In the hallway he started biting my neck. I don't like that at all. I backed away immediately so things would be clear. We went in. I poured us two whiskeys, I rolled a joint, we started smoking. Then we got undressed, naked he was really gorgeous, we kissed, embraced, I was really turned on. He started biting me again. I stiffened up. He stopped. We started touching each other again. He bit me again. I backed off. I looked at him.What do you think that will do for me, biting me like that? I said. You think I enjoy it? I haven't stopped trying to show you the opposite. So what's the deal? What are you trying to do? He said I just felt like doing it, that's all. He came back in close so we could start fondling each other again. I said, I think we're going to stop there. I stayed sitting at the top of the bed. He got up, put on his black underwear, black socks, black jeans, black t-shirt, black sneakers, in silence. I walked him to the door without saying a word.
I shut the door. I stayed there without moving. I told myself What's happening to me? How can something like this happen to me? I watched him cross the courtyard from my window. I thought This guy in black was a sign. If I stay here I'm going to die. I'm going to end up putting sperm in everyone's ass and everyone is going to end up doing the same to me. The truth is that's the only thing left that I want to do. In fact, it's already happening. Of course I won't be able to tell anyone about it. I won't be able to meet anyone. I'll wait to get sick. Surely it won't be long. Then I'll be so disgusted with myself that it will finally be the time to kill myself. I told myself that the only thing left to do was to leave.
15 Exit
I got lucky. I was offered a job far away, overseas. I thought, I'm heartbroken, I'm headed for the end of the world, that's what you have to do in this case. I accepted. I spent another month arranging my affairs, seeing people, friends, my grandmother. I wanted to leave things in order.
I called Terrier on the telephone. I hadn't shared any news with him in a long time. He told me he wasn't doing anything. That he was still unemployed. That he just stayed home all the time, except the weekend sometimes, to go see his mother. That he no longer went out. That he was sick and tired of waiting for Prince Charming. I didn't suggest that we see each other, I was afraid that it would be too sad. He didn't suggest it either. He wished me a good trip. Said that he would come see me. I told him that wouldn't be a problem. I wondered if I would pay for his trip someday. Maybe.
Stéphane was my last date. He had told me that he would prefer to see me right before I left because he was too busy before, but I had thought it was for a deeper reason, that he thought it was best that this goodbye would be for good. He was supposed to come by and pick me up to go to lunch. It was a Saturday. Of course, I hadn't been able to get up in time to be ready, I had spent the night out again. I opened the door for him in my half-tied bathrobe. I immediately went back to bed. He sat down on the edge. We talked. About him, about me, about his new boyfriend. And then then we got so emotional that we held each other in our arms. Electric erection. We kissed. It was powerful. I told him, Get undressed. We found ourselves naked on the bed. I was super hard. I told myself that I was going to leave him with a good souvenir. I leaned over towards his dick and I sucked it like I had never sucked it before. With love. He almost came. I stood up. I said Who is fucking who? He said I feel like fucking you, I don't remember what it feels like. I agreed, I found it better than the other way around given the context. It was absolutely amazing. Afterwards I invited him to lunch at a brasserie in Les Halles. We drank like fish. We laughed. He took me back home by car. I watched him leave, the profile of his beautiful little head framed by the car door window. He waved at me before heading down the street. It was night. I know that I should have left him much earlier. When I told myself for the first time that I would never be in love with him. But it felt so good to be loved by him. So good.
I'm Going Out Tonight
A Novel
Introduction by Thomas Clerc
For those who have never read Guillaume Dustan, I'm Going Out Tonight, published in 1997, the second volume in this first trilogy, is the best gateway to his work. Two years after the sexual radicalism of In My Room, which could potentially have scared away the unsuspecting reader, Dustan explored another world equally as consubstantial as his room—that of the night club. Dustan was one of the first writers to have introduced this modern place of pleasures to French literature, affording him an almost mythological respect. It is surprising that dancing, a favorite activity of young people in general, did not have its own “Balzac” until Dustan, unlike the cinema world which had produced the cult film for a generation, Saturday Night Fever,1 in 1978. The reason is that literature is often written by writers who stop frequenting these kind of places once they hit their forties (that is, if they ever frequented them at all), and instead turn their attention to places where age is not so diriment, places like brothels or casinos, especially in heterosexual culture.2 We can draw a history of literature through its characters as well as through its spaces, and from this perspective, Dustan is an innovator.3
The Pink and the Black
For Dustan, night clubs were not just any other place. Not only were they places the author regularly frequented, but they also corresponded more broadly to a moment in the life of the “thirty-year-old man,” when the subject was at the top of his game, despite the disease lingering in the background. The night club was a space where youth appeared to shine, not just Dustan's own youthfulness, but also that of an “eternal youth” before its unavoidable decline. At this age in life, when it is not too early to start writing or too late to head home, the night club encourages an experience of expenditure that recalls Georges Bataille, even in the mystical dimension. Dustan, however, never reached the age of forty, that period during which a writer's work supposedly ripens and achieves a mastered form of expression. His premature death did not allow him to settle or to polish a style that indeed had no need for it. In a certain sense, the night club was his descent into hell4 and foreshadowed his future disappearance. Beyond the generational difference, the statement by one of his favorite writers, Marguerite Duras, “it's soon too late in life to go to the Tabou,” was confirmed in a completely different way: by AIDS. The virus has a discrete but nevertheless firm presence in I'm Going Out Tonight, and the dedication of the book, “In memoriam Alain Ferrer,” a deceased friend of Dustan's, is reinforced by the mention of his death as early as the second paragraph. To paraphrase a slogan from Act-Up Paris that remains beyond redemption, “Night clubs = AIDS,” we could say that for homosexuals at the time the simple pleasures of partying and of life were indissociable from their opposite. For all that, I'm Going Out Tonight radiates a certain euphoria that we do not necessarily think of when we evoke Guillaume Dustan. His critics have insisted on the depressing nature of his world, but I'm Going Out Tonight proves them wrong. It's a mild, Zen-like book that offers a more nuanced ethos to the reader in which the pink wins out over the black.
The Night Club, a Heterotopia
I'm Going Out Tonight is a novel that elevates the concept of the night club from the ranks of a setting for fiction to that of civility, even civilization. This nocturnal establishment, which unites the novel, is a place where types of relationships other than typical diurnal ones are explored—a locus for alternative experiences. Even though it is located at the heart of the city, or rather, under the city, the night club, in this case La Loco, is a place that eludes it in order to offer different, less normal, crazier rules that are constructed in excess by its users themselves. The night club is a “heterotopia,” a concept invented by Michel Foucault in a very famous text, another type of space where all that is judged deviant no longer is so.5 In the upside-down world of the club and of the night, the oppressive values from above are abolished to the benefit of a sociability that the author both theorizes and puts into practice.
Dustan's consistency comes from the fact that he selected key locations that were in no way simple backdrops to a realist narrative
but on the contrary places that he assiduously patronized because they seemed to offer the possibility of new experiences. In a certain way, Dustan's political project was born in the night club. The reader who is discovering I'm Going Out Tonight does not know it yet, but can feel it, and will confirm it retroactively after reading the entire collection. The body itself, as well as nocturnal conviviality, are at the heart of a new ethical code and of a new esthetic that eventually lead to a political avant-gardism that would be developed in the second trilogy. With the work to come still inchoate, I'm Going Out Tonight was content with displaying nightlife and showing the pleasures it could bring on a phenomenological level. The most obvious sign of this claim resides in the very title of the work, where the pronoun “I” rings out like a manifesto: I'm Going Out Tonight is simple and magnificent, universally borrowable by any subject, a titlesentence with its verb in the present tense, and its four short words that whip the ears with their repetitive vowel sounds.
Although marked by its homosexual bent, I'm Going Out Tonight has the intelligence not limit itself to that. The world of nightlife abolishes differences, and Dustan's “communitarianism,” a problematic concept if ever there was one, tends to merge into a generality of pleasure. This accurate description of a minority world is also a snapshot of the sociality of night life taken in the specific chronotope of 1990s France. I'm Going Out Tonight is therefore a book that clearly exceeds the micro stakes of the “ghetto,” something the entire corpus of Dustan's works will continue to prove. This novel sketches out a community that transcends class and sexual differences: Dustanian universality is born in a mixed, working class night club that is not exclusively gay. Fresh because of its theme and the approach Dustan brings to it, committed beneath a superficial appearance, I'm Going Out Tonight is both mundane and serious, Nietzschean and Warholian, superficial and deep at the same time.
The Empty and the Full
Similar to In My Room, I'm Going Out Tonight is a conceptual book in its form: the respect of three classical unities or place, time, and action is absolute, since Dustan recounts an evening at La Loco in less than a hundred pages. Engrossed in a pure present that is both a stylistic characteristic of the time as well as a style of writing unique to Dustan, the reader easily makes their way through the description of a night out at the club up to the final return to “the room,” which echoes back to Dustan's previous text, and for which the club constitutes an outside. I'm Going Out Tonight maintains the stylistic minimalism of the first novel as it singularizes it. The narrative, composed of various fragments of unequal length, at times single sentences, glorifies the perceptual dimension of the night club. The text stays as close as possible to the physical sensations of the club goers. In this hypogeum of sorts, Dustan advocates for the pleasures forbidden by the world above. From this point of view, I'm Going Out Tonight picks up the corporeal theme that we saw in In My Room but points it in a much more hedonistic and joyful direction. Dustan the dancer constructs an image of a subject who wishes to let go, and lose the very self-control authoritarian society demands of him.
Narrated by a full subject, this work centers with superb finesse on the seductive quality of emptiness. On the one hand, events are simply described in successive order by a consciousness that is steadily emptying out. The style of the text, as it attempts to adhere to phenomena, reduces the action to the subtle repetition of its operations. The first-person narration constructs autonomous moments that appear to lead to some end, which it then cancels deceptively. In a stimulating article,6 Bénédicte Boisseron suggested we might compare Dustan's style to CocaCola (a parallelism that would undoubtedly have pleased the author), a beverage that embodies the “death of materiality and the self-reference of desire in a tantalizing mise en abyme.” 8 Flipping through the pages of I'm Going Out Tonight constitutes a form of light arousal due to the qualities of the drink as well as to its iconic status. We could read the text according to Jean Baudrillard, for whom the contemporary passion for the real has mutated into hyperreality: that is to say, the degree of fascination this text exerts draws perhaps its source in this repetitive and shallow totality, this absolute transparency where the pragmatic dimension wins over everything without hierarchy. This type of reading, however, provides only a partial key to the text, which is not a critique of the modern subject lost in a gaseous version of reality. Describing emptiness is a positive experience of ecstasy.
Indeed, the night club was a locus of dispossession of the self. What a paradox that the intense subjectivity of the “Dustanian subject” was absorbed in an almost Buddhist like quest for desubjectivation carried out by music, drugs, and the intermingling of bodies. That the vindication of pleasure was also given as a political act was perhaps Dustan's greatest achievement. Dustan, a fanatic individualist, was also an heir, a continuator of the anarchist spirit of the ‘70s restructured by liberal postmodernism. The context of AIDS reinforced community ties: the heterotopia of the night club was not cut off from the world, it offered a protection against the disease by affirming the preeminence of pleasure over death. Here, more than in the other two novels in this collection, Dustan began with the specificity of homosexuality and moved beyond it into a Dionysian quest.
Dance or Death
Blending his own experience with that of his brothers in the struggle, Dustan embodied the condition of the young gay activist of the 1990s. The world of nightlife and its restitution were inevitable. More than Foucault, Dustan's ultimate reference was Nietzsche, who frequently appeared in Dustan's prose and whose defense of the figure of the dancer seemed the fieriest of commands: “Truth for our feet! Truths upon which we can dance!” 7
In fact, I'm Going Out Tonight is a musical: due to a rhythmic infusion its writing is where the action occurs. For this literalist author, the night club entailed short sentences and a simple repetitive style that imitated the pulsing bass of techno music. In the final third of the novel, large blocks of blank white page mark the progressive loss of consciousness of the narrator-protagonist which grew throughout the night. In a stroke of genius, Dustan inserted multiple series of blank pages that represent the satori-like perceptive state, the confusion made possible by that locus of anti-normative behavior that is the night club. I Dance, Therefore I am would perhaps be the best subtitle for this synesthetic text. Sight, the most aristocratic of the senses, has a problematic role to play in that the nocturnal settings of the place and the artificial lighting alter the perception of people and things. Sight cuts the viewer off from their object. This cut (and on another level, the cut between private and public, literature and experience, and pleasure and intellect) is something Dustan looked to abolish because it was a down-time in the accomplishment of desire. Sound, conversely, is fundamental in a world saturated with music and where communication is reduced to what is essential—the body.8 The numerous musical references serve to reinforce the setting of this era, but it is the deafening musicality and direct structure of Dustan's sentences that sets the tone of the story, as shown by the abundant blank verse: “I was unquestionably / at the basement of Palace” or “The music is worse. / I rest on the edge of the dance floor.”
Dancing was another way of warding off death, just like sex and exercise, which are other types of self-care. Physical activity or exercise was certainly a direct response to AIDS, a way to ignore it but not deny its existence. The collective quality of the night club united a community. People danced not so much to be seen, but rather to dissolve into a mass that did not prohibit the self, but rather multiplied it. Although he was no doubt a snobby writer, Dustan proclaimed his hatred of snobbism when it excluded others. Dance and the whole of adolescent culture, on the contrary, united people in a common and participatory quest that prefigured a polis based on pleasure and constituted it in action: with dance, heterotopia was a realized utopia.
Pop Literature, Underground Literature
Dustan was not content with creating a representation of the night club, he wa
nted to share the experience of it. Dustan's modernity lies also in this defiance against reducing literature to a simple mimesis—a faulty position, an esthetic. Dustan doesn't have anything to “tell;” rather, it is reality that is important to him. As opposed to the detached qualities of fiction which thrives on its capacity to lull the reader to sleep, autobiography provides direct access to the world of experience. I'm Going Out Tonight is more than an analysis of actions at a night club, it's a performative that brings them to life.
There exists a literary Dustanian paradox, for both the underground and pop culture coexist within it. Underground literature, which is made below ground, tramples the established order just as dancers immerse themselves in a world freed from bodily constraints. With its pop culture theme and standard language, I'm Going Out Tonight laid the foundation for a literature addressed to the biggest of crowds. There is a pop culture fantasy within Dustan (and in the texts of other writers whom he admired) which links dancing and literature through the notion of mass culture. Literature's only value is to be shared by all, but in reality, it is reserved for the elites. Dustan, who would later go on to outline a surprising panorama of French literature,9 had a democratic ideal; the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity found a place to express themselves literally within the space of the night club. The contradiction between pop culture and the underground is not truly resolved in Dustan's work, but it is posited with an acuity that is rare in French literature. Autobiography plays a decisive role here: although Dustan speaks from a singular position, he does so in a voice in which many can recognize themselves, a whatever singularity, a collective voice that aims, in the context of the night club, at abolishing the distinction between what is personal and what is anonymous.
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