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PARTISAN REVIEW
a new balance between self-indulgence and self-control, relaxation and
alertness, complaint and creativity, passivity and action. His' power–
lessness did not preclude the possibility of writing powerful prose. He
was aware that Renee-Pelagie's visits gave less impetus to his literary
activity than solitude did.
Let me know, then, whether it is true that you are going so long
without seeing me....
If
it is true and if you will not be coming for a
long time yet, I am going to begin a delicious lillie poem, a lillie
dialogue. I know of nothing more interesting than
to
sing to you.
And Magdalene of Montreuil-the more I am plagued, the more I
need my brain to be distracted, and it plagues me
to
be prevented
from seeing you.
The ambivalence is scarcely concealed: would he not prefer singing
about her to seeing her?
For five years he had suffered from having nothing
to
distract him
from himself. Confinement in a small space forcibly concentrated his
attention on his body, its needs, its smells, its noticeable deterioration.
He could also distract his attention from it by using his brain, but he
was aware that reasoning had led him into unreason. Without aban–
doning his attempts to reason with his persecutors, he had lost faith in
the power of rational discourse. What he would develop in his fiction
was the logic of unreason.
If
his enemies used moralizing argument as
a weapon, there must be a way of either turning it against them or
discrediting it. Like a wrestler, he must take advantage of the muscular
pressure being exerted against him.
Again and again in his novels, innocent victims suffer at the hands
of omnipotent libertines. While the image picked up from the sadistic
experiences he had once enjoyed, it gave him enjoyment in the present
by inverting the situation of the impotent libertine dominated by the
ruthless mother-in-law. After inflicting imaginary tortures on her in
letters to Renee-Pelagie and in notes on scraps of paper, he arrived at
moments of greater relaxation when he could enjoy empathizing
ironically with Mme de Montreuil in plotting against him. This is a
literary coefficient of the physical reflex that had made him want to
exchange roles with the victims of his flagellation . H ere, with macabre
relish, he is identifying with the woman who was victimizing him .
There is one note on a scrap of paper which starts in the middl e of an
argument:
I say unction because how could Madame la Presidente's bidet
sponge fail to be very oily? Tell her that I ask her, the next time she
