Love and Lust
MERKIN, DAPHNE
Writers & WHting LCVE AND LUST BY DAPHNE MERKIN w. riting, however valiantly it summons up the image of potency, is in the last analysis impotent: "The keyhole of language," as Roland Barthes...
...Stuck behind the barred windows of a paddy wagon or behind the pane of the whorehouse, beneath the "punched-out, pallid sun" of Paris, she also has recurring pastoral fantasies that she shares with her friend, Malou: "How about running away to some place at the ends of the earth, where nobody knows us or anything about us...
...Cordelier has the accouterments of the skin trade at her disposal: used rubbers, Valium, false eyelashes, sleazy hotel rooms...
...Everyone will understand that X has 'huge problems' with his sexuality...
...She escapes the unfamiliar surroundings and humdrum routine and returns to her sordid native grounds...
...We'd arrive unannounced in our print dresses in some warm, inviting village...
...Marie is plucked out of school a few months short of graduation by an obtuse social-worker and becomes an au pair girl to a family in London...
...The variety of Barthes' references testifies to an asset rarely present in intellectuals—namely, a highly-developed playfulness...
...Just look at it—all that shining, blazing chrome...
...And his style reflects this dilemma, veering between pithy detachment and sudden bursts of confidence...
...Fascination with the seductive powers of language perhaps accounts for the fleet-footed, allusive nature of this book...
...I cross Quai des Orfevres, to the sunny side of the street...
...but no one will be interested in those Y may have with his sentimentality...
...I want to be both pathetic and admirable, 1 want to be at the same time a child and an adult...
...Marie, feeling she has nothing to lose, becomes his "wife" (one of three) and flashes her wares on the streets and in the brothels of Pigalle so that Gerard's pockets may jingle...
...For that one must turn from evocations, no matter how adroit—Emma Bovary, for instance, who "slid the tip of her tongue between her fine teeth to lick, drop by drop, the bottom of the glass"—to what can only be known beyond the contrivance of words, in the flesh...
...But it cannot give us the real thing—the caress itself...
...One discovers very quickly that there is as much sham and artifice in the come-hither of the hooker as there is in the marital schemings of well-bred Jane Austen heroines...
...Jeanne Cordelier is a gifted writer...
...Cordelier's turf is the realm of the body after the mind has been evicted and lust is rampant, bereft of civility, of all but perverted refinements...
...Irony does not come easily to her, perhaps because to be able to view life ironically one must not actively covet dying, as the majority of prostitutes in this clear-eyed account do, their slashed wrists and broken ribs providing stark proof...
...1 can fall in love," Barthes slyly notes, "with a sentence spoken to me" (author's italics—D...
...Barthes posits a hypothetical situation that has brought him to tears: "So this cannot be seen, I put on dark glasses to mask my swollen eyes . .. this gesture is a calculated one: I want to keep the moral advantage of stoicism, of 'dignity' . . . and at the same time, contradictorily, I want to provoke the tender question ('But what's the matter with you...
...Yet the "gang of dream-busters" cannot destroy Marie's persistent vision that she will emerge from the far side of paradise: "1 craved sweetness, I craved all the sweetness there was in the world...
...Barthes' ideas are modestly interspersed with borrowed ones, but they are striking in their very contemporaneity...
...She then gets engaged to Jean-Paul, who works on the production line at Renault...
...Family-life consists of scratchy meals (featuring a dish called lung-stew) and beatings...
...He is especially interesting when he comments upon the modern attitude of embarrassment at the ungainly abandon that being in love entails: "The moral tax levied by society on all transgressions affects passion still more than sex today...
...Her marriage plans are scuttled when she meets Gerard, who drives a car that hits Marie "like a burst of sunlight...
...Marie's father is a "hood" who first introduces his daughter to her potential career by slipping her pocket-money in exchange for sexual favors...
...Barthes, cognizant of the limits of his metier?these things 1 am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one 1 love (the other)"—has produced a flirty work, alluring as only the hesitant, the withheld can be...
...Her older sister, Lulu, has run away and already been lured into "the life...
...even bad blood runs thick...
...Although her narrative has strange lapses, awkward transitions and a frequently grating style, such considerations belong to the world of meticulous sensibility that Roland Barthes inhabits...
...T> JL ^^oland Barthes' observations emanate from a privileged domain of education and culture...
...It is sprinkled with quotations from disparate sources that include the expected (Stendhal, Werther, Proust), the less expected—especially to those who do not know Barthes' earlier writings?Winnicott, Lacan, Wahl), and the improbable (the movie version of Kleist's story, "The Marquise of O" and Jakob Grimm, quoted from Gershom Scholem's On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism...
...It's an insult to poverty...
...The "interminable winter" that is the life of a hooker finally draws to a close: "And what if I crossed over instead of keeping to the shadows...
...she has stocked up on two dozen towels and a pressure cooker...
...He goes about the task of fitting his scrambled allusions into coherent if flexible patterns of interpretations with merry ingenuity, like a precocious child assembling a difficult jigsaw puzzle...
...The process of dchumanization that leads to the final degradation of selling your body—when it is not yours but your pimp's—begins early...
...Her mother spends most of the day, and night, at the local bar with her lover, Paul...
...Notwithstanding all its reflections on the anguish inherent in the drama of romance, A Lover's Discourse is a happy book...
...By the end of these memoirs Marie has dared to extricate herself—at the risk of her life—from the clutches of Gerard and from her own self-destructive impulses...
...She undergoes brutal abortions and cries?it was a bad habit, she could never manage to shake it"—in her man's arms, the same arms that propel her back to the daily round of humiliation...
...It's a truly provocative, arrogant siren...
...Marie's father warns her that Gerard has "the hands of a loafer" (the single gesture approaching the paternal that he makes throughout the book), but to his daughter they are "beautiful, manicured hands, with a ring on each pinkie...
...His fragments clear a space for the "amorous subject," keeping at bay, with their arsenal of old and new intelligence, "the thousand forces of the world which are, all of them, disparaging forces...
...she has endured?I've been inoculated with the scrum of perseverance"—the kind of life that the shabby creatures in Jean Rhys' novels have just managed to skirt...
...A segment entitled "Dark Glasses," one of the more memorable in the collection, affects an uneasy, humorous compromise between the mutually exclusive positions of absolute pride and total vulnerability...
...The number of attempted suicides in "The Life" is the most inescapable fact about a profession that has often been celebrated—at a safe remove—by intellectuals and esthetes as the incarnation of the pure sexual motif, free of the hypocrisy that accompanies the official bourgeois code...
...Barthes' own preoccupation with keeping up the breezy appearance of the unenamored, his concern with not losing the all-important sense of perspective, is at odds with his unfashionable Werther-like craving to be engulfed, to be passion's slave...
...Cordelier has ascended from depths that are murkier than most of us can begin to imagine...
...There wouldn't be tears streaming out of your eyes but millions of droplets of sunshine...
...In between taking care of her younger brothers and shopping for groceries, Marie tries to concentrate on her schoolwork in the hope of getting a junior high school diploma...
...In place of belles lettres...
...It has given her an original and hence unembarrassed way of viewing things, a lough qualitv that is nevertheless strangely gentle, resulting in writing of almost profane lyricism: "And the toilet bowl, instead of overflowing with puke, will be filled with red roses...
...To this end, the form of A Lover's Discourse is consciously arbitrary, divided into three-to-five page segments that range in content from linguistic speculations to personal reminiscences, and every once in a while stop to tease with some inscrutable Zen tale...
...This, as we know from Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World and Rene Girard's Deceit, Desire, & the Novel, falls into the category of the mediated—the joy of sex as experienced by the mind...
...Jeanne Cordelier in her "The Life": Memoirs of a French Hooker (Viking, 368 pp., $10.95) writes from the gutter...
...The narrator, "Marie," known alternately as "Sophie" and "Fanny," grows up in a crowded apartment that is part of a housing project outside of Paris...
...Writers & WHting LCVE AND LUST BY DAPHNE MERKIN w. riting, however valiantly it summons up the image of potency, is in the last analysis impotent: "The keyhole of language," as Roland Barthes calls it in his new book, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (Hill and Wang, 234 pp., $10.00, translated by Richard Howard), can allow us close enough to overhear a rustling of sheets, sharp intakes of breath...
...By sheer use of his wits, Barthes affirms the "1 love-you" possibility that transcends—and sometimes invites—self-absorption...
...Avoiding the bodily—i.e., lust—he concentrates instead on abstracted sexuality, on desire...
...The sections have titles of sorts?Catastrophe," "Flayed," "In the loving calm of your arms"—which, in their disregard for consistency (nouns, verbs, questions, interrupted phrases, whole sentences peacefully mingle) and varying connection to the texts, point to the element of whimsy so essential to the logic of these fragments...
...Thereby 1 gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses...
Vol. 61 • October 1978 • No. 21
