The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (27 page)

last word, the authority, is the text, surely not some social authority. People can criti- cize my narcissism, regardless of the fact that it helped me to bring the book into being; or they can, and indeed do, call me a “whore,” a “nymphomaniac” or a “foolish virgin” though none of it will last because it is not in the book. It is true too that we are freer to use our bodies and show them off if we do not belong to any union or group, if we are not hampered by any hierarchy or administrative power; by preserving the financial autonomy of
Art Press,
we were guaranteeing not only our freedom of expression but also our own individual freedoms. But social pressure can just as easily be exerted through family or within a marriage. It is quite apparent that Jacques and I have not been ensnared in this way. We had to emancipate ourselves from a particular convention of married life in order for me to succeed in writing this book while

still being with Jacques, and in order for him to read it.

The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
sets out first and foremost to bear witness, or, to put it more precisely, the text is intended to es- tablish a truth, the truth of a very particular individual, of course. While I was working I kept thinking of Cézanne’s famous resolu- tion: “I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you.” Cézanne wrote this sen- tence in the same letter to Émile Bernard in which he explained that “whatever our tem- perament may be and whatever power we may have before nature, the process that needs developing is giving the picture what we ourselves see, forgetting everything that has gone before us.” To paraphrase: “Good God,” Cézanne thinks to himself, “these mas- ters, Poussin and the like, taught us well but it could just be that the masters were jealous of their pupils and managed to hide the skel- eton holding the world together.” Cézanne

himself dug right down to the bone and, from the far scrubland where he lived, with no intention of playing the master clinging to his power and keeping his secrets, he made it his duty to transmit what he’d found.

I have forgotten what was published be- fore me. Denis Roche encouraged me to read
My Secret Life,
thinking that I should follow in the footsteps of the anonymous English writer and stick to factual material. I agreed, although I soon realized that the facts in- cluded not only facts in reality but also ima- gined facts and fantasies linked to them, and that the description also had to cover the in- terior representations of the body, which ex- press sensations. I strayed most notably from this model by adopting the thematic structure I have mentioned instead of a suc- cession of episodes. Another book had more influence over the way in which I put togeth- er this account. While I was working on my book I was reading Melville. It struck me one

day that the way in which he introduced his subject suited me well and that I had subcon- sciously adopted his rhythm. Melville often begins his chapters with general points, sort of primary truths, pronouncements, vast metaphors, before introducing his main sub- ject. “As the vine flourishes, and the grape empurples close up to the very walls and muzzles of cannoned Ehrenbreitstein, so do the sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.” This, at the end of a long page, to show a father dying before his son’s eyes but calling his adulterous daughter to him in his delirium. Other chapter openings in
Pi- erre or, The Ambiguities
include: “Glorified be his gracious memory who first said, The deepest gloom precedes the day,” and “Sucked within the maelstrom, man must go round.” I like his way of ironizing, which gives the impression that it is only with some difficulty that the subject is isolated from an ocean of shared ideas, as if it were at first

seen from a great distance, from the opposite shore to what all men communally say and think.

I unfortunately lack Melville’s inspiration, but I did get into the habit of announcing certain themes through initially distant com- ments; I frequently resorted to using indefin- ite pronouns such as “you,” “we,” or “one,” followed by generalizations, I commented on clichés, brought digressions (on art criticism, for example) to the fore, and finally I used what I had “heard said” about myself. This was one of the most efficient ways of guaran- teeing that I remained distanced. I tell a very individual story but one that is nonetheless available to all. This structure is not without analogies in what I actually say in the book, for example on the subject of the evenings in the Bois de Boulogne, when I was at the cen- ter of a group and could imagine that I was connected to a whole population of shadows, but I was myself a shadow. It could in fact be

that some other literary reminiscence was in play when I chose the title of the first chapter. Among the sentences we read and that imprint themselves more indelibly on our minds than the verses we learned at school I have this one from Bossuet: “I was sent only to make up the numbers.” I am now rereading all of
Le Sermon sur la mort
. “It is not the entire expanse of our lives that distinguishes us from oblivion,” writes Bos- suet, it is something else: “In the midst of this matter and through the obscurity of our knowledge, if we knew how to look inside ourselves, we would find there a particularly vigorous principle that demonstrates its ce- lestial origins, and which has no fear of cor- ruption.” Let us say that by looking inside myself I found, rather than a principle of ce- lestial origins, a book (a thing that has no fear of corruption either).

Since my book was published I have been answering journalists’ questions every day,

and these journalists are now of every na- tionality. I come out of these interviews ex- hausted. Similarly, the sessions with photo- graphers before, during or after the inter- views are extremely tiring. (Added to this is the fact that I struggle to answer all my mail and that, particularly for a few days after my participation in television programs, I have had to accept being approached by strangers on the street or on the Métro…always kind, but curious too and making unexpected con- fessions.) In one passage in the book I say that on some occasions I went to places for sexual encounters in the same state of anxi- ety that I feel just before giving a lecture, in- tuiting the exhaustion I will experience after surrendering my body completely, in the same way that I feel all of me being sucked into the text that connects me to my listen- ers. Over the past six months the systematic, minute and professional picking to pieces of my own person in the media has had the

same effect. I feel as if I am displaying the same availability, and the exhaustion here has less to do with the vampirism of others who would drain me of my substance than, inversely, the effort of re-creating myself each time, re-creating myself honestly and before their very eyes. As if I had to undergo the proliferation of multiple Catherine M.s, and Catherine Millets too, without ever actu- ally betraying myself. Surely this malleability can derive only from my libidinal economy.

For a long time I was haunted by charac- ters from Bernanos, dreaming of achieving in my own life the same faculty for giving one- self, while at the same time well aware that many of these characters fall more easily into wrongdoing than attain goodness, and that saints fail when accomplishing miracles. To those who come and ask me questions in the hope of discovering some secret about sex, I could at least reply using more or less the same words as Chantal in
La Joie:
“I may

seem impressive. I may look as if I’m stand- ing fast, but actually I’m already worthless…. Granted, I don’t believe I’ve ever lied to any- one; the trouble is that I just seem to without meaning to…. You just tell yourselves that I must know more about it than I’m letting on…. Well, I don’t.”

I am infinitely grateful to Chantal Thomas for the fact that after reading
Catherine M.
she immediately said that “it’s the per- missiveness and not the transgression” that attracted her. And I was not very surprised when my book was given a hostile reception by people who themselves one might have assumed had relatively emancipated sex lives. They must derive their pleasure from transgression, and therefore need to uphold certain taboos—particularly in what is actu- ally said—in order to continue getting their kicks in private. Having never attributed any sacred value to sex, I have never felt the need to shut it up in a tabernacle as (most likely)

do those who criticize me for robbing it of all its mystery.

One of the comforting effects of the book’s success is that it demonstrates that, to some extent, my “permissiveness” has found an ally in the freedom that a great many people have shown by going into bookshops and un- inhibitedly buying this
Sexual Life,
and then by discussing it among themselves. At the risk of further irritating those who are afraid I am appropriating their Marquis de Sade, I would even add that mothers have told me that they have talked about it with their daughters, and daughters with their moth- ers. On one page of the book, I amuse myself imagining a society sufficiently tolerant for people to swap pornographic magazines quite happily with complete strangers in the same train compartment. On another page I suggest this fantasy: fucking in a station con- course without causing offense to any pass- ersby. Surely the circulation of this book and

of conversation around it mean we can envi- sion, within the realm of possibility, a realiz- ation of this easing of human relations, an easing facilitated by an acceptance and toler- ance of sexual desire, and which some pas- sages in my book represent in a clearly utop- ic, fantastical way. And surely we should take pleasure and rejoice in this vision.

Table of Contents

1. Numbers
   

2. Space
   

3. Confined Space
   

4. Details
   

Afterword: Why and How

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