Figuring (Out) the I

Literary criticism on the early-twentieth-century French novel too often remains silent — or worse, ambivalent — about what was at stake for authors who held a clear investment in representing and even theorizing same-sex sexualities. Sure, there is plenty of work on the representational politics and theories offered by the works themselves. But there seems to have been a real critical reticence to take on the difficult questions around what novelists themselves were trying to do as they navigated the rough aesthetic, social, and political terrain of doing a queer theory of sorts by writing the very novels they wrote.

In Never Say I, the first of a two-volume study, Michael Lucey constructs a deft and innovative model for thinking about the problems Colette, André Gide, Marcel Proust, and others faced as they struggled to articulate a first person that might aptly speak about — and, just as often, speak for — same-sex sexualities in a fraught linguistic, literary, social, and political arena: the arena of the “I.” Lucey is interested in the motivations, beliefs, and strategies behind mobilizing the I, both in literary works and in real lived experiences, as a training ground for speaking and writing with authority, authenticity, and legitimacy about same-sex sexualities. The authors under examination, he argues, are engaged in an often deliberate process of learning not what they may say but how they might most effectively say anything — and in some cases, just about everything — about such sexualities. Borrowing a term from Pierre Bourdieu’s oeuvre, he sets out to trace Proust’s, Gide’s, and Colette’s various “labors of enunciation” as they argue in favor of which categories they prefer to describe people involved in same-sex sexual practices and communities, to create representations of the people who fit these categories, and to develop certain narrative practices for writing about such people — to make their experiences available, valuable, and intelligible.

Even with this seeming focus on speaking the unspoken, however, Lucey is careful to note that these authors’ projects “cannot be reduced to the struggle of certain sexual outsiders to escape from an imposed silence, to wrest the means of expression away from a normatively homophobic social order” (55). By warning against this reduction, Lucey is able to transcend now threadbare ideas of a simple politics of attempting to resist dominant discourses around same-sex sexualities, instead drawing our attention to the ways that authorial position-taking and self-figuration are complex processes at a nexus of multiple fields: most prominently the social, the political, and the literary.

Many studies of queer representations in the novel have focused too narrowly on just one of these fields — the political. By using Bourdieu’s theory of overlapping fields, however, Lucey adds dimension and suppleness to his model, allowing for readings that introduce a way to understand how authors were interacting with others as interlocutors as they hashed out ideas about sexual categories and narrative modes for exploring same-sex sexualities, in conversations with other authors and in writings and, in the case of Colette, theatrical performances.

Lucey’s reading of the collaborations and interactions between and among authors and their social worlds adds a dimension of agency and knowingness to Proust’s, Gide’s, and Colette’s work on same-sex sexuality, and it makes a good argument for rethinking biography as a fresh and productive critical mode in literary studies. This is because Lucey’s conception of biography, again based on Bourdieu’s concept of the field, relies on the social, rather than on the traditionally individual, personal, and psychological, for its definition. Lucey cites Bourdieu’s “L’Illusion biographique” to argue that “biographical events take shape as so many placements and displacements in social space, that is, more precisely, in the different and successive states of the structure governing the distribution of different kinds of capital which are at stake in the given field” (83). Lucey evades the oversimplification of earlier, more strictly “biographical” readings, with...