- Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust
In his latest book, Michael Lucey places the fictional and autobiographical writing on “same-sex sexual relations” (the comprehensive designation that he favors) by three authors in a philosophical, sociological, and literary context, as particular instances of a modernist challenge: how to earn the right to speak in the first person, or even to speak at all. In an era of crisis for literary narrative and philosophy of meaning, negotiating the social and aesthetic restrictions placed upon writing on homosexuality, and doing so in a non-recognized (non-normative, non-sensationalist, non-pornographic, etc.) mode, became an allegory for writing itself. For such authors, there was no standard for naming varieties of gay experience, no preexisting position of authority from which to do so, and no established readership (of the sort on which literary success depends) to recognize such authority, and the discourse that it enables, as valid.
To understand Lucey’s contribution, it helps to remember that these authors were struggling against oppressive precursors who often exploited the topic for sensationalism, prurience, avant-garde authenticity, or a combination thereof. These precursors include Catulle Mendès, Jean Lorrain, Pierre Louÿs, Rachilde, and J. K. Huysmans, each of whom receives due attention here. By contrast, Vautrin’s love for Lucien de Rubempré in Balzac plays an important role in this study because it is not so easily categorized: neither prurient nor decadent, it makes of Balzac a more apt forerunner of Colette, Gide, and Proust, perhaps because he is more concerned with problems of representation and legitimacy than with simply importing into his text an emblem of anti-bourgeois values. The revolution that Lucey describes consisted in gaining the right to speak, not only about same-sex sexual relations, but from them; not to write a description of illicit sexuality, but as part of, or on behalf of it.
The inside-outside dichotomy that distinguishes texts that merely represent alternate sexualities from those that claim an affiliation with them also describes the quarrel between Gide and Proust, as related by Gide. Gide accused Proust of not taking sufficient responsibility in his work for his homosexuality. Meanwhile Proust, in words that produced the title of this study and recur frequently throughout, admonished Gide that one can speak of anything (i.e. even the unspeakable, for which homosexuality serves as an apt example) “but on condition that you never say: I.” Lucey redefines their exchange, not as a conflict between the literary “closet” of Proust and the politically-charged (and carefully orchestrated) “outness” of Gide, but rather as alternate “appeal[s] for legitimacy, authority, [and] authenticity in representation” (7). Clearly, we are dealing here not primarily with literary concerns, as in Lucey’s earlier study on Gide (Gide’s Bent 1995), but rather homosexuality as a figure for the withholding and appropriation of cultural capital, for the concept of difference in the construction of meaning, for the relationship between text and context, and related issues for which a range of sociologists and philosophers of language, including Pierre Bourdieu, Erving Goffman, Nelson Goodman, and Michael Silverstein, is enlisted.
The texts Lucey considers make a mockery of generic categories, as well as of the broader distinction between literature and life: the printed page is sometimes the historical record of actual speech, such as the conversation reported in Gide’s Journal. Here Paul Bourget, evidently deeply concerned that the inner life of a fictional character may have irrevocably altered social and aesthetic norms, asks Gide point-blank to reveal whether Michel in L’Immoraliste is un pédéraste. In an earlier manuscript of the reported conversation, the term is un homosexual (34), a change in nomenclature, responding to subtle changes in context that is a part of the evidence on which Lucey [End Page 266] persuasively argues for the centrality of same-sex relations to the modernist enterprise. Lucey discovered a similar blurring of categories in an article by...