No bed of roses >> There’s nothing romantic about Nelly Arcan’s diary of a prostitute, Putain, which she’ll be discussing this week at Blue Metropolis
Mirror: Putain
has been compared to the work of filmmaker-author Catherine Breillat
and author-editor Catherine Millet (who will also be at the Blue Metropolis),
but you’ve admitted to only reading these contemporaries after
your book came out. Nelly Arcan:
It’s true, I only recently read their writing, since I’ve
met them on TV shows. I read La vie sexuelle de Catherine M., which
I loved, but I find that it is the opposite of my book. Our books are
compared because they have sexuality as a theme, which is really such
a vast theme, and a theme that used to be private but now is quite public.
But in my book, sexuality is conflictual, it isn’t pleasurable.
It’s the sexuality of a prostitute who is sick of sex, sick of
repeating the same gesture. Whereas in Catherine Millet’s book,
it’s the opposite—she always wants the sex, she invests in
it, she can’t get enough. For me, it’s more about the writing.
The moment that the theme overshadows the writing, it’s the wrong
approach to literature. There’s nothing erotic or pornographic
about my book. I’d even go so far as to call it puritanical. That’s
the paradox of the book—there may be sexual words, but there is
no pleasure. Because of the title, people jump to conclusions. M: Why did
you go so far to avoid titillating the reader? NA: Because
it wasn’t the point of the book. There are so many magazines and
Web sites out there for that purpose, that’s not what I was after
at all. There was a time when I felt truly disgusted by the idea that
a man could ever get turned on by my book, I almost wanted to disgust
the reader. M: Do people
assume that you and the narrator are one and the same? NA: Yes,
and it’s not the case. The experience that led me to write is real,
but what I’ve written is not real. Once I started writing, I exaggerated,
deformed and invented things. For instance, the parents in the book
are not my parents, even though they share some characteristics. I don’t
believe in pure autobiography, just as I don’t believe in pure
fiction because there’s always a bit of the writer’s truth
in it. M: How has
being in the media spotlight affected your life? NA: It hasn’t always gone well. I don’t feel very comfortable in front of the camera. It’s too immediate, I don’t like being on TV—I find there’s too much of an inconsistency between who I am and what gets conveyed on TV. I find it hard to talk about my own experience over and over, so I got to a point where I only wanted to talk about the book. But I got to travel and go to Paris where I met a lot of interesting people and so, in general, it’s been great.
Sex and the
single Smurfette M: With
her never-ending sentences, stream-of-consciousness rants and obsessive
hatred for both mother and father, the narrator seems trapped in her
inner world. NA: She’s
searching for the origin of her discontent. She returns to her mother
and realizes that she has been absorbed by her mother’s depression,
her father’s rejection of her mother, she can’t get out of
this vicous circle. She doesn’t have the strength to escape her
parents’ legacy. So desire becomes problematic for her because
she realizes that men want young women, that they want women who aren’t
their own, and that women are not passive, but participate in this dynamic. M: The narrator
refers to women either as whores/“Smurfettes” or larvae (like
her mother). Is this
misogyny just a reflection of her self-hatred? NA: Everything in the book is treated with the same disgust. Nothing escapes her hatred: desire, sexuality, women, men. She can’t see anything beautiful in life. She cannot accept how men and women relate to each other sexually, that her mother was living a kind of death because her husband stopped wanting her and so she became just like a larva, doing nothing. If I had held up femininity against the supposed power and virility of masculinity, then it would have been misogynist, but everything is destroyed. As for the term “Smurfette,” in the cartoon, she’s the only female in the village. She’s pretty and blonde, wears high heels and a little white dress. Every other Smurf has personality traits, but Smurfette is characterized only by the fact that she is feminine, her life goal is to be feminine. And that’s what you see held up as ideal in women’s magazines, to live only for your femininity.
Pedophile’s
paradise M: That’s
another obsession of hers: being a slave to her appearance, her consciousness
of being the ultimate victim of what feminist Naomi Wolf called “The
Beauty Myth.” NA: It’s
because she is in competition with the girls in the magazines. When
she sees another woman, all she can think is, is she prettier than me?
Is she better than me? I think that whether a woman feels this way or
not about other women, it has to do with her relationship with her mother.
Personally, I can’t buy fashion magazines. They show off extremely
young girls, maybe because they scare men less than a fully developed
woman. Like at the escort agency that I worked for, when clients called,
they would always ask for an 18 year old, and I always thought that
if they could ask for a 15-year-old, they would. M: Do you
think the way magazines sell sex is a kind of prostitution? NA: Perhaps,
because sex is suggested in imagery everywhere, with the goal of making
money. But in the book, it’s taken to its extreme, meaning that
the narrator lives to maintain her sexuality. But it’s not the
same thing, because with models, sex is only suggested. For a prostitute,
the sacrifice is much bigger because of the actual act, an undesired
act, that’s excessive and has very grave consequences. I know women
who were prostitutes who didn’t think about the consequences, but
you can’t escape them. It affects your views about women, about
men, about desire, in a big way. M: The theme
of psychoanalysis that runs throughout is also central to your UQÀM
master’s thesis in literature. NA: My thesis is on a text that was written by a psychotic at the beginning of the century, while coming in and out of hallucinatory states of paranoid delirium. I’m fascinated by the mental world, by the world of the imagination. I’ve always been reserved, in class or in a group of friends, I’ve always observed people from afar, so it’s from this vantage point that I write. The book is written from this internal imaginary world. Often, a book is descriptive and it’s up to the reader to interpret as they wish, but with my book, I offer an interpretation and it’s up to the reader to imagine the universe in which it takes place. : Arcan presents
Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, April 6, 9pm, at the Cinéma
du parc. She also speaks at the “This Writing of Lives” round-table
discussion with Phyllis Lambert, April 7, 2pm in the Prince Arthur room
of the Renaissance Hotel, info: www.blue-met-bleu.com |
As
the title hints, Putain (“Whore”), Nelly Arcan’s debut
semi-autobiographical novel, is clearly not a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold
tale. Unlike in the movies, the tale’s narrator is neither doomed
to die a tragic, tear-jerky death, nor destined to be rescued by a wealthy
prince—she’s too real for any of that. No, this hooker, who
uses her dead sister’s name when on the job, is simply trapped
in a living hell and is unable (or unwilling) to find a way out.