A Perfect Vacuum (6 page)

Hostile reviewers say that Hannahan has produced the largest logogriph in literature, a semantic monster rebus, a truly infernal charade or crossword puzzle. They say that the cramming of those million or billion allusions into a work of belles-lettres, that the flaunting play with etymological, phraseological, and hermeneutic complications, that the piling up of layers of never-ending, perversely antinomial meanings, is not literary creativity, but the composing of brain teasers for peculiarly paranoiac hobbyists, for enthusiasts and collectors fanatically given to bibliographical digging. That this is, in a word, utter perversion, the pathology of a culture and not its healthy development.

Excuse me, gentlemen—but where exactly is one to draw the line between the multiplicity of meaning that marks the integration of a genius, and the sort of enriching of a work with meanings that represents the pure schizophrenia of a culture? I suspect that the anti-Hannahan group of literary experts fears being put out of work. For Joyce provided brilliant charades but did not tack onto them any explanation of his own; consequently the critic who contributes commentary to
Ulysses
and
Finnegan
is able to display his intellectual biceps, his far-reaching perspicacity, or his imitative genius. Hannahan, on the other hand, did everything
himself
. Not content merely to create the work, he added reference materials, an
apparatus criticus
twice its size. In this lies the crucial difference, and not in such circumstances as, for example, the fact that Joyce “thought up everything on his own,” whereas Hannahan relied on computers hooked up to the Library of Congress (twenty-three million volumes). So, I see no way out of the trap into which we have been driven by the murderously meticulous Irishman: either
Gigamesh
is the crowning achievement of modern literature, or else neither it nor the tale of Finnegan together with the Joycean Odyssey can be granted admission to literary Olympus.

(Walker & Company, New York)

 

If one is to believe the author—and more and more they tell us to believe the authors of science fiction!—the current surge of sex will become a deluge in the 1980's. But the action of the novel
Sexplosion
begins twenty years later, in a New York buried in snowdrifts during a severe winter. An old man of unknown name, wading through the drifts, bumping into the hulks of snow-covered cars, reaches a lifeless office building; he pulls a key from his breast pocket, warm with the last of his body heat, opens the iron gate, and goes down to the basement. His roaming there and the snatches of memory that intrude upon it—this is the whole novel.

The silent vaults of the basement, through which wanders the beam of the flashlight unsteady in the old man's hand, may have been a museum once, or the shipping division of a powerful concern in the years when America once again carried out the successful invasion of Europe. The still half-handmade trade of the Europeans had clashed with the implacable march of conveyor-belt production, and the scientific-technological-postindustrial colossus instantly emerged the victor.

On the field of battle remained three corporations—General Sexotics, Cybordelics, and Intercourse International. When the production of these giants was at its peak, sex, from a private amusement, a spectator sport, group gymnastics, a hobby, and a collector's market, turned into a philosophy of civilization. McLuhan, who as a hale and hearty old codger had lived to see these times, argued in his
Genitocracy
that this precisely was the destiny of mankind from the moment it entered on the path of technology; that even the ancient rowers, chained to the galleys, and the woodsmen of the North with their saws, and the steam engine of Stephenson with its cylinder and piston, all traced the rhythm, the shape, and the meaning of the movements of which the sex of man—that is to say, the sense of man—consists. The impersonal industry of the U.S.A., having appropriated the situational wisdoms of East and West, took the fetters of the Middle Ages and made of them unchastity belts, harnessed Art to the designing of sexercisers, incubunks, copul cots, push-button clitters, porn cones, and phallo-phones, set in motion antiseptic assembly lines off of which began to roll sadomobiles, succubuses, sodomy sofas for the home, and public gomorrarcades, and at the same time it established research institutes and science foundations to take up the fight to liberate sex from the servitude of the perpetuation of the species. Sex ceased to be a fashion, for it had become a faith; the orgasm was regarded as a constant duty, and its meters, with their red needles, took the place of telephones in the office and on the street.

But who, then, is this old man prowling the passageways of the basement halls? The legal adviser of General Sexotics? For he recalls the celebrated cases brought before the Supreme Court, the battle for the right to duplicate with manikins the physical appearance of famous people, beginning with the First Lady. General Sexotics had won, at the cost of twenty million dollars—and now the wandering beam of the flashlight plays on the dusty plastic bell jars under which stand frozen the leading film stars and the world's foremost women of society, princesses and queens in splendid dress, for by the decision of the courts it was forbidden to exhibit them otherwise.

In the course of the decade, synthetic sex came a long way from the first models, the inflatables and the hand-windups, to the prototypes with thermostats and feedback. The originals of these copies are long dead, or else are now decrepit crones, but teflon, nylon, dralon, and Sexofix have withstood the wear of time; like waxwork figures in a museum, leaping from the darkness into the light, elegant ladies smile immobilely at the old man, and they hold in their raised hands cassettes, each with its siren text (by Supreme Court ruling, the seller was not permitted to place the tape inside the manikin, but the buyer, of course, could do so in the privacy of his home).

The slow, shaky step of the old hermit raises clouds of dust, through which glimmer from across the room, in pale pinks, scenes of group erotica, some of them thirty-membered, resembling giant pretzels or intricately braided breads. Could this be the president of General Sexotics himself who walks the aisles among these high gomorrarcades and cozy sodomy sofas, or perhaps the chief designer of the company, the man who made all America, and then the world, crotch-aware? Here are videos (“viewrinals”) with their controls and programs, and with that lead seal of the censor over which lawsuits ran through six courts; and here are stacks of containers ready for shipment overseas, filled with Japanese spheres, dildos, precoital creams, and a thousand similar articles, complete with instructions and service manuals.

That was the era of democracy come true at last: one could do anything—with anyone. Heeding the advice of their own futurologists, the corporations, having quietly divided up among themselves the global market in contravention of the antitrust act, went into specialization. General Sexotics worked on equal rights for deviants, and the remaining two companies invested in automation. Flagellashes, batterabusers, black-n-blue's appeared as prototypes, to assure the public that there could be no talk of a glut on the market, for a great industry—if it be truly a great industry—does not simply meet needs: it creates them! The old methods of home fornication—the time had come for them to be laid to rest alongside the flints and clubs of the Neanderthals. Scholarly bodies offered six- and eight-year courses of study, then graduate work and advanced degrees in the higher and lower eroticisms; the neurosexator was developed, then throttles, mufflers, insulating materials, and special sound absorbers, in order that one tenant not disturb another's peace or pleasure with uncontrolled outcries.

But they had to go on, further, fearlessly, and ever forward, because stagnation is the death of production. Already in the works was an Olympus for individual use; already the first androids in the shape of Greek gods and goddesses were being fashioned out of plastic in the blazing ateliers of Cybordelics. There was talk, too, of angels, and a financial reserve was set up for legal battles with the churches. However, certain technical problems still had to be ironed out: what should the wings be made of; feathers might irritate the nose; should they be movable, or would that get in the way; how about the halo, what sort of switch to turn it on, where to put the switch, etc. And then the lightning struck.

A chemical substance—code name Nosex—had been synthesized some time before, possibly as early as the 1970's. Only a small group of experts, security-cleared, knew of its existence. The drug was immediately recognized to be a type of secret weapon, and was manufactured by the laboratories of a small firm connected with the Pentagon. The use of Nosex in aerosol form could in fact decimate the population of any country, because the drug, taken in quantities of fractions of a milligram, eliminated all sensation accompanying the sex act. The act, true, continued to be possible, but only as a variety of physical labor, fairly fatiguing, like wringing out clothes, scouring pots, scrubbing floors. Later on, consideration was given to the idea of using Nosex to check the population explosion in the Third World, but the plan was thought to be dangerous.

No one knows how the world-wide catastrophe came about. Was it true, as some said, that a stockpile of Nosex blew up as the result of a short circuit, a fire, and a tank of ether? Or did there come into play here a move on the part of the industrial enemies of the three corporations that controlled the market? Or, then again, did some subversive organization—reactionary or religious—possibly have a hand in it? We are not told.

Wearied by his trek through the miles of vaults, the old man takes a seat on the smooth knees of a plastic Cleopatra, but not before pulling her brake, and his thoughts travel back, as to the edge of a precipice, to the Crash of 1998. Overnight, in an instinctive feeling of revulsion, the public turned its back on all the products then flooding the market. That which yesterday enticed, today was what an ax is to a tired logger, a washboard to a laundress. The eternal (it had seemed) enchantment, the spell cast by biology on the human race, was broken. Thereafter, breasts brought to mind only the fact that people are mammalian; legs, that they have with what to walk; buttocks, that there is something also with which to sit. Nothing more, but nothing more! How lucky McLuhan, that he did not live to witness this catastrophe, he who in his later works had interpreted the cathedral and the spaceship, the jet engine, the turbine, the windmill, the saltcellar, the hat, the theory of relativity, the brackets in mathematical equations, zeros, and exclamation points as surrogates and substitutes for that single function which alone is the experiencing of existence in the pure state.

This line of reasoning lost its validity in a matter of hours. The specter of extinction hung over humanity. It began with an economic crisis compared to which the one of 1929 was as nothing. The entire editorial staff of
Playboy,
in the forefront as ever, set fire to itself and died in flames; employees of striptease clubs and topless bars went hungry, and many leaped from windows; magazine publishers, film producers, huge advertising combines, beauty schools went bankrupt; the entire cosmetic-perfume industry was shaken, as was lingerie. In the year 1999, there were thirty-two million jobless in America.

What now was still capable of exciting the public's interest? Trusses, fake humps, gray wigs, a palsied figure in a wheelchair, for only these did not suggest the strain of sex, that onus, that curse, that grind; only these seemed to guarantee protection from the erotic threat, hence respite and peace. The governments, aware of the danger, were mobilizing all their forces to save the species. In newspaper columns there were appeals to reason, to a sense of responsibility; clergymen of every faith appeared on television with sublime exhortations and admonitions, reminding their flocks of higher ideals, but this chorus of authorities was listened to by the general public with little enthusiasm. Nor did the sounding of the official trumpets help, the proclamations enjoining people to get a grip on themselves. The results were negligible; only one unusually law-abiding nation, Japan, gritted its teeth and followed these injunctions. Then special material incentives began to be instituted, honorary degrees and distinctions, prizes, awards, citations, medals, and fornication competitions (the trophies were loving cups); when this tack also failed, repressive measures were taken. But then the populations of whole provinces began to evade their procreative obligation, teen-age draft dodgers lay low in the surrounding forests, older men presented forged certificates of impotence, and the public boards of enforcement and supervision became riddled with graft, for everyone was ready—if need be—to keep tabs on his neighbor, to see that he wasn't shirking, though he himself avoided that dreary labor as much as he could.

The time of the catastrophe is now only a memory sifting through the mind of the lonely old man as he sits on Cleopatra's knees in the basement. Mankind has not perished; fertilization now takes place in a way that is sanitary and hygienic; it is not unlike inoculation; after years of ordeal a stabilization of sorts has taken over. But culture abhors a vacuum, and the terrifying suction of that emptiness caused by the implosion of sex has drawn, into the vacated place, food. The gastronomy of the day is divided into normal and obscene; there exist perversions of gluttony, glossy restaurant publications with centerfolds, and the partaking of meals in certain positions is considered unspeakably depraved. It is not permitted, for example, to consume fruit while kneeling (but for this very freedom a sect of knee deviates is fighting) ; it is not permitted to eat spinach or scrambled eggs with one's feet propped up. But there exist—of course!—private clubs in which connoisseurs and epicures are treated to indecent floor shows; before the eyes of the spectators special champions gorge themselves, and the drool trickles down the audience's collective chin. From Denmark are smuggled pornoculinary magazines containing things unbelievably gross. One picture shows the ingestion of scrambled eggs through a straw, during which the ingester, sinking his fingers into heavily garlicked spinach and at the same time sniffing paprika goulash, lies on the table, wrapped in the tablecloth, his feet bound with a cord hooked up to a percolator which in this orgy serves as the chandelier. The Prix Femina that year went to a novel about a character who first smeared the floor with truffle paste, then licked it clean, after having wallowed his fill in spaghetti. The ideal of beauty also has changed: the thing now is to be a two-hundred-and-ninety-pound butterball, for this attests to uncommon ability on the part of the alimentary canal. Changes have taken place in fashion as well, and it is generally impossible to distinguish women from men by their dress. In the parliaments of the more enlightened countries, however, the question is being debated whether or not schoolchildren should be instructed in the facts of life, i.e., the digestive processes. So far, this subject, because it is indecent, has been placed under a strict taboo.