The Second Sex (41 page)

Woman’s first duty is to yield to his generosity’s demands; when he imagines Solange does not appreciate his caresses, Costals turns white with rage. He cherishes Rhadidja because her face lights up with joy when he enters her. So he takes pleasure in feeling like both a beast of prey and a magnificent prince. One may be perplexed, however, by where this fever to take and to satisfy comes from if the woman taken and satisfied is just a poor thing, some tasteless flesh faintly palpitating with an ersatz consciousness. How can Costals waste so much time with these futile creatures?

These contradictions show the scope of a pride that is nothing but vanity.

A more subtle delectation belonging to the strong, the generous, the master, is pity for the unfortunate race. Costals from time to time is moved to feel such fraternal gravity, so much sympathy in his heart for the humble, so much “pity for women.” What can be more touching than the unexpected gentleness of tough beings? He brings back to life this noble postcard image when deigning to consider these sick animals that are women. He even likes to see sportswomen beaten, wounded, exhausted, and bruised; as for the others, he wants them as helpless as possible. Their monthly misery disgusts him, and yet Costals confides that “he had always preferred women on those days when he knew them to be affected.”
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He even yields to this pity sometimes; he goes so far as to make promises, if not to keep them: he promises to help Andrée, to marry Solange. When pity retreats from his soul, these promises die: Doesn’t he have the right to change his mind? He makes the rules of the game that he plays with himself as the only partner.

Inferior and pitiful, that is not enough. Montherlant wants woman to be despicable. He sometimes claims that the conflict of desire and scorn is a pathetic tragedy: “Oh! To desire what one disdains: what a tragedy!… To have to attract and repel in virtually the same gesture, to light and quickly put out as one does with a match, such is the tragedy of our relations with women!”
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In truth, the only tragedy is from the match’s point of view, that is, a negligible point of view. For the match lighter, careful not to burn his fingers, it is too obvious that this exercise delights him. If his pleasure were not to “desire what he disdains,” he would not systematically refuse to
desire what he esteems: Alban would not repel Dominique; he would choose what he desires: after all, what is so despicable about a little Spanish dancer, young, pretty, passionate, and simple; is it that she is poor, from a low social class, and without culture? In Montherlant’s eyes, these would seem to be defects. But above all he scorns her as a woman, by decree; he says in fact that it is not the feminine mystery that arouses males’ dreams but these dreams that create mystery; but he also projects onto the object what his subjectivity demands: it is not because they are despicable that he disdains women but because he wants to disdain them that they seem abject to him. He feels that the lofty heights he is perched on are all the higher as the distance between them and her is great; that explains why his heroes choose such pathetic sweethearts: against Costals, the great writer, he pits an old provincial virgin tortured by sex and boredom, and a little far-right bourgeois, vacuous and calculating; this is measuring a superior individual with humble gauges: the result is that he comes across as very small to the reader through this awkward caution. But that does not matter as Costals thinks himself grand. The humblest weaknesses of woman are sufficient to feed his pride. A passage in
The Girls
is particularly telling. Before sleeping with Costals, Solange is preparing herself for the night. “She has to go to the toilet, and Costals remembers this mare he had, so proud, so delicate that she neither urinated nor defecated when he was riding her.” Here can be seen the hatred of the flesh (Swift comes to mind: Celia shits), the desire to see woman as a domestic animal, the refusal to grant her any autonomy, even that of urinating; but Costals’s annoyance shows above all that he has forgotten he too has a bladder and intestines; likewise, when he is disgusted by a woman bathed in sweat and body odor, he abolishes all his own secretions: he is a pure spirit served by muscles and a sex organ of steel. “Disdain is nobler than desire,” Montherlant declares in
Aux fontaines du désir
(At the Fountains of Desire), and Alvaro: “My bread is disgust.”
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What an alibi scorn is when it wallows in itself! Because one contemplates and judges, one feels totally other than the other that one condemns, and one dismisses the defects one is accused of free of charge. With what headiness has Montherlant exhaled his scorn for human beings throughout his whole life! It is sufficient for him to denounce their foolishness to believe he is intelligent, to denounce their cowardice to believe himself brave. At the beginning of the Occupation, he indulged in an orgy of scorn for his vanquished fellow countrymen: he who is neither French nor vanquished; he is
above it all. Incidentally, all things considered, Montherlant, the accuser, did no more than the others to prevent the defeat; he did not even consent to being an officer; but he quickly and furiously resumed his accusations that take him well beyond himself.
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He affects to be distressed by his disgust so as to feel it is more sincere and to take more delight in it. The truth is that he finds so many advantages in it that he systematically seeks to drag the woman into abjection. He amuses himself by tempting poor girls with money and jewels: he exults when they accept his malicious gifts. He plays a sadistic game with Andrée, for the pleasure not of making her suffer but of seeing her debase herself. He encourages Solange in infanticide; she welcomes this possibility, and Costals’s senses are aroused: he takes this potential murderess in a ravishment of scorn.

The apologue of the caterpillars provides the key to this attitude: whatever his hidden intention, it is significant in itself.
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Pissing on caterpillars, Montherlant takes pleasure in sparing some and exterminating others; he takes a laughing pity on those that are determined to live and generally lets them off; he is delighted by this game. Without the caterpillars, the urinary stream would have been just an excretion; it becomes an instrument of life and death; in front of the crawling insect, man relieves himself and experiences God’s despotic solitude, without running the risk of reciprocity. Likewise, faced with female animals, the male, from the top of his pedestal, sometimes cruel, sometimes tender, sometimes fair, sometimes unpredictable, gives, takes back, satisfies, pities, or gets irritated; he defers to nothing but his own pleasure; he is sovereign, free, and unique. But these animals must not be anything but animals; they would be chosen on purpose, their weaknesses would be flattered; they would be treated as animals with such determination that they would end up accepting their condition. In similar fashion, the blacks’ petty robberies and lies charmed the whites of Louisiana and Georgia, confirming the superiority of their own skin color; and if one of these Negroes persists in being honest, he is treated even worse. In similar fashion, the debasement of man was systematically practiced in the concentration camps: the ruling race found proof in this abjection that it was of superhuman essence.

This was no chance meeting. Montherlant is known to have admired Nazi ideology. He loved seeing the swastika and the sun wheel triumph in a celebration of the sun. “The victory of the sun wheel is not just a victory of the Sun, of paganism. It is the victory of the sun principle, which is that
everything changes … I see today the triumph of the principle I am imbued with, that I praised, that with a full consciousness I feel governs my life.”
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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.
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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.”
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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)”;
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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!”
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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,”
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he writes in 1925. And again: “In fact, what do I want? To possess beings that please me in peace and poetry.”
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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!”
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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;
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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!”
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