Words hurt

She was starting to feel desperate. Not only was she running out of time, but nobody would believe her. That was the reason she was running out of time: she'd put too much faith in the opinions of others and those opinions had undermined her own reasoning. Nevertheless, every time someone had objected to her ideas, some with minor reticence and others laughing out loud at her, she had gone back to the drawing board. She was not going to let a little rejection get the best of her, but it was so, so hard. 

Now there was only a week left to finish her paper. She could count the free minutes she could apply to writing it here and there as well, but that would only increase her desperation, her despair that she could ever write anything people would read. She couldn't let that happen, just couldn't, after all she'd worked.

The paper was on a novel by a well-known Galician writer who had had the bad taste to base it on prostitution, or maybe more accurately, on prostitutes in a city she had refused to name, just left the location anonymous, as if that would give the story a more mysterious air. She - the critic, not the novel's author - disagreed with that approach to the topic, because it just made the women more anonymous as well, and so readers could just write them off (pun maybe intended; readers don't write, they read). 

The critic also was not convinced that the plot of said novel went anywhere. It just kept describing dark, bloody spaces where women seemed to be dying but life in the City kept on. Ironic, yes. However, was it good writing? Why bother with prostitution? After all, more than a few novels have been written about it, some quite illustrious. One could argue that sex workers have been much maligned through history, but that's an attitude the critic wasn't at all concerned with, except in the case she decided to address reader response in her study. She only planned to take the response into account as far as they turned away from the topic of the novel and refused to read it. Which of course would mean that they wouldn't be readers then...

She had found that, despite the mystery of whodunit, people generally thought the topic should be taboo and, even more, so it was implied that a woman who sold her body to earn a living was not worth anybody’s attention, much less concern. What was there to write about? The critic pondered this idea for a long time, then saw there was a light shining at the end of the tunnel. She decided to look more closely.

Could it be that the author knew what she was writing about? 

The critic thought: This writer is on to something. And so she set about looking at theories. She listened to the gaps, the silences, in what was being told. The way the narrative flow was cut up in the same manner as the prostitutes’ bodies were being cut up, with no reverence for the dead or the living. In the shadows of Putown, which is where the dissections were taking place, people kept talking and looking and knowing, but it was if they were all dead, as dead as the bodies of the women whose lives were extinguished for no reason, or for reasons nobody was willing to state out loud. 

This was all on a personal level. The critic needed to justify the killings, right? She needed to explain why the novelist had been serious about her writing. And then it was clear, thanks to Kristeva.

We need horror, blood and guts, crime and punishment, in order to situate ourselves in the world. We need to look at the degraded, dirty, deteriorated, and dismal, as well as the dying or the dead, so as to declare that none of that detritus pertains to us. We place ourselves at a cringing distance from all that classifies as abjection, and we feel superior. We are not all of that, not any of that. We are different, superior. Above all, we are not dead.

And so the critic returned over and over to the novel, hoping to find a point where the author had tripped up, let down her guard, showed the prostitutes in their true colors, not just red, black, and a bit of feeble light illuminating the bodies. It did not work. The bodies weren’t stupid and they weren’t silent. In fact, dead or alive, they appeared determined to tell a story. It was a story of liminality, of living on the edge, just beyond the gaze of society.

The author had given life to a marginal existence, but maybe more than live, she had given it a voice, which could be coming from the dead or the living. The women speaking and whose names are at the head of the fragments of the novel, might not be dead yet, but their destiny is already determined. The speaking, however, does not constitute a narrative nor does it have a plot. Was this really a novel, then? The critic wondered.

Putown or Whoreville or whatever one chose to call it, was only a fiction on one level. On another level, where critics feared to tread, it was a true account of real lives lived in total anonymity. The critic wasn’t sure she was prepared to deal with that possibility, since she was only trained to deal with the reality of literary theory. What was she to do?

There was an alternative, of course. That involved looking at techniques used by the author to tell the story of the whores who meant nothing to anybody except their colleagues and their community. The critic found poetic tropes, intertextuality, influences of writers from distant shores. The poetry and the echoes of other writers should not have been there, but they were. She became angry at how much she would need to read in order to fully comprehend the depth of each blade cutting into a body and she had to fight the urge to turn away, just as readers and non-readers had been doing with the sad little novel.

Sad, not because of its literary merit but because it portrayed a sadness only understandable to those who find consolation in abjection and desperation. Although the only desperate person in this case was the critic, who wanted to get far away from the liminal world of prostitution. She thought about the power that this horrible world had over her, her non-critic, non-theoretical heart ached for the women young and old who had existed - until they hadn’t - in an insensitivity they wore like a shroud, knowing its power of protection.

And then the critic left the realm of the analytical to succumb to the poetic. She had tried to avoid it, insisting poetry had nothing to do with sex workers, but had failed. The author had inserted a hook into the collar of her shirt at the back of her neck, yanking her back into the infected text. She couldn’t help it. The pleasure of the poetry that had seeped into many lives in the novel of Whoresville or Putown or the City Nobody-Wants-to-Name was far too evident. It played with horror’s blood, guts, and decapitations. It mitigated them or seduced readers like a perfume that refuses to be swatted away.

The critic thought that maybe it was worth worrying about and was contemplating giving up on writing the paper. She was already almost out of time and felt desperate. She was also aggravated by the readers who would read a book, even if it were fiction, about such a base occupation. She was almost ready to give up, because she could hear the clock ticking.

Then she remembered the scent of the poetry. It wasn’t the smell of the dead, decaying, and dying, but rather a scent that pulled her into the book. All she could do was breathe, and breathe deeply. She hoped it wouldn’t hurt when she too lost her head. Like the prostitutes.

Was this the definition of despair?