AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures

5. AIDS and the Unraveling of Modernity: The Example of Herv

Hervé Guibert’s AIDS novels, published between 1990 and 1992, were the first literary testimonies of their kind to enjoy a vast critical and commercial success in France. Many reasons have been put forward to explain why Guibert became such a cultural phenomenon. For some, a young, handsome, dying Hervé Guibert embodied something like a romantic ideal of creativity and early death. For others, he represented a long French literary tradition of first-person introspection in the face of illness and death. For most, whether they praised or condemned him for it, Guibert’s contribution was to be found in what he had to say not about AIDS specifically but about universal human concerns with life, love, creation, and death. While recognizing his importance in increasing AIDS awareness in French society, the activists of ACT UP-Paris were prompt to criticize him for ignoring the social and political dimensions of the AIDS crisis, and, in effect, encouraging a universalizing reading of his work that could only be complicit with the epidemic. In the frontlines of the AIDS world, Guibert was often perceived as a self-centered, self-aggrandizing artist who was of no use in the fight against the epidemic. Hence, ACT UP argued, his immediate, and eminently suspect, canonization: If Guibert could be so easily recuperated by the system responsible for AIDS, it was because he was on the wrong side of the fight, on the side of the disease. 112 5 S AIDS and the Unraveling of Modernity The Example of Hervé Guibert It is true that, with Hervé Guibert, we find ourselves on the side of disease, but, I contend, in a way that is akin to Genet’s strategy of border crossing as analyzed in chapter 3. Reappropriating exclusionary figures, Guibert, too, was unapologetic about his sexuality, and he often depicted sex acts in a very explicit fashion that many found shocking. Guibert, in fact, was not one to present a harmless, middle-class image of gayness that had been sanitized for the public’s protection—quite the contrary, as we shall see. Yet, like Genet before him, he was fully aware of the ambiguity of his position, that is, he was also operating within the very system that defined him as Other and sick. In what follows, I show that, although Guibert’s strategy was not one of explicit political engagement or confrontational activism, his novels nonetheless propose a radical destabilization of the traditional health/disease rhetoric and the power structure that rests on it. My reading focuses particularly on Guibert’s subversion of the medical gaze and the doctor-patient relationship; his redefinition of subjectivity, no longer in terms of the wholeness and health that had defined the modern subject , but rather in terms of disease; and his elaboration of a discourse that takes disease and contamination as the defining principles of language itself, and for which rumors and gossip may provide a discursive model. Hervé Guibert At the time he published his first novel dealing directly and primarily with AIDS, A l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie, Hervé Guibert was a rather prolific albeit not widely read author. Since 1977 he had published many mostly autobiographical novels, as well as short stories, a screenplay, and essays.1 He was also a photographer and photography critic for the daily newspaper Le monde. In the spring of 1990, when A l’ami was published, condom ads had been authorized and the first official prevention campaign had taken place only three years before . Aides, the association founded by Michel Foucault’s longtime lover Daniel Defert after the death of the former, was not the huge organization it is today; ACT UP-Paris had come into existence less than a year before and was not yet known to the mainstream public. The only semi-celebrity who had declared publicly that he had AIDS was the essayist and journalist Jean-Paul Aron. And the few AIDS novels or testimonials that had come out were far from being best sellers. But on 16 March 1990, Guibert’s TV appearance on the famous literary talk show Apostrophes made him an overnight media sensation. He had an extraordinary impact on the public. Although he looked obviously ill and tired, AIDS and the Unraveling of Modernity S 113 his youth and beauty may have had a lot to do with his success: in a sense Herv...