Having talked about medical dramas, autism, and the hellscape depths of capitalism, we turn now to a simpler question: is there a piss kink in Paradise Rot? Paradise Rot is a 2009 short novel by Norweigan musician and novelist Jenny Hval. Translated into English in 2018, it follows a young Norweigan student starting university in the suspiciously familiar ‘Aybourne’ (technically not Melbourne, where Hval herself went to study). Mostly people talk about the piss thing.

In brief, the story is a classic coming of age narrative. Djåoanna (or Jo) comes to Aybourne and starts university. She rents a room with a stranger, Carral, who lives in an old brewery with thin walls. The two grow close, and then probably a little closer again, and mushrooms start growing in the bathtub, and eventually Jo realises she needs to move out and move on with her life. It’s very gay, and also deeply Biblical. The title obviously alludes to Paradise Lost, with all of its associated imagery of the garden and the forbidden fruit – which is classically tied to Eve in a doubled way, both symbol of her sexuality and token of her fallen nature. In Western culture, the forbidden fruit is the sort of ur-image of female sexuality as a polluting force. It’s constant throughout literature, as for instance in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market‘:

“She cried, ‘Laura,’ up the garden,
‘Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeez’d from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;'”

As much as ‘Goblin Market’ is a glorious gay bacchanal, it’s also published in 1862, which means the transgressive elements of female sexuality are approached in a veiled way, by shaking a finger at them. The fruit has this fantastical, evil origin – it’s goblin fruit, carried about and sold by evil little fantasy creatures that do not exist in reality. It’s unnatural, literally from outside of the natural order. The goblins in turn are confronted and overcome by pure, virginal heterosexuality, one which refuses to consume the forbidden fruits. Like Dracula, like any other gothic text, the trangressive elements burst into the narrative before being beaten back by normative social forces. The transgressive desire remains, but it’s subdued. Crucially, it needs to be cast as an evil or perverting force to be spoken about at all. Later queer artists often adopt Christian images of evil or the demonic, not because they think there’s something wrong with being gay but as a form of resistance to the heterosexual Christian worldview that cast them out in the first place. When, for instance, Lil Nas X goes to hell and gives Satan a lapdance, he appropriates a religious language that has long been used as a weapon against gay men. He adopts Christian imagery and in doing so overthrows it. There’s no stink of condemnation in his work: the Christian vision of good and evil is hollowed out, rendered into an aesthetic distinction with no real force or power. The attack on gay men – they’ll end up in hell – is returned with a sort of devil-may-care insouciance: yes, and I’ll give Satan a lapdance.

The same process of reinterpreting or rewriting Christian imagery exists in Paradise Rot. Jenny Hval takes the image of the forbidden fruit, both the original sin and female sexuality, and turns it to rot. Most immediately that imagery serves as a metaphor for queer sexuality, signifying the evolving relationship between Jo and Carral. A literal bag of apples make an appearance maybe thirty pages in: “I liked the sound of Carral’s mouth as she took a huge bite out of one of the golden apples and crushed the sweet flesh between her teeth. The soft yellow of the peel was almost the same as her hair.” The pair talk directly about Eve and the forbidden fruit, and within ten pages the apples have turned to rot. “The apples spread all over the flat. Half-rotten fruit was left in the bin, on dirty plates and in used coffee mugs.” Even as they turn, the apples retain a sexual dimension: “Sometimes I sat and watched the apple; how the juices dribbled from the bite marks. I wondered what was apple juice and what was her spit, and thought about licking the place where she’d bit to see if I could tell the difference.” As the novel continues, that fruit-language evolves towards terms associated with rot, with fungus. The fruit terms typically associated with the desireable female body (sweet, soft, tender, juicy, fresh) are replaced by the vocabulary of rot as the two flatmates become conjoined. Jo dreams of two female bodies joined together: “the cracks between them were covered in white mould fur, as if they shared a skin woven around them.” Their experiences blur; Carral tells one of Jo’s childhood stories as if it were her own, and as Carral drinks milk, Jo tastes it in her own mouth: “Carral nodded and sipped her milk slowly; as she swallowed I felt something warm, slimy white in my throat.” Everything starts to blur together. There’s a giant mushroom in the bathtub, and at times it seems like it’s reading over Jo’s shoulder. It’s described as milky white, using the same terms that elsewhere describe Carral’s skin.

Paradise Rot takes the image of the forbidden fruit (female sexuality, desire, the female body) and turns it to rot, perverting the associated language and recasting it as this ghoulish rot-love. Sweetness and juice turn to damp, wet fungus, as the image of the idealised female body is replaced with a physical, gross body – it’s not all sweetness and juice, Hval says, it’s mould, musk, darkness. It’s dangerous, infectious, unhealthy. It’s all of these unsettling, perverse things. The female body as desired fruit is reimagined as a site of horror – as fruit gone bad. That imagery serves as the basis for a sexuality outside of the Christian vision, in contrast to the ways that women are so often expected to be. It’s unsettling and gross, but as a model of sexuality it also shifts from the markedly heteronormative dynamic of food (where male and female represent consumer and consumed, eater and eaten, desirer and desired) into a model of mutual growth – into something communal, shared, cross-pollinating. Two become one: it’s hard to tell the difference.

With that in mind, we can come back round to the piss thing. Everyone in this book spends a lot of time pissing. Piss is observed, discussed, considered. “I wondered if Pym, assuming he was the one who knocked, could hear us as we heard him, if he could hear me pee, if he could hear the difference between my sharp fast stream and Carral’s slow dripping trickle.” Does it rise to the level of kink? Maybe. It’s definitely a point of focus. Carral’s piss, like everything else about Carral, is described with the language and imagery of food. It’s the colour of “melted butter”. If you called it a piss kink, I don’t think anyone would get mad – I’d maybe just want to step a little more lightly around how this book joins what’s gross with what’s sexy. The book is about the sexuality of rot. It’s not meant to be straightforwardly horny – you’re meant to have a complex reaction to what’s going on. It’s meant to be sort of gross and offputting. Fungus is not immediately something you want to associate with the bedroom, right. Paradise Rot is about attraction to the forbidden. If we lose sight of the ‘forbidden’ part of the forbidden fruit, the whole aesthetic principle is thrown out of balance. The sex fungus book isn’t as good if you’re not slightly grossed out by the mushroom in the bathtub (“the warm spores from its surface melted into slime on my fingers, slipping between the grooves in my skin”). Like – yes, it’s a piss kink, but only if you stop calling it that.