Yes to Power and Sex28
The crystal-like dimension of his work united two indissociable necessities: to expose a nonconsensual image of homosexuality and to invent a form of writing that would be its most direct expression. Exposing sex, which should not be interpreted as a way of surveilling the body but as an affirmation of its supremacy, was the first step of a political esthetic. Generally speaking, through the potential inherent in desire, but this theme, already rehashed by straight people, wouldn't hold without its homosexual component. Dustan described homosexual sexuality as immediately accessible, a well-known topos that no one had ever so ferociously shown. There is clearly something fascinating about direct access to pleasure that justifies either an empathetic reading or one of rejection. Dustan was a sexual anarchist: by putting forth this image of masculine homosexuality, he exposed himself to contrasting reactions. On one hand, the fairly widespread moralizing approach condemning the orgiastic dimension of his works understood through the psychoanalytic lens of drive theory ultimately leading to death. On the other, the concern about the social effect of such a depiction. In 1981, Foucault had already curiously claimed that “one of the concessions one makes to others is not to present homosexuality as anything but a kind of immediate pleasure.” 29 According to Foucault, who had already turned his back on Sade and rejected the notion of desire,30 this comes down to creating a “tidy image [of homosexuality] that lost all its potential worrisome parts.” 31 Yet Dustan's first trilogy was the opposite of both of these critiques. Not only did he maintain the subversion that was specific to sexuality, but he also showed that the liberal sexual regime existed in direct opposition to the puritan and family-oriented social structures that were at the heart of what he would call, after Monique Wittig, “the political system of heterosexuality.” 32 Negative reactions against Dustan were just as frequent from heterosexuals, who considered his debauchery alienating and felt that it negated the other, as they were from homosexuals, flabbergasted at the caricature that Dustan drew of their milieu. For them, Dustan favored homophobia by depicting the homosexual world as “decadent.”
We believe that Dustan's work is neither decadent (that is a reactionary topos) nor tidy (this goes without saying). On the contrary, it belongs to an anti-illusionist esthetic tradition passed down from Rousseau as well as to a libertine-utopian tradition that is more linked to Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich than to Foucault and is contemporary with the rise of a global youth culture. This is why the puritan hypothesis seems much more solid, in its constancy, than its repression or negation. Dustan's sexual expenditure reveals an initial condemnation of both sexuality and homosexuality. He would be very clear about this later as his work became more discursive, blaming his education and especially the authoritative role of the father in society. But here, we would risk going too far if we considered the paternal dogma as no longer functional in society. On the contrary, the law of the father gave shape to Dustan's sensitivity and to the extremely violent revolt of I Accuse the Law, the great unpublished work that became LXiR.
We cannot truly understand Dustan's attempt to destroy puritanism if we do not refer it back to Foucault's own denial of it.33 We truly miss the point of Dustan's literary project if we do not see the emergence of a new conservatism that coincided with the moment he began to write, that of a “reactionary Left” which had renounced the principles of May ’68, and had adopted a “moral” position which shifted it to the right.34 Contesting French neopuritanism could only occur violently given the degree of repression Dustan attributed to it. Obviously, a reader who is unconvinced by the idea of a regressive Left will judge Dustan's work as useless provocations, the very product of what it builds on. But in this case, we would need to toss out all contemporary literature and its desire for exhibitionism, from Christine Angot to Virginie Despentes, from Catherine Millet to Annie Ernaux. Instead of this sacrificial solution, we prefer to think that exhibiting sex in this way, rather than a trend, corresponds to the need of a specific historical period that was encapsulated quite well by De Certeau's phrase “capture of speech.” 35 Dustanian self writing blends both de Certeau's speech capture and bodily exhibition with a crafted immediacy that is accessible to all. This form of writing would be presented explicitly in his next trilogy. As for pornography (used here in the neutral sense of the word), expressed via autobiography rather than fiction as it was in his earlier books (a game changer), it does not offer a refined erotism destined to titillate the reader but rather a model of protest which involves the subject itself. Dustan's work is thus inseparable from the exploding intellectual fields of gay and lesbian studies but also porn studies36 and cultural studies, in short, from intellectual innovation that he helped bring to France.
Another Culture
If the first survival action put into play by Dustan was to fanatically proclaim his identity, running the risk of finding himself labelled a “ghetto writer” and marginalized by his own excess, the richness of his position nonetheless resides in its ambivalence. For indeed, the sexualist side of his identity was coupled with a cultural one. Foucault's philosophy becomes useful once again to explain the creative side of Dustan's work, a progressive call to overcome the notion of sex. As we will see, the second collection of Dustan's works would update this position, which is more cultural than identity-based. Furthermore, one cannot but be struck in these first three books by the intensities that guarantee Dustan's status beyond that of the scandalous homosexual. By linking his awareness of his own difference to the pleasures of a moment, he succeeded in creating both a political and cultural dimension that went beyond measly entertainment.
Indeed, music in its popular forms (techno, house, disco, trance), drugs, sex, dancing, bodybuilding or sadomasochism weren't just simple themes for him. They were primarily ways of expanding his own being and that he shared with an ever-growing community that was not exclusively homosexual, and that eventually became global. The “I” quickly becomes a “we,” proof that the singular and the plural are not as distant as we might believe. For Dustan, such openly accepted and glorified practices seemed the most efficient way to contest the puritanical order he wanted to topple and which he believed had planted its roots during the 1980s in France. Dustan was the only French author to have viewed hedonistic practices as a way to promote a new, entirely democratic world founded on pleasure, open to all, and practiced by a global youth in which he saw a non-violent avant-garde. This was where the shift in meaning from sexual identity to gay culture occurred; indeed, the latter probably derives from the former but is not restricted to it. We can thus better understand how Dustan placed himself in the wake of liberal and anarchist principle of pleasure. His strength was not only the fact that he described and conceptualized it (thus making him both an artist and a critic), but moreover, that he did it in a way that appeared the most universal to him, in a pop-culture-style autobiography.37
All of the elements of the Dustanian counterculture were weapons in his battle against the old order (which repressed them) but were also tools to build a freer world. Obviously opposed to the right-wing conservatism that was entrenched in France, Dustan had no illusions about the traditional Left, which he would critique more and more aggressively, feeling that it had betrayed the principles of liberty that had enabled its rise to power in 1981. What was interesting in the new culture extolled by Dustan was that it got rid of the Left/Right paradigm, replacing it with the paradigm of progressive vs. conservative that was essentially linked to sociocultural issues. Dustan refused the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate cultures, which he believed characterized the elitism that he felt was so harmful in supposedly democratic societies. Dustan's sexual self-assertion was also a sort of allegory of mass culture. His accessible yet scandalous work was a programmeant for the educated middle-class against which Dustan had spoken quite harshly, especially when it claimed to be socialist. Thus, it was the enormous question of literary postmodernism and of political liberalis
m that was posed by an author who was not simply “attentive” to the demands of a generation that no longer recognized itself in established representations but by a young man who belonged to it. There will be traces of this question in the prefaces to each of the novels in this collection, and it will be developed more fully in the next collected works.
There is an evolution in Dustan's literary orbit, a rushed evolution that draws its beauty from that very precipitateness and includes within its ten-year span the recent history of the homosexual movement with its greatest contradictions. Dustan's prized anarchy takes on two forms: the Dionysian glory of the endangered body, and the creation of a redeeming figure of an anti-intellectual intellectual. Only a starkly rational or moralizing approach can ignore the subversive aspect of this unsettling and questionable yet highly exhilarating work. Reducing Dustan to simple polemics cannot stop readers from enjoying an oeuvre that glorifies life much more than it excoriates it.
After Guibert, Dustan had to create a new homosexual ethos close to Pasolini's “rabbia analitica” 38 but one that was equal parts pop and postmodern, refusing the nostalgic tendencies of the Left and adhering to the original idea of a subversion specific to mass culture. What brings these three works together, sex (In My Room), club music (I'm Going Out Tonight), and drugs (Stronger Than Me), is the manifesto of a youth that is an “inferiority,” to borrow from Witold Gombrowicz. To express it through a literary genre that all of Western history considered until recently to be an “inferior” genre was certainly a stroke of genius.
Thomas Clerc would like to thank Liza Rynkowska, Sophie Baranès, Philippe Joanny, and Tim Madesclaire.
In My Room
A Novel
Introduction by Thomas Clerc
Published in 1996 when he was thirty-one years old, In My Room, Guillaume Dustan's first book, is rough: in this way it truly is a “first book,” sketching out Dustan's fiery and desperate existence. The book is something of a “descent into hell” with its nearly single-minded focus on sex. The often unbearable representation Dustan gives of it explains the suspicion that surrounded him. Guillaume Dustan would have loved being a popular writer; his radicality prevented that. If there is something “pop” in his work, it's a pop culture that did not forgo negativity. Andy Warhol painted flowers, but they were chrysanthemums.
Hitting Hard
Writing style is primary in establishing an author's identity: Dustan's rested upon a shocking stylistic tension between a minimal syntax and an informal vocabulary. His style was both trashy and cold. The direct exposure of sex scenes, the continuous narration in the first-person present, the obsession with mundane details, the high-rate of unsafe sexual encounters, and the verbal and physical violence resembled the photographic worlds of Nan Goldin or Robert Mapplethorpe with a mix of trance and house music as a soundtrack. Dustan's language was in perfect harmony with what he wrote: truncated words, Anglicisms, hipster speech and/or slang, nouns phrases, repetitions, cleft sentences borrowed from oral speech, and usage of implicit references that excluded the uninformed reader. This collection of traits, hardly concerned with pleasing, provocatively built an off-putting novel that would never have brought Dustan into the mainstream. But this act of cutting himself off from the traditional readership—the straight, intellectual, bourgeois establishment—was much more than a pose. His implicit refusal of literary codes and traditional norms of behavior was coupled with a manifesto on the behavioral practices of his milieu.
There is something about Dustan's writing, however, that resists the simple classification of trashy literature, which implies a certain complacency, the use of stereotypes, and a lack of humor, all of which Dustan carefully avoids. Indeed, trashy literature aims at pleasing the expectations of its reader with the intent to shock. Yet Dustan, probably because he was interested in the question of evil, never played smug. All of his literature was literal; beyond the disgust some passages may evoke, this is precisely what gives it its undeniable power, even, dare we say, its morality. This moral sincerity, which is comprised of not being “not duped,” is one of the two ethical forms of literary modernity, the other being, on the contrary, the ironically postmodern play of clichés and pop cultural references. In the first case, autobiography; in the other case, self writing. Dustan was never kitsch. If he would later affirm an esthetic closer to camp or queer, these were not the stakes of the first three books collected here.
Inscribed in its time, nearly bordering on the ephemeral but overcoming it by its mastery of a perceptible form, Dustan's deliberate flat writing style is the inheritor of a literary history. Stemming from a Modernist degree zero of writing as well as subjective speech, it exposes the brutal surface of things. The unbridled voice of the underground is superimposed upon an Albert Camus-like “white writing,” whose influence on Bret Easton Ellis has hardly ever been noticed. Indeed, Ellis is the major reference for Dustan. Continuing the avant-garde tradition of pushing the limits in terms of representation, in an autobiographical framework, Dustan creates a formal mimesis of a porn film with the following unwritten rule: no chitchat just action. And indeed, narrative logic cedes the way to visual dynamics. His ultra-focused descriptions reduce sex to an intense series of acts and gestures that are empty of all sensuality. Structured in short chapters similar to Polaroids, In My Room manifests an esthetic intelligence that consists of keeping it short. Extremism thus meets its limit. The first trilogy oscillates between hardcore and minimalism, a minimalism that does not need any transcendence to justify its existence and implies no emotional loss, while on the contrary reinforcing its own pathos through its distancing.
This first book performs a mixture of hot and cold: Dustan's writing style is neo-clinical. Behind this literalist coldness, one can continuously observe a sensitivity bloom. Perhaps Dustan's limit will have been his inability to remain completely cold, which was the reason for his admiration for Warhol. For language itself acts: the informal nature of the words, the irony distilled here and there, and the demonstrative dimension of the sexual scenes all betray a constant presence that provides a unique tonality to this trilogy, something between a phenomenological approach and a dark romanticism.
A Room of One's Own
Dustan defines a space that is perhaps the only benchmark for his disorganized existence: the bedroom. There is something touching in the desire for protection that the title demands, as if this intimate space, that of sex—that is, the most precious and intense form of identity—is first and foremost a pushing away of the world. Of course, the bedroom is a social space, but it is first a personal space: “In my room, I am free,” 1 noted Dustan in one of the columns he wrote for the magazine e.m@le, as if he couldn't possibly be free in the streets. However, the bedroom isn't “the closet,” that metaphor used to designate both the real or mental hovel where homosexuality must hide under the yoke of repressive social laws.2 Opening up his room to the reader, whom he transforms into a voyeur, Dustan designs a space that is both private and public (its twin is the nightclub): paradoxical interiority, defined by a place more than an awareness. Dustan's autobiographic undertaking is experienced less in psychology and more in action. The “I” that appears in In My Room, which is closer to an amateur porn video than to a “home sweet home,” rejects intimacy, opting instead for the rawness of sexual representation. For that matter, the term “representation” is imperfect, and we prefer the term “action,” as if Dustan were emptying sex of its human dimension in order to substitute the immediacy of its pure presence. Governed by scopophilia, In My Room is subject to an analysis according to which the sexual act is not shared between two people, but rather in the presence of a third person, the reader-voyeur who is essential to autobiography. According to Bénédicte Boisseron, “the virtual, exterior eye allows both subjects to exteriorize themselves and to stimulate their desire with the idea of someone viewing their copulation from the outside.” 3 Pornography belongs to the realm of thought, both as image and idea, but one m
ust know how to give it shape. In order for this “thought from the outside” to be effective it paradoxically needed to be grafted onto a constant “I” that never let go of the reader—something Dustan maintains from the very start through the use of “my” in his title.
The bedroom is no more a secretive place than autobiography is the realm of intimacy. Rather, it is where the opposition between public and private is abolished. How can we not compare the bedroom of pleasures with the one that makes writing possible, according to Virginia Woolf?4 The most personal space is thus the one that is depersonalized by sex.
Dustan the Pornographer
Sex, depicted in an extremely raw fashion in this first opus (something to which Dustan will return in his third book under the form of sadomasochism), is immediately affirmed. The role of sex in Dustan's existence and in the development of his sensibility is crucial—he had an obvious sexual passion that he threw, without any hesitation, right into the reader's face. And yet Dustan wasn't a cynic in the trivial sense of the word since his provocations had another aim than themselves. Since “sex is the main focus” 5 it is out of the question to create an “erotic” version of it, in the tradition of a certain bourgeois—and heterosexual— fictionality destined to seduce the reader. For Dustan, describing his sex life is not an exercise dictated by considerations heterogenous to his work.
The Works of Guillaume Dustan, Volume 1 Page 3