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PARTISAN REVIEW
In English sexual "nourishment" is symbolized by "meat" (e.g. "meat
market"). Another symbolic identification is manifested in the use of
"head" for the male (and even female) genitals. In Shakespeare's
Measure for Measure
this exchange is decisive for the structure of the
work:
Provost:
Can you cut off a man 's head?
Pompey:
If
the man be a bachelor, sir, I can: but if he be a married man,
he's his wife's head, and
I
can never cut off a woman 's head.
(IV.ii.I-4)
In the system of physiological language of the Trobrianders the
eyes, as Malinowski noted, are the seat of sexual desire:
magila kayta,
literally the "eyeball," is the summit of the entire system.
RELATIONS
The expressions for coitus at the vertex of Sex have a characteristic
signification: " intercourse"
(Ie rapport),
consort
(Ie commerce),
etc.
Equivalently, coitus can be signified within the paradigms of spacial
models as "flying," "climax"
(Ie comble),
"coming"
(jouir).
In the
advertisement for an American airline a stewardess invites passengers
to
"Fly me!", with its blatant sexual connotations.
In the English of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries one
could use in place of "coming" another verb "dying"
(mourir).
In
Shakespeare and in the poems of Donne "dying" was used as well as
"coming." In classical French there is the same exchange between the
vertices of the Genitals and of the Anus in the symbolic connection of
" Ia petite mort"
(orgasm) and"
la mort"
(death).
