Why the Silence?
After “surrealist”, “horror” is the second most frequent lumpengenre applied to these two novels. But such labels seem inadequate; misapplied. There is nothing of the idealist in Topor, no dream, no fantastic rupture; the terror of his writing (and it is terrifying) emanates from its quotidian referentiality and possibility. The protagonists or “victims” of his narration have been plucked from silent inexistence and thrust into a cell of unbearable noise.
Andrew Hodgson gets trapped in an unbreakable scream with Roland Topor.
Head to toe portrait of Suzanne
My God, I’m too fat. No one loves me. I’m still young, kind of. But it has always been like that. At school they called me Oinker, and later Big Belly or Lard Ass, or Big Lard Ass Fatso. God, how I suffered. I alone knew the wealth of purity that was hidden beneath my barrels of fat. The others considered with disgust this body which they believed to be the physical representation of my moral state. It’s like how visitors at the zoo recognise guilty elements of humanity in the animals, condemned to expose their degradation for all to see. The monkey is an obscene man and the tiger a deceitful man, the serpent is a vile man and the lion a proud man. Me, I’m a pig. A dirty gluttonous pig. My spirit is incapable of raising itself up from the floor. Divine gravity dictates to me this law: my body resides at ground level, there must rot my soul.
An excerpt from Roland Topor‘s Portrait en pied de Suzanne, translated by Andrew Hodgson.