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[...] to my utter astonishment it was in his eyes that I saw tears.
“I have been behaving like a swine!”
I said, “It’s not being a swine to love another woman. You can’t help it.”
Shrugging his shoulders he said, “Do I really love her?”
I have been feeding on that remark for the last two days. They spent a fortnight together, in the freedom and the beauty of the mountains, and he comes back saying, “Do I really love her?” It is a line I should never have dared play deliberately; but my desperation has worked on my side. This long tête-à-tête has begun to wear out his passion. Again he said, “I didn’t want this! I didn’t want to make you unhappy.” As for that, it is a stock phrase which hardly moves me at all. If he had felt only an upsurge of pity I should not have taken hope again. But there in front of me, speaking aloud, he said, “Do I really love her?” And I tell myself that perhaps this is the beginning of the decrystallization that will detach him from Noëllie and give him back to me.
“But you didn’t want to admit that Maurice was a swine, either,” I said.
She protested. “No. Maurice is not a swine! He’s a man caught between two women: no one is a very shining light in cases of that kind.”
“He never ought to have got himself into that position.”
“It happens to very decent creatures.”
She is indulgent with Maurice because she has put up with a great deal from Charles. But their relationship was a completely different story.
“I don’t believe Maurice is a decent creature anymore,” I said. “I am discovering small-minded aspects in him. I wounded his vanity by not going into ecstasies over his successes.”
“There you are unjust,” she said, with a kind of sternness. “If a man likes to talk about his work, that is not vanity. It has always surprised me that you care so little for what Maurice does.”
“I’ve nothing of any interest to say to him about it.”
“No. But he would certainly have liked to tell you about his difficulties, and the things he had discovered.”
[...] She grew very angry. “I can’t bear seeing you tearing yourself to pieces in this way. With Papa treating you like this, you ought to send him packing. Let him go and live with that woman: you will be much quieter in your mind.”
She would not have given me that advice only a month ago.
The fact is that if I were a good loser I should tell Maurice to go. But my last chance is that Noëllie, for her part, should grow exasperated, make scenes and show herself in an unpleasant light. And also that the way I stick it out should touch Maurice. And then even if he is not often here, this is, after all, still his home. I am not living in a desert. Weakness; cowardice: but there is no reason why I should torture myself—I am trying to survive.
stopppp
“You’ll get ill. Or go off your head. As for me, I can’t help you because I’m part of it. But I beg you, do see a psychiatrist.”
I said no. He pressed me and pressed me. In the end he grew impatient. “How do you expect to get out of it? You do nothing to help.”
“Get out of what?”
“Out of this depression. Anyone would say you were sinking deeper into it on purpose.”
He shut himself up in his study. He thinks I am trying to blackmail him with misery, so as to frighten him and prevent him from leaving me. Maybe he’s right. Do I know what I am? Perhaps a kind of leech that feeds on the life of others—on Maurice’s, on our daughters’, on the life of all those lame ducks I claimed to be helping. An egoist who will not let go: I drink, I let myself slide, I make myself ill with the unadmitted intention of softening his heart. Completely phony through and through, rotten to the bone, playacting, exploiting his pity. I ought to tell him to go and live with Noëllie, to be happy without me. I can’t bring myself to do so.
He urged me to take up this diary again. I see the gimmick perfectly well—he is trying to give me back an interest in myself, to reconstruct my identity for me. But the only thing that counts is Maurice. My self, what does that amount to? I have never paid much attention to it. I was safe, because he loved me. If he does not love me anymore.… It is only the transition that haunts my mind—how have I deserved it that he should no longer love me? Or have I not deserved it, and is he a swine—a swine that should be punished, and his accomplice with him? Dr. Marquet sets about it at the other end—my father, my mother, my father’s death: he wants to make me talk about myself, and I only want to talk to him about Maurice and Noëllie. Still, I did ask him whether he thought me intelligent. Yes, undoubtedly; but intelligence is not a quality with an independent existence: when I go on and on pursuing my obsessions, my intelligence is no longer available to me.
STOP
“You just won’t talk to me about myself: do you think so very badly of me then?”
“What a notion!”
“I know I am being a bore. But I do want to see clearly into my past.”
“It’s the future that counts. Find yourself some men. Or take a job.”
“No. I need your father.”
“Maybe he’ll come back to you.”
“You know perfectly well he won’t.”
We have had this conversation ten times over. I bore her too; I exasperate her. Perhaps if I were to push her far enough she would end up by breaking out and telling me. But she has such patience that I lose heart. Who knows but they may have written to her to tell her about my case and beg her to bear with me?
lol
I asked her what she thought of her father.
“Oh, for my part, I don’t sit in judgment on anyone.”
“You don’t think he has behaved like a swine?”
“Frankly, no. He is certainly kidding himself about this woman. He’s a simpleminded soul. But not a swine.”
“You think he has the right to sacrifice me?”
“Obviously it’s tough on you. But why should he sacrifice himself? I know very well I should not sacrifice myself for anyone on earth.”
“There you are, that’s one of your words. It really has no meaning as far as I am concerned.”
“Then that is to say you’re not happy.”
Aggressively she replied, “My life suits me splendidly.”
Work, going out, brief encounters: it seems an arid sort of an existence to me. She has rough ways, spurts of impatience—not only with me—that seem to betray a conflict. This is certainly my fault too, this refusal of love: my sentimentality sickened her, and she has warped herself in trying not to be like me. There is something stiff, almost unpleasing, about her ways. She has introduced some of the men she knows and I have been struck by her attitude with them—always on the watch, remote, hard; there is no mirth in her laughter.
:/
She seemed embarrassed. “And what about you—how do you see yourself?”
“As a marshland. Everything is buried in the mud.”
“You’ll find yourself again.”
No: and perhaps that is the worst side of it all. It is only now that I realize how much value I had for myself, fundamentally. But Maurice has murdered all the words by which I might try to justify it: he has repudiated the standards by which I measured others and myself; I had never dreamed of challenging them—that is to say of challenging myself. And now what I wonder is this: what right had I to say that the inner life was preferable to a merely social life, contemplation to trifling amusements, and self-sacrifice to ambition? My only life had been to create happiness around me. I have not made Maurice happy. And my daughters are not happy either. So what then? I no longer know anything. Not only do I not know what kind of a person I am, but also I do not know what kind of a person I ought to be. Black and white merge into one another, the world is an amorphous mass, and I no longer have any clear outlines. How is it possible to live without believing in anything or in myself?
This is not a relationship of simple reflection, where art is a mirror held up to some underlying economic “base” assumed to hold the truth of the world, much less one of homology, where art reflects some mystical world spirit distributed evenly across the whole of society. Rather, I argue for a complex set of reversible mediations between different social spheres. On the one hand, wage labor and other types of unfree work provide the social and technical means for art work. Artists and writers draw from the methods and means and techniques available to them, many of which come from the workplace, and in doing so respond to the world of work, recasting it, critiquing it, celebrating it, or constructing alternative social arrangements from it. At the same time, however, industry looks to art as a sphere that can be commodified and to art work as an activity that can be turned into waged labor. Finally, in searching out its own methods, industry looks to art for transposable techniques, means, and materials that it can borrow and put to work, so to speak. To Adorno and Horkheimer’s notable examination of the industrialization of culture, we must add an understanding of the corresponding aestheticization of industry. Additionally, we must understand both of these phenomena as dialectically entangled with an active, and sometimes critical, engagement by writers and artists with the methods and materials of capitalist work.