"That is Not What I Meant at All"

Someone may be thought of as the third in a trilogy of books on sexuality in French literature by Michael Lucey, following The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (2003) and Never Say I: Sexuality in the First Person in Colette, Gide and Proust (2006). One of the most distinguished scholars in sexuality studies and certainly the most interesting in French studies, Lucey has developed a set of conceptual preoccupations and a methodological approach that are at once idiosyncratic—to use one of his own key terms—and compelling. Methodologically, this has meant an approach to literature as sociological that is inseparable from a Bourdieusian sociological approach to literature, with a constant back-and-forth between the type of sociological thinking carried out in novels, on the one hand, and the external dynamics of the literary field, on the other. Conceptually, Lucey's work has been attentive to the "misfit," meaning at once the individual whose sense of self does not fit well with available categories, vocabularies, and representations, as well as the fact and typically uncomfortable experience of that lack of fit. In all three books, Lucey shows that "sexual identity" cannot be thought separately from social positioning, and vice versa, and the feeling of "misfit" often occurs at the intersection of the two. Someone's productive innovation is to draw on the linguistic field of pragmatics, which studies the context-dependent, nonsemantic, nonexplicit functions of utterances. "Misfit sexualities," Lucey contends, "sometimes exist in language and culture without ever being explicitly talked about or explicitly laid claim to," but "leave other kinds of traces, more pragmatic than semantic ones" (9). Not so much loves that dare not speak their name as loves that have no name to speak, they are subject to an "ongoing denotational incapacity" (138); they are at their most visible in those moments when characters, narrators, or writers "try out" a bit of conventional sexual nomenclature yet feel—with anger, curiosity, or regret—that, in T. S. Eliot's words, "That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all."

As a pioneering work of sexuality studies, Someone resonates with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's account (in Epistemology of the Closet and "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl") of the obscuring effect of the homo/hetero binarism on the "lush plurality of . . . sexual identities" that preceded its rise to dominance (Sedgwick 1994: 117). Lucey's book—though he would certainly not put it so conventionally—suggests that an equally consequential effect of the homo/hetero binarism is to eclipse the plurality of potential sexualities that exist contemporaneously with it—or better yet, under it, as one lives "under" a regime. In a disarmingly simple moment, indeed, Lucey explains that the point of his project is "simply to notice other sexualities that it is often all too easy to miss" (9). Intriguingly, these "other sexualities" often have something to do with a problematic bisexuality, though again, to put it like this is reductive in comparison to the subtlety of the social and sexual positionings Lucey brings to light. Nevertheless, in an early moment Lucey does note that "speech about bisexuality . . . often highlights the fact that there are forms of cultural knowledge about sexuality that cannot be done justice by taxonomies" (12), and in many chapters the deviation from a presumed or established monosexuality turns out to be more difficult to pull off, especially over time, than casual talk of "fluidity" would appear to suggest. Still, one of the most fascinating instances of a "misfit" studied here is when Hervé Guibert, a figure whose sexual identity most of us would consider straightforwardly nameable, says of the word homosexuality: "That's a word that for me has never felt like it had any relationship to me, which seems strange because obviously it does" (203). The clash between a way of feeling and an irrefragable but alien knowledge ("obviously") is symptomatic of the misfit's predicament...