Mortal Men proposes the debunking of a fictional myth, the myth of the deadly woman on which many paintings, novels and movies are based. The piece is a big game and the arguments are clear and strong. Let’s listen to Elisenda Julibert (Barcelona, 1974): «Blowing up the myth of the deadly woman by presenting the beloved as the disastrous invention of a selfish and alienated individual, for whom simple regression has turned into a universal tragedy. […]a deep-rooted understanding of love in which alienation is a sign of perfect love.
Even more interesting than the shattered myth is the quality of the dismemberment, it provides considerable intellectual pleasure to see the handful of fictional men summoned here disintegrate as the presumed evil of femme fatales fades. Julibert eschews the social approach, historical injustice and gender conflict, legitimate and just (and somewhat integrated) perspectives, but these are often repetitive and somehow mechanically, not to say predictable. The author tends to examine in detail the emotions that come into play in mortal relationships (passion, love, jealousy, possessiveness, delusion, alienation, domination…), this long-term critical observation (a much more difficult way than suggesting an example). To illustrate an already established theory that has placed it in the orbit of writers like René Girard, Roland Barthes, and Clement Rosset).
Julibert develops these treatises on the teasing of emotions that accompany mortal love, along with a critical reading of well-known and easily accessible films and novels: Carmen, That vague object of desire, Lolita, Vertigo, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Con faldas or the madman.
These are clear pieces that escape the mundane and strive hard to be precise, avoiding jargon and hiding places of ambiguity. It is prose that is very sensitive to movements of thought, which tends to concentrate on elegant aphorisms.
While the texts acknowledge that they were read independently, a certain progression can be seen from Prosper Mérimeé’s naive (or shameless) account of the fatal woman to the more complex and critical view of Luis Buñuel’s myth. The last two parts of the essay are more propositional, containing a refutation of Sigmund Freud’s suggestion that desire should be reduced to the sexual instinct, and a lengthy commentary by Bouvard and Pécuchet (Gustave Flaubert’s final and unfinished masterpiece) that begins as an exposition. ends with the irrelevance of desire and the defense of slow love (“a modest space to rest from the wide world, a simple, small but stubborn fire, perhaps in the open. But beside it, each can participate in the desires or wishes of the other fearless phobias, because no one is dissatisfied with the person they say they love. not blamed for it”), calling for a correction in the perspectives of desire (experienced and represented) contributes to dilute the expectation that half the population is a dark continent and a cursed breed.
Although Fatal Men is not one of the essays of the year, we are faced with a golden literary route.