The Anus of Tiresias: Sodomy, Alchemy, Metamorphosis

Abstract

In Western literature of the twentieth century, the mythical figure of Tiresias often functions as a cultural shorthand for non-normative sexual identities and pleasures. In Marcel Jouhandeau's 1954 erotic novel, Tiresias, a bisexual man, renames himself as Tiresias after being anally penetrated by a young male hustler. While the novel has been noted as a celebration of anal sexual pleasure, I argue further that penetration is part of a larger metaphorical language of cross-gender sexual transformations, located in the assumption of a Tiresian identity and in the related esoteric language of alchemy. Sodomy, in the novel, creates a transformed and very queer sexual identity that is emphatically not male.