Gentlemen Callers invokes an experience more akin to binging on a box of chocolates than anything like reading a conventional novel or short story collection. Each section (or is it chapter? scene? prose poem?) is a miniature theater of desire that sumptuously, delicately bursts upon the palate fine, dissolving in rapt transport before the next confection is proffered to the roused appetite. Rather than overwhelm through cloying excess, however, what sustains dramatic interest is a variety of texture, flavor, and feel. While many vignettes decline to leave the realms of pure suggestion (the chiropractor working down her vertebrae), or schoolroom innuendo (the pâtissier desperately looking to deposit his cream), others are quickly content to amply detail country matters. A few encounters may cleave to plain realism, but most are imbued with a freewheeling surreality as the narrator continuously shapeshifts, becoming a sponge, tentacle, otter, or housefly, to cite only the first four episodes. In some scenes, the narrator is an object to be manhandled, such as when the chef works her over with a ladle, and in others she brandishes the superior force, such as where she becomes the Gulf Stream to overwhelm a geographer. Her attitudes range from affectionate, as with the groomer in whose lap she reclines in feline form, to brusquely impersonal. Most interactions are wildly playful, some antagonistic, and a good many indulge an ambivalent role-playing that muddies the water between. They typically chart a path of crescendo though they are not unacquainted with abrupt disappointment should her museum guard beau, for example, decide to shave off the moustache she fixates upon. Indeed, climax itself is at most only ever implied in double entendre, Hoex never risking a refractory break in the erotic tension, but stringing the reader along upon the deftest of edges. Almost needless to say, these dream sequences are rambunctiously funny, the speaker having a particular skill for zinging one-liners (“What stamina the Church has! . . . And to think that there are those who claim its strength is waning,” she opines after a tryst with her priest). Even behind those few rendezvous that attempt to stay straight-faced, one cannot help but sense a sidelong smirk on the verge of cracking up.
This is an aesthetic rococo in essence, its brushwork governed by an irrepressible metamorphosis. If there is anything like a structural continuity beneath this constancy of the inconstant, it does not lie in any sense of psychology or character: Hoex’s idiom is a careening metonymy of affects that barely cedes the requisite moment to crystallize a “meaning” or excavate the kinds of cross-reference that constitute a personality. Her prose has a select preference for the inflective play of surfaces over the plumbed self of depth psychology, for caress over penetration. These are not, however, eminently visual surfaces, sequenced images governed by a montage logic; instead, desire often attends upon a gesture or tic, the slightest grace note of a detail that becomes a theme for progressively lunatic variations, these being plied and piled upon into an eventual choreography so convoluted as to defy visualization, but one that garners an undeniably felt character in this rampant swell. Hoex’s is a sexuality not of the gaze, but of texture and graze. It is a desire that does not paint or project an image upon its environs, but sculpts it, opting to actively burgeon and graft upon it as a substrate to be molded, conjuring a space that is less an arena for vision than an immersive medium of touch. Anything approaching a motif therein is thus not symbolic but topological: there abound constant acts of envelopment, for instance, such as the aviator entering the narrator-qua-cloud, “my diaphanous thighs wrapped around him . . . curl[ing] my lovely tendrils,” eventually giving way to a suggestive rain.
Penetration meanwhile rarely focuses on the entrant so much as the discovery of her own body as a volume, underscoring not the intrusion of the outer upon the inner, but a blurring of this threshold as she is engorged by inner pressure. Consider the priest who endows her with the rapture of the Holy Spirit, her own body not violated but wrested toward a sumptuous consumption, devising novel pleasures in the variations of density as she “expands, thickens, condenses.” With and against these more conventionally sexual logics of conjugating spaces, gestures of splicing and divvying take on a complementary erogenous charge: that same aviator’s propeller “spins in a frenzy, the blades relentlessly whipping” her into a “churning mist;” or the tailor “slicing my corset, peeling, stripping away my lingerie to the very last ribbon.” Even when neither touched nor touching, the skin is incessantly sensate, riven through with pining tremors, prickling hairs and anticipatory shivers that are perhaps the book’s most recurrent image. Gentlemen Callers is nothing less than an outlandish, speculative bestiary of felt space, of ways to be touched within, upon and without, all rhythmized by the desire suffusing it: staccato pricks and stroked legatos; restless throbbing, thrums that crest swelling undertows; tempi ranging from madcap flurry to aching stationary tensions. Desire begets only more desire, contravenes all economy in tireless positive feedback, and its only statute unto itself is therefore the paradoxical one of total permissiveness. Hoex knows the law of this land better than anyone, and yet is acutely aware that anarchy is by no means an adequate alibi for artlessness; on the contrary, it demands the most scrupulous attention.
The premise might seem open to the prospect of easy politicking, but only by the most literal reading is the book a blithe celebration of feminine sexuality or a monotonous assertion of its sovereignty over a group of hapless men (as if hypersexuality or the simple inversion of a power dynamic could possibly constitute a subversive maneuver today). Hoex unquestionably recognizes the inextricable relation of power and sexuality, yet sidesteps the temptation of cut-and-dried tactics, instead teasing out this knot, twisting and convoluting it as a means of forging eccentric and unexpected agencies. The book’s longest scene, for example, sees the narrator as a forest intruded upon by “the insolence of a true hunter, crush[ing] my hyacinths, trampl[ing] my primroses,” a repartee ensuing as she seeks to entrap him as a prisoner in her “luxurious, shadowy, tangled . . . bushes” and as he vies for escape. What begins as an agonistic field soon yields to covenant, however, as the intrusion is subverted through its invitation, a counterpoint founded between “his dragging footsteps softly stroking me” and “the exquisitely damp warmth secreted within my wet earth,” a mutualism finally heralded as “below my roots, I feel the rumble of his life.” Elsewhere, where opposition does not give way to reciprocity, she never resorts to means so crass as to simply contradict or overpower, but simply short-circuits the game altogether by withdrawing her desire, pulling the rug out from under her adversary, spurning her circus trainer for his own sea lions, or stifling the advances of a maritime surveyor for a polar bear eyeing her from a nearby iceberg. When she does elect to play, the game is one of feint, parry and suggestion, whose terms are ever changeable to the libido’s upper hand. It inexorably ekes out an object and extracts pleasure from even the most Gordian configurations of intersecting wiles. This might be through the masochistic alchemy of pain transposed to pleasure, as with her tailor’s “rapacious onslaught” as he “violently rips my bodice and lacerates the scarlet silk like a bloodied pelt.” Elsewhere, the very negation of erotic possibility itself becomes a kind of wish-fulfilment via the nightwatchman, who paradoxically guards her from dreams altogether. Meanwhile, when a particularly ominous encounter with a schoolteacher offers little prospect of pleasure in the staunch submission demanded, it is only as he drags chalk screeching across the blackboard that the section terminates with her own “long, hoarse shriek. A breathless fever pitch,” the barest intimation of a tenuous climax snatched away in this last-ditch volta. The sense is of a desire that always hits the mark, setting upon weird and fortuitous tacks in the ruckus of vectors, ever primed to tilt the field if necessary for the narrator to reap her due with shrewd fatalism.
Notably, Hoex only ever identifies her suitors by their profession, her flights of fancy always taking off from the platform of their labor. As yet another turn of the screw upon the already knotty mass of power relations subtending the book, multiple readings abound: are these episodes a respite from labor, or a perverse eroticization of it? Is it even clear which of these is the more subversive option? Furthermore, although no mention of any monetary transaction is ever made (or possibly indeed arising from this very ambiguity), it might even be unclear who is in fact providing whom the service in question. After all, if these men are idiomatic gentleman callers in all but the most tongue-in-cheek sense, the mores of bygone courtship hardly being on anyone’s mind here, there is the possibility of it being euphemistic. It is particularly allusive that Baudelaire, for whom the figure of the prostitute was perhaps unparalleled amongst his various symbolic fixations, is by some margin the most common writer to deck the epigraphs (and Gentlemen Callers itself resembles no other book more than Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en Prose, those fifty oddball prose poems steeped in languorous reverie of which it would “be wrong to say has neither head nor tail, since, on the contrary, it is all alternately and reciprocally head and tail”). Yet if Baudelaire’s call girls are always purely objects in an aestheticized distance whose sexuality, by way of his inverted though entrenched Catholicism, is both symbolically beatified and carnally demonized, Hoex’s calling gentlemen provide a counterpoint. As Walter Benjamin noted, Baudelaire “never wrote a poem on prostitution from the perspective of a prostitute,” and the relentless verbosity of Hoex’s narrator is not only a rejoinder to this, but one furthermore left cold by the solipsistic yearnings of distance, instead hymnifying the proximal: what is on or in the skin, proselytizing something like intimacy.
Notwithstanding the paramour stereotypes of the nation, the Francophone novel has perpetually accorded a certain privilege to erotic experience: a lineage runs from Héloïse and Abelard to the present, whether in the assorted post-structuralist variations upon the “pleasure of the text,” or even in Houellebecq, whose jaded posturing is only an indelible romantic idealism in a dark mirror. Hoex’s own homage to the rencontre amoureuse in Gentlemen Callers tends to the zealously overt side of the tradition, and is exemplary of a constellation of novels and chapbooks that she has spent the better part of two decades assembling in tireless orbit of desire’s absent center. Judge by their titles alone: 2008’s Ma robe n'est pas froissée (My Dress Was Not Wrinkled), or 2012’s Le ravissement des femmes (The Ecstasy of Women). Gentlemen Callers is notable in this compact body of work for being one of its shorter outings, an hour’s riotous entertainment that sits comfortably within a certain contemporary gallic habit of short, offbeat, fragmentary novellas—think Jean-Phillipe Toussaint, Éric Chevillard, Anne Serre, or Tanguy Viel. To channel momentarily the gourmand inclinations of its narrator, if it be the first of her works to reach us in English, one can only hope that it is the amuse-bouche.
