Irene's Cunt (Paperback)

by Louis Aragon (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Review
The finest of all works touching on eroticism. -- Albert Camus

This work of genius...a lyrically urgent evocation of the mystical core of true sexual carnality. -- Times Literary Supplement

Product Description
First published anonymously in France in 1928, Le Con d'Irene, is the last 'lost' masterpiece of Surrealist erotica. Likes Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye (published the same year), Irene's Cunt is an intensely poetic account, the story of a man's torment when he becomes fixated upon the genitalia of an imaginary woman and is reduced to voyeuristically scoping 'her' erotic encounters. In between describing various events in brothels and other sexual adventures, Louis Aragon charts an inner monologue which is often reminiscent, in its poetic/ surreal intensity, of the work of Lautreamont, and of Artaud in its evocation of physical disgust as the dark correlative to spiritual illumination.

This new edition features an exceptional and completely unexpurgated translation by Alexis Lykiard (translator of Lautreamont's Maldoror and Apollinaire's Les Onze Mille Verges), and includes complete annotation and an illuminating introduction.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: The Tears Corporation/Creation (February 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1871592542
• ISBN-13: 978-1871592542
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,868,150 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Phallic Distortion, August 15, 2008

By	Luca Graziuso (NYC) - See all my reviews

It is expected and obvious that the English language speaking public finds a surrealist masterpiece such as Louis Aragon's as intimately obscene, and on such grounds impregnates disparaging critiques that climax with inelegant statements pronounced with a stiff intellectual disregard. Here we do not find the graphic frames of admissable seductive contrivances of a DH Lawrence, rather we unveil a psycholyrical morphology that unsettles and unravels.

The text was originally published in 1928 anonymously by Rene Bonnel, the renowed controversial publisher of greats of the stamp of Jarry, Apollinaire, Pierre Louys and Raymond Rodiguet. Le Con D'Irene was confiscated and the supression of its publication dated through 1968 when authorship became awarded to a Albert de Routisie ( anonymous nome de plume of Aragon), and where five indelible illustrations of Andre Masson illuminated the text. The book, which runs to merely 90 pages, was immediately deemed to be a staple work of surrealist literature, its circulation spurred by the continuous attempts of the French conservative magnates at censure.

There are some aspects of this enigmatic erotic literary engagement that define new features to the previously overripened eros, and - if Cupid was seen as the whimsical child at the court of Aphrodite - we find in Aragon a disavowed Cupid that seems thrust out of the Olympian heights and cast away through to the depths of the underworld. How can sensuality be intellectual? The answer which the surrealist had found consensus within is best elucidated through this novella. The two most prominent aspect of the aforementioned change reflect the expression of disgust and transgression, as well as the ritual and magic that eroticism is akin to. In the first instance we are issued a sedimented encounter that seeks to define the limits of subjectivity by violating its comfort; In the second we meet a spiritual affirmation that absolves of moral imperatives the natural, the carnal and the law of desire which, by way of transgression, accentuates its pleasure, not by suspending rational strictures but by rendering them in a methodology of habit and order that incarcerates the mind as much as the flesh.

Philosophically this is a testament to a dialectic of desire that was being premised by Freudian analytical techniques, particularly as elucidated in Totem and Taboo and Civilazion and its Discontent, through an associative paradigm that functioned within a syntax of condensation and displacement. Namely the erotic was redrawn to overwrite the biological and inscribe a pattern of social stimuli that causes the sublimation of libininal sensibilities. Aesthetic sensibilities need not be seduced but more aptly raped; this was the new invitation to the intellectual Bacchanalia of modernism. There is a force that destabilizes the ego and announces the intercourse of the political with the enervated energy of the id. Here we realize that the act itself is not as sensually satisfying as the voyeuristic distance perpetrated. The closer one comes to desire the farther one is from satisfying it. These are not easy arguements of psychological valence, and to make this encounter all the more problematic, there is a mystical eruption of hysterical proportions that functions as an excess to the repressive implications of social mores.

If as Georges Bataille put it "sexual union is a compromise, a half-way house between life and death" then in Aragon's piece we find a true exponenet of such anxious absolutions; If mystical ecstasy is procured by the absolute expression of ego-psychic abandonment then eroticism is a psychological quest not alien to death; If temptation and irreverence are prophylactic ensurers of a fractured self, then Aragon's prose is a fundamental exponenet of these thematic effusions clad in a literary dress. Louis Aragon, much like Apollinare, was a a literary exponent that stood in the midst of a dialogue in flux between the traditional and the avant-garde. His prose reads beautifully, ecstatically, and is sharpened by an eloquence of the keenest powers. One may easily mistake the excellent rendition of Alexis Lykiard for a page of Nabakov's Lolita - the Russian author was, not surprisingly, an enthusiastic reader of surrealist fiction and particularly of Aragon. This is not trash literature any more than Salvador Dali's or Frida Khalo's paintings are obscene maniacal art. Its fascination stems from a sustained adoptive enterprise that surveyed the works of Horace, Ovid, Lucretius, and Catullus, where the word more prudely and properly translated genitalia is a mainstay of creative exuberance and mysogynistic exploitation. Here Louis Aragon does not stray far from such lamenting, rather he materially propagates what a Blake, for example, sought to do metaphysically during the English Romantic era. Obviously however the two could not be farther apart, but this is for the same reason that a circle's beginning and end meet at some point to close the spherical index.

Finally it is to the title that we must return our gaze. It is the creative impulse turned inside out: the phallic lust is made absent to make for a wounded rational slip that engorges, engrosses and hides as it absorbes the thrsut of passion in favour of a fanciful praxis.
A book that ultimately fails, as did surrealism proper, because of the impossibility of rationalizing the irrational, the chaotic sterility that intention will forever be bound to, even as the claim to spontaneity is advanced. Albeit this is a work that deserved a readership, if for no other reason, a fund of critical treasures and lyrical dexterity. Postmodernism could not have been possible were it not for the surrealist endeavors at supplying the libidinal with a transcendental pulsion that is both ecstatic (as in beyond the essence) and intense (as in within it). Irene is the a transliteration of the Greek Eirenes, namely the goddess of Spring, of nature, the Satyr's energy force, reminding us that it is in absence that creativity is spurred rather than in fullness (plenum): The gestation of Desire is implicated through a lack. Here we find a healthy tension where if you are partially disgusted and partially appalled you lend merit to a literary exposition of unrest as a force of change. Ultimately the one aim was freedom and we cannot achieve freedom unless we strive to go beyond the limits set about us by cultural prescriptions and such like determinants.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Too French for me, February 5, 2008

By	wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

After an introductory note by the translator, this opens with a Dada or Surrealist poem by Aragon - at least, I think it was supposed to be a poem. In truth, I found this blank verse (and others like it, later in the book) incoherent and repetitive, and unrelated in every way to erotic experience as I understand it. Next, a nihilist short story expresses dysphoria, anhedonia, ennui, and other diseases of the soul that have names only in French. The writer hints at some family, but he seeks out prostitutes instead then despises them even as he expects them to service him. The progression continues, through other short first-person features in varying but dismal moods. One of the cheerier ones comes from an older man, aphasic and paralyzed with tertiary syphilis, watching and musing on various fornications around his rural farmhouse.

"I have never sought out anything but scandal, and I cultivate it for its own sake." So said Aragon, and I imagine that this succeeded even in the intellectual climate of 1928 Paris. The good news is that Aragon fell out with the Surrealists shortly after this was written - one may hope that he moved beyond the literary level of a toddler playing with potty words.

-- wiredweird

2.0 out of 5 stars snoozy contribtuion to a literary dead-end, October 22, 2008

By	Bachelier "Husband, Father, Catholic, Finance... (Ile de France) - See all my reviews

If this is an artistic expression of lust's madness, then I'll take Jack Webb's boarder line parody of hardboiled detective metaphors any day.

"She drifted into the room like 98 pounds of warm smoke. Her voice was hot and sticky--like a furnace full of marshmallows."

The explicit baseness of voyeurism which is this novel's ultimate subject is only interesting to those who have surrendered their life to voyeurism instead of living life. Free yourself from mere spectator: be alive.

Specific to the book: surrealist literature was burdened by its artificial aping of its visual counterpart (it was perfected in magical realism, but surrealist literature is by-and-large a failure).

Transitions are poor, and the translation is wooden. Sadly, the French isn't any better. This is a minor work for specialists only, and its only contribution to the average thinking man's horizons of knowledge is "what were they thinking" and since it concerns voyeuristic lust the inescapable conclusion "not very much."