a bonobo humanity?

Canto: So, having read The Second Sex recently, I’m pondering over her essay on Stendhal, a writer I was a little obsessed with in the 1980s, in the years of my fading youth…

Jacinta: Right, so near the middle of that book Beauvoir wrote five little essays on five writers, treating of their treatment of women, from the most misogynist to – Stendhal. So the first four, in order, were Henry de Montherlant, D H Lawrence, Paul Claudel and Andre Breton. 

Canto: Yes and she mentions Stendhal with affection in Memoirs of a dutiful daughter too, so it transports me back to my discovery of Stendhal’s work in the early eighties, and then, in the late eighties, my decision to write my French Honours thesis on Stendhal’s work, which led me to read and reread more or less all of his oeuvre, as well as much literary criticism, including, if I’m not much mistaken, Beauvoir’s essay. 

Jacinta: And in that essay, she points out that Stendhal is more invested in the female characters than the males. His writing career is bookended by Lamiel, his unfinished last novel, and Armance, his first written work of fiction, which uses physical impotence effectively to disguise the emotional difficulties faced by the male lover, Octave…

Canto: Well I’ve been reading critiques, by women, of Beauvoir’s treatment of Stendhal’s treatment of women, and it all becomes a bit abstruse, but surely nobody wold doubt that Stendhal has a view of women that is very much out of synch with his time. But what most interests me, is the personal nature of his interest. Because I identify with it. I very much recall his account, in Vie de Henri Brulard, of his writing the names in sand, or was it dirt, of the women he loved (whatever that may mean), and who never returned his feelings. And watching the waves, or was it the wind, wash those names away. Stendhal was always a ‘brevity is the soul of wit’ writer, whose writing became most taut when emotionally charged. Few writers have had greater emotional impact on me than Stendhal, no doubt because I too have been a terrible failure in love, or lust, or whatever it is that brings bodily closeness, of the kind that bonobos manage so effortlessly. 

Jacinta: Culture, and religion, and its aftermath, have left us with a legacy that makes physicality, so basic to other mammals, an arena replete with problems. The very process of writing illustrates this. Bonobos don’t write, or talk, they don’t put off spontaneity. If they’re spurned, as Stendhal was spurned by those he obsessed over, they find someone else, without giving up on their first choice. And if they’ve proved themselves, they might succeed in their first choice next time, without giving up on their second choice…

Canto: But maybe there’re bonobo versions of Stendhal, and myself, who don’t succeed in their first second or third choices… 

Jacinta: Bonobo society is clearly inclusive. It’s not just about sex, but about closeness. That’s what makes for less violence and more collaboration. In the primate world, our world, greater female empowerment makes all the difference. 

Canto: No bonobo left behind. But we have become ‘literate’, spectacularly, which has led to our science and complexity, Shakespeare and Newton and music and quantum mechanics and longevity and so many understandings of the universe and neutrinos and the butterfly effect and complex feedback loops… 

Jacinta: And still there is warfare – involving the rape and murder of women – a feature of every example of warfare over the last 5000 years and more – and invariably perpetrated by men. Men men men men men men men. 

Canto: What about Thatcher and the Falklands? 

Jacinta: Complex, but initiated by the aggression of Argentinian males, and of course there are aggressive women… 

Canto: Well getting back to Stendhal and Beauvoir, let me offer this quote from Beauvoir’s essay for our commentary: 

Music, painting, architecture, everything he cherished, he cherished it with an unlucky lovers’ soul; while he is walking around Rome, a woman emerges at every turn… by the regrets, desires, sadnesses and joys women awaken in him, he came to know the nature of his own heart; it is women he wants as judges: he frequents their salons, he wants to shine; he owes them his greatest joys, his greatest pain, they were his main occupation; he prefers their love to any friendship, their friendship to that of men; women inspire his books, women figures populate them; he writes in great part for them. ‘I might be lucky enough to be read in 1900 by the souls I love, the Mme Rolands, the Melanie Guilberts…’ They were the very substance of his life.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Vintage Books, p261)

Jacinta: Sad. Mais touchant, tout de même. It seems like it’s both a joy and a torture. Joy in remembrance and contemplation, but suffering in the presence of their indifference, or disdain, or discomfort. And that’s how you feel? But then you have me. But of course you am I. Am you. Am I?

Canto: Haha, well it’s more like how I used to feel, before I became a dried out old husk. I could tell some comically sad tales of my youth, but now I think of these things in a more abstract way. And admiring the example of bonobos as the human way of the future is about as abstract as it gets, so I feel very comfortable about it. And I talk to myself a lot, but I’m not even sure any more if my imagined interlocutor is female. 

Jacinta: Ah, the way we were. So, all passion spent, you can focus on more important things like war and peace, global warming, artificial intelligence, female empowerment, wealth inequality, the WEIRDening of the world… 

Canto: And, of course, bonobos. I really would like to be one. Just for one day. 

References

Simone de Beauvoir, The second sex, 1949

Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a dutiful daughter, 1958

Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard, 1890

Stendhal, Love, 1822