Le Baiser des Lumières, and: Le Baiser: Le corps au bord des lèvres (review)

In his Diary of a Seducer, Soren Kierkegaard expressed regret about the lack of a good study of “the kiss.” It seems that since the publication of the Diary in 1843, the philosopher’s wish has been fulfilled beyond his wildest dreams, with numerous books about the kiss published over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including several published very recently. In the past decade, for example, the kiss has been the central topic of art exhibits, academic colloquia, and books. Academics, scientists, artists, and the popular media have shown an increasing interest in kissing, which accounts for the downright surge in publication of encyclopedias, histories, photograph albums, anthologies, and self-help manuals dedicated to this apparently banal gesture.

Among the plethora of recent titles, a few works stand out by their academic approach and by the fact that they require from their readers a deeper and more sophisticated literary knowledge. I am, of course, referring to Alain Montandon’s two recent offerings: Le Baiser des Lumières, a collective work published in 2004, and Le Baiser: Le corps au bord des lèvres, published in 2005.

Yet before we discuss these books, let us back up a step in order to survey the context from which they emerge. Some historical perspective will permit us to better evaluate Montandon’s contributions. To begin, we should note in a general way that the kiss has not always had the social functions and visible place in social life that it now has. Western civilization is currently so inundated with kissing imagery that it is easy to forget that the functions, codes, and symbolisms attached to kissing are not universal or even “natural.” What now can occur without scandal in broad daylight used to take place only behind the drapes of closed carriages, dense foliage, or in the intimacy of a boudoir. There was a time when moral rules either banned or limited the length of a kiss in movies, whereas nowadays long, passionate embraces are usually only build-up to something more. And, if we reach back further into history, representations of kissing used to have a “sacred” function, not an erotic one. Such contextualization is necessary to learn how to decrypt images of kissing “on the mouth” (and often between males) in the Christian tradition, for example, and in order to avoid erotic or homoerotic anachronism.

Most of the recent titles (The Book of Kisses, The Book of the Kiss, The Kiss, The Encyclopedia of Kissing, etc.) are thus not properly historical: they tend to provide an amalgam of anecdotes, dictionary entries, and literary quotes, ranging from western antiquity to the troubadours, various myths to uncanny rituals, Renaissance poetry to naturalist novels. In this category, one might mention The Literature of Kissing, published in 1876 by C.C. Bombaugh, an anonymous study published in Nancy in 1888 entitled Le Baiser, étude littéraire et historique, and The Kiss and Its History, written in 1901 by the Romance studies scholar Chistopher Nyrop. These books might be considered the “ur-texts” of kissing studies since they are among the most quoted (often without fact-checking) and since their vocabulary, historiographic method, and even their anecdotes have produced a kind of kissing “folklore.” Most books on the kiss seem to feel the need to repeat the Latin vocabulary of embracing (osculum, basium, and suavium), make reference to Montaigne’s comments on the kissing etiquette of his time, and so on. Adding a new twist to this tradition, Martine Mairal’s anthology, Le Livre du baiser (published in 2000), creates kissing categories and invites the readers to fill in the blanks with their own memories and personal experiences. Since Freud, it is hard to tear the kiss apart from certain vital functions, especially from the nutritive function. Often the kiss is included (as in Claude Olivenstein’s Ecrit...