Gabrielle Wittkop (1920–2002)

Gabrielle Wittkop's The Necrophiliac was originally published in France in 1972, but only recently was it translated into English. This short novella is related in the form of a journal, in which the narrator recounts his various sexual encounters with dead people, including children.

Because of its style and subject matter, Wittkop's story asks to be judged alongside its literary peers, demanding admittance to a literary subculture that combines the transgressive practice of pornography with a serious philosophical investigation into the overlapping themes of life and death. One does not, after all, read works like this for the sake of titillation. Despite its sexually explicit themes, The Necrophiliac is intensely focused on the theme of how death shapes our understanding of life's purpose.

So just who are Wittkop's putative peers? Obviously, there is the Marquis de Sade who, in works like The 120 Days of Sodom and Philosophy in the Bedroom, combined sexual cruelty with a probing examination of the meaning of life in a godless universe. From the nineteenth-century, we might single out Edgar Allan Poe who, while hardly pornographic in the traditional sense, nonetheless demonstrates an intense interest in perversity, as well as Charles Baudelaire, whose poem "The Corpse" (from The Flowers of Evil) seems particularly relevant here. In the twentieth-century, the obvious representative would be Georges Bataille, whose novella Story of the Eye is a masterpiece of intellectual pornography.

The enduring fascination of those earlier works lies in the adventurous way in which they pushed the boundaries not only of taste, but also of thought, in new directions. It is a sensation I didn't get from reading The Necrophiliac which, given its original publication date of 1972, seems like a pale imitation of those earlier writers. Taken on its own, it is a stylish, accomplished piece of fiction, but when placed in the larger context of the genre, it can only be seen as a minor work.… (more)

This is a graphic book which made me wince a couple of times, and it's so well written that it nearly turned my head. Whenever an author manages to push something out there which - especially considering the title of this novella - makes the reader, to some level, understand the main character where the content - necrophilia - is so stigmatised on so many levels - including the fact that corpses are exhumed and sexualised on many a level - and this is done on so few pages, I'm really in awe of the author.

The contents, then? As I said, it's graphic, but one is shown the world of a person who works with antiques and also lusts for dead bodies and the world of the dead.

Read this. Challenge yourself!… (more)

"Exemplary Departures by Gabrielle Wittkop highlights her refined, luxurious, and idiosyncratic style. Put in simple visual terms, the taut and lean prose of someone like Elmore Leonard resembles the chrome simplicity of a Zippo lighter. Gabrielle Wittkop’s prose resembles a jewel-encrusted lighter designed by Bulgari. Cigarettes kill; Gabrielle Wittkop kills with style."

For the full review at the New York Journal of Books, click below:

rel="nofollow" _target="_top">https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/exemplary-departures… (more)

Very short and quite good. The content is described in other reviews, and both story and Wittkop's telling of it are arresting. This could have been a lurid tale, or one overwhelmed by a narrator's moral agonising over his behaviour, but Lucien's narration is calm, spare, subtly humourous, and sometimes poetic. The style is so attractive that when I tried to begin a more conventional novel shortly after finishing this, I gave it up as an irritant: relative to this book, it seemed ridiculously wordy. Wittkop passes no overt judgement on Lucien though she gently implies through both his words and his actions the extent of his self-delusion.

There is one rather colourful description at the book's beginning, but that aside I can't imagine a reader finding any of the incidents repugnant in a visceral way. A couple of aspects of the story did niggle slightly, though: Whilst the origin of Lucien's inclinations is entirely plausible, the passage detailing it doesn't seem quite to fit in--perhaps because it's the only one taking us back to the distant past--and I found it difficult to suspend disbelief so much as to accept without question Lucien's being able to dig up graves and take bodies home (via a lift, no less) to his apartment unobserved.

Overall, I'm left very eager to read more of Wittkop's books.… (more)