On Love, Marriage, and Swinging
Transcription
On Love, Marriage, and Swinging
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, 76 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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). 77 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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 78 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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. 79 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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, 80 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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 81 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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. 82 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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): 83 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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 84 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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 85 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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. 86 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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. 87 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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 88 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 “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: 89 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 “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. 90 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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). 91 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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 92 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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 93 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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. 94 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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 95 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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) 96 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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 97 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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 The South Carolina Modern Language Review 13 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. 99 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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. 100 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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. 101 The South Carolina Modern Language Review Volume 6, Number 1 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. 102