Constance Debré
A body in question.
I’ve read two novels by Constance Debré. Playboy (2018), the second novel to be published in English, is coming out from Semiotext(e) in April, and I’ll comment further then. I’ve written about Love Me Tender (2020) in my most recent column in Oldster Magazine. oldster.substack.com/p/notes-on-another-new-life-12.
I want to rush at you with my thoughts about Debré’s spare and flinty sentences, the way they move through what feels like a series of hallucinations, interspersed with blunt reflections on how people lie. In both books, a woman leaves a marriage and a young child, quits practicing law, takes up writing full time, has lots of sex with women, swims every day, visits her father (a lifelong drug addict with the affect of a tree stump), shaves her head, gets tattoos, spends time with her son and then spends most of her time trying to regain custody of him after her husband fights her in the courts.
Here’s how she sounds from Love Me Tender:
“I wake up, I can’t sleep any longer, often I go home in the middle of the night. I leave so I can read or try to sleep, I leave, so I won’t wake her up, I leave, so I don’t end up resenting her. And the next day I come back. Last night she asked me if I still wanted this, we’ve been seeing each other for six months now, she’s happy with things now, she really wants to be with me now. What do you mean? I answered.”
This morning, when Richard and I were writing, he drafted a piece about “the exhibitionary complex,” a term coined by the museologist Tony Bennett. Bennett is describing public places where, starting in the 19th Century, people in cities came to see and be seen and where they learned the manners of “civilized” middle class citizens. These places—among them museums, department stores, parks, libraries, worlds fairs, etc.—urged social conformity not with punishments but with pleasure and entertainments and with what Richard calls, “virtue policing,” where you learn to correct yourself under the watchful eyes of those circulating around you, instead of through the surveillance operations of the panopticon, that looks down on you.
As often happens when Richard and I write, we had a Vulcan mind meld, even though we don’t talk about what we’re going to write ahead of time and seldom know. When he read me his piece, his notions of “the exhibitionary complex” and “virtue policing” kissed what I’d written about Debré.
Last night, we watched Obscene (Kanopy), a documentary about Barney Rosset, the founder of Grove Press and Evergreen Review. The movie has a bad title, although it’s gripping, and I felt myself following the progress of Rosset’s life the way I had lived the years when he was an important defender of free expression. Rosset was the first to publish Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg. He published The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley, Story of O, books by Genet, and the banned classics Tropic of Cancer and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
It was a period when men didn’t notice that women were nowhere in their thoughts as thinkers and artists—even though Rosset was married to the great painter Joan Mitchell from 1949 to 1952. A woman like Mitchell was considered “an exception.” These men—the Beats and every other male human having a say about what mattered in culture and society in those decades—didn’t consider that women, working from the perspective of the chronically overlooked and underrated, might have new things to say about how the world worked. It didn’t cross the minds of these men because they didn’t think that women, actually, were people.
You get something of this sense of things from reading Debré. She’s so annoying in the way she writes about women, as if she’s not one of them, while at the same time she acknowledges she is some kind of woman. She’s a woman who is not a woman—the same way all women are women who are not women as they’ve been evaluated in the “exhibitionary complex.” By these standards, we are all some kind of fake or impersonation.
The narrator of Debré’s books thinks she’s an exception, partly because she’s also an “aristocrat,” she reminds you every five minutes, in case you didn’t register the source of her independence. She breathes her sense of exceptionalism into nearly every sentence she writes. When she speaks about women—whom she calls girls—she’s spellbound and condescending, and you have to get past this part of her (or not) to see the innovation she adds to the mix of women’s literature.
Her sentences are wily and wry and almost never boring. In both books, she basically writes the same things over and over—and mostly describes sessions of sex with women. You wait for a slight variation in one of her interests, and voila, the writing collects into a Bach cantata instead of heap of broken fortune cookies.
Her candor is never tedious. It’s a bit of a miracle. Even when she’s candid about how much of life bores her. She’s so richly observant about the monotony of love, sex, food, romance, and hope, you begin to feel a little idiotic you aren’t bored by these things, too. Once you realize how rare candor has become—a thing that’s practically gone the way of the Dodo and the Tasmanian Tiger—you can’t get enough of it.
Debré’s narrator theorizes about girls on purpose to be irritating. She must know that theories are sad, newborn birds it’s easy to tip out of the nest. Anyway, here’s a sample of what I’m talking about from Playboy:
“A woman is a very strange thing. Radically different from anything else. I don’t know when I started thinking that. Maybe when I looked at her lying there next to me that first morning, when she was sleeping and I wasn’t. . . . I saw myself, and I saw her, her and all the other women I’m not. The shoulders, the suppleness, the roundness, all the things she has, and they have, and I don’t. I measured her up, and I measured myself up too. Physically, morally. I thought, a woman is something I had never imagined. Something more bare, and more raw than a man. Something perpetually verging on obscene. . . . Men don’t get under your skin. Maybe they don’t have the same capacity to move you, either. But they don’t get under your skin. Yes, maybe it started the first time I saw her naked. Maybe it was later. When I saw that she didn’t want to give me anything. When I felt her dry hands on my body. When I saw her with her children, slowly devouring them, her mind at rest, her heart at peace. When I realized that she prefers things to people, not even the big things, but the small things, the most insignificant things. When I understood there was nothing she desired from the world. That’s when I thought, So that’s what a woman is, soft skin and stupidity, a narrow soul that can’t compare with the softness of the skin, sloppy caresses, a body that can’t return the reverence it inspires, an animal that knows nothing of love and desire, that knows nothing of beauty either, a bourgeois body, devoid of greatness, slightly dirty. It’s someone who cries when they’re being mean. To love a woman, is to despise her. I understood the violence of men. I wondered if that’s how they had always felt about us, if that’s how Laurent had always felt about me.”
I think some of this is meant to be comical, it’s so dripping and over-the-top. I don’t know. Never mind. Whatever.
All the women Debré’s narrator calls girls, as a way to separate herself from them, all the women she seduces are seduced (according to her account) by her blank, sexy-looking face and increasingly handy ways of making them come. Also by spending days with them in bed before she tires of them and moves on.
She thinks girls want her to look at them and evaluate them, which is what she can’t stop doing—looking at them and evaluating them. She thinks wanting this attention is what makes them girls, instead of people like her who don’t give a fuck about how they’re seen. She thinks it’s the biological condition of girls to want this, and, as I said, never mind.
This view of women Debré has copied well from men like Barney Rosset and the male writers he published, an understanding of what women are that has to turn her stomach to be around, as contempt always does. In the migration of Debré’s narrator from girl-child who thinks of herself as not-girl, to female human assumed to be a woman because she has married and had a child, to butch girl-boy mixture (in her words) who fucks only women, she lands on the most conventional and socially acceptable view of women the world continues to enjoy. Good luck to her. Or, as my mother would say, Zei gezunt.
The main thing I want to tell you is that, in the forms Debré writes and in her manner of address that does not apologize, explain itself, or ask for love, she offers a model of freedom for women writers. The freedom she takes to write about women the way she does—and anything else she feels like saying—with the same resistance to “virtue policing” that men claim. (I say this with the assumption “virtue policing” hasn’t taken down all men yet.) Men, for example, who look at women with a kind of impassive and sometimes frenzied state of arousal, while simultaneously seeing them as members of a secret society or an alien species they can’t know anything about. Woman in the work of these men and in the writing of Debré is the obscure object of desire, otherwise known as disgust.
I don’t mind Debré’s disgust as much as I mind the disgust of men. The disgust of men turns my stomach and arouses hatred in me, I mean red hot burning hatred. Also I don’t care about the stupidity of men. It’s beyond boring. Even the rage I feel is boring. It just rises up, and there it is. Debré makes me feel a little sorry for her romanticism. I’m sure she couldn’t care less about what I think, and it’s one of the things I love about her.
What would happen now, if all the women doing imaginative work took a page from Debré and let go of caring about how we’re seen? Having been interpreted all our lives, we are stuck in a spiral of hell circles, where we worry about what the mean girls say about us behind our backs. We work to correct their impressions. We petition the courts to rename us. What would happen if we said “fuck it” to the entire project?
How do we become free the way Debré’s narrators are free, women who, with their flat, mean spits of truth, come across cut off from their emotions? What would it sound like if a woman didn’t give a shit about what anyone thought of her and just went about the business of not explaining herself? What it would sound like is the freedom of Debré, freedom dotted with tedious, ignorant proposals I don’t need to take seriously.
As I write these sentences, it strikes me I have spent my entire life wondering about how I’m seen and arguing against the interpretations of others. What would happen to my sentences if I stopped giving a shit? What would happen to my life and my ability to attract readers? I don’t know, because I’m still too afraid to write many things I think. The sentences I’ve written here about Debré may be a starting point. If you think I’ve fallen in love with a butch whatever, I’m not going to try to talk you out of it.
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I went downstairs to talk to Richard. I said I was a little disappointed in the reception to this piece so far. He said, "The Venn diagram for what people would need for it to be popular would include (1) Concern for French aristocrats fallen on hard times. (2) A warm and fuzzy response to a character with ice water in her veins and contempt for the women she sleeps with. (3) An interest in why Laurie Stone advocates for this figure as a literary model for women writers."
This piece isn't just a commentary; it's a challenge to the status quo and an invitation to engage with literature and creation on a more liberated, personal level. Thanks for sharing your insights and pushing the boundaries of how we think about storytelling and self-expression.