'Emmanuelle' by Emmanuelle Arsan

Review by Alexander Turner

    "The art of erotic pleasure is what matters and we must constantly offer ourselves, give ourselves, unite our bodies with more and more bodies, and count all time spent out of their arms as wasted."

    There are things in life you believe and things that you want to believe. As a child I wanted to believe that Ninjas could abseil into a volcano just to help James Bond and Kissy Suzuki defeat Blofeld's latest ghastly plan to take over the world. I wanted to believe that Fu Manchu had a plan to destroy Britain and an evil daughter with glinting obsidian eyes who would taunt and tantalise men with her oriental charms until they caved in like helpless children. I wanted to believe that if I, by chance, got bitten by a radioactive spider during some science lesson I would be endowed with the relative strength of a spider, gain the ability to crawl up walls, and be able to spend my weekends swing from skyscraper to skyscraper on an almost invisible silken thread.

    I also wanted, as an early adolescent, to believe that somewhere in Bangkok there was a sparkling blue swimming pool around which languished lovely, long legged, and lithe French women whose tanned flesh glistened with sun oil while they spoke of grand sexual adventures and longed for more. They all had the predatory looks of the women in Helmut Newton photographs. They wanted excitement, and especially the excitement of new blood to be drawn into their completely sexual world. The new blood would arrive in the shape of a girl who, in my mind if not the author's, looked a lot like Sylvia Krystel, a girl with opaque blue eyes and a delicate frankness about her own sexuality and what gave her the most pleasure. Of course these other women would mock her innocence and see her as a sexual challenge. She would have to be conquered in some seductive lesbian embrace which was, of course, only natural. There were no condemning voices in the world of Emmanuelle, just a world of opportunities to experience sensual pleasure, and I wanted to believe in it perhaps more than any of the other fictions and fantasies swarming my young mind.   

Of course for me, growing up in mid-seventies London the women of Emmanuelle bore no more resemblance to reality than triple breasted alien whores set on abducting and mating with human males to repopulate the planet Pornotron. Emmanuelle might as well have been a work of science fiction for all the resemblance it bore to my world. There was a definite lack of languid sexuality around me. The girls I knew wouldn't have been able to spell languid. Girls whose voices had all the sensual charm of fingernails scraping across the surface of a blackboard. Girls whose sole erotic ambition was to snog the dark haired one from the Bay City Rollers. Girls to whom sex was not a life enhancing adventure into the world of pleasure but rather something "dirty" you had to do to keep your boyfriend from leaving you.  

For me reading Emmanuelle was like stepping off a cliff and plunging into a sea of flesh. It was set in Bangkok, but what was Bangkok to me? I knew it was a real place because I'd seen it on the news, but it didn't sound like a real place. Bangkok. I never thought that in my life I'd go to Bangkok. Hell I didn't even think about wanting to go to Bangkok. In Bangkok white women turned golden and became wholly sexual. Bangkok was an impossibility maybe but it was a wonderful one. A place where everyone was attuned to their desires and able to fulfil them merely by asking. It was a world beyond beyond.    

Even buying Emmanuelle was like breaking into a world of sexual experience. I remember the day quite clearly walking, cold and wet, into Foyles on Charing Cross Road brimming with anticipation. It felt, to me at twelve, like slipping into some dark alley brothel and paying for sex with some beautiful young French girl. The cover had a picture of a half-peeled apple turning into a perfectly shaped derriere. I took it to the counter with the sensation of blood rushing to my head. The counter girl had a full fat face under a mop of dirty blonde hair. She wore thick black make-up around grey-blue eyes that never once glanced directly at me. I think I imagined she had me pegged as one of those dirty mac wearing social misfits who frequented the area. Foyles was, after all, just a hundred yards away from the Soho of sex shops, peepshows, clip joints and tired eyed strippers who'd clump across from club to club wearing improbably high heels and heavily expensive fur coats. There's no sleaze in the world that feels sadder than London sleaze. But once I'd bought the book and was careening through the streets of Camden on the top deck of a number 24 bus the cold dank world of London and Soho felt far away, because my mind was already immersed in Emmanuelle's eventful flight to Bangkok.

    Emmanuelle, published in France in 1967, caused an immediate mixture of outrage, disgust and, from some, more liberal quarters, praise. President Charles De Gaulle, leader of the Free French, tried to have the book banned. I don't know if this means he'd actually read it or not. He probably worried it might damage the international reputation of the French foreign service who are depicted in the novel, with casual assurance, as work-shy hedonists whose morality couldn't be further from the ideals of the French Resistance. Needless to say his stance helped ensure the book sold over 500,000 copies. Nothing makes you want to read a book as surely as being told that you mustn't. Some French intellectuals quoted Emmanuelle as a great liberating treatise. Panorama claimed the author had "launched an all-out one-woman crusade to liberate mankind from sexual taboos", while Pierre Kyria, in Combat, claimed that the experiences related in the book "attest much more to a healthy sexuality than to any disturbing perversity."    

The author Emmanuelle Arsan (real name Mayrat Rollet-Andriane) was the beautiful Eurasian wife of a French diplomat stationed for some time in Bangkok. At the time the book was unleashed upon the world he was a member of the French delegation at UNESCO.    

Arsan went on to write a series of similarly erotic books including "The Further Adventures of Emmanuelle", "Nea", "Laure", and a non-fiction work called "The Secrets of Emmanuelle". In addition to being a best-selling novelist she went on to have a career in film which included playing a role in one of the later Emmanuelle movies and directing a drama based upon her own screenplay. In France she remains a well known figure but her international reputation went into a steep decline when the name Emmanuelle became associated with millions of cheaply made soft-core movies that had nothing to do with her work. 

    Apart from the effect it had on me personally is there anything significant in Emmanuelle? This is hard to say for sure but re-reading it the first thing that strikes me is how sincere it seems to be. Nowadays erotic fiction, or what little I have seen of it, seems to trade on fantasies that have as much, if not more, to do with money and power than with sensuality. Emmanuelle explores its sexual world with a degree of honesty and candour. There are some pretty revealing insights into the mentality of foreigners living and working in Bangkok. You get a sense of them living in a protective bubble that requires very little genuine interaction with Thais. All the Thais mentioned in the book seem to be either servants or houseboys or taxi drivers or prostitutes. I can't think of any Thais who are on equal footing with the French, English or American characters. There is also the disturbing idea that is still present amongst some rich expats, and probably rich Thais too, that if you have enough money you are entitled to do anything you please. Anything at all.    

Mirroring a tendency in Thai society the women in the book live quite separately from the men. They all gather by the poolside or in gym club clusters talking about how they are going to betray their husbands, while the men go off on their little expeditions to massage parlours, brothels and opium dens.   

Emmanuelle enters this world after a flight from Paris in which she manages to have sex with two complete strangers (well it is a long flight) and soon gets into a debate with the mentally advanced adolescent Marie Anne about her masturbation techniques:    

"What's your favourite place to caress yourself ?" Says Marie Anne.

"Oh, I have several. The sensation is different at the tip, or on the side, or on the bottom. And the little opening just below - you know, the urethra - is also very sensitive. All I have to do is touch it with my fingertips and I come immediately... I like to caress myself inside my labia where it's wettest."    

"With your fingers ?"

"Yes. Also with bananas. I push them all the way in. I peel them first. They mustn't be ripe. The long green ones that you can buy at the floating market. I can't tell you how good they are! You see, I can caress myself several times in a row."    

Emmanuelle is depicted as a real innocent abroad and the people of Bangkok are only sketchily revealed. We read about the heat and the trees and the architecture of the houses and how they smell but there are few references at first to the actualities of the town. It is as though Emmanuelle is so consumed with her sexuality and her feelings that she has little time to properly see the place she is moving through, as if she is in a kind of erotic daze. But at about the half way mark the real Bangkok starts to impinge more and more on her. One moment, when Emmanuelle, obsessed with some sexual infatuation, sees a leper stands out:

"For an hour she drove around aimlessly, often getting lost, stopping sometimes to go into a store. Once she was frozen in horrified contemplation of a leper. Sitting on the sidewalk, he was moving backward supporting himself on his decomposing wrists and dragging the stumps of his thighs along the soiled ground. She was so shaken by the sight that she was unable to start the engine of her car. She sat there paralysed having forgotten where she wanted to go and the movements she had to make with her undecayed feet, her healthy, fragile hands."

Of course this is just one moment and most of the time the book is at its strongest when Emmanuelle is either having sex or contemplating having sex, such as here when she feels the desire to replay an earlier liaison:
    "She suddenly wanted to be naked with Ariane lying naked on top of her, both of them very naked, more naked than they had ever been before. She wanted her breast against her breast and her sex to be against her sex. And she wanted to be caressed by a woman's hands, by a woman's legs, lips, body... Ah. If Ariane had come back at that moment, how Emmanuelle would have given herself to her."    

Yet, despite all her lesbian affairs, her real allegiance is always to her husband Jean. Jean spouts a lot of very sixties sounding ideology about not wanting to restrict Emmanuelle's growth and wanting her to experience every erotic pleasure she can. He's not remotely jealous. Mind you he's usually getting a massage from a naked Thai woman when he expresses such ideas so they probably don't count for much. But it seems that he has given her all the ideas she has about sexual experimentation and needing to improve herself erotically as part of some plan to build a perfect wife, and, as she loves him, she has bought into this completely. At one point she says to him:

"I know there's some kind of progress I have to make, something I lack and have to find before I can become a real woman, really your wife. But I don't know what it is !"    

The figure that emerges as the catalyst for her erotic education is an Italian count by the name of Mario. She is introduced to him at a party by Marie Anne and knows at once that she is bound to give herself to him.    

Mario's world seems more refined than anything she has encountered in Bangkok up to this point. But what he actually does is commit a kind of psychological rape. He plays her and plays on a kind of indifference to her charms to draw her in. He challenges her to come to his home and when he sends a car to pick her up she feels as though she is somehow obliged to go. Once she is in his lair he indoctrinates her with a set of philosophical principles that he calls The Law. This process is set out in the longest chapter of the book. A chapter whose literary style recalls the revelatory passages in one of the Bildungsroman of Herman Hesse.    

Mario's house is a perfect example of native chic. Made of logs overhanging a "shimmering black canal". The interior is the type you might see in a coffee table book on Asian decor. Mixing styles and textures of soft leather and hard wood, the mood, the heat, the Asian splendour and the whole environment is perfect to indoctrinate Emmanuelle into his ideology. Mario's Law like the tenets at the heart of many a religious cult offers freedom from the constraints and impositions of conventional society while being able to exist only at the expense of a society in which freedom equals poverty. Mario, in many respects, resembles the character of Sir Stephen from Pauline Reage's Story of O who, with the consent of O's husband, demolishes everything that O was in order that she can be transformed into a new and stronger type of woman. In fact many commentators have accused Emmanuelle of plagiarising The Story of O but I don't think this is fair as the Story of O could, itself, be accused of plagiarising the philosophical immorality tales of the Marquis De Sade. There is also some reason to believe that this relationship relates to something experienced by the author.    

Mario's vision seems to be supported by the book. Like every good guru and most evil ones he has an answer for each of Emmanuelle's objections. If she raises a point he will have already anticipated this and be ready with a clear concise response. There is no real break in his flow. Everything from Emmanuelle's lips and those of the under written third party Quentin serve to propel Mario's lesson. His own immaculate philosophy.    

Of course, once examined in the cold light of reason, Mario's philosophy is really just a mismatched combination of Sade, Huysmans and Nietszche, with a bit of Keats and Byron thrown in for poetic effect. But it is easy to believe that to a beautiful nineteen year old French girl isolated in this intoxicating environment the Law must seem like gospel:    

"I'd like the supreme virtue to be the passion for beauty. It contains everything. What's beautiful is true. What's beautiful is justified. What's beautiful thwarts death. It's because of love of beauty that the world will ultimately refuse to sit in the theatre of illusion where the masquerades of politics and religions act out their shadow play with regal slowness. The universe in motion will laugh at their immobile pretensions.    

"But remember this: It's not in the finished work that beauty awaits you. It's not a success. Not the paradise promised to the loyal workman or the serenity of a twilight after the piety of toil. It's a creative blasphemy that is never silent, a question that nothing satisfies, a forward march that never wearies."    

Emmanuelle's reason for being there is not, of course, to get a lecture. She is really there because she has set her mind on Mario taking advantage of her sexually after which she will become his mistress. The fact that Marie Anne has already told her that he is a homosexual who will be quite immune to her charms has done little to deter our spunky heroine. If he is a homosexual then she will be able to convert him. Simple as that.    

Of course, according to Mario at least, his homosexuality is not really homosexuality in the normal sense but part of his belief in following the least natural path. Early Twentieth century mystics posited an idea which defined the soul as not existing naturally. It was something that had to be brought into existence with effort. Mario preaches a version of this doctrine whereby evolution is in the hands of those who defy all natural methods of sex and refuse the taboos, not just of society but nature too. If man is to develop he cannot be defined by nature but by his own choices and the more unnatural those choices are the more they define his autonomy and freedom. What is perverse and unnatural is what will cause a new kind of man, "erotic man", to emerge and rise above humanity. It won't happen en masse but through individual mutation and those "erotic men" will be the followers of his Law defying all natural law and becoming the bright future of the human race.    

"So erotic man will be a new animal ?" Emmanuelle asks.    

"He'll be more than man. And yet he'll still be man. Simply more adult, further advanced on the scale of evolution. The day is coming when, just as surely as artistic virtues separated men from beasts, the values of eroticism will separate the proud man from the ashamed man who huddles in the dens of present society hiding his nakedness and chastising his sex."    

The final chapter of the book ventures into a surreal and disturbing hinterland. Dark alleys and a tree shrine with sacred lingam phalluses which Mario pushes the bewitched Emmanuelle into using on herself. Following a dark and winding khlong Mario and Quentin lead her to a shack in a part of town rarely visited by foreigners. Here Emmanuelle is primed by smoking an opium pipe which, according to Mario, is to clarify her mind. Once in the state of blind obedience to Mario Emmanuelle is initiated into The Law. But the reality of The Law is less to do with any superhuman erotic man than the worst kind of exploitative perversion. I often wonder if, as an adolescent, I had read this far I would have as high an opinion of the book. But however disturbing Mario's actions may be, this chapter also includes some of the most powerful passages in the whole book. You get a profound sense of what Bangkok was probably like 30 years ago, and, however much people mourn the old Bangkok, that some things have undoubtedly changed for the better.

    In 1972, due to a condemnation from the pope and half a pound of butter, Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris became a major box office success with queues lining round the block almost wherever it played. Seeing a possible market in classy upmarket soft-core sex film producer Alain Siriczky secured the film rights to Emmanuelle for a meagre 2,500 francs. Dutch fashion photographer Just Jaeckin was set to direct and a young actress called Sylvia Krystel (also Dutch) was hired to play the leading role of Emmanuelle.    

For me the film of Emmanuelle works best as a kind of Bangkok travelogue. Jaeckin's images recall the fashion spreads in Vogue more than anything out of Playboy, Penthouse or Hustler. This decision proved well judged because the film went on to be a major box office smash (it remains the most successful French film ever made).    

The plot of the film follows that of the book fairly well but the tone is altered. Mario's Law is reduced to one or two choice phrases and most of the film follows Emmanuelle's love affair with an American girl called Bee. Krystel is a long way from the character of Emmanuelle described in the book. She is perky and playful and looks most ill at ease in the scenes where she plays opposite Alain Cuny as Mario who looks half interested in the material and old enough to be her grandfather. She just doesn't look dumb enough to be taken in by any of his garbled aphorisms.    

The film is enriched by the fact that director and cameraman seem much more intrigued by Bangkok than by the story of Emmanuelle. Every Bangkok location is photographed in a way that captures the heat, the friendliness and the freneticism of the town. Local sounds, music and chatter too add to a real sense of what it is to be in the middle of Bangkok. It just seems a shame when you leave Bangkok exteriors and focus on bedroom activities. It must be unique in being a sex film in which you really are more interested in the scenery.    

There are a few standout scenes in the movie that do have some erotic power though. The scene where one of the houseboys is joined by one of the maids as he watches Emmanuelle making love to Jean under a large mosquito net. Turned on by the sight he starts trying to make love to her mirroring the couple. She runs away. He chases her and catches up with her and the two make violent love in a shack.    

Another scene in a massage parlour captures a playfulness in the exchanged glances who have been told by Jean to seduce his slightly pompous friend Christopher.    

Possibly most interesting of all is a scene that was, apparently, not shot by Jaeckin, where Jean goes to a go-go club inhabited mostly by wealthy looking Thais. The naked go-go dancers get involved in a lesbian show while Jean gets more and more drunk and more and more pissed off. Maybe because he realises how much more sensual these Thai women are than any of the white women in the film.    

This lesbian show is followed up by a scene that is, as far as I can make out, unique in the mainstream cinema. One of the naked go-go dancers lights a couple of cigarettes and bends herself over before going about smoking them in the Patpong manner.    

Apparently these scenes were inserted into the film against Jaeckin's wishes and he wanted them cut from the finished film. His wishes were granted in a number of countries that decided that the couples Emmanuelle was supposedly aimed at were not ready for the sight of cigarette smoking vaginas. In some countries this scene remains heavily censored on video although even in the UK there are about three different versions of the film available. So if you are thinking of renting the video as a small reminder of this great trick be sure to emphasise that you want to see the one with the pussy cigarette trick. I'm sure most of the staff at Blockbusters will know exactly what you mean.

Emmanuelle by Emmanuelle Arsan is still available in various editions through Amazon.com and various other booksellers.
Edition reviewed translated by Lowell Blair Copyright Eric Losfeld Le Terrain Vague 1975

Review copyright Alexander Turner 2001

© Jago Turner. All rights reserved by the author.