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12 Prostitution Introduction: Textual Promiscuity Chénier, de Lisle, and Valéry share the same fear of impurity, and the same fascination with corruption. Helen is an emblem of that corruption: poetry’s sacred prostitute.Why is nineteenth-century France fascinated by the figure of the prostitute? Because the prostitute is a woman with a past and stands for any space that others have traversed. At Iliad 3.180 Helen, now Paris’s wife, remembers that she used to be Menelaus’s and calls herself a whore.1 (See chapter 1, ‘‘Mimesis,’’ for a detailed reading of this scene.) But before Menelaus there is Theseus, and after Paris there is Deiphobus, then Menelaus again, and perhaps later even Achilles.2 With Helen, sexual promiscuity goes hand-in-hand with textual promiscuity. This is the equation explored in this chapter by wayof several nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels and dramatic works. A number of nineteenthcentury novels such as France’s Thaïs and Flaubert’s La tentation de Saint Antoine figure Helen as femme fatale: fatal because unforgettable. The protagonist of La tentation de Saint Antoine is condemned to remember her. Flaubert’s novel is the story of a man in love with literature. For Saint Antoine to purge himself of desire, he must forget what he has read. But he is what he has read: he is a graft of books. History in La tentation is thus an endless cycle of graft: textual graft (repetition, imitation, citation) and sexual graft (copulation, abduction, adultery). From Helen’s grand entrance on the Trojan battlements on, I have suggested that representations of her tend toward the theatrical—in the sense that her 218 Prostitution 219 actions are always performances, and in the sense that they are always spectacles , made to be witnessed and watched. Thus the relationship between Helen as a novelistic character and Helen as a dramatic persona is a close one. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century French theatrical works like Meilhac and Halévy’s La Belle Hélène and Claudel’s Protée, Helen, along with the classical past, is debunked as a fraud. This equation of classical beauty with graft underlies Giraudoux’s La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu, perhaps the most extended modern theatrical meditation on beauty as a Hellenic topos. In that play Giraudoux is asking, in effect: what does it mean to fight for Helen? Giraudoux’s Helen becomes a figure for the dangerous promiscuity of all figuration, for she can be prostituted to any ideal. Helen in the Novel: When Reading Around Is Like Sleeping Around Helen, I have suggested, has always been at home on the stage. The last chapter began with an opera house in Frankfurt, where Nerval was entranced by the spectacle of Faust, and with the imperial court in Faust II, entranced by the spectacle of Helen. But wherever Helen is, we have seen, there is an audience, a performance, a representation, a costume, an illusion. The teichoskopia was itself a theatrical entrance. A number of nineteenth-century novels that take up the figure of Helen explicitly or implicitly are essentially extended teichoskopias . All are stories about actresses or courtesans: Emile Zola’s Nana, Anatole France’s Thaïs, and Gustave Flaubert’s La tentation de Saint Antoine. Helen of Troy is never explicitly mentioned in Nana (1885), but it would be difficult to read the first chapter of this novel without thinking of her. A number of traces are left in place.We are in a théâtre de boulevard, awaiting the début of a new vedette named Nana in a musical called La Blonde Vénus (in Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène, Helen enters with the chorus singing ‘‘Hear us, fair Venus / We need love, even if no love is left in the world!’’ [‘‘Ecoute-nous, Vénus la blonde, / Il nous faut de l’amour, n’en fût-il plus au monde!’’ (Halévy and Meilhac n.d.:6)]). The first character we are introduced to, eagerly awaiting the evening ’s entertainment, is Hector de la Faloise (the first instance of direct speech in the novel is ‘‘What was I telling you, Hector?’’ [‘‘Que te disais-je, Hector?’’ Zola 1885:2]).While the first act of the play takes place ‘‘on Olympus’’ (‘‘dans l’Olympe’’), the second takes us to a ‘‘dance hall, the Boule-Noir, in the middle of Mardi-Gras’’ (‘‘bastringue de barrière, à la...

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