This Macabre, Whirling Orgy: On Márcia Barbieri’s “The Whore”
Márcia Barbieri, transl. Adrian Minckley | The Whore | Sublunary Editions | March 2023 | 162 Pages
“A huge vague vulva casts a shadow over my head,” says the narrator of Márcia Barbieri’s The Whore. This great vulva, “a concave spherical mirror,” reflects those who approach it in a distorted and enlarged fashion, its supplicants made grotesque by its vacuous permissiveness. But it not only reflects; it is a negative space, “a black hole, antimatter, ancestral nothingness.” It devours desire and transmutes it, annihilates it through its inexorable gravitational pull. The vulva is indiscriminate—everything is welcome, everyone can cum.
But this is not how we enter, as it were, The Whore. We enter through a short prelude, told in one of the novel’s sparsely deployed footnotes: “I spied men sucking desperately (or was it hungrily?) on primates’ phalanges, they were in a circle. A bonfire heated the crossed-eyed night,” says Anuncia, the novel’s narrator as well as the titular “whore.” Here we feel the confluence of desire and consumption, the loose and permeable distinction between meat and flesh. This is the beginning, and from here Anuncia narrates, in staccato prose and cryptic and grotesque aphorisms, like a gutter-tongued Lispector, encounters with her lovers, her memories of her mother, the birth of her son, and finally, her startling and bizarre “virgin” birth of a jarred fetus.
To explain The Whore too much by way of plot would be confusing. Scenes in the novel blend into one another, punctuated by chilly passages of nothingness. Time dilates and collapses, and space follows suit. The book, which loosely chronicles Anuncia’s attempts to survive and make sense of the new state of the world in which everyone is now condemned to live, follows in a stream of consciousness, but that stream flows from some unfixed point. It is a given that things happen, but it is Barbieri’s formal adventurousness and audacious takes on sexuality which turn a bleakly funny erotic picaresque into a meditation on the twin human capacities for desire and disaster, and which make The Whore such an exciting novel.
The Whore takes place against the backdrop of a world that has suffered a terminal catastrophe, the result of a sparsely-detailed but all-consuming war. Vast lands have been laid to waste, food and medicine are scarce—though somehow cocaine remains reasonably accessible—and aside from a few scattered and desolate towns, people rove the wastes until they die from disease, hunger, thirst, exposure to a hostile climate, and murder. “The population,” we are informed, “dropped almost to zero.”
In the midst of this catastrophe, almost all social codes and taboos have collapsed as well. We see cannibalism, the consumption of dogs and monkeys, the torture of animals—a buffet of horrors. “Our tendency towards indignation is comical,” states the whore. “It’s almost a memorized prater, a litany, but there’s no real indignation, it’s an apparatus, we have no real capacity for scruples.” In the new post-apocalyptic world, the litany has been lost, the prater silenced. Catastrophe discards everything into the same junk pile of existence; which is to say, catastrophe turns everything into junk.
It follows that this would apply to sexual mores as well: this is, of course, a novel about and narrated by “a whore.” Anuncia’s name is a joke—as in the annunciation, as in virgin birth—an early example of Barbieri’s current of dark humor. Necrophilia, a lover covered with a horrific foul smelling scaly rash all over his body, marathon sex in a bathroom covered in mold and slime and lizards, two instances of just-barely-sublimated incest—everything is fair game for Anuncia.
After having sex with Virgilio the poet, the man with the rash, Anuncia admits that “I went to take the money but quickly realized how ridiculous it was, I charged out of sheer force of habit, money was no good anymore.” The title “sex worker” would not be appropriate, both tonally and descriptively, because Anuncia does not seem to work at all—rather, “whore” is a pastime. Anuncia fucks for pleasure, and if not for physical gratification then just for the fuck of it. “Whore,” then, is yet another of Barbieri’s jokes: As with Anuncia’s name, her title also carries forward the novel’s funhouse New Testament motifs. “Whore” alludes to The Whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelations: a woman “full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication” seated upon “scarlet colored beast, full of names of blasphemy.” She is a personification of evil; a stand-in for the kingdom whose name she bears. But whereas the Whore of Babylon carries a golden cup, wears splendid clothing, and is both magnificent herself and a representation of the magnificent and sinful city of Babylon, Anuncia is resolutely human. She is covered in stretch marks and ingrown hairs, prone to herpes outbreaks, and “works” in a physically degraded and wretched world, enduring all manner of abjection.
But “whore” is also more than a joke. It’s a mission statement of sorts; a condition explored throughout the book, which is marked by a logic of exchange in which everything is rendered qualitatively identical. It’s all good, so long as you can pay. Payment here is also a symbolic ritual, different from the exchange of money as we understand it. It is an induction into the new world, the world where all desire has been let loose, where “all of us are fucked and some more fucked than others.”
It’s tempting to see echoes of the Marquis de Sade in these passages. Like Anuncia, Sade’s characters, particularly in The 120 Days of Sodom, have a twisted sense of compassion. “I advocate for monsters,” Anuncia says, “I perform vivisections on rabid dogs, I like to watch their hearts pumping. I don’t believe in first-time offenders.” But Barbieri and Sade reflect two radically different, even opposing worldviews. Sade remains, contrary to his popular image, “a great puritan” (as Angela Carter once called him). For him, sex is a means to an end, and desire finds its center in scopophilia: a pleasure in looking and in turning the gazed-upon into an object. This is reflexive as well, as Sade takes pleasure in being looked at in disgust as he stages the scene of transgression—the transgression of all moral codes, on the way to their apotheosis in the dehumanization of the other. Yet one cannot access the pleasure of dehumanization unless one accepts the concept of human dignity; as Simone de Beauvoir put it, “To find pleasure in humiliating flesh, or exalting it, one must valorize it.”
The Whore, however, begins from a different presupposition: the essential absence of human dignity. In the world of the novel, humanity is already debased—there is no possibility of dehumanization because humanity has, through the disaster of war, already been stripped of its dignity altogether. In this context the Sadean equation is moot: there is no such thing as crime, and this absence opens the way for a polymorphous eroticism, one that is indiscriminate as opposed to refined through a kind of gourmet sensibility.
When we first meet Virgilio he is covered in “putrefied flesh”—no perfume “could cover up the carnage.” When he shows up on Anuncia’s doorstep as a corpse, she proceeds to clean his stinking flesh and notices that his “dick was still as hard as ever” as a result of rigor mortis. She begins, grotesquely, “riding the corpse,” from which she cannot get down “until [she] touched [her] clit and waited to climax.” The cadaver is a site of pleasure as long as it can be fucked. In the generalized catastrophe, life and death coexist, the living are the living-dead, and even the identity-disturbing limit of the abject—the cadaver—has lost its potency. Death is no barrier to pleasure.
Wounds and blood are no barrier either. Describing sex with the Philosopher—Anuncia’s partners are primarily referred to by their “professions”—Anuncia says “I make a cut on my thigh and stick your fingers in—I want you to see that reality is dirty, obscene. I want you to dig around in my limb’s rot…” The world that has fucked you into oblivion can be fucked in turn; the blood that seeps from the wounded leftovers of humanity is just as wet as anything else. The emptiness, or bottomlessness of Anuncia’s desire and the abyssal state of the world make her capable of eroticizing the abject, erasing the disturbing distinction between I and not-I, a kind of return to human prehistory where the border between us and nature (not-us) was not so defined.
The one unassimilable thing Anuncia finds amid all of this abject baseness is her own son. The fantasy of oblivion running through the novel is vitiated by his appearance. Anuncia first meets Flamenca, a woman with a strange accent, who smells of herbs and works as the town’s midwife and abortionist, at the abortion and delivery clinic. Anuncia is at first repulsed by Flamenca’s squat figure, her accent, her overly familiar manner, and her chain smoking. But then she notices her smell, a smell that recalls her mother, an erstwhile maniac, herbal healer, and chain smoker. She recalls an earlier digression: “Who can swear they never thought of stabbing and fucking their mom?” Anuncia then notices the pack of cigarettes Flamenca keeps between her breasts, and suddenly feels the need for a smoke, a habit that previously disgusted her:
I didn’t understand it, but it was like that area of her body had me hypnotized… for the first time in my life I felt the urgent need to take a pull, but not just any pull, not from just any pack, and not just any cigarette, it had to be that one and more than that, it had to be damp with sweat from her cleavage, my tongue dragging along her tits.
There is more than just the oedipal connotation here: there is the desire to suck smoke from the breast instead of milk: the transmutation of the mother into the anti-mother, the abortionist—an attraction to the idea of having never been born at all. “It’s better to never be born,” Anuncia says, “than to live in the howl.”
Anuncia pulls the cigarette as an act of seduction, the two proceed to fuck on the surgical table, and then the procedure begins. But something is wrong, the boy will not come out. Flamenca leaves a vacuum inside Anuncia’s womb for weeks, but the boy, immovable, clings to life. When eventually he is born, instead of crying he gives a toothless grin. Anuncia despises him, shows him no sweetness, and leaves his rearing and feeding to Flamenca. This boy too is abject: the living being that was once inside the mother, incorporated of her body, jettisoned into the world. The boundary has been crossed, the border reified in the form of the child (so too for the child). The mother is not her child, though she was, in a sense. As if the child is blood, pus, excrement, bile—animated waste, the abject come to life.
For Anuncia, it’s only the possibility of love, of an experience beyond exchange or immediate carnality, that provokes true horror. It is the intrusion of the old world, not only in the form of the institution of marriage, but also in the form of futurity, of the creation of foundational connection. Anuncia at one time states that “the illness carries the seed of its cure,” but, like a true dialectician, she suspects that the opposite is also true. Look at the world, look at what the cure—is it love?—has wrought.
The fantasy of oblivion which love obviates comes as a response to the real oblivion of the world in which Anuncia lives. “There is,” Georges Bataille writes of sexual desire, “an element of disorder and excess which goes as far as to endanger the life of whoever indulges in it.” In The Whore, we see this in Anuncia’s various episodes of nullity, whether the endless, all consuming sex-marathon in the bathroom with the Machinist, or the void-like captivity immediately after, both of which are something like death—la petit mort, only not so petit. The “element of disorder and excess” is not only a diagnosis of desire taken past the reality principle but also a diagnosis of the world. This world is one which in its very form—pure disorder and excess—becomes the backdrop on which the erotic is enacted in such a way that the erotic and the disaster become one in the same. There is no redemption from the disaster in the erotic; on the contrary, this macabre, whirling orgy is only possible because of the disaster.
Should it be any wonder, then, that the thing Anuncia seems to distrust above all is language? If Paul Celan responded to the death-making of the German language after the Holocaust by forging a new way of writing from its corpse, Anuncia’s response to catastrophe is to turn to the body itself. Language struggles to keep up: Anuncia walks “over the morning’s blood femur,” her vulva is a “red mollusk without a roost scarfing the white gunk down,” the Philosopher “looks to the sky and tallies the moon’s stretch marks. He searches for the universe’s clit.” All returns to the body; the world is a body waiting to be fucked, a body bleeding and decaying. Barthes wrote that language is a skin, trembling with desire. Fuck that! cries The Whore, skin is skin, fucking is fucking, and talking is emphatically not fucking; language “pushes me outside the world, casts me as a public good.” The Philosopher and the Poet each, in their own way, serve as counterpoints to Anuncia’s incarnated desire. The Philosopher seeks to explain it, to intellectualize it: “Our bodies are deceptive, my dear, they distract us from the true climax,” he says. But neither the Poet nor the Philosopher “understood that words are dead or that a tongue in your crotch is worth more than a whole grip of worthless lexicon.”
It’s wishful thinking, however, trying to break free of language. This is a novel and language is a necessity. And what’s more, it is a novel of aphorisms, of surprising and potent metaphors, and so maybe the Sadean dialectic reenters the scene: Anuncia is no great believer in moral law or chastity—they no longer exist in any event—but perhaps, if she is reaching for something to transgress, that one external thing that motivates her desires, it is language itself.
“All men, all of them, have tried to give some boundless importance to words, make them more potent than action, but the truth is that instinct and desire rein supreme,” says Anuncia. Barbieri has written a text which takes the mind-numbing Sadean impulse for the mere cataloging of crimes and restores to it a self-conscious literariness. It is simultaneously impotent—language is always catching up to the horrors enacted by humanity—but also here, in its immediate closeness to those horrors, given a restored vitality.
Just before the Poet dies, he sets out to write the first epic of the new era. When, after his death, Anuncia finally reads what he has created she finds only this: an epigraph—“The word is a grunt when compared with the silence of God”—and then a thousand pages consisting only of various iterations of “OMMMMMMMMM.” The Philosopher said “the world will begin again by narrating its destruction.” The Poet begins the process, the sacred syllable, a meditation to drown out the noise of language. Sure, but it is language nonetheless—in the beginning was the word. “Our desperation begins in the ear,” Anuncia says, “it spreads our cries across the threshold.”