The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (26 page)

without putting the camera down, he came to remove my hand, my passage in which he slid was tumescent as never before. The reas- on was immediately clear: I was already filled by the coincidence of my real body and these multiple, volatile images.

It was a thought that came to me one morning. I seem to remember standing in the square meter marked out by the corner of the bed, the side of the wardrobe and the door to our tiny bedroom, when the idea came to me and the title—
The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
—etched itself comically on my mind. Every time I am asked the question (and it is the one that recurs the most): “Why did you write this book?” that image re- appears and I have to step out of its frame, break away from its immediacy, to find an- swers to the question that are satisfying, var- ied (although not too much so) and plaus- ible. I cannot settle for describing that space, a sort of imaginary sentry box in which I

found myself, nor such a fleeting moment, without arousing incredulity in my question- er. Navigators are very fortunate in that they have to give only a degree of latitude and a degree of longitude to describe their posi- tion. I would like to say simply: “I wrote this book because suddenly one day, standing in a doorway as night gave way to day, I made myself laugh with a very literal five-word phrase plus a single letter.” Because what reason could I—rather than anyone else—have to write an account of my sex life if not that I had once stumbled on the obvi- ous title of that account?

First published in the review
L’Infini
77, January 2002.

I do, however, have to acknowledge that things, and even the title, are not so simple and that, leaning over a becalmed sea, the

navigator sees himself in the reflected image of the stars. I said I “seem” to remember be- cause memories always have to be corrected to a greater or lesser extent. Now that I think about it more carefully, I actually think the thought came to me when I was lying on the bed with my eyes open, looking toward the little portion of space I have described, and that the idea occurred only because it insinu- ated itself into the projected image of myself, me standing and turning to look at my body lying there. Those who are surprised by the “distance” I maintained as I wrote my ac- count are the ones who, in fact, surprise me. Can a reasonable human being have any- thing other than a specular relationship with themselves? Is it because it is about sex that people expected me to surrender my own awareness as we do in the throes of ecstasy? Yet, if we concede that it is possible to write under these conditions, would the effect not be to elicit the reader’s empathy? Whereas

the aim here was merely to describe one per- son’s sexuality, the sexuality of Catherine M.

I now see the author of
Catherine M.
in the same way that the latter viewed her sub- ject, and I identify no more completely with one than with the other. I pay attention to the questions I am asked and to whoever is asking them, I read the comments in the press, I follow the inquiry about my own metamorphosing person and about the people she meets. When people are con- cerned as to whether I have been affected by various attacks on the book and on myself, I reply without emotion because I have the overriding impression that these adversaries are sticking their pins into a fetish of their own making. Or when I am congratulated for my relaxed delivery in, say, radio or televi- sion programs, I explain that this derives from the fact that I feel no obligation to “play a part,” quite the opposite to the conditions I impose on myself when I appear publicly in

my role as an art critic! But when I hear or see myself I do not find myself all that “nat- ural”; I overdo it. I grew up in the 1950s when television sets were establishing their place within the family. “The society of the spectacle” was beginning to diffract our lives. To me, a writer was someone who wrote books but also someone who came and answered questions on a cultural talk-show. I was already writing stories. When I read over my work and thought it was bad, I would clarify my thoughts by sitting in front of the large mirror on the wardrobe door, an- swering the questions of an imaginary inter- viewer. I did this long before it occurred to me that I could take the same position in front of that same mirror, this time to glimpse the folds hidden between my thighs.

Why did I write this book? Because I wanted to write and because there are things about which I do not talk. The desire to write is an urge that manifests itself before it finds

its object, and which you then satisfy as best you can. By linking it with a relatively well developed faculty for observation and even for contemplation, I fulfill it with art criti- cism. Nevertheless, I have always felt that this desire was sufficiently imperious to war- rant being satisfied once and for all, in a unique gesture that could take any form so long as it was definitive—for oneself, obvi- ously. Now, this is surely too idealistic (or even benignly megalomanic), but it does sit well with a very real appreciation of eco- nomy. I like Ad Reinhardt’s idea of the “Ul- timate Painting” (although I am perfectly well aware that Reinhardt was not a dogmatic avant-gardist, and that he went on painting those “Ultimate Paintings” for ten years…). I put myself in a situation where I could exert my faculty for observation to the maximum while choosing the most readily accessible territory and, out of a sense of ex- tremism, I focused on the most blinding

material: sex (as an art critic I have written a great deal about monochrome art, another blinding type of subject). I have, therefore, just published my “Ultimate Book.” We shall see what follows in good time!

In one public debate, someone asked me who my book was intended for. Thank good- ness we write without imagining the readers, or we eliminate them as and when they sud- denly loom large like the policeman in front of Guignol. In fact, now that the book was finished, I replied spontaneously: “for wo- men.” This idea flitted through my mind: all those “women’s” conversations that I had not had, that I would have liked to have had. I had stuck to my banal questions about sexu- ality, avoiding those confidential exchanges and nurturing the misguided opinion within my entourage that, given the life I led, I ought to know more on the subject than any- one else. I avoided these conversations first because they are usually dressed up with

emotional considerations, which immedi- ately makes them cloying, but also be- cause—however intimate your relationship with the man or woman you are talking to—the words you have to fall back on are al- ways wrong, approximate or vulgar. Either you fall short of what you wanted to say or you hide your unease behind excesses of smuttiness; in other words, we censor ourselves when we think we are revealing all. I have confirmed this again and again when reading articles about my book written in conversational rather than literary style; their authors, who wanted above all to demonstrate how liberated they were, laid it on with a trowel. Added to this is the fact that vulgarity is by definition the thing that mixes people together. However much I have partaken in what is known as group sex, when I put myself in the context of a verbal exchange—without the intention of estab- lishing an erotic connection—I have no wish

to
touch
the person I am talking to at the core of their sexual instinct, which is what al- most always happens if you suddenly use ob- scene vocabulary. If it is used carelessly, this vocabulary acts on the senses almost as dir- ectly as physical contact. In their vulgarity, some people who have been hostile toward my books have made
gestures
toward me in their outspoken declarations. My concern is that they could lead their readers to believe that I had adopted a similarly vulgar style. No, contrary to their desires, I do not
mix
with them. Choosing the right words on the subject of sex is testing work, which (except in the case of the constant questioning of words in the presence of an analyst) there- fore has more to do with the written than the spoken word.

Prior to this need for such concentration, there must be very profound intimate motives, which are not immediately obvious and which, in my case, have not yet all come

to light. In interviews, in order to cut to the chase, I talk about maturity, about a personal stock-taking, and the like. To be more precise, I started writing the book shortly after finding myself, for the first time in my life, in the situation of questioning my sexual behavior. Until then I had enjoyed considerable ingenuousness and, suddenly turning to look at myself, in the two-way traffic of gazes between my body as it lay on the bed and my body standing beside it, I found myself terribly diminished. My search for pleasure had very gradually taken a dif- ferent direction. Now, what belongs in the past can quickly be tidied away into secret drawers and, without the tools with which to think through this change, I allowed ques- tions that had not occurred to me before to insinuate themselves into me: Had I done something good? Had I done wrong? This created a real split, a terrible struggle between my prior ingenuousness and an

attempt at moralizing. (It has to be said that you cannot set out on the road to beatitude without being put to the test and overcoming a few temptations!) I who, in terms of sexu- ality, had never had a role model, then be- came aware of the risks that lay in looking to any example set by others. The book was a means of presenting the single example of my individuality, and it pushed aside the di- vision. The contradictions within me came to light during the calm progress of the text—as it carved out its riverbed and left its own al- luvial deposits—and they have had a com- pletely ambivalent effect: an effect that has consummated the separation between the subject of the book and its author, and allows them to live together in perfect agreement.

There are many contemporary works of art that are combinations of several images, and they are all the more striking when they use photographic or digital images and when they are portraits. If, for example, the artist

had superimposed different portraits of the same person taken at different stages in his or her life. The viewer of the work is aware of the composite nature of the image but would not be able to distinguish the demarcation between the different elements. We can grasp that a work of visual art that is univer- sally accessible may be especially suited to contracting time, and it is therefore more rare for the arts (such as writing and film) that lean on linear time to tear themselves away from narrative. All the same, I did try to. If I had written a sexual biography in chronological order I, as the author of the ac- count, would very soon have found my- self—even if I did not want to—face-to-face with a perspective from which I myself was excluded, just as a classical painter virtually withdraws himself from the landscape he is painting, or perhaps looks down on it from above. And whoever sets the perspective not only interprets but also comes close to

judging. His distance confers a certain au- thority. Given what I have said above about the intimate circumstances that drove me to starting this work, I could not adopt such a position. I should try neither to understand nor to explain, and even less to justify. There is no trial, no case to be made, because there is nothing more than a laying-out of facts. Self-portraits of different stages of my life, including the period during which I was writing the book, are intermingled in a single shot. Time is condensed into one “all over” surface and, just as Pollock in the act of painting was present in his canvases, I por- trayed myself writing within the book.

I made a note of the themes under which I would build the book (and as they now ap- pear as the titles of the chapters) on a sheet of paper…in my appointment book. Five or six words on four lines on a blank page, the most succinct résumé I could make of my- self, an ironic extraction from the clutter of

scribblings on the other pages of the calen- dar. It was my very first act in the process of writing: to define those topics, in other words the common traits in the different self-portraits, the only time in which I did in fact have to adopt an overview. Then I launched into a determined search for the right words. This search led me to explore more fully my impressions and memories; it is when we correct our own sentences that we sense our own honesty. Hence I would never have been able to imagine, when I was already well on with the book, exactly which pages would be the last (the description of the various positions of the body in the Polaroids and film stills, and finally disem- bodiment in the hazy image of a video), but retrospectively it strikes me as logical. These pages highlight the importance of the specu- lar relationship we have with ourselves and, in a spiral movement, they indicate the source—both the mental and the

methodological one—of the book. There is an underlying chronology, but it is that of a pro- gressive introspection, carried by the pro- gress of the writing itself. I have never kept a diary but I do have a good memory, espe- cially for the visual.

Generally, I cannot start writing without having previously accumulated a phenomen- al quantity of notes, to the point where this accumulation becomes stifling, and the writ- ing appears as a way out. This time I also covered pages, on the one hand dredging my own memories and, on the other, comple- menting them or confronting them with the memories of other people. As I am still on friendly terms with many of my partners, it was easy to call some of them, to have a drink or a meal with them and ask them questions. They all found the undertaking amusing as well as interesting. Some of them gave me photographs or video footage, which I watched. One man was sufficiently trusting

to show me some pages from his personal di- ary. When I wondered about how I would go about writing this book, Jacques told me that I should proceed in exactly the same way as I would for an essay about art. Which is what I did.

“You were very brave,” I am sometimes told. I was only as brave as anyone has to be to execute any task that requires time, per- severance and probity. But I know that what they really mean is: “with respect to other people’s attitudes, public opinion,” etc. I have never paid any attention to such opin- ion. I who in my search for pleasure feel such a need for a reflection of my own image can—when my search is in the realms of the intellectual—plow ahead like a tank. I am convinced that the quality of the work pro- duced brings into perspective the importance of the author and that blend of im- ages—whether dreamed or projected—it pro- duces of him or that others fabricate. The