SARRASINE

 

 JEFFREY ST. CLAIR 

 + The French novelist Honoré de Balzac hid from his creditors for nearly seven years on the top floor of a house on the Rue Berton in the Passy district of Paris, keeping his location secret from nearly everyone except his mistress, the Polish countess, Madame (Ewelina) Henska. He could rarely venture outside because his Balzacian girth made him instantly recognizable to the bailiffs who were looking to arrest him and toss him into debtor’s prison. So he wrote and he wrote, his swelling body swaddled in a monk-like white cashmere hooded gown and fueled by 50 cups of coffee a day

In a letter to Henska he described his writing routine: “Working, dear Countess, is to get up every night at 12, write until 8, take breakfast for a quarter of an hour, then work until 5, dine, go to sleep, wake up at midnight and start all over again.” In his seven years in the house, he wrote the novels: The Black Sheep, Cousin Bette, A Murky Business, Cousin Pons and Lost Illusions. Not bad for a hedonist.

If you’re lying in bed at Fitzgerald’s witching hour (3 am, unable to get back to sleep (nearly every night for me these days) you might try another book Balzac wrote in his secret garret, the novella Sarrasine, about a young French sculptor who goes to Rome to become the next Michelangelo and falls madly in love with a singer who turns out to be a castrato.

In Balzac’s story, Sarrasine attends the opera one night and becomes obsessed with the beauty of one of the singers, who goes by the flamboyant stage name La Zambinella. Sarrasine rushes back to his studio and, in a lustful frenzy, begins molding a clay statue of the singer, viewing her as the very model of modern femininity. He attends the same play over and over again and ultimately tries to seduce her, but she resists his advances without offering a convincing explanation.

Finally, he plots to abduct her during an appearance at the French embassy in Rome, where La Zambinella appears dressed in men’s clothing. Surprised, but intrigued by her appearance, Sarrasine is told that Zambinella is not a young woman, but a male castrato, whose testicles had been hacked off as a young teen to sustain the soprano registers of his voice.

Humiliated and enraged, Sarrasine grabs Zambinella and drags “her” to his studio, where he plans to kill the object of his desire, only to discover, too late, that he/she has other admirers, less unnerved by her transgendered nature, including a cardinal of the Church, who has sent his agents to stab Sarrasine to death before he can slit Zambinella’s throat.  The whole story is pretty far-out, particularly for 1830.

The novella formed part of Balzac’s La Comédie humaine series but had been suppressed for obvious reasons until 1970, when Roland Barthes took it apart almost sentence by sentence in his book S/Z. The Barthes book is barely readable, but Balzac roars along as immediate as ever and nearly 200 years later almost perfectly captures the gender hysteria of our time. The Crying Game has nothing on this story.

COUNTERPUNCH