Akiko's
Note:
66.12-14: "if we recall the
customs of certain Far Eastern people, virtually halfwits in many other
respects:" What does VN has in mind as the customs? I
might be expected to
figure it out as one from the Far East, but I must confess I have no idea
(virtually half-witted!). "The contrast between the
fictitious and the
factual" is, for example, the Chinese reversals associated with death in *The
Gift*?
TT
passage:
Hugh's mediocre potency might not have survived
the ordeal had she concealed from
him more
completely than she thought she did the excitement derived
from the contrast between the fictitious
and the factual -- a
contrast which after
all has certain claims to artistic
subtlety if we recall the customs of
certain Far Eastern
people, virtually halfwits in many
other respects. But his chief support lay in the never
deceived expectancy of the dazed
ecstasy that
gradually idolized her dear
features, notwithstanding her efforts to maintain the flippant
patter.
--------
EDNOTE. Akiko's Note calls
attention to VN's (or Mr. R's) remark about "Far Eastern sexual customs" and
ponders what customs these might be. A couple of passages from
ADA (cited below) offer some clarification. VN apparently illustrates the
"fictitious" and the "factual" distinction by reference to old Japanese
prints such as the one I have attached. Although it is not particularly
evident in this example, an examination of erotic shunga and ukiyo-e
prints shows that the faces of the participants, especially
females in frenzied couplings, very often display no emotion. This
disjunction of strong emotion and stolid expression is presumably what VN has
in mind in his account of Armande's sexual protocol. Although I know very
little about such matters I would hazard that the Japanese dichotomy may
be in some part a by-product of the limitations of woodblock printing as
well as local traditions of sexual etiquette. Perhaps those better informed
could enlighten us.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ADA
passages:
The
collection of Uncle Dan’s Oriental Erotica prints turned out to be
artistically second-rate and inept calisthenically. In the most hilarious, and
expensive, picture, a Mongolian woman with an inane oval face surmounted by a
hideous hair-do was shown communicating sexually with six rather plump,
blank-faced gymnasts in what looked like a display window jammed with screens,
potted plants, silks, paper fans and crockery. Three of the males, contorted
in attitudes of intricate discomfort, were using simultaneously three of the
harlot’s main orifices; two older clients were treated by her manually, and
the sixth, a dwarf, had to be contented with her deformed foot. Six other
voluptuaries were sodomizing her immediate partners, and one more had got
stuck in her armpit. Uncle Dan, having patiently disentangled all those limbs
and belly folds directly or indirectly connected with the absolutely calm lady
(still retaining somehow parts of her robes), had penciled a note that gave
the price of the picture and identified it as: ‘Geisha with 13 lovers.’ Van
located, however, a fifteenth navel thrown in by the generous artist but
impossible to account for anatomically.
----------------------------
‘—
took place at coincident dates, we were just ordinary sisters, exchanging
routine nothings, having little in common, she collecting cactuses or running
through her lines for the next audition in Sterva, and I reading a lot, or
copying beautiful erotic pictures from an album of Forbidden Masterpieces that
we found, apropos, in a box of korsetov i khrestomatiy (corsets
and chrestomathies) which Belle had left behind, and I can assure you, they
were far more realistic than the scroll-painting by Mong Mong, very active in
888, a millennium before Ada said it illustrated Oriental calisthenics when I
found it by chance in the corner of one of my ambuscades.