PHILIPPE SOLLERS
INEVER 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 Quincey’s title (
On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts) and to that of Michel Leiris (
On Literature Considered as a Bullfight).
1 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. It’s the instance of a new art of love, then—something that can’t 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.