession and power. In contrast with this one act, the representation of anal sex throughout the novel, as Robinson suggests, emphasizes “mutuality of desire and unity in pleasure” (253). In this first sodomitical scene with Richard, the mutuality and reciprocity of the act are rendered in mutual cries and simultaneous orgasm: “sa douceur en moi se répandait, ma douceur inondait ses mains,” his sweetness poured out in me, my sweetness flooded his hands (14). Richard, though, is himself a border figure, described as “michemin entre l’adolescent et l’homme fait,” as well as having the air of just having come from a bath — “Il a toujours l’air de sortir du bain” (18) — an echo, perhaps of the another Tiresian tale, his encounter with Athena bathing. Whether Hera blinding him because he claims women have more sexual pleasure than men, or Athena blinding him because he sees her naked, in the traditional Tiresian mythographies, the threat of the feminine is rendered as blinding or castrating goddesses. In later variants, the threat is refigured as penetration: a threat to the integrity of the (heterosexual) masculine subject or body through effeminization or penetration, the male body rendered female in the act of anal sex. The Tiresian tale offers a metaphorical figure for this understanding — Tiresias’s prior experience when he lived as a woman mapped onto his body and psyche as memory, as specter, and perhaps more importantly as a form of pleasure (since in the Olympian court he says that women have greater sexual pleasure than men, a pronouncement that provokes Hera’s blinding). In proposing woman as the site of pleasure (and the male as the signifier of knowledge, of power), the Tiresian tale clearly represents the way woman may function in the binary cosmologies of men — by naming woman as the site of pleasure, Jupiter and Tiresias assume the power of knowledge over pleasure. As Maurice Olender points out, if the myth names woman “l’être de jouissance,” it follows that “La femme a dû ainsi, souvent, se fondre dans une cosmographie virile où elle avait son rôle à jouer, une position à assumer dans, pour et contre l’imaginaire masculin” (179), that she dissolves into a virile male cosmography where she functions as a figure within, for, and against which the masculine constructs itself. Or as Gayatri Spivak succinctly 118 FLS, Vol. XXXIV, 2007 puts it, “The discourse of man is in the metaphor of woman” (169). The “feminine,” a social and cultural construct, is neither universally nor essentially nor biologically female. The Tiresian story — in its allegorization of pleasure and knowledge, pleasure and power through the terms of gender — warns that constructions of the Tiresian body, to whatever ends used, risk essentializing the feminine, deploying the feminine. The Tiresian body, a performative body, produces what it pretends to have been: the category of the feminine. Is the female psyche, then, a cause or an effect? Which comes first, the male body or the female soul? Can sodomy (ef)feminize the psyche? According to medical historian Alice Dreger, that very fear was at work in early studies on hermaphroditism and sexual inversion, one doctor lamenting in 1894 the formation of “accidental hermaphrodites”: although such young men were already feminine in appearance, through an “indoctrination into pederasty” “their souls become feminine too” (Dreger 52). In the discourse of sexology, the metamorphotic itself was a discourse of pathology. In the foundational work of sexology, Psychopathia Sexualis, Richard Von Krafft-Ebing used “sexual metamorphosis” to designate a specific sexual aberration, that of the man or woman who not only assumes the clothing and identity of the opposite sex, but also operates under the “paranoid” delusion that the body itself has changed to match that interiorized sexual (mis)identification.4 By the middle of the twentieth century, about the same time as Jouhandeau was writing his Tirésias, sexual metamorphosis would be listed alongside sexual inversion in standard medical dictionaries as a perversion, a pathologization of transgendered identities: “A perversion in which one adopts the habits and dress of the opposite sex” (Taber S-36). –––––––––– 4 See Krafft-Ebing (261-80). As Magnus Hirschfeld elaborates, “Typical is that they feel that their genitals have changed into those of a woman. They imagine that they are growing women’s breasts, . . . that their clothing is women’s when in fact they are men’s” (183). In Hirschfeld’s study of transvestites as “sexual intermediaries,” in which he distinguishes between the act of “simply” cross dressing and a more fundamental “sexual drive to change” (which Prosser identifies as a nascent attempt at transsexual definition [121-23]), Hirschfeld suggests “sexual metamorphosis” as a logical term for the assumption of a transgendered identity, but he rejects it because of its specific history in Krafft-Ebing as a paranoid disorder (233-34). Madden 119 The Tiresian tale allows for confusions of sexual and psychosexual cause and effect — Tiresias being a floating signifier of queerness, a figure standing in for a narrative — but Jouhandeau is more precise. In the novel, sodomy creates the feminine, or more precisely, the sexual pleasure of being penetrated allows a man to imagine a female sensibility within himself. He describes the female identity as a spectral form within his body and a trace written on its surface — a sweat, the trace of another man on his skin, an odor that suffuses his body, a demonic halo around him, a silence that imbricates his most anodyne words (89). For Jouhandeau, however, this is not metaphoric: as the soil remembers the plowshare, he says, so his trembling flesh remembers the penetration, and the experience changes the very expression on his face (22). It is deeply written in the body itself, his very blood and marrow changed (24). All of this produced by the force of Richard’s magic phallic wand. In Jouhandeau’s Tiresian narrative, anal sex produces the feminine interior associated with the Tiresian body. *** Although the first transformation of the narrator into Tiresias is the central and titular transformation of the text, the novel is suffused with metamorphosis and boundary crossings. With his second lover, Philippe, Theophile/Maurice/Tiresias discovers that sexual pleasure is not tied to love or to desire for one man, that it can be found with more than one — Philippe his lover on Tuesdays, Richard on Thursdays (43), neither dominating his passions or affections. This multiplication of desire is echoed in the multiplication of mythic transformations in the chapter. Philippe is both a god and a beast (47-48) — a sexual animal: “c’est mieux pour ce que nous devons faire” (46). The young men are repeatedly metaphorized as animals — cougars, lions, dogs, bulls — and the dwarf is a gorilla and a shark (chien de mer, dogfish). Similarly, sex is figured as harnessing and riding — Philippe’s arms a harness on the narrator beneath him (40), or the narrator’s legs as reins on the neck of Pierre, the young bull mounting him (76). Even Philippe’s rough and bestial nature is described as the roughness of an ignorant stable-boy — “une bêtise de palefrenier” (47). 120 FLS, Vol. XXXIV, 2007 These bestial metaphors are coupled with mythical metamorphoses. As Philippe rides the narrator like a horse, the two men together become a Centaur, half-man and half-horse (40). With his last lover, Pierre, the narrator becomes a unicorn as well as woman to Pierre’s phallic Taurus (76). The dwarf — hairy and well-endowed — is described as a satyr, with “cette culotte de fourrurre” (57). With the satyr, an efficient and effective if unattractive lover, the narrator realizes that sexual pleasure may be separate from — and more important than — the physical beauty of the partner.5 The narrator himself becomes a sexual monster with the dwarf; in fact, just as the name Tiresias is a figure for a narrative of pleasures and transformations, so he then becomes Pasiphae — as well as the bull, the minotaur, and the labyrinth — with Ariadne’s thread running through his entrails (58). These bestial metaphors and transformations indicate Jouhandeau’s own complicated understanding of queer sex, and they emphasize the metamorphotic sensibility of Jouhandeau’s narrative. As the narrator recalls near the end of the tale, Zeus often took the form of animals to have sex with mortal humans (85) — as if in some way debasing himself, finding a lower plane. “La mythologie montre sans cesse les dieux et les monsters en coquetterie” (85). If the narrator’s sexual partners are beasts, then, they are also gods, and this duality of gods and beasts — or gods and monsters — suggests the duality Jouhandeau locates in queer sex: its bestial, almost mechanical pleasures, and its mystic (for him even sacramental) possibilities for selftransformation. The myths of metamorphosis, writes Jouhandeau, are simply sublime prefigurations of the private metamorphoses that shake and unsettle our passions and our bodies (27), and the central mystery of mythology is that each person experiences multiple metamorphoses within the self (49). Sex is transformation, according to Jouhandeau. Men become beasts and gods, a man becomes a man-woman, people receive new and mythological names, bodies and psyches are transformed, transfigured — all during the sexual act. With Pierre, Jouhandeau writes, “Entre mes mains, son visage se change en un masque de bronze” –––––––––– 5 The sex is mechanical — like an affair with a machine (57). On one’s knees, Jouhandeau explains, one doesn’t see or know who is behind, sensing only the approach of the penis (82); it is simply pleasure that needs no justification (58). Madden 121 (47). As Pierre reaches orgasm, his face is transformed into a mask of bronze, an alchemical transformation of flesh into precious metal. Jouhandeau represents gay sex as an alchemy of pleasure, and gay sexual cultures as secret realms of esoteric knowledge into which one must be initiated. His central metaphor for this sexual and initiatory alchemy is the image of communicating vessels, or “les vases communiquent” (19) to suggest the relation of bodies and knowledge in gay sexual practices. He writes: Ce qui m’amuse dans l’amour entre hommes, c’est au passage du regard le côté mécanique des gestes, le côté clinique et symbolique des opérations, quand les vases communiquent, le sexe prenant volontiers des airs d’alambic pour expériences, auxquelles ne serait pas étrangère quelque recherche mystérieuse, analogue à celle de l’alchimie. C’est l’alchimie du Plaisir” (19) The alchemical passage appears in the first chapter, appropriate given that chapter’s focus on the narrator’s transformation into Tiresias, prophet and vessel of mysterious knowledge. Sexual relations are sacred mysteries into which the narrator is initiated (26); his transformation into a phantasmatic woman — or something other than a man — is achieved by “cette magie cérémonielle” (23). For Jouhandeau, the secret subcultures of homosexual cruising and sex are a culture and a discourse of esoteric knowledge — mysterious and strange knowledge distilled in the alembic of sexual experience, the word expériences suggesting both the experimental and the experiential nature of this form of knowledge. Though sexual relations seem both mechanical and clinical (the narrator, after all, is paying for sex), they are also symbolic and mysterious. The image of “les vases communiquent” may derive from André Breton’s book of the same name; in surrealism, communicating vessels allow contrary things — such as dream and reality — to flow into one another, the two connected vessels allowing for the convergence and merging of distinct realms. Both Jouhandeau and Breton refer to a contraption familiar from physics class experiments and from alchemical lore. Communicating vessels are vertical vessels — tubes or vases — connected by a tube or reservoir at the base, allowing any fluid poured into one to rise to a point of equilibrium in the other, or 122 FLS, Vol. XXXIV, 2007 allowing two different things to flow into one another, the vessels sharing — in a secret base of connection — their distinct contents. The image is suggestive, fluids rising in equilibrium in two bodies, a metaphor for the two male bodies in erection. Fluids suffuse this text and spill onto and into men’s bodies — semen, milk, hot liqueurs, lava. Like communicating vessels, sex between men offers alchemical unions of contrary things — gods and monsters, purity and impurity, tenderness and brutality, pleasure and pain. From the first experience with Richard, anal sex is represented as both pleasure and pain, “douceur” and “douleur” (13).6 And Philippe’s bestial nature is a roughness tempered with sweetness — a sweetness that comes between them “comme une coulée d’huile de noix entre nous” (47) — that shot of nut oil between their bodies literalizing sweetness in a sexual pun. 7 The suggestion of equilibrium and complementarity in the image of the vases communiquants finds fulfillment in the final chapter about Pierre, with whom the narrator feels such sexual complementarity that he describes them as two sides of a coin (one the faces of two gods, the other the bodies of two beasts), and as the right and left arms of the same body (75). With Pierre, complementarity is so important that he apologizes when they don’t experience simultaneous orgasm, and the narrator writes with delight of falling asleep with Pierre’s phallus still hard inside him. They are — almost literally — vases communiquants, two vessels sharing a connection that allows for the secret sharing of fluid. Pierre also offers the narrator his fullest initiation into sacred mysteries. Sex with him is both religious tragedy and physiological scandal (74), and the narrator says the result is a kind of secret stigmata, present in him but not visible to others (75). *** The final chapter with Pierre also offers the strangest of all the bestial metamorphoses in the novel: “En moi maintenant il est né, –––––––––– 6 Robinson notes that the rhyming words make delight and pain “almost homophonous” (255). 7 As Frank Paul Bowman has noted in a study of Jouhandeau’s religious metaphors of homosexuality, the reader is faced with a very real problem of tone (303). While a reader may find this passage, like others in the novel, comic in its earnestness, Bowman notes that even the comic and sacrilegious equations of homosexual sex with religious or mythic meaning are driven by serious intent. Madden 123 l’oursin, qui tient autant de la flore marine que de la faune terrestre.” Within him is born the sea urchin he says, “végétal et animal à la fois” (80). No longer god and monster, man and woman, he is now both animal and vegetable. This metaphor has a specific physiological location: the urchin is his rectum, which receives the finger or penis of a lover — the “anneau” or sphincter which opens and closes again, “comme s’il respirait autour du doigt adamantin de Pierre” (80). French psychoanalyst René Nelli reads the eroticized “anal zone” as a specifically Tiresian site of sexual metamorphosis and gender transgression. Focusing on heterosexual anal sex, Nelli argues that the eroticization of the anus, an organ similar on the bodies of both men and women, symbolizes simultaneously a flouting of the very category of the feminine and an exchange of masculine and feminine polarities, the woman symbolically masculinized in her equivalence to a sodomized male partner, the man symbolically feminized to the degree, according to Nelli, that he dreams of penetrating himself through the figure of the female body. 8 Further, the male sodomizer is thus haunted or obsessed by a “femme mythique” which he imagines within himself, the possibility that he might be penetrated thus, too.9 Nelli also reads homosexual anal sex as transgressively metamorphotic, at first in the expected stereotypical assignment of active and passive gender roles, the receptive male thus feminized (though a receptive female is masculinized), but then Nelli insists that homosexual passions find a higher signification of sexual transgression in the continual exchange and reversibility of sexual and gender roles. 10 For Nelli, then, the interchangeability of “gender” constructs within homosexual male sex serve a representational function, transforming categories and states of gender identification into processes of –––––––––– 8 In a survey of sexual themes in literature, John Atkins suggests that traditionally “sodomy” or “buggery” masculinizes the penetrated woman, transforming her into an imagined male — which may be, in fact, the desired object (245-46). 9 Nelli writes, “La sodomisation, en effet, masculinise symboliquement la femme, mais, indirectement, féminise l’homme dans la mesure où il rêve de pénétrer, sous les espèces d’un corps féminin objectif, le mâle qu’il est, lequel est précisément hanté déjà par la présence en lui d’une femme mythique” (141). 10 See Nelli (141-42). 124 FLS, Vol. XXXIV, 2007 identification and refiguring sexual identity as phantasmatic rather than corporeally grounded. 11 Through the metaphor of the sea urchin, Jouhandeau transforms the anus of Tiresias into a transgressive and performative figure. Earlier Jouhandeau described Richard’s penis as a gourd full of milk (20), and Philippe’s mouth as he orgasms as a squirming oyster (48). With Pierre, these vegetal and marine figures and these pleasures are reimagined in the rectum of Tiresias. The sea urchin is a non-sentient creature ruled only by appetite, a ring of spines around a central mouth that functions simultaneously for respiration, excretion, and nourishment. Moreover, in Jouhandeau’s text, it breathes and blooms, around “le tétin” (85) — language that refigures anal sex as nursing, non-normative sexual pleasure as infantile appetite. In the midst of his use of the image of the urchin, Jouhandeau also describes the rectum as a vulva, a sheath opening up to pleasure (82). Leo Bersani has noted “the widespread confusion in heterosexual and homosexual men between fantasies of anal and vaginal sex” (211). But the psychosexual confusions here are multiple and selfconsciously representational — as phallic, vulvic, oral, and anal pleasures and drives are located not in the anus of Tiresias, per se, but in the metaphor of the sea urchin. Reframing both phallic and phantasmatic vaginal pleasures in one very queer figure, the sea urchin becomes a strange concatenation of sexual identifications and pleasures. –––––––––– 11 Because his analysis is oriented around penetration, lesbianism appears only tropologically in an analysis of a transsexual “limit case.” In the case of a female-tomale transsexual, Nelli (using the feminine pronoun throughout his discussion) says that “her”/his preference for oral sex with women (“la façon d’une lesbienne”) leaves the person confused as to whether s/he is a male so excessively attracted to the “appearance” of the female genitialia that he has become a lover of the clitoris, or a “tribade” (meaning either a lesbian, or more specifically a masculinized lesbian with a presumably large clitoris) who was, s/he realizes always and “naturellement” a false woman, “une fausse fille” — that is, in an epistemologically charged oxymoron, she was naturally counterfeit in terms of gender. Further, when s/he “suffers” or submits to anal sex, s/he thinks it means that s/he really wants to be either a masculine homosexual or a “veritable” woman. Nelli says of this “unstable androgyne” (marked by both interior and exterior metamorphoses) that sexual identity is always in process both in loving and in being loved, and the acts of identification and desire so fluid that “she” had always loved as a man the man with whom she had been in love as a woman — “Elle aimait toujours comme homme, en réalité, l’homme dont elle avait été amoureuse comme femme” (142). Madden 125 The metaphor — like the use of Tiresian myth — seems problematic in its appropriation of the female as a trope for the gay male body. The rectum is not a vagina and the narrator is not literally a woman, he is a penetrated man. Still, Jouhandeau’s figure offers more than a reductive gender cosmology that would simply assign pleasure to the female and knowledge and power to the male, and more than an implicit and important valuation of anal sexual pleasure.12 The feminine and the Tiresian are the tropes by which the body is renamed as not male, no longer male: “je ne sois plus seulement un homme. Tirésias!” (14). If heterosexual masculinity is structured around disavowals of both the homoerotic and the feminine — melancholically identifying with the father and repudiating the feminine in the body of the gay male, then the gay male may claim and adapt that repudiated category. Perhaps that is why Jouhandeau’s revision seems so efficacious. Keeping the terms of the sexist myth — the feminine as site of mutual pleasure — Jouhandeau deploys and transforms the myth of the Tiresian body to revalue homosexuality, and to imagine a queer body that is male but also not male. The phantasmatic feminine provides a conceptualization for this experience of pleasure. The mythic story of Tiresias provides a name. And Jouhandeau’s proliferating metonymies and menageries of transformation — “la ménagerie que je suis” (85) — offer a means for imagining this capacity of sexual being, this queerness. –––––––––– 12 The classical tradition from which the figure of Tiresias derives, a tradition organized around phallic norms of activity and passivity, is one in which the mutuality of sexual pleasure was assigned to women. As the tale of Tiresias confirms, women get more pleasure because they both give and receive. David Halperin notes that few ancient texts acknowledged that men might enjoy “passive” sex, and for the most part the role of being penetrated was represented for the adult male as an indignity; for a man to take pleasure in such was “a symptom of moral incapacity” (270-71). 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