Poetics of Guilt

The distinction between an ethical and a moral approach to guilt, suggests poet and appellate attorney Vanessa Place in The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality, and Law (2010), is this: while the ethical "wonders what the collective us is doing" when we do what we do (to "innocent" citizens and convicted criminals alike), the moral "is hot and murky, circling the question of what makes us human." The Guilt Project presents a nuanced argument about criminal law, specifically the counter-intuitive laws concerning rape; it is aimed at the concerned and curious lay reader, whom it leaves bursting with ethical wonder. By contrast, Place's Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts plunges its reader hard into the murk. There is no evident polemic, no well-deliberated thesis, in Statement of Facts, and this is precisely the point: it earns its moral weight in spite of, and because of, its status as conceptual poetry.

Like The Weather, Kenneth Goldsmith's 2005 book of New York City weather reports transcribed from the radio, Statement of Facts can be seen as an example of what Goldsmith terms "uncreative writing," an anti-Romantic methodology that emphasizes the importance of the idea or concept above other literary considerations, producing texts in which "all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair." It is certainly (again like The Weather) an example of appropriation, a technique in which language is lifted by the writer directly from another (often non-literary) context with another (often more utilitarian) use. Unavoidably reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp's readymades—in which an object becomes art by virtue of its placement in an art context—appropriation is also a technique that Place and her co-author, Robert Fitterman, locate on the "pure" end of the continuum laid out in their primer on conceptual writing, Notes on Conceptualisms (2009).

All this alone is enough to turn some readers on or off, depending on their proclivities and aesthetic allegiances. But content, too, matters. Duchamp's Fountain (1917) may not have made the same splash had it been a slop sink instead of a urinal that the artist signed and installed in a gallery. Unlike The Weather, which deliberately takes as its subject the least taboo topic in our culture, Statement of Facts deliberately takes up one of the most: sex crimes, in all their gory and mundane detail.

According to the book's jacket copy, a statement of facts is "a legal document which sets forward factual information without argument." The statements that comprise the book pertain, apparently, to convicted sex offenders who have registered an appeal (in each case, the offender is referred to as "Appellant"). I say "apparently" because, apart from the minimal jacket copy and blurbs, there is no apparatus to ease entry into Statement of Facts—no introduction, notes, critical gloss, or explanatory gesture from the author. Just the murk, ma'am. And what murk it is. The book's 430 pages contain tale after tale of touching, sucking, forcing, cutting, binding, stalking, hitting, whipping, burning, cajoling, drugging, abducting, imprisoning, deceiving, crying, apologizing, and raping, raping, raping. The victims are mothers, daughters, students, neighbor boys, wives, cousins, infants, employees, prostitutes, and the elderly. The appellants are gang members, pimps, drug dealers, dropouts, respected teachers, former police officers, members of the military, and psychologists. Most cases include accounts of the prosecution's narrative, the defense's narrative, and the prosecution's rebuttal; some proffer additional sections of expert testimony or scientific evidence. While the writing style is consistently deadpan, sentences range from the plainly factual—"At the time of trial, Tye was ten years old; appellant is her great uncle"—to the patently interpretive: "Doe began cutting her arm in 8th grade as a way to deal with the abuse." The variety in severity among the cases is notable, as is the order of their presentation (there is no obvious arbitrary order such as chronological or alphabetical): a consensual drunken grope-fest between teenagers (the girls under 17...