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consciousness and of a collective one. As we saw in the first part of this book, both the insults of daily life and the structure of the sexual order of which they are the symptoms are determining factors in gay ‘‘subjugation’’ (subjectivity produced as a subjection). Yet they are also, simultaneously, determining factors of a possible—a necessary—resubjectification (the reinvention of a subjectivity as an autonomous consciousness). Moreover, the historical form of insult represented by homophobic discourse and the inscription of it in the social, legal, and cultural order have been important forces in the creation of a counterdiscourse, an autonomous way of speaking, that has across the centuries allowed for the emergence and the existence of a self-consciousness and a collective memory.
Oscar Wilde’s condemnation shook up people’s minds. For many gay
people, especially men, his name quickly became the symbol both of gay culture and of the repression it inevitably calls down on itself whenever it goes too far in the direction of making itself public. ‘‘Oscar’’ became a word that could be used as an accusation of homosexuality (‘‘he’s an Oscar’’), but
‘‘Wilde’’ also became a way for gay people to talk of themselves and think of themselves. The hero of Forster’s novel Maurice does not know how to designate himself to a doctor, so he says, ‘‘I’m an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.’’∑ Thanks to the reference provided by Wilde, Maurice can name what he is while insisting that it is unnamable. Thus Wilde’s name and his figure have played a considerable role in the establishment of gay culture—and also of lesbian culture—in the twentieth century. His example, his books, his life, his su√erings inspired people as various as the founder of the German gay movement, Magnus Hirschfeld, or writers such as Virginia Woolf—and
many others.∏
Wilde’s personality and his tragic end obsessed authors such as André Gide and Marcel Proust. In many ways they were determinant in the definition of Gide’s and Proust’s literary projects. There is no doubt that Gide’s tenacious desire to write a ‘‘defense’’ of his sexual tastes is closely linked to his meetings with Wilde and to Wilde’s fate. We know that at the beginning of 1895, at the moment of Wilde’s trial and his condemnation, Gide began to assemble a file he labeled ‘‘Pederasty’’ in which he kept notes on his ideas as well as press clippings.π He had gotten to know Wilde rather well in Paris in 1891 and had seen him again at the very beginning of 1895, during the famous trip to Algeria that he would recount thirty years later in If It Die . . . , a text that still trembles with the emotion Gide experienced during the intimate night he spent together with the ‘‘little musician’’ Mohammed, whom
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f Wilde practically placed in his arms. This would have taken place only weeks before Wilde was sentenced to prison.∫ When Wilde was released from
prison in 1897 and went to stay at a seaside resort in Normandy, Gide wanted to be the first to see him again and hurried there as soon as he managed to obtain the address.Ω Upon Wilde’s death in 1901, Gide wrote his moving ‘‘In Memoriam,’’ in which he spoke of the profoundly destabilizing e√ect on him of his encounters with Wilde.∞≠ Homophobic critics have seldom failed to blame Gide’s assumption of his homosexuality and his homosexual advocacy on the bad influence of Wilde. In the book that he devoted to The Youth of André Gide, the psychiatrist Jean Delay cites letters from Gide to his mother in which Gide tells her to what an extent he is drawn to Wilde and Douglas.
Delay hammers home his diagnosis: ‘‘We are certainly not claiming that if he had never met Wilde, Gide would not have become homosexual, but it is likely that he would not have so quickly adopted and interiorized the attitude of an arrogant pederast, insistent on claiming his anomaly as his norm. The moment at which he began to think that that which he had previously held as a kind of inferiority could represent or be represented as a superiority can be quite precisely situated after the meeting with Wilde in Algeria.’’∞∞
In point of fact, the meeting with Wilde liberated Gide from the feelings of guilt and inferiority that had hitherto held him in their grip. Wilde’s trial and sentence led Gide to understand that it was no easy matter to free oneself from social pressures. He set himself to think about this, about the problem of how to speak of homosexuality. Shortly thereafter, in 1902, he would write The Immoralist. It is thus clear that Gide’s ‘‘apologetic’’ project is at least partly rooted (for we should not forget his own drive toward ‘‘confession’’) in the pain he experienced due to Wilde’s rapid decline and the sad ending of his life. It would be shortly after another trial, another homosexual scandal—the Eulenburg a√air that was unleashed in Germany in 1908—that Gide would undertake to write Corydon. ∞≤
From the very first page of Gide’s book we are plunged into the history of homosexuality: Oscar Wilde’s trial in England, the Eulenburg a√air, Krupp’s suicide in Germany, and so on. There is every indication that Gide followed the Eulenburg trials attentively and that this ‘‘a√air’’ was one of the factors producing his feeling that it was necessary for him to write this defense. In 1908 he drafted a good portion of it. A first edition of twelve copies was published in 1911. On the very first page, the narrator of the book, who speaks with the voice of ‘‘common sense,’’ alludes to these trials without giving a precise date: ‘‘In the year 190—, a scandalous trial raised once again
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the irritating question of uranism. For eight days, in the salons as in the cafés, nothing else was mentioned.’’∞≥ In an earlier, unpublished version, Gide had written: ‘‘In the year 189—, a scandalous trial raised once again the irritating question of uranism.’’∞∂ The date he had been thinking using was thus that of the Wilde trial rather than the Eulenburg trial.
The Eulenburg a√air, and the enormous press coverage it received along with its general impact on European culture, would help crystallize in Proust’s imagination the idea of a vast novelistic project that would have at its center the accursed race of inverts.∞∑ In his ‘‘1908 Notebook,’’ Proust mentions among the guiding threads of the book he is contemplating, ‘‘Balzac in A Harlot High and Low [ Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes]’’ and ‘‘Eulen-bourg.’’∞∏ These are the two capital references around which the project of his book will be elaborated, the book he will claim in a 1909 letter to Alfred Valette, director of the publishing house Mercure de France, is nearly finished and whose provisional title is Against Sainte-Beuve: Reminiscence of a Morning. Yet that title, he insists, should not be allowed to conceal the fact that this is a ‘‘real novel,’’ indeed ‘‘an extremely shameless novel in certain parts,’’ for ‘‘one of the major characters is homosexual.’’∞π
At the starting point of the Proustian enterprise we thus find a literary theme—the character Vautrin from Balzac, of whom Charlus will in some way be a reincarnation—and a scandal that had inscribed itself deeply into the minds of Proust’s contemporaries. It is therefore hardly surprising to find in a draft of part of the novel that dates from 1912 remarks that link Balzac and the Eulenburg a√air. In that draft, Proust holds the Eulenburg a√air responsible for the spread of the word ‘‘homosexuality’’ in France, a word he finds ‘‘too Germanic and pedantic.’’ He would prefer the word
‘‘invert,’’ not feeling himself authorized, as we saw earlier, to take up the word used by Balzac: ‘‘ tante,’’ auntie. Moreover, the draft of the theoretical essay that will open Cities of the Plain ( Sodome et Gomorrhe) is at that point titled
‘‘The Race of Aunties.’’∞∫
All this will disappear before the final version. Yet references to Balzac and Eulenburg can certainly be found in Cities of the Plain. Balzac first: Baron Charlus says to the narrator: ‘‘What! you’ve never read Le
s Illusions perdues? . . .
And the death of Lucien! I forget who the man of taste was who, when he was asked what event in his life had grieved him most, replied: ‘The death of Lucien de Rubempré in Splendeurs et Misères’’’ (rtp 2:1084). It is probably worth pointing out in passing that the ‘‘man of taste’’ in question here was Oscar Wilde.
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f As for the Eulenburg a√air, Charlus cannot prevent himself from speaking of it—just as, more generally, he is unable to help speaking of his
‘‘secret,’’ of anything that would allow him to refer to it without really seeming to. At a certain point, Charlus launches into a tirade about the German emperor: ‘‘ ‘As a man, he is vile; he abandoned, betrayed, repudiated his best friends, in circumstances in which his silence was as deplorable as theirs was noble,’ continued M. de Charlus, who was irresistibly drawn by his own tendencies to the Eulenburg a√air, and remembered what one of the most highly placed of the accused had said to him: ‘How the Emperor must have relied upon our delicacy to have dared to allow such a trial! But he was not mistaken in trusting to our discretion.’ ’’∞Ω Proust thus takes up, or attributes to Charlus, the idea, prevalent at the time, that the Emperor was himself homosexual and had allowed his friends to be tried in order to avoid being personally implicated or revealed.
If Proust’s writing finds inspiration in the scandal that tainted the German aristocracy, this nonetheless does not imply that he himself chooses to retell Eulenburg’s story. For him it is a question of transforming life into art, and he has other models as well to help him in this work of elaboration and of literary creation. He has, among others, for example, Count Robert de Montesquiou (about whom one might also note that he had already been a model for the 1884 book Against Nature by Huysmans, a book that had a great influence on Oscar Wilde, as we shall see in the pages ahead).≤≠ But many of the themes that will be woven together in Remembrance of Things Past— the secret, underground life of the ‘‘sect’’ of ‘‘ tantes,’’ the ties between a man who belongs to high society and more popular types, the inexorable downfall of someone who had thought himself invincible, and so on—had all been more or less directly suggested to Proust by the Eulenburg a√air and by all that was written about it in subsequent years, as by his fascination for Balzac, in whose work one already finds the project of describing the real life that lurks hidden beneath the surface of things.
A number of books had in fact appeared about the series of trials that took place in Germany.≤∞ Proust first had the idea of writing an article, an
‘‘essay on pederasty,’’ in order to enter the debate around the Eulenburg a√air.≤≤ Yet he realized quite quickly that ‘‘art’’ would allow him access to a higher level of reality than would the simple description of facts from real life. What was to have been an article quickly became a ‘‘story.’’≤≥ There is thus no exaggeration involved in asserting that Proust’s work is grounded in part in his will to intervene in the debate about homosexuality that had been
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produced in this moment of noisy repression, one accompanied by a proliferation of homophobic discourses. The theme of the ‘‘curse’’ of homosexuality can perhaps be better understood when it has been resituated in its historical context. The transfiguration of this theory through novelistic genius was to produce not only one of the monuments of twentieth-century literature, but also one of the crucial books of gay culture—or in any case, one of the books that played a decisive role in the collective self-perception of gay people. Surely this is not what those who had condemned Wilde and screamed about Eulenburg had been hoping for.
Gide was perfectly aware of these kinds of paradoxes. It is doubtless with a certain amount of malice that he has the homophobic narrator of Corydon say: ‘‘I’ve always thought it was best to speak of such things as little as possible—often they exist at all only because some blunderer runs on about them. Aside from the fact that they are anything but elegant in expression, there will always be some imbecile to model himself on just what one was claiming to condemn.’’≤∂ Gide knows perfectly well that it is not by reading books or magazines that one becomes gay. But he also knows that any
speech against homosexuality is also speech about homosexuality: it can thus be consumed with a certain avidness, an uneasy fervor, by those who thereby hear themselves and their ‘‘vice’’ spoken of. Any public statement about homosexuality immediately finds a profound echo in gay people, simply because they are there being spoken of in a world where the reality of their feelings, of their sexuality, of their personalities, usually remains unspoken, impossible to speak about. It is thus easy to understand why gay men and lesbians have always eagerly consumed works in which they knew they
would find images of themselves, even when they were sinister and de-
formed ones (as was almost inevitably the case until recently). Certain characters from the movies would become fetish objects for gay men and lesbians even when they were marked out for tragic fates and for violent deaths, or even when they were simply portrayed as monsters. (Vito Russo has
provided many telling examples of this in The Celluloid Closet—think of Man-kiewicz’s Suddenly Last Summer. ) Even if the reason behind their monstrous-ness was not clearly in evidence, for gay and lesbian eyes there were clues that allowed the enigma to be deciphered or the mask seen through. To caricature, to ridicule, to insult homosexuals—for a long time there were few other publicly accessible forms of discourse about them—was at least to
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f speak about them. And to speak about them was in some way to allow them to recognize themselves. It allowed them to move beyond the feeling they all must have had of being alone in the world.
The censors also understood this, and not only those in the Hollywood studios who worked diligently for years in order to eliminate any trace of homosexuality from the movies, even including mentions that condemned it. Lucidity on this point has a long history. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries certain legal experts had made the point that it was better not to bring homosexuals into court, because the publicity that would be produced by the scandal could well have the opposite e√ect to the one they were counting on. Moreover, it seems quite likely that this was the reasoning behind the decision not to criminalize sexual relations between persons of the same sex in the French penal code. Surely it was not (or not only) because Cambacérès was homosexual, even less because Napoleon
was inclined to tolerance on the issue of homosexuality, that the decision was made to favor certain policing measures (such as banishment) and to avoid court cases. Rather it was because Napoleon worried about the uncon-trollable e√ects of publicity.≤∑
If gay speech has often risen up in reaction to repression, it has, especially in literature, in return often subsequently encountered a profound, hate-filled hostility. Gide, who published The Immoralist and then If It Die . . . , Corydon, and The Counterfeiters, was not spared these attempts to impose silence upon him, attempts he resisted with an obstinacy that grew all the stronger as his growing fame permitted it to do so. A large part of his work can be interpreted as the slow maturing of his desire to speak of himself, of his sexuality, of the forms of his emotions. He wanted to say who he was—to say it for himself, and to say it in order to help those who did not enjoy, as he did, the protections that went along with being a famous writer.≤∏ But at every step the attacks against him became more violent.
Given all of this, how could gay speech ever avoid being marked, even from the interior, by the hostility that it provoked? Would its content not be necessarily constrained and restrained by such reactions, given that it could easily anticipate them and therefore somehow conform to the exigencies of a certain kind of prudence? More fundamentally, would this co
ntent not have been defined and shaped by the preexisting hatred, the hatred that was there waiting to burst forth? Gay speech, in all of its various forms, constructed
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itself in an essential relation to the violence it was going without fail to provoke. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is certainly not wrong to point out that homophobia preceded the construction of modern homosexual identity, historically and structurally speaking. In e√ect, as she writes, ‘‘however radically . . . the meanings of homosexual identity were changing during the two centuries after the Restoration,’’ its evolutions made an astonishing contrast to the ‘‘most stable and temporally backward-looking elements’’ that constituted the ‘‘thematics and the ideological bases of homophobia.’’≤π In any case, it was in the face of this always already present homophobia, in the face of this hatred that always preceded it, that any form of gay speech had to make its way forward. Given that all these ways of speaking were, for the most part, discourses of legitimation or of justification as much as they were discourses of a≈rmation, they could only make their case in most instances by accepting the terms of the discussion that were imposed upon them and by making an e√ort to reappropriate them and transform their meaning.
This is why homophobia and gay speech are so intimately linked together, so tightly imbricated. Gay speech was only able to invent itself, to come into the light of day, in large measure as a ‘‘reverse discourse,’’ to use Michel Foucault’s expression, by taking up in its own way the categories of thought that it needed to fight against and that were opposed to it. Gay speech has thus often helped spread those categories, images, and representations and has contributed to their perpetuation.
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 22