Reviews are always great to get but now and then they are stupendous.
This
is the wildest review habu has ever received
This review is written by Emma who you will find
here http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5558652-emma
She knows what she likes, BDSM, dubious consent,
etc in the books she reads, and tells it like it is.
If you don't want to read all this review here
is her summary
Conclusion
So, obviously, if you want m/m romance pass this
by. If you like gay erotica, then it's a good read. If you want to admire some
pretty clever writing disguised as gay erotica, then this is your book, baby.
Full review
*grin* I see what you did there, Habu.
Home to Fire Island is
actually an exploration of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory through a gay erotic
bildungsroman. Clever work, man. My hat's off to you.
The imaginary, the unconscious, and the
Symbolic
Danny has lost his father, and his mother fails
to emotionally care enough for him, in her quest to pay rent and put food on the
table. This initial home life functions as the realm of the imaginary: the
closed dual relationship of mother and child. The imaginary father is literally that:
with only his dog tags, Danny's father is the composite of all the constructs
that he builds up in fantasy around the figure of the father
Danny's stepfather Floyd has sex with him. At
first Danny convinces himself this is against his will, but when Floyd make him
activly participate Danny realises that hewants sex
with men, he's desperate for it. Floyd is the unconscious: the discourse of the
other, which regulates desire.
While Floyd offers Danny the sex he craves, Floyd
wants both the mother and the son. Danny's emptiness cannot be filled by sharing
someone. The symbolic father is any agency that separates the young subject from
its mother: here, Floyd, who functions to break Danny away from the mother-child
dyad, and out into the world.
Danny has a book, which he reads constantly, that
tells him about the gay lifestyle of casual sex, which is out there for him to
find. Lacan's shorthand for the wider world was the Other - 'the big other, that
is, the other of language, the Names-of-the-Father, signifiers or words
[which]...are public, communal property'. Through the symbolic language of the
book (comprised also of the unconscious and the imaginary), Danny engages with
the Other.
The Mirror stage
Danny travels to Fire Island, where he assesses
his body and wonders if men other then Floyd will desire him. Acccording to
Lacan, "The mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value.
In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point
in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an
essential libidinal relationship with the body image."
Jouissance
Danny knows he wants . . . something,
but he doesn't know what it is. Therefore he decides to experience every sexual
activity he can, hoping to find it. Six on one, DP, public sex shows: Danny
tries them all. Danny stands out among Fire Island rent boys for his lack of
limits and endless innocence: he'll try anything, and sex is always as if for
the first time. But the more Danny participates in, the less happiness he seems
to get from it. He feels sad and lost that he can't find what he seeks.
The pleasure principle, according to Lacan,
functions as a limit to enjoyment: it is the law that commands the subject to
'enjoy as little as possible'. At the same time the subject constantly attempts
to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go beyond the
pleasure principle. Yet the result of transgressing the pleasure principle,
according to Lacan, is not more pleasure but pain, since there is only a certain
amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure
becomes pain, and this 'painful principle' is what Lacan calls jouissance.
The way the sex is written reflects this
inability of all this sexual activity to assuage Danny's need. Although endless
climaxes are reached, there is never any climax in the story; one sexual act
melds immediately into the next sexual act, then the next, and the next....
There is no ultimate pleasure: the surfeit of pleasure becomes jouissance.
Danny, or indeed we as the reader, are never satisfied; never find what he/we
seeks.
In this, the depiction of jouissance just as
equally reflects the m/m romance fan, always looking for the next book, the next
m/m emotional high. I churn through m/m novels like popcorn, man. The endless
persuit of pleasure cycles over and over until the inability of each book to
fulfill my lack is experienced as pain (*cough*SeanMichael*cough*).
Lacan says "Desire is neither the appetite
for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from
the subtraction of the first from the second," and adds that "desire
begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from
need." Hence desire can never be satisfied.
Desire
Danny finally manages to identify and articulate
what he seeks: committment, love, home - a Daddy.
The aim of psychoanalysis is to lead the
analysand to uncover the truth about his or her desire, and this is possible
only if that desire is articulated:
until you can say what
you want, you can never know what it is. Lacan wrote that "it is only once
it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the
full sense of the term."
However, it's not a particular human
being that Danny wants to
be his Daddy, he just wants a Daddy, any Daddy: Danny only seeks to fill his
emptiness. Desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack.
The Real
Danny gets a glimpse of the Real when the first
man he thinks will be his Daddy turns out to be married with kids, and frowns
Danny away when he turns up to what he thinks will be his house.
As he walks away he feels a loss and despair, but language fails to describe
what he is experiencing. This trauma is Danny's look at the Real: when he has
passed beyond the ability of symbolic order to describe it. It is this
resistance to symbolization that lends the Real its traumatic quality.
Symbolic oppositions
Danny then finds a new Daddy, and displaces the
previous boy, Billy, who couldn't handle the constant sex (Daddy has three balls
(I kid you not), and, going by the evidence, priapism).
But at the same time Danny finds a home, he is
also separated:
“You’ll have a room of your own...It can
be private. You don’t have to let me in. We’ll have a lock ...”
Daddy tells Danny:
"You are so sweet. It’s like I’m
taking a virgin each time. Your tight channel – even after all those men. But
just right. Taking all those has made you ready for me, able to take me at long
stretches . . . You, innocent and tough at the same time.”
Danny is the eternal lack; always empty, always
desperate to be filled. He finds the eternal phallus; always hard, always ready
to fill Dany's emptiness.
“A bull. You’re a bull”
“You need me to stop?”
“Oh, shit no. But you’re a bull. No man . . . “
. . .
“Exhausted? You need to rest?”
“No. No, please. Fuck me to heaven.”
. . .
“Have I used you up? Can’t take any more of me?”
“Never enough . . . never enough of you.”
“What I wanted to hear . . . here we go again”
. . .
"Right now, again, unless you tell me to stop..."
Danny is forever in a Symbolic opposition of
presence/absence, phallus/lack, together/apart, home/lost. A lack which has been
honed by the search for Lacan's objet petit a: the unattainable object of
desire.
Drives and desire
Daddy promises to educate Danny, to fuck him,
kiss him, tell him he loves him, give him an allowance, hold him, get him a job,
take him on a yacht...Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral drive (the
lips, the breast), the anal drive (the anus and the faeces), the scopic drive
(the eyes and the gaze), and the invocatory drive (the ears and the voice).
Daddy will attempt to satisfy all Danny's drives, moving from one to the next in
a never-ending chain. Drives differ from biological needs because they can never
be satisfied and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually around
it. The true source of jouissance is the repetition of the movement of this
closed circuit. Danny is now in a never-ending circling around the objet petit
a.
Daddy will eternally try to satisfy every drive
Danny has, but Danny's desire can never be satisfied.
As Danny pleads to the world:
“No charge. I just need . . . I just need .
. .”
Conclusion
So, obviously, if you want m/m romance pass this
by. If you like gay erotica, then it's a good read. If you want to admire some
pretty clever writing disguised as gay erotica, then this is your book, baby.
BarbarianSpy for
literary heat
