April 23, 2020 33
As Clean as Rage
Nadja Spiegelman
Vernon Subutex 1
by Virginie Despentes, translated
from the French by Frank Wynne.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
340 pp., $16.00 (paper)
Paris at night in 1994, shaky footage on
fast- forward. The camera rushes up the
cobblestone side streets onto the wide
boulevard of the Champs-Élysées. It
turns to enter a Virgin Megastore, clat-
ters down the stairs toward the litera-
ture section, skims over the art books
and shoppers. The lens steadies as it
settles on a young woman in a bright
red employee vest. The video slows.
She stands alone in front of the paper-
back display, hair hanging over her
face, arms tightly crossed, shoulders
hunched. The man behind the camera,
Thierry Ardisson, approaches, and the
woman rocks back on her heels, nods a
greeting. Ardisson is the host of Paris
Dernière, a tour of the city’s nightlife,
sex clubs, and brothels. This episode
is the first time France will meet Vir-
ginie Despentes, the queer punk wild
child who will go on to become one
of the country’s best- known writers
and change the landscape of French
feminism.
But for now, she is twenty- six years
old, working as a clerk at the Virgin
Megastore, which also happens to sell
her first novel, Baise- Moi. Ardisson
grabs a copy from a stack on the table
behind her. We see only his hands as
he flips it open. Later published in En-
glish as Rape Me, the title more closely
translates to “fuck me” (but more vul-
gar, as in French the meaning can only
be literal). It’s a title that grabs you by
the neck as you’re walking by.
The book opens on Nadine, a sex
worker, watching hardcore porn in her
living room (“urine gushes out like
a show of holiday fireworks”). She is
watching in part to critique it artisti-
cally and in part to annoy her uptight
roommate, whom she will, a few pages
later, unceremoniously strangle to
death. The early chapters alternate be-
tween Nadine and Manu, a nihilist with
a thirst for “come, beer, [and] whiskey.”
Manu’s best friend has just been mur-
dered, but she refuses to show emotion.
Instead, she goes out to a bar, bums
drinks, and finds herself in a park with
an acquaintance named Karla. There,
the two women are violently raped by
three strangers passing by in their car.
Karla fights back and the men bash her
head against the ground. Manu lies
perfectly still.
When the men return to their car,
Karla, in disgust, asks Manu, “How
could you give in like that?” Unruffled,
Manu explains her passivity. “It’s like
a car that you park in the projects,”
she says of her body, “you don’t leave
anything valuable in it ’cause you can’t
keep it from being broken into. I can’t
keep assholes from getting into my
pussy, so I don’t leave anything valu-
able in there.” The statement shocks,
yet it rings of hard-earned truth. Karla
turns her rage toward the assaulters
and runs after their departing car.
They run her over.
I read the book with a pencil in hand,
and my copy is littered with notations
such as “!!!! Karla DIES!?”: the dis-
orienting thrill of realizing how many
narrative rules could be broken. Manu
steals an ex- boyfriend’s gun, murders
the man who killed her best friend, and
kidnaps a stranger she encounters at
an abandoned train station to drive her
getaway car. The stranger turns out to
be Nadine, who recognizes Manu from
the pornography she’s been in; the two
find an instant affinity. They are both
on the run from a system that never
protected them and that will now at-
tempt to bring them to justice. The pair
embark on a road trip as hedonistic as
it is nihilistic. This is only the end of the
first act.Baise- Moi is a torrent of a text,
trapped in the velocity of an infernal
present. Nadine and Manu go on a kill-
ing spree—men, women, eventually
a child—not for revenge, but for the
rapture of the performance, the way it
feels to hold the gun. They drink, they
do drugs, they masturbate, they smear
themselves with menstrual blood be-
cause it smells good, they fuck men
for their own pleasure, and they fanta-
size about murder while they orgasm.
Their pictures appear in the papers,
they marvel that they haven’t yet been
caught, they revel in their own ugli-ness, they imagine the headlines that
will announce their dramatic, inevita-
ble suicides. When someone suggests a
murder that might bring them money,
Nadine refuses: “We’re into bad taste
for the sake of it.” The novel is an ode
to the outcast, to deviance as the purest
state of grace.
Ardisson, the voice offscreen at the
Virgin Megastore, riffs on the vulgar-
ity of the book. He asks Despentes
if she likes to fuck, if she has a boy-
friend, if she (like her characters) has
had foursomes, if she is a lesbian, and,
when she says no to all these ques-
tions, how she manages to live with-
out sex. Despentes doesn’t play along,
doesn’t go coy or smile. The bags be-
neath her large blue eyes are already
deep, and her telegenic charm, the
charm that would captivate an entire
country, is already there. It’s a mix of
ferocity and fragility—the vulnerabil-
ity of someone who doesn’t know how
to dissimulate paired with the strength
of someone who doesn’t care what you
think about her. “I could never sepa-
rate her innocence from her rage,” one
of her old friends has said. “Transgres-
sion,” Nadine thinks, as she admires a
model in a porn mag. “She does what
isn’t supposed to be done, with such
obvious pleasure. What’s most dis-turbing is her quiet confidence in ex-
posing herself.”
Despentes wrote Baise- Moi when
she was twenty- three years old. She
was an indomitable child, chafing at
authority, trying to lead her school-
mates in hunger strikes, skipping
curfew to go to punk concerts. Her par-
ents, leftist postal workers who taught
her “L’Internationale” as a toddler,
put her in a mental institution to con-
tain her. She left home at seventeen
and hitchhiked across France, taking
odd jobs to make ends meet. In an early
1990s fanzine, Despentes came across
a story by the experimental feminist
writer Kathy Acker, and the accompa-
nying photo—short hair, red lips, hard
stare—stopped her cold. “I want you to
fuck me, I want you to fuck me twice,”
Acker wrote. As Despentes later put it,
on the blog she kept in the early 2000s,
“It was in that precise moment that I
understood what I wanted to do with
my life. To write that kind of thing,
while being a woman, while wearing
lipstick that could be seen from across
the room.” It was a revelation: not only
could Despentes read Bukowski, whose
books she devoured with near- religious
fervor, she could write like Bukowski.
She could write as a woman, about
women, with untrammeled id.
She wrote Baise-Moi in one frenetic
summer month. Nine publishers re-
jected it. Not even the bookstores that
let you sell your own pamphlets on
commission would carry it.
But a year later, after Despentes
had given up on a literary career, lost
the manuscript, and returned to life as
the ringleader of a squat, a friend gave
a copy to Florence Massot, a young
editor who self- published magazines
about street culture. Massot took a
chance. He formed a publishing house
and printed a thousand copies, then
two thousand, delivering them to al-
ternative coffee shops and rock cafés
from the basket of his bicycle. Baise-
Moi began to make its way through the
punk scene, where it thrilled without
shocking; the book, like Despentes
herself, was of this spiky world.
And then Despentes met Patrick Eu-
deline, a rock critic and former punk
musician who was one of her idols. They
spent three days in a hotel room, “tell-
ing each other their wildest stories,”
he later said. Despentes gave Eudeline
her book, and he brought it to Thierry
Ardisson’s attention. After Despentes’s
appearance on Paris Dernière, sales
jumped to 40,000.
Baise- Moi would go on to sell hun-
dreds of thousands of copies. The
French press hurled themselves at
Despentes, whose rough voice and
tattoos set her apart from the overed-
ucated authoresses who usually ap-
peared on television. They tried to
throw a veil of modesty over her past,
but she spoke about her history as an
occasional sex worker in peep shows
and massage parlors with as much plea-
sure as she’d taken in doing the work
itself. They tried to cast her as the girl
who’d been saved from sleaze by the
grace of her talents, but she refused
the role, insisting that the best years
of her life were the ones before she’d
been “discovered”—the zines andVirginie Despentes, 2014JF Paga