Review: Peter Brooks on Sally Rooney, Philosophy and the Boudoir

Plate for a 1934 edition Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses illustrated by the art deco designer George Barbier

Sally Rooney in Beautiful World, Where Are You seems to have pulled off the feat of resurrecting the eighteenth-century philosophical tale, developed especially in France: the conte philosophique—think of Voltaire’s Candide and Zadig as the best known among many examples. Rooney found success, even celebrity, with her highly crafted novels of personal relations, Normal People and Conversations with Friends. In her new book she seems to have set her sights on something bigger, and I think largely succeeds in a way that at moments reminds me of that sometimes brilliant and always outrageous exponent of the philosophical tale, the Marquis de Sade. Although her books are forthright, Rooney is no pornographer; her novels in fact are marked by a certain restraint and decorum. But like Sade, she finds a way to combine philosophical discourse with scenes of sex.

Discourse and sex tend to alternate in Beautiful World. The novel is structured on a series of long emails between the friends Alice and Eileen. Their correspondence mingles personal concerns with laments about the dire state of the world: the immiseration of much of its population, the destruction of nature, the soul-murder of the modern workplace (Alice’s friend Felix works in an Amazon-like warehouse), the depreciation of intellectual labor combined with the vapidity of the acclaim given to the successful writer, the threat of imminent general systems collapse. Is this all that life offers? There are to be sure relationships, or the search for them, the subject that Rooney has always captured with particular accuracy and grace. In Beautiful World, the principal relationship that gets going, between Alice and Felix, who meet via Tinder, finds its essential expression in sex, candidly and coolly recounted.

And this is very eighteenth-century. With the waning of religious belief in the Enlightenment, the human animal needed rethinking in secular terms, as a product of nature and society. A number of philosophes begin to see humans as a combination of natural endowment and socialization. Writers discovered that the most telling of human behaviors could be found in sexual encounters, which possibly tell you more about who you are than anything else. (See as the most brilliant example Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons dangereuses.) That certainly is Sade’s premise. His resolute atheism brought him to a twisted version of Rousseau’s cult of nature, which Sade conceives as a force that offers no moral norm but rather permits anything. His manic works discourse of the body and its possibilities, including the outrages that can be performed on it in the name of pleasure, as the farthest point in testing what nature and human nature will allow. In Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir, the libertines Dolmancé and Madame de Saint-Ange discourse incessantly (the book is written in dialogue form) as they carry on sexually, expounding their rejection of a deity and any moral prohibitions, their adherence to a natural philosophy that permits anything that nature makes happen. And they always speak their sexual pleasure as well, articulating their moments of jouissance: e.g.: “All of us, let’s discharge together! Christ, but I perish! I expire! Ah, in my life never have I come more voluptuously!” (That’s Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver’s translation, a bit toned down from the original.) Dolmancé’s love of philosophical exposition will lead to this famous diatribe, “Frenchmen, one more effort if you want to become republicans,” an impassioned argument that the French Revolution will fail unless it attends to the liberation of sexual drives.

Rooney does not go in for Sade’s over-the-top performed and spoken sex. And yet the way she juxtaposes her disquisitions on the state of the world and her bed moments can have a similar effect. She understands sexual encounter as a crucial moment of human interaction, an intense state that illuminates our being in the world. Sex reveals who we are, and it’s essential for Rooney’s reflections on human relations. Felix and Alice in bed discuss sex, pleasure, bodies in a way that few novelists have undertaken with such clarity. One moment is illustrative:
For a little while he kissed her and said nothing. Then he asked if she would go on top because he was tired, and she said yes. Once he was inside her she was still for a few seconds, breathing hard. Okay? he said. She nodded. He looked content to wait. You have such a perfect cunt, he said. A shudder dropped over her, from her head down to her pelvic bone. She put a hand on his shoulder.

It is Felix’s words here that Alice finds arousing. Rooney’s whole enterprise works toward bringing sex into the same discursive realm as climate change and the collapse of civilization. If the novel is to be worth anything as a genre, Rooney implicitly argues, it has find the words for things that matter.

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Peter Brooks is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University. His most recent book is Balzac’s Lives.

Sally Rooney’s 2019 Conversations with Friends was considered for Book Post by Elaine Blair.

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