April 23, 2020 35
in part. Despentes’s earlier pulp novels
are revolutionary and furious, but they
never aspired to greatness—they are
intentionally trash (and perhaps un-
intentionally heavy- handed). Ver non
Subutex 1 is grander in its ambition, but
it sprawls, the voices of the characters
blend together, and it’s occasionally
sloppy (in one chapter, a film producer
complains that the release of the 2011
movies The Artist and Les Intouch-
ables “has royally screwed up his year”;
in the next chapter, we are told that it’s
2014). The misogyny and xenophobia
of her characters are startlingly aggres-
sive; the book is filled with a bitterness
that doesn’t taste quite as clean as rage.
There is hope that Ver non S ubu tex
will mark Despentes’s breakthrough
in America—FSG has taken on the
project of publishing it in English, with
the first volume released last Novem-
ber and the second scheduled for July.
While the first book hews toward real-
ism, the subsequent two grow stranger.
Vernon’s disparate band of friends
converge in the park where he lives,
and, with him as their unwilling guru,
they form a ragtag utopian community.
He begins to DJ raves where, without
drugs, the pure power of music evokes
transcendent visions; the narrative
telescopes centuries into the future
where, the world destroyed, we learn
that the followers of Subutex have cre-
ated a cult- like religion.
Initially set against the backdrop of
a Paris reeling from the 2015 and 2016
terrorist attacks (specifically, the mas-
sacre at a concert venue), later books
escalate steadily into the kind of blood-
bath that marked Despentes’s earlier
novels. The second volume is messier
than the first—monologues drag and
the tension dissipates—but the third,
where things really start to get weird,
is my favorite of the three. Taken as a
whole, the trilogy is a rather extraor-
dinary act of creation and destruction,
a realistic Paris evoked, transformed,
and torn apart.
But Despentes, with her ear for spo-
ken French, is almost impossible to
translate, and Frank Wynne’s trans-
lation is no better than those of her
other books. Women are described as
“frumps,” “old codgers,” “cantanker-
ous old cows,” “wrinkly old bats”—
insults that, if said aloud, would be
more notable for their anachronism
than their venom. Dialogue as fluid
as air in French becomes, “No way,
you’re shitting me!” In one place, a
mistranslation of “que ce soit elle qui se
charge de” as “she was the one chosen
to” (instead of “she took on the task”)
makes a passage difficult to under-
stand. In reference to writing online,
the sentence “She doesn’t do the thing
of adolescent bad grammar—putting
k’s everywhere”—is translated as “She
refuses to use leetspeak—replacing ‘E’
with ‘3.’” In another chapter, Vernon
observes of a character with whom he
has a single conversation in the park,
“She uses young people’s words....
She says ‘swear down,’ she says ‘on
fleek,’ she says ‘bae.’” (The words given
in French translate more closely to “for
sure,” “that sucks,” and “that’s awe-
some.”) In translating the rich range
of Despentes’s argot (which includes
wonderfully untranslatable French ver-
lan, a form of slang where words are in-
verted, such as “keupon” for “punk”),
Wynne, who is Irish, pulls from hacker
culture, African- American vernacular,
and slang from the north of England in
an unfortunate mixture that undercuts
a book whose greatest pleasure is the
precision of its references.Despentes, in my opinion, has written
one great book, a book that underlies
the rest of her oeuvre, and though it’s
the most straightforward to translate
linguistically, it may also be the most
complicated to translate culturally.
King Kong Theory (Éditions Grasset &
Fasquelle, 2006; Feminist Press, 2010),
Despentes’s intense and personal fem-
inist manifesto, is often referred to as a
“difficult” text by American feminists,
though the exact difficulty is rarely
named. (It is currently out of print in
the US, though it will soon be reissued
by Fitzcarraldo in the UK, in a new
translation by Wynne.) I first heardof it in a hallway at a literary party in
New York City, in the midst of the Me
Too upheaval, when a woman writer
said to me, confidentially, “Well I felt
one way about my rape, but then I read
King Kong Theory, and that changed
everything.”
In King Kong Theory, Despentes
tells, for the first time, the story of her
own rape. She describes it as “a found-
ing event. Of who I am as a writer, and
as a woman who is no longer quite a
woman. It is both that which disfig-
ures me, and that which makes me.”
Despentes was seventeen years old,
hitchhiking with a friend. She had a
knife in her pocket, a switchblade she
was adept at using. She prayed her at-
tackers would not find it. “I am not fu-
rious with myself for not having dared
to kill one of them,” she writes:I am furious with a society that has
educated me without ever teach-
ing me to injure a man if he pulls
my thighs apart against my will,
when that same society has taught
me that this is a crime from which
I will never recover. And I am most
of all utterly enraged that, faced
with three men and a gun, trapped
in a forest from which we could
have never escaped on foot, I still
feel guilty today for not having had
the courage to defend us with a lit-
tle knife.Here, Despentes writes not as other
people speak but as she speaks, with
unbridled brutality. “I am writing as an
ugly one for the ugly ones: the old hags,
the dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the
unfuckables, the neurotics, the psy-
chos, for all those girls who don’t get
a second look in the universal market
of the consumable chick,” the prologue
begins. There is an almost sacrificial
generosity to her voice, a willingness
to say it for you that makes any woman
want to copy out the phrases as her
own.
King Kong Theory is peppered with
references to Anglophone feminists—
Virginia Woolf, Angela Davis, Gail
Pheterson, and Annie Sprinkle pro-
vide the epigraphs for short essays on
the sexual revolution, rape, prostitu-
tion, and pornography—but the writer
who had the most profound influence
on Despentes is Camille Paglia. For
years, Despentes never named her rape
as such—she had been taught that rape
ruined a woman, and she refused to be
ruined. Then she came across an essay
in which Paglia, in Despentes’s para-
phrase, described rape asan inevitable danger, a danger that
women need to take into account
and run the risk of encountering, if
they want to leave their homes and
move around freely. If it happens
to you then pick yourself up, dust
yourself down, and move on.For Despentes, this was a liberation.
“For the first time,” she wrote, “some-
one was valuing the ability to get over
it, instead of lying down obligingly in
the anthology of trauma.” Rape was
a risk Despentes had chosen to take
in exchange for her freedom, and that
made it into something over which she
had agency. Despentes never absolves
men, or minimizes her trauma—King
Kong Theory is blistering with anger,
and so precisely phrased that it feels
an injustice to summarize it. But itacknowledges the prevalence of rape,
and the ways in which we fail to equip
young women to respond in any way
other than as victims. We deny them
fury, or the simple defiance of unblem-
ished survival.
While touring with the film version
of Baise- Moi, Despentes had conver-
sations with American and Canadian
feminists that, she writes, left her
feeling like feminism in France was
a decade behind. As someone who is
half French, I can attest to this being
half true. Many things in France feel
“behind” at first blush—businesses
don’t have websites, reservations are
made by phone, young people still use
Facebook, the list goes on. But when
it comes to social issues, I’ve found it
misleading to measure progressiveness
as linearly as iPhone upgrades. French
feminism differs fundamentally from
American feminism in where it places
responsibility. As #MeToo bloomed on
American Twitter, French women em-
braced the hashtag #BalanceTonPorc,
whose wording was tellingly different.
“Get rid of/denounce your pork” was
a phrase that emphasized women’s
agency. While the American part of
me believes that “Me Too” was more
powerful in making visible how many
women have experienced sexual ha-
rassment, the French part of me un-
derstands the desire to frame the
conversation in the language of action
instead of the language of suffering.When I lived in Paris, I often spent
my days writing in the café on my cor-
ner. Because a young woman alone in
any part of this city is presumed by men
to want company, I wore foam earplugs
in my ears: they served the double pur-
pose of blocking out sound and, when
I slowly removed them, of thoroughly
disgusting the men who approached
me. One afternoon, a tall, broad-
shouldered older white man spoke to
me, and I gestured at my ears and went
back to writing. When I walked home
from the café, going past the numeri-
cal keypad at my front door, through
the second locked door, and then up
my staircase into the small apartment
where I lived alone, I only vaguely reg-
istered someone behind me. Seconds
after I had shut my front door, someone
pounded on it. “Who is it?” I yelled.
“It’s the young man from the café,” he
responded, in a strange falsetto. Had
a neighbor not passed between us on
the stairs, I would not have had time
to close the door. When I called my
French mother, shaken, she said, “You
must have done something to give him
the impression you were available.”
When I called my French grandmother,
she said, “Don’t flatter yourself, he
was after your laptop.” When I called
a French friend and asked him to walk
me to the restaurant where we were set
to meet, he stepped into my apartment
and exclaimed, “But you look so nice
today! I would have followed you home
too!”
I’m not saying that these were the
responses I wanted, or that a world in
which women must look behind them-
selves while walking home is a just one.
But I am saying that, as I write the end
of this essay, back in Paris with my
family, I am sitting in that same café,
at the same table where I’d been sitting
that day, because it is one of my favor-
ite places to write. And that doesn’t, in
any way, diminish my rage. QTHE STEPS
1.I take a step back
and it’s like dancing.But what would it mean
to “return to my roots”?Is that what the flowers do
in September?2.Kids earn money
and love
by being themselves
on YouTube.“It only works
if it’s authentic.”Was it better
when enthusiasms
had objects—such as distant wars
or tulips?Now we pay attention
to attention.Take a step back,
and it’s like dancing.What would it mean
for attention to be emptyas a phrase
repeated too often?—Rae Armantrout