#laggingbehind

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At the end of my rope. #smallanimalswalking #puppybutt #laggingbehind (at New York, New York)

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A Book A Day | Intimacy, Sartre.

This old edition of Intimacy belonged to my mother (and now I have effectively hijacked her entire library), and I vividly remember how I felt when I ‘noticed’ the book for the first time, around the time I was in fifth grade. The picture of the woman naked on the cover took a little time to decipher, and I remember the shock I felt, especially when I opened the book and the first line began ‘Lulu slept naked because she liked to feel the sheets caressing her body…’ I couldn’t believe Mamma could own such a book, and it wasn’t possible for me to grasp the idea that this too could be ‘fiction’, and that these lines might hold a story.

I was skeptical about whether I would be able to find a full-fledged paper or review of Intimacy, since it’s a short story, and I found this gem of a review by Edward Morris which was published in the Yale French Studies. The review took me through the book section-by-section, summarizing each action or monologue, and discussing its implications. For a story that seemed so simple and unsettling, Morris has unearthed a gorgeous trove of analysis in this review – for one, he compares Intimacy continuously to Ulysses. He describe the whole story as  a ‘situation open at both ends, with only a very arbitrary climax’. The concept of Lulu playing the ‘masculine-hero’ role in this story is central to Morris’ analysis of Intimacy. The three people who surround Lulu are Henri, her husband, Rirette, her dominating friend and confidante, and Pierre, her current possessive lover. While the first section is Lulu’s monologue, the second is Rirrette’s which Morris says makes Lulu’s seem ‘elemental’ in comparison. ‘Movement,’ says Morris, is the ‘sanest and most fundamental characteristic of Lulu; her suffering has come at points of forced inertia’.

This is what essentially happens in Intimacy: we meet Lulu, and see her restlessness with her bear-like husband, Henri, who is described as having a ‘soft, impotent non-masculinity’, the aggressive Rirrette, intent on guiding Lulu and dominating her life, and finally Lulu’s lover, Pierre, rich and crude, who like ‘pressing into her from the back’. Lulu deliberates over leaving Henri, then leaves him and announces it to Rirrette as they meet in a café, to go to Nice with Pierre, the idea of which again, repels her because of continual sex with Pierre; she decided to visit Henri to say goodbye properly, where again his passivity and helplessness frustrate her, and she goes back to the hotel to Pierre, only to write a letter to Pierre explaining she would not come with him to Nice, and will remain with Henri, at the same time, telling him she will still be his lover. All these ‘frustrated agitations’ then, are completely pointless. In his concluding lines, Morris looks at Intimacy in (of course) Existentialist terms: Lulu by refusing her choice, remains ‘astride of the paradox’ in her attempt to profit from both relationships.

For me, there are two ways of reading Intimacy: one, as a short story penned by Sartre, and simple that: to enjoy the dynamics of language, and to see how he discusses the idea of ‘intimacy’, and the other, to see Intimacy in all its contexts and comparisons: as one of Sartre’s earliest works, as a piece of Existentialist fiction, juxtaposing it with a work as weighty as Joyce’s Ulysses. I enjoyed it more as the former. If you’ve read Marquez’s Love In The Time of Cholera, there is this moment when, in the bedroom of the newly married couple, the wife sits on the bed and hears her husband pee for the first time, that’s exactly the kind of uncomfortable intimacy that Sartre expands in this short story. This description of Henri, for instance, as Lulu watches him coming out of the toilet: ‘and he comes out pulling at his pants and bending his legs like an old man’. As unsettling as his realities might be, they belong to all our lives, and reading Intimacy opens our eyes to the toes, bedsheet holes, and rumbling stomachs that litter our days.