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 - Guilty of contributing Jazz and Rock 'n' Roll articles for Muzikreviews.com , Examiner.com.
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