This stupidity derives especially from the after-effects of the ideology formerly applied to women: Christian love (fanatical belief in marriage), courtly love, romantic love, etc. (Develop).
Women play their game, and there is no cause to reproach them for it. The reproach should be aimed at men, for playing theirs badly. For letting themselves be imposed upon by these centuries of gynolatrous literature, not daring to be either clear-headed, truthful, or ruthless enough with women (everything that women and their toadies call 'caddish'), and all this either from a false sense of honour, because they are mesmerized, or from cowardice, because they are afraid public opinion will be against them if they act otherwise. Women are well aware of this, and so long as they are not brought forcibly face to face with what they are, as a dying man is brought face to face with death, they will shuffle and squirm and try to keep up the pretence.
One of the duties, therefore, of the modern European who wants to live rationally is the duty of coarseness in love. He must have the 'effrontery' to cut through those Gordian knots which women tie, those difficulties which are not difficulties at all. He must struggle against whatever there may be inside himself which reaches towards that swampy or mined terrain on to which she would entice him. He must oppose with the utmost firmness a systematic frivolity to her unhealthy complications and sublimations. He must cease to create for himself, where she is concerned, under the pretext of desire, idiotic obligations, I mean unjustifiable obligations. He must fight against the artificial reflexes of 'chivalry', by repeating to himself each time: 'If every human being has a right to respect, woman has a right to that respect, and no more. She has no right to special respect. There is no valid reason why a woman should be treated differently from a man.' He must oppose a harsh indifference, real or feigned, to all the vulgar tinsel of bogus uplift, bogus high-mindedness, bedroom idealism, Lurve-as-social-convention, all that that 'threepenny opera' which virtue turns into when it is conceived by the mind of woman, and laugh himself silly when women call him a lout because he pretends not to understand what they are talking about. In short, he must on the one hand dishonour Lurve, and on the other, to the extent that woman is not indispensable, free himself from her. And, after all that, he will see that women do not cease to come to him, that some of them, perhaps, come to him all the more readily. And he will take the leper in his arms, and enjoy her, and give her pleasure too - why not? poor kitten, - but without catching her leprosy.
At which, just as there is always some arch-unbeliever ready to throw black looks at those who eat meat on Good Friday, there will certainly be some male hog who will grunt: 'Alas for French chivalry!' And then you will remember that there was a Greek chivalry at one period of antiquity, a pre-Islamic Arab chivalry, a Persian chivalry at the time of Shah Nahmeh and the Beharistan, a German chivalry based on the cult of the hero, a Japanese chivalry with the samurai - all of them in the last degree authentic, by which we mean branded with the authentic chivalric absurdity, - and that in not one of them did women play the smallest part (any more than 'God' did, be it noted in passing).
And to all those who, 'rending their garments', yelp 'He has blasphemed; he has committed a crime against love!' we say further that it is not love that we are defaming, but its caricature, Lurve. Parental love and filial love, true friendship, even the love of 'God' and the love of humanity, such as they are to be found in certain lofty spirits; and even those sentiments which are deemed to be no more than pale reflections of love, to bear no relation to it whatsoever - the intellectual esteem of a disciple for his master, the graciousness of a superior to his subordinate, the comradeship of arms or adventure, the interest an educator takes in his pupil; and even sentiments which public opinion puts lower still, such as the friendship of a man for his dog or his horse, are sentiments altogether nobler and worthier of respect than Lurve.
Progress comes about, not through women, but in spite of them...Learning, reason, justice, all that is best in the patrimony of our species, is threatened by the advent of women. AMIEL, Journal.
That what we are saying here has been said many times before may be an argument against us, but what does it matter as long as it argues in favour of what we say? The civilization of which we have just laid bare one of the principal characteristics is not a Utopian one. It was, for thousands of years, that of the ancient world, which for centuries afterwards was praised to the skies, without anyone ever being aware that 'all the great things done by mankind in antiquity derived their strength from the fact that men found themselves side by side with other men, and no woman could lay claim to being, for man, the object of the closest and highest love, or even the sole object' (Nietzsche). [And again: 'To be mistaken about the fundamental problem of man and woman, to deny the profound antagonism between the two and the necessity for an eternally hostile tension, to dream perhaps of equal rights, equal education, equal claims and obligations: those are the typical signs of shallow-mindedness. A man who has depth of mind as well as of desires, and also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and harshness ... can only look on women as Orientals do ... He must take his stand on the prodigious rationality of Asia, on the superiority of the instinct of Asia, as the Greeks did of old, those best heirs and pupils of Asia - those Greeks who ... from Homer to the time of Pericles, joined the progress of culture and the growth of physical force to an even more oriental strictness towards women.' (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.)
These, almost word for word, are the views expressed by Napoleon on St Helena: 'We, the peoples of the West, have ruined everything by treating women too well. We have raised them, very wrongly, almost to be our equals. The peoples of the East have a sounder sense; they have declared them the virtual property of men, and indeed, nature has made them our slaves. It is only through our wrongheadedness that they have laid claim to being our rulers.'] It is that of Asia, whose wisdom we praise, forgetting that the land 'whence cometh the light' is a land where woman has no place other than sexual. It rules the Moslem world, one of whose traditions tells us that the Prophet said: 'When he is in doubt, a Moslem consults his wife, so that he may do the opposite of what she advises' (quoted by Djami). Two thousand years of a different civilization, over only one part of the globe (Europe and the new World), against the millennia of that civilization [That the attempts made in the USSR to inject a bit of common sense into the 'couple' seem to be failing is not because they are 'unnatural', as our bien-pensants claim. For if Christianity has succeeded, anything unnatural can succeed.]
Perhaps, to a future race, the era of woman's rule will appear as remote as the era of priestly rule seems to the men of today. Lurve will have disappeared as completely as the great saurians of the mesozoic period. The modern conception of the couple (sublimation, wrangling and frenzy) will arouse the same horrified amazement as marriage between brother and sister or the sacred prostitution of certain ancient civilizations arouse in us. It is possible that this period of health will last only for a time: civilizations are by nature ephemeral, like political régimes. The quantity of human stupidity probably remains constant; when it has been eradicated here, it springs up again there, like boils (what a staggering list one could draw up of the successive lunacies of humanity!), but it does happen that, between boils, there is a moment of respite. If a civilization in which woman no longer holds sway is no more than a respite in the furunculosis of our planet, one will nevertheless deserve credit for having been among those who brought it about.
'Well, you must admit it isn't too badly put,' he said cheerfully to the young woman over whose shoulder he had just re-read his thesis, which she was still holding in her pointed hands, her fore-arms resting on her hip-bones (half-Egyptian through her mother, she was built like those Egyptian figures one sees on monuments). 'Infamous race!' He kissed her head, the very scalp, underneath her hair, which had three different smells - on the crown of her head, on the temples, and where it met her forehead. 'Yes, you really belong to an infamous
sex.' There was a silence. Then he added: 'Nevertheless I'm pleased with you for not yet having protested: "Pretty odd to write things you don't believe." '
'I haven't said it because I don't think it. But I admit I'm disconcerted....'
'Everything I've written there I profoundly believe, and I've believed it since adolescence, since the age when one starts getting to know about people. But sometimes it seems to me that I could maintain with equal sincerity - that is to say with total sincerity - a completely opposite view of the question: a view that would demonstrate the grandeur of woman. Why? Because that maleficence and that absurdity and that grandeur all exist in women. Turn and turn about. Always turn and turn about. Sometimes, too, it seems to me that...
'Here, I'll tell you a story. There was once a boy in a boarding-school who was persecuted by one of the masters, who treated him with monstrous unfairness. One day, towards the end of the school year, the master sent for this boy, who appeared before him tense and bristling and said: "I suppose you're going to give me another wigging." The master replied: "No, I sent for you because I'm leaving the school for good, and we won't see each other again. And so I wanted to tell you that if I gave you a rough time it was because I liked you so much. Now give me your hand and go." They shook hands and parted. And, as he had said, they never saw each other again.'
'What's the point of that story?' asked the young woman, knitting her brows a little.
'Isn't it obvious?'
She had turned her face towards him, and she searched his eyes (like a real woman) not so much in order to understand as to see if she could find reassurance there.
But he, as always, was smiling at something else.
Table of Contents
Title page
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
PART TWO
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
EPILOGUE
1928
1929
1930
1931
APPENDIX
The Lepers Page 20