33 In the In Repose (fig. 14), the loose and irregular application of the Brothel printer's ink to the metal plate — Degas used a brush, rag, and sometimes his fingers — is seen in the paper print in the unevenness of the dark lines and the blurriness and varied densities of the tonal areas. As we have noted, this look has been read in the twentieth century as the sign of a relatively nonchalant and rapid manufacture. The relative "sincerity" of a drawing, with which a monotype has much in common, is often determined on the basis of the presumed freedom and speed of its execution. So also with Degas's prints. The composition of Repose, with its cutoffs and fragmentations, characteristic of most of the monotypes, has contributed to this impression. The man entering the room at the left has to be deduced from minimal bits: a hat brim, part of a face, a hand, and a pant leg. The legs of the seated woman are sliced through at the shins. And the oblique angle of view runs counter to the rules of conventional viewer- oriented pictures. The man at the door sets the immobility of the two women in a specific temporal frame- work: he arrives, but they are not yet aware of him, because they do not shift position as they would be expected to. They maintain what appear to be relaxed, unselfconscious, gravity- bound positions: the twisted, reclining naked woman hugs the sofa edge with a draped leg, and 17 the other sits with her legs apart and a hand resting between her thighs at the groin. The women appear, then, to attend to their own reveries or, more likely, to be simply blank, not actively involved with each other or with the arriving man and not animated individually by an interior state. Consequently, the print is devoid of subjective prediction: it does not carry hope for the emotional coalescence of its three figures. The whole format insists that nothing of consequence is going on, or, perhaps better said, it does not construct a proper narrative out of its parts: these are just the sheer material facts of an average brothel, laid out broadly and greasily, observed from a nonparticipatory, offstage oblique angle. It is a virtuoso semblance of nonchalance. The likelihood of a connection between Degas's monotypes and novels about prostitutes must be addressed. Among the likely reasons that Degas upheld the disparaging view of the erotic atmosphere of the brothel, which is evident in the monotypes, and identified the pension- naire as the alienated and commodified modern woman par excellence were the impetus and example provided by his literary predecessors and contemporaries (from Eugene Sue and Ho- nore de Balzac to Emile Zola, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Edmond de Goncourt). From the time of Sue, following the analysis of Peter Brooks, writers discovered in "her" the preeminently narratable life and condition. Paraphrasing Brooks, because the prostitute is preeminently someone with a novelistic destiny (whose plot is by definition a deviance) and because "she" gives access to an eminently storied subworld, she was taken to be the "last refuge of the narrat- 18 able." What better theme, then, to provide content for an art form that all but forecloses upon narration? What more effective way automatically to sustain "a plot" while the forms them- selves conspire to muffle and confound the telling of a story? In sum, what better way to be (to appear to be!) a realist and a modernist at once? Even in the face of my relentlessly social dis- cussion of Degas's monotypes, we can see that a reading of the prints as reports upon the "mo- dernity" of prostitution cannot be undertaken apart from an active discussion of their formal language.