Dirty Hungry Homosexuals: ‘Paradise Rot’ probes the sensuality of sound

In “Dirty Hungry Homosexuals,” columnist Dayanara Yepez Ramirez reviews gothic, horror literature that spotlights queer women.

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

If I were a dictator, my first order of business would be forcing everyone to write a novel. Tell me, is it not fascinating to consider how a coder might write prose? Would they try to make every sentence as succinct and clear as possible, unable to forget the rules presented by the CS 106B grading rubric? How does someone’s craft influence the way their words meet paper? Ever hoping to appease this curiosity, I picked up “Paradise Rot” by Jenny Hval, eager to see how a singer-songwriter transitions from spoken melodies to silent, engraved words.

Hval’s novel tells the story of Jo, a young woman arriving in a new country for university. Though Jo struggles to find permanent housing, she luckily discovers an old warehouse with a woman named Carral. The bleak warehouse-turned-home echoes every noise: Jo’s senses become forcefully attuned to her roommate’s presence, picking up on the mere whisper of Carral moving a hair strand. Ultimately, we see Jo try to balance her desire to participate in sexual acts with skepticism regarding her ill-defined dynamic with Carral. 

Carral and Jo’s relationship is sensual from the beginning. Jo can’t stop waxing poetry about Carral’s skin and keeps trying to get a glance of her nipples, to no avail. Jo makes frequent desireful comments: “The yolk burst under my tongue, and I imagined it was her skin I was tasting.” 

The intriguing nature here, however, is that we see Jo wish for a man to make love to her as opposed to the woman she cannot get out of her mind. Hval does a great job tackling compulsive heterosexuality, especially through the inclusion of a male character, Pym. Long story short, Jo makes out with Pym twice. She initiates the first time but then wishes to forget it all, and the second time it’s against her will. 

In response to Jo’s second make-out with Pym, Carral has sex with him, while Jo hears the whole thing. Very messy, I know, yet it works to make the characters more real. Queerness is confusing, especially with the whole world shoving heterosexuality down your throat from a young age. It makes perfect sense for Carral and Jo to have all these homosexual thoughts and still end up pursuing a man.

I’ve found queerness and cannibalism are often attached at the hip in literature (“Yellowjackets”), yet Hval has an interesting take: it occurs through sound. Jo seems to exist only to hear, as if it’s the only thing she can do. Carral and Jo engage in a mutual consumption, where Carral nibbles on Jo’s brain and thoughts through every noise she makes, and Jo tastes a little more of Carral with every movement she hears. Crafting descriptions you can feel throughout your body, “the hiss and bubble from her mouth…,” Hval showcases her keen knowledge of sound — something presumably acquired through years of hyper-fixating on the faintest beats in her music production.

Of the several recurring themes in the book, the one I need to point out is Hval’s unexpected fixation on urine. This was actually one of the things that first enticed Jo, as she says, “I hadn’t met a lot of girls who talked while they peed, and definitely not a lot of girls who talked about peeing while they did it.” 

At first, I thought, “Hey, I talk while I pee!” but then Carral started peeing in bed with Jo a few times and that’s when Hval started losing me a little. Nonetheless, not wanting to let societal norms of what’s “proper” get the best of me, I started to question: “Why would Hval make urine such a focal point of Jo’s character?” To which I now think that in the same way you can’t control your sexuality, you can’t control your bladder. Urine spreads, contaminates, rots the same way Carral’s every action does to Jo’s mind. Urinating is a private practice, a private sound, and Jo getting access to it accentuates the pair’s lack of boundaries. Getting past my initial discomfort, I’m surprisingly glad Hval wrote so much about urine.

All this is to say, I endlessly appreciate how much Hval wasn’t afraid to be disgusting. With all the rotten soggy apples, all the reverberations of the streams of urine and spreading fungi, Hval is able to punctuate how queer desire spreads and consumes. For me, the moral of the story is “Don’t be afraid to get a little nasty.” After all, if your love isn’t a bit dirty — if it doesn’t rip you of all reason and consume you — is it really the one?

I urge you, my Stanford peers, don’t let the fact that you haven’t showered in days be the filthiest thing about you. Go be in love, be gay and most of all, be disgusting. 

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