From fairy tales to the battle of the sexes, Edition-Originale explores the other 364 days of womanhood and the strategies employed by female authors to envision a world different from that of the medieval poet Christine de Pizan, who wrote: "The existence of most women is harsher than that of slaves among the Saracens."
Rare first edition comprising a fine series of 40 two-tone lithographs by Yuko Watanabe depicting Japanese types, scenes of traditional life, costumes, and more: Ronin, hara-kiri, samurai, the attack on Shogun Nobunaga, a geisha’s visit, young women paying a call, a game of go...
Not in Colas, nor Hiler & Hiler; lacking from the Bn; not in Nipponalia or Cordier. Wenckstern, I, p. 228 (gives the Yokohama address, undated, and mentions two volumes, the second—of which no trace could be found—containing 25 plates).
Bound in full beige cloth, smooth spine without lettering, lithograph mounted on the upper cover; twentieth-century binding.
Minor tears affecting three remargined plates and the final leaf (backed); a few small spots of foxing; small green ink stain touching most of the prints in the margin only, not affecting the image.
Autograph letter signed by George Sand, addressed to her friend Stéphanie Bourjot, daughter of Étienne Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire. Four pages written in blue ink on a folded bifolium bearing George Sand’s monogram. Fold marks as usual.
This letter was partially published in Correspondance, vol. XIV, no. 7846.
A beautiful and partly unpublished letter in which George Sand discusses Marie Pape-Carpantier’s book and the education of her young maid, Marie Caillaud : « It is an excellent book, which I use to teach my young maid to read. She is extraordinarily intelligent, and this book opens her mind to all sorts of sound ideas. Educating this 18-year-old child—who, six months ago, was only two in terms of knowledge—has been a unique experience. She now seems her age, yet retains all the innocence of childhood. So every evening, we read Marie Carpentier’s little stories, and I enjoy them just as much as my pupil does. »
Marie Caillaud was only eleven years old when George Sand hired her to wash dishes and tend to the chicken coop, a task that earned her the nickname “Marie des poules.” But the writer soon recognized the young peasant girl’s intelligence, appointed her as housekeeper, and by 1856 included her in the performances of the Nohant theatre. Her education is first mentioned in early 1858, notably in a letter from George Sand to her friend Charles Duvernet: « During my winter evenings, I took on the education of little Marie, the one who acted with us. From a dish washer, I immediately raised her to the rank of housekeeper, a role for which her excellent mind makes her perfectly suited. The greatest obstacle was that she couldn't read. That obstacle no longer exists. In thirty half-hour lessons—fifteen hours in a month—she mastered all the difficulties of the language slowly but perfectly. This miracle is due to the admirable Laffore method, which I applied with the utmost gentleness to a perfectly lucid mind. » (16 February 1858)
Marie Caillaud would go on to become a notable actress at Nohant and move in the circles of George Sand’s illustrious guests: Delacroix, Gautier, Dumas, Prince Jérôme Bonaparte…
But Marie was not George Sand’s first pupil. All her life, Sand was deeply interested in pedagogy and taught not only her children and grandchildren, but also members of her household staff and local peasants.
This letter is a remarkable testament to her hands-on approach as a teacher, always seeking new and effective ways to impart knowledge : « What is lacking—or at least what I haven’t found—is a true reading method. I’ve devised one for my own use (never written down), based on Laffore’s and adapted to my own ideas. But what I haven’t found in primers for children or public school manuals is a well-crafted exercise book that teaches reading logically while also making sense of spelling. Does such a book exist? » Far from a casual activity, education was central to George Sand’s worldview. As Georges Lubin noted, her aim was not merely to teach literacy. Taught to write by her own mother at the age of five, Sand understood from an early age that the only path to equality lay through intellectual emancipation: « She understood very early on that the only road to equality was intellectual emancipation. The ignorance imposed upon women was the root of their servitude. The ignorance imposed upon the working classes underpinned class inequality. Education was the key to opening locked doors. » (« George Sand et l'éducation » in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 1976)
A beautiful and important testimony to George Sand’s tireless struggle for the emancipation of women through education.
First edition on ordinary paper.
Half red morocco over marbled paper boards, spine lightly sunned in six compartments, marbled endpapers and pastedowns, covers and spine preserved, top edge gilt.
One top corner very slightly rubbed.
Handsome autograph inscription by Charles Maurras : "A madame Colette Willy, en souvenir de la cocarde."
A substantially cropped print bearing the same penciled number on the back of our photograph (11214), is in the Reutlinger archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Album Reutlinger de portraits divers vol. 53, p.3). We have been unable to find any other examples of this photograph in other public collections. A similar photograph belatedly dedicated to Maurice Chevalier went on sale in 2008.
A beautiful, sultry shot of Colette probably taken the year of her banned dance show "Rêve d'Egypte" at the Moulin Rouge where she shared the bill – and a scandalous kiss – with her cross-dressing aristocrat lover Missy.
"Colette was a nude dancer, which at the time meant that she [...] draped herself in vaporous veils, concealing part of her anatomy under animal skins" (Paula Dumont). Colette had already used animal skins, hugging her figure in this picture, as a sensual costume in Charles Van Lerberghe's Pan, accompanied on stage by Lugné-Poe and Georges Wague. This was the first time anyone had dared to go without a flesh-colored body suit. Justifying her choice, she went on to say: "I want to dance naked if the body suit bothers me and humiliates my plasticity".
At the time of this photograph, in 1907, Colette was performing in countless shows, following her debut two years earlier in Nathalie Clifford Barney's Sapphic Salon where Mata Hari also danced. For Colette, dance was synonymous with emancipation in more ways than one - as a means of sustenance and liberation of her body which finally belonged to her after her separation from her abusive husband Willy in 1906. Her undulating, almost gestureless dance was linked by contemporary critics to that of Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan; her greatest success remained "La Chair", a risqué mime show she performed two hundred times in Paris and was subsequently produced with a new cast in New York's Manhattan Opera House. It was also in the halls of Parisian dance venues that Colette flaunted herself freely on the arm of her lovers. Her scandalous union with Missy, the virile Marquise de Morny who accompanied her on stage in male costumes, contributed to the fame of her performances.
This is probably the rarest photograph of Colette taken by Reutlinger who also photographed her draped in Grecian style or wearing her costume from "Le Rêve d'Egypte".
A rare visual testimony to a revolution in dance costume brought about by Colette, a key figure in twentieth-century artistic and literary Paris.
Edition of wich no leading copies exists.
Binding of the editor in full black fabric.
Iconography.
Slips slightly warped in margins, the book that had stayed in a damp place previously, otherwise nice copy.
Rare autograph signed Kenzo Takada Gilles Brochard.
First edition following the unobtainable mimeographed version produced by the author.
Inevitable minor wear along the edges of the covers and spine, restoration to the upper left corner of the front cover, newspaper clipping laid in. Barnes & Noble price sticker affixed to the front cover.
Commentary by Paul Krassner.
This incendiary pamphlet, issued by the marginal and modest Olympia Press, newly re-established in New York, was printed in only a small number of copies.
Gender discrimination, hate speech and incitement to genocide, a violent and unrepentant attempted murder of one of the most celebrated artists of the twentieth century, the advocacy of anarchic violence in a grotesque burst of laughter, the elimination or humiliation of half of humankind...
In her misandrist pamphlet, Scum Manifesto (« Society for Cutting Up Men »), Valerie Solanas shows no empathy, grants no room for moderation or reconciliation, and makes no exception in her plan to eradicate men save for « the men who methodically work towards their own elimination [...] [such as] the transvestites who, by their splendid example, encourage other men to demasculinize themselves and thus render themselves relatively harmless ». The first manifesto of radical feminism is not addressed solely to women, but also embraces in its struggle the sexual identities cast aside by the phallocratic society Solanas sought to destroy with unprecedented rage for such a cause.
« Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex. »
In 1971, Emmanuèle de Lesseps, taking on a French version, translated this opening as:
« Vivre dans cette société, c'est au mieux y mourir d'ennui. Rien dans cette société ne concerne les femmes. Alors, à toutes celles qui ont un brin de civisme, le sens des responsabilités et celui de la rigolade, il ne reste qu'à renverser le gouvernement, en finir avec l'argent, instaurer l'automation à tous les niveaux et supprimer le sexe masculin. »
At once an insurrectionary political programme, a paranoid delirium and a poetic text, Solanas's manifesto unsettles by refusing to be confined to any single genre—serious, utopian, or satirical. The real question posed by such a work may not be one of morality, but of the author's right to claim excess. Published after her attempted murder of Andy Warhol, Solanas’s manifesto is the literary and literal assertion that men hold no monopoly on violence.
Though presented as an urgent cry of anger, SCUM was in fact the product of two years of thought and writing before Solanas, lacking a publisher, mimeographed it herself in 1967 and sold it on the street (1 for women and 2 for men), meeting no success.
Seeking recognition, Valerie Solanas moved in New York’s underground scene and became close to the pope of counterculture, Andy Warhol, frequenting the Factory. Unable to have her manifesto published—« the best piece of writing in all of history, which will be surpassed only by my next book »—Solanas turned to her first literary work: Up Your Ass, a play she hoped her mentor would produce. Unfortunately, Warhol rejected the piece and lost the only manuscript. In compensation, he offered her roles in two of his films. Dissatisfied with this minor artistic recognition, on 3 June 1968 she fired three shots at Warhol, gravely wounding the artist and achieving instant notoriety. She made no secret that her murderous act, more than a personal vendetta, was above all a political necessity and an artistic means to secure circulation of her work. Questioned on her motives, she offered this laconic reply to the courts and the press: « Read my manifesto, you’ll know who I am. »
Maurice Girodias, the notorious publisher of Olympia Press, repeatedly condemned, notably for issuing Lolita and Naked Lunch, had already noticed Solanas the previous year. Though he had rejected her manifesto, he offered her a contract for future works. After the attack, he decided finally to publish the feminist pamphlet of this atypical criminal who proclaimed women’s omnipotence and the toxicity of the male sex. In a final provocation, Girodias reproduced on the back cover the front page of the New York Post reporting Warhol’s tragic hospitalisation.
Is Solanas’s book the work of a sick woman—abused as a child, prostituted as a student, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, repeatedly confined in asylums, and who would die in poverty and solitude? Or is such an interpretation itself proof of the refusal to allow a woman the extremes of delirium and anarchist utopia that men have long claimed?
In 1968, in the midst of the interminable Vietnam War, violence was no longer the sole prerogative of oppressors, and the rising anger of minorities against endemic discrimination in the United States manifested itself in violent clashes and the rise of radical groups such as the Black Panthers. Yet women remained excluded from these struggles and their rights denied by both sides, as Angela Davis and Ella Baker also denounced.
Unlike them, however, Solanas adhered to no emancipatory struggle and rejected every utopia then in vogue, which, in her view, liberated only men, leaving women at best as rewards:
« Le hippie [...] est follement excité à l'idée d'avoir tout un tas de femmes à sa disposition. [...] L'activité la plus importante de la vie communautaire, celle sur laquelle elle se fonde, c'est le baisage à la chaîne. Ce qui allèche le plus le hippie, dans l'idée de vivre en communauté, c'est tout le con qu'il va y trouver. Du con en libre circulation : le bien collectif par excellence ; il suffit de demander ».
« Laisser tout tomber et vivre en marge n'est plus la solution. Baiser le système, oui. La plupart des femmes vivent déjà en marge, elles n'ont jamais été intégrées. Vivre en marge, c'est laisser le champ libre à ceux qui restent ; c'est exactement ce que veulent les dirigeants ; c'est faire le jeu de l'ennemi ; c'est renforcer le système au lieu de le saper car il mise sur l'inaction, la passivité, l'apathie et le retrait de la masse des femmes ».
A true detonation in activist circles, S.C.U.M. split the emerging feminist movements such as NOW and Women’s Lib and gave birth to radical feminism. Yet Solanas refused all affiliation and even rejected the support of activist lawyer Florynce Kennedy, pleading guilty at her trial even as Warhol refused to press charges against her: « Je ne peux pas porter plainte contre quelqu'un qui agit selon sa nature. C'est dans la nature de Valerie, alors comment pourrais-je lui en vouloir ». (A fascinating testimony to the psychological hold these two opposites exerted on one another).
In a fireworks display of obscenity and mocking extremism, Solanas’s work nonetheless dismantles the arguments of progressive intellectuals while exposing the inescapably patriarchal structure of a falsely modern society. « S.C.U.M. stands against the entire system, against the very idea of laws and government. What S.C.U.M. wants is to demolish the system, not to secure certain rights within it. »
Fifty years on, Solanas’s manifesto retains its biting acuity, and the delirious energy of her prose cannot justify the progressive erasure of her place in social history—mirrored by her own mother’s destruction of all her manuscripts after her death.
Outraged, convinced, or stunned by the cathartic violence of the text, no reader emerges unscathed from the S.C.U.M. experience. This is doubtless due to the literary force of Solanas’s prose—almost Céline-like in its vitriol—but also to the undeniable relevance of her revolt today:
« Celles qui, selon les critères de notre « culture », sont la lie de la terre, les S.C.U.M. ... sont des filles à l'aise, plutôt cérébrales et tout près d'être asexuées. Débarrassées des convenances, de la gentillesse, de la discrétion, de l'opinion publique, de la « morale », du « respect » des trous-du-cul, toujours surchauffées, pétant le feu, sales et abjectes, les S.C.U.M. déferlent... elles ont tout vu - tout le machin, baise et compagnie, suce-bite et suce-con - elles ont été à voile et à vapeur, elles ont fait tous les ports et se sont fait tous les porcs... Il faut avoir pas mal baisé pour devenir anti-baise, et les S.C.U.M. sont passées par tout ça, maintenant elles veulent du nouveau ; elles veulent sortir de la fange, bouger, décoller, sombrer dans les hauteurs. Mais l'heure de S.C.U.M. n'est pas encore arrivée. La société nous confine encore dans ses égouts. Mais si rien ne change et si la Bombe ne tombe pas sur tout ça, notre société crèvera d'elle-même. »
New edition.
Contemporary binding in half green shagreen, spine in four compartments set with gilt stippling, gilt fillets and gilt fleurons in the corner pieces, multiple blind tooled frames on the boards, white iridescent paper endpapers, all edges gilt.
Some leaves shorter in the bottom margin.
Handwritten inscription signed by George Sand on the first endpaper: “à mon bon ami Edmond Plauchut. G. Sand".
Today the only outsider to the family buried in the cemetery of the Nohant house, is Lucien-Joseph-Edmond Plau
chut (1824-1909) who began an epistolary relationship with George Sand in the autumn of 1848 when he was a voluntary expatriate after the fall of the Republic. Leaving for Singapore, he was shipwrecked off the coast of the Cape Verde Islands and was able to save only one cassette containing Sand's letters that he had preciously bound. These missives were his salvation: they allowed him to be collected, fed and laundered by a rich Portuguese admirer of the Lady of Nohant, Francisco Cardozzo de Mello.
After several journeys toward the Far East, and several exotic presents sent to his distant and yet so close friend, Plauchut finally met George Sand in
1861. In 1870, she paid a vibrant tribute to him in the preface of her novel Malgrétout.
Despite everything, she recounts the shipwreck of which he was a victim and expresses with emotion her friendship for this courageous friend. Plauchut, much loved by the Sand family – and particularly George's granddaughters who nicknamed him Uncle Plauchemar – was an integral part until his death in January 1909.
The handwritten signed inscriptions on La Mare au Diable are very rare, this one is from a superb provenance.
First edition with 25 full-page photographs.
Green cloth publisher's binding. Copy complete with its dust jacket, with very slight tears, and traces of wear to the margins.
Rare autograph signature of Maria Callas on the title page.
First edition, one of 90 copies on Holland paper, ours being one of a few lettered hors commerce copies.
Bradel binding in half brown box, smooth spine, decorated paper boards, brown endpapers and pastedowns, original covers preserved, top edge gilt, binding signed by Goy & Vilaine.
Precious autograph inscription signed by Paul Valéry: « A Victoria Ocampo, - a sus piès de Vd - ce petit rien qu'elle a bien voulu désirer. »
A superb dedication that marks the beginning of the enduring friendship between the two writers, beyond all differences.
At Valéry's death in 1945, Victoria Ocampo would recall their first meeting in December 1928 during a writers’ dinner to which the young Argentine, newly arrived in Paris, had been invited.
A founding moment of their friendship and of the mutual admiration testified by their moving correspondence, it is against the measure of this first impression that Victoria Ocampo described her relationship with the poet and « les sentiments contradictoires que suscitèrent en [elle] la rencontre de l'œuvre et de l'homme qui la conçut : émerveillement, étranglement, admiration, accablement, bonheur. Effets, sur une Sud-Américaine, amoureuse du génie français, d'une des plus grandes intelligences européennes, lorsqu'elle s'en approcha - un peu tremblante - comme d'un feu qui vous attire et vous tient à distance du même coup. »
There is no doubt that Valéry’s impression was no less intense, since he addressed to her, soon after, this humble dedication reminiscent of Victor Hugo’s treasured inscriptions to Juliette Drouet « à vos pieds, Ma Dame ».
As the fallen poet’s epistolary confidante during the harsh years of war, Ocampo would pay him, at his death, a fervent homage « par-delà l'intelligence et la bêtise, par-delà la vie. Avec mon respect, mon culte, ma tendre affection si nouée à l'humain. Avec tout ce qui en moi, tant que je vivrai, ne cessera de le sentir vivant, ne cessera d'être le lieu périssable où son immortalité commence. »
A few small spots of foxing.
A perfectly preserved copy.
First edition, limited to 59 numbered copies on Arches vellum, signed in pink pencil by André Masson beneath the limitation statement.
Rare and fine copy.
Illustrated with two original etchings by André Masson, printed full-bleed and issued hors texte.
First edition of the French translation established by Emmanuelle de Lesseps.
Handsome and very rare copy.
With a presentation by Christiane Rochefort.
Gender discrimination, hate speech and calls for genocide, violent action with a furious, premeditated and unrepentant murder attempt on one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, promotion of violent anarchy with great scatological laughter, programmed elimination or humiliation of half the human race...
In her misandrist pamphlet, Scum manifesto ("Society for Cutting Up Men"), Valerie Solanas shows no empathy, leaves no room for moderation or reconciliation, and grants no exception to her project of eliminating all men except for "men who methodically work toward their own elimination [...] [such as] drag queens who, by their magnificent example, encourage other men to demasculinize themselves and thus render themselves relatively harmless." The first manifesto of radical feminism addresses not only women but also encompasses in its struggle the sexual identities rejected by the phallocratic society that Solanas wants to bring down with unprecedented rage for such a battle.
"Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex."
An introduction that in 1971, Emmanuelle de Lesseps, undertaking a French version, would translate as:
"Vivre dans cette société, c'est au mieux y mourir d'ennui. Rien dans cette société ne concerne les femmes. Alors, à toutes celles qui ont un brin de civisme, le sens des responsabilités et celui de la rigolade, il ne reste qu'à renverser le gouvernement, en finir avec l'argent, instaurer l'automation à tous les niveaux et supprimer le sexe masculin." ["Living in this society means, at best, dying of boredom. Nothing in this society concerns women. So, to all those who have a bit of civic-mindedness, a sense of responsibility and of fun, there remains only to overthrow the government, finish with money, establish automation at all levels and eliminate the male sex."]
At once an insurrectional political program, paranoid delirium, and poetic text, Solanas's manifesto disturbs through its refusal to be confined within a genre—serious, utopian, or satirical. For the question posed by such a work may not be that of its morality, but of its author's right to claim excess. Published after her murder attempt on Andy Warhol, Solanas's terrible manifesto is the literary and literal assertion that man does not have a monopoly on violence.
Although it presents itself as a cry of anger written in urgency, SCUM is in reality the fruit of two years of reflection and writing before being, for lack of a publisher, mimeographed by Solanas in 1967 and sold in the street ($1 for women and $2 for men), without meeting any success.
Seeking recognition, Valerie Solanas then moves in the New York underground milieu and befriends the pope of counterculture, Andy Warhol, whose Factory she frequents. Unable to get her manifesto published, "the best text in all of history, which will only be surpassed by my next book," Solanas tackles her first literary work: Up your Ass, a play she wants her mentor to produce. Unfortunately, Warhol refuses the play and loses the unique manuscript. In compensation, he offers his friend a role in two of his films. Solanas is not satisfied with this small artistic success and, on June 3, 1968, fires three times at Andy Warhol, seriously wounding the artist and achieving fame at the same time. The young woman does not hide that her murderous gesture, more than revenge against the artist, is above all a political act and an artistic necessity to allow her to disseminate her work. Thus, questioned about the motivations of her criminal attempt, she submits to justice and the media this laconic response: "Read my manifesto, you will know who I am."
Maurice Girodias, the sulfurous publisher of Olympia Press, condemned several times notably after the publication of Lolita and Naked Lunch, had already noticed Solanas the previous year. He had then rejected her manifesto but had offered her a contract for her future works. After the attack, he finally decides to also publish the feminist pamphlet of this atypical criminal who declares the omnipotence of women and the harmfulness of the male sex. The height of provocation, Girodias reproduces on the back cover the front page of the New York Post, relating Warhol's tragic hospitalization.
Is Solanas's book the work of this sick woman, a violated child, a prostituted high school and university student, an adult diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, escaped from several asylums, and who would end her days in extreme solitude and poverty? Or is this interpretation precisely the demonstration of the prohibition for a woman to claim all the extremities of anarchist delirium and utopia that are granted to men?
In 1968, at the heart of the interminable Vietnam War, violence is no longer the preserve of oppressors and the rising anger of minorities against the endemic discrimination of the United States manifests itself through violent confrontations and the birth of radical groups such as the Black Panthers. But women remain excluded from demands and their rights are denied by both camps, as Angela Davis and Ella Baker would also denounce.
However, unlike them, Solanas adheres to no emancipation struggle and refuses all fashionable utopias which, according to her, only liberate man; woman remaining, at best, a reward:
"Le hippie [...] est follement excité à l'idée d'avoir tout un tas de femmes à sa disposition. [...] L'activité la plus importante de la vie communautaire, celle sur laquelle elle se fonde, c'est le baisage à la chaîne. Ce qui alléche le plus le hippie, dans l'idée de vivre en communauté, c'est tout le con qu'il va y trouver. Du con en libre circulation : le bien collectif par excellence ; il suffit de demander." ["The hippie [...] is wildly excited at the idea of having a whole bunch of women at his disposal. [...] The most important activity of community life, the one on which it is based, is chain fucking. What attracts the hippie most in the idea of living in community is all the cunt he's going to find there. Freely circulating cunt: the collective good par excellence; you just have to ask."]
"Laisser tout tomber et vivre en marge n'est plus la solution. Baiser le système, oui. La plupart des femmes vivent déjà en marge, elles n'ont jamais été intégrées. Vivre en marge, c'est laisser le champ libre à ceux qui restent ; c'est exactement ce que veulent les dirigeants ; c'est faire le jeu de l'ennemi ; c'est renforcer le système au lieu de le saper car il mise sur l'inaction, la passivité, l'apathie et le retrait de la masse des femmes." ["Dropping out and living on the margins is no longer the solution. Fucking the system, yes. Most women already live on the margins, they have never been integrated. Living on the margins means leaving the field free to those who remain; it's exactly what the leaders want; it's playing into the enemy's hands; it's strengthening the system instead of undermining it because it relies on the inaction, passivity, apathy and withdrawal of the mass of women."]
A true explosion in protest circles, S.C.U.M. divides emerging feminist movements like NOW or Women's Lib and gives birth to radical feminism. Yet, Solanas refuses any affiliation and even rejects the help of militant lawyer Florynce Kennedy by pleading guilty at her trial while Warhol did not want to press charges against her: "I cannot press charges against someone who acts according to their nature. It's in Valerie's nature, so how could I hold it against her." (A fascinating testimony to the mutual psychological hold these two contrary beings had on each other).
In a great fireworks display of obscenity and laughing extremism, Solanas's work nevertheless methodically deconstructs the propositions of progressive intellectuals as much as it reveals the irremediably machistic structure of a falsely modern society. "S.C.U.M. stands against the entire system, against the very idea of laws and government. What S.C.U.M. wants is to demolish the system and not obtain certain rights within the system."
Fifty years later, Solanas's manifesto remains bitingly acute, and the sometimes delirious verve of its author cannot justify the progressive erasure of her memory in social history, like her own mother destroying all her manuscripts upon her death.
Outraged, convinced, or stunned by the cathartic violence of the text, no one claims to emerge unscathed from the S.C.U.M. experience. This is undoubtedly linked to the almost Célinean literary force of Solanas's pen but perhaps also to the undeniable relevance of her revolt:
"Celles qui, selon les critères de notre « culture », sont la lie de la terre, les S.C.U.M. ... sont des filles à l'aise, plutôt cérébrales et tout près d'être asexuées. Débarrassées des convenances, de la gentillesse, de la discrétion, de l'opinion publique, de la « morale », du « respect » des trous-du-cul, toujours surchauffées, pétant le feu, sales et abjectes, les S.C.U.M. déferlent... elles ont tout vu - tout le machin, baise et compagnie, suce-bite et suce-con - elles ont été à voile et à vapeur, elles ont fait tous les ports et se sont fait tous les porcs... Il faut avoir pas mal baisé pour devenir anti-baise, et les S.C.U.M. sont passées par tout ça, maintenant elles veulent du nouveau ; elles veulent sortir de la fange, bouger, décoller, sombrer dans les hauteurs. Mais l'heure de S.C.U.M. n'est pas encore arrivée. La société nous confine encore dans ses égouts. Mais si rien ne change et si la Bombe ne tombe pas sur tout ça, notre société crèvera d'elle-même." ["Those who, according to the criteria of our 'culture,' are the scum of the earth, the S.C.U.M. ... are comfortable girls, rather cerebral and quite close to being asexual. Rid of conventions, kindness, discretion, public opinion, 'morality,' 'respect' for assholes, always overheated, bursting with fire, dirty and abject, the S.C.U.M. surge forth... they have seen everything - the whole thing, fucking and company, cock-sucking and cunt-sucking - they have been both ways, they have done all the ports and have done all the pigs... You have to have fucked quite a bit to become anti-fuck, and the S.C.U.M. have been through all that, now they want something new; they want to get out of the mire, move, take off, sink into the heights. But S.C.U.M.'s time has not yet come. Society still confines us in its sewers. But if nothing changes and if the Bomb doesn't fall on all this, our society will die of itself."]
