Roberte Ce Soir [Paperback]

This reads, perhaps as if a leering monologue inspired by Beckett doubled in translation from French to English, like a parody of a French intellectual's one-handed amusement. Here, scholastic philosophy thickens into stultifying langour what fleetingly reminds me of tamer moments of Pauline Reage's "The Story of O" with more than a hint of the artistic studies of awkward erotic acrobatics that both Klossowski and his brother, "Balthus," delighted in.

Since the tales do involve sex, I admit that parts intrigue me. Yet the naughty bits are few and far between. Little remains in the mind after reading many pages at a time. The pace slows, the plot staggers. There is a story buried in the second novella about the fall of Rome in 1944 that hints at a mixture of Kafka and "Open City," Sartre and "The Night Porter" through an atmosphere charged with tension, but even this energy lessens under thousands of words of unrelieved speculation and intellectual discussion. This is not fiction so much as sketches. Suitably, if not altogether satisfactorily, Octave and Roberte keep journals-- hers notably closer to "O" and his nearer Sade crossed with Bataille (his mentor). Klossowski appears to tell us an elaborate setup, only to dupe us whenever we think we're getting nearer a punchline or a money shot. This delayed and postponed climax provides the form of the novellas and their content, but the sexual struggles under the philosophical. So, aesthetically this fiction can be explained, but it's not Anais Nin or even Violette Leduc. It's far more erudite, less erotic.

Less engaging in realization than conception proves the endless neo-Thomist softcore in the first tale, expressing Octave's wish for his wife Roberte to open herself to any guest's lubricious "male gaze" and fawning caresses. This is an intriguing idea, a spin on what this fiction combined with others was issued as "The Laws of Hospitality" and which is partially translated here. But, this will titillate few readers with its vocabulary of "sedcontra" and "quidest," amidst much learned banter of austerity, essence, accident, substance, and actuality.

As an ex-Dominican seminarian turned scholar of Sade & Nietzsche, the formidably learned author may be writing more for his own delight in such rarified discourse than his reader. We truly are "incurable heirs of Augustinian Manicheism" (99) in our difficulty in rendering to the body what the flesh craves while serving the power of the spirit, and I understand Klossowski's mission as expressed by seductive Roberte "the Censor" and her erstwhile keeper Octave as stand-ins for Klossowski and his real-life wife! But, these paired novellas from 1953 & 1959 remain often too inert, too rarified. Like Sade, they jolt between high-end rationalization and low-end (if more willing here from Roberte's p-o-v) expropriation. But, unlike say Beckett at his best or Sartre in his fiction, the narrative often stalls and fails to ignite. What could have been exciting in its exploration of where the carnal swirls into the divine appears too haphazardly constructed and tediously conveyed.

This book may pay re-reading. But my interest failed rapidly after pages of theological language obscured the potency of the body and the potential of the soul to break through the confines of the erotic. Klossowski's on to brilliant material, but at least in English, the prose is too clotted and the arguments too enamored of their own cleverness. He forgets the reader needs to be enticed by images rather than bludgeoned by ideas. The potential or actual (!) subset of those able to enjoy scholasticism and endlessly delayed, teasingly meticulous voyeurism I estimate as rather limited.

A review by Dr. Joseph Suglia

ROBERTE CE SOIR and THE REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES: two religious-erotic/erotic-religious novels from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Pierre Klossowski.

ROBERTE CE SOIR: Who is Roberte? To her nephew, Antoine, she is an austere and sexually prepossessing older sister. To her husband, Octave, she is an infuriatingly beguiling hostess. To any guest who traverses the threshold of their home, she is an open receptable for virility---strangely inaccessible and accessible at once. But Roberte is nothing, strictly speaking, in herself: she is a ceaselessly multiplying play of masks. Her self-multiplications enlarge infinitely. Purely mutative, purely transformative---who is she, really, in herself? To every man she encounters, she is the replica of his desires.

Her sin, according to Octave (and the narrative!), is to have separated the spirit from the body. She is (according to Octave) both atheist (exclusive of the spirit) and a censor (exclusive of physicality). Quite appropriately, the prose is, at times, erotically informed (emblematical of the body); at others, theologically informed (emblematical of the spirit).

THE REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES: In this second novel, Roberte speaks in her own language. We see her free from the one-sided interpretations that men have imposed upon her. No, she never separates the word from the flesh. She is word and flesh at once; like Klossowski's God, she is eminently communicable, absolutely self-transformative, the hypostatical union of three-in-one. And she never denied God, only the idol that men have made of God (God as an immutatable and incommunicable substance).

THE REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES revokes every hypothesis that may be imposed on Roberte, Klossowski's muse and God. Like a tableau vivant (a living painting, a human sculpture), she dangles silently in space.

The latter fiction folds upon the former. Together, they form a cartouche or an envelope.

In these absolutely remarkable books, theological digressions (the spirit) and eroticism (the body) dovetail into a seamless flow of language. Together, they form a metaphysics of the flesh.

Klossowski, my neighbor.

Dr. Joseph Suglia