French Literature after Censorship - Elisabeth Ladenson L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 44, Number 3, Fall 2004, pp. 82-93 (Article) Published by Johns ...
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French Literature after Censorship
Elisabeth Ladenson
L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 44, Number 3, Fall 2004, pp. 82-93 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2010.0440
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/264978/summary
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]French Literature after Censorship
Elisabeth Ladenson
IN 1861, SOME FOUR YEARS after the trial of Les Fleurs du mal, the
critic Armand de Pontmartin wrote the following in La Revue des deux
mondes: "Que serait une société, que serait une littérature qui
accepteraient M. Charles Baudelaire pour leur poète?"1 It seems clear that this
was meant rhetorically, that is, not as a question to be answered but rather as
a statement the force of which derives from its being framed in the form of a
putatively unanswerable question. If we were to translate Pontmartin's rhetor-
ical question into a declarative statement, it might read as follows: "Une
société, une littérature qui accepteraient M. Charles Baudelaire pour leur
poète seraient inimaginables: inimaginablement corrompues, elles ne seraient
plus une société, ni une littérature reconnaissables."
Pontmartin, well known for his royalist views and a general conservatism
that extended loquaciously into both political and aesthetic realms, a member
of the Assemblée nationale for some years as well as a respected critic for La
Revue des deux mondes and other periodicals, was a man of his time, repre-
senting one of the major ideological currents of the mid-nineteenth century. I
bring up the views of this now-forgotten critic because it is important to bear
in mind his time—specifically the moment when both Madame Bovary and
Les Fleurs du mal were put on trial, thus inaugurating both modem literature
and attempts to stamp it out—when considering our own. In order to consider
the implications of Pontmartin's question for our time, it is pertinent to note
that it survives exclusively in the guise of an entry in a dictionary of stupidity
and errors of judgment.
First published in 1965 and again in 1991 in a revised and expanded edi-
tion, Le Dictionnaire de la bêtise et des erreurs de jugement, a fascinating,
entertaining, and useful volume in the tradition of Flaubert's Sottisier, lives up
to the first part of its title by including hundreds of solemnly idiotic pro-
nouncements, such as "Un cheval est noir lorsqu'il a tous les poils et tous les
crins noirs" (from the 1937 Manuel de grade d'artillerie lourde), or Jules
Renard's assessment of Nietzsche, "Ce que j'en pense? C'est qu'il y a bien
des lettres inutiles dans son nom."2 Presumably we can all agree—even
Armand de Pontmartin might well have agreed—that the definition of a black
horse as one having a black coat, and that Friedrich Nietzsche's most notable
characteristic was the recondite spelling of his name, are stupid pronounce -
82 Fall 2004Ladenson
ments in any era or cultural climate, transcendental idiocies, as it were. It is
the "erreurs de jugement" part of the dictionary that poses a problem, and by
the same token lends it an interest beyond that of mean-spirited diversion. The
volume is filled with perfectly cogent and intelligent statements that have in
common the characteristic of violating the received ideas of late twentieth-
century Western culture. (As a result, while it resembles Flaubert's Sottisier,
this book reads at the same time like a negative version of the latter's Diction-
naire des idées reçues.) Under the rubric censure, for instance, we pre-
dictably find a number of arguments in favor of that practice evidently
included only because they violate late twentieth-century received opinion,
according to which censorship is by definition a bad thing. In this way the
Dictionnaire de la bêtise et des erreurs de jugement represents a detailed neg-
ative template of our current idées reçues. It is like a collection of fashion
photographs or drawings from decades or centuries past: very amusing to look
at, but inevitably inviting the question of what our own sartorial excesses will
look like in a few years.
One of several errors of judgment under the rubric of censorship in the
dictionary furnishes an especially pertinent example of this phenomenon.
René Fauchois, writing in Les Marges in response to a survey on literary free-
dom in 1923, had this to say:
Je suis personnellement partisan d'une censure. Entre plusieurs, une raison me suffit: j'ai des
enfants qui pourront lire bientôt. En quoi la censure a-t-elle gêné l'éclosion d'un beau livre, même
erotique? Tout ce qu'elle peut empêcher c'est sa vente à découvert, sa diffusion dangeureuse entre
les mains d'enfants ou d'érotomanes latents dont la maladie n'a pas besoin de stimulants.... Et
finalement, la censure n'a pas beaucoup nui au talent ni au succès de Flaubert et de Baudelaire....
Alors?3
We may well disagree with the view put forth here, and bring all the anti-cen-
sorship arguments of the past 150 years to bear on the subject. But can we
really call Fauchois's judgment erroneous? On the contrary, it seems that he
is merely expressing a familiar argument that has, by a strange twist of the
Zeitgeist, come to seem secularly heretical. In fact, underlying Fauchois's par-
tisanship is an assertion that is still common currency: the idea that some
material should be kept at all costs out of the hands of children. We hear less
about érotomanes these days of course, but they reappear in the guise of
pedophiles. The only difference is that it is now unusual, especially in the
United States, to hear anyone openly declare an opinion favorable to censor-
ship. Instead, almost all who express ideas similar to what I just quoted pref-
ace them with a statement to the effect that they are certainly against censor-
Vol. XLIV, No. 3 83L'Esprit Créateur
ship in all its forms, but ... [insert exception here]. That is, one hears and
reads many arguments for censorship in various forms these days, but they are
almost always preceded by protestations to the effect that the speaker or writer
is always against censorship: it is the word and the concept, seemingly, to
which he objects, but not necessarily the practice.4 If Flaubert were to come
back and update his Dictionnaire des idées reçues, it would surely contain an
entry along these lines: "Censure. Tonner contre. Pourtant il y a des limites."
And yet what exactly are those limits, what is their justification, and what
are their consequences? The subject of this essay was originally suggested to
me by the frequent reiteration of questions involving the limits of literature
that appeared in the media coverage of the 2001 rentrée littéraire in France.
One thing that seems clear is that the apocalyptic scenario suggested by
Armand de Pontmartin's rhetorical question has come to pass: the society and
the literature that would accept Baudelaire as their poet are France and French
literature today. In a larger sense, of course, that had already happened in
1949, when the French judicial system saw fit to rehabilitate Baudelaire and
decriminalize the six poems inculpated 92 years previously. As a result, for
instance, Georges Pompidou's 1961 Anthologie de la poésie française—by
virtue of its editor an official inventory if ever there was one—not only fea-
tures more poems by Baudelaire than by any other poet, but among the 43
poems under his name there figure two of the pièces condamnées ("Les
Bijoux" and "À celle qui est trop gaie"). It was not, however, until more
recently that mainstream French literature as a whole took on the flavor that I
am calling Baudelairean. I mean by this a deliberate, systematic, and open
flouting of what used to be called bonnes mÂœurs, in the interest of exploring
the limits of what are still sometimes called mÂœurs tout court: contemporary
sexual mores. This trend, which certainly finds precedents in the history of a
national literature that has been obsessively concerned to épater les bourgeois
at least since the rise of the latter figure during the nineteenth century, is
nonetheless a new one in its present form. The names of Sade, Flaubert,
Baudelaire, Bataille, Genet, and "Pauline Réage" among others can be cited
in objection to what I am describing, but the difference is that those authors,
including the latter, were writing in a cultural climate in which literary cen-
sorship was a constant threat, and most often a reality. As for the last case, the
French government began instituting proceedings against Jean-Jacques Pau-
vert, the publisher of Histoire d'O in 1954, only to abandon them, apparently
because Dominique Aury, author of the pseudonymous work, had charmed the
Minister of Justice during a luncheon. This was two years before Pauvert went
on trial for publishing the collected works of Sade for the first time.
84 Fall 2004Ladenson
As cultural journalists have pointed out with great regularity, contempo-
rary French literature ostentatiously reflects the fact that there is no more lit-
erary censorship, at least not in terms of bonnes mÂœurs, that is, in terms of the
representation of sexuality. Calls for censorship of Michel Houellebecq's
Plateforme (2001), for instance, were made not on the grounds ofthat novel's
frequent and explicit sex scenes, but rather for socio-political reasons, in
response to statements made both in the novel and more particularly in inter-
views (where it is after all the author himself speaking and not a fictional
character, however autobiographical) such as the memorable if inelegant
claim made in a much-quoted inverview, "l'Islam c'est quand même la reli-
gion la plus con."5 As a resuit Houellebecq risked violating the law on the
only discursive grounds currently in effect, that is, through "incitation à la
haine ou au racisme." It was on these grounds as well that during the same
year the original edition of Renaud Camus's Campagne de France was
revoked and replaced by a revised text purged of its allegedly antisemitic pas-
sages. If Houellebecq's book was not in the end actually censored, it did
create a great deal of controversy not just because of its remarks about Islam,
but because it centrally features an apology of sexual tourism. Plateforme,
which was hailed in 2001 as the first great novel of globalization as well as
vilified as a celebration of Third-World sexual slavery, elaborates the same
theme put forth in Houellebecq's two previous novels, Extension du domaine
de la lutte (1998) and Les Particules élémentaires (1999): the idea that love
and even sex have become impossible in the Western world.
Houellebecq is only one of a number of contemporary French authors
whose works, taken as a whole, insistently suggest that, as Freud famously put
it in a very different context, it is "as though the weather were bad in the world
of sexuality." Freud made this remark in the fourth of his five lectures on psy-
choanalysis at Clark University in Massachussetts in 1909, and what he was
referring to was more or less the diametrical opposite of the sort of sexual
inclemency we find described in contemporary French letters. Here is Freud's
assertion in context:
People are not candid over sexual matters. They do not show their sexuality freely, but to conceal
it they wear a heavy overcoat woven of a tissue of lies, as though the weather were bad in the
world of sexuality. Nor are they mistaken.6
The sexual malaise represented in French literature of the past five or ten
years is of a very different sort. Instead of being concealed, sexuality is every-
where displayed and constantly discussed. This remarkable openness, how-
ever, is not accompanied by the sort of liberating effect Freud might have
Vol. XLIV, No. 3 85L'Esprit Créateur
imagined. Instead, contemporary authors take advantage of the culture of lib-
eral discourse about sex in order to describe a world in which sex is every-
where but does not seem to function as it should. To take up Freud's sartorial
metaphor, the climate has not improved, but everyone has taken to wearing
transparent raincoats.
Many of the recent works that push the boundaries of acceptable discourse
about sexuality and that represent sexual anomie in various ways are by
women writing about female sexuality. Some salient examples include Marie
Darrieussecq's Truismes (1997), which takes place in a futuristic dystopia in
which prostitution is essentially the only career choice open to women and
whose heroine spends her time inconclusively metamorphosing into a sow
(thus furnishing the titular pun), and a number of novels by Christine Angot,
notably L'Inceste (1999), the main point of which is indicated by the title, but
which also offers a brief (and ultimately disavowed) excursion into female
homosexuality. One could also list Marie Nimier's Nouvelle pornographie
(2000), Québécoise writer Nelly Arcand's Putain (2002), and Catherine Breil-
lat's Pornocratie (2001). AU these works, however, have been left in the
dust—both commercially and, I would argue, esthetically—by Catherine
Millet's La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M., which became an immediate best-
seller in France on publication in April 2001 and has since been translated into
many languages and sold like hotcakes all over the world. As its title indi-
cates, on the most basic referential level (as is clear from this list, such works
tend to wear their subject on their sleeve), this book presents itself as an
account of the sexual life of its author, a prominent art critic and editor-in-
chief of the journal ArtPress. Winner of the prix Sade, this book is in many
ways reminiscent of Sade's writings, especially in the often soporific cata-
logue of sexual exploits and multiple partners that it showcases. Interestingly
though, Catherine M. shares with Houellebecq's characters a distaste for sado-
masochism, which in her case is one of the few sexual practices she does not
describe engaging in with enthusiasm. The book is also unlike most of Sade's
writing in the almost complete absence of pornographic impetus.
La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. seems to fall into the category of pornog-
raphy in the sense that it is a narrative exclusively concerned with description
of sexual acts and situations, description whose grossièreté would moreover
fit most dictionary definitions of pornography. The book's title is rigorously
accurate: Millet talks about her work, her childhood, family, modem art, her
friendships and her marriage, but always and only insofar as these intersect
with and shed light on her sexual life. When she talks about her writing, for
instance, it is in the context of her much-cultivated talent for fellatio, a source
86 Fall 2004Ladenson of great pride: "Il y aurait peut-être même une lointaine correspondance entre ma façon de peaufiner un pompier et le soin que j'apporte, dans l'écriture, à toute description."7 The book reads like a treatise on the author's sexuality, but it also contains elements of quest-narrative, and its central thesis can be resumed in the following assertion, which she offers in parentheses in the course of recounting her adventures with a man who enjoyed urinating on her: "(tout exercice sexuel plus ou moins original, loin de me rabaisser, était au contraire une source de fierté, comme un jalon de plus dans la quête du Graal sexuel)" (204). This telling parenthetical observation is in fact the only point at which Millet alludes to the Arthurian dimension of her sexual exploits, and it is not quite clear precisely what this Grail might look like or contain. What is clear though is that the book is not pornographic in one important aspect: what is delicately referred to in dictionaries as complaisance in terms of the thrill-seeking reader. The latter's prurient interest is at once fully satisfied in the sense that Catherine M.'s sexual history, preferences, techniques, and fan- tasies hold absolutely no mysteries for us, and at the same time completely thwarted in that the book reads nothing like like a pornographic novel. In its relentless descriptions of partouzes the text conveys an impression of solip- sism, as though Millet were writing for her own pleasure, and against that of the reader; as though the book represented a challenge to the reader to appro- priate her pleasure in the service of his own. She unveils her sexuality, leav- ing nothing unseen, nothing unsaid, and she does so in an insistently exposi- tory, narratively minimalist manner that defies pomographization. The effect is one of non-pomographic sexual saturation, in which the category of pleas- ure is alluded to but left undescribed. La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. is not the only work to apply apparently pornographic means to distinctly non-pomographic ends. This effect, which Virginie Despentes pertinently calls "du sexe qui fait pas bander," is central to her novel Baise-moi. This work attracted a certain amount of attention when it was first published in 1994 by Florent-Massot; it was then reissued by Gras- set et Fasquelle in 1999. The work recounts the week-long killing spree of a prostitute and a pornographic actress, set off by a brutal rape. Despentes her- self turned it into a film, in collaboration with former pom star Coralie Trinh Thi, with pornographic actresses playing the major roles. The cinematic ver- sion was released in June 2000, classified as "interdit aux moins de 16 ans," and, by order of Cultural Minister Catherine Tasca, theaters displayed a warn- ing sign: "Ce film, qui enchaîne sans interruption des scènes de sexe d'une crudité appuyée et des images d'une particulière violence, peut profondément perturber certains des spectateurs." This was not enough for members of the Vol. XLIV, No. 3 87
L'Esprit Créateur
group Promouvoir, a far-right organization in defense of Judeo-Christian
values, who had apparently somehow gotten hold of an advance copy of the
film. They lodged a formal protest, at which point the Conseil d'État annulled
the visa d'exploitation or permit to distribute the film, which was then classed
X and thus could not be shown in regular theaters, according to a mid-1970s
law that effectively prevents films from being shown without legally forbid-
ding their distribution.8 A 1958 law had done the same for books, allowing
publication of objectionable material but forbidding its advertisement, display
or sale in any context that might come to the attention of minors. As Jean-
Jacques Pauvert, publisher of the collected works of Sade and of Histoire d'O,
points out, this was "l'arme la plus perfectionnée jamais fabriquée dans Ie
genre."9 The 1994 law under the auspices of which Baise-moi was taken out
of circulation, known as the loi Jolibois, is the descendant of the 1958 law,
and it applies, in principle at least, indiscriminately to films and books as well,
in fact to any medium:
Le fait soit de fabriquer, de transporter, de diffuser par quelque moyen que ce soit et quel qu'en
soit le support un message à caractère violent ou pornographique ou de nature à porter gravement
atteinte à la dignité humaine, soit de faire commerce d'un tel message, est puni de trois ans d'em-
prisonnement et de 500.000 francs d'amende lorsque le message est susceptible d'être vu ou
perçu par un mineur. (Pauvert, 188)
Pauvert refers to this law as "le chef d'Âœuvre de la censure" (189), specifi-
cally because of its vagueness, which allows it to be applied at the discretion
of the government or of those wishing to put pressure on the government, as
in the case of Baise-moi.
Controversy predictably raged after the effective censoring of the film
version of Baise-moi, which was rehabilitated in 2001 and shown in theaters
in France. I saw it in San Francisco, where it was screened under its original
title, the theater festooned by a banner titillatingly declaring it as "Banned in
France." However Baise-moi had already made its North American debut at
the Fall 2000 Toronto film festival, where it was shown under the grotesquely
inappropriate title Rape Me, which was not only a horrendous misrepresenta-
tion of the work itself but also a disturbing testimony to the ill effects of what
the French like to call Anglo-Saxon puritanism. The only accurate translation
of the title Fuck Me, would be unacceptable under any circumstances in North
America, where Rape Me is apparently a less disturbing imperative.
All this of course points to the problems posed by Baise-moi itself, the
tone and themes of which are well represented by its title. The verdict of the
Conseil d'État that took the film out of circulation was made on the following
88 Fall 2004Ladenson
grounds: "Baise-moi est composé pour l'essentiel d'une succession de scènes
d'une grande violence et de scenes de sexe non simulées, sans que les autres
scènes traduisent l'intention, affichée par les réalisatrices, de dénoncer la vio-
lence faite aux femmes par la société" (Bier, 147). As a result the film was
found to be in violation of the hi Jolibois. One of the striking things about
this finding is that the law in question, as previously noted, specifies "par
quelque moyen que ce soit." In other words if the film version of Baise-moi,
which is relatively faithful to the novel on which it is based, was found to be
in violation of the law, the book should in principle have been taken to violate
that same law. In fact the book contains scenes prudently left out of the film,
such as the killing of a child and his grandmother. Not only was there never a
question of censoring the novel, the controversy, which raged in French
newspapers for weeks, predictably caused book sales to skyrocket. One of the
more diverting byproducts of the scandal was that a large advertisement for
the book, bearing the words Baise-moi in huge type, occupied the front page
of Le Monde (below the fold, of course) for weeks.
Baise-moi is a harrowing film, unpleasant to watch, and almost univer-
sally panned by critics, who mistook it as a gauche attempt to reproduce the
succès de scandale of Breillat's much less interesting Romance X, filtered
through the sensibility of Thelma and Louise; it bears only the most superfi-
cial resemblance to either of these. The novel on which it was based was the
first published effort of a young autodidact who wrote the book while work-
ing in a sex shop in Lyon. It reads as though a committee formed by Gustave
Flaubert, Serge Gainsbourgh and Raymond Queneau had set out to update The
SCUM Manifesto. Written entirely in a terse, argot-filled style indirect libre,
alternating between the viewpoints of its two antiheroines, the novel is at once
mercilessly despairing and filled with a humor produced by the juxtaposition
of high and low discursive registers. It is a bleak Terminator II filtered
through Zazie dans le métro.
In its wild linguistic vacillations and mise-en-abyme insistence on the
banality of cinematographic violence, the film bears a much closer affiliation
to Pulp Fiction, which came out the same year as the novel was published,
than it does to the carefully didactic romanticism of Thelma and Louise, or the
pointless deployment of pornographic tropes in Romance X. It foregrounds
the blurry relation between film and reality, and in particular the idea of
pornographic representations of sex and violence as claimed by these women
as their own, on their own terms, and for their own pleasure, in the absence of
other possibilities. Because the film is already a cinematic representation, it is
less adept than the novel at displaying the extent to which Nadine and Manu,
Vol. XLIV, No. 3 89L'Esprit Créateur
as they cross France while engaging in sex and murder while waiting for the
violent death that is their inevitable and even desired lot, are trying to live out
a film of their own devising, based on all the violent American films they have
seen. Manu, whose character is neatly resumed by the phrase "Une certaine
constance dans le n'importe quoi," has as her refrain the observation that
everything depends on remaining "du bon côté du flingue," on the correct side
of the gun.10
Baise-moi is by far the most "Baudelairean" of die works considered here.
For one thing it is haunted, as is Baudelaire's writing, by the equation of sex
and death. The two women alternatively have sex with or kill those they run
across, and a persistent fantasy of having sex with the gun itself resurfaces at
various points. But Baise-moi reads like a sort of Fleurs du mal 2000 in more
self-conscious ways as well, as for instance when "Enivrez-vous" is updated in
the novel's initial presentation of Manu: "Il n'y a strictement rien de grandiose
en elle. À part cette inétanchable soif. De foutre, de bière ou de whisky, n'im-
porte quoi pourvu qu'on la soulage" (14). Later, when the question of trying to
make a mn for the border comes up, Nadine's response is a melancholic vari-
ation on the "N'importe où, hors du monde" that is their necessary destination:
"Nadine declare pensivement: —Ailleurs, moi j'y crois pas" (184). The two
women's version of art for art's sake is presented when someone suggests that
they commit a big-time robbery: "—On fait pas ce genre de truc. Nous, on est
plus dans le mauvais goût pour le mauvais goût" (187). Ultimately, their motto
might be Baudelaire's aphorism from Fusées: "Ce qu'il y a d'enivrant dans le
mauvais goût, c'est le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire.""
It should therefore come as no surprise that a quotation from "Delphine et
Hippolyte" (one of the pièces condamnées that do not appear in the Pompidou
anthology) is placed as epigraph to the middle section of the novel:
Ombres folles, courez au bout de vos désirs
Jamais vous ne pourrez assouvir votre rage.
Loin des peuples vivants, errantes, condamnées,
À travers les deserts courez comme des loups
Faites votre destin, âmes désespérées,
Et fuyez l'infini que vous portez en vous.
This citation, attributed to "Charles B.," is inaccurate on two counts. The
original poem reads "âmes désordonnées," not "désespérées," although
Nadine and Manu correspond to both these qualifications. More strikingly,
Despentes leaves out a line. The poem reads: "Jamais vous ne pourrez assou-
vir votre rage / Et votre châtiment naîtra de vos plaisirs" (Baudelaire, 152). It
90 Fall 2004Ladenson
is not an accident that the second line is absent from the epigraph. Baude-
laire's concluding condemnation of the lesbians in "Delphine et Hippolyte" is
predicated on the idea that the "chercheuses d'infini," as he terms them in the
other "Femmes damnées," are both elect and doomed because of their sexu-
ality. Despentes's femmes damnées are neither; nor, for that matter, are they
lesbians. Although Baise-moi reads among other things like a love story
between the two women, their intimacy is marked by the fact that they do not
sleep together, since they sleep with everyone else. The line is left out, it
seems, because it represents what is no longer valid in Baudelaire's charac-
terization. Their punishment is not bom of their pleasures; rather, their pleas-
ures are in the end a result of the punishment they have spent their lives
taking. In this sense at least, the Conseil d'État was very wide of the mark in
its estimation that Baise-moi does not fulfill its stated aim of denouncing soci-
etal violence toward women.
The event that sets off the narrative is an extremely brutal scene in which
Manu and another woman are raped and beaten by three men who happen
upon them as they are sitting by the river drinking a beer. The two women face
this situation in different ways. Karla screams and fights back, and is
viciously beaten. Manu plays dead; she offers no resistance and waits for it to
be over, hoping they will not be mutilated or killed. Her response is greeted
with incredulity by the rapists, who say, "J'ai l'impression de baiser un
cadavre." "Elle a même pas pleuré celle-là , regarde-la. Putain, c'est même pas
une femme, ça." Disgusted, the men leave, one saying, "J'ai même plus envie,
elles me dégoûtent trop ces truies. C'est de l'ordure" (55). It is clear that by
defending herself Karla has in fact played her part in a scenario scripted by
the rapists, and more generally by the society as a whole. After the men have
left Karla turns on Manu, saying, "Comment t'as pu faire ça? Comment t'as
pu te laisser faire comme ça?" Karla seems to be more disgusted by her com-
panion's failure to fight back than by the rape itself. Manu responds by
observing that they are still alive: "C'est rien à côté de ce qu'ils peuvent faire,
c'est jamais qu'un coup de queue." Karla, still horrified by her friend's atti-
tude, demands a further explanation, which Manu provides:
Je peux dire ça parce que j'en ai rien à foutre de leurs pauvres bites de branleurs et que j'en ai pris
d'autres dans le ventre et que je les emmerde. C'est comme une voiture que tu gares dans une cité,
tu laisses pas des trucs de valeur à l'intérieur parce que tu peux pas empêcher qu'elle soit forcée.
Ma chatte, je peux pas empêcher les connards d'y rentrer et j'y ai rien laissé de précieux... (57)
Karla just stares uncomprehendingly at Manu, who adds, "Excuse-moi,
j'veux pas en rajouter. C'est juste des tracs qui arrivent... On est jamais que
Vol. XLIV, No. 3 91L'Esprit Créateur
des filles. Maintenant, c'est passé, tu vas voir, ça va aller." But Karla walks
toward the car containing the three rapists, raises her fist and screams, "FiIs
de putes, faut pas croire que j'suis comme ça, vous allez payer pour ça, vous
allez payer pour ça," at which point the car backs up and Karla is run over.
(This is not shown in the film.) Manu runs away, and not long after there
begins the rampage that is the rest of Baise-moi.
Karla's responses to the rape and to Manu's attitude demonstrate that,
however much of a confused barfly she may be, she operates within a tradi-
tional system of values that reserves its greatest contempt for "les filles
comme ça." This is in fact the same value system alluded to by the rapists
themselves when they complain that Manu is not worth raping because she is
not putting up sufficient resistance. This economy of sexual value is also
incarnated by Séverine, Nadine's roommate (who does not know she is living
with a prostitute). Severine's refrain is the assertion that she is not "une fille
comme ça." For Séverine, the category '"fille comme ça' résume correcte-
ment ce qui se fait de pire dans le genre humain" (9). It is no accident that
Karla and Séverine are the novel's first casualties, as they represent the gen-
eral and generally internalized system of sexual regulation that Nadine and
Manu can think of no way to escape other than by engaging in a spectacular
cinematic revenge spree culminating in certain death.
Baise-moi, perhaps more than any other work, exemplifies what Armand
de Pontmartin might have had in mind, had he been able to conceive of such
a thing, when he asked his rhetorical question about a society and a literature
that would accept Baudelaire as their poet. Obviously it is absurd to try to
imagine what someone like Pontmartin would think of such a work, precisely
because that work represents Pontmartin's unthinkable dystopia of Baude-
laireanism ran amok. What has changed since Pontmartin's time though is not
just the threshhold of "realism," the boundaries of the acceptable in terms of
subject, style, and vocabulary, but the place and function of literature itself.
The only reason the novel Baise-moi managed to gain a wide readership
beyond its initial succès de scandale—but again, scandal-driven works have
been rife in French literature for some time—is that it was made into an
uncompromising film which was for a time deemed unacceptable for general
audiences. The film was effectively censored because it displayed what it
sought to criticize. Like the works of Sade, Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover,
and other formerly banned works, Baise-moi, book and film, employs 'porno-
graphic' techniques toward interesting and troubling ends. Despentes's novel
though was left alone, because censorship debates have in the past few
decades taken a new tum. For the most part they have left the forum of liter-
92 Fall 2004Ladenson
ature entirely, moving on to the more technologically pertinent domains of
film, video games, and the internet. We live in a Baudelairean world beyond
the worst nightmares of Armand de Pontmartin, but poems long ago ceased to
be our currency. Books are no longer seen as a threat, because they are no
longer exciting. Literature seems to have become a car which one can park in
plain view in any neighborhood, filled with anything and everything, without
fear of anyone ever trying to break in again.
University of Virginia
Notes
1. Cited in Guy Béchtel and Jean-Claude Carrière, eds., Dictionnaire de la bêtise et des erreurs
de jugement (Paris: Laffont, 1965; revised 1991), 49.
2. Renard, Journal, July 7, 1906, cited in Bechtel and Carrière, 304. These two examples are
selected almost at random from the same page.
3. Response to a survey on freedom of expression in Les Marges, 15 February 1923; cited in
Bechtel and Carrière, 75. Flaubert's Sottisier is included in Bouvard et Pécuchet, Claudine
Gothot-Mersch, ed. (Paris: Gallimad, 1979), 454-76.
4. On the history of censorship in the United States, see Marjorie Heins, Not In Front of the
Children: "Indecency, " Censorship and the Innocence of Youth (New York: Hill and Wang,
2001). On the history of literary obscenity cases, see Edward DeGrazia, Girls Lean Back
Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (New York: Random House,
1991).
5. Interview in Lire, September 2001.
6. Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (New York: Norton, 1977), 41.
7. Catherine Millet, La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 177.
8. See Christophe Bier, Censure-moi: histoire du classement X en France (Paris: L'Esprit
Frappeur, 2000), 125-30.
9. Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Nouveaux (et moins nouveaux) visages de la censure, suivi de l'affaire
Sade (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994), 174. On the history of censorship in France in the 20th
century, see also Pauvert's La Traversée du livre (Paris: Viviane Hamy, 2004).
10. Virginie Despentes, Baise-moi (Paris: Grasset, 1999), 94.
11. Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, Claude Pichois, éd. (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 1.661.
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