Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila

Such were, too, your own last words, according to posterity or wicked tongues. Distinctly over-the-top for an atheist!

Here’s the nub: you, who taught me that “the first step toward philosophy is incredulity,”¹⁰ didn’t hesitate to make a character sing the praises of the Christian faith, even though she had been ill-treated by it! Is this another ironical pirouette, should it be taken with a pinch of salt, are you teasing us? Or are you rehearsing, slyly, vicariously, what it would be like to feel enthralled by that “profound wisdom,” to submit to its attachments, to practice its dialectics? To comprehend its logic while condemning its abuses?

Maybe this was not more than a “strumpet thought” among others, one you discarded, before capsizing at the end. There was more urgent business to attend to in those effervescent days, after all. But I wonder: by limiting yourself to diagnosing how religion oppresses “good nature,” didn’t you deny yourself the chance to deploy the complexities of your discernment, to plumb the “mysteries” of that mystification after having denounced its aberrations?

You did, however, in your correspondence with Sophie Volland, undertake to plumb a different mystery — that of the Apocalypse whose name is “Woman.” And still another after that, the enigma of the asocial individual, the eccentric parasite, the nephew of the great Rameau. Religion, seduction, hysteria, art…As mystifications and delusions go, you are not exempt: by rewriting your mocking farce in the form of a narrative, you stepped right into that region of mystification that could not fail to “clash” with your personal continent, that further illusion of which you are the master: literature. The imaginary, the fantasized, the written. How does it connect with religion? What links are there between religion, literature, the female body, and the artistic body? Between desire, seduction, and manipulation? Between feminine and masculine? Between art and parasitism? Truth and falsehood? Such are the abysses of philosophy. And how about between dominion over others, elevation of others, abuse of others? Between the powers of language, rhetoric, faith, and the Word? Such are the abysses of culture, of freedom, of the Enlightenment.

In a bid to cast light on your tale, scholars have pored over the original “correspondence” with the pious, deceived Monsieur de Croismare; but there is another, missing correspondence that remains unwritten and whose absence drove you to tears: that of the canon you once were with the philosopher you became. Is it because the ill-being of others — or your own? — wounds you so much that you prefer to act rather than to delve into its labyrinth of impasses and delights? “I would rather dry the tears of those who are unhappy than share the joy of the rest,” you wrote to Sophie Volland. And to Madame d’Épinay: “I belong to the unhappy; it would seem fate sends them into my path; I cannot fail a single one of them, I haven’t the strength; they rob me of my time, my talent, my fortune, my very friends…”¹¹

How I understand! Barring the talent and the fortune, I could write the very same words — why else would I be so attached to the MPH? But I’m not with you all the way. The Diderot who bursts into tears, undone by his Nun, makes me doubt his luminous encyclopedist’s certainties elsewhere.

Did you really believe in that benign “nature without artifice” touted by the Enlightenment? At the time of writing those mischievous letters to Croismare, you were also beginning work on the Nephew. And in that book, over and above its notoriously baroque, corrosive, seething critique of buffoons and braggarts, musical feuds and anarchic enthusiasms, what is it but good old “human nature” that gets blown to smithereens in the convulsion of passions, mimeses, unbearable truths, impossible filiations, tempests of the senses and sensations, in short, in the absence of any point of reference amid the strange, the infinite comedy of language and languages? All of this — the crucible of persiflage, of the literary laboratory, of imaginative power, of the hatefatuation of the sexes — surrounds The Nun, shattering the hypocrisy of sanctimonious God-botherers, beyond the control of the very institution of faith. You make no effort to contain it. You simply make it exist, in laughter, in tears, in style.