Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature: From Loti to Genet (review)

Edward Hughes brings a new focus to the often-studied relationships of the West and the rest, self and Other. His recent book investigates narratives by Frenchmen at odds with repressive metropolitan society. The exclusive consensus in France against which their marginality gets defined is shaped by many factors including oppressive mothers, heterosexual hegemony, pathological patriotism, and the trappings of bourgeois conformity. Marginality thus serves as a rallying point for a rather eclectic assortment of writers—Loti, Gaugin, Proust, Montherlant, Camus, Genet. Within this rubric Hughes emphasizes Frenchmen who explore their homosexuality in relation to exotic Others. Gaugin and Camus are two exceptions to the book's orientation, though they are both found to be morally or sexually transgressive. The center-periphery relationship is constituted by intersections between the private realm of desire and the public spheres of nation, class, and culture within the broader context of France's colonial empire.

The texts selected are set in an astonishing array of places: Tahiti, Morocco, Turkey, Japan, Senegal, France, Algeria, and Palestine. But specificity of milieu matters little since these cultural arenas simply become playgrounds where Frenchmen explore aspects of their private and public selves in rebellion against repressive metropolitan norms. The Fanonian décor in the introduction is spun into a fashionable rhetoric of relationality and dialectical engagement of the kind that decorates much "postcolonial" theory and criticism. The heart and soul of Fanon's project, realizing Third World liberation and fostering grass-roots initiatives that would restore a more equitable balance of power, are not of real interest.

Hughes's discussion of Loti's fiction and career as a colonial officer proposes that his cultural migration amounts to little more that a superficial donning of the Other's ethnic garb. Gaugin's writings in Tahiti are set alongside Loti's and found to express a similar predatory sexuality that verges on the homoerotic. In the end, a projection of desire and self-interested pursuits prevent both Frenchmen from a dialectical engagement with the ethnic Other. Hughes goes on to explore how Proust's reflections on "primitive sexual desire" in the francocentric world of A la recherche du temps perdu are worked out against an exoticist backdrop in which "Africa" becomes "home to an unspeakable sexual perversion" (45). Whereas homosexuals in the imperial center are compared with risk-taking primitives on the colonial periphery, xenophobia and a narcissistic refusal of difference are associated with the mother. With Montherlant's La rose de sable, Hughes returns to themes of veiled homosexuality, militarism and sexual predation. The story of a French officer's affair with a Bedouin girl whom he pays for her favors and his repressed desire for an Arab boy ends with a paternalistic apology of colonial obligation. Curiously, it is the "matriarch's pathological patriotism" back home that pushes the son to overcome his crippling sense of inferiority by realizing his duty to the colonial nation abroad. In the end, the colony remains a playground for self-exploration free from metropolitan heterosexism in which private pursuits of pleasure prevent Frenchmen from respectfully engaging the ethnic Other's difference.

Ironically, Hughes reserves the most aggressive terms of denunciation for Camus who opposed militaristic expansion and predatory relationships on the colonial fringes. The moderate, heterosexual intellectual who opposed violence during a time of war is condemned as "unapologetically imperialist" (104) and "unashamedly European" (105) in his offerings of "clichéd tourist fare" (105), whereas homosexual colonial officers are seen to wrestle heroically with their cultural ambivalence and repressed predatory desire for sadistic dominance. Although the author chides Camus for neglecting Algeria's "native histories," Hughes himself remains comfortably within the confines of a Eurocentric paradigm. The reader is occasionally treated to an aside about this or that local cultural dynamic, but the book teaches us next to nothing about...