PRIAPUS ON THE PROWL

Full story originally appeared in Paloma.

It’s raining tonight and his penis feels endowed with great power, so he decides to head out early.

This is the sentence with which Zaretsky begins his latest story. It came to him after much consideration of syntax and connotation, understanding as he does how great stories—or at least the ones which find anthologization, earn esteem, fetch prizes, stir envy—often open with an audacious, attention-seizing claim. Stories that demonstrate finesse, authority, mastery. And these are the kinds of stories he desires to write.

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Here’s what’s supposed to be happening: Priapus, the ithyphallic dreamer, now adrift in our terrestrial realm, is exhibited as a metaphoric representation of virility, in all its assumptions and self-contradictions. Priapus, scion of Dionysus, is archetypally portrayed as wielding an unflagging, abhorrent erection, his engorgement a raging beacon of potency for generations of Lampsacenes and Bithynians, his high-striking foot-long fascinum brandished as a pivot of vitality for Persians and Cairenes. Acts of sexual aggression toward donkeys, also a favoured pastime.

Zaretsky’s story reimagines this myth amid the dreariness of contemporary Toronto. Situating such phallocentric deification in so banal a setting, Zaretsky aims to portray male sexuality in a manner, goes his contention, rarely seen in contemporary fiction: neither as a function of some inherent misogynistic aggression nor as something outright comic, some spoof of feckless men led around by their own wilted dicks. By plundering the symbolism of the ancients, harkening back to antiquity and the clarity of a premodern age, he accesses a near-endless well of allusion, both gratifyingly ironic and stirringly, in a way, beautiful—a pursuit any author sincere in their ambitions, he believes, might reap gainfully in exploring.

Read the rest here.