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Fetishizing Sex Writers

Remember when I wrote just a few weeks ago about stalkers and protecting yourself? Recently deceased Montreal novelist and sex writer Nelly Arcan had a stalker. The cops say her death was a suicide, but something doesn’t add up. If I were to play Columbo, I’d point out the article she published in Ici (or, rather, its latest incarnation, 24 Heures) on Sept. 3, with the title “Prends-moi, ou t’es mort.” English translation: “Take me, or you’re dead.”

Sounds threatening to me.

Then again, Arcan had just finished her latest book, and perhaps she was feeling a kind of postpartum depression in that void between the end of one big project and the start of the next. She had written articles, and even novels, that justified suicide as a life choice. Her previous publisher, Éditions du Seuil, was quick to point out in a Sept. 25 article in The Gazette “that suicide was a theme ‘at the heart of her work and of her violent life.’”

Whether or not Arcan’s death is ruled a suicide, the fact remains that this is a terrible loss for Quebec literature, as well as for those who loved her on a more personal level. At only 36 years old, she is gone far too soon.

In the shadows

I didn’t know Arcan, personally or professionally, so I cannot speculate on why she may have decided to end her life. I find the thought itself terrible, particularly as a fellow writer and someone who has often pondered whether the fate of the artist is one of solitary suffering. There is a darkness that shadows many of the great writers, one that is cultivated as much by the media as by the artists themselves, and which unfortunately gives the idea that to be a writer is to choose a life of misery.

In many cases, I fear it is precisely the other way around. Those artists who suffer deeply often turn to writing to soothe their wounds. It certainly seems this was the case for Arcan, who wrote autobiographically about her days as a sex worker in her first novel, Putain, and became an international success because of it. Describing the life she lived as one of violence and pain, she played into the stereotype of the sex worker as a broken woman as much as she rebelled against it.

Arcan made the personal something both political and public, and her own private life was as much discussed and dissected as her novels—something every writer risks when she writes about her own experiences, no matter how veiled in fiction.

Why this societal penchant for taking the content of novels so literally, for wanting to use what the writer has written against her, always digging deeper, wanting more? Where is the line between reality and fantasy, and why do readers so long to cross this line when writers tackle intimate subjects like sex?

Beauty talks, truth walks

The easy way out is to point to Arcan’s physical appearance. She was often described in interviews as beautiful, and her appearance was almost always mentioned prominently, as though the journalist speaking to her could hardly believe someone so lovely could also be intelligent, or sensitive or deep.

What a great example of the exact ways in which we devalue women in our society. And yet Arcan herself played into this role of the “beautiful writer,” with her breast implants and collagen pout. She did not attempt to disguise her beauty, and why should she? Indeed, why would journalists emphasize it so fetishistically?

When writers discuss sex candidly, readers automatically assume that the sex described reflects the writer’s own bedroom activities. This may not be the case at all, but readers develop an attraction to these writers because of their candid way of discussing a taboo subject, assuming that the writer talks about sex because she wants sex. Particularly for young, attractive, modern women, writing about sex is seen as foreplay, no matter how disgusted the writer may seem with the act of sex itself, as in Arcan’s Putain.

Because of the popularity of her first novel, Arcan continued to write in this autobiographical vein, and readers became more and more obsessed with knowing her—or the public image of her—as more of her work was published. Her latest novel was meant to break with that image, to present a completely fictional work that did not touch upon her own life at all.

Arcan completed Paradis clef en main shortly before her death; it seems as though it may now be viewed as the suicide note of a talented young writer who tragically chose to throw it all away. The title seems to mock us all, as we await the release of her final book, perhaps naively hoping Arcan succeeded in finding the keys to the paradise she sought.

(Originally posted at Hour.ca)

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