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[aafontenoy]

Introduction

I have started this blog to report on my ongoing research into the almost entirely undiscovered author A.A. Fontenoy. After discovering a single volume of Fontenoy’s work in a second hand bookshop (one that, owing to its immense untidiness, and in spite of the riches of what I found there, I probably won’t be visiting again), and subsequently rifling through multiple libraries and archives in order to find more of it, I eventually came to the opinion that this work ought to be considered among the most fascinating of world literature: if one forgives Fontenoy for her occasionally awkward and untrained prose, one will find amidst the pages of her writing a stream of unparalleled curiosity and admiration of human life, particularly in its erotic and bodily guises, which—in my view at least—never ceases to excite, titillate, provoke, intrigue (and, yes, arouse).

(A note on Fontenoy as a person: I do not know what either of her ‘A’ initials stand for, nor can I trace the origin of her surname, having so far found no information on her relatives. Indeed, biographically Fontenoy is a null point of biographical or bibliographical presence, excepting her extensive—some might say excessive—literary output. I confess that my use of the pronoun ‘her’ is mostly arbitrary; partly an (admittedly ineffectual) feminist gesture, partly a response to my observation that the erotic thrust of Fontenoy’s writings is overtly feminine; I say this as someone who has at least an enthusiasm for the work of Cixous, Irigaray, etc. etc., if not an expertise.)

As regards the work itself: the bulk of Fontenoy’s writings—which, I stress, I have not yet uncovered the entirety of—consist in a multiple-volume book that weaves essay with history, biography, and (I suspect) fiction, and which takes the title “Songs After the Seventh Sultan: A Narrative of the Depths and Extremities of the Human Body, viewed at once in both its sacred and profane dimensions, ali my with its vicissitudes, habits and manners, functions conscious and unconscious, etc.” In Fontenoy’s self-referential passages—and here I will follow her—she typically refers to it as “The Book”.

As regards this titular “Seventh Sultan”, some readers may already recognise a reference to Sultan Sanjar-Shah, the seventh leader of perhaps the least known of minor provinces in the Seljuk Empire, who lived in his palace—the Pûm palace, regrettably now almost entirely in ruins, save some artefacts that are left behind in a museum or two—from 1038 to 1081, near Neyshabur. The second most notable thing about Sanjar-Shah, I should say, is the mythos surrounding the approximately one hundred women who lived with him in the palace (alongside nobody else), who together constituted a considerably liberated harem for their time. Sanjar is said to have fed and clothed these women with produce of as high a quality as he himself received, and that he ensured that nearly all of them received education and training in various vocations—poetry and writing, music, gymnastics, and so on; the exceptional (and, yes, most notorious) aspect of his treatment of these women is that he strictly forbade them from removing or trimming any of their body hair; some historical accounts (see, for instance, Allen and Ahmed 1997, or Billiet 2003) relate stories of women with moustaches, with bushy armpits, or with bellies covered in soft brown hair, living alongside the sultan. Of course, the most notable thing remembered about Sanjar-Shah is that his masculinity was an identity adopted after his birth; when he passed away (with, notably, no family surviving him; nobody at all except the many women he kept as company), the outside world found for the first time a vulva between his legs, and breasts bound against his chest. An interesting fact to consider, when we consider also that the sultan is widely reported to have had frequent and rather lively sexual relations with the women in his harem: some writers (e.g. Hearst 1969) speculated that these women were, in fact, treated by Sanjar—arguably even cultivated by him—as men, with the expectation of them playing a penetrative role in sex; others (most notably Anwood 2006, in quite an exhilarating piece of work) wish to accentuate the sultan’s life as one of exuberant lesbian sexuality and passion. I take no stance on these issues.

As regards Fontenoy’s perspective on the seventh sultan, her writing is nothing short of reverential: Sanjar-Shah, one has the sense while reading The Book, stands in for Fontenoy as the apotheotic symbol of a manifold fetishism of human sexual life: encompassing a practically worshipful attitude towards the body in its less frequently (or, at least, less acceptably) eroticised aspects: not only the anal side of things, that is, but also that of body hair, gender transgression, flatulence, urine, and the body’s natural uncleanliness and scent, and so on. To be clear, Fontenoy’s book is not about the sultan and his harem; indeed, it is difficult to say what it is “about” at all. But its titular dedication to him fits perfectly with its sexually indulgent content.

I have written a lot, so I will elaborate more in another post to come.