Eros: Anti-Eros

In his "Letter to the Shade of Hemingway Regarding the CurrentState of Fiction," Harold Jaffe, of _Fiction International_ fame,admits, "[T]he dominant culture's condom sheathes us all fromhead to foot and folds inwards to coat our brain stem, vulva, cock andballs and viscera." _Eros: Anti-Eros_ is an innovative book offictions where Jaffe effectively contests "the society of thespectacle"(Debord), its penetration into our culture's mostintimate reaches.In "Eros / Calvin Klein," Jaffe turns anotherwise familiar scene into something previously unseen. The veryrhythm of the opening passage transports the listener lickety-split"high above the moiling city," to the"museum-corp-penthouse," where the distant air-raids arefurther muffled by Meret Oppenheim's fur and deodorized by ChristianDior's perfume. The setting and the props lend the encounter theirframed-art features, while the pauses in the dialogue create atrance-lucent screen around the speakers. These pauses are very loadedwith diversions of all sorts, which allow the "guerrillawriter" to smuggle some explosive ingredients: state terrorism,European condescension (Euros / Lesser-Euros) and anti-communism,American corporate expansion, and social sores.While the diversionscarry the reader around, the woman and the man behind thetrance-lucent screen are moving in and out of focus. Their bodilyintercourse denied, the couple end up secretlyinterchanging... commodities--the triumph of an empty fibrous formover the live and vibrant content--the triumph of theabsurd."Eros / Medical Waste" is a pastiche of aB-movie-like romantic love story, but this one looks freshly cut--likeSandi/Santos after the radical surgery. The author effectively usesthe narrative space; how much he manages to communicate to his readerswhile following the young men around Manhattan. The world, aspresented by Jaffe, seems to have undergone some radical surgery, andits body cannot recover from this mutilation; rockefellers havecastrated the Third World cultures and exhibit the cut-outs from theirprivate collections in museums; hypodermic needles have replacedconiferous ones under the trees in parks--everything is in differentstages of denaturing. When Sandi/Santos meets Jean-Marc in New YorkCity, s/he is a pre-op transsexual; a few months later, it is she whomJean-Marc rushes to meet at Paris International Airport. The authoroffers a few pastiche endings of the story: if the nature isdismembered so radically, it doesn't really matter how one willre-assemble the pieces.The theme of the rape of nature, includinghuman, continues in "Eros / Xerox." In fact, nothing seemsalive in this story's landscape, even the wilderness. Everything is acopy of a copy, colourised or not: the billboards, the scenes ofinstitutional brutality, the human figures outside the motel window,the road signs that lead nowhere--everything is a simulacrum, so thecouple finally colourise their lives in that void, too--they colourthem red; such world is more than st