Gabrielle Wittkop - Necrophiliac love: the only sort that is pure. Because even amor intellectualis -- the great white rose -- waits to be paid in return. No counterpart for the necrophiliac in love, the gift he gives of himself awakens no enthusiasm.

Gabrielle Wittkop, The Necrophiliac, Trans. by Don Bapst,
ECW Press, 2011.


Read it at Google Books


Translated for the first time into English, this masterpiece of French literature is striking, not only for its astonishing subject matter but for the poetic beauty of the late author’s subtle, intricate prose. As the haunting protagonist Lucien grapples with a taboo desire, the novel goes far beyond mere gothic horror to explore the melancholy in the loneliest depths of the human condition, forcing readers to confront their own mortality with an unprecedented intimacy. The Necrophiliac has become a cult classic in the 40 years since its original publication, one that is especially intriguing due to the insight it lends into the author's fascinatingly reclusive mind.

A Parisian antique dealer with a lust for corpses indulges his macabre fetish in this faux shocking novella by the late Wittkop (1920–2002). It's written in a diary format that plainly records the thoughts and actions of Lucien, a middle-aged man of some means who suffers a terrible loneliness that can only be assuaged by having vigorous sex with putrid corpses. Sometimes Lucien attains heights of feverish passion, such as for Suzanne, a woman he exhumes from the Montparnasse Cemetery and keeps packed in ice in his flat, delirious with a happiness edged by decay. Lucien later travels to Naples and descends into the catacombs for more gnarly adventures before spiriting off the bodies of two Swedish adolescent siblings who have recently drowned. While the material is inarguably gruesome, it's not especially smart or alarming, though it may hold some appeal to the young and disaffected who haven't yet been turned on to the marquis de Sade. - Publishers Weekly

"A striking book, unique in its kind, in which one suddenly finds oneself thrown up against 'that flesh so cold, so soft, so deliciously tight, found only in the dead.'"  —Actuel

"There lies within it a velvet smooth writing of baroque coldness, which goes marvelously well with its exceptional subject matter: a man who unearths cadavers, takes them into his apartment, loves them, and weeps to see the decomposition of flesh that takes them away from him. . . . The Necrophiliac is a queer book: a flawless delicacy of oblique irrationality."  —Hubert Juin

"It's a fascinating dive into the abyss into which Gabrielle Wittkop has invited us. The loves of a necrophiliac—a real one—so abrupt, raw, direct, disturbing and yet capable of moving us to pity. . . . An ode without a touch of complaisance or amorality to the icy beauty of the cold sexes and putrescent charms of bodies the colors of wax with the strange odor of moths. An arresting style with macabre, hypnotic accents."  —Philippe Lecardonnel

"Nothing is as flawless as a corpse," says Lucien, the eponymous necrophiliac, shortly after he has had sex with one. The sentiment—revolting but stunningly sincere—sets the tone for what follows. In a series of dated diary entries, Lucien chronicles his graveyard adventures. Given the subject matter and the insistent intimacy of Lucien's detailed depravities, it seems rather an understatement to deem this little book “disturbing,” if only because this misses the point. Lucien’s journal is not a confession, at least not in the sense of guilt or expiation; unapologetic, he is nothing but casual and thoroughly even-keeled in his descriptions. Like some unrepentant, polymorphously perverse Humbert Humbert, Lucien intoxicates with his language, accepting his predilection for the dead as what it is. “I can’t see a pretty woman or a handsome man without immediately wishing he or she were dead,” he notes. There is little indication of a battle waged against this inclination, little sense that Lucien is troubled by his desires. It is as if, straddling the taboo line between life and death, he has consecrated his desecration. Living in the moment, for his attachments are necessarily brief, Lucien “fall[s] in love each time,” even as he accepts love’s—and life’s—brevity. In his astonishing, seemingly boundless desires—in the course of the novel, Lucien describes his varied intimacies with men and women, adolescents, even newborns, his love objects bound only by the commonality of death—“the necrophiliac” melds Eros and Thanatos into one terrible whole, all the while insisting that the amalgamation cannot be undone. “Sex is spoken of in all its forms except one,” Lucien remarks, and his record is perhaps meant as a rejoinder. The resulting narrative is discomfiting to be sure, but it is also far more sad than shocking. Loving the dead, it seems, is no less complicated than loving the living, and in the end, we all die alone. - Yevgeniya Traps
 

Deadpan ... Gabrielle Wittkop. Photograph: Pierre-Franck Colombier/EPA

When George Orwell wrote to defend Henry Miller in his essay "Inside the Whale", he noted that when approaching an "unprintable" (for his times) book, "either one is shocked and disgusted, or one is morbidly thrilled, or one is determined above all else not to be impressed." That was in 1940, and we are all much less worked up about that kind of thing these days, aren't we?
So I found myself somewhat discomfited when, on the tube, I took out this book and started reading. It is in diary form, recording the amorous exploits of one Lucien, an antiques shop owner who exclusively prefers to have sex with the dead (sex and age immaterial, we learn). The book begins with his description of a dead young girl with "the sly, ironic smile of those who know a lot". The next day "the little girl played a mean trick on me. While I was sliding into that flesh so soft, so cold, so deliciously tight, the child abruptly opened an eye, translucent like that of an octopus . . ." Actually, I think I'll stop quoting right there. This is, after all, a family newspaper. I will spare you the details except to say that Gabrielle Wittkop had obviously given some thought to the kinds of things that can happen when having sex with the dead. She puts us right there, sparing us nothing. I checked carefully to see if anyone had been reading over my shoulder, and slowly put the book back in my pocket.
Artists who like to shock readers out of the conventional proprieties can be accused of doing it just to get a rise out of us, so to speak. And the astonishing opening of The Necrophiliac can be seen as a kind of hurdle. Balk at this, the author seems to be saying, and perhaps the rest of this book is not for you. Certainly, I cannot imagine this being chosen for the Ambridge reading group, or picked up by the kind of readers who say they didn't like such-and-such a book because they didn't like the characters.
Then again, Humbert Humbert isn't awfully likeable, is he? And yet he is the protagonist of one of the 20th century's acknowledged classics. There are superficial similarities with the diarist of The Necrophiliac: snobbishness and fastidiousness, which seems to go so well with forbidden loves. To rephrase Nabokov/Humbert: you can always count on a pervert for a fancy prose style. There is also the daring challenge to the reader: what, we are asked, can you see beyond the perversion?
Wittkop, whose first novel this was (published when she was 52, in 1972; never before translated into English, amazingly) certainly seems, from the little I know about her, to be the kind of writer who enjoyed freaking out her audience. I can imagine her, in an idle moment, wondering how to shock the petit bourgeoisie, thinking "Ah! Necrophilia!" and chuckling.
But there is more to this than mere outrage, that's clear from the start. As with Nabokov, the comedy comes from the difference between how our narrator writes and what he gets up to. And you can see Wittkop, deadpan, wondering what she can get away with next – rather like Lucien. "Henri, dead of scarlet fever at six – though I never catch the slightest sickness – is a brave little man."
This would be a poor and revolting little book (fewer than 100 pages, which is quite enough, really) if it did not have such a poised tone and sensibility, such intelligence, behind it. Or if it sheltered itself, in cowardly fashion, behind allegory. It is the apotheosis of sick humour, the kind that makes us both laugh and confront things we would normally rather not. (Lucien sees a man violating a very ugly dead nun on an altar: "The little fellow was certainly not an inveterate necrophiliac, at most he was maybe among those who figure it's never too late to start.") With its intimate involvement with the decaying body it makes other engagements with death and the macabre look like silly, superficial flirtations. I was, like Orwell's imaginary reader, determined at first not to be impressed. But I very quickly was. This is a masterpiece. - Nicholas Lezard



“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” says Humbert Humbert, the pedophiliac protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. And murderers aren’t the only ones. Authors ranging from the Marquis de Sade to Edgar Allen Poe to Chuck Palahnuik have relied on similar tricks, juxtaposing the abhorrent behavior of their characters with irresistibly lovely language, daring the reader to fall under the poetic spell and into the seductive consciousness of every variety of sadist, fetishist and psychopath.
Thanks to translator Don Babst, the latest English-language entry into this macabre cadre is The Necrophiliac, a slim little volume by Gabrielle Wittkop. Wittkop, née Menardeau, is one notable exception to the tacit boys-only rule that governs this sort of extreme literature. Her biography suggests a history of transgressions in both life and art, from her marriage “of friendship and affection” to a homosexual husband, to her eventual suicide at 81 (she was suffering from lung cancer). She announced her intentions to her editor in a farewell letter: “I intend to die as I lived, a free man.”
Babst’s translation represents Wittkop’s first into English; the majority of her titles are available only in French or German (her native and adopted tongues, respectively). But from those titles—titles like “Sérénissime assassinat” and “La Mort de C”—we can perhaps get some idea of where her interests lie.
The Necrophiliac, Wittkop’s 1972 first novel, is structured as a series of entries in the diary of Lucien, the eponymous corpse-lover and owner of a small antiques shop. Describing his profession—“its cadaverous ivories, its pallid crockery, all the goods of the dead”—Lucien observes: “Truly, the occupation of an antiquarian is a situation almost ideal for a necrophiliac.” (40) Addicted to the intoxicating smell of “the bombyx,” plagued by a series of abdicating cleaning ladies, and begged by his tailor to wear something other than black, Lucien’s obsession renders him a solitary figure. Our view into his journal, then, is a peephole into a consciousness largely invisible to the outside world. As Lucien writes:
“[Necrophiliacs] have definitely chosen incommunicability, and their loves transcend into the inexpressible. Alone, we are not even the link between life and death. There is no link. For life and death are forever united, inseparable as water mixed with wine.” (18)
One imagines this guy wouldn’t be too much fun at a cocktail party. And yet, Lucien is strangely charming, offering even the occasional gestures of dark humor. When a cleaning lady declares “that [he smells] like a vampire,” Lucien muses: “Always this old and aberrant confusion between two beings so fundamentally opposed as the vampire and the necrophiliac, between the dead that feed off the living and the living who love the dead.” (15) Our dear diarist is clever, to be sure, or at times wryly candid, as when he admits: “I can’t see a pretty woman or a handsome man without immediately wishing he or she were dead.” (26)
Alongside these moments of bleak wit, Lucien is also prone to waxing philosophical about his unique predisposition, and in this area he is a harsh judge—a perverse purist, but a purist nonetheless. On witnessing a stranger having his way with a dead nun, Lucien’s tone is undeniably condescending:
The little fellow was certainly not an inveterate necrophiliac, at most he was maybe among those who figure it’s never too late to start. In truth, I think it was more a case of opportunity making the thief, and he would have just as well appeased his brusque needs on a goat. (44)
Lucien is an elitist, a connoisseur. And he has his morals, too—reminded of Gilles de Rais, the infamous serial killer of children, Lucien writes:
I don’t like Gilles de Rais, a man of a deficient sexuality, eternal little boy who never stopped committing suicide through others. Gilles de Rais disgusts me. There’s only one dirty thing: the suffering one can cause. (64)
These morals are perhaps less honorable given their circumstance (what reminded Lucien of Gilles de Rais in the first place? The dead 6-year old child with whom he was taking a bath). Still, he has a point: the necrophiliac’s suffering, and his ecstasy, are only his own.
Such observations hint at the deeper loneliness at the heart of Wittkop’s book. In a sense, necrophilia is simply the human condition taken to its darkest extreme, a gruesome metaphor for the futility of sex-as-attempt-at-true-connection. As such, Wittkop’s rather facile explanation for Lucien’s fetish—an early masturbatory experience interrupted by news of the death of his mother—is hardly necessary; nor does it jive with the prevailing psychoanalytic theories, which attribute necrophilia to a desire for control and/or fear of rejection. In any case, whatever sympathy the reader comes to feel for Lucien is not the sort that stems from such justifications. No, that sympathy comes in the moments when we are lulled by Lucien’s “fancy prose” into almost forgetting that his affairs are so different from our own. Like any diehard (pun intended) romantic, Lucien too has that One Great Love, the one who got away, described in his diary with Nabokovian reverence:
Suzanne, my beautiful Lily, the joy of my soul and of my flesh, had started to marbleize with violet patches. I multiplied the bags of ice. I had wanted to keep Suzanne forever…As time passed and the dust deposited an ashy veil over everything, my despair over having to leave Suzanne grew…I told myself I should have taken Suzanne abroad…I should have had her embalmed and I would never have to separate myself from her. (37)
Don’t we all suffer under the storm cloud of love’s transience, the torturous ephemerality of desire, the fear of loss? Don’t we all want to put our loves on ice, to preserve them, to make them last forever? Don’t we all hate when the decaying corpse on which we’re lavishing our most intimate attentions suddenly vomits black bile and—
And we’re back, again, in the gritty, visceral logistics that no prose flourish can hide. Clearly, Wittkop has acquainted herself with the finer points of her subject, and she describes the machinations of Lucien’s affairs in great detail. (It goes without saying that squeamish readers need not approach this book.) But as the brevity of The Necrophiliac demonstrates, Wittkop is also capable of restraint—that, or she just ran out of euphemisms for “decaying.”
In truth, brevity is vitally necessary to the success of Wittkop’s book. There are only so many variations on this theme, only so many dead nuns to be violated, and Wittkop seems well aware of the law of diminishing returns, of the need to keep upping the ante—and, finally, to quit while she’s ahead. Lucien himself deems his final affair—a torrid threesome in which he is the only participant with a heartbeat—the apotheosis of the necrophiliac form, and the climax (pun unintended!) comes just in time. Any longer and this book would simply be pornographic, or, worse, boring.
Ultimately, The Necrophiliac is neither. Graphic, yes. But the thrills here are anything but cheap, and the pleasure the reader derives is more cerebral than carnal. To read Lucien’s diary is to examine the darkest corners of human sexuality and morality, to question what it means to be alive in a body that seeks pleasure and connection with other bodies, to confront desperation and loneliness in their most lawless extremes. Wittkop’s unorthodox subject matter is what makes these themes resonant, fresh and utterly devoid of cliché. The Necrophiliac is a fast and mischievously satisfying read. Just don’t read it while eating. - Ali Shapiro



  The Necrophiliac is, indeed, the story of someone who defiles corpses. The narrator of this very slim novel is a die-hard lover of the dead, aroused by almost nothing else, enraptured by the bombyx-like smell of human decay.
       It is, of course, a passion that can only be embraced ever so briefly: for the necrophile, more than any other, "joy never comes without the grief of knowing it is only ephemeral". Nabokov's nymphets may have a few good years in them, but a corpse ... well, there's only so long that can be used as a play-thing -- and it's not so long. Indeed, the narrator's downfall comes when he can't bring himself to let go, finally losing the self-control that has allowed him to get away with indulging in his abominable pleasure for so long, giving in to this passion entirely.
       In this one respect necrophilia is, arguably, passion boiled down to its essence, an ephemeral pleasure that can not be held onto, do what one might. Less convincing is the narrator's other claim, that:
Necrophiliac love: the only sort that is pure. Because even amor intellectualis -- the great white rose -- waits to be paid in return. No counterpart for the necrophiliac in love, the gift he gives of himself awakens no enthusiasm.
       Of course, he's gotten that all wrong (well, except the part about awakening no enthusiasm): necrophilia is not just the opposite of pure, it is also nothing more than self-gratification of the basest sort. There is no other involved in the act, beyond what the perpetrator projects on the object; it is an entirely solitary act.
       Yet these surely are the reasons Wittkop chose such a character and such a premise for her novella: she doesn't want to shock (well, presumably it amuses her to shock, too, but that's just incidental, a pleasant bonus) but rather to show in its icy-clearest form that love, in all its physical manifestations, is entirely fleeting, and that sex remains always an entirely solitary and self-serving act, with only the delusion of connection to the other. The creepiest thing about this very unsettling work is not what the narrator does -- which is quite decorously presented -- but the conviction that is conveyed: the narrator's passion is 'real', even as it involves the unthinkable, and this suggests that all our passions, even the most 'normal' and socially acceptable are similar constructs, and that romantic gush is merely a more respectable excuse for something that is entirely individual and only at its most superficial mutual.
       The narrator of The Necrophiliac is an antiquarian -- "a situation almost ideal for a necrophiliac" -- and the story is presented in the form of brief diary entries. He explains how he goes about his business -- generally digging up fresh graves (this aspect of his story doesn't sound entirely realistic, but one gives him the benefit of the doubt), and then disposing of them in the Seine after he's had his way with them. The narrative doesn't just describe a sequence of ... conquests, but rather presents the whole picture of life-as-a-necrophiliac: what helped set him off as a young boy, various encounters with the living (from the police to the maids who comment on the smell to the occasional possible fellow-necrophiliac). Wittkop gets the worst over with quickly; the gurgling on the second page of his story is about the nastiest thing she throws in the reader's face -- but, admittedly, there's a lot of off-putting stuff in the book, though most of it is artfully presented.
       Certainly, The Necrophiliac is not for the squeamish -- as, for example, in the descriptions of Henri, who died of scarlet fever at age six (yes, the necrophiliac is willing to have a go at anything, regardless of age, sex, or physical condition) and whom he clings to for a bit too long:
His flesh softens from hour to hour; his greening stomach sinks in, rumbling with bad flatulence that bursts into enormous bubbles in the bathwater.
       The narrator also has some standards: far from considering him a confrère, for example, he maintains that the sadistic "Gilles de Rais disgusts me".
       There's a lightness to his tone, too, which works well given the darkness of the subject matter; one can almost hear his sigh as he admits:
     I can't see a pretty woman or a handsome man without immediately wishing he or she were dead.
       The narrator is, of course, a very limited character -- and Wittkop was wise not to let him stretch his tale out at much greater length. Defined solely by his passion, it's his passion that eventually is his undoing -- in the inevitable conclusion to what is, after all, an archetypal romance tale.
       Stylishly written, The Necrophiliac is a disturbing but impressive work, a dark reminder of the true nature of love and passion, suggesting that even those who find the protagonist's actions abhorrent fundamentally differ from him only in the nature of the objects of their affection. - M.A.Orthofer





Eccentric French novelist Gabrielle Wittkop had a pronounced tasted for the sinister, wrote ten books of dubious repute and killed herself in 2002. The antihero of THE NECROPHILIAC is a Goethesque romantic, and his baroque tale is told in bewitching prose...

“To the memory of C.D., who fell into death like Narcissus into his own image”...
This is the dedication on the first page of French writer Gabrielle Wittkop’s novel, THE NECROPHILIAC: The Most Forbidden Love Of All, which has only recently been translated into English by macabre writer and enthusiast Don Bapst. I found the book the day before my birthday, whilst I was casually strolling through the local bookshop. It was on the “novelties bookshelf”: A slender volume with a stylishly intricate cover design, a dark jewel of a book. It was also the only copy on display, almost hidden from view between a couple of gargantuan new apparitions. I knew I wanted it immediately and bought it in the next few seconds under the baffled scrutiny of the shop attendant on duty. It was probably the best birthday present I ever bought myself.
I’d never heard about Gabrielle Wittkop before, but a simple Google search taught me that she was an eccentric French novelist with a pronounced taste for the sinister, who wrote ten books of dubious repute and killed herself in 2002, probably in response to her torturing fight with cancer. THE NECROPHILIAC – according to unreliable internet sources – was the first novel she ever published. The book is written in the form of a journal and it follows the life of Lucien, a young man from Paris who is painfully obsessed with death. His obsession takes the form of necrophilia, a psychiatric condition translated through an erotic fascination with corpses. The prose itself is bewitching, and even though you may be way over the age of eighteen and therefore immune to “parental guidance”-type restrictions, it will still make you feel as though you were trespassing, partaking of something forbidden and dangerously alluring.
Lucien’s point of view is conveyed through well-balanced lyrical prose and the – how else should I term it but “gothic” – passion he expresses for the bodies he unburies is far from ludicrous or nauseating. On the contrary, the whole story has an air of sacred, consuming, pagan kind of erotic rapture as opposed to sacrilegious defilement. Lucien is not simply a desecrator of corpses; he comes across, rather, as a despairing romantic of the kind of Goethe’s Werther, the young man who ends up killing himself as the result of a frustrated love story. THE NECROPHILIAC is, more than anything, a careful study of the melancholy human psyche pushed to the extreme and trying to cope with the – often traumatising – reality of death by transforming it into an intimate expression of love. Of course, in doing so it flies right off the tracks of “normality” and into “the valley of the shadow of death”, to quote the Bible, that is into the realm of the obscure and unsettling. Though short, the book is packed with tension and graphic descriptions that – why shouldn’t I admit it? – don’t fail to deliver the guilty pleasure of observing nameless acts through a peephole.
This novel’s got everything from illicit sex set against a carefully-wrought baroque backdrop to hair-raising confrontations in the graveyard, in the middle of the night. And if you’re set upon reading and enjoying the text to its full extent, take my advice: only read it at sundown, preferably in the company of a bottle of exquisite wine and with neoclassical music playing quietly in the background. Or not – if you’re more darkly-inclined, then you’ll surely appreciate the “bouquet” of Gabrielle Wittkop’s novel regardless of place or beverage. For those of you living in the UK, this dark jewel of a book can also be purchased online on Amazon UK (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Necrophiliac-Gabrielle-Wittkop/dp/1550229435/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1316017146&sr=8-1), so if you’re into extravagantly obscure pleasures, go ahead and buy yourself this beautiful decadent present. - Maria Cohut





Reading translation is an act of trust. We trust that the translated text is true to the original, that the spirit of the original comes through to the reader with the same potency as it would if read in the native tongue. The editorial decisions made by the translator –- regarding idiomatic phrases, sound versus sense, what to do with meter in closed form work, et cetera—are the conundrum that does not change the intrinsic nature of translation, as Charles Bernstein says, as that of being “always a form of collaboration: between two[..] poets and  two[…] languages” (199). In the end, the text must speak, must rise to possess the mind of the reader, must be present.

  Given that print forms have a somewhat beleaguered status in this second decade of our twenty first, common era, century, a book becomes a bit more that a sheaf of bound pages, it becomes an entity, a vessel to contain the spirit of the text, the urn of the genii. How much this vessel’s artifice is appropriate to the spirit within becomes the collaborative relationship—or not—between the author of the text and the publisher. In the case of translation, the physical nature of the original text seems mostly left to the mysteries.

  Enter into hand now a lovely, slender volume with a paper cover hued an understated deep bronze, with titling font sized more appropriately to a wedding invitation than the garish, outsized, bling-glitter that seeks to leap to the eye and that is nauseatingly popular of late. The paper of the pages is a weighty non-glare reminiscent of artist’s drawing surface sheets. There is a sense of true quality in this object: efficient, understated, but not blind to the pleasure of the hand or eye.

  The cover informs us “Translated from the French”, as if plating a dish at a Michelin multi-star restaurant; the chef –- the translator – is the last name on the cover (slightly smaller in font  point than that of the original author—Gabrielle Wittkop-- but in the same all capitol font), acknowledging this work without self-aggrandizement: Don Bapst.

  The book itself does not begin with the usual essay detailing the agonies of invocation: a frontspiece with the required copyright, a two line dedication. It is quite clear that this text is meant to speak for itself. Any effort at introduction is made of the back cover, where we find out that this translation is a shade under ten years posthumous to the original author, and four decades post publication in the original French. There is an allusion to Poe and Baudelaire for the reader with weak critical skills, or to the big-box minded to help them shelve the book along the lines of gothic or horror….

  The reader enters the text thus in perhaps the same way as the diner must descend their fork and is once again awash in a sensory ecstasy: “The grey eyelashes of this little girl cast a grey shadow against her cheek.” Immediately, the doubts about translation versus the authentic song of the original diminish as the potency of the imagery, the sensitivity of subtle and sonorous repetitions of vowels possess the reader into experiencing the text, into submitting to the elegance of the imagery.

  It is the elegance of the language, the very literary merit of  Wittkop’s novella that validates the what-must-be labyrinthine task of translation, and which posits a primary irony that will have more puritanical—and thus most American—readers reaching with shrieks for their white sheets: the transgressive nature of the character’s doings. No such sense of trauma was apparently felt by the Canadian publisher, which clearly sees the work as one of literary art, and this holds American hypocrisy up for scrutiny. America has a history of public prudery, yet mobs will throng for spectacles of degeneracy: sexual malfeasance, infanticide, and whatever heinous crimes individuals can muster their impoverished imaginations to commit, all whilst a multi-million dollar media bread-and-circuses distracts the immobilized citizenry from crimes against the planet. Against this Gomorrah-as-usual expectation, the journal entry format of the novella’s plot seems almost a whisper.

  Oh how potent the lover’s whisper—private, resonant. When the protagonist names himself, it is with self-reflective irony: “ I had lost the notion of time, measuring my wait not by my watch but by the light. The light…My enemy…Why had I been named Lucien, me the lucifuge?”(54). The text continues with a characterization of a dead man as vivid as Garcia-Marquez’ drowned nobody:
A beautiful man…Heavens! He measured barely less than two metres and was well in proportion. They probably tried to save him at the hospital, for a thick bandage, marked in its centre with a watery stain, squeezed his monumental torso where the dense brown hair curled. Never had I seen a dead man so calm, with his somewhat Roman profile, his sweet white skin like that flour he kneaded over the years into bread for the living”(54-55).

  Lest the reader still doubt the literary validity of the text—for although the protagonist does engage in meditative transgression as do many of Poe’s characters, literature has absorbed with amnesia toward the origin of this now trope—Wittkop gives a nod to Baudelaire when one brief episode reveals:
  Jerome  given back to the night. Jerome given back to the abyss, what currents are you sinking in, drunken boat?

And me, soon. I will fall into death like Narcissus into his own image(61).

  This last allusion was chosen by translator Bapst as the dedication; thus, even the dimmest reader understand that this is a text of passion, meditated—in translation microscopically scrutinized—distilled, born forth as literature.

  Lest it be forgotten, literature transforms the reader into more of themselves; it is more than mere escape of prosaic drudgery, it allows for a sentience beyond the skin of the individual. The rigors of writing seek to conjure this spirit, that the work has a life of its own; the intricacies of translation seek to summon this spirit intact and true to itself. The character is always a symbol for some manifestation, perhaps bidden hidden to the daily eye; nonetheless, Wittkop’s Lucien experiences transformation through his transgressions:
 Nervous, edgy, extremely emotive in daily life, I have a tremendous reserve of calmness and aptness as soon as it’s a question of carrying off a dead body. I become another person. I’m suddenly a stranger to myself, all the while being more myself than ever. I stop being vulnerable. I stop being unhappy. I reach a sort of quintessence of myself[…](81).

  This confession of transformation is the novella’s climactic perception, and a wise reader will search self-knowledge for their own moments of self-quintessence. Indeed, American rewards its sports stars quite obscenely for their public displays of this very loss of self into a creature of superb motion.

  At a time in America’s cultural climate when the very validity of love is publicly debated as potentially transgressive, Lucien becomes an elegant symbol—for his is a journey of passion, albeit forbidden in expression. While the idiot literalist will balk at who and how the character loves, only the puriently prejudiced will deny the literary lyricism of the text itself. In our times of censorship and tokenism, it would well bespeak any critical mind to reflect on the chaos of our own literary history: from the journals of slaveship survivors to the brief light of multi-culturalism accepted by textbooks at the end of the twentieth century, the face of American literary wisdom looks more like a mutual masturbation of a secret society endlessly discoursing on the ennui of a certain caste, or in avid voyeurism for the country club party to which they will never be invited. This text exists in a purity that is as refreshing as it is uncompromisingly elegant. A rare and valuable read for any mind not weakened with the drugs of dross. - SuZi

Reading translation is an act of trust. We trust that the translated text is true to the original, that the spirit of the original comes through to the reader with the same potency as it would if read in the native tongue. The editorial decisions made by the translator –- regarding idiomatic phrases, sound versus sense, what to do with meter in closed form work, et cetera—are the conundrum that does not change the intrinsic nature of translation, as Charles Bernstein says, as that of being “always a form of collaboration: between two[..] poets and  two[…] languages” (199). In the end, the text must speak, must rise to possess the mind of the reader, must be present.

  Given that print forms have a somewhat beleaguered status in this second decade of our twenty first, common era, century, a book becomes a bit more that a sheaf of bound pages, it becomes an entity, a vessel to contain the spirit of the text, the urn of the genii. How much this vessel’s artifice is appropriate to the spirit within becomes the collaborative relationship—or not—between the author of the text and the publisher. In the case of translation, the physical nature of the original text seems mostly left to the mysteries.

  Enter into hand now a lovely, slender volume with a paper cover hued an understated deep bronze, with titling font sized more appropriately to a wedding invitation than the garish, outsized, bling-glitter that seeks to leap to the eye and that is nauseatingly popular of late. The paper of the pages is a weighty non-glare reminiscent of artist’s drawing surface sheets. There is a sense of true quality in this object: efficient, understated, but not blind to the pleasure of the hand or eye.

  The cover informs us “Translated from the French”, as if plating a dish at a Michelin multi-star restaurant; the chef –- the translator – is the last name on the cover (slightly smaller in font  point than that of the original author—Gabrielle Wittkop-- but in the same all capitol font), acknowledging this work without self-aggrandizement: Don Bapst.

  The book itself does not begin with the usual essay detailing the agonies of invocation: a frontspiece with the required copyright, a two line dedication. It is quite clear that this text is meant to speak for itself. Any effort at introduction is made of the back cover, where we find out that this translation is a shade under ten years posthumous to the original author, and four decades post publication in the original French. There is an allusion to Poe and Baudelaire for the reader with weak critical skills, or to the big-box minded to help them shelve the book along the lines of gothic or horror….

  The reader enters the text thus in perhaps the same way as the diner must descend their fork and is once again awash in a sensory ecstasy: “The grey eyelashes of this little girl cast a grey shadow against her cheek.” Immediately, the doubts about translation versus the authentic song of the original diminish as the potency of the imagery, the sensitivity of subtle and sonorous repetitions of vowels possess the reader into experiencing the text, into submitting to the elegance of the imagery.

  It is the elegance of the language, the very literary merit of  Wittkop’s novella that validates the what-must-be labyrinthine task of translation, and which posits a primary irony that will have more puritanical—and thus most American—readers reaching with shrieks for their white sheets: the transgressive nature of the character’s doings. No such sense of trauma was apparently felt by the Canadian publisher, which clearly sees the work as one of literary art, and this holds American hypocrisy up for scrutiny. America has a history of public prudery, yet mobs will throng for spectacles of degeneracy: sexual malfeasance, infanticide, and whatever heinous crimes individuals can muster their impoverished imaginations to commit, all whilst a multi-million dollar media bread-and-circuses distracts the immobilized citizenry from crimes against the planet. Against this Gomorrah-as-usual expectation, the journal entry format of the novella’s plot seems almost a whisper.

  Oh how potent the lover’s whisper—private, resonant. When the protagonist names himself, it is with self-reflective irony: “ I had lost the notion of time, measuring my wait not by my watch but by the light. The light…My enemy…Why had I been named Lucien, me the lucifuge?”(54). The text continues with a characterization of a dead man as vivid as Garcia-Marquez’ drowned nobody :
A beautiful man…Heavens! He measured barely less than two metres and was well in proportion. They probably tried to save him at the hospital, for a thick bandage, marked in its centre with a watery stain, squeezed his monumental torso where the dense brown hair curled. Never had I seen a dead man so calm, with his somewhat Roman profile, his sweet white skin like that flour he kneaded over the years into bread for the living”(54-55).

  Lest the reader still doubt the literary validity of the text—for although the protagonist does engage in meditative transgression as do many of Poe’s characters, literature has absorbed with amnesia toward the origin of this now trope—Wittkop gives a nod to Baudelaire when one brief episode reveals:
  Jerome  given back to the night. Jerome given back to the abyss, what currents are you sinking in, drunken boat?

And me, soon. I will fall into death like Narcissus into his own image(61).

  This last allusion was chosen by translator Bapst as the dedication; thus, even the dimmest reader understand that this is a text of passion, meditated—in translation microscopically scrutinized—distilled, born forth as literature.

  Lest it be forgotten, literature transforms the reader into more of themselves; it is more than mere escape of prosaic drudgery, it allows for a sentience beyond the skin of the individual. The rigors of writing seek to conjure this spirit, that the work has a life of its own; the intricacies of translation seek to summon this spirit intact and true to itself. The character is always a symbol for some manifestation, perhaps bidden hidden to the daily eye; nonetheless, Wittkop’s Lucien experiences transformation through his transgressions:
  Nervous, edgy, extremely emotive in daily life, I have a tremendous reserve of calmness and aptness as soon as it’s a question of carrying off a dead body. I become another person. I’m suddenly a stranger to myself, all the while being more myself than ever. I stop being vulnerable. I stop being unhappy. I reach a sort of quintessence of myself[…](81).

  This confession of transformation is the novella’s climactic perception, and a wise reader will search self-knowledge for their own moments of self-quintessence. Indeed, American rewards its sports stars quite obscenely for their public displays of this very loss of self into a creature of superb motion.

  At a time in America’s cultural climate when the very validity of love is publicly debated as potentially transgressive, Lucien becomes an elegant symbol—for his is a journey of passion, albeit forbidden in expression. While the idiot literalist will balk at who and how the character loves, only the puriently prejudiced will deny the literary lyricism of the text itself. In our times of censorship and tokenism, it would well bespeak any critical mind to reflect on the chaos of our own literary history: from the journals of slaveship survivors to the brief light of multi-culturalism accepted by textbooks at the end of the twentieth century, the face of American literary wisdom looks more like a mutual masturbation of a secret society endlessly discoursing on the ennui of a certain caste, or in avid voyeurism for the country club party to which they will never be invited. This text exists in a purity that is as refreshing as it is uncompromisingly elegant. A rare and valuable read for any mind not weakened with the drugs of dross. - Bylines

In a country with very few morals and fewer clothes, Gabrielle Wittkop was a pioneer before the taboo became the norm. With movies like The Human Centipede making its debut into modern culture, it’s hard to believe that The Necrophiliac was written in 1972 but never appeared in English until 2005.


Lash Of A Whip
Gabrielle Wittkop was born in Nantes, May 27, 1920, and died December 22, 2002, in Frankfurt, Germany. She married Justus Wittkop, a homosexual 20 years her senior and they lived a life referred by her as an "intellectual alliance". Both she and her husband committed suicide, living out her words that stated, "I wanted to die as I lived: a free man."
Her work can be compared to that of Marquis De Sade, Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe, for their macabre tendencies and infinite sacrosanct scenarios, but her poetic flow had a mind of its own.
In The Necrophiliac, Lucien is an eccentric antiques shop owner who has a taste for the clinically dead. His lust goes far beyond a mouthful. He describes in vivid and lurid detail his encounters with various corpses.
His tastes don’t stop at gender; he’ll take it all with a sly smile; men, women, young, old, brother and sister. His techniques are guided by his nocturnal tendencies and his slip-ups begin to widen as the 91 page horror story emerges.
Possible Retreat
To what he referred to as his “Ivry Virgin”, death brought with it an exquisite prize when this particular corpse “dilated itself like a fishbowl to the point that I thought I had lost myself in some sort of abyss, other times it seized me subtly, held me, fed off me with a gluttonous lapping”. Wittkop made the surreal imaginable and the forbidden permissible; at least in the few pages that make up The Necrophiliac.
Calmness And Aptness
The creation of such a horrific yet romantic perspective on death and sex can be difficult to imagine. Both subjects are glorified in music, art and literature but never in such a light. Readers are asked to take a voyage into familiar yet uncultivated terrains, forcing us to live and enjoy and perhaps remember that our own mortality is very forlorn.
Death comes but so does life. Gabrielle Wittkop lived both in her flesh and in her writing, leaving behind her a story that asks questions most of us will never answer. - Ingrid Calderon

Gabrielle Wittkop, Murder Most Serene, Trans. by Louise Rogers Lalaurie, Wakefield Press, 2015.

In the last days of the Venetian Republic, the successive wives of Count Alvise Lanzi suffer mysterious, agonizing deaths. Murder Most Serene offers a cruel portrait of a beautiful, corrupt city-state and its equally extravagant, cruel, and corrupt inhabitants; redolent of darkness, death, corruption, poison, and transgression, it is also an over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek Venetian romp. Rich in historical detail and bursting with bejeweled putrescence, Gabrielle Wittkop’s chilling memento mori eschews the murder mystery in which it is garbed for a scintillating depiction of physical, moral, societal, and institutional corruption, in which the author plays the role of puppeteer—“present, masked as convention dictates, while in a Venice on the brink of downfall, women gorged with venom burst like wineskins.”


Murder Most Serene is a portrait of late eighteenth-century Venice, the action presented: "in two tempos, passing from 1766 to 1797, as I see fit", following the great city's decline, all the way to its fall to Napoleon. The author sets the stage -- and tension -- from the beginning (and soon enough: "the narrative runs on under its own momentum, like a bobbin of thread unraveling down a slope"):
There is a progression, nonetheless, in the crescendo to catastrophe, the gradual fraying of the rope predestined to break.
       In the years leading up to Venice's fall catastrophe has already been in the air, punctuated by signs -- real and imagined -- that would seem to portend ever-greater horrors, from warnings of an earthquake that will be greater than that of Lisbon -- a joke of Casanova's that the locals take seriously -- to the more tangible, such as the births of severely deformed children ("Never have so many monsters been brought forth"); "We might almost be in ancient Rome", someone observes.
       This Venice is beautful, but decadently so. Brutal, too: "People kill a great deal in this city" -- and violent, ugly deaths are also at the heart of this novel, as the narrative returns again and again to Alvise Lanzi and the successive horrible deaths of his four wives.
       Alvise -- "more unfathomable even than some of the characters in these English novels which are so greatly in fashion nowadays" -- is neither a Bluebeard not a tragic figure, and Murder Most Serene does not in any way follow the demands or expectations of genre-fiction: this isn't a murder-mystery. Indeed, the author eventually sums up: "there is no motive nor opportunity that may be applied equally to these various deaths" -- and in a book whose epigraph comes from the divine Marquis Wittkop turns to her master in reminding readers:
And was it not Sade who told us that an effect may not necessarily require a cause?
       So: no whodunnit tension or thrills here. That's not the point, or method, of Wittkop's fiction. Yet if lacking cause and effect -- or, rather, a connection between the two -- her narrative still has an undeniable power -- at times almost deafening, as when she writes and comes to: "Crescendo. Crescendo. Crescendo."
       Yes, Wittkop has a style quite all her own. So also, as she reminds us:
Even when it seems nothing is happening, we should not conclude that nothing happens.
       Wittkop lingers over and draws out each horrible death, and among the most dreadful-powerful scenes is one of an autopsy (concluding coldly, simply: "Again, the doctors are thoroughly disconcerted"). Few authors can bring death -- the state of death -- to life as Wittkop can. That these scenes are unsettling is hardly surprising, but Wittkop manages to be thoroughly unsettling throughout, even in scenes that could otherwise pass for placid.
       Wittkop compares herself and her role as writer to that of the bunraku master in the shadows, manipulating her characters like those puppets. Like bunraku, her fiction is stylized -- and certainly theatrical. With its short, varied scenes here -- ranging from letter-excerpts to descriptions, shifting in time, place, and perspective -- Murder Most Serene is a compact yet surprisingly rich portrait of a time of decline and decadence, and of the human condition.
       Several times there are descriptions of how suffocating a house or room is -- "One cannot breathe in this house. The house is suffocation itself" -- and it is only books that are, or might offer a breath of air. Indeed, for Alvise: "his passion for books is his anchor and salvation". Wittkop, too, turns to the literary as anchor and salvation -- but the hold she offers is anything but reassuring or, in the traditional sense, secure; instead, she embraces and accepts death itself, and treats it on equal terms.
       This is dark, rich, deeply disturbing writing, conscious of its artifice and expertly manipulating that. - M.A.Orthofer


Sérènissime Assassinat (‘Murder Most Serene’) is a fabulous Venetian poisonfest by the strange, dark and wonderful Gabrielle Wittkop, set at the decline and fall of the Serene Republic, where the grisly deaths suffered by the serial wives of Count Alvise Lanzi provoke gossip and speculation among the denizens of the Libro d’Oro, the city’s celebrated Golden Book, its pages inscribed with the names of Venice’s oldest and grandest families.

Venice is a fitting backdrop for a work of translation: the city owes some of its splendour to an act of translation in the other (true? literal?) sense – the bringing across of the remains of the evangelist and Christian martyr Mark from Alexandria, making it an important place of pilgrimage.  And Wittkop is the perfect writer to celebrate Venice’s characteristic mix of beauty and decay, its stunning assertion of civilisation and art (all that gold and marble, colour and architecture, all those glittering mosaics) in a featureless wash of sea and sky, its embodiment of human ingenuity and rottenness alike, its determination to celebrate life amid the persistent whiff of death. Like her cinematic kindred spirit Peter Greenaway, Gabrielle Wittkop’s work is full of all these things. Unafraid of death, she put an end to her own life in 2002, at the age of 82, after being diagnosed with lung cancer, choosing to skip the unenticing final episode of a long, richly eventful, sexually adventurous existence, and to die as she had lived – in her own words – ‘a free man.’
Wittkop loved Venice, the mermaid city, wedded to the sea. Like her writing, Venice is outlandish, beautiful, and a rich source prurient fascination (all those smells, all that fluorescent seaweed slopping at the foot of marble palace walls). And so to the pages of Vanity Fair (the March 2014 issue; I have it with me on the train). Lili Anolik’s brilliant piece All About Eve has this to say about L.A. party girl and boho intellectual Eve Babitz, scarred by horrific burns following a motor accident:
‘…she tells me what her skin looks like (“I’m a mermaid now, half my body.”) That last remark is the one that knocks me out the most. I love it not simply because it shows how tough she is, how un-whining, but because of its sneaky eroticism. She’s comparing her burned epidermis – a painful and grisly condition, a disfigurement – to the scales of a mermaid, the femme fatale of the sea. As an image it’s grotesque and romantic at once. Not just sexy, perversely sexy. Not just perversely sexy, triumphantly perversely sexy.’
This is pure Wittkop. A couple of years ago, leading a discussion of her writing with MA students at the University of London Institute in Paris, I found many who shared my enthusiasm, but others unable to suspend their moral abhorrence: one passage, from Gabrielle’s memoir Chaque jour est un arbre qui tombe, describes the fascinating beauty of a leper’s skin, and the same man’s piercingly human, ‘salacious’ eye, jewel-bright in its exotic setting.  Wittkop’s novel The Necrophiliac (translated by Don Bapst; ECW Press 2011) was hailed by Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian as a masterpiece, but perhaps not one you’d care to be seen reading on your morning commute. Triumphantly, perversely sexy.… - Louise Rogers Lalaurie

Gabrielle Wittkop, EXEMPLARY DEPARTURES, Trans. by Annette David, Wakefield Press, 2015.

Exemplary Departures consists of five exquisitely wrought novellas depicting five “exemplary” deaths in various exotic locations around the globe: a gentleman spy disappears with his secrets into the Malaysian jungle; a young woman agonizes atop a ruined castle overlooking the Rhine; a writer succumbs to alcoholism in the streets of Baltimore; a salesman expires as a vagabond in the sewers of New York; and hermaphroditic twins are assassinated in a stagecoach. Drawing from the remnants of real-life anecdotes—from Edgar Allan Poe’s final days to the agonizing tale of Idilia Dubb—these stories are imagined descents into the death’s supreme indifference. A true modern inheritor of the legacy of the French Decadent writers, Wittkop spins these tales with her trademark macabre elegance and chilling humor, maneuvering in an uncertain space between dark Romanticism, Gothic Expressionism, and Sadistic cruelty. “Death is life’s most important moment” Wittkop had claimed; Exemplary Departures offers five particularly important moments for the English reader’s dubious delectation.

On her 81st birthday, the eccentric and sulphurous novelist and essayist Gabrielle Wittkop wrote a farewell letter to Bernard Wallet, publisher of the small but very choice Editions Verticales in Paris, telling him she had lung cancer and intended one day to put an end to her life. "I intend to die as I lived, as a free man." She went on: "I am a free man, and there are very few of them today. Free men are not career men."
Her birthplace, Nantes, has been the abode of a strange assortment of artists and writers, among them the venerable genius Julien Gracq. Gabrielle Ménardeau's father possessed a large and liberal library where his daughter was allowed free range. She taught herself to read by the age of four. At six, she was reading the French classics: "As soon as I learnt to read, I got the feeling, unforgettable, of absolute power." Naturally, she started to write, and her liberal father paid her five francs for her first manuscript, when she was eight. By the age of 20, she had read everything, with a special predilection for the 18th century. By then, France was at war, and she did not publish anything for many years.
During the Occupation, she met in Paris a German deserter, Justus Wittkop, whom she hid from the Nazis. He was a homosexual, some 40 years older than Gabrielle, but they married, and with the peace in 1946 moved to Germany, where she wrote her first book, in German, E.T.A. Hoffmann in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten ("E.T.A. Hoffmann: self-revelations and picture documentations"), in 1966. She wrote articles for magazine and newspapers including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in whose pages I first became entranced by her stimulating sarcasms and curiously learned deflations of international literary self-satisfactions. She also employed her scientific and medical knowledge, and her familiarity with the benefits and bugbears of all kings of drugs, when working for Hoffmann-La Roche laboratories.
From her bisexual adolescence onwards, Gabrielle revelled in sexual excess, and developed a healthy dislike of humankind. She learned the rapture of loneliness, and was totally opposed to any kind of "social consciousness" .
She was one of those blessed originals who never had to go to school: "My father declared that school was a place where children were forced into unnatural conformity by the imbeciles whose natural habitat is the classroom." He did not encourage his daughter to be "sociable" and she confessed: "I detest nothing so much as little children; even when I was a child I couldn't stand their company."
These free-thinking attitudes to life were also extended by her to the wry contemplation of death, disease and decrepitude. So it was the subject of her first novel, Le Nécrophile ("The Necrophiliac"), published in 1972 by the equally anti-moralistic, anti-political, pro-sexual-liberty pioneer of modern erotic editions, Régine Desforges. In later life, Wittkop remarked of her: "Ah, yes, that Régine! I don't like her, and she doesn't like me. But she's afraid of nothing!" An insight that could certainly be applied to Wittkop herself.
In German, she published in 1985 Unsere Kleidung ("Our Clothes"), a refreshingly fetishist history of European fashions which was never translated. She wrote with an often scabrous wit about her multifarious roamings around the world, and in 1986 published Les Rajahs blancs ("The White Rajas"), in which her favourite beast, the tigress, makes an appearance among the international hoi polloi of Sarawak. Another travel book, Les Départs exemplaires, appeared in 1995.
One of her best novels, La Mort de C., had been published in 1975, the story of the death of an English homosexual tourist, Christopher, in the brothels of Bombay, a city that fascinated Wittkop. Another great city that she came to know well through paintings and literature and many visits was Venice, and her book about the 18th century's macabre follies around its lagoons is Sérénissime assassinat, a glorious evocation of rapturously immoral sexual deviations and inventive poisonings, published in 2001.
Hemlock (1988) describes with strangely moving detachment the voluntary death of her lifetime companion, the homosexual deserter she married to protect him from the Occupation troops in Paris. They were both sexually ambivalent, and Gabrielle writes: "It was a marriage of friendship and affection. My motto is: don't get on other people's tripe!" At the end of his life, Justus Wittkop developed Parkinson's disease, and she treated sympathetically his decision to end his own life in a dignified manner:

He talked to me about it, and I told him: "Yes, you should do it!" I had to leave home next day on business, and I knew what I would find when I returned home in the evening. He didn't want a life in a wheelchair. His dear friend Ulrich was with him, and told me: "His hand did not shake when he drank the poison . . . I hope I can do the same one day."

It was a sentiment Gabrielle Wittkop preserved in her own unobtrusive manner of leaving this life, with her true feelings for the resolution of her lifelong necrophiliac passions. - James Kirkup


Self-styled heir to the Marquis de Sade, Gabrielle Wittkop (1920–2002) was a French author of a remarkable series of novels and travelogues, all laced with sardonic humor and dark sexuality, with recurrent themes of death, decay, disease, and decrepitude. After meeting Justus Wittkop, a German deserter, in Paris under the Occupation, she hid him from the Nazis and then married him after the war, in what she described as an “intellectual alliance.” He would commit suicide in 1986, with her approval, after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Her first novel, The Necrophiliac, appeared in 1972, but a number of her books have only been made available since her own suicide in 2002, after she was diagnosed with lung cancer.