Scott Powers - On Love, Marriage and Swinging

8/18/2019 Scott Powers - On Love, Marriage and Swinging

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The South Carol ina Modern Langu age Review Volume 6, Number 1

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On Love, Marriage, and Swinging:

The Postmodern Narratives of Frédéric Beigbeder

by Scott M. Powers

The University of Mary Washington

In Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered

Marriage (2005), social historian Stephanie Coontz reaffirms what scholars have

suggested for sometime, notably that the love-based marriage is essentially a modern

institution. Whereas throughout most of its history, marriage constituted an economic and

political transaction for both the rich and the poor, the practice among young people of

choosing their spouse on the basis of love became common only within the past 150

years. Once perceived for its volatility as incompatible with the principles of marriage, in

modern times romantic love has developed into marriage’s legitimizing force. What is

perhaps most original about Coontz’s study is her argument that romantic love, in serving

as the foundation of modern marriage, has actually weakened the marriage institution.

She attributes the significant increase in divorces, unwed mothers, and cohabitation to the

unrealistic expectations that modern society places on the love-based marriage: “In this

Western model, people expect marriage to satisfy more of their psychological and social

needs than ever before. [...] Individuals want marriage to meet most of their needs for

intimacy and affection and all their needs for sex” (23). George Bernard Shaw expounded

on the unreasonably high standards that society places on married couples when he

described them as “under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive,


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and most transient of passions. They are required to swear that they will remain in that

excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”1

A common practice among proponents of the “traditional,” or more accurately

love-based marriage has been to blame the breakdown of marriage on the social and

sexual revolution of the late 1960s. For instance, in Michel Houellebecq’s Les particules

élémentaires (1998), the 1950s and ‘60s are depicted as “un véritable âge d’or du

sentiment amoureux,” as a period of “évolution vers le mariage d’amour,” a short time

span that approached a “civilisation de la paix, de la fidelité et de l’amour” (54). The

rapidly expanding subculture of swingers during the late sixties and seventies depicted in

the novel is meant to emblematize a decadent society that has rejected the preceding

moral order founded on the principles of marriage, including mutual love, fidelity, and

constancy.2 However, Coontz’s historical analysis of marriage implies quite the opposite.

The changes in gender roles and sexual expression as well as the emergence of new forms

of conjugal living in the late 1960s constituted, rather, the logical outcome and extension

of the principles of a more extensive “love revolution.” Over the past 150 years, this

revolution has gradually replaced the mariage de raison and its role of forming

“cooperative relationships between families and communities” with love relationships

based on individual choice, self-fulfillment, fairness, and emotional gratification (31,

259). Coontz argues that certain so-called alternative conjugal lifestyles are equally

founded on the principles of the love-based relationship. Once or still perceived by

society as non-traditional, households in which wives work outside of the home, couples

who decide not to have children, or same-sex partners are in fact simple variations of the

mariage d’amour (274).


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This essay will explore the notion that so-called alternative lifestyles commonly

associated with the 1960s and ‘70s, especially those perceived as radical, such as

swinging and other forms of sexually open relationships, do not necessarily constitute a

break with the mariage d’amour, but rather, represent an attempt to uphold love-based

relationships including the institution of marriage. I will focus on a popular novel genre

in contemporary French literature that groups best-selling authors such as Christine

Angot, Frédéric Beigbeder, Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, and Catherine

Millet, and that is often stigmatized by critics for its graphic sexual content as a “culture

poubelle” genre or “littérature de latrines.”

3

But far from lacking in moral substance, the

depiction of “alternative” lifestyles in this budding literary tradition often represent new

strategies on the part of the couple to attain true love.

In the pages that follow, I will also investigate the emergence of a postmodern

critique of le mariage d’amour that can be linked to a common skepticism of marriage

associated with Generation X. Overwhelmed by high divorce rates, Generation Xers have

been characterized by social anthropologists and psychologists as skeptical toward

commitment and marriage.4

Similarly, scholars have defined postmodern thought by its

pervading skepticism, which targets universalizing theories (or “metanarratives”), all

claims of historical progress, and the notion of the self predicated on individual agency.5

Postmodern thinkers perceive desire—in this case for love and marriage—as a social

construct mediated by discourses and images. Unable to escape the legion of voices that

have always already determined its desires, the self, in deciding whether or not to enter

into a committed relationship, must constantly negotiate between various discourses on

love. Suffering from a saturation and fragmentation that psychologist Kenneth Gergen


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calls multiphrenia, the self is inundated by too many messages about who it is and what it

wants. As their way to question cultural narratives of human desire, postmodern writers

often resort to “playful probings of basic understandings of the self” through a variety of

literary tropes, including irony and pastiche. 6

Not unlike their peers (Generation X),

whose skepticism toward love and marriage has translated into serial monogamy and

cohabitation, postmodern writers, in their “playful probings,” renounce the traditional

love story, notably the romantic quest for true love.

A postmodern treatment of the question of love is perhaps most evident in novels

by Frédéric Beigbeder, a contemporary French author who explores the complex issues

that face today’s youth with regard to love and marriage. Like many of his peers,

Beigbeder’s narrator Marc Maronnier, a thirty-year-old bachelor, has high expectations

for marriage, and as a result, is skeptical that marriage will offer him true love. His

skepticism is aggravated by popular scientific discourse on the ephemeral nature of love

and man’s genetic programming for sexual diversity. In his attempt to negotiate between

conflicting discourses on love relationships and human sexuality, Marc eventually

experiments with so-called alternative relationships in his pursuit of true love. On one

level, Marc’s “alternative” lifestyle constitutes a sincere attempt to find true love, and

perhaps even to salvage the institution of marriage. And yet, embedded within

Beigbeder’s romantic narratives, an ironic voice places into question the very concepts of

love and marriage.


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A Brief History of the Literary Tradition on Love

In L’amour et l’occident (1972), scholar Denis de Rougemont has highlighted the

longstanding notion of the incompatibility of marriage and passionate love in Western

society. Beginning at least in medieval times, marriage, advocated by the Church, was

defined by its social, political, and economic responsibilities. Passionate love was

perceived as anarchic desire, and thus a threat to the stability of marriage. The

troubadours and the Cathars, on the other hand, favored what they considered the

liberating force of passionate love, which resisted the Church’s codification of

relationships.7 If there is one thing that the Church on one side, and the Cathars and

troubadours on the other agreed upon, it was that love and marriage should not mix. In

the interest of protecting the political alliances and economic stability that the marriage

institution insured, not simply to the bride and groom, but especially to the extended

families and community, Church leaders were opposed to the destabilizing and

destructive nature of passionate love. Conversely, the proponents of passionate love

opposed marriage for they perceived the fulfillment of love in marriage to mean the death

of love.8 From a pre-modern perspective, then, le mariage d’amour of modern times

would seem at the very least a curious amalgamation, and most certainly a self-

destructing union.

According to Rougemont, the question of love in Western literature is founded on

the premise of the incompatibility of love and marriage, which is best articulated in

Tristan and Iseult , the medieval myth and archetype of subsequent love narratives. The

love potion that Tristan and Iseult unknowingly drink, and by which they fall in love,


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symbolizes the irrationality of an adulterous love that the couple cannot explain nor for

which they claim responsibility. As Rougemont explains, Tristan and Iseult never would

have loved each other, had they acted freely. And in fact, they do not love each other, but

rather, according to the nature of passion, “ce qu’ils aiment, c’est l’amour, c’est le fait

même d’aimer ” (43).9 But passion, according to the myth, is not only irrational, it is also

fickle. The potion’s effects last only three years: “A combien fu determinez / Li

lovendrincs, li vin herbez: / La mère Iseut, qui le bollit, / A trois anz d’amistié le fist”(28).

Accordingly, three years after the birth of their passion, Tristan and Iseult suddenly grow

weary of their love and separate, as Iseult returns to her husband Marc.

10

But after a short

time, the lovers’ passion resurfaces. This is so, Rougemont explains, because of a series

of obstructions that rekindle their love. The perils that Tristan and Iseult face, which

threaten both their relationship and their lives, are self-imposed so that their spontaneous

ardor will survive. The obstacle to love’s fulfillment that most feeds the lovers’ passion is

the fact that Tristan and Iseult cannot marry (46-47). And as Rougemont shows in the

second half of his study, the notion that marriage destroys love prevailed for centuries, as

expressed in a rich literary tradition from La Correspondance d’Abélard et Héloïse to

Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves and Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse.11

As historians have shown, society’s perception of what marriage ought to be

about gradually evolved. Coontz, among others, attributes this evolution to political and

economic change. From this perspective, society’s emerging perception of passionate

love and marriage as analogous was an outcome both of the Enlightenment, which

advocated individual rights and the pursuit of happiness, and of the spread of the market

economy, notably its introduction of wage labor that significantly altered domestic


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relationships (Coontz 145-46, 152-56, 177-95). But even modern novels generally

reproduce the pre-modern notion of the incompatibility of passionate love and marriage.

On the one hand, unlike pre-modern stories of passion, the modern novel includes the

new moral imperative that a husband and wife should be in love with one another. Yet,

modern love stories seldom center on the love between a husband and wife, often

constitute adulterous relations, and are typically fueled by obstacles. Similar to Tristan et

Iseut , in novels such as Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir , Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and

Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, (adulterous) passion inspires the narrative, which carries on as

long as new obstacles come between the lovers’ full possession of one another. In novels

such as these, the common obstacle that fuels the lovers’ passion is that one of the lovers

is married to someone else.

The contemporary novels of Frédéric Beigbeder, however, constitute a new twist

to narratives on passion. Similar to the Tristan and Iseult myth, the love relationships that

Marc, the narrator, pursues are based on passion and fueled by various sorts of obstacles.

But the fundamental difference is that Marc, the romantic hero of Beigbeder’s novels,

plays the role not of Tristan but of Marc (Iseult’s husband), as his name suggests.

Whether married or in an analogous relationship with a woman, Marc goes to great

lengths to remain passionately in love with his “legitimate” partner. Or, to quote Shaw,

“to remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death

do them part.” Indicative of contemporary society’s ongoing attempts to reconcile love

and marriage, Beigbeder’s novels depict one man’s struggles to live up to society’s

expectations of marriage that he has internalized. It is this depiction that I will now

explore.


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Imagining “Alternative” Relationships

The overarching plot of Beigbeder’s novels concerns the narrator’s attempt to

establish a more perfect union between his lover and himself. In Mémoire d’un jeune

homme dérangé (1990), a novel written in the form of a journal, the narrator reflects on

the nature of love as he becomes enamored with a new woman. Marc is recurrently

haunted by his own romantic history, which he summarizes as an unsuccessful series of

one-night stands and short-term relationships that would quickly dissolve “comme une

pastille d’Alka-Seltzer dans un verre d’eau” (55). However, Marc’s skepticism of love

relationships is balanced by his romantic nature, as the story centers on his quest to attain

true love. Often, this involves the narrator’s experimentation with “alternative” forms of

relationships. While Marc dismisses as fiction a common perception that passionate love

grows over time, he also refuses to accept an opposing perspective that holds that passion

gradually decreases through the course of a relationship. Instead, Marc constructs his own

theory, which could be considered almost as utopian as the first, in which love remains on

the incline, thanks to the couple’s deliberate attempts to reignite the flames of passion: “Il

existe peut-être une troisième voie. Un coup de foudre à peu près réciproque peut se

transformer en passion durable à condition de l’entretenir à coups de voyage, de

beuveries et de scènes de ménage gratuites (voir figure 3)” (45). In his journal, Marc

graphs his theory of the possibility of love’s trajectory (figure 3), which he juxtaposes to

the more common perspectives on passion (figures 1 and 2):


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The irregularity of passion’s trajectory in Figure 3 would indicate both its natural

propensity to wane over time, as well as its frequent resurgences, due to the lovers’

calculated efforts. 12

This formulaic theory fuels Marc’s quest for true love through a

number of “experiments” that form the substance of subsequent novels.

Beigbeder’s second novel, Vacances dans le coma (1996), can be considered an

experiment designed to test the hypothesis that through concerted effort, a couple may

remain in an excited state of passionate love. Marc, who the reader is led to believe is

single, spends an extravagant evening at a hip nightclub to meet beautiful women. But the

narrator explains that what Marc really wants is to fall in love again: “Au fond, il sait bien

qu’il cherche la même chose que tous ses amis: retomber amoureux” (23). 13

This passage

suggests that similar to Tristan and Iseult, what Marc (and his peers) loves “is love and

being in love” (Rougemont 43). After hours of heavy drinking and flirting with various

women, he eventually meets a beautiful face that stirs passion in him. The two share a

magical hour of engaging conversation and the birth of sexual desire: “[Marc] est

amoureux fou, [...] éperdu et perdu” (125-26). The two are so taken by each other that

they enter the women’s restroom to have sex. In the novel’s surprising conclusion, Marc

comes to realize, as if awakening from a dream (or coma), that the woman with whom he

has spent the evening is in fact his wife of two years: “Tout s’éclaire soudain. Marc se

souvient [...]. Cette Anne, non seulement son visage ne lui est pas inconnu, mais en plus il


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l’a épousée voilà deux ans [...]. Bien sûr qu’il est marié: un mariage d’amour, en plus”

(148). Then, as if himself recovering from a coma, the narrator finally elaborates on Marc

and Anne’s peculiar relationship:

Ils se prennent pour des aventuriers des temps modernes: ils rajoutent de

l’estragon sur les côtelettes d’agneau. Ils bouffent du camembert très fait et

reprennent du bourgogne rouge. Ils perdent leurs lunettes sous le lit.L’amour est une botte de radis achetée à Tarascon et croquée sur un banc

avec du gros sel. Ils jouissent de concert. Ils retrouvent leurs lunettes sous

le lit. Ils se lavent tout le temps les dents. Ils font beaucoup d’efforts pour

que ce miracle continue. (149)

Here, Marc’s relationship with his wife takes an unconventional path, which is meant to

sustain their “mariage d’amour.” In retrospect, the entire novel constitutes the couple’s

elaborate strategy to maintain the feeling of being in love. Specifically, Marc tricks

himself—just as the narrator tricks the reader—into believing that he is single once again,

thereby allowing himself to relive with his wife that initial coup de foudre (love at first

sight), which many married couples long for but only experience for a second time in an

extramarital affair.

In another “experiment,” a short story of the collection Nouvelles sous ecstasy

(1999) entitled “Ecstasy à Go-Go,” the protagonist, this time named Frédéric, goes to

extreme measures to prove that love does not necessarily fizzle with time. The story’s

introduction describes Frédéric and his girlfriend Delphine as a “couple moderne,” that is

to say they have a sexually open relationship. Unconvinced that fidelity helps keep the

marriage intact, they believe, on the contrary, that by occasionally sleeping with others

they will ensure that their love will last (84). The plot recounts a vacation that the couple

takes to Phuket, an island of Thailand that thrives financially on sex tourism. Convinced

that fidelity, not infidelity, dissolves relationships (“Ce qui tue les couples, c’est la


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fidélité”), Frédéric and Delphine decide to explore the island separately in search of

sexual trysts (85). Once again, the narrative appears to deal exclusively with the

adventures of the male protagonist. The story describes Frédéric’s visit to a “bar à pute,”

where, after a lap dance and conversation with the go-go girls, the bar pimp leads

Frédéric to a well-equipped torture chamber. Presented to a hooded slave chained to the

wall, Frédéric pays the going rate, and proceeds to “faire subir à cette jolie femme tout ce

qui lui passera par la tête” (91). After extracting great pleasure from his sadistic acts,

Frédéric unmasks the slave, who is revealed to be his beloved Delphine:

Après avoir donné à l’esclave une ‘alternance de joie et de peine’ [...],Frédéric est pris de curiosité. Il veut voir le visage de la beauté qu’il vient

de caresser, de pénétrer, de malmener et de mordre quasiment partout. Ildézippe alors quelques fermetures éclair et, lorsqu’il parvient à retirer la

cagoule, reconnaît le visage radieux de Delphine qui lui demande: “Dis

donc Fred, tu sais que tu viens de me mettre enceinte?” (92)

In this story, the amorous couple lead an “alternative” relationship in which they

seek out sexual encounters with others to help keep their love for each other alive.

However, while Frédéric and Delphine believe that they are engaging in sexual acts with

complete strangers, they are in fact fulfilling their sexual fantasies with one another.

Similar to Vacances dans le coma, this conclusion suggests that elaborate role-play

among lovers (rather than a true open relationship) may suffice to keep the flames of

passion alive. It is also ironic that such an unconventional way for a couple to strengthen

their love for each other in fact forms a traditional, domestic bond. In a conclusion that

borders on the religious sublime, Delphine, appearing before Frédéric in “radiant” beauty,

announces, as if divinely inspired, that she has just become pregnant. The outcome of

Frédéric and Delphine’s unorthodox sexual behavior is presented as the miraculous birth

of a “nuclear” family.


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In Beigbeder’s writings, sexually open relationships are presented in a positive

light, as an arrangement designed, paradoxically, to strengthen the love bond between

emotionally monogamous partners. Although the main plot of “Ecstasy à Go-Go” does

not actually recount an occasion in which the couple engages in sexually open relations

(although they believe that they are), the narrator explains that the purpose of their

sexually open relationship is to maintain their passion for each other. It is not surprising

then, that Beigbeder goes one step further by advocating the practice of swinging—or

partner swapping. In his preface to Christine Ley’s Voyage au pays de l’échangisme

(2003), a sociological study on the practice of swinging in Western society, Beigbeder

proposes swinging as a solution to adultery and divorce. Partner swapping, he argues,

ultimately serves to protect the love bond of the married couple:

L’homme cherche à échapper à la prison qu’il a échafaudée de ses propresmains. Après avoir imaginé son propre enfermement (le mariage, le couple,

la vie conjugale, destinés à séquestrer son épouse légitime), l’homme a

trouvé de nombreux moyens d’y échapper: le divorce, la polygamie,l’adultère bourgeois, l’union libre. On peut dire qu’il a tâtonné pendant des

siècles jusqu’au jour où il a découvert la solution: l’échangisme. [...] La

solution échangiste repose sur des règles du jeu très précises, qui permettentde protéger l’amour en le séparant du sexe. (7-8)

While swinging is commonly perceived as immoral, swingers have long defended its

purpose to strengthen emotionally monogamous couples.14

It would appear then, that

Beigbeder’s love stories, in light of their happy endings that proffer solutions to society’s

marital discontents, reconcile love and marriage, and idealistically close the longstanding

debate on the question of love.


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Toward a Postmodern Account of Love-Based Relationships

My presentation in this section of Beigbeder as a postmodern writer runs counter

to the love stories that I summarized above. The optimism of Vacances dans le coma and

“Ecstasy à Go-Go” that expresses the possibility of everlasting love as well as the general

faith in humankind’s search for relationships that correspond to man and woman’s

desires, contradicts the very skepticism inherent in postmodern thought of any ontological

definition of the self and its desires, and of any historical progression of the institution of

marriage toward the realization of universal principles of human psychology. This is why

my analysis must go beyond a “reading for the plot” to highlight the textual elements that

question the very possibility of true love that each story claims to solve.15

The “death of the subject,” a central belief elaborated on by key postmodern

thinkers including Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-François Lyotard, maintains

that the self, far from being a sovereign agent that can study the world from a detached,

objective position, is “governed,” even “constructed,” by institutional discourses

(Holstein 79).16

A common practice among postmodernists is the analysis of the

discourses at play in the formation of the so-called individual will. In Beigbeder’s

L’amour dure trois ans (1997), a novel that I will focus on in this final section, reveals

two powerful discourses on love and marriage that determine the narrator’s thoughts and

intentions. In portraying the subject as discursively constructed, the postmodernist writer

often employs literary tropes to demystify the grand narratives on human desire. As Paul

Sheehan asserts in “Postmodernism and Philosophy,” the power and originality of

postmodernist writing resides in its use of ludic, performative language, which include


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“sly puns, audacious juxtapositions, and eccentric allusions [in resisting] distillation,

paraphrase, and quotation” (35). In his Introduction to From Modernism to

Postmodernism, Lawrence Cahoone characterizes postmodernist writing as above all

ironic. In their attempt to separate themselves from the methodological or philosophical

claims that they critique, “postmodernists write in a coy or ironic fashion” (21). Similarly,

Beigbeder’s writing resists the totalizing discourses of love and marriage through irony,

conveyed by juxtaposition, parody, and sarcasm.

The plot of L’amour dure trois ans, which an ironic reading will seek to undo,

recounts another attempt by the narrator, now divorced, to reconcile love and marriage as

he embarks on a new relationship. But this time, the quest becomes more a play among

conflicting discourses. The so-called individual, outpaced by too much information about

itself, finds itself in a never-ending game of negotiations between society’s ideals of

marriage and popular science’s claims concerning man’s genetic programming for sexual

diversity.

In moments of heightened awareness, Marc perceives le mariage d’amour as

essentially a social construct that instills in the self the desire for a fulfilling, everlasting,

monogamous relationship:

Le mariage n’est d’ailleurs pas seulement un modèle imposé par l’éducation

bourgeoise: il fait aussi l’objet d’un colossal lavage de cerveau publicitaire,cinématographique, journalistique, et même littéraire: une immense intox

qui finit par pousser de ravissantes demoiselles à désirer la bague au doigt

et la robe blanche alors que, sans cela, elles n’y auraient jamais songé. [...]Alors elles attendent le Prince Charmant [...] (48-49).

Not just the female sex, but also the male sex, including Marc, is the target of a constant

media campaign that advocates the ideals of love-based marriages. Marc attributes the

failure of his marriage to his having been enticed by a seductive discourse into marrying:


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“Pourquoi au lieu du bonheur simple qu’on m’avait fait miroiter, n’ai-je trouvé qu’un

compliqué délabrement?” (25). Because of his recent divorce, marriage for Marc has been

partially demystified. Nonetheless, years of programming continue to lay hold on Marc’s

psyche, as he finds himself longing once again for a relationship based on true love. The

second half of the novel consists of Marc’s concerted attempt to enter into such a

relationship with Alice, despite his awareness that “l’amour est la seule déception

programmée, le seul malheur prévisible dont on redemande” and his constant self-

reminders that “IL N’Y A PAS D’AMOUR HEUREUX.” (68, 80).

At the same time as social mores praise the virtues of love-based marriages, a

diametrically opposed discourse, diffused by popular science, claims that love, a

physiological condition briefly sustained by the body’s short-lived chemical reactions,

“lasts three years.” In his attempt to understand his divorce, Marc cites from a women’s

magazine a common synopsis of the ephemeral nature of “love”:

On vous fait croire que c’est pour la vie alors que, chimiquement, l’amour

disparaît au bout de trois années. Je l’ai lu dans un magazine féminin:

l’amour est une poussée éphémère de dopamine, de noradrénaline, de prolactine, de lulibérine et d’ocytocine. Une petite molécule, la

phényléthylamine (PEA), déclenche des sensations d’allégresse,

d’exaltation et d’euphorie. Le coup de foudre, ce sont les neurons du

système limbique qui sont saturés en PEA. La tendresse, ce sont lesendorphins (l’opium du couple). La société vous trompe: elle vous vend le

grand amour alors qu’il est scientifiquement démontré que ces hormones

cessent d’agir après trois années. (28)

This type of article on the science of love, commonly found in fashion and health

magazines, reiterates textbook accounts of the chemical mechanisms of passionate love.17

Beigbeder’s novel demonstrates that the age-old perception that passionate love is short-

lived remains in force, even as its symbolism as a love potion in medieval thought is

replaced with another (bio-) chemical account.


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According to popular science, the ephemeral nature of love is also assured by the

central role that infidelity plays in human evolution. Marc states that “un chercheur

américain vient de démontrer que l’infidélité est biologique. L’infidélité, selon ce savant

renommé, est une stratégie génétique pour favoriser la survie de l’espèce” (52). In widely

circulated magazines and best-selling books, scientists regularly challenge heterosexual

monogamy by presenting sexual promiscuity as natural.18

In brief, popular science

conveys the message that enduring love is a myth, and that fidelity is unnatural.

In light of these discourses, the plots of Vacances dans un coma and “Ecstasy à

Go-Go” appear as attempts by the romantic hero to appropriate the body’s sexual drive

for love’s sake. In the two stories, elaborate role-play and sexually open relationships

become strategies to trick the mind into believing that it is engaging in sex with a new

body. Advocates of the swinger “lifestyle” similarly negotiate between conflicting

discourses on love to substantiate partner swapping. Often resorting to popular science to

back their claims, swingers maintain that partner swapping addresses both man and

woman’s desire for life-long partnership as well as their equally compelling drive for

sexual diversity.19

Drawing from scientist Robin Baker’s theories on “sperm warfare,”

sociologist Christine Ley, among others, asserts that partner swapping actually functions

as an aphrodisiac in intensifying the sexual passion of the married couple.20

And Terry

Gould, in The Lifestyle (1999), claims that on an emotional level, the strict ethical code of

the lifestyle—which ensures that all sexual activity is mutually consensual, that a husband

and wife always leave an encounter together, etc.—ensures that the couple is engaging in

a marital bonding experience (219-61).


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Key elements of Beigbeder’s writing suggest that solutions that purport to reconcile

passionate love and marriage are in fact naive and formulaic. As we have already seen, by

drawing attention to the role that institutional discourses play in constructing the self, the

text undermines the very notion of individual desire, at least of one that can be known.

Beigbeder’s dismissal of romantic idealism is also evidenced in a later passage from his

preface to Ley’s study. Shortly following his initial praise of the swinging lifestyle,

Beigbeder juxtaposes an account of swinger idealism with a fantasy of his that cannot be

fulfilled:

Je voudrais être invité à une party où tout le monde serait mannequin oucélèbre, sentirait bon, et me sucerait la bite avec l’accord de la femme que

j’aimerais, pendant que je la verrais pousser des cris de jouissance dans les bras de plusieurs éphèbes. Malheureusement, l’échangisme glamour

n’existe pas, sauf chez Kubrick, c’est-à-dire dans la fiction. La majorité des

échangistes sont gros, laids et vieux. Je suis un échangiste frustré car mes

fantasmes sont irréalisables. Heureusement, sinon qu’écrirais-je? (8)

Here, Beigbeder relegates his ideal of swinging to fiction, thereby negating the types of

fulfillment that the swinging subculture promises. Beigbeder implies that swinging is not

all that it advertises itself to be, that it cannot fulfill both one’s emotional “needs” and

sexual fantasies. From a postmodernist/post-structuralist perspective, the self’s desires

will always exceed any lived experience, if for no other reason, because desire is

inherently desire for something unattainable, i.e. a “fantasy,” or more simply, “fiction.”

Far from being an atmosphere that fulfills both man’s sexual drive and his romantic quest

for true love, the swinging subculture leaves Beigbeder “frustré.” This ironic twist, in

which Beigbeder negates the premises of swinging that he initially praises, perhaps

unexpected for a preface to a sociological study on swinging, is typical of Beigbeder, and

begins to explain the nature of his writing as the expression of frustration, or lack of


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fulfillment. But Beigbeder quickly recasts this frustration in a positive light because he

recognizes it as the very premise of his writing.

The conclusion of L’amour dure trois ans, similar to Beigbeder’s other stories,

presents an idealistic solution to the question of love. As Marc becomes increasingly

aware of the mediated messages about love and marriage that continue to inspire his

thoughts and desires, he in fact appropriates the scientific discourse on love’s short-lived

nature, paradoxically, to sustain his passion for his partner. The most powerful

obstruction of the plot, that which sustains Marc’s passion for Alice, his current lover, is

the very fatalistic discourse that announces passion’s eventual demise. While Marc is

seemingly convinced of the claims of popular science that “love lasts three years,” his

conviction in fact works to stir passion, and consequently to propel the plot. At several

points in the novel, the narrator reminds himself, as well as his lover, that their

relationship is doomed. Halfway through the novel, Marc compares this new relationship

to a countdown clock whose final seconds will mark the dissolution of love:

En sortant sur la place, devant l’usine Georges-Pompidou, nous noussommes arrêtés sous le Génitron, cette horloge qui décomptait les secondes

qui nous séparaient de l’an 2000.

--- Tu vois, Alice, cette horloge symbolise notre amour. […] Le compte à

rebours est commencé… Un jour tu t’ennuieras, je t’énerverai, tu mereprocheras de ne pas avoir rabaissé la lunette des chiottes, je passerai la

soirée devant la télé jusqu’à la fin des programmes, et tu me tromperas […].

Nous n’avons pas de futur. Regarde les secondes qui défilent, elles nousrapprochent du malheur... (92-93)

Because of the time limit on his relationship that Marc imagines, the story remains at a

high level of urgency. In fact, the final chapters of the novel, entitled “Day Six,” “Day

Five,” “Day Four,” etc., act like a clock that counts down to Marc and Alice’s three-year

anniversary, i.e. the end of their love. But in contemplating what he perceives as the


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inevitable dissolution of his current passion, Marc’s frequent repetition of “L’amour dure

trois ans” becomes the refrain of his love story, a story that eventually passes the three-

year threshold. In the final pages of the novel, Marc declares his triumph over time and

rejects the notion that “love lasts three years”: “L’amour ne dure pas trois ans; je suis

heureux de m’être trompé. Ce n’est pas parce que ce livre est publié chez Grasset qu’il dit

nécessairement la vérité” (188).

Alongside the novel’s plot, however, a postmodern critique of the discourses on

love and marriage is articulated through various rhetorical devices. For instance, Marc’s

frequent use of sarcasm in his reflections on his relationships undermines the credibility

of the popular biological “imperative” on passion: “La chanson de Ferré résumait tout:

‘Avec le temps on n’aime plus.’ Qui êtes-vous pour oser vous mesurer à des glandes et

des neurotransmetteurs qui vous laisseront tomber inéluctablement à la date prévue?”

(30). Here, personification paints a ridiculous portrait of the body conspiring to defeat

passion and the powerless lover. In another example, the narrator imagines an equally

ridiculous scenario in which a lover excuses his adulterous affair as the means to passing

along good genes to future generations: “Vous imaginez la scène de ménage: ‘Mon

amour, je ne t’ai pas trompée pour le plaisir: c’était pour la survie de l’espèce, figure-toi!

Peut-être que toi tu t’en fous, mais il faut bien que quelqu’un s’en préoccupe, de la survie

de l’espèce! Si tu crois que ça m’amuse!’” (52). The humor of this passage is at the

expense of popular science. In parodying the attempt by scientists to explain all human

behavior in terms of reproduction, the narrator expresses the skepticism of

“metanarratives” that is emblematic of postmodern thought. In the end, Beigbeder’s novel

negates such claims to truth about human relationships.


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Of equal importance is the text’s distancing from the romantic discourse that the

plot advances. On occasion, the description of Marc’s romantic meditations becomes so

saturated with clichés and couched in sarcasm that the reader has no choice but to read it

ironically:

Je prends mon stylo pour dire que je l’aime, qu’elle a les plus longs cheveux dumonde et que ma vie s’y noie, et si tu trouves ça ridicule pauvre de toi, ses yeux

sont pour moi, elle est moi, je suis elle, et quand elle crie je crie aussi et tout ce que

je ferai jamais sera pour elle, toujours, toujours je lui donnerai tout et jusqu’à ma

mort il n’y aura pas un matin où je me lèverai pour autre chose que pour elle et luidonner envie de m’aimer et embrasser encore et encore ses poignets, ses épaules,

ses seins [...]. Comme la joie de vivre nous étouffe, je n’ai jamais vécu ça, est-ce

que tu ressens ce que je ressens? tu ne pourras jamais m’aimer autant que je t’aime,

non c’est moi qui t’aime plus que toi [...]. (165, 167)

As noted earlier, the narrator is acutely aware of the influence of social discourse on love

and marriage in the shaping of his desire. Marc’s references to desire as a social construct

are often juxtaposed with parodies of romantic scenarios. Even as the narrator falls in

love with Alice, and recounts a series of candlelit dinners and love-letter exchanges, he

describes le mariage d’amour as “l’objet d’un colossal lavage de cerveau publicitaire,

cinématographique, journalistique, et même littéraire: une immense intox [...]” (48).

While the dénouement proceeds to a happy ending, the narrator distances himself

from his story, as if snapping out of a daydream, to suggest that what he is experiencing

belongs to fiction, and that his writing resembles the conclusion of Hollywood romances:

Dans un beau film, je me mettrais à courir après le taxi sous la pluie, et nous

tomberions dans les bras l’un de l’autre au prochain feu rouge. Ou bien ce serait

elle qui changerait d’avis, soudain, et supplierait le chauffeur de s’arrêter, commeAudrey Hepburn/Holly Golightly à la fin de Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Mais nous ne

sommes pas dans un film. [...] Nous sommes dans la vie où les taxis roulent. (159)

Because of the ironic perspective on relationships that the text often takes, the reader is

lead to interpret with skepticism the novel’s ending, in which Marc declares that his


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passion for Alice is taking a permanent form: “J’ai regardé ma montre: il était 23h59.

Encore soixante secondes, et nous serions fixés” (194). Even in these sentences, the

conditional form of the verb and the fact that the novel ends one minute before Marc and

Alice’s three-year anniversary leave the reader incredulous concerning the reality that

Marc will actually remain passionately in love with Alice beyond the story’s conclusion.

It appears, rather, that Marc’s obsession and frustration with science’s claim that “love

lasts three years” overshadows any genuine love that he feels for Alice. Above all, the

conclusion makes it obvious that Marc, in his desperation to take his relationship beyond

the three-year threshold, continues to be manipulated by mediated discourses.

L’amour dure trois ans highlights the inconsistencies in the opinions that the

present generation expresses with respect to committed relationships. The narrator’s

thoughts, wavering between his yearnings for romantic love, his concomitant suspicion of

its mediated portrayals, and the claims of “scientific” realism, characterize a new,

complex mind-set toward love and marriage. In her investigation of contemporary

perceptions of different relationship scenarios, sociologist Eva Illouz has found that

respondents categorically rejected “with suspicion, derision, and ironic distance,” a

romantic account of “love at first sight” among strangers on a train who decided to marry

only days later (175). However, when asked to describe their most memorable or

fulfilling relationship, almost all participants referred to a past relationship that mirrored

“the narrative model of love at first sight as codified in popular cinema” (172):

Like postmodern artists and sociologists, the respondents maintain the ironic stance

that their representations and experiences are ‘simulacra’, imitations ofmanufactured signs devoid of referents. The romantic self perceives itself

ironically, like a pre-scripted actor who repeats the words and gestures of other pre-

scripted actors, simply repeating others’ repetitions. (181)


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In the end, the contemporary self is emblematized by its awareness of the incongruence

between its romantic idealism and its skeptic realism. In the conclusion to her study,

Illouz states: “The romantic self perceives itself in the halo of an ironic semiotic

suspicion. Like Baudrillardian sociologists, my respondents suggest that their own lives

are ‘simulations’, repetitions, of authorless signs empty of any real referent. [...] Love

seems to have ‘flattened’ out in a culture where all forms of ‘intensities’ are actively

encouraged and simultaneously demystified” (182-83).

Beigbeder’s narratives clearly respond to a rich literary tradition on the question

of love. But instead of simply offering another love story that eternalizes passion, either

through the death of the lovers or a fairy-tale ending in which the couple live happily ever

after, Beigbeder’s writing renders problematic any attempt on the part of the romantic to

attain true love, a notion that is itself rendered problematic. A couple’s strategies of role-

play, open relationships, and swinging are unveiled as simply new moves in the non-

ending game of desire. As a postmodern thinker, Beigbeder lays bare the discourses that,

from a postmodern perspective, always already predetermine our desires. The end result

is the self’s expression of frustration toward unfulfilling relationships, which are shaped

by discourses that continue to entice us. To be sure, Beigbeder’s writing reflects the

concerns and frustrations of Generation X with regard to love-based marriages. Much like

Xers’ characteristic self-reflexivity and suspicion of committed relationships, the

postmodern narrative, in its awareness of the complexities of love, recounts love stories

of indecision, which emerge from the unresolved play between desire and distrust.

1 Quoted by Coontz, 15.2 Several scholars have commented on Houellebecq’s rejection of May ’68 ideology and his concomitant

nostalgia for the moral integrity of earlier generations. In “Sex and the West,” Madeleine Byrne states that

Houellebecq “argues that 60s radicalism, with its unchecked individualism has dissolved social institutions,


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such as marriage and the family (the only things, Houellebecq argues, that can act as a buffer against

capitalism’s excesses) (208). In “Transfigurations: Verbal and Visual frissons in France’s Millennial

Change,” Colin Nettelbeck asserts that in Les particules élémentaires, “the author took to flaying, with

merciless and savage energy, the 1968 generation” (93). And Gavin Bowd, in “Michel Houellebecq and the

Pursuit of Happiness,” states that “Houellebecq’s thought is marked by both nostalgia and resentment: a

very affectionate and sentimental memory of grandparents who are monogamous, hard-working and voteCommunist or Gaullist; hatred of hippies, America, May 68 and Maastricht liberalism” (37).3 In “No Man’s Land: Genres en question dans Sitcom, Romance et Baise-moi,” Stéphane Spoiden discusses

the general rejection among readers of a “culture poubelle” in his analysis of readers’ reactions to

Despentes’s novels. In La Littérature sans estomac, writer and scholar Pierre Jourde groups the novels of

Angot, Beigbeder, Darrieussecq, Despentes, Millet, and others under the category “littérature de latrines,”

which, he argues, markets its titles by promising readers extreme accounts of sex and violence (18).4 See Lynnea Chapman King’s “Generation X: Searching for an Identity” 9; Sherry Ortner’s “Generation X:

Anthropology in a Media-Saturated World,” 418; and Angie Williams’ “Talking About Generation X:

Defining Them as They Define Themselves.”5 In Routledge’s Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought , editor Stuart Sim begins his classification of

postmodernism by identifying its overall skepticism of the values that characterized the modern era: “To

move from the modern to the postmodern is to embrace scepticism about what our culture stands for and

strives for” (vii). In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard defines

postmodernism as “incredulity regarding metanarratives, that is to say, “grand stories about the world and

the place of inquiry in it” (xxiii-xxv). In “Science, technology, and postmodernism,” Ursula K. Heise

analyzes the general rejection by postmodernists of any assumptions about progress, in particular the

postmodernist “ambivalence vis-à-vis science and technology as unequivocally positive forces, [and] the

narratives of progress and mastery of nature” (137). In The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity in a

Postmodern World , James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium present an in-depth summary of the

postmodern critique of subjectivity and its predication on individual agency. While some postmodern

thinkers speak of a “decentered self” that is constantly being shaped by social forces, others including Jean

Baudrillard altogether dismiss the self as a “real” being (56-80).6 For a study of Gergen’s notion of the “saturated self,” see Holstein and Gubrium’s The Self We Live By,

58-60.7 In his analysis of medieval texts, Rougemont underscores a negative portrayal of passionate love, or eros,

as ‘the love of passion for its own sake,’ and as “le désir ce qui nous blesse, et nous anéantit par son

triomphe.” Far from bringing joy to the couple in love, eros betrays our secret preference for what isunhappy, and requires increasingly perilous obstacles that delay fulfillment if it is to survive (53-55).8 See, for instance, Coontz, 17; and Miguel Benasayag’s Le pari amoureux, 32-42. Another common

reference is the conclusion to Mme de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678), in which the heroine

similarly renounces marriage to the man with whom she is in love precisely in order to remain in love

(187).9 Emphasis is Rougemont’s.10 It should be noted that Rougemont’s analysis of the Tristan and Iseult myth draws from the French

versions attributed to Béroul and Thomas. Other versions, including Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan und

Isolde, do not place much importance on the role of the love potion. Gottfried von Strassburg does accord a

place to the love potion in the story, but seems to do this only out of respect for the French tradition. In his

version, there is genuine love between the Tristan and Isolde throughout the story, independent of the

potion.11

Rougemont essentially upholds the perspective on passionate love that the Church held up through atleast the eighteenth century by insisting on the destructive nature of a type of love that, in the end, does not

bring happiness to the couple: “What then, is the legend really about? The partings of the lovers? Yes, but

in the name of passion, for love of the very love that agitates them, in order that this love may be intensified

and transfigured—at the cost of their happiness and even of their lives” (37).12 Marc calls this type of relationship the “bostella amoureuse,” the name of a dance involving two

contradictory types of movement, one happy and one sad. The epigraph to Mémoires d’un jeune homme

dérangé presents a description of the “Bostella”: “Alternance de joie et de peine / D’allégresse et de

contrition / Marquez bien les temps / Rythme cardiaque normal / C’est le premier dansodrame mimé /

Dansons la Bostella” (7).


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13 In Vacances dans le coma, unlike in Mémoires d’un jeune homme dérangé, the narrator is not the

protagonist. Rather, he is what Gérard Genette would call “extradiegetic.” That is to say, he is not a

character in the plot that he recounts ( Figures III 225-67).14 In his investigation on the growing subculture of swingers in The Lifestyle (1999), Terry Gould states that

“the idea [of swinging] is to protect and defend the marital unions of everyone involved [...]” (162).15

In “Reading for the Plot” Peter Brooks highlights the importance of plot—the design and intention ofnarrative—in understanding human experience (of time, desire, etc.). My intention in this section is to

highlight the incongruence and therefore a fortiori dialectical relationship in postmodern fiction between

plot and other textual elements, notably the literary tropes of pastiche, parody, and irony.16 Foucault even argues that the idea of the individual, a centered self, is itself a discursive formation. See

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 305.17 For instance, in Janet Hyde and John Delamater’s Understanding Human Sexuality (2000), a popular

textbook used in college psychology courses, the authors state that “passionate love is like an amphetamine

high; both activate certain neurochemical circuits, and it is this activation that causes high energy, euphoria,

elation, and idealization. [Michael] Liebowitz suggests that phenylethylamine (PEA) is the chemical

responsible. Like all chemically induced highs, this one must end. Either the neural circuits become

accustomed to PEA, so it has less effect than before, or levels of PEA fall” (352). The authors also state that

the waning of passionate love generally occurs within the first six to thirty months of a relationship, a range

that roughly spans three years (351).18 The increasingly popular discipline of evolutionary psychology portrays the human male as genetically

programmed for diversity in sexual partners. As cultural anthropologist Roger Lancaster notes in The

Trouble with Nature (2003), “evolutionary psychology explains our attitudes and behaviors in terms of

natural selection and sexual selection” (11). Evolutionary psychologists claim that the male psyche is

defined by his innate search to spread his infinitely abundant seed to as many mates as possible (11-12). In

The Mating Mind (2000), Geoffrey Miller’s description of nearly all human behavior, even artistic

expression, in terms of sexual selection, is a prime example. According to Miller, not unlike the male

peacock, the human male seeks to spread his seed to as many females as possible through elaborate

courtship, that is, by the marketing of “good genes” (fitness, intelligence, etc.).19 See, for instance, Terry Gould’s The Lifestyle: A Look at the Erotic Rites of Swingers, 3.20 Drawing from the thesis in evolutionary biologist Robin Baker’s Sperm Wars (1996) that the human

sexual drive, in order to assure that the best genes of a pool reproduce, is programmed for “sperm wars,”

Christine Ley affirms that for men especially, watching their spouse engage in sexual relations with another

man serves as a potent aphrodisiac: “L’homme qui suspecte sa compagne d’avoir mené une relationsexuelle avec un autre homme éjacule ensuite plus fortement, son sperme est plus riche en spermatozoï de et

son orgasme plus puissant que d’habitude” (68-69). See also Baker, 36-41.


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Works Cited

Baker, Robin. Sperm Warfare. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

Beigbeder, Frédéric. L’amour dure trois ans. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.

- - - . Mémoire d’un jeune homme dérangé. Paris: La Table Ronde, 1990.

- - - . Nouvelles sous ecstasy. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1999.

- - - . Vacances dans le coma. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1996.

Benasayag, Miguel and Dardo Scavino. Le pari amoureux. Paris: Editions La

Découverte, 1995.

Bowd, Gavin. “Michel Houellebecq and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Nottingham French

Studies 41.1 (2002): 28-39.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

Byrne, Madeleine. “Sex and the West.” HEAT 4 (2002): 205-17.

Cahoone, Lawrence. “Introduction.” From Modernism to Postmodernism. Ed. Lawrence

Cahoone. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love

Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage,

1977.

Genette, Gérard. Figures III . Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969.

Gould, Terry. The Lifestyle: A Look at the Erotic Rites of Swingers. Ontario: Vintage

Canada, 1999.


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Heise, Ursula K. “Science, Technology, and Postmodernism.” The Cambridge

Companion to Postmodernism. Ed. Steven Connor. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2004. 136-67.

Holstein, James and Jaber F. Gubrium. The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity in a

Postmodern World . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Houellebecq, Michel. Les particules élémentaires. Paris: Flammarion, 1998.

Hyde, Janet Shibley, and John D. Delamater. Understanding Human Sexuality. New

York: McGraw-Hill, 2000.

Illouz, Eva. “The Lost Innocence of Love: Romance as a Postmodern Condition.” Theory,

Culture & Society 15 (1998): 161-86.

Jourde, Pierre. La littérature sans estomac. Paris: L’Esprit des Péninsules, 2002.

King, Lynnea Chapman. Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 19.2 (2000): 8-

18.

Lancaster, Robert. The Trouble With Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture. Los

Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.

Ley, Christine. Voyage au pays de l’échangisme. Lausanne: Editions Favre SA, 2003.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans.

Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1984.

Miller, Geoffrey. The Mating Mind . New York: Random House, 2000.

Nettelbeck, Colin. “Transfigurations: Verbal and Visual frissons in France’s Millennial

Change.” Australian Journal of French Studies 39.1 (2002): 86-101.


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Ortner, Sherry. “Generation X: Anthropology in a Media-Saturated World.” Cultural

Anthropology 13.2 (1998): 414-40.

Rougemont, Denis de. L’amour et l’occident . Paris: Union Générale des Editions, 1972.

Sheehan, Paul. “Postmodernism and Philosophy.” The Cambridge Companion to

Postmodernism. Ed. Steven Connor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2004. 20-42.

Sim, Stuart. The Routledge Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought . Ed. Stuart Sim.

New York: Routledge, 1999.

Spoiden, Stéphane. “No Man’s Land: Genres en question dans Sitcom, Romance et Baise-

moi.” Esprit Créateur 42.1 (2002): 96-106.

Williams, Angie, Justine Coupland et al. “Talking About Generation X: Defining Them

as They Define Themselves.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 16:3

(1997): 251-77.

Scott Powers - On Love, Marriage and Swinging

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