Capillaria
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- Capillaria by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy is a darkly humorous satire on the 'battle of the sexes'.
Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy's fantastic novel Capillaria (Hungarian: Capillária, 1921), which depicts an undersea world inhabited exclusively by women, recounts, in a satirical vein reminiscent of the style of Jonathan Swift (author of Gulliver's Travels), the first time that men and women experience sex with one another.
Expressing a pessimistic, perhaps misogynistic, view of women, the novel suggests that, with disastrous effect, women, who are emotional and illogical, dominate men, the creative, rational force within humanity, who represent the builders of civilization.
The males, known as bullpops, are of small stature. They spend their time building and rebuilding tall, complex, rather phallic, towers that the gigantic women destroy as quickly as these structures are erected. Meanwhile, the females engage in sexual adventures, surviving by eating the brains of the miniature men, who have become little more than personified male genitals.
The undersea kingdom is mentioned in the comic book version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Related works
Capillaria, which purports to be the sixth voyage of Swift's Lemuel Gulliver, is the sequel to Karinthy's 1916 novel, Voyage to Faremido, (Some publishers have released the two novels together in a combined edition. A German edition places them together under the title: The New Travels of Lemuel Gulliver (German: Die neuen Reisen des Lemuel Gulliver). The novels are distinct, however, and have little in common.) in which he is transported from the battlefields of World War I to Faremido. There he encounters men of steel with musical voices and brains composed of a "mixture of quicksilver and minerals." A readily available summary of the relatively rare novel's plot is provided in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.
Voyage to Faremido and its sequel, Capillaria, are presented by the author as the fifth and sixth journeys of Gulliver.
Capillaria is a distinct novel, with a different topic. Science, nature etc are not discussed (or mentioned only slightly), the novel's main topic is the coexistence of men and women. Also the genre of the two novels are different: Voyage to Faremido is an example of utopian-satyrical literature, but Capillaria is not utopian.
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