The Divine Comedy

Craig Raine

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781848872837
• eBook ISBN: 9780857897220
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The Divine Comedy is a fugue and a black comedy. In delicious and bawdy detail, an unnamed narrator offers snapshots into the lives and loves of an astonishing cast of philanderers and fuckups while along the way, the evidence amasses for a comic, cosmic conspiracy. Craig Raine's second novel, The Divine Comedy, is a voyeuristic meditation on sex and insecurity, God and the nature of the human body - its capacity for pleasure and pain, its desires, disappointments, and its many mortifying betrayals.

After two minutes that felt like six minutes, Rysiek’s electric toothbrush – a present from an English friend – had its brief but unmistakable orgasm. Normally, he never cleaned his teeth after lunch, but today he was going to see his dentist. Rysiek Harlan. You will be hearing more about him.

After two minutes that felt like six minutes.

The theme of subjectivity.

Its brief but unmistakable orgasm.

Precision. And, by contrast, the idea of human unreliability.

The machine, then, and the human being – the machine with God in the machine.

The dentist is important, too.

Adam came before Eve. Eve came after Adam. If this were not the case, the human race would die out. Imagine a world in which the woman turns away from her toiling partner because she has already come and she is feeling sleepy – and far too tired to wait for her mate to achieve his elusive orgasm. Eve has to come after Adam.

Once upon a time, there were three brothers (and a sister) who were Jewish. In fact, they were the children of the mohel. All three boys were circumcised, therefore. But the mohel was experienced and he knew from experience that, although circumcision was a religious and hygienic requirement, it could nevertheless entail certain disadvantages – the main one being the skin’s loss of play along the shaft of the penis. Erect, the penis was solid, inflexible. Lose the prepuce in its entirety and you had a trombone without a slide. Masturbation was impossible without a lubricant. Well, not impossible, just rather awkward. Good. The mohel disapproved of the solitary vice.

Mutual heterosexual masturbation was also awkward. Not good. The wife’s pleasuring of the husband prior to full intercourse held (the mot juste) two possibilities. The first was unlubricated manhandling. With the hope, perhaps, that, were the wife naturally inventive or sexually savvy, saliva might stimulate the secretion of prostatic fluid (known in German as der Sehnsuchtstropfen, the drop of longing).

(Strike out ‘sexually savvy’: the mohel harboured no such ‘hope’. His wife was an autodidact. His sons’ wives should also be inexperienced – ignorant yet intuitive.)

The second possibility was that, without the wife’s spit, the man would be sufficiently excited to secrete his own transparent lubricant – the sufficient excitement creating possibly unbearable excitement, in which teleology would inevitably and rapidly overcome the desire not to come.

(There was a third possibility. But the mohel did not allow the idea of fellatio to leave his mind. He could not stop it entering.)

So the mohel circumcised his male children subtly, modestly, semi-symbolically. He practised circumcision as synecdoche, the part for the whole. The entire glans was not revealed – only the tip with its goldfish mouth.

The penis in its polo neck.

With the result, in the case of the eldest boy, of the operation being re-performed – at the age of seven, in hospital, under local anaesthetic – to detach the prepuce from the glans, where it was joined in two places. An unforeseen eventuality, that attachment, preventing the play of skin.

In case, therefore, the foreskin should re-attach itself after separation, it was completely removed. Preventing the play of skin.

In his mid-twenties the same boy had a cyst removed from just below his exposed glans. The black-edged crater healed and almost vanished, as the surgeon had promised.

The second son of the mohel discovered a lump on his right testicle at the age of fifteen. The female doctor conducted a manual examination and sent the boy for ultrasound inspection. The lump was diagnosed as a non-malignant, epididymal cyst. Surgery was not required or recommended.

The third and youngest son of the mohel was discovered to have an undescended testicle at birth. The prognosis was that, except exceptionally, the testicle would descend of its own accord at some later stage. However, the latest Swedish research had demonstrated a correlation – purely statistical, not physiological – between the onset of testicular cancer in males in their mid-twenties and the occurrence of an undescended testicle at birth. It was decided, therefore, to operate – to induce the descent surgically, severing the testicle from its future phantom Siamese twin, the diseased and late-descending statisticle.

As the mohel discussed the matter with the medics and his wife, he recalled a monorchid cousin whose testicular cancer forced him to leave the Royal Navy and the royal yacht Britannia. These troublesome testicles.

The mohel’s daughter had none of these problems. Her problems would come later – after childbirth had weakened her pelvic floor, leaving her with a slight disposition to incontinence and a tendency to prolapse of the uterus. And haemorrhoids. Of course. Naturally.

The divine comedy.

On the ceiling of the delivery suite, a haze of blood.

The shaven vagina is now no longer shaved – unless there is to be a caesarean. The enema is no longer obligatory. A little shit is no longer shocking.

The vaginal sweep is when the midwife inserts her anointed rubber glove to enlarge the dilating cervix. You can see the play of muscles on her forearm. When the hand is withdrawn, a spate of jelly and cream is released.

Birth via the vaginal canal is possible when the cervix is eight centimetres dilated. When fully dilated it is ten centimetres.

An episiotomy is a cut made on the entrance walls of the vagina to expedite the birth and to prevent tearing. Tearing is harder to repair than a clean cut. The outer lips of the vagina and the perineum are injected with local anaesthetic. A pair of blunt-ended scissors is worked past the baby’s head. Making the cut isn’t easy. It takes two hands and strength.

The anus is on a stalk like a head of broccoli. The midwife cuts a modesty pad from a sanitary towel to shield it from the student midwives watching. Birth depends on the action of excretion.

The child is a little channel swimmer, covered in vernix, shivering, with goggles of flesh over the eyes. The colour purple. Which changes to crimson when it cries.

When they clip and cut the umbilical cord, you can hear the scissors going through grit.

To stitch the cut, they put your legs in stirrups. The blood is swabbed with frothing jaundiced antiseptic. The surgeon counts the layers of epidermis, dermis, hypodermis briskly like a bank teller and orders them tidily. The needle comes threaded from the sterilised pack and is held in a pair of plier-ended scissors. Each stitch is pulled to a peak, a little white pimple, before going on to the next.

You can feel the scar for six months. Like a needle left behind. I’ve got you under my skin.

The process isn’t painless. The endorphins released by the body are inadequate. The epidural works – but carries a risk, if only a slight one, statistically.

The process is a miracle.

The four-week-old baby boy was naked in the health visitor’s scales, bawling but doing well, having made up his birth weight and gone beyond it. A crimson cry, he squirmed and raged from lusty lungs.

The visitor leaned in and looked over her glasses to see the calibrated dial, then noted the new weight, first in pencil on her clipboard, then in the baby’s notes. She was Brobdingnagian in the pelvis, swathed in a bolt of boldly patterned hounds-tooth tweed. Turning to the mother, she said, ‘He’s blessed.’

‘I’m sorry?’ the mother responded.

‘He’s blessed.’ She was looking at the baby’s penis and invited the mother to follow her glance.

The mother’s expression gave nothing away. She was puzzled and was halfway home before she realised that the health visitor was referring to the size of the baby’s penis.

In two weeks’ time the parents had an appointment with the plastic surgeon to decide about the baby’s hypospadias – first degree, so relatively minor, a urethral misalignment easily repaired or possibly left well alone. ‘Provided he can urinate standing up …’ the doctor shrugged.

So, a mixed blessing.

(But not, thank God for small mercies, penoscrotal transposition. Think about it.)

The female consultant plastic surgeon inspected the same baby’s foreskin, fissured at the frenum, and pronounced it, through chocolate-red lipstick, to be perfectly functional. Erection and intercourse would be unimpaired. A repair would be ‘only cosmetic’.

Only cosmetic?

Three-quarters of every chemist’s shop is given over to Max Factor, Rimmel, Bourjois, Elizabeth Arden, Neutrogena, Garnier, L’Oréal, Dior, Chanel … The cosmetic industry has a turnover of billions of pounds – a figure that demonstrates the unimportance to everyone of the cosmetic.

In the Independent newspaper (8 May 2009) the television critic Alice-Azania Jarvis reviewed a Channel 4 programme about male bodies, Extreme Male Beauty. She began by deploring ‘physical fascism’ that mocked physical flaws – like ‘moobs’, which are ‘male boobs’. Then she mocked male efforts to improve their bodies. She concluded: ‘Next week: penises. Might give that a miss.’ Penis ennui. When Jacques Derrida was asked what he would like to ask the great philosophers of the past – Kant, Hegel, Heidegger – he said he would like to know about their sex lives. He stipulated that he didn’t want a porno movie version but rather a sense of what this occluded yet central part of their lives was actually like. I am not sure I believe in penis ennui any more than I believe in penis envy. But curiosity definitely exists. When Derrida came to Oxford to give an Amnesty lecture at the Sheldonian in February 1992, a Jewish undergraduate called Tommy Karshan told me he happened to be standing at the urinal next to Derrida’s. He looked.

As a matter of fact, Alice-Azania Jarvis looked, too, despite her advertised impatience, at the next episode of Extreme Male Beauty. But then, turned off, she turned off.

Blake’s ‘The Book of Thel’ touches on the black laughter attendant on the physical:

‘Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy?

‘Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?’

Meaning, of course, the foreskin and the hymen, potential obstacles both – the second obvious enough, the first less obvious, until you recall that Gerard Manley Hopkins was operated on at the late age of 29 for a troublesome prepuce. Blake is generalising, perhaps from personal knowledge. But there is nothing in principle that he needs to retract.

The morning after the widow’s party, the phone rang twice while she was still having breakfast. All-Bran Pétales and skimmed milk. It was 7 a.m. She had been up for an hour, had showered and watered her plants. Neither caller apologised for ringing this early. They were old, so it wasn’t early.

The first caller was Richard. He wanted the address in Versailles of that sexy blonde 52-year-old he’d met at the widow’s party. Yes, mon Dieu, he liked her. Yes, he would follow it up. Let me just get a something to write with. Absolutely. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Bye.

Richard was 70 and twice-divorced. His hands shook a little, but he still had his hair.

The second caller was Larissa, a Russian émigré, who was 61. She talked for an hour because, after the party, she had lost her virginity to a 68-year-old. He had just left her apartment. She was excited.

‘You know, I didn’t orgasm. But it didn’t matter. You know, I didn’t expect to. And it is so nice being kissed. His breath smelled a little, but it didn’t matter. At his age, you expect it. You do. I was shy, you know, of taking off my clothes. I have this appendix scar and that thing on my knee. I must get it removed. But he wasn’t so great either, you know. Little bit fat. Not gross. Just a little bit, you know, drawn with a wobbly pencil. One with a broken point so you can’t put any pressure. And his thing was fine. Big. But the balls make me laugh, you know. So funny. No one tells you how funny they are. He wants me to put his thing in my mouth. Like a whistle. He says, will I blow it. Is that? Did you ever do that? Oh, OK. I just didn’t know, you know. Well, he changed his mind and jiggle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph page
• The Divine Comedy
• Acknowledgements