Foreword
As a master of erotic realism, Marcus Van Heller may justly be ranked along with Jean Genet and the other vanguard writers of the modern French school. TERROR, however, is much more than an erotic novel; in it, while still displaying his genius for delving deeply into individual character, Van Heller expands his canvass to paint a memorable picture of "underground" life in Paris, specifically of its swarming night-life, during the Algerian troubles that plagued the French capital a decade ago. In dealing with this broader aspect while still focusing his insight on the individual dramatis personae, Van Heller's tour de force is reminiscent of the works of that modern master of French realism, Georges Simenon.
TERROR tells the story of Ahmed ben Lulla, a young Algerian much more interested in making love than in political agitation, and his French prostitute girl friend Francoise. Both are caught up in the slimy toils of the Algerian underground organization in Paris a cutthroat group calling itself representative of the National Liberation Front, but actually fattening on the profits of terrorism, extortion, procuring, and other assorted criminal activities. The "organization", headed by the sinister, lecherous Mahmoud Taluffah, hounds Ahmed for the "political contributions" he and all other "Loyal" Algerians in Paris are required to make to "the cause", under threat of torture or death; and they similarly hound Francoise for their cut of her pitiful earnings as a whore around the Pigalle dives.
When Francoise is viciously raped, beaten and abused by Mahmoud's agents, Ahmed finally finds the guts to rebel; he allies himself with Police Inspector Pierre Raimond, who is out to get the Algerian assassins of a police superintendent. Raimond's own wife is brutally raped and abused by Mahmoud and his gang, before the final climatic scene in which Ahmed is put on "trial" by the NLF for "treason" to the Algerian rebel cause.
In the political aspects of its plot and action, TERROR inevitably calls to mind Liam O'Flaherty's Irish classic "The Informer", with the roles reversed: the rebel organization the vallain, rather than the individual turncoat.
An outstanding feature of Van Heller's TERROR is the fact that the erotic passages, which are plentiful, are not forced, nor dragged in artificially for their own sake. This is true erotic realism, the New Wave in literature, of which Drs. Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen have pointedly written.
"It (erotic realism) is nothing modern or futuristic. It has along tradition in the arts and literature. Wherever and whenever society has saddled the poet and artist with artificiality, sham, and pretense, there have been those disciples of the Muse who refused to go along with the trend. If they were painters and sculptors, they did the human figure without fig-leaves, showing pubic hair and genitals with the same taken-for-grantedness as they painted faces with mouths, noses, and head hair. If they were writers and poets, they described, treated, and discussed the sex lives of men and women with the same naturalness with which they spoke of other, nonsexual, affairs. Erotic realism is not an isolated phenomenon. It represents a realistic orientation in art and literature, and is part of a greater whole, just as one cannot be a Zen Buddhist without being a Buddhist, or a Lutheran without embracing Christianity."
Such realism is the essence of this book by Van Heller, originally published in Paris and presented here in its first American printing. In some of his other published works, notably in ADAM AND EVE (Collectors Publications, 1967), Van Heller has ventured afield into the considerably more rarefied realm of erotic surrealism the creation of bizarre fantasies which are to be understood symbolically on many more levels than one. In TERROR, on the other hand, he adheres to simple realism, and does a superb job of it. Especially notable is his economy of style; at all times he hews closely to the main theme, the main line of action; his work is uncluttered with pointless digressions.
Nevertheless, if one cares to probe deeper, Van Heller even in this tale of fast-moving action, cannot help but display his intuitive grasp of dynamic psychology. In addition to being a story of Algerians fighting the French authorities and fighting among themselves, TERROR is also a masterly study in sadomasochism, of which Freud has written:
"The roots of active algolagnia, or sadism, can be readily demonstrable in the normal individual.
The sexuality of most men shows an admixture of aggression, of a desire to subdue, the biological significance of which lies the necessity for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by actions other than mere courting. Sadism would then correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct, which has become independent and exaggerated, and has been brought to the foreground by displacement.
". . .That cruelty and the sexual instinct are most intimately connected is beyond doubt taught by the history of civilization, but in the explanation of this connection, no one has gone beyond the accentuation of the aggressive factors of the libido. The aggression which is mixed with the sexual instinct is, according to some authors, a remnant of cannibalistic lust. ... It has also been claimed that even pain contains in itself the possibility of a pleasurable sensation. Let us be satisfied with the impression that the explanation given concerning this perversion is by no means satisfactory, and that it is possible that many psychic strivings unite herein, into one effect."
The eroticism of the characters in Van Heller's TERROR is almost entirely on the sadomasochistic side; as such, it reflects a much more universal trend in our high-pressure civilization, than the comparatively limited milieu of the Algerian colony in Paris; Van Heller is writing not only about Algerians, but about men and women, and his characters are valid reflections of men and women everywhere and of their frequently tortured and distorted relations with each other.
Edward S. Sullivan
Los Angeles, California July, 1967