Blood, Shit, and Sex

While he is best known in his native France as an artist, and perhaps for his turn as Renfield in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu (1979), Roland Topor’s written works are still generally unacknowledged. In the scant body of critical writing surrounding his books, they are classed as “post-surrealist horror” that demonstrate “the same half-sane magnifications that strike home in Kafka.” And yet to read his novels, short stories, and plays is to enter a world far from the sleek poeticisms of Breton’s Nadja (1928) or indeed the safety of a barricaded room in which Gregor Samsa hides his transformation in The Metamorphosis (1915). Topor’s writing, much like his illustrations, plunges the reader again and again into predicaments in which grotesque metamorphoses are encountered already in advanced states of development and resultant crisis. In this way, the narratives lead us in a sense to the ground where Breton and Kafka leave off.

Unlike these earlier works, Topor’s evocations of dysfunctional social interactions are not a narrative end in themselves, nor can the individual in transformation hide away from social relations, or escape their fate in death, but must continue. In pushing these tropes beyond their established limits, Topor generates a world in which the great unsaid realities of human life are painfully laid bare,” (“blood, shit, and sex”). While few of his texts have been made available in English, they are nevertheless representative of his wider body of work, in which the reader constantly trips over these same themes as if stumbling upon a naked corpse in a darkened room. They predicate an oeuvre of carnivalesque and necrophilic eroticism, and draw out the pungent, animalistic core hidden within the norms of our everyday existence. Topor’s narratives are shot through with macabre irony, orgiastic scatology, and physical and psychological cruelty, which constitutes a fundamental reframing of the characteristics of human interaction with others. According to Alexandre Devaux, Topor “deploys the arguments of an authentic reflection on the human condition. But it’s a reflection where thought travels through mirrors that are both deformed and deforming. Where reason is mutated and put through absurd metamorphoses, exasperating it to the point of insanity.” Within the texts, the reader’s self-reflection is warped via a grotesque sublimation of Stendhal’s conception of literary mimesis, and Devaux’s description is indeed reminiscent of a celebrated Stendhalian image: