What might have once begun as the simple act of branching a plug into a wall socket becomes a transgressive and sublime ritual, as an almost imperceptible character tries to piece together a collapsed life, perhaps believing that what has gone wrong on a human level must be corrected or else natural laws will collapse. As such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam.
Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind.
But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new. The result is a transgressive act framed in measured terms and careful language, at once more beautiful and more disturbing than the usual approach to such acts can be. Here it becomes clear that for Marcus, as for Klossowski's Sade, the aesthetic purpose is not so much to convince the reader as to establish complicity. He binds the inhabitants in such a way that they must watch him, and then settles in the middle of them as he conducts a self-made ritual which will culminate in his demise. After the suicide, the narrator postulates, one of the members of the family will somehow manage to get free of the restraints and flee the house.