SOURCE: "Intimacy," in Yale French Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring-Summer, 1948, pp. 73-9.

[In the following essay about Sartre's short story "Intimacy, " Morris examines the character Lulu, noting that in "Existentialist terms, Lulu refuses her choice; she remains 'astride' of a paradox in Baudelairian fashion. " Morris concludes by asserting that "Existentialism is for heroes."]

The opening section¹ of Sartre's "Intimité" is the richest of all in the dramatic, esthetic, and metaphysical ironies which lie at the center of the story and the situation it describes. It reminds us inevitably of the closing episode of Joyce's Ulysses, where Molly Bloom, "in the attitude of Gea-Tellus, fulfilled, recumbent, big with seed," at rest in her bed, approximating the lotus-dream of the Great Sleeper Haveth Childers Everywhere, lets flow forth the vital rhythms of the feminine principle. As Joyce's last becomes Sartre's first, the Earth Mother-soprano is metamorphosed into a barren little flirt ("Je ne peux pas avoir d'enfant, c'est constitutionnel") who designs fabrics and would like to have time to paint. An attempt to name the genre of this first section flounders, finally, in the same ambiguity, for while Lulu's monologue at first appears to be a stasis (just as the whole story is really a situation, open at both ends, and with only a very arbitrary climax) closer examination reveals an essentially dramatic structure, the rhythm, to be exact, of the sex-act which does not take place between Lulu and her impotent husband, Henri. Again, "Intimité," as a whole falls neatly into five acts, with prologue and epilogue; only all actions, except the one critical one, take place off-stage. This device has the double value of making Rirette and Henri's tug-of-war over Lulu stand out, as the only action in the story, with a ritual clarity and significance, and of conferring upon the written word, the récit, all the dignity which it has in Racine (to whom Sartre alludes obliquely not only by this sleight-of-hand elimination of scenes, but also in Lulu and Pierre's outing at Port-Royal.)

This absence of action, then, is a drama, and it is Lulu who assumes the masculine hero-role, jutting out clear and free against the massive, shadowy background of her somnolent husband, who imagines himself bound by countless tiny threads which reduce him to complete helplessness. ("le plaisir [de Lulu] de se sentir alerte auprès de cette chair molle et captive.") In a gesture of assertion Lulu proves that she is untrammeled and distinct by inserting her toe into a hole in the sheet and breaking her threads; with this same gesture she begins an extraordinary rehearsal (with Lulu herself in the male lead) of the same absent act of love. It is soon apparent, in fact, that Lulu's libido is not a happy one: what love she has for Henri is a gravitation to his soft, impotent non-masculinity; in a significant passage she remembers herself at a carnival shooting rubber arrows at disk-like targets.

Lulu's married life is something less than idyllic, since Henri, who admires Swiss manners and is (ironically enough) "stiff as a post" in company, finds that she is not distinguished—"distinguished", in fact, is an adjective he pathetically reserves for his Swiss brother-in-law who has produced five children. Lulu, overlooking the equivocal nature of her instincts, has corrected this romantic deficiency in the conventional way; like Molly Bloom, though without her prolific proficiency, she has entertained one lover after another. But her current gallant, Pierre, is possessive in the extreme, completely lacking in the gentle impotence that oddly characterizes Henri, of the bearlike aspect. He loves to stand behind Lulu and press against her. This represents the last degree of brutality and humiliation since he sees her while she cannot see him; Lulu is an auto-erotic ("le plaisir il n'y a que moi que sache me le donner") who finds only horror in the physical reality of love, and in whose eyes to take the offensive in the anticipatory action of seeing is equivalent to subjugating and using another person. If she accompanies Pierre to his villa at Nice (as he is pressing her to do) it will be one long trauma, a continual climbing of the marble staircase while Pierre watches her from behind. Even the physical love that Pierre pretends to have for her is unreal and meaningless, since he would not know her internal organs from anyone else's, if he were to see them in a jar; "starfish must love each other better than we do" because they expose their stomachs to open view. Lulu, reflecting on what orifice might serve to display the human stomach, for the achievement of this Utopian sensuality, decides (with pathetic irony) that it could only be the navel, the still point of the body, the receptacle of mother-nourishment, Joyce's "umbrilla-parasoul." Lulu's reflections on priests, her childhood desire to be a nun and flirt with men, her visit with Pierre to Port-Royal, (the apogee of modern ascetic Christianity) constitute oblique references to the absolute of religion, now bankrupt, which in another age might have profferred a matrix of repose. Now in this ironic image of fertility and fulfillment, Sartre connects the maternity which Lulu can never know with her experience of sterility and disgust in her relations with her lover ("c'est dégoûtant, pourquoi faut-il que nous ayons des corps?") knocking down the one idol which the toughest of modern writers (Hemingway, Faulkner, and Co., in particular), for all their iconoclastic cynicism with regard to fixed values, have adored as the last, great Unmoved Mover.²

Frustrated at every turn, Lulu seeks to lull herself to sleep by thinking about the crimson-and-gold ear of her friend Rirette, but quickly becomes irritated when the aggressive side of Rirette (her constant nagging at Lulu to leave Henri and go away with Pierre, her precise, nasal voice) obtrudes upon her reflection. She is disgusted at the idea of homosexual love with Rirette, who is just like Pierre in her eagerness to possess and dominate Lulu. Repulsed again, she reverses her field and fabricates a charming fantasy in which she lives in purity and moonlight with a delicate young boy, whom she loves as a sister loves a brother (again we catch Sartre amusing himself by inverting Molly Bloom, who, in her monologue, goes into raptures at the idea that Stephen, the young poet, may come to live at No. 7, Eccles Street, and that she may be able to seduce him). Finally she comes to rest in a scene where she imagines herself, free, untouched, and invisible, watching Rirette in the act of being seduced; this situation is the only possible erotic satisfaction for Lulu, who lives, in the final, decadent stage of unengaged individualism, by the watchword "noli ne tangere."

At the end of the section, worn and wrung by the terrors of her erotic Odyssey, Lulu decides that if Henri would only take her in his arms and plead with her, she would make the "sacrifice" (!) of staying with him.

II

If Sartre's Lulu-Molly seems a perverted and unearthy Cybele, we can understand how elemental a soul-searching her monologue has been only when we are exposed to the corresponding rhapsodies of Rirette (his Gerty MacDowell) whose little tragedy is interwoven with and contrasted to Lulu's in the second part of "Intimité." Nausicaa meeting Odysseus on the Phaeacian strand and Gerty MacDowell calling to "that handsome foreign-looking gentleman," Mr. Leopold Bloom, from her Rock on Sandymount beach, merge into Rirette calling to a waiter and making eyes at a Montparnasse Bohemian in the Dôme. Sitting in this restaurant whose lack of tone and style she deplores, ruminating on the ideal man, with his odor of Cologne and English tobacco, and his gentleness which comes from suffering,³ Rirette keeps reaching towards static beatitude in contemplation of the face of her God—but irrational, irritating Lulu (already a half-hour late for her pre-arranged meeting with Rirette) keeps coming to her mind with an insistence which disturbs the equilibrium of her reflections. Rirette's ideal is simply a more vulgar version of Henri's, a Utopia of "style" and "distinction;" but she detests Henri because impotence is a revolting, physical affliction.⁴ Lulu must leave Henri for Pierre; she hasn't the right to compromise her happiness. "Le bonheur, le bonheur": it is a magic word for Rirette, its complete lack of meaning absorbs all her shopgirl's aspirations.

The disturbing intrusion which has been prefigured by the repeated appearance of Lulu in Rirette's musings is realized; Lulu, again in masculine rôle, comes thrusting into the undifferentiated, flat sea of Rirette's thought, into the restaurant where Rirette sits and whose name (Dôme) is a plastic-objective of the feminine, maternal principle. Aliter, she arrives in a taxi, valise in hand, to announce that she has left Henri. She tells Rirette how, after a quarrel that morning, she locked Henri out on the balcony in his pyjamas (a complete triumph for Lulu, since Henri, like a fish in an aquarium, is powerless to prevent all who wish from observing him) and then left for good and all, tired of his domineering attitude. Rirette is of course delighted, but at the same time wishes Lulu would tell the story more comically, and would not be rude to the waiter. This mixture of irritation and pleasure ("ce que j'aime en elle, c'est sa vitalité,") is the crux of the ironic contrast Sartre establishes between Lulu and her foil Rirette; Rirette must stop all action, compress the real into two-dimensionality, and fit the unusual into the patterns of normality, before she can understand or enjoy. Lulu, who flows with the rhythms of Nature itself, cannot be "contained" in this way. At the instant of Lulu's arrival Rirette muses on "the bluebird, the bird of happiness, the rebellious bird of happiness" and a few seconds later she thinks "Lulu is charming, but she can be amazingly futile; she's a bird." In this seemingly gratuitous juxtaposition Rirette's unattainable ideal takes on a meaning: it is the realm of three-dimensional, fluid, "unfrozen" reality, the vital world which Lulu, the Magna Mater, is, and which Rirette simply cannot surround. In her opening monologue, remembering Rirette's remark, "You simply can't stay with Henri, since you don't love him, it would be a crime," Lulu thinks with annoyance "To her everything is simple and easy: you love or you don't love. But I'm not simple." The final blow for poor Rirette comes when she excuses Lulu's "nervousness" to the waiter, who, obviously bewitched, replies that he finds Lulu charming.

That afternoon, as Lulu and Rirette shop for clothes for Lulu's fugue, they meet Henri in the boulevard Montparnasse and the climactic (and only) action takes place: while Lulu, "molle comme un paquet de linge" tries to pursue her course along the sidewalk, Henri pulls on one arm, shouting "Tu es à moi" and Rirette, pulling in the other direction, manages to get Lulu into a taxi. Rirette has triumphed; Lulu has been ripped untimely from her nuptial couch and will go with Pierre. In this mad dance the real loser is Lulu; her vital forward-movement has been stopped; Henri has claimed her and pulled at her as a wife-possession-thing, Rirette has used her as a mere thing for her own sentimental satisfaction. She retains no more dignity or freedom than a bundle of laundry. It is too much: "I hate you, I hate Henri, I hate Pierre" she screams at Rirette, "you're all torturing me." Rirette can only feel cold and haughty, shocked as she is by the vulgarity (the one great sin) of the scene. She returns to her room, where loneliness and self-pity overwhelm her as she thinks of the ingratitude of Lulu; after all (another great ironic stroke of Sartre's) Lulu will know happiness at Nice, and will owe it all to Rirette. She breaks down completely, sobbing "A Nice . . . à Nice, au soleil . . ."

III & IV

"Pouah! Nuit noire."—this dismal echo of Rirette's "au soleil" wrenches us from our tepid bath of "bonheur" into cold, damp blackness, into the boue⁵ of the sordid hotel-room⁶ where Lulu lies captive and defeated after her unsavory tryst with Pierre. The word "passion" (which Sartre doesn't use but Rirette would) seems to attend ironically and etymologically at this second enchainment of all Lulu's active liberty. Once again, it is too much, and Lulu flees from this black saloperie back to the maternal womb of her own room, where the warm red light of a neon sign filters through the blinds, back into the arms of Henri, who is no longer a domineering, impotent husband, but a pure, tender companion (almost the young boy of her fantasies), a shelter against Pierre and Rirette and their plot to possess and control. But the visit offers Lulu only very temporary consolation; brought up short against Henri's indifferent and helpless passivity, she is forced to realize that once again she has been the buffeted victim of an impulsive reaction of pure negation. She has rebounded to Henri as to a citadel of stability, only to see a mirage dissolve before her very eyes. More miserable than before, she attempts to explain to Henri (whose own chagrin proceeds from the blow to his respectability he anticipates and from his mistaken feeling that, while he is powerless, Lulu is a free agent) why she cannot stay with him: "C'est comme une fatalité . . . c'est le flot qui vous emporte." Lulu's recourse to generalization (the classic refuge of mediocrity in the face of adversity) is the climax of Sartre's ironic equivoke with regard to the real motivation of "Intimité." In one sense, this flot is Lulu's earthy permanence, the momentum of the spheres, what Rirette calls "vitalité"; but also (as it now appears clearly for the first time) it is the restless frustration, the mad surface-gyration of a body at once attracted and repulsed by many potential points of rest, the yearning without object prefigured in the monologue at the beginning of the story. We have come to think of movement as the sanest and most fundamental characteristic of Lulu; her suffering has come at the points of forced inertia. Now the tragedy is re-interpreted, with Lulu as "l'oiseau bleu, l'oiseau rebelle, l'oiseau futile." "Inquietum est cor meum, donec requiescat in te"; the tragedy of Lulu and of modern man is the progressive evaporation, not only of God-as-te, but of all te, of all solidity outside the ego.

Between the third section of "Intimité" and the brief Epilogue in the Restaurant, event follows event with the regularity of simple harmonic motion: fleeing from Henri as she has just fled from Pierre, Lulu returns to the sordid Hôtel du Théâtre (whose name gives us a sly, Sartrian tip-off on the dramatic character of the story). There Rirette comes to visit her, and Lulu, reacting once more (but this time to a weaker agent of repulsion than Pierre or Henri)⁷ assumes her final position, elucidated in the tender note to Pierre which the dumbfounded Rirette (insisting to the bitter end "Je possède ma Lulu sur le bout du doigt,") reads in the Dôme, the site of her sometime triumph. "I'm not leaving, my darling Pierre; I'm staying with Henri . . . but we'll see each other as often as in the past."⁸ In Ulysses, Joyce presents Molly Bloom not only as Cybele, but as a parody of the faithful wife, a Penelope who prefers to entertain not only Odysseus-Bloom but Antinous-Boylan as well, and many another "suitor." Sartre's parody of a parody has even more complexity and irony: Lulu, and not Henri, has been the wanderer, returning (again in the masculine role) to the faithful spouse; and while Lulu, like Molly, keeps her lover because he is more manly than her husband, and her husband because he is more comfortable than her lover, this complex of relationships is meaningless in the pathological case of the androgynous Lulu who is constitutionally unable to enjoy the masculinity of her lover. Joyce resolves Bloom's undirected longings and fretful peregrinations in the deep, still rhythms of Molly's near-dream at the end of Ulysses; placing the ruminations of Lulu at rest in her bed (relatively, the most conclusive and reposed section of his story) at the beginning of "Intimité," Sartre proceeds through successive frustrated agitations to an end in fragile tension, anguishing in its lack of finality.⁹

In Existentialist terms, Lulu refuses her choice; she remains "astride" of a paradox in Baudelairian fashion. This unresolved tension, this attempt to profit from two relationships, one of which has meaning only as a reaction to the other, is perhaps the only possible inconclusion of "Intimité." It is inconceivable that a Lulu would be able to integrate from within, to create a set of values out of the potentially positive nihilism which has been revealed to her (where convention, marriage, religion, and even sex are just so many old crutches now knocked out from under the uncertain personality), to rise vertically out of this Hegelian situation which frustrates her. Existentialism is for heroes.

Notes

¹ On one level "Intimité" is a light, easy story, almost in the New Yorkergenre. If I have voluntarily neglected this aspect of the story in an attempt to uncover the patterns underlying it, it is not with intention to mystify or mislead, but simply because this approach seems best to show Sartre's extraordinary talent for expressing thematic richness through banal reality and seemingly indifferent detail. It would be impossible to represent the richness of detail of this first section (which resumes the whole story and therefore deserves more careful study than the other episodes) without giving a completely unreadable word-forword analysis of it. I shall try to trace the central themes of its structure, and ask my reader to reread Lulu's monologue with these currents in mind, rejecting no possible meaning as too fantastic. The imagery of the passage is informed by the central section of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams ("The Dream Work"), and the reader will find it especially profitable to read pages 371-375 in the Modern Library edition, The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, New York, 1938.

² Again Sartre finds his prophet and apologist before-the-letter in Freud,who in the essay called "The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life" insists that the very nature of the sexual instinct precludes complete gratification in sexual relations.

³ "The story of a haunting sorrow was written on his face" thinks Gerty of Bloom,Ulysses (Mod. Lib. ed.) p. 351.

⁴ Just as Ivich in Les Chemins de la liberté hates anything which she thinks of as "physiological" in herself or others; Rirette's subjective disgust with the physical is ironic foil to Lulu's constitutional sterility and pathological androgyny.

⁵ Marking Lulu's final and complete humiliation, Sartre savors the assonance of "boue" and "tout" on pp. 127-128. Compare the last sentence of La Nausée: "Demain il pleuvra sur Bouville" (italics mine).

⁶ Sartre seems to have an extraordinary sensitivity to the nature of rooms, as containing-vessels to put people in: in Le Mur,the rank cellar is a box of unreal, or sur-real, inhuman atmosphere; in La Chambre, Pierre's room is a cage of insanity; for Paul Hilbert, in Erostrate,his room is a closed-off refuge against "the others"; in L'Age de Raison, Mathieu's room is the center of his meaningless, unengaged liberty, and only becomes real when Brunet enters it.

⁷ Rirette, of course, does not interpret Lulu's abrupt change of mind in this way: she thinks the Texiers (friends of Henri's) have convinced Lulu that she must stay with her husband. For us the fact that Lulu uses the Texiers' visit as an excuse in her note to Pierre suffices to invalidate this explanation.

⁸ Note the Racinian character of this second climax, this violent coup de théâtre which takes place offstage.

⁹ In this consummate esthetic irony in an early work we find Sartre in the destructive phase of his "revolution in literature"; taking an idea from Joyce, the master of the literary tradition against which Existentialists are in full rebellion, he parodies it (not without "complicity") in a drama without actions, a situation expressed in motion. At once fulfilling and destroying a previous idea, breaking an old form open at the seams, he prepares the way for "the new literature."