Sexuality, Politicization, May 1968: Situating Christiane Rochefort’s Printemps au parking

Écrire est un des moyens de poser le possible.

(Rochefort, Journal de printemps 66)

Il va de soi que l'indétermination provisoire des possibles est très différemment perçue et appréciée.

(Bourdieu, Homo Academicus 237)

In an article called "Le chemin de la connaissance, c'est la sexualité" [Sexuality is the Path to Knowledge] that she wrote for the Magazine littéraire shortly after the publication of her 1969 novel, Printemps au parking [Springtime in the Parking Lot], Christiane Rochefort ¹ comments that "Sexuality is a way of raising consciousness [un moyen de prise de conscience] on all levels, moral, social, political. [. . .] I think that sexuality is one of the most rapid, most abrupt, most immediate ways of managing to raise consciousness [parvenir à une prise de conscience]" (44). Rochefort's novel, Printemps au parking, tells the story of two fellows who, apparently despite their heterosexuality, fall in love and become a couple. They come to understand what happens to them as a political as well as a sentimental and sexual experience. Rochefort followed the novel with the publication of an account of its writing, called C'est bizarre l'écriture [Isn't Writing Strange?] (reprinted seven years later in Montréal in a slightly expanded version as Journal de printemps). In that journal she recounts in detail her own politicization through the writing of a book about sex between men. In the short article in the Magazine littéraire, she describes the experience she underwent more succinctly in the following terms:

In order to write the book, I had to get rid of a prejudice I didn't even know I had, about relations between men. I think of myself as liberal--it is a question of liberalism after all, given that I'm watching from the outside--but when I had to look more closely I didn't want to. I was afraid, ready to chicken out, and only realized it after the fact. It was curious how things unfolded, I had been thinking that it was literarily that I didn't know how to deal with these kinds of relations. Sure, I know plenty of gay boys, but their relations were unknown to me. But in trying to be truthful I discovered that it was in me that something had to give--a kind of prejudice--and I managed to get it to give by writing: literature has something going for it after all! (45) ²

Rochefort's fascination with her own unconscious prejudices marks the writing of C'est bizarre l'écriture in interesting ways. Her relation to her queer novel continued to evolve even after she published C'est bizarre l'écriture. ³ A few years later, sometime in the mid-1970s, she felt obliged to return to the novel and rewrite the ending. ⁴ The revisions make clear that the process of politicization around sexuality that she associates with the novel continued to preoccupy her. As we shall see, her revisions also testify to her engagement in debates both on the relation between feminist and gay liberation movements and on the place of gay liberation politics within leftist politics in general in the France of the 1970s.

In the final entry in Journal de printemps, where she indicates that she has felt it necessary to redo the entire ending of her novel, Rochefort writes:

So I've done it. The whole ending, Christophe's return home, etc., that patchwork, got thrown out, I couldn't stand it any longer. I would say: I hate that ending. And it turned out people would reply: I'm glad to hear it, because I do too. But I was scared to tell you.

Well you should have. You should always tell writers: I don't like that particular passage. If they get mad, they're idiots, turning up their...