Nelly Arcan takes no prisoners,
Breakneck, Nelly Arcan’s newly translated third novel (originally published in 2007 in French as À ciel ouvert), secures the late author’s singular place in Canadian letters as a writer who punctures the platitudes of sex. Composed in Arcan’s trademark fiery style, Breakneck sets up a struggle between Rose and Julie, two successful, artistic women who want the same man. Breakneck is an unflinching, often outlandish look at female extremity in the matters of the heart, exposing how female rivals often share the same flaws. This is sisterhood, in Arcan’s formation, “at the bottom of the barrel.”
Arcan’s prose constantly works to point at this grotesque, conjoined female nature. Blond is a “lethal gene.” Rose’s lips, the same as her toxic and depressed mother’s, are a “gash.” Rose and Julie agree that women in the fashion industry (and “Madrid Transsexuals”) have “vulva-bodies,” while their own implanted breasts give the impression of an erect penis. The vagina is alternately a “black hole” and an “open casket” while the clitoris is a “pulled-back teat.” In her violent and exacting prose, Arcan shows Rose and Julie as seemingly inviolable modern women who are, in fact, constantly in need.
In one of Rose and Julie’s epic rooftop battles over Charles — a handsome, successful and traumatized pornography addict — Rose ridicules the fact that all women do is “talk about themselves and reveal themselves, their interior, their emotions. Women and their sentimental truths! Women and their need to say everything!”
Julie realizes that Rose cuts to the heart of the matter: female scheming. Women hate and undermine each other because they are always competing for men. Arcan shows how Rose and Julie, fighting for pitiful resources, dissolve their intellectual capital, pinpointing how even their self-directed sexual desire becomes self-hatred.
Arcan takes this denigration of female potential to its breaking point by leading us into the ring of extreme female debasement: Rose and Julie’s cosmetic surgery, cocaine use, self-harm, masochistic sex, alcoholism, depression, etc. By skilfully constructing a warped cultural mirror in Breakneck where women might recognize the contours of their bodies but find themselves irredeemably lost, Arcan tries to impose a kind of logic: She boldly defines the process of cosmetic surgery, especially vaginoplasty, as changing form (the folds of the vagina) to formless (inner folds swallowed up by outer). Moreover, Arcan infuses the procedure with potential female psychological control not just over men, but over a world on edge.
Yet, as Arcan plays out the concept of the “Ideal Pussy” — Breakneck‘s nightmarish motif — her thinking circles round and round, eventually closing in on itself. For underneath the dominance of the cosmetically altered female sex creep the Amazons, “the female creatures that have an eye inside their” vaginas. This contrast provides the book’s overriding false dichotomy: a sterilized, bald and surgically tightened vagina is diametrically opposed to a female warrior’s lurid and castrating sex. It feels almost impossible to bear these threatening extremes.
Breakneck is a novel in the subversive, French feminist tradition (I am thinking specifically of Monique Wittig’s 1969 Les Guérillères, which imagines a literalized war against the patriarchy) and Arcan’s story also tries to send the patriarchy off to die. In fact, a last minute switch to Charles’ dying point of view highlights the male inability to understand burgeoning female power. Yet, as the book engages deeply and philosophically with notions of female superiority, Arcan seems unsure — I am unsure — if cosmetically altered women are powerful sexual citizens or flaw-ridden, alienated “bitches” who use men. It all feels like an uncertain advance vis-à-vis Wittig’s crusading Amazons with their sun-reflecting genitalia and pubic hair like “a spider’s web that captures the rays.”