This book explores a leitmotiv, the figure of the queer martyr, in works of modern French-language fiction.
In modern fiction from France and Belgium, certain writers have used queer sexuality as a device for exploring a broader range of problems of ethics and aesthetics. They did so by combining Christian and secular symbols, drawing analogies between the ways in which both can work. These writers are relatively few in number but broad in range. They are of various sexualities and religious persuasions, although they all come from a Christian background. Very few are identified with the canonical Catholic novel, whose heyday (roughly 1880–1914)1 overlaps with the earlier portion of this study’s historical period. Alongside the queer martyr’s appearance in experimental texts, it also appears in the strongly identified genre of gay literature, where its manifestations become increasingly mannered. Well-known classic authors such as Flaubert , d’Annunzio , Artaud , and Genet , and more recently Tournier , figure alongside popular and genre authors such as Georges Eekhoud , René Crevel, and Guy Hocquenghem .
The texts examined hereafter constitute a field of convergences that does not overlap entirely with gay and lesbian literature. “Queer literature” is normally, but sometimes erroneously, thought to mean the literature of male and female homosexuality. This book understands the term differently, and uses it to mean “literature that uses minority sexuality as a rhetorical device.” The definition is deliberately functional, and in so being reflects the nature and interests of queer theory.
There seems in the corpus to be a pattern of polar distribution. At one extreme, queer martyr-figures appear as allegories of faith and redemption, often within a post-Christian framework; at another, such characters function as essentially political vehicles for promoting the author’s own sexuality, or else as vehicles for pornography. The former type of figures holds a universal ethical application, whereas specifically homosexual and homophile2 characters are used to justify the self and its expression—“making it visible.” For this second group, iconic visibility is more important than iconic meaning. One more recent writer, Michel Tournier , distributes this difference in emphasis according to meaning vs. visibility among the characters. In his worlds, characters who are of minority sexuality, but not gay, serve philosophical ends, whereas gay-identified characters promote familiar gay identities and themes from earlier literature.
This development could seem at first counterintuitive, in that one might expect to see a wider range of applications for this figure in a more formally and socially experimental age. Such an expectation might be grounded in the belief that “modern” writers enjoy wider discursive freedom in their depiction of sexuality overall. Support for this would come from observations of the burgeoning of gay literature in general, together with what is known of the changing cultural position of homosexuality in France. Male and female homosexuality is the type of queerness most identifiable and traceable in the literary corpus.
Gay writers showed less innovation precisely on account of the concerns and generic devices that shaped that very corpus. The genre of queer literature by and about homosexuals specifically was, from the beginning, fundamentally separate from the question of using queerness itself as a motif. The condition and roles inherent in being a gay writer were articulated, relatively early on, so as to render transcending their limits impossible when sexuality came into question.
With regard to the later works, this might seem to be a paradoxical situation. Much queer theory, and certainly post-Foucauldian theory , to which recent gay men’s literary discourse in French owes a great deal, perceives sexual identity as a factitious categorization. “Homosexuality” would be a construct, a social structure with misleading effects, and should be discarded as such. The view that various sexualities might be social constructs has spread widely since its emergence in the late 1960s, certainly in France as well as in the English-speaking world. Pending a fuller discussion of these issues with regard to specific passages and works, I can say that the idea emerges very clearly in the theoretical writings of Guy Hocquenghem , one of whose novels will be featured in a later chapter. The discourses in Hocquenghem’s imaginative work in my view stand in ironic contrast with his theoretical output. Overall, the evidence in these texts suggests that post-Foucauldian writers, whatever their persuasion, seem incapable of assimilating homosexuality other than in terms of identity . However, this observation seems to sit at odds with a sensible view of imaginative freedom. It seems naïve or simplistic to expect that if sexuality is expressed in writing, it will automatically betoken some sort of self-articulation project, instead of serving as a rhetorical device. One might as well say that the representational usefulness of queer characters would somehow be limited a priori, which seems hard to justify. In terms of religious-themed material, case examples that disprove these limited and limiting views seem to emerge only in the work of writers outside what one might call the “homosphere.” Flaubert , for instance, had no need for homosexual self-expression, but he did enjoy broaching unwelcome topics. I would suggest that the social cost of recognizing an identity seems to be implicit conformity to it, regardless of one’s perception of its merit or relevance.
There is a comparable question of generic restriction with regard to the Catholic novel. Catholic fiction in France is generally recognized as having arisen in the earlier nineteenth century but enjoyed its heyday during the Belle Époque.3 It comprises novels that treat Catholic concerns and themes, from a Catholic point of view. Neither the historical period, nor the list of names varies greatly from one critical treatment to another. Indeed, a good measure of the criticism has tended to winnow out certain proposed members of this movement according to their perceived degree of heterodoxy, leaving the impression that an atheist who treated religious themes in fiction would not truly belong to the genre.
In the same way as I am discussing “queer material” in a range of texts, some of them typically queer and others less so, I am also explicitly engaging with literary treatments of Catholic themes in texts that generally belong outside the genre of Catholic fiction. There is no expectation that the treatments of martyrs discussed here will be doctrinally orthodox . There is no assumption that their authors belong(ed) to a Catholic social or political movement, or intended to. What is in question is the high degree to which Catholic ideas inform and blend with other ideas. The martyr character functions similarly to a Christian icon , by being both inherently “sacred” (a special, possibly supernatural person) and referring to a “sacred” reality, the value behind the argument.
To anticipate briefly a discussion of historic interaction between queer and religious discourses, I suggest that queer fiction overcame the problem of a relative lack of endogenous precedents by borrowing from visual art. Western art, especially painting, has produced several hundred years’ worth of exercises in such topics as queer “saintliness,” whereas what was available in literature was not comparable until at least the 1930s. Even now, the question of a queer literary icon, if “icon” is to maintain some of its religious reference, is not always easy to reconcile with a representational culture that still leans heavily on three key inspirations: female divas, Hellenistic art, and above all St. Sebastian .
It would be appropriate to outline the historical range of this work. Flaubert’s “La Légende de saint Julien l’Hospitalier” (1877) and Hocquenghem’s La Colère de l’agneau (1985) correspond with periods of historical and societal change that impinge on the discourses treated here. Flaubert’s short story comes in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, in the early days of the Third Republic, when a defeated but still-ambitious France was consolidating its rise as an industrial society. The 1870s mark the beginning of a truly modern France, as the social changes following industrialization took hold duri...