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First Edition: Corrado Costa, La sadisfazione letteraria, Cooperativa Scrittori, Roma, 1976 2013 Edition: Benway Series, 1 Translation: Paul Vangelisti Book Design: Michele Zaffarano Art Editor: Mariangela Guatteri © Biblioteca Panizzi – Reggio Emilia © 2013 by Paul Vangelisti (for the translation) ISBN 978-88-98222-04-9 Digital printing: Tipografia La Colornese Sas Publishing: Tipografia La Colornese – Tielleci editrice via San Rocco, 98 Colorno (PR) Special thanks to Amedea Donelli and the Panizzi Library (Reggio Emilia) for the precious help, and for allowing this publication.
Corrado Costa
LITERARY SADISFACTION
An Instructional Manual for Writers Translation by
Paul Vangelisti
Benway Series
LITERARY SADISFACTION
An Instructional Manual for Writers
Our tongue’s poverty has forced us to employ terms which today good literary government disapproves of. We hope that our illustrious readers understand and do not confuse absurd political despotism with the most wanton despotism of libertine passion. C. C.
“The most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution of discourse, well then…”
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaah! (ah) — cries M.me de Saint-Ange, seeing me enter her delightful boudoir – Aaaaaaaaaaah! Ah! at last!… Look, I’m entirely naked. Make your dissertations upon me as you please!” “M.me de Sans-Ange — I say, beginning to take slowly off my clothes, stumbling into one of my most awkward lapses. — Now your nudity is wanting a subject to declare it. Let us remain for the entire duration of this tale, which, like all tales, has the merit of already having been told, completely naked and abandoned. Your body will remain so clearly exposed in its not being described!… to no one!… no one!… your most beautiful body! Even the ostentatiousness of your nudity will remain but a pseudo-nudity, as if, without captions or titles, you were lying abed in the middle of a center-fold or perching on hands and knees in a Catholic porno film, without a soundtrack.” “Then what has become of the subject? What? What have they done with the subject that underlines your disappearance? — M.me de Saint-Ange anxiously demands, inadvertently covering her ass with her gauze negligee — that fundamental element! On le nomme membre par excellence! There’s not a single part of the discourse into which it cannot intrude!… Always obedient to the passions of the person wielding it, sometimes it nests there, in the beginning or the end, in the mouth or in the buttocks of the discourse, between the breasts, in the armpits, whatever be the place among these most preferred, in front or behind. Excited, it becomes excited, writing emerges and the word plunges into so in9
tense a delirium, as to procure the sweetest pleasures for him who heeds it. So then? Then? Have we come to the absence of the subject so as to achieve instead the absence of the tale’s production? “M.me Saint-Ange — I exclaim — there’s no production of the tale, only its reproduction and that’s all.” “There must, instead, only be narration, and that’s all! — sighs our famous speaker — so enough of reproduction!… Ah, my dear friend, let us touch lightly… let us touch upon what pertains to the dull business of reproduction, in order to address ourselves principally, nay, uniquely, to those libertine pleasures whose spirit is in no wise reproductive.” First Tale “M.me de Saint-Ange, I would like to tell you — so I begin my story to occupy M.me de Saint-Ange, lying on the sofa in a state of abandon, her bosom strikingly disheveled — that during the past gloomy summer, fleeing the torrid city of Avignon with, in fact, Mme. de Saint-Ange, we made our way to a hotel called Les Visions du Château des Pyrénées, under the sign of the virtuous sodomite. At the little hotel, in the late night hours, M.me de Saint-Ange summoned the innkeeper and his servants, beseeching them kindly to bring a large mirror to our room, the largest to be found in the hotel. They carried in a giant crystal mirror, of about sixteen square meters, which rested on bronze feet in the shape of a griffon’s, with sharp and feathered talons. A dragon, in fact, held up the mirror, angled forward in the correct position. The servants rekindled the flames in the two fireplaces and in their blazing light they left us nude and abandoned, well-placed in front of that mirror, which had certainly served multinational couples, as well as high-end consumers. 10
“The right hand” — I replied.
She cried: “Ah! mon ami, me voilà donc foutue des deux côtés!…”
Just as she was, completely naked, turned toward the mirror and showing me her back, M.me de Saint-Ange bowed her head, her eyes always on the mirror, hands lowered around her neck. She went to her knees lifting her left leg, already bent upward, almost resting it level with her breasts, while holding the other leg crouched on her heel. Then, right leg lifted, she slowly folded it, resting it on her right calf, and with her eyes still fixed on the mirror, she placed her hands some distance apart. She positioned her legs until her ankles rested squarely on my shoulders and she squatted on her flanks, passing her left arm under her neck, lifting one foot, then the other, putting on the couch one hand then the other, piecemeal, on all fours. With the fingers of her left hand somewhat splayed, she sat next to me, next to my legs, which I had comfortably stretched out along the couch, where I was most comfortably seated. So we found ourselves seated next to each other in front of this very large mirror. Then M.me de Saint-Ange stretched her right leg toward me (upon which I mischievously kept my hand, near the knee), and said to me: “Which hand resting on my leg?” “The left hand,” I replied. “Now look in the mirror — she resumed — and tell me which hand rests your image upon my leg.” “The right hand — I replied — though in recompense your image stretches out its left leg.” End of the First Tale At this point I break off the story, staring at M.me de SaintAnge who kisses my hands and cries: “Ah! mon ami, me voilà donc foutue des deux côtés!… Ah! Ah! foutre! Foutre! Double nom d’un dieu, dont je me fous…Sacré bougre de dieu! Ahe!… Ahe!… Ahe!… quel incroyable excés de volupté!..” and I ask her: 13
“Tell me how your philosophy explains this species of Carrollian misdemeanor?” “We must start from one fundamental point — she says — in literature, nothing is frightful. The most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution of discourse, well then, even those are not frightful, and there’s not one amongst them that cannot be demonstrated within the boundaries of literature! Oh! how dullwitted they are, these imbeciles who think of nothing but reproduction, detecting nothing but crime in anything that conduces to a different end! I say, is it so firmly established that literature has such a great need for reproduction, as they would like to have us believe? Is it so very certain that one is guilty of an outrage whenever one abstains from this stupid notion of reproduction? M.me de Saint-Sangue raises the index finger of her right hand toward the mirror and her image immediately raises the index finger of her left hand toward her. “To convince ourselves, let us for an instant scrutinize both her operations and her laws. Were it that nature did naught but create, and never destroy, I might be able to believe, with those tedious philosophers, that the most sublime of all actions would be to labor incessantly at reproduction, and following that, I should grant along with them, that the refusal to reproduce would perforce be considered a crime. However, does not the most fleeting glance at literary operations reveal that destruction is just as necessary to its plans as creation? That one and the other of these functions are interconnected and enmeshed so intimately that for either to operate without the other would be impossible? That nothing would be born, nothing would be regenerated without destruction? Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of literature’s mandates.”
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