i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Truth Unveiled / 155hand, Gold’s Marxist perspective may not have been necessary, for this wittysend-up of sexual liberation in Greenwich Village in the 1930s exempliƒeswhat June Sochen called the ribald laughter of the bawdy woman, for whomsex does not entail “obeisance.” 23Neel’s „irtation with pornography in the “John” watercolors permitted herto transgress the boundaries of both middle-class values and modernist “high”art. Whereas Joie de Vivre was aimed at the latter, untitled (Bathroom Scene,ƒg. 149), is aimed at the former, and particularly at its concepts of modesty thathad been assailed by both Lawrence and Joyce. Two years after the ban onUlysses was lifted in the U.S. District Court of New York, Neel staged a littlesideshow to Joyce’s monumental comedy of the body. A genuine contributionto the underground tradition of bathroom humor, untitled depicts the practicalpreparations for sexual intercourse. The lovers are not swooning in a rapturousembrace; rather they are each urinating so that their subsequent activitieswill not be interrupted. In place of the closeted boudoirs of Degas’s bathers,Neel’s “toilet” (she is undoing her hair) occurs on the commode. For his part,John, like the sailor in Ulysses, has the „exibility to pee where he pleases, inthis instance into the sink. Bourgeois gentleman that his delicate physique ifnot his action reveals him to be, he has a condom at the ready to slip onto hisaroused male member. Both John and Alice close their eyes to fantasize aboutthe coming encounter: John empties himself into the vagina-shaped sink,while Neel squats on the toilet, with its phallic base. The viewer’s fantasies, onthe other hand, rapidly fade before the stark black-and-white reality of thescene of bodily preparations in the modern bathroom. In isolating this subject,Neel has not simply violated all norms of modesty, privacy, and decorum, shehas demystiƒed the sex act.Neel’s humorous approach to transgressive subjects, like that of womenwriters such as Djuna Barnes and Mary McCarthy, is at the opposite pole fromthat of male artists, who use it to celebrate a revised, modernist heroism: theirdangerous courting of debasement and death. In Georges Bataille’s surrealistnovel, The Story of the Eye (1928), 24 for instance, sex represents the realm ofthe primal, characterized not by positive male-female union but by base instinctswhose “release” is not merely impolite but potentially destructive of allsocial codes. Urination is not a mundane bodily function, it is part of the uncontrolleddebauchery of the sexual act. 25In countering the view that the avant-garde’s transgression of social codeswas subversive, Kate Millet has pointed out that “contemporary literature hasabsorbed not only the truthful explicitness of pornography, but its anti-socialcharacter as well.” 26 Bataille acknowledges only his own fantasies, whereasNeel acknowledges that both men and women have sexual fantasies, fantasies