THE MOST INTERESTING THING I’ve read in the papers recently is a New York Times review of “The Sexual Life of Catherine M.” The book is a sexual memoir by a 53-year-old French art critic named Catherine Millet, and somehow it seems to represent the pathetic end-point of a series of very long and very sad cultural slides.
In the first place, it’s the end-point of the “let’s be frank about sex” school of literary daring. Millet, according to Janet Maslin’s wicked and devastating review, spends much of the book detailing in graphic, four-letter word detail, her vast sexual history. There are apparently long passages when she is spread on the hood of a car. There is the endless string of partners. Often she entertains them in groups. There are, Maslin notes, “frequent and repetitive accounts of how, in effect, she took on the whole football team.”
This sort of thing was once considered vulgar and disgusting. Then, starting in the 19th century, it seemed daring in an anti-bourgeois sort of way when men did it. Then, in the 20th century it seemed daring when women did it. Now it just seems vulgar and disgusting again.
But being an art critic, of course, Millet can’t just be pornographic. She also has to be highbrow. And in this regard, too, she seems to represent a pathetic final destination. She describes her “ludic spirit” and “fornicatory communion.” She arranges her adventures in artsy, highbrow categories: “Numbers . . . Space . . . Confined Space . . . Details.”
Maslin presents this little gem of prose as an example of Millet at her most intellectual: “While the flickering pixels blur boundaries so that the space they delineate becomes almost an extension of the space you are in, the window at a peep show is a hiatus that substantiates the separation between two symmetrical parts, one that can be crossed but remains tangible.”
I don’t know about you, but in that passage I can hear the whole project of French intellectual life coming to a halt. All the postmodern gestures, all the deconstructed abstractions, they’ve all become ponderous tics to be utilized in the self-presentation of a middle-aged slut.
Any honest reader will want to know how Millet looks. I can tell you that based on her author photo she looks not bad, though a little worse for wear. If you were a football team, you wouldn’t turn her down. She has large oval eyes, a perky face in the French manner, complete with a slightly too big nose and some facial moles. She also has an impressive jawline and a desperate-to-be-an-ingenue expression. If, in 1972, you had been casting one of those farces in which the charming young heroine spends most of the movie running around in her underwear, Catherine Millet would have been your girl.
But that seems so over. And all the cultural trends she has embraced seem so over.
All this gives me some reason for optimism. No young person today could get excited by the cultural trends that must have excited Ms. Millet when she was young. I’ve recently had some meetings with college students and one thing I’ve noticed is that whatever their politics, they all consider the deconstructionists and the lit-crit radicals stale and pathetic. InstaPundit notes that there has been a sea change in the academy since September 11. I wouldn’t be surprised if that sort of thing is happening across the cultural landscape, even among art critics, even in Paris.
David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
