Table of Contents
MARRIAGE AS A FINE ART
MARRIAGE AS A FINE ART
JULIA KRISTEVA
PHILIPPE SOLLERS
TRANSLATED BY
LORNA SCOTT FOX
Columbia University Press New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
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Du mariage considr comme un des beaux-arts
copyright 2015 Librairie Arthme Fayard
English translation copyright 2016 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-23154-303-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kristeva, Julia, 1941 | Sollers, Philippe, 1936 author. |
Fox, Lorna Scott, translator.
Title: Marriage as a fine art / Julia Kristeva; Philippe Sollers;
translated by Lorna Scott Fox.
Other titles: Du mariage considr comme un des beaux-arts. English
Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. | [First published
in French as] Du mariage considr comme un des beaux-arts copyright
2015 Librairie Arthme FayardVerso title page. | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016021195| ISBN 9780231180108 (cloth: alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780231543033 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Kristeva, Julia, 1941 Marriage. | Sollers, Philippe,
1936 Marriage. | MarriagePsychological aspects. | Marital quality. |
Man-woman relationships. | Love. | Sex.
Classification: LCC PQ2671.R547 D813 2016 | DDC 848/.91403dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021195
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .
Cover design: Jennifer Heuer
Cover photograph: courtesy of Julia Kristeva
Contents
PHILIPPE SOLLERS
I NEVER THOUGHT about getting married.
Except once.
For once and for all.
This odd and deeply impassioned adventure deserves, I believe, to be related in detail.
But what about the title: Marriage as a Fine Art? It harks back in ironic fashion to Thomas De Quinceys title (On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts) and to that of Michel Leiris (On Literature Considered as a Bullfight). Most of the time, marriage is a conflict in which one of the parties winds up a victim. People get married out of calculation or delusion, time wears down this fragile normality contract, they get unmarried, they remarry, or else they stagnate in mutual disappointment.
Nothing of the sort with us: both partners equally preserve their creative personality, each stimulating the other all the time. Its the instance of a new art of love, thensomething that cant easily be accepted by a broken-down society that sets great store by order. Marriage as social critique and poetic apology for freedom against every form of obscurantism? You try it.
JULIA KRISTEVA
A WINK AT On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (18271854) by Thomas De Quincey, our title also echoes On Literature Considered as a Bullfight (19451946) by Michel Leiris. What has marriage to do with crime, corridas, or literature, you may ask? At first sight, not much at all. Are we gearing up for an ironic account of the ancient institution of wedlock, intended to secure sexuality for all, or are we going to aestheticize the shared life? Or legitimize convention?
None of these, really. We shall rather try to tell all about a given passion, with precision, without shame or shirking, without altering the past or embellishing the present, and steering very clear of the flaunting of sentimental fixations and erotic fantasies so prevalent in the current selfie memoir. We shall also avoid overstatement and the gothic pulp that covers for unspoken grief.
Nevertheless, when a passion spares neither distress nor aggression, it invites both trenchant density (bullfighting) and the voluptuousness of desire unto death (murder, suicide). Might marriage be the place for such an alchemy? The answer is yes, on certain conditions.
LUCK AND FREEDOMS
What were the chances that Julia (born in Sliven, Bulgaria, in 1941) and Philippe (born in Bordeaux, France, in 1936), whose respective novels delineate their incommensurable singularities, would meet in Paris in 1966? Would love each other before, during, and after May 68? Would stay married from 1967 on? The odds were so small, any calculation of the probabilities would require an astronomic amount of noughts
And yet this thing exists. This marriage was well and truly registered at the town hall; and the reason it has lasted so well, with such uncompromising vitality, is because it never obeyed any law but its own. A permanent adjustment, loving and lucid, nurtured by two reciprocal and distinct freedoms.
She: more tested and secretive, with her Byzantine heritage, her foreignness as an exile of communism, with Freud holding her head above water among the eddies of globalized believing and knowing. He: craftier and more extroverted, a Girondist, a Venetian, a seducer, a libertarian, who slyly smuggles the life of the divine into the excellence of the French he impresses onto literature and politics.
Well leave it at that: dont expect any earth-shattering revelations about the life or works of the protagonists, merely the exploration of two paths that chime and diverge and complete each other by pacing out the space, the precise and precious place, that is THEIR marriage. Accepted, constructed, dismantled, and rebuilt, incessantly, ever since this LIVING WITH appeared to them as inevitable. A place as alive as an organism: whole swathes of each of us dying, by murder or by suicide, as one or the others freedom will have it, while others burst into life, unforeseeably, surprisingly, reticentlya never surfeited movement of starting over.
THE PLACE WHERE ONE MUST BE
You are going to approach this place through conversations. Words, reflections, questions, attitudes, and laughter are the inherent, inoperable materials of each of our identities. They are the stuff of our coexistence as a couple, then as a threesome when our son David enlarged the vulnerable space of marriage by making it one of parenthood.
To tell the truth, there is no possible meaning to any marriage other than singular. Neither the romantic hallucination of the coup de foudrewhich, short of expiring in an embrace beyond time and the world, is transitorynor the perfection of the fusional couple, who orchestrate everything for just one voice, will do. No, the marriage of two singularities relies less on the law that founds it than on an unshakable conviction, able to withstand trials as well as the joys that are not in short supply elsewhere or additionally. The conviction that here is the place where one must be.
The name of marriage has becomeacross our two lifetimesthe reality that recreates us, perpetually suspended like a grace and an invisible menace, like the substance that nourishes and bathes each thing but does not mingle with it. It does not staunch the pain of renunciations, of sacrifices, of death blows, of passing rebirths inside or outside it; it does not negate our animal reflexes, our mindless bestiality and instincts, our decays, sicknesses, and cares, or our certain death. In marriage and with it, these upheavals pass the relay to a supreme tie, the only possible one because it is clear-sighted, which holds me
