What are you thinking? Debré doesn't think you are.
Playboy is Debré’s deconstruction of boundaries in fiction, sexuality and class
Playboy is the first volume of Constance Debré’s autofiction trilogy. Told in a series of short and sharp vignettes, the work chronicles her metamorphosis into lesbianism. It features many lifestyle shifts typical to coming into your sexuality: abandoning a former relationship, a change in appearance, sexual explorations. But Debré doesn’t try to persuade you that she’s achieved any feat in identity. The book’s quite unlike other works about sexuality because of its banality and matter-of-factness. It achieves liberation by inverting how we’ve come to expect such stories about sexuality.
A few weeks ago, I had a conversation about the categories of fiction with a former professor. She’s currently writing a book with both fiction and nonfiction aspects. We discussed how in other countries, most fiction-esque books are categorized under a broad “Literature” genre. This was indeed the case when I traveled to Mexico City this past summer. In their bookstores they packaged all their books under the singular genre “literatura.”
This differs from how your local Barnes and Noble will organize our novels. On one hand, I recognize how genres offer a helpful guideline for readers who know exactly what they want to read. But on the other hand, the dependency on genre categories is homogenizing literature. Within genre categories are subgenre categories, the Sarah J. Maas-esque high fantasy, Casey McQuinston-type queer literature, Sally Rooney-feeling books about millennials, etc. Before a publisher releases any book, a little line “For lovers of…” must be printed on the cover. From the publisher’s perspective, this is an obvious cash grab. Success of a previous release guarantees a readership might buy it. But our reliance on pursuing texts packaged in these neat subcategories for enjoyance is numbing our tastes, and we relinquish the literary pursuit of anything risky or challenging or meaningful.
Overreliance of categories leads to all the eye-roll cliches. The gravitation to books repackaged in the same formula inevitably results in the tropes associated with genre fiction: formulaic, emotional appeal, archetypal characters. I am not arguing against the existence of genre fiction. Often I hear people justify their consumption of genre fiction by claiming they want to “turn their brain off.” I sympathize with the sentiment. It’s easy to read something you’ve already consumed before; there’s a reliability. I’ve reread Conversation With Friends and listened to “The Idler Wheel” an ungodly number of times. The trouble lies in how we’ve allowed and encouraged an industry of mind-numbing content.
The central aim of art should not never be to numb our minds. There’s been a recent departure of literary authors who are rejecting fiction. The “literary fiction” genre has long existed as a not-so-covert diss against genre fiction. But so long as it exists within the boundary of “genre,” it succumbs to the same tropes. Authors are taking lengths to depart even further from fiction as a whole. Rachel Cusk (who I have written about previously in my reviews for Parade and Outline) considers fiction “fake and embarrassing”: “Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous.” Then in 2018 she told the New Yorker: “I’m not interested in character because I don’t think character exists anymore.”
In a time when nothing can be authentically itself, why not put yourself directly in the work? And though French writers have been writing autofiction far longer than this relatively recent wave of American autofiction writing, I associate Playboy with the current literary impulse towards selfhood.
My introduction in this article claims Playboy inverts the typical sexuality story. But Debré doesn’t actually care about how others have lived their lives. If anything, she’s repulsed by how they’ve lived. The book is evidence of how she’s solely concerned with her own truth.
This zealous air of ego lingers throughout the book. Debré includes the sexual impulses and desire related to sexuality, but the sense of self related to lesbianism leaks into other facets of her identity: mother, daughter, being a part of the bourgeois class, her career. She achieves the closest realization of her gender in sex.
She struggles against the “codes” of how we perceive reality. Debré identifies certain scripts we follow, as if we’re a piece of rolling fiction every moment we’re alive. For instance, she becomes struck by her own classist snobbery when she interacts with Agnes, a part of the petit bourgeois. The amount of money they own is irrelevant to their class identities. Debré rarely works and barely has money, but her upbringing in bourgeois class conditioned her. The portrait of her class identity becomes stark when she interacts with Agnes: “I always feel a bit like I’m a character with her” (28).
Debré is disgusted by our current culture’s refusal to think. She characterizes the petit bourgeois as unimaginative, and feels embarrassed by her associations with Agnes. Debré describes how Agnes pairs intention and action as illogical: “Maybe she thinks that words contain real things, that reality is only there so we can find the words inside it” (60). The condition of love, for instance, does not exist for Agnes so long as she doesn’t utter it. If no prewritten intention prescribes her actions, she lacks the thinking to connect why she’s compelled towards this dykey Debré.
The portrayal of sexuality reminded me of a quote from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts: “A friend says he thinks of gender as a color. Gender does share with color certain ontological indeterminacy: it isn't quite right to say that an object is a color, nor that the object has a color.” The indeterminacy relates to the inability of anything to occupy its quality besides itself. Only color is color. Sexuality, like color, cannot prescribe an existence. Queer is queer, Debré is Debré. The body serves as the locus of our true desires and personas. Words offer a means of describing the conditions of our internal beings, but it’s false to act on behalf of the terms.
No wonder lesbianism becomes a significant channel for Debré to realize her self-desires. Sex helps her achieve selfhood: “For the first time, I feel it like a sting, all the violence of desire. The desire for women’s bodies… I didn’t know sex could be this good. I didn’t know it could be this important” (91). The act of love makes mutuality a fundamental part of their identities. Think of how even the fulfillment of mundane needs like the aching urge to eat. The self preserves itself through biological impulse. The fulfillment of sexual desire validates the self’s emotional and sexual identity.
But despite the depicted aches and longing produced by the violence of desire, Playboy shrugs it all off. Debré shares my boredom at the dependency on fiction to substantiate ourselves. A departure from prescription leads us to self-alignment. Ultimately, that self was never as big of a deal as our fictions deemed it: “Deep down, being gay means nothing to me, just like being Jewish means nothing to Robert, just like being a junkie means nothing to my father. There’s no substance to any of it. Nothing of importance. Nothing essential” (169).
What might it mean if we freed ourselves of the paradigms of our life? Evaluate your obligations. Approach desire. Approximate it, and then fully seize it. By the end of Playboy, Debré has transformed through incremental changes in appearance and status. The slow departure from her father, husband, child, and career frees her. I’m not saying it’s easy to do it. It’s far easier to not think, to package your tastes and preferences. Like Debré says, “it would have been easier with a man… We leave the question of courage to them. I don’t know when I realized it would be up to me. The thought scared me. I liked it, too. I liked the idea of being the boy” (34). To play a boy means being no longer beholden to any scripts. Instead, Debré pursues pure, personal impulse. She is red, violet, blue. She is gay. Nothing of importance. Nothing essential.