Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature by Lisa Downing (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.2, 2005 505 naively takes Sade at his word when he claims to depict libertines as they truly are in order to deter the reader from imitating them. In Brix's terms, Sade is therefore an anti-libertine writer.However, the novels that do this are, forBrix, not 'anti-libertine' but 'libertine' novels: 'on reserverait l'etiquette de "romans libertins" aux recits qui font une peinture ambigue du libertinage et montrent que, sous ses attraits apparents , celui-ci recelerait en fait de nombreux dangers' (p. 18). Les 120 Journees de Sodome, La Philosophie dans le boudoir,Justine, and Juliette are thus confusingly classified as 'libertine' novels. Brix makes his case forcefully,ifnot entirely convincingly. The reading of authorial intention, even into texts that encourage such readings, is doomed to remain at the level of conjecture, and Brix handicaps himself further by sliding perilously between author and work, eliding differences between them. A final chapter examines the fortunes of libertinage after Sade, from its disappearance in the nineteenth century to its revival by the Surrealists in the twentieth, leading to the late twentieth-century vogue of 'sexually liberated' women authors from Pauline Reage to Catherine Millet. Brix is particularly judgemental here, dismissing the latter, for instance, as representing a body constantly available formen, and so undermining fe? male emancipation. For all its oversimplifications and prejudices, however, this book has many qualities: it is hugely readable, elegantly written, well informed, vigorously argued, and a refreshing departure from the hagiographical readings that the genre often attracts. Indeed, the very tendentiousness of this study is a testimony to the dynamic character of current work on the libertine novel, however defined. London Metropolitan University John Phillips Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature. By Lisa Downing. Oxford: Legenda. 2003. x+146 pp. ?35. ISBN 1-90075-565-3. At the hands of another, this topic might have lent itselfto an exercise in transgressive rhetoric. Lisa Downing could have turned a trick in queer studies, so to speak, trumping all other perversions with the most radical of them all. That is certainly not what she has done, but readers should not be too quickly reassured by that. She does not exploit the radical positioningof necrophilia forlurid effect,but she certainly does make a sustained attempt to describe it as a complex thematic figure.One might say that she uses necrophilia to understand a certain literary and sexual aesthetic, and indeed that she helps us to see necrophilia itself as a radical form of understanding. Downing is working outside the scope of any simple discourse of pathology, and perhaps outside the queer undoing of pathology as such. Her work turns back at every point to literary studies, understood narrowly.' It can be argued', she says, 'that necrophilia is as much an aesthetic, a mode of representation, as it is a sexual perversion' (p. 4). The mark of Downing's ambition is the range of theoretical references she uses. Her claim to methodical hybridity is lucidly made (p. 15) and her ambitions carefully measured, but there is no guarantee that the differentapproaches she uses will finally intersect, although she insists that the explanations she provides are 'not mutually exclusive' (p. 30). She seeks to combine a set of analytical tools drawn from psycho? analysis with those of a revisionist history, invoking 'the vast history and geography' associated with 'our collective psyche', while wishing to attend quite strictlyto 'local examples of these phenomena' (pp. 6, 10). It is worth recalling here that under Fou? cault's influence psychoanalysis itself has tended to become the subject of revisionist analysis precisely for its claims to vast generality, but Downing deflects that critique without confronting it. She certainly seeks to provide a historicist corrective to the ambitious claims made by psychoanalysis, focusing on what she calls 'the cultural fan? tasy of necrophilia' (p. 14). Freud's own writings are thus called to account: 'Freudian 506 Reviews psychoanalytic works will be discussed and their rhetoric analysed as texts in their own right' (p. 15), although in factvery few non-literary texts are subjected to analysis here, as Downing herself acknowledges (p. 18). One of the most telling points Downing...