joe_olipo 's review for:

The Wild Ass's Skin by Honoré de Balzac

1.0

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"The Vagina of my Life
is so stretched
out — Eileen Myles

Balzac is writing here like Tolstoy (in the sense that he's conveying a hatred of frigid bitches only slightly less intense than his hatred of the syndicated literature review). The point of interest doesn't lie in the chief character's punishment for use of the subjunctive tense. (I once had a professor who dealt out punishments no less harsh for use of the past imperfect.) It occurs, rather, after that romantic outing in which the chief character has managed to forget himself in "a pleasant abiding here and now" and yet manages no mistake. This is followed by the small anagnorisis (petite-mort) in which he notices a fractional retraction of the magic skin. A poisoning of regular happiness, to always be dependent on a convivialité one knows to be false. I wonder about the coincidence between the shrinkage of that glabrous skin after a pleasant episode of verbal intercourse and Balzac's knowledge of anatomy. Because he appears to be associating, in the negative movement, the stretching of the female organ that was once thought to be associated with the act. A skin that shrinks down to nothing and magically ends your life has its corollary in the moment when "the vagina of your life is so stretched out" that, to Balzac, you're as good as dead.