When Federico Andahazi wrote a novel about the clitoris, Argentines were scandalised – and women rushed to buy it for their husbands. Maya Jaggi reports
Every discovery is arrogant, says Federico Andahazi, and possibly none more so than that charted in his remarkable novel The Anatomist. At its heart is a real Renaissance scientist from Padua who made the bizarre claim to have discovered the clitoris – or at least flagged it in European anatomy books for the first time.
That the man was called Mateo Colon and was a near-contemporary (though no relation) of his more famous Genovese namesake Cristobal Colon – Christopher Columbus – was an irresistible call to likening the mapping of territories and bodies, the driving of proprietorial flagpoles into earth and flesh.
Andahazi, a 34-year-old Buenos Aires psychoanalyst of Hungarian descent, was awarded Argentina’s main literary prize, the Fortabat, for this, his first published novel. But while his anatomist is tried as a heretic and his work banned for unveiling that which should have remained hidden, Andahazi found his topic scarcely less of a taboo 400 years on. Tipped off about the book’s contents, the 72-year-old “cement queen”, heiress Amalia Lacrose de Fortabat, cancelled the prize ceremony. Her objection: the novel failed to “contribute to the exaltation of the highest values of the human spirit”.
The jury stood firm and the $16,000 cheque was quietly slipped under the writer’s door. The book become a bestseller across Latin America – more than 70 000 copies sold in Argentina alone – and the spat helped secure the unknown Argentine a record $200 000 for English-language rights from Doubleday in the United States. His novel now appears in English for the first time, with film-makers including Amadeus director Milos Forman and Hector Babenco, who made Kiss of the Spiderwoman, knocking at his door.
While the scandal might seem laughable – Fortabat denounced Andahazi as a “communist porn artist” – the author is not amused. He pointed out that under Argentina’s dictatorship of 1976-83, and its dirty war in which 30 000 people “disappeared”, “To call someone a communist or a pornographer was to sign their death warrant. Any censorship today reverberates with the loss – through murder or suppression – of the previous generation of writers.”
Sex has always troubled the powerful, not least for its ability to vault socially constructed barriers – of wealth, class, race, even gender. And the subversive potential of female desire has evoked a particular dread. The kleitoris (from the Greek “little hill”) has doubtless been known of – and enjoyed – for centuries. The Latin poet Juvenal made reference to it as the “cock’s comb”, while those in Africa and the Middle East enforcing the pre- Islamic, pharaonic practice of “female circumcision” knew only too well the site of women’s pleasure since they cut it out, the better to rule their wives and daughters (twoEmillion girls are still mutilated each year).
Yet what was known in private was not named in public. Even today, of 15 standard British sex-education textbooks, only five mention the clitoris.
“The clitoris is odd,” says Andahazi. “It’s perhaps the only bodily organ which has no other purpose than to afford pleasure. Its discovery – or invention – in the 16th century obviously had an impact on the representation of women as agents of pleasure. Until then, sex for women was supposed to be a conduit to childbearing and nurturing, not enjoyment.”
His interest was first piqued by an apparent historical blackout. Although Colon was a reputable scientist of his day who theorised about the circulation of blood 50 years before its English “discoverer” William Harvey, little is known of him. “How could someone of that stature pass unnoticed through history?” asks Andahazi, in whose novel identifying a diminutive “female penis” is as great a heresy as Galileo’s remapping of the heavens.
Yet what emerges is not so much a clash between science and the church as a contest between men for women. The clerics, jealous of a man rumoured to leave women bearing “a smile like the Mona Lisa”, want the discovery locked up in forbidden books. “What would happen,” they ask, “if the daughters of Eve were to discover that, between their legs, they carried the keys to both Heaven and Hell?”
But the anatomist is himself a conquistador of the female body. For him the goal is not to pleasure a woman but to possess her. “Every act of discovery brings with it an act of appropriation; that’s the only reason you discover things, to patent them,” Andahazi says. “The most brutal example is the discovery of the New World, which became the property of the Old. But it’s a metaphor for what happens to women; male power is about appropriating them body and soul.”
Yet in Andahazi’s comic burlesque, the valiant explorer gets lost in his own rib – as the biblical origin of woman would have it. Both his women (Ines de Torremolinos and Mona Sofia, the madonna and the whore) opt to own their bodies and be mistress of their hearts. “So it’s the story of a failure: Mateo Colon thinks he’s possessing the body and soul of a woman but he fails utterly because there’s no way force can appropriate another person’s will.”
Andahazi, who describes himself as “a man of the left”, declines to label himself a feminist, since “feminism for me is not an all-explaining theory; the struggle is much wider than the battle of the sexes”.
He may want his critique of power understood as more than a history of female anatomy, but an evident thirst for the subject may frustrate him. A New York Times survey in Buenos Aires found women were buying the novel in droves to give to their husbands and boyfriends – hinting they might learn something. As one woman put it: “It’s apt that the book is set in the Middle Ages, because that’s exactly the level of knowledge most men have when it comes to female anatomy.”
Andahazi laughs that the response of women in other countries is unlikely to be different, since “it’s not just macho Latin American men who are preoccupied with their own pleasure – though there may be some truth in the stereotype”. But he is alarmed to find his novel of ideas approached as a sex manual.
Ironically, it may itself be flawed as such. The book describes the clitoris as “barely exceeding the size of the head of a nail”. According to Australian research reported in New Scientist last month, the clitoris is “10 times bigger than the average person thinks”, encompassing erectile tissue that extends far into the body.
Scientists may be catching up with what researchers such as Shere Hite and the Boston-based group publishing Our Bodies, Ourselves – have insisted since the early 1970s: that there is indeed far more to the clitoris than meets the eye. Perhaps the most obvious thrust of that discovery is that men and women might not be so different after all.
Now there’s a heresy.