Onan

Poet Georges Hugnet’s Onan reprises the biblical story of a man punished by God for refusing to impregnate his brother’s widow. In Hugnet’s retelling of this parable, which was commonly deployed in Christian teaching to discourage nonprocreative intimacy, the character Onan reflects on his decision to disobey God and his discomfort at not receiving forgiveness from either God or his family.

The book’s frontispiece, an abstract etching by Salvador Dali, was made through the Surrealist method of automatic drawing, a technique to override the limitations of consciousness. Harnessing the spirit of Onan’s story, Dali explained that his “espasmo-graphisme” (graphic spasm) was “obtained with the left hand while masturbating with the right hand until blood until bone until scar.”