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all overboard at one and the same time, and this is obviously much
more expedient. I tried in so far as I could to make the distinction
between pederasts in the Greek sense of the word (love of boys) and
inverts, but no one deigned to see anything in this but a rather ground-less discrimination, and I had to give it up. It’s probably better not to try again.∏
This is obviously a strange way of not trying again, since he seems still in 1951 to be regretful that people did not take up this distinction that was already rather suspect in 1924. And there is more. He adds in the text from 1951: ‘‘As for my sexual tastes, I have never hidden them except when they might embarrass others. Without exactly flaunting them, I have let them be apparent. This is partly because I have never thought they were such as to dishonor me.’’ So far, so good. But it is di≈cult not to be troubled upon reading, shortly thereafter, that he again feels the need to denounce others who inspire in him a disgust that he cannot stop himself from expressing—
all in order once again to attempt to legitimate his identity, to distinguish himself from those who live their homosexuality di√erently: ‘‘It is the free-and-easy, self-indulgent yielding to those tastes that dishonors’’ (161).
Reading these words it is di≈cult to understand how Gide was able to
repeat as often as he did that his books, and especially Corydon, were intended to ‘‘embarrass’’ or to ‘‘trouble.’’ (‘‘I do not want to move to pity with this book; I want to embarrass [gêner].’’)π A reader of today naturally has some di≈culty grasping how and to whom such notions could be troubling. They seem so clearly to reveal a desire to conform to the values of the dominant culture.
Yet in fact they were troubling. More than that, they provoked reactions of an extreme violence. This tends to suggest that in the eyes of its opponents, the actual content of homosexual discourse is unimportant. What is important is the act of speaking, of refusing what Adrienne Rich refers to as
‘‘compulsory heterosexuality.’’ Gide was not attacked because of the absurd things he said about pederasty. He was attacked for speaking of love between men.
This is doubtless why Gide was able to insist throughout his long career that Corydon was among all his books the one he considered the most important, the most useful, the most necessary, indeed, the most subversive, whereas it might seem to us rather far behind other texts in which he makes an e√ort to express his homosexuality. What a huge distance, for example,
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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 between the fever of The Fruits of the Earth, which he would more or less disavow, and the sti√ and a√ected tone of Corydon, whose present-day importance and future relevance he continually reiterated. It thus seems that there are two Gides when it comes to thinking about homosexuality: the Gide who strove to open literature to ‘‘homosexual’’ desire (in The Fruits of the Earth, The Immoralist, Saul, Amyntas, If It Die . . . , The Counterfeiters, and so on) and who on occasion proves amazingly audacious, and then the Gide who sets out to accomplish the laborious self-justifying enterprise that is Corydon, an enterprise that will take him over ten years, only to produce that strange song of praise to classical pederasty that e√aces any sexuality or even sensuality in favor of moral and educational duty. There is, on the one hand, the Gide who is like Wilde. On the other, there is the Gide who is like Symonds. We can’t even really speak of an evolution from the one to the other. Rather, the two seem to coexist, and to remain relatively autonomous and even to reinforce each other. One can always find in Gide—as in Proust, as we have seen—a text, a sentence, a line that will contradict or undermine the most assertorial statements contained in another text or sentence. This explains the necessity of analyzing such statements as much for the political gesture that lies behind them as for their exact content.
That the heavy-handed demonstrations in Corydon, which seem to us so dated and without interest, should be the aspect of his work that made him a trailblazer in the history of modern homosexuality is perhaps not the least of the paradoxes of Gide’s work. He was a trailblazer simply in the fact that he took a position and avoided masking it by this or that artistic detour. At the moment when it was about to be accepted that literature could take up the subject of homosexuality, it nonetheless proved scandalous that a militant discourse could see the light of day. François Porché expressed this crudely in his 1929 response to the critique Gide o√ered of his book, The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name—a book in which one rather disagreeable chapter was devoted to Gide. Porché writes: ‘‘There is a crucial di√erence between a work of art and a tendentious work, one conceived as propaganda. . . . An author rarely confuses the two. He knows perfectly well when the drive toward disinterested art has been strongly overruled by an obsessive interest in exercising some immediate influence. . . . It is that desire that I frowned upon. Corydon is nothing other than a political tract.’’∫
Even before Corydon was published, Jacques Maritain, who apparently made it a personal project to ‘‘save’’ homosexuals, had visited Gide to urge him not to commit the sacrilege of publishing the book. Gide describes the
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scene in his Journal in December 1923: ‘‘I told him that I had no intention of defending myself but that he must be aware that everything he could think of saying to me about this book I had already said to myself, and that a project that resists the trial of war, of personal losses, and of all the meditations that ensue runs the risk of being too deeply anchored in the heart and mind for an intervention like his to hope to change it.’’ Maritain leaves him with the request that he ‘‘ask Christ to let you know, directly, whether you are right or wrong to publish this book.’’ Gide replies that he cannot ‘‘agree to call on him today as one rings someone up on the telephone.’’Ω
Maritain’s pleas regarding the state of Gide’s soul were in vain. It did him no good to emphasize that it might be ‘‘dangerous’’ for Gide to publish what he imagined to be the ‘‘truth.’’ Nothing availed him. Gide was committed to his mission: ‘‘I protested . . . that this book had to be written, that I was uniquely qualified to write it, and that I could not without a sort of bank-ruptcy release myself from what I considered my duty’’ (2:339).
Gide was perhaps not wrong in imagining that his long struggle—with
himself, with his friends, with literary circles, with the world around him—
over the publication of Corydon was the struggle that had demanded the most courage of him, the most obstinate determination, the struggle in which he stood to lose the most.∞≠ In 1911, he had had twelve copies printed, which were immediately ‘‘put away’’ in a drawer from which they never emerged.∞∞
His friends had convinced him not to finish the work, which, at the time, was only made up of ‘‘the first two dialogues and the first part of the third.’’
The rest was ‘‘merely sketched.’’ Still, he emphasizes in 1920, as he prepares a new edition (of twenty or so more copies), that ‘‘the considerations I was setting forth in this little book seemed to me of the greatest importance, and I believed it necessary to present them.’’∞≤ Ten years had passed, yet Gide remained convinced that ‘‘however subversive it might seem,’’ Corydon ‘‘attacked only falsehood after all and . . . nothing is actually unhealthier, for an individual and for a society, than an accredited lie’’ (xxiii-xxiv). In 1922, when he composes the preface for what will become the commercial edition of 1924, he reiterates this point:
Ideas which at first attract and seem to dazzle us fade by the next day or soon thereafter. That is why I have waited so long to write this book and, having written it, to publish it. I wanted to be sure that what I was propounding in Corydon, and what seemed to me obvious, I would not soon have to retract. But no: my ideas
have merely been confirmed in
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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 the meanwhile, and what I now have against my book is its reserve, its timidity. . . . What I believed before the war I believe more strongly today. The indignation Corydon may provoke will not keep me from believing that what I say here must be said. Not that I believe one
should say all that one thinks, and say it no matter when—but precisely what I am saying here must be said, and must be said today. (xx)
In 1942, he made a remark in his Journal concerning the posterity of his work: ‘‘ Corydon remains in my opinion the most important of my books; but it is also the one with which I find the most fault. . . . I believe I said in that book just about everything I had to say on this most important subject that had not been said before me; but I reproach myself with not having said it as I should have done. None the less, certain attentive minds will manage to discover it there later on.’’ He makes a similar remark again in 1946, when he mentions the possibility of his election to the Académie Française: ‘‘The Academy? . . . Yes, perhaps, accept becoming a member if I can do it without making solicitations, groveling, paying visits, etc. And immediately after-ward, as my first act as an Immortal, a preface to Corydon, declaring that I consider that book to be the most important and the most serviceable of my writings.’’∞≥
In 1949, during his recorded conversations with Jean Amrouche, he re-
turns once again to ‘‘the capital importance that will little by little be recognized’’ in this text. He insists: ‘‘Not only do I not regret writing this book, but at the moment during which I was writing it I had no idea how right I was to be writing it, and this is why my manner in writing it was a bit timid and ironical.’’ He also recalls that he had written Corydon out of a ‘‘kind of moral obligation.’’ ‘‘I considered that it was indispensable for me to say these things, things only I could say.’’
Amrouche asks him: ‘‘Was the drama of Oscar Wilde an incitation to
write this book?’’
Gide replies: ‘‘Yes, of course, among other things.’’∞∂
12
The ‘‘Preoccupation with Homosexuality’
One might say that Gide decided to publish Corydon because the necessary conditions had been met so that such a book could be published. In 1922, Proust had published Cities of the Plain ( Sodome et Gomorrhe), a book that brought more public attention to homosexuality than had perhaps even been the case during the period of the Eulenburg a√air. Around the same moment, Roger Martin du Gard—perhaps the only one of Gide’s friends who did not try to dissuade him from publishing his dialogues—notes in his Journal that ‘‘the books of Proust, the movement of ideas in Germany and in Italy . . . the theories of Freud will all bring about very quickly a moment when one will regard with a completely di√erent eye sexual deviance; there will no longer be anything courageous about throwing o√ the mask.’’∞
Yet surely Gide was not only concerned about being overtaken by changing ideas and changing mores. He also wanted to dispute the medicalized representations of homosexuality that were being propagated by Hirschfeld and by Proust. Hirschfeld’s motives were those of an activist. (His motto was Per scientiam ad justiciam, ‘‘Through Science, Justice.’’) Proust’s goals, on the other hand, were literary and his portrayals derogatory. Clearly the great di√erence between Proust and Gide as regards homosexuality, or as regards the relation of their work to homosexuality, is that Gide speaks either implicitly or explicitly as a homosexual (thus the necessity to ennoble homosexuality by transforming it into pederasty), whereas Proust speaks as if he were heterosexual. In one case, the task is to describe in the manner of an apologia the makeup of the personality and the emotions of the person who is writing. In the other case, it is a question of revealing—either comically or tragically—novelistic characters who are apparently subject to observation by a ‘‘moralist.’’ In a note to the preface to Corydon that is dated November 1922,
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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 Gide explains what it is that in his eyes justifies his public intervention despite all the objections of his friends:
Certain books—Proust’s in particular—have accustomed the public to
be less alarmed by, and to consider more deliberately—what it pre-
viously pretended or preferred to ignore. For how many of us suppose
they can suppress what they ignore! . . . But such books have greatly contributed, I fear, to our current confusion. The theory of the woman-man, of the Sexuelle Zwischenstufen (intermediate degrees of sexuality) advanced by Dr. Hirschfeld in Germany quite some time before the
war—and which Marcel Proust appears to accept—may well be true
enough; but that theory explains and concerns only certain cases of
homosexuality, precisely those with which this book does not deal—
cases of inversion, of e√eminacy, of sodomy. And I realize today that one of my book’s shortcomings is in fact its failure to deal with them, for they turn out to be much more frequent than I previously supposed.
Even granting that Hirschfeld’s theory accounts for these cases, his
‘‘third sex’’ argument certainly cannot explain what we habitually call
‘‘Greek love’’: pederasty—in which e√eminacy is neither here nor there.
(xx)
Caught o√-guard by the evidence that ‘‘inverts’’ and ‘‘e√eminate’’ men are more numerous than he had believed when he began writing the book in
1908, caught o√-guard as well by the appearance of activist or literary discourses on homosexuality, Gide makes it clear that he intends for his voice to be heard in the defense of a point of view that could only seem outdated given both the audacities of Proust and the expanding visibility of a gay subculture in Paris, one no one could miss—one that was immortalized by Brassaï in a famous series of photographs from the early 1930s.≤ Perhaps it was also because Gide was so fully aware that the image made available by the presence and visibility of this gay culture was the one from which he was so eager to distance himself that he became so insistent that pederasty had nothing to do with the ‘‘monsters’’ portrayed by Proust or with the individuals in drag or the more ostentatious inverts who could be found in the cabarets and the balls of the time. Also we should at this point be wary of an understanding of the transformations within gay culture or within representations of homosexuality that is too evolutionary, that conveys too much a sense of some ‘‘progress’’ being involved in which older forms are relegated to the past. After all, the construct that Gide was defending has perhaps
‘‘ p r e o c c u pat i o n w i t h h o m o s e x ua l i t y ’’
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never entirely disappeared. It continued to coexist with new ways of being homosexual or of thinking oneself to be such. The history of homosexuality is not an evolution from one representation to another, one manner of being to another. It is the unstable and often conflictual cohabitation of ways of life, images, and discourses that have no stability and no coherence either individually or among themselves.
It is amusing to note, for example, that even though Gide rejected outright all of Hirschfeld’s theses, he insisted on visiting Hirschfeld’s Institute (devoted to research on sexuality) during a trip to Berlin a few years after Corydon was published. Christopher Isherwood was there that day and describes the Francophobic impulse he experienced upon witnessing this
‘‘sneering, culture-conceited frog’’ looking about with a haughty smile on his face, ‘‘judiciously fingering his chin.’’ Isherwood immediately did a mental about-face: ‘‘Suddenly he loved Hirschfeld—at whom he himself had been sneering, a moment before—the silly solemn old professor with his doggy mustache.’’≥
We might note that Gide, in his way of opposing himself to Hirschfeld, startlingly resembles the ‘‘masculinist’’ tende
ncy within the German homosexual movement, one which preached more or less the same themes found in Corydon: a ‘‘bisexuality’’ based on the one hand on masculine friendships that fall within the pederastic framework and, on the other, heterosexual marriages destined to reproduce the species.∂ In opposition to the idea of a ‘‘third sex,’’ for instance, Benedict Friedländer became the advocate for pederastic relations that took place alongside family life, and Adolf Brand set up an opposition between ‘‘the Greek side of things’’ and Hirschfeld’s theories. If we are considering only the description of Greek culture or of the redeeming potential of male sociability for civilization, the texts of these German ‘‘masculinist’’ theorists are more or less identical to those of Symonds or Gide.
Brandt and his collaborators on the journal Der Eigene thought that by insisting on the idea of a third sex Hirschfeld was limiting homosexuality to a minority definition, one dictated by nature, and was rendering it impossible to imagine propagating homosexuality or homoeroticism throughout
the social body, a propagation that was the basis of their idea of social reform.∑ This universalizing conception made for a much more radical calling into question of the heterosexual norm than the one contained in the minoritizing conception of Hirschfeld. It was nonetheless still based on the
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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 absolute principle of male domination. This universalizing conception also reached in the direction of certain other ideological currents developing at that time in Germany, currents that were at the opposite end of the spectrum from the socialist and progressive views of Hirschfeld, and were also quite distant from the opinions of Gide and Symonds. Symonds, as we have seen, belonged to an intellectual tradition of liberal and democratic social reform.
Gide, in the 1920s and 1930s, was very clearly engaged on the left and involved in anticolonial struggles.∏
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 33