The Second Sex (42 page)

Yes. Montherlant’s values and exploits are a sad farce. The noble deeds that intoxicate him are also merely gestures, never undertakings: he is touched by Peregrinus’s suicide, Pasiphaé’s boldness, and the elegance of the Japanese who shelters his opponent under his umbrella before taking his life in a duel. But he declares that “the adversary’s specificity and the ideas he is supposedly representing are not all that important.”
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This declaration had a particular resonance in 1941. Every war is beautiful, he also says, whatever its aims; force is always admirable, whatever it serves. “Combat without faith is the formula we necessarily end up with to maintain the only acceptable idea of man: one where he is the hero and the sage.”
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But it is curious that Montherlant’s noble indifference regarding all causes inclines him not toward resistance but toward national revolution, that his sovereign freedom chooses submission, and that he looks for the secret of heroic wisdom not in the Maquis but in the conquerors. This is not by chance either. The pseudo-sublime of
The Dead Queen
and
The Master of Santiago
is where these mystifications lead. In these plays that are all the more significant for their ambition, two imperious males sacrifice women guilty of simply being human beings to their hollow pride; they desire love and earthly happiness: as punishment, one loses her life and the other her soul. If once again one asks, what for? the author answers haughtily: for nothing. He does not want the king’s reasons for killing Inès to be too imperious: the murder should be a banal political crime. “Why do I kill her? There is probably a reason, but I cannot see it,” he says. The reason is that the solar principle triumphs over earthly banality; but this principle does not inform any aim: it calls for destruction, nothing more, as has already been seen. As for Alvaro, Montherlant says in a preface that he is interested in certain men of this period in “their clear-cut faith, their scorn for the outside reality, their taste for destruction, their passion for nothing.” This is the passion to which the master of Santiago sacrifices his daughter. She will be arrayed in the beautiful shimmer of words mystical. Is it not boring to prefer happiness to mysticism? Sacrifices and renunciations
have meaning only in the light of an aim, a human aim; and aims that go beyond singular love or personal happiness can only exist in a world that recognizes the price of both love and happiness; the “shopgirl’s morality” is more authentic than hollow phantasms because it is rooted in life and reality, where great aspirations can spring forth. Inès de Castro can easily be pictured in Buchenwald, with the king hurrying to the German embassy for reasons of state. Many shopgirls were worthy of a respect that we would not grant to Montherlant during the Occupation. The empty words he crams himself with are dangerous for their very hollowness: this superhuman mysticism justifies all kinds of temporal devastations. The fact is that in the plays under discussion, this mystique is attested to by two murders, one physical and the other moral; Alvaro does not have far to go to become a grand inquisitor: wild, solitary, unrecognizable; nor the king—misunderstood, rejected—to become a Himmler. They kill women, they kill Jews, they kill effeminate men and “Jewed” Christians, they kill everything they want or like to kill in the name of these lofty ideas. Only by negations can negative mysticisms be affirmed. True surpassing is a positive step toward the future, toward humanity’s future. The false hero, to convince himself he goes far and flies high, always looks back, at his feet; he despises, he accuses, he oppresses, he persecutes, he tortures, he massacres. It is through the evil he does to his neighbor that he measures his superiority over him. Such are Montherlant’s summits that he points out with an arrogant finger when he interrupts his “mouth-to-mouth with life.”

“Like the donkey at an Arab waterwheel, I turn, I turn, blind and endlessly retracing my steps. But I don’t bring up freshwater.” There is not much to add to this avowal that Montherlant signed in 1927. Freshwater never sprang forth. Maybe Montherlant should have lit Peregrinus’s pyre: that would have been the most logical solution. He preferred to take refuge in his own cult. Instead of giving himself to this world, which he did not know how to nourish, he settled for seeing himself in it; and he organized his life in the interest of this mirage visible to his eyes alone. “Princes are at ease in all situations, even in defeat,” he writes;
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and because he delighted in defeat, he believes he is king. He learns from Nietzsche that “woman is the hero’s amusement,” and he thinks that it is enough to get pleasure from women to be anointed hero. The rest is the same. As Costals might say: “Deep down, what a farce!”

Lawrence is the very antipode of Montherlant. His objective is not to define the special relations of woman and man but to situate them both in the truth of Life. This truth is neither representation nor will: it envelops the animality in which human beings have their roots. Lawrence passionately rejects the antithesis sex versus brain; he has a cosmic optimism radically opposed to Schopenhauer’s pessimism, the will to live expressed in the phallus is joy: thought and action must derive their source from this, or else it would be an empty concept and a sterile mechanism. The sexual cycle alone is not sufficient, because it falls back into immanence: it is synonymous with death; but better this mutilated reality—sex and death—than an existence cut off from carnal humus. Unlike Antaeus, man needs more than to renew contact with the earth from time to time; his life as a male has to be wholly the expression of his virility, which posits and requires woman in its immediacy; she is thus neither diversion nor prey, she is not an object confronting a subject but a pole necessary for the existence of the pole of the opposite sign. Men who have misunderstood this truth—a Napoleon, for example—have missed their destiny as men: they are failures. It is by fulfilling his generality as intensely as possible, and not by affirming his singularity, that the individual can save himself: whether male or female, an individual should never seek the triumph of pride or the exaltation of his self in erotic relations; to use one’s sex as a tool of one’s will is the irreparable error; it is essential to break the barriers of the ego, transcend the very limits of consciousness, and renounce all personal sovereignty. Nothing could be more beautiful than that little statue of a woman giving birth: “A terrible face, void, peaked, abstracted almost into meaninglessness by the weight of sensation beneath.”
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This ecstasy is neither sacrifice nor abandon; there is no question of either sex letting itself be swallowed up by the other; neither the man nor the woman should be like a broken fragment of a couple; one’s sex is not a wound; each one is a complete being, perfectly polarized; when one is assured in his virility, the other in her femininity, “each acknowledges the perfection of the polarized sex circuit”;
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the sexual act is without annexation, without surrender of either partner, the marvelous fulfillment of each other. When Ursula and Birkin finally found each other, they “would give each other this star-equilibrium
which alone is freedom” … “For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness.”
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Attaining each other in the generous wrenching of passion, two lovers together attain the Other, the All. So it is for Paul and Clara in the moment of their love: she is for him “a strong, strange, wild life, that breathed with his in the darkness through this hour. It was all so much bigger than themselves, that he was hushed. They had met, and included in their meeting the thrust of the manifold grass stems, the cry of the peewit, the wheel of the stars.”
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Lady Chatterley and Mellors attain the same cosmic joys: blending into each other, they blend into the trees, the light, and the rain. Lawrence develops this doctrine extensively in
A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”:
“Marriage is no marriage that is not basically and permanently phallic, and that is not linked up with the sun and the earth, the moon and the fixed stars and the planets, in the rhythm of days, in the rhythm of months, in the rhythm of quarters, of years, of decades and of centuries. Marriage is no marriage that is not a correspondence of blood. For the blood is the substance of the soul.” “The blood of man and the blood of woman are two eternally different streams, that can never be mingled.” This is why these two streams encircle the whole of life in their meanderings. “The phallus is a column of blood, that fills the valley of blood of a woman. The great river of male blood touches to its depth the great river of female blood, yet neither breaks its bounds. It is the deepest of all communions … And it is one of the greatest mysteries.” This communion is a miraculous enrichment; but it requires that claims to “personality” be abolished. When personalities seek to reach each other without surrendering themselves, as usually happens in modern civilization, their attempt is doomed to failure. There is a personal, blank, cold, nervous, poetic sexuality that dissolves each one’s vital stream. Lovers treat each other like instruments, breeding hate between them: so it is with Lady Chatterley and Michaelis; they remain locked in their subjectivity; they can experience a fever analogous to that procured by alcohol or opium, but it is without object: they fail to discover the reality of the other; they attain nothing. Lawrence would have condemned Costals summarily. He depicted Gerald as one of those proud and egotistical males; and Gerald is in large part responsible for this hell he and Gundrun hurl themselves into.
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Cerebral and willful, he delights in the empty assertion of his self and hardens himself against life: for the
pleasure of mastering a spirited mare, he holds her firm against a fence where a train thunders past, bloodying her rebellious flanks and intoxicating himself with his power. This will to dominate debases the woman against whom it is directed; physically weak, she is thus transformed into a slave. Gerald leans over Pussum: “Her inchoate look of a violated slave, whose fulfilment lies in her further and further violation, made his nerves quiver … his was the only will, she was the passive substance of his will.” Here is pitiful domination; if the woman is merely a passive substance, the male dominates nothing. He thinks he is taking, enriching himself: it is a delusion. Gerald embraces Gudrun tightly in his arms: “She was the rich, lovely substance of his being … So she was passed away and gone in him, and he was perfected.” But as soon as he leaves her, he finds himself alone and empty; and the next day, she fails to appear at their rendezvous. If the woman is strong, the male claim arouses a symmetrical claim in her; fascinated and rebellious, she becomes masochistic and sadistic in turn. Gudrun is greatly disturbed when she sees Gerald press the frightened mare’s flanks between his thighs; but she is also disturbed when Gerald’s wet nurse tells her how in the past she “pinched his little bottom.” Masculine arrogance provokes feminine resistance. While Ursula is won over and saved by Birkin’s sexual purity, as Lady Chatterley was by the gamekeeper, Gerald drags Gudrun into a struggle with no way out. One night, unhappy, shattered by a death, he abandons himself in her arms. “She was the great bath of life, he worshipped her. Mother and substance of all life she was … But the miraculous, soft effluence of her breast suffused over him, over his seared, damaged brain, like a healing lymph, like a soft, soothing flow of life itself, perfect as if he were bathed in the womb again.” That night he senses what communion with woman might be; but it is too late; his happiness is vitiated because Gudrun is not really present; she lets Gerald sleep on her shoulder, but she stays awake, impatient, apart. It is the punishment of the individual who is his own prey: alone he cannot end his solitude; in erecting barriers around his self, he erected those around the Other: he will never connect to it. In the end, Gerald dies, killed by Gudrun and by himself.

Thus it would seem at first that neither of the two sexes is privileged. Neither is subject. Woman is neither a prey nor a simple pretext. As Malraux notes, Lawrence thinks that it is not enough, unlike Hindus, for woman to be merely the occasion for a contact with the infinite, as would be a landscape: that would be another way of making her an object.
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She is as
real as the man; a real communion has to be reached. This is why Lawrence’s heroes demand much more from their mistresses than the gift of their bodies: Paul does not want Myriam to give herself to him as a tender sacrifice; Birkin does not want Ursula to limit herself to seeking pleasure in his arms; cold or burning, the woman who remains closed within herself leaves the man to his solitude: he must reject her. Both have to give themselves to each other, body and soul. If this giving is accomplished, they have to remain forever faithful to each other. Lawrence believed in monogamous marriage. There is only a quest for variety if one is interested in the uniqueness of beings: but phallic marriage is founded on generality. When the virility-femininity circuit is established, desire for change is inconceivable: it is a perfect circuit, closed on itself and definitive.