Zoom Link | Goth Book Club

let's talk about masturbating to religious paintings

Our next book club chat for paid subscribers is TONIGHT at 8 pm UK (check here for your time zone!) and we’re discussing Yukio Mishima’s first novel, Confessions of a Mask, with special guest

Heather Parry

. We’ll be discussing all things sex and violence; even if you haven’t finished the novel, feel free to come along and join the chat. The replay will be available for those that can’t make it and a paid subscription gets you access to the archive of all previous chats.

Our co-host for tonight, Alice M of

🫀body fluids🦷 - a lit mag

recently posted a note dissecting the language writers use to describe their editing process as one of violent self-splitting, and it got me thinking about the proliferation of romance novels that try to push into the transgressive but ultimately become symbols of the bland mainstream—those that become Tiktok sensations but leave nothing behind in the mind of the reader. Alice had said the problem with talk like “‘I dragged my guts up and sliced them’…sounds good because it’s high arousal, low information.” While Alice was talking more about the edgy representation of personal process than the language we use to explore sadomasochist acts on the page, I think the principle of it applies: viral novels like the H.D. Carlton shark romantasy or Colleen Hoover exploring violence and sex may try to approach these concepts, but nothing new is gained from the experience. The tropes are so well-worn, the violence they convey is more cosy than it is compelling.

I keep thinking about Heather’s essay symbolic wounds in light of the context in which Mishima was writing this novel, as well. Heather brilliantly discusses the connection between the techno-fetishistic films Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Crash:

Of the intersection of human culture and technology, the way that the machinery of technological progress crashes into our lives with little control and no off button. For Baudrillard, the post-collision bodies of Crash showed human flesh ‘commixed with technology's capacity for violation and violence’—something that perfectly describes the Salaryman by the end of Tetsuo, as he and the fetishist come together in something distinctly monstrous. But at whose feet can responsibility be put? In both Crash and Tetsuo, the initial collisions are inescapable, but almost without blame; they simply occur, and change everything. Is it the person who stepped behind the wheel that is at fault? The one who built the car? The person who laid the road? All, together, set the groundwork for this violence. All stepped behind the wheel and pushed the accelerator to the floor. We all agreed on progress. And now here we are.

Mishima’s post-war Japan was ravaged by apocalyptic death and forced to endure an occupation that enforced a doctrine of pacifism, but it isn’t the only consideration of Kochan’s obsession with dominance and violence in Confessions. And unlike the previously described viral narratives, Mishima gently walks the reader through every moment of his yearning, from the lived in smell of his first crush to the long meditative stretch contemplating his voluntary self-disintegration. It’s like being lowered into a comforting bath if the bath were one where you were stabbed to death by arrows flying at the speed of light.

Link is available below, excited to see you tonight!