Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts / Critical Texts, and: Century of Clouds (review)

120 the minnesota review Shiloh is not a perfect collection. A few of its sixteen stories read as weak or strained versions of her strongest woik; and her endings tend to clutch all stray details together into an implausibly epiphanical totality. But at its best—in "Shiloh" and "Old Things," "The Ocean," "A New Wave Format," and "Detroit Skyline, 1949"—Mason's fiction portrays a truth about life in the image society of late capitalism which neither glossy Edie nor the addled Channels ofDesire seems able to admit or suggest. At the elite level of image production and distribution, it is certainly quite deliberately exploitative; at the level of consumption it is often a bewildering, dazzling mystification at best. But for many working people the same images and free-floating signifiers that fill white-collar marxists and intellectuals with despair constitute a new language and set of options for thinking and action—a new kind of freedom, in effect. Until we learn to understand this postive, even Utopian component of the society of the spectacle as thoroughly as its much more frequently analyzed negativity, we cannot know how to move politically from here. FRED PFEIL Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts / Critical Texts. Ed. George Stambolian and Elaine Marks. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979. 387 pp. Bruce Boone. Century of Clouds. San Francisco: Hoddypoll Press, 1980. 73 pp. $4.50 (paper). In the opening footnote to his "Gay language as Political Praxis: The Poetry of Frank O'Hara" in Social Text (Winter 1979), Bruce Boone acknowledges his debts: "Jameson's lectures at the first Summer Institute of the Marxist Literary Group ofthe MLA, during the summer of 1977, have been particularly helpful to me. ... I would also like to acknowledge an indebtedness to two other lecturers at the Institute, Terry Eagleton and Stanley Aronowitz. ... In general, in the stimulating environment of this Institute I found a great deal to draw from, though, indeed, much to struggle with too." The O'Hara piece is evidence of the text which emerged from the Institute; Century of Clouds is the painful record of the context which generated this text on homosexual language. And in creating this ambiguous double vision of homosexuality as both text and context, Boone approximates the aims of Homosexualities and French Literature, a collection of theoretical texts about homosexuality and the critical application of these theories to literature. Perhaps the key to the focus shared by Boone's work and the Homosexualities anthology is the emphasis upon the ambiguity which underlies most of our understanding of sexuality of all sorts— homo, hetero or bi-sexuality. As marginal figures, the three gay men at the MLG Institute—Alex, Robbie and Bruce (Boone) — understand that they are more tolerant of open or shifting sex roles than are the others there: "We gay men tend to have a tolerance for ambiguity this way that's often lacking in many straight men in my opinion. And though we dont 'copy* it, we often seem to share this tolerance with women. And here is what I want to ask—isn't the question of women critical for our politics? . . . Hasn't feminism raised the question ofpeople's subjectivity for the first time politically?" (20). It is precisely this same otherness that Marks and Stambolian signal as the "center" of their anthology in their "Introduction": The emphasis throughout is on difference, or rather on the multiple differences that exist among theories and texts, between men and women, within time and space. By revealing the limits of "homosexuality" and the categories and oppositions it supports and by exposing what the singular has dissimulated or suppressed, "homosexualities" invites us to rethink differences, as well as to think in terms of difference. Within this play of various and changing relations no centrally imposed meaning can be justified, 121 reviews no ultimate meaning can exist." (30) Both texts then assure us of what most of us probably already assumed —that homosexuality is no longer considered a disease or sickness (the medical model); in addition, both add mat neither is homosexuality a specific individual "condition," created by either a corrupting environment or a mutant and suspect heritage. Homosexuality may...