A few weeks ago when I was entering data into the computer at the new bookstore, I came across the catalogue for Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands, translated into English by Tim Mohr. I was vaguely aware of the controversy – that old staple argument: art or pornography? – but somehow the release of the English translation in Australia had completely passed me by. The entry came with explicit instructions to put a note attached to the title reading “warning, not for the faint of heart.” To me, such a warning is practically an open invitation to explore something further. Call it morbid curiosity, it is just how I am. Although I wasn’t entirely disappointed in Roche’s visceral novel, as is usually the case it didn’t live up to the warnings or brouhaha surrounding it.
In an internet age where 2 Girls 1 Cup, Goatse, Tubgirl et al. go viral, it’s strange to imagine that a novel about bodily functions still has the ability to cause such an uproar. A few years ago, back when livejournal was the hippest, happening place on the internet, there were a number of communities of variations on the theme of TMI, too much information, in which users posted publicly about the bizarre, the gross, the pure abject occurrences of their bodies. You can probably imagine: photos, descriptive passages of the expulsion of bodily fluid in various forms. Maybe, my experience with this online exploration of bodily functions has desensitized me against the provocation of Wetlands, which is essentially the novel equivalent of these online communities
When he’s finished licking and looks up with his blood-smeared mouth, I kiss him so we both look like wolves who’ve just ripped open a deer.
Helen, the 18 year old narrator, has been hospitalized after an intimate shaving accident. The rest of the novel takes place in the proctology unit of the hospital, as Helen is operated on, recovers and ruminates on her body and her past experiences, sexual, physical and emotional. She lusts after a young male nurse, Robin, and desperately wants her divorced parents to get back together. She plans to reunite them by coordinating their hospital visits, and when told that she may be released sooner than expected, resorts to a shocking act of violence to extend her stay. The denouement is beautiful in an unexpectedly cinematic way.
The controversy extends not from Helen’s fascination in her body, its excreta and functions in itself, but that she is a female who openly discusses and takes great delight in her body. It’s not so much the experience of the body that is taboo, but the open expression of these experiences. However, her attitude toward her body is refreshing., even if she does see hygiene standards as a form of prudence. Helen relishes that her body is hers, she takes great pleasure in what it is capable of and what extremes it can be pushed to. Wetlands is a confronting assault to the sanitized female body perpetuated in the cultural imagination.
I don’t know how they do it, but they always look better washed than the rest of us. Everything is clean and carefully styled. Every little body part has been treated with some beauty product.
What these women don’t know: the more effort they put into these little details, the more uptight they seem. Their bearing is stiff and unsexy because they’re worried about messing up all their work.
Well-kept women get their hair, nails, lips, feet, faces, skin, and hands done. Colored, lengthened, painted, peeled, plucked, shaved, and lotioned.
They sit around stiffly – like works of art – because they know how much work has gone into everything and they want it to last as long as possible.
While the controversy that ensued in the wake of Wetlands‘ publication raises some serious and important issues about our relationship to our bodies, the book presents itself as really nothing more than a scatological comedic farce. Still, its ability to provoke debate and dialogue shows that there are still, at least in literature, taboos and borders to be transgressed.
This is going to sound so tame, but the thing that affected me most about Wetlands was Helen’s constant referencing to avocados. I have such a distaste, bordering on revulsion, toward them. It’s a hereditary thing, my Dad is the same. Luckily the library copy didn’t have the avocado cover, otherwise I think that would have been just too much for me to bear.
