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French Forum 27.2 (2002) 65-98



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Unspeakable Writing:
Jean Lorrain's Monsieur de Phocas

Michael du Plessis


unspeakables of the Oscar Wilde sort

E. M. Forster, Maurice

Why Speak of Lorrain Today?

It is difficult, even today, to speak of Jean Lorrain without embarrassment. Those aspects of his life and works that appeared scandalous to his contemporaries, such as his openness about his homosexuality, his ostentation of any and all kinds of perversity, and his notorious bad taste, may seem to invite rather than repel current critical interest. 1 Nevertheless, even for a position that has revalued artifice, sentimentality, and "vice," Lorrain's writing may prove to be unpalatable: his clamorous antisemitism, his vociferousness as an anti-Dreyfusard, his insistent misogyny, his approval of colonialism, and his concomitant reveling in the worst forms of late nineteenth-century Orientalism are almost insurmountable obstacles in the way of a permanent revaluation of Lorrain as a "good" writer.

Why write of Lorrain at all then? Some previous attempts to revive interest in his work sanitizes it by presenting it as quaint: so, Philippe Jullian's biography, Jean Lorrain ou le satiricon 1900, admirable as it is, tends to make Lorrain seem ready for a nostalgic and neutralized mass consumption, rather like the art nouveau that Lorrain himself relished. Other influential discussions of Lorrain, such as Mario Praz's in The Romantic Agony, turn Lorrain into a practitioner of art brut, a pathological writer who can be classified and contained within an established counter-tradition. For Praz, Lorrain's oeuvre is to be savored as symptomatology, and the disease is the man: Praz contrasts Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray with Lorrain's best-known novel to the advantage of the latter because it supposedly "bears witness to a [End Page 65] profoundly troubled and painful state of mind" (345). Praz denigrates the "inopportune decorative images" that flourish in Dorian Gray, and he cites them as evidence that Wilde was as "greedy and capricious as an irresponsible child" (344). An abrupt transition to Wilde's putative cultivation of "scandal" and his "second trial" (344) makes it clear that for Praz style signals an author's sexual orientation. Pathological where Wilde is decorative, "troubled" where Wilde is "irresponsible," Lorrain appears as nothing less than the homophobe's homosexual. 2

It is exactly between the twin closets of decoration and pathology—the Scylla and Charybdis of aesthetic homophobia—that reception of Lorrain's work has been divided. That both ornamentation and deviance function as markers of an erratic desire is clear from Praz's discussion of Wilde and Lorrain, as if the one metonymically supposed the other, no matter how seemingly opposed their modalities. That both Wilde and Lorrain were not only homosexuals, but also homosexual writers is not quite as apparent from Praz, although his treatment of both writers relies on the unstated knowledge of their sexuality.

Recent gay criticism and queer theory has reappropriated and triumphantly reclaimed Wilde. Eve Sedgwick, Ed Cohen, William Cohen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Kevin Kopelson, and especially Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield have all forced a reconsideration of Wilde. 3 But despite the frequent linkage of their names and their texts (Lorrain, for example, inspired Wilde's Salomé 4 ), Lorrain remains unexamined and largely unread, perhaps partly because of his disastrous political allegiances. 5 Lorrain moreover occupies an anomalous position in the history of gay literature: while his sexuality was a secret neither to his contemporaries nor to us, his prose writing, for all its excessiveness, never really comes out. Thus in a great deal of writing about his writing, Lorrain can be maintained as the signifier of a free-floating "homosexuality" to which, then, an inevitably phobic signified gets ascribed.

A striking example of what Lorrain has come to signify can be found in Michel Leiris's 1946 autobiography, L'âge d'homme. The protagonist tells of attending, as a young boy, a performance of a ballet called Narkiss "qui fit scandale à l'époque, pour des raisons de moeurs" (98-9). "C'était une affabulation dans le goût...

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