The Inverted Gaze

Queering the French Literary Classics in America

François Cusset, David Homel

• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781551524115
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: LGBT Literaturkritik

François Cusset, author of the acclaimed book French Theory, investigates the queering of the French literary canon by American writers and scholars in this thought-provoking and free-minded journey across six centuries of literary classics and sexual polemics.Cusset presents the foundations and rationale for American queer theory, the field of study established in the 1990s and promulgated by writers and scholars such as Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael Warner (in the wake of Michel Foucault), which challenges a supposed "heteronormative" ideology in our culture. He provides an overview of their reinterpretation of the French literary canon from a queer perspective, then deliberately goes further, confronting that same canon with a lively form of general suspicion—seeking gender trouble and sexual ambiguities in the most unexpected corners of French literary classics, in which macho heroes turn out to be homosocial melancholics and the most seemingly submissive housewives are great vanguards of lesbian liberation.Cusset's survey includes medieval and Renaissance literature, works from the Age of Enlightenment, nineteenth-century avant-gardists such as Charles Baudelaire and Honoré de Balzac, and twentieth-century modernists such as Marcel Proust and Jean Genet.Bold in its themes and propositions, The Inverted Gaze (a translation of the book Queer Critics ) is an extraordinary work about French literature and American queer politics by one of France's biggest intellectual stars. François Cusset is a professor of American studies at the University of Paris. He is the author of numerous books including French Theory (2008). David Homel is an award-winning translator and writer who lives in Montreal, Quebec.

The Modern and Its Muddle

The question is not, as for Hamlet, to be or not to be, but to belong or not to belong.
—Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

The twentieth century, whose actual chronological limits still divide historians, opens on a rather erratic spectacle of pallid dandies and asexual victims of suicide, that end-of-century pallor that denotes onanism and sterile pleasure. A dawn of ghosts, and hovering over it the freshly minted image, new but already decadent, of the neatly made-up Des Esseintes of À Rebours (Huysmans’ Against Nature or Against the Grain) moving through Paris with his loping, striding steps, following a long-legged young man, hoping to inculcate in him the pleasures of “perfidious friendship,” or his own pleasure—that he would love to share—at feeling his “satisfaction” inevitably mixed with a “handsome disarray.” A tone has been sounded: friendship is no longer passionate but deliberately vicious, pleasure and pain will no longer be furtively linked according to the dice throw of destiny; they will remain incomplete if separated. One asserts oneself; one steps out of the closet; one joins up with specialized societies; one isn’t always at one’s ease, of course—perhaps there isn’t enough material for one’s novels—but a new division has come to light, crueler than what came before, because it is less shadowy. It divides hetero and homo as two scientific categories, two natural truths (the first, of course, to be recommended), two pigeon-holes that psychiatrists and doctors, tutors and moralists work to fill with the “objective” results of their research in situ. So how can we treat the twentieth-century literary corpus, as prudish as its allusions may be, the way we did Rabelais and Montaigne, Diderot and Baudelaire, all those authors writing before the modern label of homosexuality was invented? This is a question of method, but a thorny one all the same.

In literature, sexual polysemy will no longer possess the insouciance of past centuries. The ambivalence of hetero experience can’t be linked to the innocence it had in the romantic times any more, and homo deviancy will cease to be an incongruous exception casting doubt on “normal” love. The latter will be a figure of a new genre, whose tenants and exegetes will work to tease out its specificity. A counter-literature will emerge from this context, sometimes within the dominant corpus, adding its own cohort of new classics to the great love stories of the times: Colette’s Le pur et l’impur, Gide’s Corydon, Violette Leduc’s Thérèse et Isabelle, René Crevel’s prose (and his games with the masculine body in My Body and I) that ring like an intruder in the Surrealist hetero-sect, the stories of Jouhandeau and the portraits of Cocteau, the first hundred pages of course of Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, the autobiography of Julien Green, and the Hellenizing cross-dressing of Yourcenar. Then, finally and more recently, a bold new literature pushes forward that has no trouble with labels: writers like Guy Hocquenghem, Yves Navarre, Hervé Guibert, Hélène de Montferrand with Les amies de Héloïse and Renaud Camus with his pioneering Tricks.

While with their predecessors, the gay critics were often happy to sanctify this alternative corpus and turn it into the program for another type of education, queer theoreticians reacted in two ways when it came to the question of method posed by writers in the twentieth century, the century of demands. The first attitude is based on the method imposed by writers in previous centuries, but a little more open given the new freedoms taken by disinhibited writers. Hetero novels had to be “queered” in order to reveal the always constant homoerotic wellspring, and in so doing, invalidating the irritating dichotomy of two literatures. Malraux’s heroes go for Chinese guys and their androgynous bodies (which is what the “temptation” of the West really meant [58] ); Mauriac’s “notables” would have been better off coupling among themselves instead of imposing rigid provincial morality on their wives; and Pagnol’s boys didn’t climb up the plane trees just to enjoy the view. Within the hetero corpus, queer critics’ favorite target is Sartre’s fiction; Serge Doubrovsky has already taught us how to resexualize it. Everything is fair game, starting with his confession to Simone de Beauvoir in their interview in L’Arc (no. 61, 1975): “I’ve always felt there was a sort of woman in me.” The nausea that afflicts Roquentin would have its roots in sexual rather than existential indecision, the uncertainty about becoming a woman displayed as much by the pain “at the tip of [his] breasts” (after the testicular ache of the frustrated lover) as by the “so fragile” hardness of his penis, or by the curious litany of “from behind” in the midst of his introspection (existence takes him, or thoughts assail him, “from behind”). Nausea (1938) also translates a much more explicit disgust for women, their white smoothness, their newborn smell, their strange resemblance with the pub(l)ic garden in Bouville that “smells like vomit.” And when he’s not dreading the woman inside him, Roquentin is becoming an immense cock, a penis-being. These roots that cause him anxiety, his “virile rooting” and the “reason for living” are described as a kind of subterranean turgescence, and his head takes on the appearance and the horrible sensitivity of a glans, and he foresees his own death when he gazes upon this “lurid purple old man” who “is sucking the end of a pencil.”

A perverse reading of Nausea lingers lovingly over the character of the autodidact, whom Roquentin meets at the library. [59] His name is first interpreted as “an eye of excrement”—Ogier, or O(eil)-chier, why not? Before Ogier gets kicked out of the library for having come on to a college student, Roquentin has a kind of monstrous premonition of the event as he stares at the man’s thick finger, like “the male sex organ” but yellowed by tobacco, that brushes the student’s white hand as it lies on the surface of the table. The hand itself is as bare as the “indolent nudity of a woman sunning herself after bathing.” Sartre, we must admit, is doing the queer critics’ work for them, so they have to up the ante. They call Ogier’s left-wing altruism “masturbatory humanism,” and happily slip through the butter, be it metaphor or real fat, spread by the text of The Road to Freedom. Daniel Sereno’s elegance is compared to “fresh butter.” The Germans enter Paris “like a knife through butter,” and any agreement with the enemy is like a dry hump (“no more armistice than butter on your ass”). As for the books by his protégé Jean Genet, in Saint Genet Sartre compares them to, according to the QCs, so many “tubes of Vaseline.” Nothing less.

But besides de-reading the hetero classics—and that includes buttering Sartre’s virginal ass—the other queer method of handling the twentieth century consists, more strategically, in developing an oblique reading of the most famous homo pages. As a result, traditional gay criticism, so happy to have a few standard-bearers on its shelves, loses its monopoly. The QCs propose another way of approaching our great fictional homo heroes, from Charlus to Divine and even Michel Ménalque, other than a reappropriation of identity, reductive and even dangerous. Queer critics don’t hesitate to denounce, in Proust’s and Gide’s work, the biologizing avatars of the discourse of the times regarding a “natural science” of homosexuality. The Proustian allegory involves bees and pollen to describe the tactics used by sodomites, and Gide’s zoological comparisons seem to spring from a folkloric bestiary, the complete opposite of the queer project, which is to denaturalize, dequalify, and complexify the homo impulse.

In a broader fashion, as it already was for a number of texts from past centuries, the queer alternative presents itself as a change of focus. It’s better, say a number of critics out of concern for distinctions, to turn one’s playful projector on the ambiguous cases rather than on the out-and-out fairies, on the light caresses and not just the penetration, on the beginning cross-dressers to the expense of the mustached professionals who haven’t scared anyone since the days they promenaded their overstated appearances down the corridors of more than one novel—to the point that Gide, Proust, and even Genet, the grand masters of the official homo corpus, whether they like it or not, have become, on the contrary, in queer logic, the apostles of the undefined, poets of the unaccomplished; less subjects anchored in their time and batterers of posteriors, and more the defenders, for posterity, of a much vaguer desubjectification.

A Brush with Gide

For Gide to remain Gide, it is important for his “gate” to be “strait.” In The Immoralist (1902), Michel feels his desire for Moktir rising as his tender friendship with Marceline is cooling off. In The Counterfeiters (1925), Édouard notes in his journal his irrepressible attraction for Olivier, and fails in his attempt to love Laura. Bisexual vacillation, rather banal and marked here by a certain platonic dualism (the desire for the body of the same sex, passion for the soul of the other sex), is less appealing to queer critics than the indecisive in-between to which such vacillation dooms these characters, as they forever draw out the sweetness of refusing to choose, the pleasure of no longer knowing. Quite the contrary, says critic Wallace Fowlie, of those militant gays obsessed with recognition and who, according to him, use Gide too freely, reducing his work and his message in the process. In Gide’s work, there is no homosexuality in the meaning of a preference and its libidinal logic, but only these two crucial forms that constitute his sexual “asceticism” (more like Sparta than Athens): renouncing bourgeois norms rather than opting for a sodomite orgy, and what he calls “availability”—what hetero humanists piously call “tolerance,” and what QCs want to transform into a complete abandonment of the body to sensual spontaneity.

In that way, the famous dialogue in Corydon (1924) reads like an idealistic ode to the love of the same, but very puritan (not very compatible with pleasure, in any case), and hardly anything to do with the habeas corpus of gay rights that some militant readers have seen in it. Queer students of Gide read in his work an appeal to all the forms of dilation of the self rather than a rehabilitation of the inverts. In scenes from his autobiographical works, including the Journal (1939) and If It Die (1926), that tell the story of his sexual touching with Tunisian teenagers, perhaps we ought to wonder, beyond the acts of pleasure, how less pleasant impressions participate in the equation; the feelings of colonial guilt, for example, or this desire to forget as quickly as possible exactly what is happening in the moment—a desire that itself hesitates between forgetting and self-forgetting. It is worthwhile lingering over these primitive scenes, even if it means abandoning the homo sources of his fiction, to better understand the importance of diffuse caresses and brushing, sidestepping and approach, all of this important to Gide’s homoerotic identity troubles. In other words—must we say it again?—this is his intrinsically queer character.

In Gide’s writing, everything works to put distance (a distance more voluptuous than respectful) between the boys’ games that nevertheless reach their final denouement, [60] as with the very playful Ali, the ephebe of Soussa, the arrow of desire, the trace of the desert. First comes the statement of memory, the initial process of the distancing of the subject: the “I see again” of the opening words gives way to a “one another” of a first embrace, then to a shameful “we” when bodies blend together, and in the end to a strange “one” when fusion becomes more abstract. Then comes the pleasure of the voyeur when he steps back to watch Ali’s little seduction dance, as if he were excluding himself from the scene, or when he takes pleasure, several years later (at the end of If It Die), in the spectacle of a Parisian friend playing the same scene with a young Arab as he looks on. Add to that the distance of other more perverse mediations, as when Oscar Wilde himself procures for Gide the docile, virginal Mohammed, whom he will enjoy alone at first, then share two years later with his friend Daniel B. In that same scene with Mohammed, we see the extension of pleasure far beyond the act and the person of the boy himself, since once he has “reached ecstasy” five times “at his side,” he lingers in a “state of shivering jubilation” even after he has left him, to the point that (and here the text is more than allusive) he needs to relieve the pressure by himself alone in his hotel room. Distance once more, rather more racy this time, via the old-fashioned stylistic device of preterition, by which Gide will all but repeat what he did, though saying that he can no longer speak it: “How can I name my emotions upon holding in my naked arms this perfect little savage body, ardent, lascivious, a land of shadow? ...” The three-dot elipses play an equivalent role, as when Gide chooses to fall silent at the critical point of the story: “Clothes fell away, he threw his jacket from him, and stepped forth naked as a god …” Distance once again—let’s hide behind this dune, better to watch them at work—through the exact words the author uses to describe their posture, a discreet copula of their coupling undertaken rather than actually accomplished: [61] “one near the other, yet not one with the other.” Like a game of proper distance, the refusal of face to face contact, of the kiss that may come, the unthinkable insertion, for the more playful pleasure of teasing the adversary, catching the one who is offering himself by taking a step backward, or making him laugh—a sound intrusion in this silent scene—when, “seizing the hand he offered, I caused him to fall upon the ground.”

Distance, spatial or stylistic, is also distance in time, the voyeur’s game, with deviant seduction becoming tender struggle; even the author’s preteritive pauses all work to put off a more direct embrace, until finally it becomes highly improbable, even though, surrounded by great discretion, it does take place. Here we recognize the logic of delay so dear to queer exegetes, which tickles them in the writings of Crébillon, Benjamin Constant, or even Madame de La Fayette. Gide, the watchmaker of misunderstanding, the hedonist of postponement, measures his pleasure through these tiny delays. If Ali accelerates their little protocol, Gide, a tantric pleasure-artist, prolongs the lead-up, never to descend again; he prefers to step back and interrupt the ascent: “I was not so naïve not to understand his invitation, yet I did not respond immediately.” Some time later, returning to the Tunisian beaches, he rediscovers, even before the memory of Ali’s salty taste, the equivalent pleasure of endlessly sunning himself on the sand as he delays the moment he will enter the water: “It is not only bathing that I loved, but the mythological expectation.” As for love—that sensation as soft and pressing as the half-erection of adolescent games—its only value is in its misunderstanding and lag: “Love, fearing it will be tarnished upon contact with reality, forever puts off its accomplishment” (Strait Is the Gate, 1909). Memory as well—this “unformed” flow that delivers the exotic sporting of young adolescence—is for Gide another source of deferral, more distended, more exquisite still: to “unfinish” the scene that is told, to fill it full of silences; better to enjoy it outside the text, by himself, the onanistic nostalgia of an author setting down his pen, there where orgasm is finally accessible.

Sexuality in Gide is defined by its very delay, its distances, by the uncertain play of caresses. It is linked to the brush of a masturbating hand, mutual or solitary (in movie theaters or train compartments), to the unique experience of the unexpected, and never of course to the paradigm of the family, theatrically hated, nor even on the fine sentiment of love (except, perhaps, with Marc Allégret). The condition of this sexuality is the dissolution of the self—summed up by the key word in all of Gide’s subjectivity, “denuding”—caused by the loss of all initiative, the forgetting of the slightest intention, the abandonment to the events of the senses, when faced with the impulse for the meaningless act, or Ali’s boyish shoulders: “And while all will disappeared, porous as a bee-hive, I let sensations distill their secret honey within me …” The sacrifice of all will constitutes, in Michael Lucey’s terms, “a sacrifice of masculine gender” that delivers over the passive body that has lost its virility (despite its fear of that process), desubjectified (despite the egotism of the style), to the primary submission of anal sexuality—even beyond Gide’s famous refusal of sodomy: to be taken, because first you have been dissolved.

Perhaps the literary paradox of Gide, and not just the sexual one, can be understood in this odd axiom about fantasy: the harmony of the phrase against the convulsions of the body, classical narration to envelope sobbing and trembling, as if Gide’s classicism were the only way of expressing its contrary, the mastery of style being the only way to approach the lack of mastery over himself. In that way, through a pleasurable relaxing of awareness, we can understand the recurring term of “curiosity” that Gide uses once he begins describing his “brushes.” Curiosity in the sense of unknowing, of a loss of self, the way in which the masterful Foucault invited us to engage ourselves even before queer thought: “The only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself.” The rest of Foucault’s text taken from The Use of Pleasure can be applied as much to Gide’s sexuality as to the work of queer critics in general: “After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself?” [62] Sometimes the QCs themselves lose track of things, lose their way, and lose us in the process.

Proust Inside Herself

Similar to the critical apparatus in the last edition in the Pléiade collection—longer than the novel itself—In Search of Lost Time (1913−27), from its very first English translation, set off a veritable deluge of secondary texts, from pastiche to essay to hagiography, among which his queer commentators, for once in their careers, were actually in the minority. And blackening white sheets of paper is no sin against ecology for them! Here, all queer theses have been stated, the last being the fundamental Sapphism of the narrator of Lost Time. According to critic Kaja Silverman, his love for Albertine is an “explicit lesbian love,” while Elizabeth Ladenson proposes a rereading of the entire novel informed by the author’s “lesbianism.” [63] In more recent years, Proust has become the backbone of the queer corpus, the bible of gay dogma. To the QCs, he is to Foucault what a year of internship is to a year of teaching: the indispensable praxis and the enlightening creation of a work, during which we learn (and take pleasure in) so much more than from books. These two names, Proust and Foucault, illuminate the queer firmament. Proust’s canonic opening sequence from Sodom and Gomorrah called “La race des tantes” (“The Race of Fairies”) sits on the same shelf as Foucault’s great conversations about “friendship,” And Sodom and Gomorrah is the only French text quoted as often as Foucault’s The History of Sexuality by queer pedagogues. The “sentimentality” of Proust’s homoeroticism plays a founding role for the homo-reading of any literary work, alongside Foucault’s sexual constructivism, as Leo Bersani reminds us. Dedicating a meager sub-section of this book to Proust is something of an insult to the passion that thousands of homo-readers feel for him. With all respect to the fervent, that’s not a reason not to be brief. Once again, we will turn to what is least flagrant, and to do this, we will travel through the successive layers of the queer reading of Proust, which is particularly heavy with sediment.

The first layer, the first paradox, the most classically queer: the choice of the most banal scenes, childhood rituals or hetero fumblings, at the expense of those passages—too often commented—dedicated to homosexuality. From the very beginning of Swann’s Way, the portrait of Legrandin emerging from the church at Combray is a gold mine:

He made a profound bow, with a subsidiary backward movement which brought his spine sharply up into a position behind its starting-point […]. This rapid recovery caused a sort of tense muscular wave to ripple over Legrandin’s hips, which I had not supposed to be so fleshy; I cannot say why, but this undulation of pure matter, this wholly carnal fluency, with not the least hint in it of spiritual significance, this wave lashed to a fury by the wind of an assiduity, and obsequiousness of the basest sort, awoke my mind suddenly to the possibility of a Legrandin altogether different from the one whom we knew.

Let’s compare a queer commentary from Gregory Woods to the interpretation of this excerpt by a conventional critic (Jack Murray) who sees this port...