Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge - the novel

Arsan Around

Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
aka Further Experiences of Emmanuelle
aka Emmanuelle 2
By Emmanuelle Arsan 
Granada
ISBN 9780583125741

Trigger warning: Taboo and illegal practices discussed and sometimes condemned. 

“But the borderlines of my love aren’t identical with the frontiers of her flesh.”
Jean, Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge

Originally published in a clandestine edition in 1960, following on from the ‘official publication’ of the first novel in the series from the year before (and reviewed here), Emmanuelle L’Anti Vierge has a few different titles like Further Experiences Of Emmanuelle but, the title I have managed to get hold of is a British Granada paperback tying in with the name of the second movie, Emmanuelle 2. And, of course, the actual authorship of this volume is an enigma as to whether it was Arsan or her husband writing all these novels but, I suspect it was a collaborative arrangement. Much like the declared state of being by the main character and her husband as a combined, erotic creature and, one supposes, based on the real life experiences of the two who, as I mentioned in my review of the first tome, influenced Thai culture and brought about the swinging sex scene there. Although I now suspect something far more sinister was lurking underneath that but… yeah, not sure and, all I have to go on is the subject matter of these fictionalised exploits.

Now, I have to say that I think this sequel is infinitely better than the first novel. You may remember I talked about the ‘stops dead tonal shift’ when an excessively boring character called Mario dominates the last third of the book and pontificates about the duty and intricacies of a self sacrificing erotic pathway for humanity. Well, sad to say he’s back in this one and the first twenty pages or so are more of him and his boring philosophy. However, he happily leaves the narrative for most of the book and his further interruptions are nowhere near as tiresome and, although further elucidation and exploration of his philosophy are much invoked by various characters, it’s all mixed in with the sexual shenanigans one would expect from ‘an erotic novel’ and so the pill is significantly sweetened.

Now the ‘plot’ of the novel is very simple. Emmanuelle continues to explore different lovers of various gender (and multiples thereof) throughout the tale, as part of her ‘free marriage’ to Jean, while further exploring her path extending Mario’s original line of reasoning. So, yeah, it’s very simple, for sure, but there’s a lot of interesting and downright unusual stuff going on too.

For example, a prince gives a party where Emmanuelle is sexed up by many men (and women). Another scene at a fancy dress ball where she takes part in a happily obscene tableaux as one of many dressed as specific birds conjures up satisfyingly surreal images of something like Max Ernst’s Une Semaine De Bonté or the bird mask worn in the 1960s update of Judex. Or how about being anally taken by a buddhist monk who presents a golden dildo to her in return for services rendered by her to his religion.

Another thing which features heavily in a couple of chapters is a huge glass building with thick glass walls that don’t reveal what’s going on inside due to the sheer density of glass. It’s at a hidden location and can only be entered by driving to a secret, underground entrance and being raised into the ground floor of the building. This is basically a high class brothel with very specific rules where Emmanuelle plies her trade, once her character is taken with the idea that to be truly free, one must prostitute oneself to all and sundry. It’s here, in the only truly emotional high point of the novel, that Emmanuelle finally finds her ex lover Bee but, out of conscience, rejects her advances. It’s one of three powerful moments in the novel but the other two are decidedly strange…

And are as follows…

There’s one scene where Emmanuelle is coerced by a Dr. Marais (I couldn’t find any history on whoever his real life counterpart is) who is experimenting with a course of drugs that makes women easy to control and manipulated erotically. The book turns almost into a horror novel at this point but Emmanuelle says, after her first dosage and evening of debauchery, that she will not be back for another shot and… the book makes no mention of it in the following chapters and it’s all forgotten about, it seems. Until… until, much later in the book, a headline from a newspaper is read that Marais is wanted in connection with a police enquiry regarding a dead woman found his flat. I guess it was a lucky escape for Emmanuelle but, it makes almost a weird non-sequitur of a scene, to be honest.

But not as unusual a non-sequitur as the random scene which just appears out of the blue half way through a chapter, where two lovers, fleeing an authority and being chased by dogs, end up in their dishevelled state making love in a ditch. It seems completely divorced from the content and characters in any of the rest of the book and is a bit of a curio. I was expecting the other shoe to drop later on in the novel as it did with the murderous doctor but, no... no clue. The best way, then, to take it is that maybe it’s a metaphor for the pursuit and practice of Emmanuelle and Jean’s erotic principles but, if that is the case (and I’ve no reason to assume my best guess is right here) then maybe it would have been better relocated towards the end of the book when Jean and Emmanuelle are expounding those theories.

Now, I’d hoped the underage sex thing which permeated the sensibilities of the first novel would be happily absent from this second volume and, for the most part they are. But, when they do come they are much more blatant and I really don’t know why this vile spin is allowed to be published now, even in the wake of the court cases revolving around Lady Chatterly’s Lover, I think this kind of morally reprehensible stuff has no place in adult literature. However, Emmanuelle’s treatise at one point (though discarded by the main character soon after) includes ‘younger people‘ in it and, towards the end of the book, Emmanuelle ‘deflowers’ her best friend (before dripping sperm from her own mouth into her friend’s mouth after she is taken by three brothers on a beach). Nothing wrong in that per se but, you will probably at some point remember that her friend is only 13 years old in the previous novel and that this one is set six months later. So you can do the maths on that yourself!

However, this vile ingredient of the books aside, in general I enjoyed Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge quite a lot, with the obvious exceptions. At least now I can watch the second movie with somewhat of a critical eye to adaptation. So that’s next on my list.