THE GASH
231
of the simple lesion. First of all there is the voluptuousness of cutting.
Piercing offers no great satisfaction. The point obtains but a theoretical
and abstract success; to put it more clearly, a utopian success. But the
blade plays on the nerves like a sensitive and cold bow. Its light, decisive
edge possesses singular powers of analysis. The point never does more
than affirm its original hole. But the blade runs through the flesh like a
streak of well-directed lightning, or more insistent, progresses according
to the dialectical dichotomy of the saw. It leaves a groove so sure, so
pertinently scientific that the mind is satisfied by it while the flesh
suffers. Further superiority over the needle: the blade offers transversal
satisfactions very
largely
exclusive of the cluster of possible lines which
we like to see cleanly divided by an irrefutable hiatus.
It would appear, however, that the incision is not the most de–
lectable portion of the art of gashing. For the incision is more an act
of cutting off than of simply cutting, of withdrawing the portion which
we have triangularly isolated from the scope of action. The subsisting
concavity will be lasting evidence of our personal intervention. For after
all the portion which has been cut out is of no value for all the trouble
it has been worth. The blade is unable to exact even a tithe when led
perpendicularly: it draws strong lines on the surface of the plane or
divides into two or three the thickness into which it ventures. But, as
in a puzzle, when no piece is missing, the whole thing can be put
together at a glance. The gash alone, therefore, can satisfy the sadist,
the gash alone reduces effectively, deprives the wounded of the positive
aspect of his wound in such a way that the two lips of the wound
can never come together nor the insolence be repaired by literal cica–
trization.
The readily technical vocabulary of the gasher must not delude us
as to the nature of his preoccupations which are of a sexual order.
If
this form of cruelty is in such perfect harmony with our operative
reflexes, our manual dispositions, it is not only because it is tied up with
the essential gestures of forcing exits (the well, the furrow, the mine)
or of freeing, disgorging (sap, rosin, pus), or of grafting, scarifying,
indenting or notching ... but because above all it carries to consummate
effectiveness the male obsession with the fissure. Jung states somewhere
that "the gash symbolizes the female sexual organ." There is no doubt
about this. But there is more to it. The gash is the rent which remains
open, that is-offered and viable. It is likewise the passage opened by
force, the yawning
sinus
that rape has created, the crevice which succeeds
a breaking open. The Freudian will then tell us why the schoolboy so
furiously gashes his desk. And we will note that P. J. Jouve, presenting
the first couple in the solitude of his
Paradise Lost)
points out in a casual
