The EyesJesus Ignacio Aldapuerta
Critical Vision paperback, 88 pages, £5.95
Published January 1996
ISBN 0952328836
Review by Andrew Darlington (1996)
Duality. You, reading this, are an intelligent portable unit of unique genetic individuality and incredible organic sophistication; and you’re a slab of meat. Aldapuerta’s necrokitsch operates somewhere inside the seismic shift from one state to the other. Individuality ceases to exist and becomes totally objectified; a dehumanised arrangement of organs for detached exploration, amputation and meticulous mutilation. The Eyes are ‘emetic fables by the Andalusian De Sade’, not so much Tales From the Crypt so much as tales from the cryptic.
Born in Seville around 1950, and obsessed with a morbid erotic perversity of blood, semen, foulness and corruption, Aladapuerta died at 27, possibly HIV positive, probably as a self-incinerating suicide. He left these grotesquely fascinating scatological fictions for Critical Vision to salvage into English; ten short texts of fervid nastiness in intricate arrangements of literary atrocity. There’s a kind of Apocalypse Now political allegory about the necrophile ‘Indochina’:
He was fucking not the undernourished body of a teenage refugee whore, but an entire nation. In her he was fucking all the recent dead, all the thousands, the tens of thousands killed in the week since he had last fucked a dead Vietnamese whore.
More often, The Eyes’ dark masturbatory dreams occur in an amoral vacuum, committing ‘fantasies to the dry reality of his closed hand.’ ‘Orphea’ conjures a hypnotic mood of compulsive predestination leading inexorably to a Ballardian fetishised auto-wreck, culminating in an unsettling strangeness of self-immolation and oral sex with a severed head. In ‘Armful’, a paedophile devours a child’s corpse to destroy the evidence of her sex murder, while ‘BVM’ is a sadistic delirium on the universality of pain and how the torturer destroys minds. ‘Ikarus’ extends the atmospheric dislocation further into surreal weirdness. An airborne collision impacts into a cathedral-vast bomber where a woman is ‘nailed, clamped, impaled, pincered’ into a mechanised human sculpture, an eviscerating physical collage that’s described with a clinical detachment that’s beyond horror. She’s intravenously fed blood to replace what she’s copiously losing from multiple lacerations, gouges and rents. There are fish swimming in her blood supply. The prose is not Gothic in tone, but art-technological in its detailed dismemberment. Aldapuerta is a serial offender of designer nihilism; he tells his black pornographic truth until it bleeds. His book is slim, but fastidiously disturbing. •