Marriage as a Fine Art

AWINK AT On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827–1854) by Thomas De Quincey, our title also echoes On Literature Considered as a Bullfight (1945–1946) 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.

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.

We’ll leave it at that: don’t 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 other’s freedom will have it, while others burst into life, unforeseeably, surprisingly, reticently—a never surfeited movement of starting over.

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 foudre—which, short of expiring in an embrace beyond time and the world, is transitory—nor 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.”¹

The “name” of marriage has become—across our two lifetimes—the 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 in the place where I must be.

In what language? Those languages it has been given us to learn and tame and modulate. So as to make more than a shield of our attuned discordance, rather a source-place that maintains, separately together, two beings who are not the dupes of war and peace between the sexes. But who try to think them through, with their whole bodies—isn’t that something? In order to live, give life, and render bearable the fact that it will end. Refusing to let “both sexes perish on their own” (as feared and prophesied by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Marcel Proust).

The pages that follow resonate with current anxieties around the topic of marriage, while not falling for the unlikely merger of two into one or hinting at a happy solution to the idyllic, and failed, “togetherness” of “diversity.” They invite you, simply but ambitiously, to ponder the experience of marriage as one of the fine arts.