It is also known with what a relevant sense of grandeur he presented these Germans who “breathe the great style of strength” as an example to the French during the Occupation.30
The same panicky taste for facility that makes him run when facing his equals brings him to his knees when facing the winners: kneeling to them is his way of identifying with them; so now he is a winner, which is what he always wanted, be it against a bull, caterpillars, or women, against life itself and freedom. It must be said that even before the victory, he was flattering the “totalitarian magicians.”31 Like them, he has always been a nihilist, he has always hated humanity. “People aren’t even worth being led (and humanity does not have to have done something to you [for you] to detest it to this extent)”;32 like them, he thinks that certain beings—race, nation, or he, Montherlant, himself—are in possession of an absolute privilege that grants them full rights over others. His morality justifies and calls for war and persecution. To judge his attitude regarding women, we must scrutinize this ethic, because after all it is important to know in the name of what they are condemned.
Nazi mythology had a historical infrastructure: nihilism expressed German despair; the cult of the hero served positive aims for which millions of soldiers lost their lives. Montherlant’s attitude has no positive counterweight, and it expresses nothing but his own existential choice. In fact, this hero chooses fear. There is a claim to sovereignty in every consciousness: but it can only be confirmed by risking itself; no superiority is ever given since man is nothing when reduced to his subjectivity; hierarchies can only be established among men’s acts and works; merit must be ceaselessly won: Montherlant knows it himself. “One only has rights over what one is willing to risk.” But he never wants to risk himself amid his peers. And because he does not dare confront humanity, he abolishes it. “Infuriating obstacle that of beings,” says the king in La reine morte (The Dead Queen). They give the lie to the complacent “fairyland” the conceited creates around himself. They have to be negated. It is noteworthy that none of Montherlant’s works depicts a conflict between man and man; coexistence is the great living drama: he eludes it. His hero always rises up alone facing animals, children, women, landscapes; he is prey to his own desires (like the queen of Pasiphaé) or his own demands (like the master of Santiago), but no person is ever beside him. Even Alban in The Dream does not have a friend: when Prinet was alive, he disdained him; he only exalts him over his dead body. Montherlant’s works, like his life, recognize only one consciousness.
With this, all feeling disappears from this universe; there can be no intersubjective relation if there is only one subject. Love is derisory; but it is not in the name of friendship that it is worthy of scorn, because “friendship lacks guts.”33
And all human solidarity is haughtily rejected. The hero was not engendered; he is not limited by space and time: “I do not see any reasonable reason to be interested in exterior things that are of my time more than any others of any past year.”34
Nothing that happens to others counts for him: “In truth events never counted for me. I only liked them for the rays they made in me by going through me … Let them be what they want to be.”35
Action is impossible: “Having had passion, energy, and boldness and not being able to put them to any use through lack of faith in anything human!”36
That means that any transcendence is forbidden. Montherlant recognizes that. Love and friendship are twaddle, scorn prevents action; he does not believe in art for art’s sake, and he does not believe in God. All that is left is the immanence of pleasure. “My one ambition is to use my senses better than others,”37 he writes in 1925. And again: “In fact, what do I want? To possess beings that please me in peace and poetry.”38
And in 1941: “But I who accuse, what have I done with these twenty years? They have been a dream filled with my pleasure. I have lived high and wide, drunk on what I love: what a mouth-to-mouth with life!”39 So be it. But is it not precisely because she wallows in immanence that woman is trodden upon? What higher aims, what great designs does Montherlant set against the mother’s or lover’s possessive love? He also seeks “possession”; and as for the “mouth-to-mouth with life,” many women can give that back in kind. He does partake of unusual pleasures: those that can be had from animals, boys, and preadolescent girls; he is indignant that a passionate mistress would not dream of putting her twelve-year-old daughter in his bed: this indignation is not very solar. Can he not be aware that women’s sensuality is no less tormented than men’s? If that were the criterion for ranking the sexes, women would perhaps be first. Montherlant’s inconsistencies are truly abominable. In the name of “alternation” he declares that since nothing is worth anything, everything is equal; he accepts everything, he wants to embrace everything, and it pleases him that mothers with children are frightened by his broad-mindedness; but he is the one who demanded an “inquisition” during the Occupation that would censure films and newspapers;40 American girls’ thighs disgust him, the bull’s gleaming penis exalts him: to each his own; everyone re-creates his own “phantasm”; in the name of what values does this great orgiast spit with disgust on the orgies of others? Because they are not his own? So can all morality be reduced to being Montherlant?
He would obviously answer that pleasure is not everything: style matters. Pleasure should be the other side of renunciation; the voluptuary also has to feel he is made of the stuff of heroes and saints. But many women are expert in reconciling their pleasures with the high image they have of themselves. Why should we think that Montherlant’s narcissistic dreams are worth more than theirs?
Because, in truth, this is a question of dreams. Because he denies them any objective content, the words Montherlant juggles with—“grandeur,” “holiness,” and “heroism”—are merely eye-catchers. Montherlant is afraid of risking his own superiority among men; to be intoxicated on this exalting wine, he retreats into the clouds: the Unique is obviously supreme. He closes himself up in a museum of mirages: mirrors reflect his own image infinitely, and he thinks that he can thus populate the earth; but he is no more than a reclusive prisoner of himself. He thinks he is free; but he alienates his liberty in the interests of his ego; he models the Montherlant statue on postcard-imagery standards. Alban repelling Dominique because he sees a fool in the mirror illustrates this enslavement: it is in the eyes of others that one is a fool. The arrogant Alban subjects his heart to this collective consciousness that he despises. Montherlant’s liberty is an attitude, not a reality. Without an aim, action is impossible, so he consoles himself with gestures: it is mimicry. Women are convenient partners; they give him his lines, he takes the leading role, he crowns himself with laurels and drapes himself in purple: but everything takes place on his private stage; thrown onto the public square, in real light, under a real sky, the actor no longer sees clearly, cannot stand, staggers, and falls. In a moment of lucidity, Costals cries out: “Deep down, these ‘victories’ over women are some farce!”41
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.”42
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.”43 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 p
seudo-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;44 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!”
II. D. H. LAWRENCE OR PHALLIC PRIDE
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.”45 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”;46 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.”47 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.”48 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 condemn
ed 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.49 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.
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