Temptations of the Flesh

Temptations of the Flesh Warren F. Motte, Jr. T O READ ALINA REYES’S LE BOUCHER is to penetrate into a world of meat, following the incision of the knife described in the first sentences of the text: “ La lame s’enfonça en douceur dans le muscle, puis le parcourut en souplesse d’un bout à l’autre. Le geste était parfaitement maîtrisé. La tranche tomba en fléchissant mollement sur le billot.” 1Le Boucher is a trenchant first novel, an erotic fable whose in­ itial hero will be raw meat itself, meat animated only by the stroke of the knife: “ La viande noire luisait, ravivée par l’attouchement du couteau” (9). Meat is primordial in the world that Reyes creates. It will generate and mediate all other considerations in the text, particularly the relation of the narrator, a young woman working as a cashier in a butcher shop, and the butcher to whom she is drawn. The erotic tension in the story arises in meat, and it is nourished thereby. Meat is the force that attracts the narrator and the butcher; it is the locus upon which they correspond. I should like to examine that correspondence, in order to offer a car­ nivorous reading of Le Boucher. Early on in the novel, the narrator explicitly inscribes her relation with the butcher within the framework of the game: “ Comme chaque fois que nous étions tous les deux seuls, le boucher et moi, le jeu revenait, notre jeu, notre invention précieuse pour anéantir le monde” (17).2 Although most erotic texts are, I think, significantly playful,3it is rare that the ludic contract be as overt as it is in this case. As the terms of that contract become clear, a recreational space appears, one where the game the narrator announces will be played out, progressively, upon three levels. The first of these is located firmly in the stuff that furnishes the materiality of both the butcher shop and the novel, meat. This game in­ volves the projection of desire upon dead flesh, and the consequent animation of the latter as the mediator of the living flesh of narrator and butcher. Thus, the meats in the shop window strike the narrator as living jewels. The skinned rabbits, slit open to reveal their livers, are images of a double nakedness; they are described as exhibitionists. The chicken’s rump is fantastic, compared by the narrator to a false nose on a clown’s VOL. XXXI, No. 4 51 L ’E s pr it C r éa te u r face (12). The abats, the so-called specialty meats, are the objects of par­ ticular attention. They are magnificent, in the narrator’s view, because they are at once the most intimate and the most authentic of meats, evok­ ing most faithfully the living animal that carried them: foies sombres, sanguinolents, tout en mollesse, langues énormes, obscènement râpeuses, cervelles crayeuses, énigmatiques, rognons lovés dans toutes leurs rondeurs, coeurs entubés d ’artères—et ceux qui restaient dissimulés dans le frigo: le mou pour le chat des mémés parce que trop laid, poumon gris et spongieux; les ris de veau, parce que rares et réservés aux meilleurs clientes; et ces couilles de bélier, ramenées tout exprès de l’abbatoir et tou­ jours livrées tout emballées, dans la plus grande discrétion, à un certain monsieur trapu qui en faisait son régal. (13) As she surveys and catalogues her fleshy décor, the narrator’s glance becomes that of the reader. The latter is encouraged to play the same game, to attribute animate quality to the dead meat. For this will facilitate the passage to the radical objectification of human flesh, upon which the primary force of this novel depends. That dynamic is engaged, for instance, when the narrator spies upon the butcher, copulating with his employer’s wife in the cold room (28-29). They are suspended there, carcasses among carcasses; there is no distinguishing between dead animal flesh and living human flesh; all, in short, is meat. Clearly, just as the narrator’s voyeurism is...