Fragmented Territories: AIDS and Paris in Les Nuits Fauves of Cyril Collard

Written at the height of the AIDS crisis, Cyril Collard's novel Les Nuits fauves (1989) is a singular approach to mapping AIDS on the body and in the city of Paris. Collard uses Paris and the ailing body as interchangeable metonyms for one another, in a style that renews classic nineteenth-century narrative's use of the mapping of geographic space as a figure of the protagonist's success or failure. Thus, in Le Père Goriot, to choose the most famous example, Balzac sets out three separate neighborhoods—the Latin Quarter, the Faubourg St. Honoré, and the Faubourg St. Germain—the understanding and ultimate conquest of which are signs of Eugène de Rastignac's eventual success. And, when at Goriot's funeral, Rastignac launches his challenge to Paris, it is as if he can see all of Paris from the vantage point of the elevated Père Lachaise cemetery.¹ Similarly, in Bel-Ami, Maupassant traces a finely hewn itinerary for Georges Duroy, whose success can once again be gauged by where he is in Paris.² In both cases, the authors tie a semiotics of socio-cultural and socio-political values to a geography, by which the informed reader can follow plot development with the aid of his or her knowledge of the city, and can chart the vagaries, peripetiaie, and trajectories informing the development of AIDS as well.³

If an author like Proust winds up having a more limited Parisian geography (largely restricted to the eighth, sixteenth, and seventeenth arrondissements) and if Queneau's Paris in Zazie dans le métro goes somewhat awry because of the unreliable geographical knowledge of his characters, we still find a number of more recent novels and films using Paris—a new Paris, a reinscribed Paris of the post-modern—as a semiotic touchstone. For example, Matthieu Kassovitz's epoch-making film La Haine, used Paris (and its implicit and explicit opposition to the banlieue) as a geographic metaphor for underlining some of the serious social problems facing France. And films like Jeunet's Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulin and the more recent multi-authored film, Paris, je t'aime, use both stereotypical touristic Paris and more typically "Parisian" Paris (i.e., a Paris recognizable to locals, even without the seemingly obligatory shot of the Eiffel Tower) to reinscribe the relations of characters and city, of characters within the city, and of the structuring of subjectivity by the city. Moreover, an experimental filmmaker like Lionel Soukaz often uses the space in a way to show how "gay" Paris reinscribes "straight" Paris, even when, as is the case of Soukaz (and that of Guy Hocquenghem) the act is somewhat disruptive and anti-institutional. In all these recent cases, Paris and protagonists rework a semiotics of space.⁴

Thus it comes as no surprise that an author and director such as Cyril Collard uses Parisian geography as a figure for understanding the traversal of the AIDS crisis by his autofictional counterpart. And specifically, there is an association of geography, gay liberation, illness, and mourning that are all tied together in what might, retrospectively, from the point of view of the twenty-first century, seem to be typical of the period, yet counterproductive for a complete historical understanding of the lived past. However, now that we are in the second decade of combination therapy, it behooves critics to tease out the various strands of discourses—personal, traumatic, public, liberatory, and even literary—that were bundled during the first decade and a half of the AIDS crisis, in order to see the construction (and deconstruction) of these discourses through a historical and cultural perspective. And to do that, I am suggesting that an analysis of a personal and public geography is in order.⁵

As we think about the social construction into which male same-sex desire has fit, however comfortably or not, since the early nineteenth century, if not before, namely what we consider to be homosexuality, it is invariably associated with city life. As can be seen in numerous studies...