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  • Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide and Proust
  • Emma Wilson
Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide and Proust. By Michael Lucey. Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2007. viii + 322 pp. Hb £64.00. Pb £14.99.

This is a brilliant and important book. I have been entirely won over by it. Never Say I, the first of two volumes about the 'queer first person' in twentieth-century French literature, offers tough-minded, innovative analysis of major texts by Colette, Gide and Proust, and of works by a number of their contemporaries. With lucidity and authority, Lucey opens up a ricocheting series of questions about first-person utterances and same-sex sexualities in early twentieth-century France, within an argument which devotes rewarding attention to the social function of literary works. An opening premise here is that '[t]he representation of sexuality, and, in particular, of same-sex sexual relations and of actors in them, is central to the evolution of literary prose forms in twentieth-century France' (p. 9). On this potentially contentious base, Lucey connects what could be seen as ambiguities and hesitations in the use of 'je' by his authors and in their works —their literary innovations in this regard —with the forms of sexual relation that find expression in their work. Lucey's enquiries are guided by rigorous questions. Who will speak for a given group? How will that speech be structured? Of what group are we speaking? How does speaking of and for a group help bring it into existence or dictate its contours? Answering these questions, he draws on Bourdieu throughout with apt results, and more implicitly, on Foucault and on Deleuze and Guattari. Lucey has tackled the enormity of his topic with single-minded economy (I regret his disregard of Bersani, though, or Bowie). There is a drive here to match material [End Page 490] evidence to a line of argument, and so the volume fairly bristles with textual and historical details testifying to the extensive scholarship that textures the argument. Through examination of journal entries, letters, manuscript drafts and more ephemeral writings, Lucey offers new evidence of the ways in which, for Colette, Gide and Proust, speaking of same-sex sexualities, the first person was variously produced within interactive, and interfering, contexts. Despite its own exclusions, Never Say I offers a sense of the complexity of personal and literary interaction, and of the dense involvement of different demands in differing contexts. The achievement of the volume, lavishly revealed in its concluding parts, is to persuade the reader, through the very diversity of its discussions, of the manifold social and literary consequences of taking up and working with the first person.

Emma Wilson
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
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