In the world of letters, sex is too often strangled with extremes. Whether entrenched in symbolism, proliferate with diverse politics, or avoided altogether, this pervasive element of human experience is too often deprived of its more irreverent, mirthful, and pleasurable evocations. In our Book Club selection for April, award-winning Belgian writer Corinne Hoex presents a series of sexual dreams and fantasies in Gentlemen Callers, a collection that astounds, subverts, and engages with physical pleasure in joy, levity, and dreaminess. Unabashedly funny and fiercely sensual, Hoex’s journey through the erotic is a breathless delight.
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Gentlemen Callers by Corinne Hoex, translated from the French by Caitlin O’Neil, Dalkey Archive Press, 2022
Literature has—particularly in the last century or so—become a Serious Business. I’m not speaking here of economics or occupations, but rather the affect of seriousness. Very often, the more tragical, gritty, and dark a tale is, the more lauded its reception becomes. For whatever reason, we have decided that comedy is not as worthy of critical attention or canonization, in spite of the fact that, in my estimation at least, comedy is infinitely harder to pull off. Humor is culturally specific, temporally tied, and situationally contextual, and all of these facets are amplified in the context of translation, where puns and plays become tangled in tongues. This is what makes Gentlemen Callers, by Corinne Hoex, translated from the French by Caitlin O’Neil, a truly astonishing outlier. While French literature enjoys a fairly prolific publication rate in English, the kinds of literature chosen for publication are often cerebral, philosophical, and introspective. Hoex’s series of vignettes, too, are interiorized, in that they are dreamworlds, but they are also fleshy, sensuous, and gilded with a teasing tone firmly rooted (pun intended) in sexual exploration and fulfillment.
Gentlemen Callers is somewhere between a novel and a short story collection; a first-person narrator delivers each brief tale, and her power to call men (and other more fantastical lovers) into her dreams perennially returns, but nearly every chapter is self-contained, and the narrator shapeshifts as she sees fit, all the better to become the tool with which her lovers might exercise their expertise. Each vignette is titled after an occupation, some of which happily gesture to the realm of tried and true pornographic tropes (like The Mailman or The Schoolteacher) while others are more oblique: The Butcher, The Furrier, The Beekeeper. Following each chapter title comes an epigraph, all taken from some of Europe’s most famous canonical authors: Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola. As one might expect, all the referenced authors are men, and all the epigraphs gesture to the occupation under examination, albeit some more obliquely than others. The narratorial play here is not only to reference the heights of physical joy one can achieve with a skilled workman, but also to reference the heights of intellectual joy one can achieve when toying with the phantom canon, with the master’s ghost.
Take, for example, the epigraph from “The Young Priest 2,” one of only three vignette continuations in the book. It’s from Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ, perhaps one of the most widely read Christian works after the Bible itself. The quote: “How pleasant and sweet to behold brethren fervent and devout, well-mannered and disciplined!” This earnest, chaste sentiment takes on a new and sensually playful valence when paired with the priest’s vignettes, in which a handsome man of the cloth visits the narrator in her dreams and delivers an intercession upon which, “the Holy Spirit enters me. God clasps me in His arms, possesses me with His mouth, radiates His light by waking the wild urges of his servant’s potent sap.” No doubt Kemis himself, who in his teachings stressed silence, solitude, resisting temptation, and purging fleshly pleasures, would be outraged at the implication that actions “fervent and devout” might be found in the narrator’s oblique allusion to fellatio, “kneel[ing] on [her] white cloud, back arched, face upturned, lips parted, surrendering [her] flesh to the Redeemer.”
But for the contemporary reader, this play between canon and contemporary, oblique allusion and overt description, makes for a positively hilarious and pleasurable reading experience, one which excites the imagination and, yes, the body, in all sorts of ways. Reading most of Gentlemen Callers on my train commute, I found myself stifling laughter, blushing fiercely, delighting in punnery, and desperately hoping no one was reading over my shoulder. That the sensuous language comes in the form of a translation made my delight in its lush, teasing tone all the more pleasurable. O’Neil has truly pulled out all the stops here to be as playful in her translation as Hoex is in her style and construction; there are allusions which are mere happy accidents of language, as in “The Aviator,” which one might aptly guess prominently features a cockpit (in French the much more mundane “poste de pilotage” or pilot’s post.) There are, however, other more deliberate translation choices which maintain that same loaded linguistic play, as in “The Beekeeper,” in which the narrator “feel[s] the thrust of one swift, searing prick” or “The Sculptor” in which the narrator is shaped under the auspices of her lover’s “tool.”
While Gentlman Callers is an extremely playful book, it’s not without its darker moments, points where the harsh edges of contemporary sexual realties are thrown in sharp relief against the lighter sensuality of the surrounding texts. “The Baker,” who also enjoys two dream episodes with the narrator, first presents her with a cake full of cream, but his dessert turns her into a housefly, making it impossible for him to catch her. She teases him and tickles him into a frustrated fury, and at the conclusion of their first dalliance, he vows to catch her. On his second visit, although he misses her tickling, he refuses her the cream cake and instead gluts her on rum baba. She tells him:
“You should have brought that cake, that creative success, that culinary innovation, that rich rarity, instead of this stupid baba, this huge baba that’s so copiously, so heavily soaked with rum, it’s hit me under the wing.”
“All the better, Madame!” concludes Guiellaume with a triumphant laugh, malicious, sardonic. “It’s hit you under the wing? Excellent! Perfect! Finally I’ve caught you!”
The implication here of sex under the influence, of deliberately getting one’s partner drunk, of rendering her pliable and pinioned, rings very strongly of date rape—and this is how the baker’s vignette ends. We are not, as in many of the other vignettes, assured of the narrator’s pleasure in this encounter. In fact, from her reaction to the “baba,” we can conclude she’s not very pleased at all. There are other similarly dark encounters throughout the book, including a tailor, a butcher, and an executioner. The thin line between sadomasochistic pleasure and outright assault dances in the margins of the pages, but even in violent or disappointing encounters, the narrator—the dreamer—often finds moments of transformational escape and immense pleasure with the otherworldly, against which no human lover can measure up. “The Astrologer,” for example, is a lover whose scientific devotion leaves him lacking in the field of poetry, unable to awaken the passions of the flesh. Even as he attempts to merge his Mars with her Venus, the narrator is looking to the stars themselves, catching a wild ride on an intervening comet. “Flames flowing from its golden head, and followed by its blazing tail, blindingly bright, abandoning the astrologer where he lies stricken, the astral steed carries me to orbit.”
Hoex’s playful romp through the transformative powers of female sensuality, rendered just as humorously in the English through O’Neil’s winking translation, toes the line of taste and teases the reader with allusions to the sex that saturates our culture, but which so often is treated with two polar opposite approaches. Sex is Serious Business, an act both sacred and taboo, unmentionable, but also ever-present in our media landscapes. But sex is also play. It is filled with toys, laughter, games, and pleasure. And to approach it with the mindset of revelry, with cheerful jokes aimed at deflating even the most pompous canonical egos, is something which our Serious Literary Landscape sorely needs.
Laurel Taylor is a translator, writer, and scholar currently working on her Ph.D. in Japanese and comparative literature through a Fulbright at Waseda University. Her writing and translations have appeared in Mentor & Muse, The Offing, The Asia Literary Review, and elsewhere.
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