Marriage as a Fine Art

Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, Lorna Scott Fox

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231543033
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

"We found so much to say, to share, to learn.... For it wasn't just the Marquis de Sade profile and the sporty thighs-and-calves that seduced me. It was even more, perhaps, or certainly just as much, the speed at which you used to read, and still do."—Julia Kristeva

"We're married, Julia and I, that's a fact, but we each have our own personalities, our own name, activities, and freedom. Love is the full recognition of the other in their otherness. If this other is very close to you, as in this case, it seems to me that what's at stake is harmony within difference. The difference between men and women is irreducible; there's no possibility of fusion."—Philippe Sollers

Marriage as a Fine Art is an enchanting series of exchanges in which Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers, married for fifty years, speak candidly about their love. Though they live separately, Kristeva and Sollers are fully committed to each other. Their bond is intellectual and psychological, passionate and mundane. They share everything when together, and lose themselves in their interests when apart. Their marriage is art, rich with history and meaning, idiosyncratic, and dynamic in its expression.

Yet it is also as common as they come. Kristeva and Sollers have lived through the same challenges, peaks, and lulls as all married couples do. With humor and honesty, they elaborate on these moments, turning marriage's familiar aspects into exceptional examples of relating, struggling, transcending, and being. Marriage as a Fine Art is a rare chance to know these intellectuals—and marriage—more intimately.

1

COMPLICITY,

LAUGHTER, HURT

LE NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR: First of all, what’s your definition of love?

PHILIPPE SOLLERS: That word is used in such a ragbag of ways, to suit all the varieties of modern sentimental commerce, that one might flinch from it with embarrassment or contempt, like Céline, for instance: “Love is infinity made available to poodles.” But still, it’s a serious question that merits an answer. One word I dislike is the word couple: I’ve never been able to stomach it. It implies a whole literature that I loathe. We’re married, Julia and I—that’s a fact—but we each have our own personality, our own name, activities, and freedom. Love is the full recognition of the other in their otherness. If this other is very close to you, as in this case, it seems to me that what’s at stake is harmony within difference. The difference between men and women is irreducible; there’s no possibility of fusion. The deal therefore is to love a contradiction, and that’s what is so nice. I’m reminded of Hölderlin’s lines: “The dissonances of the world resemble lovers’ quarrels. Reconciliation lies in the midst of strife, for whatever is parted is reunited. The arteries of the heart split apart and reunite, all is life, one, eternal, and ablaze.”

JULIA KRISTEVA: Love has two inseparable components: the need for closeness and constancy and the dramatic imperative of desire that can lead to infidelity. The love relationship is this subtle blend of fidelity and infidelity. In literature the figures of the love relationship vary widely: from the romance of courtly love to the crude, intense probing of the modern period. Everything that defines our civilization, in terms of its meditations on sex and feeling, is based on the faithful/unfaithful axis.

NO: But how can you associate fidelity and infidelity?

JK: First of all, let’s try to define fidelity. One could call it stability, protection, long-term reassurance. Is fidelity a dated topic, a hangover from the past or our parents, a quaint relic fit to be swept away by the pressures of modernity and the power of desire? I don’t think so. I’m speaking as a psychoanalyst here: the infant needs two figures, two imagos without which it can’t face up to the world. The mother, of course, but also the father, who is less often mentioned: the father of the earliest infant identifications. Not the forbidding, oedipal father, but the caring father. In our later experiences of love, we are also searching for variants of those two images. There lie the psychic requirements for fidelity. Once in possession of these bearings, these elements of stability, it’s possible to free up one’s sensory or sexual relationships and give desire its head.

PS: I get impatient with the systematic reduction of infidelity to the sexual aspect. In the space of one century we’ve moved from regarding sex as the devil incarnate to having it foisted on us, technically and commercially, as something indispensable. Sex is supposed to be the truth, to be all there is to say about people, while ignoring the rest: the persistence of feeling through time, the relationship’s success in the mind. Our society, which used to treat sex as fiendish, is now making it compulsory and deadly dull. I’ve often been accused of writing novels that whip up this sexual inflation themselves. But that’s exactly wrong. I’ve always shown sexuality as lightly as possible, in a detached, ironic way, like a self-aware fancy that one can take or leave. I mean, sexual infidelity doesn’t cut much ice with me. There are worse things.

JK: I think sexuality has been understood as essentially a revolt against conventional norms, and this was no doubt necessary in a society where religious or puritanical prohibitions were oppressive for individuals. These days, though, you hear a lot about retrenchment into the private, reverting to the rules. It’s certainly a step backward, into a form of conservatism. But it also marks a greater awareness of what the sexual revolt was finally about. It had a meaning, which was liberty. But also a nonmeaning: the destruction, oftentimes, of the self and the other. In male-female relations, you can engage in “outside” friendships that are sexual and sensual while still respecting the body and sensitivities of your main partner. That’s what being faithful means. It doesn’t mean never being apart or never knowing another man or another woman.

PS: Can we add to that the word trust? I was very impressed by this wonderful phrase from Vivant Denon: “Love me, which is to say, don’t suspect me.”

JK: The danger in “love me but don’t suspect me” is that it’s really saying “be my Mom” or “be my Dad”; the idealized “mother” and “father.” Many couples who claim to be faithful, and indeed are an absolute storybook picture of devotion, have become frozen in maternalism or paternalism. For those of our generation who handle their joint life differently, it looks like a frightful game. At the same time, one wouldn’t deny that infidelity packs some horrors of its own. It is always an ordeal. It can wound; it can deal lethal blows. But you can also laugh at it.

PS: I want to say that faithfulness is a kind of shared childhood, a form of innocence. Here, in a nutshell: we’re children. If we stop being children, we’re unfaithful. The rest—the encounters, the fits of passion—doesn’t matter very much, in my view. True infidelity resides in the congealing of the couple, in heaviness, in the earnestness that turns into resentment. It’s an intellectual betrayal above all. While we’re on the subject, I must stress that I don’t believe in transparency. I’m against the kind of contract agreed between Sartre and Beauvoir. I’m all for secrecy.

JK: The sentiment of fidelity goes back to childhood and its longing for safety. Personally, I consider myself someone who had reassurance lavished on her as a child, and that gave me a lot of confidence. When I was younger, I did feel bad when faced with sexual infidelity, but I can’t say I experienced it as a betrayal. In fact, I don’t feel that I can be betrayed. Or, to put it another way, treachery doesn’t really get to me. Even though, unlike you, Philippe, I don’t believe secrets can be preserved. Everything comes out sooner or later.

PS: I was talking about the honesty ideology in certain couples.

JK: Let’s be clear: female humans don’t have the same sexual and emotional interests as males. Men and women feel a different jouissance, just as their attitudes to power, society, and offspring are different. We two are a couple formed of two foreigners. Our different nationalities accentuate something else, which people often try to avoid seeing: men and women are mutual foreigners. Now, a couple who takes on board the freedom of these doubly foreign partners can turn into a battleground. Hence the need for harmonization. Faithfulness is like the harmonization of foreignness. If you allow the other to be as foreign as you are, harmony returns. The squawking becomes part and parcel of the symphony.

NO: Were the affairs you both went in for an explicit precondition of your union, or was it circumstance that led you one day to break the pledge that most young lovers make to each other: to be faithful forever?

JK: We never made that pledge.

PS: And we weren’t all that young when we met. Julia was twenty-five, I was thirty. May ’68 happened almost straightaway. It was a period of intense experimentation, in minds, in bodies. There were no contracts in those days. Freedom spilled out of its own accord.

JK: At the end of the sixties, which were the years of our youth, there was such a freedom in love relationships that what people call infidelity was not regarded as such. Today we live in another era, a time when unemployment, the dwindling of political activism, and the fear of AIDS all contribute to the new focus on coupledom and fidelity.

PS: History ebbs and flows. There are periods of opening and periods of closure. The restless liberty of the eighteenth century, then the Terror, then the Restoration. Intense mobility between 1920 and 1940, replaced all of a sudden by Travail, Famille, Patrie. A huge positive mutation around 1968, followed by fifteen years of numbness, drift, and now, finally, regression: witness all this anxiety and gloom.

JK: Yes, we’re certainly in a period when security considerations trump everything else and there’s little economic autonomy. One can’t indulge in a libertarian attitude to infidelity without a minimum sense of inner security. Plus, needless to say, of financial independence—which women, despite their efforts, are still far from possessing.

PS: Julia and I are completely on a par economically. In the absence of that prerequisite, there’s not much use in talking about the sophistications of love or the ins and outs of fidelity.

JK: We’re discussing the behavior of financially independent individuals. Otherwise we couldn’t have this conversation at all.

NO: You mentioned the famous contract between Sartre and Beauvoir, which stipulated that they would tell each other all about their extramarital adventures…

PS: I think that with them this honesty pact was actually a form of reciprocal inhibition, like signing a contract of joint frigidity. My own conviction is this: When you’re really into someone, you keep it to yourself. Besides, we don’t know how Sartre really ran his life, in what compartmented, watertight way…My feeling is that he, out of generosity and also indifference, let people say a lot of things. He had his clandestine life. It’s rather a pity he didn’t write about it. I can see him managing it on the sly. In any case, there’s not a female character in all his work who’s truly interesting. Nor in Camus either, nor indeed in Malraux. Nor in Aragon. What a century! I’ve learned a great deal more about women from Proust [laughter]. In reality, the whole business is pretty unconvincing.

JK: Sartre and Beauvoir were libertarian terrorists. Their books still display an intellectual and moral daring that is far from being understood or surpassed, even now. To carry out their work of libertarian terrorism, they turned themselves into a shock commando unit. This commando relied on their shared history as two wounded people. On the one hand, Sartre’s oedipal wound, what with his absent father and then his anguish at being so brilliant and yet so ugly. On the other hand, there’s Beauvoir, with her virile ambitions, her cold intelligence, and, I daresay, her depressive sexual inhibitions. And despite all that, they did something wonderful: they showed the whole world, to its dazzlement and envy, that a man and a woman can live together, talk together, and write together. You have a go, see if it’s easy! But their terrorism consisted in setting fire to anyone who ventured anywhere near their precious twosome and turning them into victims. Their famous “transparency” was like a charter of the powerful against the rabble of aspirants. Still, their relationship, which is unrepeatable, is to be interrogated; it shouldn’t be demonized, surely.

NO: What about Aragon’s relationship with Elsa?

JK: The myth of their couple protected him, in the same way as their membership in the Communist Party. There can be many reasons for joining a party, but in Aragon’s case it was clearly a way of ensuring himself against sexual risks. Against the distress inflicted by his own infidelity, in fact. He had a heartbreaking affair with Nancy Cunard that drove him to the verge of suicide and that he papered over in his worship of Elsa. Here is an ambivalent, unhappy instance of the sham couple, with extra poetry on the side. Other forms emerged following the death of Elsa Triolet, when Aragon owned up to his homosexuality. But we mustn’t forget the magnificent passages he wrote before that, on the female body and female jouissance, in Irene’s Cunt. Where he somehow cannibalizes the feminine, gobbling it up from inside. In this kind of infidelity tale one must keep in mind the bisexuality of both partners, which makes standard fidelity even more difficult. There again, truths that aren’t easily acknowledged.

PS: Bisexuality, there’s a subject with a future [laughter]!

JK: It certainly is! Although most people try to hide their bisexuality behind a mask, everybody’s thinking about it.

PS: I used to visit Aragon at home sometimes. Elsa Triolet was always barging unexpectedly into the study where we were chatting. It was strange. One day, she signed one of her books for me: “To Ph. S., maternally.” We never saw each other again.

NO: Another couple who made a mark on their time was Danielle and François Mitterrand.

JK: The mythical representation of coupledom responds to a social need. The unity of the group, especially a national group, is nurtured by the fantasy of the primordial union, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface: Adventure
• Preface: Harmonizing Our Foreignnesses
• 1. Complicity, Laughter, Hurt
• 2. Inner Experience Against the Current
• 3. Childhood and Youth of a French Writer
• 4. Love of the Other
• Notes
• Illustrations