On Love, Marriage, and Swinging

Transcription

The South Carolina Modern Language Review
Volume 6, Number 1
On Love, Marriage, and Swinging:
The Postmodern Narratives of Frédéric Beigbeder
by Scott M. Powers
The University of Mary Washington
In Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered
Marriage (2005), social historian Stephanie Coontz reaffirms what scholars have
suggested for sometime, notably that the love-based marriage is essentially a modern
institution. Whereas throughout most of its history, marriage constituted an economic and
political transaction for both the rich and the poor, the practice among young people of
choosing their spouse on the basis of love became common only within the past 150
years. Once perceived for its volatility as incompatible with the principles of marriage, in
modern times romantic love has developed into marriage’s legitimizing force. What is
perhaps most original about Coontz’s study is her argument that romantic love, in serving
as the foundation of modern marriage, has actually weakened the marriage institution.
She attributes the significant increase in divorces, unwed mothers, and cohabitation to the
unrealistic expectations that modern society places on the love-based marriage: “In this
Western model, people expect marriage to satisfy more of their psychological and social
needs than ever before. [...] Individuals want marriage to meet most of their needs for
intimacy and affection and all their needs for sex” (23). George Bernard Shaw expounded
on the unreasonably high standards that society places on married couples when he
described them as “under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive,
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and most transient of passions. They are required to swear that they will remain in that
excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”1
A common practice among proponents of the “traditional,” or more accurately
love-based marriage has been to blame the breakdown of marriage on the social and
sexual revolution of the late 1960s. For instance, in Michel Houellebecq’s Les particules
élémentaires (1998), the 1950s and ‘60s are depicted as “un véritable âge d’or du
sentiment amoureux,” as a period of “évolution vers le mariage d’amour,” a short time
span that approached a “civilisation de la paix, de la fidelité et de l’amour” (54). The
rapidly expanding subculture of swingers during the late sixties and seventies depicted in
the novel is meant to emblematize a decadent society that has rejected the preceding
moral order founded on the principles of marriage, including mutual love, fidelity, and
constancy.2 However, Coontz’s historical analysis of marriage implies quite the opposite.
The changes in gender roles and sexual expression as well as the emergence of new forms
of conjugal living in the late 1960s constituted, rather, the logical outcome and extension
of the principles of a more extensive “love revolution.” Over the past 150 years, this
revolution has gradually replaced the mariage de raison and its role of forming
“cooperative relationships between families and communities” with love relationships
based on individual choice, self-fulfillment, fairness, and emotional gratification (31,
259). Coontz argues that certain so-called alternative conjugal lifestyles are equally
founded on the principles of the love-based relationship. Once or still perceived by
society as non-traditional, households in which wives work outside of the home, couples
who decide not to have children, or same-sex partners are in fact simple variations of the
mariage d’amour (274).
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This essay will explore the notion that so-called alternative lifestyles commonly
associated with the 1960s and ‘70s, especially those perceived as radical, such as
swinging and other forms of sexually open relationships, do not necessarily constitute a
break with the mariage d’amour, but rather, represent an attempt to uphold love-based
relationships including the institution of marriage. I will focus on a popular novel genre
in contemporary French literature that groups best-selling authors such as Christine
Angot, Frédéric Beigbeder, Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, and Catherine
Millet, and that is often stigmatized by critics for its graphic sexual content as a “culture
poubelle” genre or “littérature de latrines.”3 But far from lacking in moral substance, the
depiction of “alternative” lifestyles in this budding literary tradition often represent new
strategies on the part of the couple to attain true love.
In the pages that follow, I will also investigate the emergence of a postmodern
critique of le mariage d’amour that can be linked to a common skepticism of marriage
associated with Generation X. Overwhelmed by high divorce rates, Generation Xers have
been characterized by social anthropologists and psychologists as skeptical toward
commitment and marriage.4 Similarly, scholars have defined postmodern thought by its
pervading skepticism, which targets universalizing theories (or “metanarratives”), all
claims of historical progress, and the notion of the self predicated on individual agency.5
Postmodern thinkers perceive desire—in this case for love and marriage—as a social
construct mediated by discourses and images. Unable to escape the legion of voices that
have always already determined its desires, the self, in deciding whether or not to enter
into a committed relationship, must constantly negotiate between various discourses on
love. Suffering from a saturation and fragmentation that psychologist Kenneth Gergen
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calls multiphrenia, the self is inundated by too many messages about who it is and what it
wants. As their way to question cultural narratives of human desire, postmodern writers
often resort to “playful probings of basic understandings of the self” through a variety of
literary tropes, including irony and pastiche. 6 Not unlike their peers (Generation X),
whose skepticism toward love and marriage has translated into serial monogamy and
cohabitation, postmodern writers, in their “playful probings,” renounce the traditional
love story, notably the romantic quest for true love.
A postmodern treatment of the question of love is perhaps most evident in novels
by Frédéric Beigbeder, a contemporary French author who explores the complex issues
that face today’s youth with regard to love and marriage. Like many of his peers,
Beigbeder’s narrator Marc Maronnier, a thirty-year-old bachelor, has high expectations
for marriage, and as a result, is skeptical that marriage will offer him true love. His
skepticism is aggravated by popular scientific discourse on the ephemeral nature of love
and man’s genetic programming for sexual diversity. In his attempt to negotiate between
conflicting discourses on love relationships and human sexuality, Marc eventually
experiments with so-called alternative relationships in his pursuit of true love. On one
level, Marc’s “alternative” lifestyle constitutes a sincere attempt to find true love, and
perhaps even to salvage the institution of marriage. And yet, embedded within
Beigbeder’s romantic narratives, an ironic voice places into question the very concepts of
love and marriage.
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A Brief History of the Literary Tradition on Love
In L’amour et l’occident (1972), scholar Denis de Rougemont has highlighted the
longstanding notion of the incompatibility of marriage and passionate love in Western
society. Beginning at least in medieval times, marriage, advocated by the Church, was
defined by its social, political, and economic responsibilities. Passionate love was
perceived as anarchic desire, and thus a threat to the stability of marriage. The
troubadours and the Cathars, on the other hand, favored what they considered the
liberating force of passionate love, which resisted the Church’s codification of
relationships.7 If there is one thing that the Church on one side, and the Cathars and
troubadours on the other agreed upon, it was that love and marriage should not mix. In
the interest of protecting the political alliances and economic stability that the marriage
institution insured, not simply to the bride and groom, but especially to the extended
families and community, Church leaders were opposed to the destabilizing and
destructive nature of passionate love. Conversely, the proponents of passionate love
opposed marriage for they perceived the fulfillment of love in marriage to mean the death
of love.8 From a pre-modern perspective, then, le mariage d’amour of modern times
would seem at the very least a curious amalgamation, and most certainly a selfdestructing union.
According to Rougemont, the question of love in Western literature is founded on
the premise of the incompatibility of love and marriage, which is best articulated in
Tristan and Iseult, the medieval myth and archetype of subsequent love narratives. The
love potion that Tristan and Iseult unknowingly drink, and by which they fall in love,
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symbolizes the irrationality of an adulterous love that the couple cannot explain nor for
which they claim responsibility. As Rougemont explains, Tristan and Iseult never would
have loved each other, had they acted freely. And in fact, they do not love each other, but
rather, according to the nature of passion, “ce qu’ils aiment, c’est l’amour, c’est le fait
même d’aimer” (43).9 But passion, according to the myth, is not only irrational, it is also
fickle. The potion’s effects last only three years: “A combien fu determinez / Li
lovendrincs, li vin herbez: / La mère Iseut, qui le bollit, / A trois anz d’amistié le fist”(28).
Accordingly, three years after the birth of their passion, Tristan and Iseult suddenly grow
weary of their love and separate, as Iseult returns to her husband Marc.10 But after a short
time, the lovers’ passion resurfaces. This is so, Rougemont explains, because of a series
of obstructions that rekindle their love. The perils that Tristan and Iseult face, which
threaten both their relationship and their lives, are self-imposed so that their spontaneous
ardor will survive. The obstacle to love’s fulfillment that most feeds the lovers’ passion is
the fact that Tristan and Iseult cannot marry (46-47). And as Rougemont shows in the
second half of his study, the notion that marriage destroys love prevailed for centuries, as
expressed in a rich literary tradition from La Correspondance d’Abélard et Héloïse to
Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves and Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse.11
As historians have shown, society’s perception of what marriage ought to be
about gradually evolved. Coontz, among others, attributes this evolution to political and
economic change. From this perspective, society’s emerging perception of passionate
love and marriage as analogous was an outcome both of the Enlightenment, which
advocated individual rights and the pursuit of happiness, and of the spread of the market
economy, notably its introduction of wage labor that significantly altered domestic
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relationships (Coontz 145-46, 152-56, 177-95). But even modern novels generally
reproduce the pre-modern notion of the incompatibility of passionate love and marriage.
On the one hand, unlike pre-modern stories of passion, the modern novel includes the
new moral imperative that a husband and wife should be in love with one another. Yet,
modern love stories seldom center on the love between a husband and wife, often
constitute adulterous relations, and are typically fueled by obstacles. Similar to Tristan et
Iseut, in novels such as Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and
Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, (adulterous) passion inspires the narrative, which carries on as
long as new obstacles come between the lovers’ full possession of one another. In novels
such as these, the common obstacle that fuels the lovers’ passion is that one of the lovers
is married to someone else.
The contemporary novels of Frédéric Beigbeder, however, constitute a new twist
to narratives on passion. Similar to the Tristan and Iseult myth, the love relationships that
Marc, the narrator, pursues are based on passion and fueled by various sorts of obstacles.
But the fundamental difference is that Marc, the romantic hero of Beigbeder’s novels,
plays the role not of Tristan but of Marc (Iseult’s husband), as his name suggests.
Whether married or in an analogous relationship with a woman, Marc goes to great
lengths to remain passionately in love with his “legitimate” partner. Or, to quote Shaw,
“to remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death
do them part.” Indicative of contemporary society’s ongoing attempts to reconcile love
and marriage, Beigbeder’s novels depict one man’s struggles to live up to society’s
expectations of marriage that he has internalized. It is this depiction that I will now
explore.
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Imagining “Alternative” Relationships
The overarching plot of Beigbeder’s novels concerns the narrator’s attempt to
establish a more perfect union between his lover and himself. In Mémoire d’un jeune
homme dérangé (1990), a novel written in the form of a journal, the narrator reflects on
the nature of love as he becomes enamored with a new woman. Marc is recurrently
haunted by his own romantic history, which he summarizes as an unsuccessful series of
one-night stands and short-term relationships that would quickly dissolve “comme une
pastille d’Alka-Seltzer dans un verre d’eau” (55). However, Marc’s skepticism of love
relationships is balanced by his romantic nature, as the story centers on his quest to attain
true love. Often, this involves the narrator’s experimentation with “alternative” forms of
relationships. While Marc dismisses as fiction a common perception that passionate love
grows over time, he also refuses to accept an opposing perspective that holds that passion
gradually decreases through the course of a relationship. Instead, Marc constructs his own
theory, which could be considered almost as utopian as the first, in which love remains on
the incline, thanks to the couple’s deliberate attempts to reignite the flames of passion: “Il
existe peut-être une troisième voie. Un coup de foudre à peu près réciproque peut se
transformer en passion durable à condition de l’entretenir à coups de voyage, de
beuveries et de scènes de ménage gratuites (voir figure 3)” (45). In his journal, Marc
graphs his theory of the possibility of love’s trajectory (figure 3), which he juxtaposes to
the more common perspectives on passion (figures 1 and 2):
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The irregularity of passion’s trajectory in Figure 3 would indicate both its natural
propensity to wane over time, as well as its frequent resurgences, due to the lovers’
calculated efforts. 12 This formulaic theory fuels Marc’s quest for true love through a
number of “experiments” that form the substance of subsequent novels.
Beigbeder’s second novel, Vacances dans le coma (1996), can be considered an
experiment designed to test the hypothesis that through concerted effort, a couple may
remain in an excited state of passionate love. Marc, who the reader is led to believe is
single, spends an extravagant evening at a hip nightclub to meet beautiful women. But the
narrator explains that what Marc really wants is to fall in love again: “Au fond, il sait bien
qu’il cherche la même chose que tous ses amis: retomber amoureux” (23). 13 This passage
suggests that similar to Tristan and Iseult, what Marc (and his peers) loves “is love and
being in love” (Rougemont 43). After hours of heavy drinking and flirting with various
women, he eventually meets a beautiful face that stirs passion in him. The two share a
magical hour of engaging conversation and the birth of sexual desire: “[Marc] est
amoureux fou, [...] éperdu et perdu” (125-26). The two are so taken by each other that
they enter the women’s restroom to have sex. In the novel’s surprising conclusion, Marc
comes to realize, as if awakening from a dream (or coma), that the woman with whom he
has spent the evening is in fact his wife of two years: “Tout s’éclaire soudain. Marc se
souvient [...]. Cette Anne, non seulement son visage ne lui est pas inconnu, mais en plus il
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l’a épousée voilà deux ans [...]. Bien sûr qu’il est marié: un mariage d’amour, en plus”
(148). Then, as if himself recovering from a coma, the narrator finally elaborates on Marc
and Anne’s peculiar relationship:
Ils se prennent pour des aventuriers des temps modernes: ils rajoutent de
l’estragon sur les côtelettes d’agneau. Ils bouffent du camembert très fait et
reprennent du bourgogne rouge. Ils perdent leurs lunettes sous le lit.
L’amour est une botte de radis achetée à Tarascon et croquée sur un banc
avec du gros sel. Ils jouissent de concert. Ils retrouvent leurs lunettes sous
le lit. Ils se lavent tout le temps les dents. Ils font beaucoup d’efforts pour
que ce miracle continue. (149)
Here, Marc’s relationship with his wife takes an unconventional path, which is meant to
sustain their “mariage d’amour.” In retrospect, the entire novel constitutes the couple’s
elaborate strategy to maintain the feeling of being in love. Specifically, Marc tricks
himself—just as the narrator tricks the reader—into believing that he is single once again,
thereby allowing himself to relive with his wife that initial coup de foudre (love at first
sight), which many married couples long for but only experience for a second time in an
extramarital affair.
In another “experiment,” a short story of the collection Nouvelles sous ecstasy
(1999) entitled “Ecstasy à Go-Go,” the protagonist, this time named Frédéric, goes to
extreme measures to prove that love does not necessarily fizzle with time. The story’s
introduction describes Frédéric and his girlfriend Delphine as a “couple moderne,” that is
to say they have a sexually open relationship. Unconvinced that fidelity helps keep the
marriage intact, they believe, on the contrary, that by occasionally sleeping with others
they will ensure that their love will last (84). The plot recounts a vacation that the couple
takes to Phuket, an island of Thailand that thrives financially on sex tourism. Convinced
that fidelity, not infidelity, dissolves relationships (“Ce qui tue les couples, c’est la
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fidélité”), Frédéric and Delphine decide to explore the island separately in search of
sexual trysts (85). Once again, the narrative appears to deal exclusively with the
adventures of the male protagonist. The story describes Frédéric’s visit to a “bar à pute,”
where, after a lap dance and conversation with the go-go girls, the bar pimp leads
Frédéric to a well-equipped torture chamber. Presented to a hooded slave chained to the
wall, Frédéric pays the going rate, and proceeds to “faire subir à cette jolie femme tout ce
qui lui passera par la tête” (91). After extracting great pleasure from his sadistic acts,
Frédéric unmasks the slave, who is revealed to be his beloved Delphine:
Après avoir donné à l’esclave une ‘alternance de joie et de peine’ [...],
Frédéric est pris de curiosité. Il veut voir le visage de la beauté qu’il vient
de caresser, de pénétrer, de malmener et de mordre quasiment partout. Il
dézippe alors quelques fermetures éclair et, lorsqu’il parvient à retirer la
cagoule, reconnaît le visage radieux de Delphine qui lui demande: “Dis
donc Fred, tu sais que tu viens de me mettre enceinte?” (92)
In this story, the amorous couple lead an “alternative” relationship in which they
seek out sexual encounters with others to help keep their love for each other alive.
However, while Frédéric and Delphine believe that they are engaging in sexual acts with
complete strangers, they are in fact fulfilling their sexual fantasies with one another.
Similar to Vacances dans le coma, this conclusion suggests that elaborate role-play
among lovers (rather than a true open relationship) may suffice to keep the flames of
passion alive. It is also ironic that such an unconventional way for a couple to strengthen
their love for each other in fact forms a traditional, domestic bond. In a conclusion that
borders on the religious sublime, Delphine, appearing before Frédéric in “radiant” beauty,
announces, as if divinely inspired, that she has just become pregnant. The outcome of
Frédéric and Delphine’s unorthodox sexual behavior is presented as the miraculous birth
of a “nuclear” family.
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In Beigbeder’s writings, sexually open relationships are presented in a positive
light, as an arrangement designed, paradoxically, to strengthen the love bond between
emotionally monogamous partners. Although the main plot of “Ecstasy à Go-Go” does
not actually recount an occasion in which the couple engages in sexually open relations
(although they believe that they are), the narrator explains that the purpose of their
sexually open relationship is to maintain their passion for each other. It is not surprising
then, that Beigbeder goes one step further by advocating the practice of swinging—or
partner swapping. In his preface to Christine Ley’s Voyage au pays de l’échangisme
(2003), a sociological study on the practice of swinging in Western society, Beigbeder
proposes swinging as a solution to adultery and divorce. Partner swapping, he argues,
ultimately serves to protect the love bond of the married couple:
L’homme cherche à échapper à la prison qu’il a échafaudée de ses propres
mains. Après avoir imaginé son propre enfermement (le mariage, le couple,
la vie conjugale, destinés à séquestrer son épouse légitime), l’homme a
trouvé de nombreux moyens d’y échapper: le divorce, la polygamie,
l’adultère bourgeois, l’union libre. On peut dire qu’il a tâtonné pendant des
siècles jusqu’au jour où il a découvert la solution: l’échangisme. [...] La
solution échangiste repose sur des règles du jeu très précises, qui permettent
de protéger l’amour en le séparant du sexe. (7-8)
While swinging is commonly perceived as immoral, swingers have long defended its
purpose to strengthen emotionally monogamous couples.14 It would appear then, that
Beigbeder’s love stories, in light of their happy endings that proffer solutions to society’s
marital discontents, reconcile love and marriage, and idealistically close the longstanding
debate on the question of love.
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Toward a Postmodern Account of Love-Based Relationships
My presentation in this section of Beigbeder as a postmodern writer runs counter
to the love stories that I summarized above. The optimism of Vacances dans le coma and
“Ecstasy à Go-Go” that expresses the possibility of everlasting love as well as the general
faith in humankind’s search for relationships that correspond to man and woman’s
desires, contradicts the very skepticism inherent in postmodern thought of any ontological
definition of the self and its desires, and of any historical progression of the institution of
marriage toward the realization of universal principles of human psychology. This is why
my analysis must go beyond a “reading for the plot” to highlight the textual elements that
question the very possibility of true love that each story claims to solve.15
The “death of the subject,” a central belief elaborated on by key postmodern
thinkers including Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-François Lyotard, maintains
that the self, far from being a sovereign agent that can study the world from a detached,
objective position, is “governed,” even “constructed,” by institutional discourses
(Holstein 79).16 A common practice among postmodernists is the analysis of the
discourses at play in the formation of the so-called individual will. In Beigbeder’s
L’amour dure trois ans (1997), a novel that I will focus on in this final section, reveals
two powerful discourses on love and marriage that determine the narrator’s thoughts and
intentions. In portraying the subject as discursively constructed, the postmodernist writer
often employs literary tropes to demystify the grand narratives on human desire. As Paul
Sheehan asserts in “Postmodernism and Philosophy,” the power and originality of
postmodernist writing resides in its use of ludic, performative language, which include
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“sly puns, audacious juxtapositions, and eccentric allusions [in resisting] distillation,
paraphrase, and quotation” (35). In his Introduction to From Modernism to
Postmodernism, Lawrence Cahoone characterizes postmodernist writing as above all
ironic. In their attempt to separate themselves from the methodological or philosophical
claims that they critique, “postmodernists write in a coy or ironic fashion” (21). Similarly,
Beigbeder’s writing resists the totalizing discourses of love and marriage through irony,
conveyed by juxtaposition, parody, and sarcasm.
The plot of L’amour dure trois ans, which an ironic reading will seek to undo,
recounts another attempt by the narrator, now divorced, to reconcile love and marriage as
he embarks on a new relationship. But this time, the quest becomes more a play among
conflicting discourses. The so-called individual, outpaced by too much information about
itself, finds itself in a never-ending game of negotiations between society’s ideals of
marriage and popular science’s claims concerning man’s genetic programming for sexual
diversity.
In moments of heightened awareness, Marc perceives le mariage d’amour as
essentially a social construct that instills in the self the desire for a fulfilling, everlasting,
monogamous relationship:
Le mariage n’est d’ailleurs pas seulement un modèle imposé par l’éducation
bourgeoise: il fait aussi l’objet d’un colossal lavage de cerveau publicitaire,
cinématographique, journalistique, et même littéraire: une immense intox
qui finit par pousser de ravissantes demoiselles à désirer la bague au doigt
et la robe blanche alors que, sans cela, elles n’y auraient jamais songé. [...]
Alors elles attendent le Prince Charmant [...] (48-49).
Not just the female sex, but also the male sex, including Marc, is the target of a constant
media campaign that advocates the ideals of love-based marriages. Marc attributes the
failure of his marriage to his having been enticed by a seductive discourse into marrying:
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“Pourquoi au lieu du bonheur simple qu’on m’avait fait miroiter, n’ai-je trouvé qu’un
compliqué délabrement?” (25). Because of his recent divorce, marriage for Marc has been
partially demystified. Nonetheless, years of programming continue to lay hold on Marc’s
psyche, as he finds himself longing once again for a relationship based on true love. The
second half of the novel consists of Marc’s concerted attempt to enter into such a
relationship with Alice, despite his awareness that “l’amour est la seule déception
programmée, le seul malheur prévisible dont on redemande” and his constant selfreminders that “IL N’Y A PAS D’AMOUR HEUREUX.” (68, 80).
At the same time as social mores praise the virtues of love-based marriages, a
diametrically opposed discourse, diffused by popular science, claims that love, a
physiological condition briefly sustained by the body’s short-lived chemical reactions,
“lasts three years.” In his attempt to understand his divorce, Marc cites from a women’s
magazine a common synopsis of the ephemeral nature of “love”:
On vous fait croire que c’est pour la vie alors que, chimiquement, l’amour
disparaît au bout de trois années. Je l’ai lu dans un magazine féminin:
l’amour est une poussée éphémère de dopamine, de noradrénaline, de
prolactine, de lulibérine et d’ocytocine. Une petite molécule, la
phényléthylamine (PEA), déclenche des sensations d’allégresse,
d’exaltation et d’euphorie. Le coup de foudre, ce sont les neurons du
système limbique qui sont saturés en PEA. La tendresse, ce sont les
endorphins (l’opium du couple). La société vous trompe: elle vous vend le
grand amour alors qu’il est scientifiquement démontré que ces hormones
cessent d’agir après trois années. (28)
This type of article on the science of love, commonly found in fashion and health
magazines, reiterates textbook accounts of the chemical mechanisms of passionate love.17
Beigbeder’s novel demonstrates that the age-old perception that passionate love is shortlived remains in force, even as its symbolism as a love potion in medieval thought is
replaced with another (bio-) chemical account.
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According to popular science, the ephemeral nature of love is also assured by the
central role that infidelity plays in human evolution. Marc states that “un chercheur
américain vient de démontrer que l’infidélité est biologique. L’infidélité, selon ce savant
renommé, est une stratégie génétique pour favoriser la survie de l’espèce” (52). In widely
circulated magazines and best-selling books, scientists regularly challenge heterosexual
monogamy by presenting sexual promiscuity as natural.18 In brief, popular science
conveys the message that enduring love is a myth, and that fidelity is unnatural.
In light of these discourses, the plots of Vacances dans un coma and “Ecstasy à
Go-Go” appear as attempts by the romantic hero to appropriate the body’s sexual drive
for love’s sake. In the two stories, elaborate role-play and sexually open relationships
become strategies to trick the mind into believing that it is engaging in sex with a new
body. Advocates of the swinger “lifestyle” similarly negotiate between conflicting
discourses on love to substantiate partner swapping. Often resorting to popular science to
back their claims, swingers maintain that partner swapping addresses both man and
woman’s desire for life-long partnership as well as their equally compelling drive for
sexual diversity.19 Drawing from scientist Robin Baker’s theories on “sperm warfare,”
sociologist Christine Ley, among others, asserts that partner swapping actually functions
as an aphrodisiac in intensifying the sexual passion of the married couple.20 And Terry
Gould, in The Lifestyle (1999), claims that on an emotional level, the strict ethical code of
the lifestyle—which ensures that all sexual activity is mutually consensual, that a husband
and wife always leave an encounter together, etc.—ensures that the couple is engaging in
a marital bonding experience (219-61).
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Key elements of Beigbeder’s writing suggest that solutions that purport to reconcile
passionate love and marriage are in fact naive and formulaic. As we have already seen, by
drawing attention to the role that institutional discourses play in constructing the self, the
text undermines the very notion of individual desire, at least of one that can be known.
Beigbeder’s dismissal of romantic idealism is also evidenced in a later passage from his
preface to Ley’s study. Shortly following his initial praise of the swinging lifestyle,
Beigbeder juxtaposes an account of swinger idealism with a fantasy of his that cannot be
fulfilled:
Je voudrais être invité à une party où tout le monde serait mannequin ou
célèbre, sentirait bon, et me sucerait la bite avec l’accord de la femme que
j’aimerais, pendant que je la verrais pousser des cris de jouissance dans les
bras de plusieurs éphèbes. Malheureusement, l’échangisme glamour
n’existe pas, sauf chez Kubrick, c’est-à-dire dans la fiction. La majorité des
échangistes sont gros, laids et vieux. Je suis un échangiste frustré car mes
fantasmes sont irréalisables. Heureusement, sinon qu’écrirais-je? (8)
Here, Beigbeder relegates his ideal of swinging to fiction, thereby negating the types of
fulfillment that the swinging subculture promises. Beigbeder implies that swinging is not
all that it advertises itself to be, that it cannot fulfill both one’s emotional “needs” and
sexual fantasies. From a postmodernist/post-structuralist perspective, the self’s desires
will always exceed any lived experience, if for no other reason, because desire is
inherently desire for something unattainable, i.e. a “fantasy,” or more simply, “fiction.”
Far from being an atmosphere that fulfills both man’s sexual drive and his romantic quest
for true love, the swinging subculture leaves Beigbeder “frustré.” This ironic twist, in
which Beigbeder negates the premises of swinging that he initially praises, perhaps
unexpected for a preface to a sociological study on swinging, is typical of Beigbeder, and
begins to explain the nature of his writing as the expression of frustration, or lack of
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fulfillment. But Beigbeder quickly recasts this frustration in a positive light because he
recognizes it as the very premise of his writing.
The conclusion of L’amour dure trois ans, similar to Beigbeder’s other stories,
presents an idealistic solution to the question of love. As Marc becomes increasingly
aware of the mediated messages about love and marriage that continue to inspire his
thoughts and desires, he in fact appropriates the scientific discourse on love’s short-lived
nature, paradoxically, to sustain his passion for his partner. The most powerful
obstruction of the plot, that which sustains Marc’s passion for Alice, his current lover, is
the very fatalistic discourse that announces passion’s eventual demise. While Marc is
seemingly convinced of the claims of popular science that “love lasts three years,” his
conviction in fact works to stir passion, and consequently to propel the plot. At several
points in the novel, the narrator reminds himself, as well as his lover, that their
relationship is doomed. Halfway through the novel, Marc compares this new relationship
to a countdown clock whose final seconds will mark the dissolution of love:
En sortant sur la place, devant l’usine Georges-Pompidou, nous nous
sommes arrêtés sous le Génitron, cette horloge qui décomptait les secondes
qui nous séparaient de l’an 2000.
--- Tu vois, Alice, cette horloge symbolise notre amour. […] Le compte à
rebours est commencé… Un jour tu t’ennuieras, je t’énerverai, tu me
reprocheras de ne pas avoir rabaissé la lunette des chiottes, je passerai la
soirée devant la télé jusqu’à la fin des programmes, et tu me tromperas […].
Nous n’avons pas de futur. Regarde les secondes qui défilent, elles nous
rapprochent du malheur... (92-93)
Because of the time limit on his relationship that Marc imagines, the story remains at a
high level of urgency. In fact, the final chapters of the novel, entitled “Day Six,” “Day
Five,” “Day Four,” etc., act like a clock that counts down to Marc and Alice’s three-year
anniversary, i.e. the end of their love. But in contemplating what he perceives as the
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inevitable dissolution of his current passion, Marc’s frequent repetition of “L’amour dure
trois ans” becomes the refrain of his love story, a story that eventually passes the threeyear threshold. In the final pages of the novel, Marc declares his triumph over time and
rejects the notion that “love lasts three years”: “L’amour ne dure pas trois ans; je suis
heureux de m’être trompé. Ce n’est pas parce que ce livre est publié chez Grasset qu’il dit
nécessairement la vérité” (188).
Alongside the novel’s plot, however, a postmodern critique of the discourses on
love and marriage is articulated through various rhetorical devices. For instance, Marc’s
frequent use of sarcasm in his reflections on his relationships undermines the credibility
of the popular biological “imperative” on passion: “La chanson de Ferré résumait tout:
‘Avec le temps on n’aime plus.’ Qui êtes-vous pour oser vous mesurer à des glandes et
des neurotransmetteurs qui vous laisseront tomber inéluctablement à la date prévue?”
(30). Here, personification paints a ridiculous portrait of the body conspiring to defeat
passion and the powerless lover. In another example, the narrator imagines an equally
ridiculous scenario in which a lover excuses his adulterous affair as the means to passing
along good genes to future generations: “Vous imaginez la scène de ménage: ‘Mon
amour, je ne t’ai pas trompée pour le plaisir: c’était pour la survie de l’espèce, figure-toi!
Peut-être que toi tu t’en fous, mais il faut bien que quelqu’un s’en préoccupe, de la survie
de l’espèce! Si tu crois que ça m’amuse!’” (52). The humor of this passage is at the
expense of popular science. In parodying the attempt by scientists to explain all human
behavior in terms of reproduction, the narrator expresses the skepticism of
“metanarratives” that is emblematic of postmodern thought. In the end, Beigbeder’s novel
negates such claims to truth about human relationships.
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Of equal importance is the text’s distancing from the romantic discourse that the
plot advances. On occasion, the description of Marc’s romantic meditations becomes so
saturated with clichés and couched in sarcasm that the reader has no choice but to read it
ironically:
Je prends mon stylo pour dire que je l’aime, qu’elle a les plus longs cheveux du
monde et que ma vie s’y noie, et si tu trouves ça ridicule pauvre de toi, ses yeux
sont pour moi, elle est moi, je suis elle, et quand elle crie je crie aussi et tout ce que
je ferai jamais sera pour elle, toujours, toujours je lui donnerai tout et jusqu’à ma
mort il n’y aura pas un matin où je me lèverai pour autre chose que pour elle et lui
donner envie de m’aimer et embrasser encore et encore ses poignets, ses épaules,
ses seins [...]. Comme la joie de vivre nous étouffe, je n’ai jamais vécu ça, est-ce
que tu ressens ce que je ressens? tu ne pourras jamais m’aimer autant que je t’aime,
non c’est moi qui t’aime plus que toi [...]. (165, 167)
As noted earlier, the narrator is acutely aware of the influence of social discourse on love
and marriage in the shaping of his desire. Marc’s references to desire as a social construct
are often juxtaposed with parodies of romantic scenarios. Even as the narrator falls in
love with Alice, and recounts a series of candlelit dinners and love-letter exchanges, he
describes le mariage d’amour as “l’objet d’un colossal lavage de cerveau publicitaire,
cinématographique, journalistique, et même littéraire: une immense intox [...]” (48).
While the dénouement proceeds to a happy ending, the narrator distances himself
from his story, as if snapping out of a daydream, to suggest that what he is experiencing
belongs to fiction, and that his writing resembles the conclusion of Hollywood romances:
Dans un beau film, je me mettrais à courir après le taxi sous la pluie, et nous
tomberions dans les bras l’un de l’autre au prochain feu rouge. Ou bien ce serait
elle qui changerait d’avis, soudain, et supplierait le chauffeur de s’arrêter, comme
Audrey Hepburn/Holly Golightly à la fin de Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Mais nous ne
sommes pas dans un film. [...] Nous sommes dans la vie où les taxis roulent. (159)
Because of the ironic perspective on relationships that the text often takes, the reader is
lead to interpret with skepticism the novel’s ending, in which Marc declares that his
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passion for Alice is taking a permanent form: “J’ai regardé ma montre: il était 23h59.
Encore soixante secondes, et nous serions fixés” (194). Even in these sentences, the
conditional form of the verb and the fact that the novel ends one minute before Marc and
Alice’s three-year anniversary leave the reader incredulous concerning the reality that
Marc will actually remain passionately in love with Alice beyond the story’s conclusion.
It appears, rather, that Marc’s obsession and frustration with science’s claim that “love
lasts three years” overshadows any genuine love that he feels for Alice. Above all, the
conclusion makes it obvious that Marc, in his desperation to take his relationship beyond
the three-year threshold, continues to be manipulated by mediated discourses.
L’amour dure trois ans highlights the inconsistencies in the opinions that the
present generation expresses with respect to committed relationships. The narrator’s
thoughts, wavering between his yearnings for romantic love, his concomitant suspicion of
its mediated portrayals, and the claims of “scientific” realism, characterize a new,
complex mind-set toward love and marriage. In her investigation of contemporary
perceptions of different relationship scenarios, sociologist Eva Illouz has found that
respondents categorically rejected “with suspicion, derision, and ironic distance,” a
romantic account of “love at first sight” among strangers on a train who decided to marry
only days later (175). However, when asked to describe their most memorable or
fulfilling relationship, almost all participants referred to a past relationship that mirrored
“the narrative model of love at first sight as codified in popular cinema” (172):
Like postmodern artists and sociologists, the respondents maintain the ironic stance
that their representations and experiences are ‘simulacra’, imitations of
manufactured signs devoid of referents. The romantic self perceives itself
ironically, like a pre-scripted actor who repeats the words and gestures of other prescripted actors, simply repeating others’ repetitions. (181)
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In the end, the contemporary self is emblematized by its awareness of the incongruence
between its romantic idealism and its skeptic realism. In the conclusion to her study,
Illouz states: “The romantic self perceives itself in the halo of an ironic semiotic
suspicion. Like Baudrillardian sociologists, my respondents suggest that their own lives
are ‘simulations’, repetitions, of authorless signs empty of any real referent. [...] Love
seems to have ‘flattened’ out in a culture where all forms of ‘intensities’ are actively
encouraged and simultaneously demystified” (182-83).
Beigbeder’s narratives clearly respond to a rich literary tradition on the question
of love. But instead of simply offering another love story that eternalizes passion, either
through the death of the lovers or a fairy-tale ending in which the couple live happily ever
after, Beigbeder’s writing renders problematic any attempt on the part of the romantic to
attain true love, a notion that is itself rendered problematic. A couple’s strategies of roleplay, open relationships, and swinging are unveiled as simply new moves in the nonending game of desire. As a postmodern thinker, Beigbeder lays bare the discourses that,
from a postmodern perspective, always already predetermine our desires. The end result
is the self’s expression of frustration toward unfulfilling relationships, which are shaped
by discourses that continue to entice us. To be sure, Beigbeder’s writing reflects the
concerns and frustrations of Generation X with regard to love-based marriages. Much like
Xers’ characteristic self-reflexivity and suspicion of committed relationships, the
postmodern narrative, in its awareness of the complexities of love, recounts love stories
of indecision, which emerge from the unresolved play between desire and distrust.
1
Quoted by Coontz, 15.
Several scholars have commented on Houellebecq’s rejection of May ’68 ideology and his concomitant
nostalgia for the moral integrity of earlier generations. In “Sex and the West,” Madeleine Byrne states that
Houellebecq “argues that 60s radicalism, with its unchecked individualism has dissolved social institutions,
2
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such as marriage and the family (the only things, Houellebecq argues, that can act as a buffer against
capitalism’s excesses) (208). In “Transfigurations: Verbal and Visual frissons in France’s Millennial
Change,” Colin Nettelbeck asserts that in Les particules élémentaires, “the author took to flaying, with
merciless and savage energy, the 1968 generation” (93). And Gavin Bowd, in “Michel Houellebecq and the
Pursuit of Happiness,” states that “Houellebecq’s thought is marked by both nostalgia and resentment: a
very affectionate and sentimental memory of grandparents who are monogamous, hard-working and vote
Communist or Gaullist; hatred of hippies, America, May 68 and Maastricht liberalism” (37).
3
In “No Man’s Land: Genres en question dans Sitcom, Romance et Baise-moi,” Stéphane Spoiden discusses
the general rejection among readers of a “culture poubelle” in his analysis of readers’ reactions to
Despentes’s novels. In La Littérature sans estomac, writer and scholar Pierre Jourde groups the novels of
Angot, Beigbeder, Darrieussecq, Despentes, Millet, and others under the category “littérature de latrines,”
which, he argues, markets its titles by promising readers extreme accounts of sex and violence (18).
4
See Lynnea Chapman King’s “Generation X: Searching for an Identity” 9; Sherry Ortner’s “Generation X:
Anthropology in a Media-Saturated World,” 418; and Angie Williams’ “Talking About Generation X:
Defining Them as They Define Themselves.”
5
In Routledge’s Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought, editor Stuart Sim begins his classification of
postmodernism by identifying its overall skepticism of the values that characterized the modern era: “To
move from the modern to the postmodern is to embrace scepticism about what our culture stands for and
strives for” (vii). In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard defines
postmodernism as “incredulity regarding metanarratives, that is to say, “grand stories about the world and
the place of inquiry in it” (xxiii-xxv). In “Science, technology, and postmodernism,” Ursula K. Heise
analyzes the general rejection by postmodernists of any assumptions about progress, in particular the
postmodernist “ambivalence vis-à-vis science and technology as unequivocally positive forces, [and] the
narratives of progress and mastery of nature” (137). In The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity in a
Postmodern World, James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium present an in-depth summary of the
postmodern critique of subjectivity and its predication on individual agency. While some postmodern
thinkers speak of a “decentered self” that is constantly being shaped by social forces, others including Jean
Baudrillard altogether dismiss the self as a “real” being (56-80).
6
For a study of Gergen’s notion of the “saturated self,” see Holstein and Gubrium’s The Self We Live By,
58-60.
7
In his analysis of medieval texts, Rougemont underscores a negative portrayal of passionate love, or eros,
as ‘the love of passion for its own sake,’ and as “le désir ce qui nous blesse, et nous anéantit par son
triomphe.” Far from bringing joy to the couple in love, eros betrays our secret preference for what is
unhappy, and requires increasingly perilous obstacles that delay fulfillment if it is to survive (53-55).
8
See, for instance, Coontz, 17; and Miguel Benasayag’s Le pari amoureux, 32-42. Another common
reference is the conclusion to Mme de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678), in which the heroine
similarly renounces marriage to the man with whom she is in love precisely in order to remain in love
(187).
9
Emphasis is Rougemont’s.
10
It should be noted that Rougemont’s analysis of the Tristan and Iseult myth draws from the French
versions attributed to Béroul and Thomas. Other versions, including Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan und
Isolde, do not place much importance on the role of the love potion. Gottfried von Strassburg does accord a
place to the love potion in the story, but seems to do this only out of respect for the French tradition. In his
version, there is genuine love between the Tristan and Isolde throughout the story, independent of the
potion.
11
Rougemont essentially upholds the perspective on passionate love that the Church held up through at
least the eighteenth century by insisting on the destructive nature of a type of love that, in the end, does not
bring happiness to the couple: “What then, is the legend really about? The partings of the lovers? Yes, but
in the name of passion, for love of the very love that agitates them, in order that this love may be intensified
and transfigured—at the cost of their happiness and even of their lives” (37).
12
Marc calls this type of relationship the “bostella amoureuse,” the name of a dance involving two
contradictory types of movement, one happy and one sad. The epigraph to Mémoires d’un jeune homme
dérangé presents a description of the “Bostella”: “Alternance de joie et de peine / D’allégresse et de
contrition / Marquez bien les temps / Rythme cardiaque normal / C’est le premier dansodrame mimé /
Dansons la Bostella” (7).
98
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Volume 6, Number 1
In Vacances dans le coma, unlike in Mémoires d’un jeune homme dérangé, the narrator is not the
protagonist. Rather, he is what Gérard Genette would call “extradiegetic.” That is to say, he is not a
character in the plot that he recounts (Figures III 225-67).
14
In his investigation on the growing subculture of swingers in The Lifestyle (1999), Terry Gould states that
“the idea [of swinging] is to protect and defend the marital unions of everyone involved [...]” (162).
15
In “Reading for the Plot” Peter Brooks highlights the importance of plot—the design and intention of
narrative—in understanding human experience (of time, desire, etc.). My intention in this section is to
highlight the incongruence and therefore a fortiori dialectical relationship in postmodern fiction between
plot and other textual elements, notably the literary tropes of pastiche, parody, and irony.
16
Foucault even argues that the idea of the individual, a centered self, is itself a discursive formation. See
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 305.
17
For instance, in Janet Hyde and John Delamater’s Understanding Human Sexuality (2000), a popular
textbook used in college psychology courses, the authors state that “passionate love is like an amphetamine
high; both activate certain neurochemical circuits, and it is this activation that causes high energy, euphoria,
elation, and idealization. [Michael] Liebowitz suggests that phenylethylamine (PEA) is the chemical
responsible. Like all chemically induced highs, this one must end. Either the neural circuits become
accustomed to PEA, so it has less effect than before, or levels of PEA fall” (352). The authors also state that
the waning of passionate love generally occurs within the first six to thirty months of a relationship, a range
that roughly spans three years (351).
18
The increasingly popular discipline of evolutionary psychology portrays the human male as genetically
programmed for diversity in sexual partners. As cultural anthropologist Roger Lancaster notes in The
Trouble with Nature (2003), “evolutionary psychology explains our attitudes and behaviors in terms of
natural selection and sexual selection” (11). Evolutionary psychologists claim that the male psyche is
defined by his innate search to spread his infinitely abundant seed to as many mates as possible (11-12). In
The Mating Mind (2000), Geoffrey Miller’s description of nearly all human behavior, even artistic
expression, in terms of sexual selection, is a prime example. According to Miller, not unlike the male
peacock, the human male seeks to spread his seed to as many females as possible through elaborate
courtship, that is, by the marketing of “good genes” (fitness, intelligence, etc.).
19
See, for instance, Terry Gould’s The Lifestyle: A Look at the Erotic Rites of Swingers, 3.
20
Drawing from the thesis in evolutionary biologist Robin Baker’s Sperm Wars (1996) that the human
sexual drive, in order to assure that the best genes of a pool reproduce, is programmed for “sperm wars,”
Christine Ley affirms that for men especially, watching their spouse engage in sexual relations with another
man serves as a potent aphrodisiac: “L’homme qui suspecte sa compagne d’avoir mené une relation
sexuelle avec un autre homme éjacule ensuite plus fortement, son sperme est plus riche en spermatozoï de et
son orgasme plus puissant que d’habitude” (68-69). See also Baker, 36-41.
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Works Cited
Baker, Robin. Sperm Warfare. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.
Beigbeder, Frédéric. L’amour dure trois ans. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
- - - . Mémoire d’un jeune homme dérangé. Paris: La Table Ronde, 1990.
- - - . Nouvelles sous ecstasy. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1999.
- - - . Vacances dans le coma. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1996.
Benasayag, Miguel and Dardo Scavino. Le pari amoureux. Paris: Editions La
Découverte, 1995.
Bowd, Gavin. “Michel Houellebecq and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Nottingham French
Studies 41.1 (2002): 28-39.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.
Byrne, Madeleine. “Sex and the West.” HEAT 4 (2002): 205-17.
Cahoone, Lawrence. “Introduction.” From Modernism to Postmodernism. Ed. Lawrence
Cahoone. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.
Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love
Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage,
1977.
Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969.
Gould, Terry. The Lifestyle: A Look at the Erotic Rites of Swingers. Ontario: Vintage
Canada, 1999.
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Heise, Ursula K. “Science, Technology, and Postmodernism.” The Cambridge
Companion to Postmodernism. Ed. Steven Connor. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004. 136-67.
Holstein, James and Jaber F. Gubrium. The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity in a
Postmodern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Houellebecq, Michel. Les particules élémentaires. Paris: Flammarion, 1998.
Hyde, Janet Shibley, and John D. Delamater. Understanding Human Sexuality. New
York: McGraw-Hill, 2000.
Illouz, Eva. “The Lost Innocence of Love: Romance as a Postmodern Condition.” Theory,
Culture & Society 15 (1998): 161-86.
Jourde, Pierre. La littérature sans estomac. Paris: L’Esprit des Péninsules, 2002.
King, Lynnea Chapman. Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 19.2 (2000): 818.
Lancaster, Robert. The Trouble With Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture. Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.
Ley, Christine. Voyage au pays de l’échangisme. Lausanne: Editions Favre SA, 2003.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984.
Miller, Geoffrey. The Mating Mind. New York: Random House, 2000.
Nettelbeck, Colin. “Transfigurations: Verbal and Visual frissons in France’s Millennial
Change.” Australian Journal of French Studies 39.1 (2002): 86-101.
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Ortner, Sherry. “Generation X: Anthropology in a Media-Saturated World.” Cultural
Anthropology 13.2 (1998): 414-40.
Rougemont, Denis de. L’amour et l’occident. Paris: Union Générale des Editions, 1972.
Sheehan, Paul. “Postmodernism and Philosophy.” The Cambridge Companion to
Postmodernism. Ed. Steven Connor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004. 20-42.
Sim, Stuart. The Routledge Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought. Ed. Stuart Sim.
New York: Routledge, 1999.
Spoiden, Stéphane. “No Man’s Land: Genres en question dans Sitcom, Romance et Baisemoi.” Esprit Créateur 42.1 (2002): 96-106.
Williams, Angie, Justine Coupland et al. “Talking About Generation X: Defining Them
as They Define Themselves.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 16:3
(1997): 251-77.
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On Love, Marriage, and Swinging

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