Renaud Camus érographe (review)

The fact that Professor Houppermans is the author of two monographs with rhyming titles, Robbe-Grillet autobiographe and Claude Ollier cartographe, probably explains the rather strange choice of title of the present work, for Renaud Camus's writing about homosexuality is not in the erotic tradition. Camus has often denounced eroticism for its tainted links with transgression, sin, and Catholicism. As for his many descriptions of sexual acts, about which there is precious little in this monograph, they are neither pornographic nor erotic, just zero-degree writing about bodies in contact. Much of that part of his oeuvre is rather boring, and in any case it no longer carries with it the forbidden frisson some readers feel when they come across Camus's not infrequent right-wing pronouncements about French society. Although Houppermans does not study the 2000 Affaire Camus itself in detail, he devotes an early chapter to Du sens, Camus' 550-page defence against the vehement media campaign of which he was the subject after the publication of the 1994 volume of his diary in which were to be found statements that most but not all commentators considered anti-Semitic. According to Houppermans, "Une lecture précise du contexte ne permet donc nullement d'incriminer Camus pour des sympathies réactionnaires ou pire" (p. 23). The critic goes on to point out that, according to Camus, topics such as antiracism and social métissage can no longer be discussed freely in France. Although generally more at ease when analysing Camus' fiction, Houppermans gives the reader an idea of the writer's polemical views, including his frequent denunciations of the domination of French society by the petite-bourgeosie with its emphasis on 'soi-même' and 'le sympa', as linguistically incarnated by the ever-present 'c'est vrai' that starts so many French sentences these days. The formalist period of the so-called Eglogues, which are deeply indebted to Jean Ricardou and Roland Barthes, is analysed in depth. In the chapter on P.A., Camus's 1997 four-hundred-page want ad for a lover (it served its purpose), Houppermans shows how intertextuality and textual multi-layering link the Eglogues with this avant-gardiste autobiographical work. For the diary, Houppermans has chosen to concentrate on the volumes for 1994–96. Readers will get some of an idea of the infamous volume of the journal, La Campagne de France, besides the oft-misquoted passages reproduced in the media during the 2000 scandal. Some may be pleasantly surprised to learn that Camus can and does write (and well) about many other topics besides his old-fashioned views on the religious origins of participants on a radio discussion programme. One chapter is devoted to the readable novels. The longest and most indepth reading is of Voyageur en automne (1992), arguably Camus's best novel. Unfortunately, in this chapter Houppermans gets bogged down in an eight-page digression on Robbe-Grillet's novel La Reprise. But Houppermans does give L'Inauguration de la Salle des Vents (2002), Camus's most challenging novel in terms of content and form, its critical due although the dreaded acronym (AIDS) needs to be stated up front especially since Camus himself is loath to use it.

Houppermans has concentrated too much on the eglogues which seem to fascinate critics even though that project is unfinished, essentially derivative and, in the end, undescribable. It would have better to give readers at least a glimpse of other parts of this huge oeuvre (over fifty works to date), for example, the books about contemporary art (Discours de Flaran and Nightsound), especially since they contain pertinent (and poignant) remarks about the Holocaust. Renaud Camus remains an archaic subject, despite or because of his very modernity. For many readers, he has become unreadable since the presumption of innocence no longer holds. Written with laudable objectivity and moderation, Houppermans' monograph provides a needed corrective. It proves that, notwithstanding the accusations against him, Renaud Camus is a complex (and...