French Gay Modernism
by Lawrence R. Schehr
University of Illinois. 201 pages, $38.
FRENCH MODERNISM has always been rather “gay.” It began with André Gide’s L’Immoraliste, continued with Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, encompassed Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants terrible and Le Livre blanc and all of Jean Genet’s novels, not to mention countless other 20th-century writers of lesser renown. The fact that homosexual themes figured so prominently in the works of the greatest French writers had the dual effect of bringing these themes to the forefront of literary criticism and infusing the emergent queer culture with a peculiarly literary quality. In this remarkable little book, Lawrence R. Schehr, a professor of French at the University of Illinois, analyzes these effects through the writings of Gide, Proust, Cocteau, Willy, and others.
In “Proust: Forgetting Homosexuality,” Schehr shows that the narrator at first “forgets” to tell the reader all that he knows about the sexuality of Saint-Loup and Charlus as he follows the emotional, intellectual, and artistic development of Marcel. “To identify with the learning process and apprenticeship of Marcel as he becomes the narrator and to follow the Bildungsroman as such, readers cannot occupy a position totally superior in knowledge to Marcel; rather, they should sympathetically identify with Marcel’s incomprehension.” Thus, when Marcel first meets Saint-Loup, the narrator neglects to tell us of their mutual attraction to each other, though the hints are clearly there. Likewise, when Marcel meets Charlus, the narrator presents the encounter as completely incomprehensible to Marcel, who doesn’t recognize the classical behavior of a middle-aged man cruising a young adolescent. Marcel’s incomprehension reinforces “the novel’s one taboo, the one impossible point: the narrator cannot be gay, cannot be perceived as gay, and must remain steadfast in his heterosexuality, even if it does not yet exist.” In “Un Amour de Charlus,” Schehr explores the relationship between Morel and Charlus. The young Marcel has already figured out what homosexuality is when he overhears an encounter between Jupien and Charlus at the hôtel de Guermantes, but when Charlus meets Morel, Marcel begins to understand it. Schehr ends this insightful chapter with an analysis of the famous sadomasochistic scene between Charlus and a male prostitute in Jupien’s brothel, which is immediately followed by a scene in the Métro during a blackout. In the latter scene, Marcel the narrator becomes Marcel the participant as he is implicated in its homosexual themes. In this way, Schehr “queers” Marcel. While Proust wrote openly about homosexuality in the 1910’s, Gide did not do so until the publication of Corydon in 1924 and Si le Grain Ne Meurt in 1926. Still, Gide had broached the subject as early as 1902 with his subtly homoerotic novel L’Immoraliste, in which the main character Michel is evidently a latent homosexual. Schehr credits Gide, through his exploration of Michel’s confession, with having offered “a beginning vocabulary and semantics for homoerotic encounters.” The case of Cocteau is a peculiar one. For whatever reason, he saw fit to disavow authorship of his overtly homosexual Le Livre Blanc, even though he had already hinted at its theme in Les Enfants Terrible. Schehr stresses the fact that “the great representational problem in Cocteau’s work is the vacillation between representing homosexuality as some depersonalized, transcendental, abstract concept and representing a homosexual individual, or part of that individual, with a homosexual ethos that remains personal and a singularity that never quite fits the abstract.” This vacillation allows him to write “endlessly … about the personal aspect of the performance of the self and the creation of a self as an ongoing production.” In “Willy and Friends,” Schehr turns to writer Henri Gautier-Villars, the husband of Collette, whose nickname was “Willy.” He took credit for her series, Claudine at School, Claudine in Paris, Claudine Married, and Claudine and Annie, all of which discussed the homoerotic nature of women’s romantic friendships. He also took credit for close to fifty other works, mostly written by other writers, who were sometimes listed as co-authors. Three of these works—L’Ersatz d’amour (1923) and Le Naufragé (1924), both written with Suzanne de Callias, and Le Troisième Sexe (1927)—dealt specifically with male homosexuality. In Le Troisième Sexe, Willy takes his readers on a sexual tour of Europe, on an exciting excursion to the gay subculture of Paris, and on a visit to the city’s libraries and bookstores, where he finds the androgynous literature of Carco, Miomandre, and de Callias. None of these novels is a great work of art, but they do reflect the changing sexual landscape of the 1920’s, a period in which homosexual relations were increasingly being depicted and normalized. _____________________________________________________ William A. Peniston, Ph.D., is manager of the library and archives, the Newark Museum, Newark, N.J.
