Alberto Moravia’s Conjugal Love is about the folly of human toil, human love, and human self-knowledge. His narrator works hard, produces nothing; loves much but understands nothing about the woman he loves; and knows himself even less than he knows his wife.
Conjugal Love tells the story of a man writing a story called “Conjugal Love”: it is the story of himself and his wife, and the novel is also about them, a married couple in their first year of marriage. Both novel and story are told solely from the point of view of the husband. His point of view is not to be trusted but then whose is? Moravia’s? There is no point of view that is objective. All our inferences — all our knowledge — derives from observations tinged by prejudices and from conclusions pre-determined by notions of destiny and just desserts: we get what we deserve, and we judge ourselves worthy of the best. Except when our confidence falters and we are certain we deserve the cheating spouse, the bad job, and the cut while shaving.
It is the husband’s inability to see himself objectively combined with his desire for his wife, especially the unknowable aspect of her person, that makes the narrator so completely and irritatingly human. And he is fantastically irritating. He goes on and on in long, layered thoughts full of words, words, words, about his writing, his desiring of his wife, and his mania over the barber who may or may not be part of his wife’s hidden life. The narrator is the ultimate belly-button gazer, so obsessed with himself, with his goal of writing a masterpiece, and with the objects that he has placed around himself in order to write his masterpiece (his wife is just an object, as is his barber) that any understanding or interest in the world outside is impossible. He is a man of many words but of little substance.
The couple are both members of the upper class, and have no need to work or worry for their creature comforts, whether it be on the Riviera, in Rome, or out in the Tuscan countryside. Nevertheless, the narrator is determined to write and to write well; once married and satisfied in love, he is sure he can finally write the masterpiece he is destined to create. The only obstacle seems to be the nightly lovemaking: it is wearing him out and leaving him listless in the mornings, the time he has devoted to writing. He decides to become chaste for the duration of his writing and his wife is only too willing to comply, all for the sake of his masterpiece. But when the barber gets too close while doing her curls, the carefully laid balance of the writer’s life is disturbed.
The narrator writes about his married life in his work entitled “Conjugal Love”: the irony is not only in the title that mimics the book itself but in that the author/narrator removes himself from conjugal love while writing his story. Is it any surprise that the final product is no good? He writes feverishly and fluidly for days, and yet when the manuscript is finished, it has no vitality, no spirit. The wife who has cuckolded him, now consoles him; he takes the consolation and the woman together, and might even try to write again but “in order to rewrite the story, I would have to know the devil….but also its opposite.” Too many words again, too high of goals again, and the reader is certain he will fail, again. But maybe he will stick to having sex this time around.
Would he be better off acknowledging his work, and his true worth? Is self-knowledge such a good thing? Moravia’s two pages of having his narrator critique his own writing could serve as a fine exercise for all writers; it certainly underscored the inability of the husband to write originally or well. Yet why not write? Writing is part one of the two-part destiny the narrator has assigned to his life, the other part being love. So what if both parts are just illusions? Even his moments of happiness are fleeting illusions that, when examined, are founded on notions too weak to support the happiness; the joy was just an alignment of the senses that gave a pleasing sensation of peace, freedom from worry, and a weightlessness in the world of gravity (reality). And yet the husband feels joy, pleasure, even happiness. Illusions, yes; but why not?
The lower classes are no better at finding true satisfaction: the lowly barber from Sicily works hard but he still has time to pursue his libertine desires. Everyone is in pursuit of perfect union, perfect joy, but everyone will fall short. Such is the human struggle, and human folly. For Moravia, the struggle and the folly are equivalent, which is neither a condemnation nor a commendation: it is just an acute observation from a writer marvelously skilled in presenting the true state of man.
Moravia is always provocative in how he portrays sexual relationships and this book is no exception. What is unusual is that his narrator abstains from sex for a good part of the novel (although he has explicit reminiscences). What is also delightfully unusual is the bizarre and animalistic warm-up dance the narrator’s wife has before getting down to sex on the threshing floor, loose straw and fancy dinner dress be damned. Moravia is all about human folly and sex is where we humans excel: Conjugal Love is an entertaining and thought-provoking look at conjugal bliss.
