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At ticketed
performances in Germany, the audience members were required
to be over-18. People fainted upon hearing some of the descriptions.
It's been called pornographic, shocking, disgusting, outrageous,
gross, engrossing, and brilliant. All this hubbub about a
novel?
These
days, disgusting books, even by popular media figures don't
manage to incite riots or book burnings or rending of garments,
but the literati are having a rather animated dialogue. I
guess that's as close to fantods as we can manage in literature.
Wetlands, or Feuchtgebiete as it's called in
the original German (loosely translated as "a moist, aquatic
place"), is the work of thirty-year-old Charlotte Roche, a
German TV host who started on the MTV-like station Viva. Essentially,
this is the equivalent of Tabitha Soren writing a book about
shit, piss, and menstrual blood, all from the POV of an 18-year-old
girl in the hospital for hemorrhoid surgery. You can see why
it has caused a stir. The unexpected part is that it has sold
500,000 copies in Germany, has been translated into French
and English, and is the first German book to land on Amazon's
bestseller list. Not bad for a book about a girl obsessed
with her bodily functions.
 Wetlands
is probably our generation's Tropic of Cancer, only
with less bannition and fewer penises. Has any recent book
caused such a furor? Maybe The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir
by Toni Bentley, a.k.a. "that anal sex book by the ballerina,"
but did anyone read that? That book is in no danger
of being considered literature, yet here is Roche being interviewed
by Granta. GRANTA, fer crissakes! Roche writes
about the fun of red wings and sharing tampons, and Granta—which
compares Wetlands to The Catcher in the Rye,
J.G. Ballard's Crash, and Germaine Greer's The Female
Eunuch—takes her seriously! This is a woman to be
reckoned with.
Ostensibly,
Wetlands is about what goes through young Helen Memel's
mind while she's bedridden after hemorrhoid surgery. And what
Helen thinks about is her vagina and all the things that go
into or come out of it, her bowel movements, her urine, her
sweat, her pubic hair, and other people's pubic hair. She
thinks a lot about menstruation and how much she likes sex
while she has her period. She describes how she washes out
her colon for anal sex. She picks her nose and eats her boogers.
She's pretty disgusting, but what's the point?
Roche
is arrogant. You can see in the Granta
interview that she cops to never reading, hardly writing
anything previously besides some of her lines for TV, and
intending for Wetlands to be a manifesto (or womynifesto
if you will) about not feeling shame over smegma. And that's
kind of a drag because Wetlands is so much more than
that.
Roche
goes off in the wrong direction when she claims that Wetlands
is a cri de cunt for ladies to stop shaving their lady
parts and to start using vajayjay junk as parfum. As
literature, Wetlands succeeds. Protagonist Helen is
a complicated and sad young lady who covers up her loneliness
with shockingly overt sexuality. She tells herself (and us)
that we should revel in our juices and not stew in them—go
without showering, let our armpit hair grow—but what
landed her in the hospital is an infection she got from trying
to shave around her hemorrhoids. Helen has no idea what she's
doing. Her obsession with sex and bodily smells and fluids,
as well as her desire to be the most outrageous person in
the room at all times, has led her to an odd disconnect between
her body and her mind since almost the entire book consists
of Helen thinking and philosophizing to pass the time in the
hospital; she's all in her head but only thinking about her
bod. Helen, with all her talk of feces and urine and blood,
clearly desires to regress to an infant state, and this is
also obvious from the fact that she fantasizes that her parents
will get back together. She longs for a time when her family
was together, but the only way for her to get there is by
not cleaning herself and acting out sexually.
 Natch,
the U.S. backlash has been notably different from the media
sturm und drang seen in the European press. Feminist
author Sallie Tisdale, writing in The New York Times,
was all like, "C'mon! Women make actual tampon art. Why y'all
acting like this is such a big deal!" That's the deal with
our American culture. As Jane's Addiction famously said, nothing's
shocking. At least to some of us. I have to admit that this
was going to be my take also. For women who read Michelle
Tea and Lydia Lunch, this is no biggie. But let's face facts—tampon
artists and graphic novels about prostitutes don't get the
attention this book has gotten. Bookstores do not prominently
display erotica anthologies, if they even carry them.
Tisdale
got herself into a tizzy about Roche saying in an interview,
"Men have this whole range of different names for their sexual
organs, while us women still don't really have a language
for our lust." Tisdale, who makes her living finding stuff
about women and sexuality and writing about it, thinks that
all ladies know about a mythological bookstore section that
devotes itself to the "extensive literature of women's sexuality."
Since I happen to know a few people who are writers of this
literature of women's sexuality and I know how difficult it
is to find their books in bookstores in NEW YORK FUCKING CITY,
smut capital of the United States, I have to call dooky on
Tisdale's claim. While complicated, unusual, and overtly sexual
books by and about women are not new, they're not common,
they're not popular, and they're not part of the conversation
about books outside of the rarified circles of feminist theorists
and bluestockings.
One of
the major themes in the book is that nice girls don't talk
about these things, even with each other. Not even with their
mothers! I know this to be true in my case. Sure, we had the
talk and sex ed classes, but there's stuff people just don't
talk about. Me and my stupid BFF Melpomene, for example, never
talked about most of the stuff that Helen tells readers, but
Mel knows what almost all of my boyfriends have looked like,
if you know what I mean.
If nothing
else, Wetlands opens up the possibility of having intimate
conversations about things women hadn't dreamed of talking
about before. I would like to start a book discussion group.
Not about the book, but about our periods.
(July,
2009)
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