Sartres body parts: Intimit as existential angst

Lawrence Schehr
Abstract
In Jean-Paul Sartres story Intimit, ultimately included in the volume Le Mur, the
protagonist, Lulu, embodies sensuality as she is drawn largely into an autoerotic world
of her own creation. Bodies and body parts are given prominence in this story, in very
physical and direct ways, but the representation of the body is often modified through
consciousness and subjectivity and this distortion, figured through discours indirect libre,
becomes the focus of the story.
Keywords: Sartre; body; Le Mur; Intimit
When it comes to notions of the body, critics of Sartre have focused on aspects of his
uvre in which a kind of existential notion of the body is developed. First of all, these
areas are associated with alienation of and from the body, as Sartre begins to develop
his existentialism; fundamental to this is the dichotomy produced by a
phenomenology of surface, an alienation at the heart of existence that will translate
into the difference between the pour-soi [being-for-oneself ] and the pour-autrui
[being-for-others]. Such an alienation is visible in the story Le Mur, in which the
young prisoner Juan, fearful and prematurely ageing, rapidly loses contact with his
own corporeal identity: Trois jours auparavant ctait un mme dans le genre mivre,
a peut plaire; mais maintenant il avait lair dune vieille tapette (Sartre 1981: 217)
[Three days earlier, he had been a kid with a girlish air; that can be attractive, but
now he looked like an old fairy]. I shall return to this odd sexual characterization.
Starting with La Nause, in which both Roquentin and the Autodidacte are
alienated, albeit in different ways, and continuing with the examples of bad faith
(especially the first one) in Ltre et le nant, Sartres condition of and for the body is
one in which the subject cannot see himself (or less often, herself ) from within his or
her own subjectivity as anything other than a thing, a non-human, an object: the
finger, the hand, the face are there, dissociated from any recuperative subjectivity that
would reintegrate the vision of the body into a conjoined, non-alienated vision of self.
In this, Sartre takes a position quite different from a Merleau-Pontian
phenomenology that reintegrates the perception of the self into a complete vision.
Not coincidentally, the Sartrean vision of the body, starting with Roquentin as
grounded in the body of a heterosexual man, is most often focused on lesser
individuals on his rather heteronormative scale: homosexuals and women. Thus does
Journal of Romance Studies Volume 6 Numbers 1 & 2 2006 ISSN 14733536
Juan, in the macho war-driven world of Le Mur, start to look like a vieille tapette:
the decomposing body rapidly falls away from healthy heteronormativity into a
position of ageing and queerness. Sartre eventually focuses on the body of the
homosexual character Daniel in Les Chemins de la libert, but more importantly and
more centrally, in Saint Genet he constructs Genets body as that of the homosexual,
perfect in his imperfection and bad faith. Sartre fixates, there and elsewhere think
of the homosexual episode in LIdiot de la famille [The Family Idiot] on the centrality
of the male anus, necessary to be seen and penetrated, in Sartres perversion or
pervision of male queerness (Schehr 1995: 68112).
In the first example of bad faith in Ltre et le nant, in which the woman lets her
hand stay immobile, as if it were inanimate, on the caf table, we are again looking at
a lesser body: Sartres objectification of the woman as woman, as the focalization of
desire, leads him to denormalize her. Thus the only possible roles accorded women in
Huis Clos are that of a mother who killed her child or an unhappy, misanthropic
lesbian, a less than comfortable choice. In all cases, Sartres vision of the body is
literally and etymologically a decadent one, with only the male heterosexual possessor
of desire at times occupying the safe position. It is nothing short of ironic that Simone
de Beauvoir turns the tables in La Crmonie des adieux, as she describes the
incontinent, ageing body of Jean-Paul Sartre.
There seems, however, to be an exception to the construction of the decadent body
in Sartres uvre: it is the often neglected story Intimit [Intimacy], written in early
1937, published first by the NRF in the summer of 1938 and eventually collected in
the volume Le Mur, with certain passages restored that had been omitted from the
original publication.
1
As Michel Rybalka points out in his presentation of the story
(Sartre 1981: 1845), one can draw a line from this story to some of the developments
on la mauvaise foi fminine [female bad faith] in Ltre et le nant. But I would
argue that that genealogy or filiation is necessarily retrospective: one must look back
from the philosophical volume to see certain figures of bad faith already potentially
present in Intimit. Indeed, Intimit is far queerer for lack of a better word than
the straightened-up pyramid of bad faith in Ltre et le nant from which only the
straight man of action, Sartre often seems to be saying, is capable of escaping.
Intimit posits a far more perverse collection of body parts, one that does not get
resolved in favour of male heterocentricity. And I believe Sartre does this for a reason:
he constructs a negative theology, the opposite of male phallocentric presence, in a
spinning-out from female autoeroticism, and this with the intimation of a telos: the
forward-looking possibility of constructing existence, order, action, engagement,
based on nothing. For Sartre and here I am going even further than Rybalka the
feminine is precisely that gap of nothingness.
The story relies to a great extent on discours indirect libre to present the point of
view of Lulu, the protagonist, who has taken a lover, Pierre, and is no longer in love
with her husband, Henri, if she ever was. In the first several pages, Sartre insists
heavily on the embodiment of sensuality in Lulu and its veritable absence in Henri.
Lulus body is present, a tool for her to produce her own pleasure: from the beginning,
there is an air of autoeroticism that will be fulfilled in the descriptions to come. The
Lawrence Schehr 186
tone is set from the very first inscription of the body: Lulu couchait nue parce quelle
aimait se caresser aux draps et que le blanchissage cote cher. Henri avait protest au
dbut: on ne se met pas toute nue dans un lit, a ne se fait pas, cest sale. (1981: 279)
[Lulu slept in the buff because she liked caressing herself in the sheets and laundering
is expensive. Henri had raised an objection at the beginning: you dont get into bed
completely naked; its just not done, its dirty]. If, from Henris point of view, his wife
is in violation of the principles of appropriate behaviour, it is equally clear that Lulu
is in the process of giving herself pleasure both from the act of violating good
behaviour and from the physical sensuality of having the sheets touch her naked
skin.
2
Lulu is drawn into an autoerotic world of her own creation, one that is rather
Bovaryesque to boot, and in which she actually mimes the standard position that
Sartre will otherwise assign to men; she penetrates: Lulu tait couche sur le dos, elle
avait introduit le gros orteil de son pied gauche dans une fente du drap; ce ntait pas
une fente, ctait un dcousu (27980) [Lulu was lying on her back; she had put her
big toe in a slit in the sheet; it was not a slit; it was an open seam]. It is not merely
the sexual connotation ascribed to the word fente, which is a term used for the
vagina; it is also that in the two descriptions just quoted, there is a sense of imbalance:
the clause implicating self-pleasure and sensuality is balanced with a rejection, or at
least a disparagement, of womens work: laundering or darning something is less
interesting to her than her own sensual pleasure. And yet this is an imaginary,
impossible world built on solipsistic bad faith.
Lulus autoeroticism is doubly inspired: an embodiment of her own sensuality
focusing on her body as a source of pleasure is coupled with a complicated rejection
of various forms of masculinity, specifically, various forms of the male body, a
fundamental dislike of erections and sperm. But we are not there yet, and we should
look at the continued inscription of her autoeroticism: Alors je mtendais sur le dos
et je pensais des curs, des choses pures, des femmes, et je me caressais le ventre
dabord, mon beau ventre plat, je descendais les mains, je descendais, et ctait le
plaisir; le plaisir il ny a que moi qui sache me le donner (283) [So I stretched out on
my back and I thought of priests, of pure things, of women, and I caressed my belly
first, my pretty, flat belly, I moved my hands down, down, and it was pleasure; I am
the only one who knows how to give myself pleasure]. Pleasure is thus, in the first
instance, something that comes from oneself to oneself. Rather than being alienated
from herself in the way many Sartrean characters will be, Lulu is a Merleau-Pontian
character avant la lettre, returning to herself, turning back into herself, her embodied
mind and her minded body coalescing into one. It will be the other who inspires
alienation, the body of the Other and his (or her) objectification, whether it is his or
her body as such or the look of the Other that reduces the self to a forced
objectification: Lenfer cest les autres [Hell is other people].
First, let us consider the body of the other woman, in this case Lulus friend
Rirette. Even if Lulu likes the body of the female Other, it is through a process of
displacement and distortion that contrasts with her own construction of herself: Elle
[Rirette] a lev le bras, jai vu son aisselle, je laime toujours mieux quand elle a les bras
Sartres body parts 187
nus. Laisselle. Elle sentrouvrit, on aurait dit une bouche, et Lulu vit une chair mauve,
un peu ride, sous des poils friss qui ressemblaient des cheveux (283) [She raised
her arm; I saw her armpit; I always like her better when her arms are bare. Her
armpit. It opened up; it looked like a mouth; and Lulu saw purple flesh, slightly
wrinkled, under curly hairs that looked like hair on someones head]. Rirette is only
herself when Lulu makes her different from herself, when her body parts are
reassigned, and when Lulu structures her teratologically. In part, this is another
substitute for the fente, the description working as well for what is said as it does for
what is not said: the armpit is like a vagina, the new mouth recalling the unspoken
labia, the hairs under her arms recalling pubic hairs as well. Displacement and
disfigurement, corporeal versions of the metonymy and metaphor of structuralism or
of Freudian displacement and condensation, turn the woman as Other into the
symbolic equivalent of the vagina dentata, the fearsome, castrating and fantasmatic
figure posited within a more standard discourse as being anathema to men. Even in
his reversal of polarities in order to extirpate deep-rooted essence and replace it with
negativity, Sartre does not fully unlock the fantasmatic, the textual and sexual
unconscious of men.
The displacement and the distortion are reciprocal, and Sartre seems to care little
whether the affect of the distortion is positive or negative. If Lulu likes Rirettes body
or part of her body, the feeling is not reciprocated, but the distortion is essentially the
same: Cest pourtant vrai quelle [Lulu] a un corps obscne Chaque fois que
Rirette voyait Lulu de dos ou de profil, elle tait frappe par lobscnit de ses formes
mais elle ne sexpliquait pas pourquoi; ctait une impression (297) [Its still true
that she has an obscene body Every time Rirette saw Lulu from behind or the
side, she was struck by the obscenity of her figure, but she did not seek to understand
why; it was an impression]. If Lulus body is a source of pleasure to herself and a place
for Pierre to pleasure himself, it is a source of obscenity for Rirette, not because Lulu
is having sex, but because it is obscene in and of itself. Its forms may be suggestive, but
its obscenity resides in its being an object pour-autrui [for-others]: Lulu se retourna et
elles se sourirent. Rirette pensait au corps indiscret de son amie avec un mlange de
rprobation et de langueur: de petits seins retrousss, une chair polie, toute jaune
quand on la touchait on aurait jur du caoutchouc de longues cuisses, un long corps
canaille, aux membres longs (297) [Lulu turned around and they smiled at each
other. Rirette thought of the indiscreet body of her friend, with a mixture of
disapproval and abandon: little perky breasts, smooth, yellowish flesh when you
touched it, you would have sworn it was rubber long thighs, a long, vulgar body,
with long limbs]. Bodies are deformed by the look of the Other, dehumanized from
the non-alienated self-sufficiency of nombrilisme, auto-eroticism and masturbation; at
the same time, bodies are deformed by Sartres refusal to put his fantasmatic
construction of women into question. The look of the Other exchanges body parts for
one another, displacing them, changes flesh into a non-human, rubber-like, inert
object. Sartre is paving the way for the alienation by the Other: the flesh becomes a
hand in Ltre et le nant, but is still not following the alienation from the self that he
had limned in La Nause. The alienation of the self from the self is, in Intimit, a
Lawrence Schehr 188
mediated position: il regardait mes seins et jaurais voulu quils schent sur ma
poitrine, pour lembter, pourtant je nen ai pas beaucoup, ils sont tout petits (285)
[he was looking at my breasts and I wanted them to dry up on my chest, to annoy
him, even though I dont have much there; they are very small].
But if the alienation of the self from the self is always due to the mediation of the
look of the Other, it is not completely reciprocal. Lulus look sexualizes Rirette and the
sheets on her bed, and, as we shall see, her mind desexualizes men. Looking at Lulu
is a process of desexualization, a reduction of the secondary sexual traits to non-
sexual ones, whether it is her breasts, as above, or her rear: [Henri] ne pense qu se
mettre derrire moi et je suis sre quil fait exprs de me toucher le derrire parce quil
sait que je meurs de honte den avoir un, quand jai honte a lexcite (2812)
[(Henri) thinks of nothing but getting behind me and I am sure he touches my
bottom on purpose because he knows I die from shame at having one; when Im
ashamed, that arouses him]. Through the eyes of the Other, a double
decorporealization occurs. Just as her auto-eroticism returns her body to her (and
pulls it away from others), the look of the Other alienates and fragments her body,
making it hers and not hers, making it teratological. Her will to have her secondary
sexual characteristics disappear is compounded by that anatomization of the body: Il
maime, il naime pas mes boyaux, si on lui montrait mon appendice dans un bocal,
il ne le reconnatrait pas, il est tout le temps me tripoter mais si on lui mettait le
bocal dans les mains il ne sentirait rien, au dedans, il ne penserait pas cest elle on
devrait pouvoir aimer tout dune personne, lsophage et le foie et les intestins (281)
[He loves me, he doesnt love my guts; if he were shown my appendix in a jar, he
wouldnt recognize it; he is always groping me, but if the jar were put in his hands, he
would feel nothing inside; he wouldnt think this is hers; you should be able to love
all of a person, the oesophagus, liver and intestines]. This is, of course, a
manifestation of the Sartrean notion of the visqueux, the horror of slime, vomit and
the viscous, already seen in various scenes in La Nause and to be continued in Ltre
et le nant.
3
The Sartrean viscous is a reminder of the extent to which subjectivity is a
precarious category for the author: subjectivity can always veer off into an
objectification that quickly becomes the abjection of the viscous, to which any
relation is teratological. It is a step beyond alienation, a step toward dissolving,
dissipation, and a move away from the standard inherited positions of continental
philosophy: what sense do mediation and the immediate have if there is no body?
One can take a position akin to that of Merleau-Ponty and of Sartres Lulu (at least
relative to herself ), wherein mind and body are unalienated and ones mind inhabits
ones body. Or one can take a position akin to Sartres own and that of many of his
characters, in which a post-Cartesian dualism separates the life of the mind from the
existence of the body. In either case, the body remains necessary, fundamental, even
if only as the whipping boy of the mind.
To disperse the body is to invoke the possibility of the viscous and to bring up the
shadow of abjection. It is also a way of so totally desolidifying the body that it goes
well beyond the positions of bad faith that Sartre will use as the negative foundation
for his moral philosophy, that against which engagement and action will happen. For
Sartres body parts 189
to be engaged means to have a body and to use it in the service of the mind. Yet the
position beyond that opposition of engagement and bad faith exists in the abjection
of the self. Lulus preoccupations echo, in a singular manner, Sartres misogyny, as her
own body melts:
[J]e ne pourrai jamais mendormir tranquille sauf quand jaurai mes affaires, parce que
l, tout de mme, il me fichera la paix et encore il parat quil y a des hommes qui font
cela avec les femmes indisposes et aprs ils ont du sang sur le ventre, du sang qui nest
pas eux, et il doit y en avoir sur les draps, partout, cest dgotant, pourquoi faut-il que
nous ayons des corps? (2856)
[I will never be able to fall asleep easily, except when I have my period, because, then, at
least, hell leave me alone; yet it seems there are men who do it with women while theyre
like that and afterward the men have blood on their bellies, blood thats not theirs, and
there must be some all over the sheets, its disgusting; why must we have bodies?]
This is a complicated move, because it is essentially redoubled. I have already
indicated that the look of the Other is the alienating glance, but here, it would seem
that there is precisely no look: Lulu can sleep peacefully when he is not looking at her
or interested in her. But she moves to imagining a scenario in which men have sex
with menstruating women and she fantasmatically projects herself into that position.
Thus, having put herself in the position of the menstruating woman, she is both
having sex and not having sex, becoming not only the newborn in the Augustinian
expression, inter faeces et urinem nascimur, but also the menses itself, her body having
dissolved into its own evacuation as a rejected liquid.
Sartres leitmotif of the viscous, of ooze and slime, here translated into a discourse
about intestines and menstruation, appears not so much as Lulus disgust but rather
as Sartres own fundamental foreignness to menstruation and to womens bodies.
Rather than being the sexuality of a woman, Lulus sexuality is a displacement of what
Sartre understands: not only the anal penetration by an erect penis that is his life-long
obsession, but the auto-eroticism that stems from Lulus using her toe or her finger as
if it were also an erect penis. Is Simone de Beauvoirs discussion of womens biology a
decade later at least in part a reaction to her companions incomprehension of the
feminine and the female?
This is a propitious moment to turn to mens bodies, or more precisely, to turn
toward Sartres imaginary, projected sense of what his characters would envision for
mens bodies. At the same time that we realize this projection and this will come as
no shock to any reader of Sartre he betrays in that projected consciousness the
figures of his own bodily obsessions. Thus is the figure of the male, even in this story
of unalienated presence to the self, bizarrely distorted into a figure of normalizing
phallocentricity, or, as Derrida would have it, phallogocentricity. In the case of
Intimit, this implies that despite the figures of the detumescent phallus or the post-
coital phallus and its ejaculate, Sartre still posits an erect phallus: Lulus problem
would be that she does not embrace phallocentrism as the location of presence and
the logos.
Lawrence Schehr 190
For Lulu, there are two sorts of male bodies, or more precisely, male organs: the
acceptable, infantilized, flaccid member and the unacceptable, erect, excited male
member. If, as I have indicated, they are central to Sartres projected conception of
feminine consciousness, they are central to the constellation of the male being. Yet
before arriving at the phallocentric moment, there is the pretence, I would argue, that
it is precisely non-phallocentric:
[I]l se ngligeait dans les petites choses, par exemple il ntait pas trs propre, il ne
changeait pas assez souvent de caleons; quand Lulu les mettait au sale, elle ne pouvait
pas sempcher de remarquer quils avaient le fond jaune force de frotter contre
lentrejambe. Personnellement, Lulu ne dtestait pas la salet: a fait plus intime, a
donne des ombres tendres; au creux des coudes par exemple; elle naimait gure ces
Anglais, ces corps impersonnels qui ne sentent rien. Mais elle avait horreur des
ngligences de son mari, parce que ctaient des faons de se dorloter. (279)
[[H]e did not take care of himself in little ways; for example, he was not very clean; he
did not change his underpants often enough; when Lulu put them in the laundry, she
could not help noticing that they were yellow underneath from rubbing against his
crotch. Personally, Lulu did not find dirtiness disgusting: its more intimate; it makes
tender shadows; in the hollows of the elbows, for example; she really didnt like those
Englishmen, with their impersonal bodies that had no odour. But she loathed her
husbands slovenly habits, because they were a way for him to pamper himself.]
In Lulus eyes, Henri becomes nothing more than a child, incapable of controlling his
body and given to the same autoeroticism to which she herself is given. But in Henris
case, because it does not lead to pleasure for her, it is merely a question of dirtiness, a
dirtiness implying urine or faeces, not ejaculate, through the yellow tinge given to his
underwear. So instead of being a mature adult, Henri becomes a child indeed an
infant who cannot control his bodily functions. At the same time, Lulu needs a kind
of dirt that he does not have and that Englishmen do not have either. What she allows
in herself, she does not allow him: he is spoiling himself instead of spoiling her, which
one assumes would be appropriate.
Yet Sartre is cagily using Lulu as a mechanism for creating an aporetic situation
that can be seen as a foundational moment for bad faith: the diffrance, to introduce
an anachronistic expression, of bad faith itself. Lulu likes neither Henris dirtiness nor
British cleanliness, preferring a sort of desexualized third position that is never spelled
out enough, that can never be visible enough, for literally and figuratively it creates
tender shadows. In other words, the only dirt that works as dirt is dirt that cannot
be seen to be dirt. Hiding in hollows or eclipsed in shadows, dirt is viable or for that
matter, cleanliness is viable when it cannot be determined, when the act of looking
at it cannot function. This non-functional gaze founds bad faith, the position of
lying to oneself that Sartre will endlessly explore in Ltre et le nant. This
foundational bad faith, this foundation of the negative through negation of vision,
stands in direct contrast to the will-to-knowledge, Sartres own continuing search to
see through, to peer through, to go past the surface to the depths of the knowable,
while never falling into the essentialism central to Western metaphysics.
Sartres body parts 191
Sartre continues to organize Lulus disposition of Henris body through images of
infantilization and paralysis, as he ultimately will activate the link between impotence
and powerlessness, weakness, and incapability. Henri is structured not to be a man: if
another story in the same collection speaks of LEnfance dun chef , and if the story
rostrate creates a theatricalized meaningfulness in an otherwise impotent
individual, Henris situation follows instead in the steps of Roquentin in La Nause,
moving toward unimportance. It little matters that Roquentin thought he had a
project and that Henri has none. To the extent that they do not act or engage in a
project of construction, they become individuals of no collective importance. While
Roquentin is not infantilized but estranged by his own actions, Henris infantilization
occurs at the hands of his wife, who imagines him seen by his mother:
Il lavait souvent dit Lulu: ds quil fermait les yeux, il se sentait ligot par des liens
tnus et rsistants, il ne pouvait mme plus lever le petit doigt. Une grosse mouche
embobine dans une toile daraigne, Lulu aimait sentir contre elle ce grand corps captif.
Sil pouvait rester comme a paralys, cest moi qui le soignerais, qui le nettoierais
comme un enfant et quelquefois je le retournerais sur le ventre et je lui donnerais la
fesse et dautres fois, quand sa mre viendrait le voir, je le dcouvrirais sous un prtexte,
je rabattrais les draps et sa mre le verrait tout nu. (280)
[He had often told Lulu: as soon as he closed his eyes, he felt tied down by thin, resistant
cords; he could not even move his little finger. A big fly caught in a spiders web; Lulu
loved to feel this big imprisoned body against her. If he could stay paralysed like that, I
would be the one to take care of him, to clean him like a child, and sometimes, I would
turn him on his belly and give him a spanking, and other times, when his mother came
to see him, Id find a way to uncover him; Id pull back the sheets and his mother would
see him completely naked.]
The fetishized body of the Other, the Other sacrificed on the Oedipal altar in a
ridiculous, abject position: Henris body becomes the locus of total incapacity,
impotence in all senses of the word, the location of shame, the location of his own
anality a subject that, as I have indicated, will continue to obsess Sartre throughout
his life. Henri becomes that shamed child, worthy of being spanked, thus humiliated
in front of the more powerful, female Other. That Sartre chooses such an example is
not surprising, for he will always take action in its most phallocentric, male
declension: acting is acting to be engaged, and the political is, in many instances, the
collectivization of the singular and sexual. Anything else is impotence:
Rduit limpuissance. Lulu sourit: le mot impuissance la faisait toujours sourire.
Quand elle aimait encore Henri et quil reposait, ainsi paralys, ct delle, elle se
plaisait imaginer quil avait t patiemment saucissonn par de tout petits hommes
dans le genre de ceux quelle avait vus sur une image quand elle tait petite et quelle
lisait lhistoire de Gulliver. (280)
[Reduced to impotence. Lulu smiled. The word impotence always made her smile.
When she still loved Henri and he was lying there, paralysed that way, next to her, she
Lawrence Schehr 192
enjoyed imagining that he had been patiently tied down by tiny men, like those she had
seen when she was young in an illustration in the story of Gulliver.]
It seems almost unnecessary to point out that Lulus construction of Henri revolves
about this incapacity to get hard, as she makes this non-tumescent phallus the centre
of his being: Moi jaimais Henri parce que sa petite affaire ne durcissait jamais, ne
levait jamais la tte, je riais, je lembrassais quelques fois, je nen avais pas plus peur
que de celle dun enfant; le soir, je prenais sa douce petite chose entre mes doigts
(2823) [I liked Henri because his little guy never got hard, never raised its head; I
would laugh; sometimes I kissed it; I was no more afraid of it than of a childs; in the
evening, I would take his sweet little thing between my fingers]. The reduction of
masculinity to its incapacity and the absence of an erection: this is a simple way of
dealing with intercourse that is itself almost childlike, and that extends to others who
do not copulate. When Lulu was fifteen, she imagined reaching under priests
cassocks to fondle their genitals; yet, as they did not use them, one might say, for
anything but urination, she imagined their genitals as being innocent, pure, vegetal:
un machin dhomme, quand cest sous une robe, cest douillet, cest comme une
grosse fleur (282) [a mans thing, when its under a frock, its cute, its like a big
flower]. Or again, since her brother is off limits sexually because of the incest taboo,
he is allowed to be close and to speak: Elle [Lulu] aimait bien shabiller devant son
petit frre parce quil avait toujours des rflexions drles, on se demande o il va
chercher a (284) [She liked dressing in front of her younger brother, because he
always had funny comments; you wonder where he gets them from].
4
The erect phallus, however, is a different matter, with two separate yet related
problems: erection in and of itself and the animality it fosters (as opposed to the
vegetality of the flower just mentioned), and seminal fluid. The erect phallus, symbol
of all of Sartres belief in power, is the organ that moves, that rises, that pushes
forward. It is the organ of engagement. But none of that for Lulu, who wants
indolence and languor, not movement, not forward thrust. If the erect phallus for the
author for men? symbolizes all too easily the higher calling of man (or of a man
or men) to engagement, it is precisely the reverse for this character whom he casts as
a stereotyped, closed-minded, sex-hating woman: Ce quil y a cest quen ralit on
ne peut jamais prendre a dans ses mains, si seulement a pouvait rester tranquille,
mais a se met bouger comme une bte, a durcit, a me fait peur, quand cest dur
et tout droit en lair cest brutal; ce que cest sale, lamour (282) [The thing is, in
reality you can never take it in your hands; if only it could stay still, but it starts to
move like an animal; it gets hard; it scares me when its hard and standing up in the
air; its beastly; love is so dirty]. And it little matters when she changes from the
ironically named Henri, whose name comes from the Old German for home ruler,
to the aptly named, hard Pierre, whom she ostensibly loves, whom she is almost
willing to run away with:
[I]l est si lourd, quand il est sur moi il me coupe le souffle. Il ma dit: Tu gmis, tu jouis;
jai horreur quon parle en faisant a, je voudrais quon soublie, mais lui il narrte pas
Sartres body parts 193
de dire des cochonneries. Je nai pas gmi, dabord, je ne peux pas prendre de plaisir, cest
un fait, le mdecin la dit, moins que je ne me le donne moi-mme. (305)
[(H)es so heavy, when hes on top of me, he takes my breath away. He said, Youre
moaning; youre coming; I hate it when people talk while theyre doing that; Id like us
to forget ourselves, but he never stops talking dirty. I didnt moan; in any case, I cant get
pleasure its a fact; the doctor told me unless I do it to myself.]
Is there a relation between language and the phallus, for Sartre? Is Lulu rejecting
(albeit illusorily) the phallogocentric model, a relation of the word and the phallus,
that Sartre himself saw as central? Arguably this is the case: Sartre sets Lulu up in every
instance as the polar opposite of his philosophical position, in a kind of working
through by means of opposition. Sartre creates a position for Lulu in which, contrary
to his own phallogocentrism, her language has no relation to power, presence, or
plenitude. In so doing, he rejects that position of silence and separation to return, at
one turn of the spiral, to a position linking phallus, presence and logos. He will now
predicate that conjoined figure that is the figure of existence not on plenitude, but on
nothingness and absurdity. If the phallocentric position of engagement and action is
the only one that is a response to the absurdity of existence, it is constructed as such
based on the underlying nant. Rather than continue in a line determined by the
plenitude of Western metaphysics and rather than retreat into either a pure Cartesian
duality or a Merleau-Pontian dis-alienation, Sartre is attempting to construct a
position in which language and meaning are not related to phallogocentric plenitude
or metaphysics, but rather to nothingness.
Sartre projects Lulu as the opposite of his own rapidly evolving position, but he
does so only insofar as solid flesh and what it can contain are concerned. Thus he
ascribes his own distaste for the feminine to Lulu in her distortion of Rirette, and
especially, his own horror at the viscous in her reflection on bodily organs. It comes
as no surprise to see Lulus greatest criticism reserved for man at his most viscous:
sperm. No figure inspires more horror in this text: solids can be reversed into
nothingness, only to re-emerge in existence; the masculine can be inverted into the
feminine, only to re-emerge even stronger. Yes, Sartre seems to be saying, we can have
a phallogocentrism based on the construction of the pour-soi, over an abyss of
nothingness. But nothing can be done about the humid spot of the viscous, the mark
of nausea, or the sign of disgust: a ne mtonne pas quil [Pierre] soit pur en ce
moment, il a laiss son ordure ici, dans le noir, il y a un essuie-main qui en est rempli
et le drap est humide au milieu du lit, je ne peux pas tendre mes jambes parce que je
sentirais le mouill sous ma peau, quelle ordure, et lui il est tout sec (304) [Im not
surprised that he is pure at this moment; he left his mess here, in the dark; I have a
towel full of it and the sheet is wet in the middle of the bed; I cant stretch out my legs
because Id feel the wet patch under my skin, so messy, and he is all dry]. The spot
always marks the Other, marks her as the one who gets splashed. The mark is an
indelible reminder of male power and relative female weakness. It keeps her in the
realm of the liquid and reminds us of how she is always marked, once a month, by
Lawrence Schehr 194
liquid. Seminal fluid is the unstoppable reminder of the necessary domination of
women by men in Sartres mind. The man walks away scot-free; the woman lies there,
moist on her skin, as she is moist in her ventre, as she has guts and blood: on sen va
dans une chambre avec un type qui vous touffe moiti et qui vous mouille le ventre
pour finir (306) [you go into a bedroom with a guy who half smothers you and who
winds up by wetting your belly]. And there is nothing to be done, nothing at all:
Saloperie! (elle stait un peu avance et sa hanche avait touch la tache humide du
drap) (306) [So nasty! She had moved forward a bit and her hip had touched the
damp patch on the sheet]. If Lulu ultimately goes back to Henri, one might surmise,
it is because his own viscosity marks only him, does not annoy her, and allows her to
stay self-absorbed in her auto-erotic fantasy world: Elle lentendit soudain tousser: il
[Henri] est aux cabinets. Quand il revint, elle se pendit son cou et colla sa bouche
contre la sienne: il sentait le vomi (308) [She suddenly heard him cough: he is in the
bathroom. When he returned, she threw her arms around his neck and put her lips
to his: he smelled of vomit].
If, teleologically and retrospectively, we see Lulus position in Intimit as
somewhat akin to the one that Merleau-Ponty would eventually develop, a position
that Sartre would reject as he worked through his concepts of existence in the 1940s,
we need to remember that there was a period of collaboration between the two
philosophers after the war and that Merleau-Ponty did not produce his critique of
Sartre, Les Aventures de la dialectique [Adventures of the Dialectic], until 1955. So I am
not suggesting that Sartre is doing anything but exploring a way to get beyond what
he may himself have perceived as an impasse produced in La Nause.
In La Nause, the nausea is never overcome; if Roquentin abandons his essentialist
project on the Marquis de Rollebon, he cannot be said, except for one moment, to
have engaged himself existentially, in the sense that Sartre would develop in his
subsequent work. That moment, of course, is the defence of the Autodidacte. But it
is merely a moment. If Roquentin leaves Bouville, it is with no express goal, no
project to build, save writing a work that will be as pure and hard as the jazz tune he
hears. There has merely been a rejection of essentialism, a turn away from the past.
In Intimit Sartre uses the body as a vehicle through which he can express a
consciousness opposed to the definition of the pour-soi [being-for-oneself ] that he is
constructing in a male world. By setting up a series of rather simple bivalent
oppositions, he can express the nothingness that has to be foundational for existence,
for as the byword of existentialism would have it, existence precedes essence. Having
rejected essence in La Nause, having produced a fictionalization of facticity in
rostrate, in Intimit Sartre explores that nothingness to which Lulu is reduced, as
he uses her as a counter-example or negative of his own ideas. In so doing, he is at
times hoist on his own petard as he fails to challenge certain assumptions about the
feminine and certain of his own textualized phobias, the most important of which is
the fear of the viscous. Intimit is literally and figuratively stained with a spot of
seminal fluid that refuses to dry, refuses to go away, a liquid facticity that challenges
the freedom of sex in a sleazy hotel: Le garon de lhtel rigolait quand nous sommes
monts, cest un Algrien, je dteste ces types-l, jen ai peur, il ma regard les jambes,
Sartres body parts 195
aprs a il est rentr dans le bureau, il a d se dire: a y est, ils font a et il sest
imagin des choses sales (305) [The hotel clerk sniggered when we went up; he is
Algerian; I hate those guys; Im afraid of them; he looked at my legs; after that, he
went into the office; he must have said to himself, Thats it; theyre doing it; and he
must have thought about dirty things]. Like the seminal fluid, the laughter and the
alienation that laughter engenders are an ever more powerful means of producing the
bad faith that will be the spark for the exploration of existential freedom in the years
to come.
Notes
1. For standard readings of the themes and narrative techniques of Intimit, see Morris
(1948) and Idt (1972).
2. On body parts in Sartre, see Holliers excellent tude de mains, (1982: 16786).
Buisines study (1986) is also a convincing reading of the importance of the body,
specifically Sartres own relation to his body and how that has an impact on his writing.
3. On the viscous, see Harvey (1991: 11821). In a personal communication, Janet Beizer
has reminded me that the quotation from Sartre seems to reference a famous remark of
Abbot Odo of Cluny about the organs of womens bodies. See also Beizer (1994: 191).
4. Or again: Robert membrassait les bras et dans le cou comme un petit homme, il est
charmant; nous faisions comme si Henri ntait pas l. De laffaire, jai oubli de me laver
(Sartre 1981: 295) [Robert kissed my arms and my neck like a kid; he is charming; we
behaved as though Henri were not there. I forgot to wash after that].
Works cited
Beauvoir, Simone de (1949) Le Deuxime Sexe, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard).
Beizer, Janet (1994) Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press).
Buisine, Alain (1986) Laideurs de Sartre (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille).
Harvey, Robert (1991) Search for a Father: Sartre, Paternity, and the Question of Ethics (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press).
Hollier, Denis (1982) Politique de la prose: Jean-Paul Sartre et lan quarante (Paris: Gallimard).
Idt, Genevive (1972) Le Mur de Jean-Paul Sartre: techniques et contexte dune provocation
(Paris: Larousse).
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1955) Les Aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard).
Morris, Edward (1948) Intimacy, Yale French Studies 1, 739.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1943) Ltre et le nant: essai dontologie phnomnologique (Paris: Gallimard).
(1981) uvres romanesques, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (Paris: Galllimard,
Bibliothque de la Pliade).
Schehr, Lawrence (1995) Alcibiades at the Door: Gay Discourses in French Literature (Stanford:
Stanford University Press).
Lawrence Schehr 196