Herve Guibert: Voices of the Self (Liverpool University Press - Modern French Writers)

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self Jean-Pierre Boule´ HERVE´ GUIBERT: VOICES OF THE SELF Translated from the French ...

Author: Jean-Pierre Boule

37 downloads 549 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

Jean-Pierre Boule´

HERVE´ GUIBERT: VOICES OF THE SELF Translated from the French by PROFESSOR J . FLETCHER

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

First published 1999 by LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS Liverpool L69 3BX # 1999 Jean-Pierre Boule´ Translation # Liverpool University Press The right of Jean-Pierre Boule´ to be identiﬁed as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this volume may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the publishers. The Photograph on the front cover is ‘Des Aveugles’ (‘Blindsight’) courtesy Hans Georg Berger Agence Vu (Paris) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 0–85323–861–8 (hardback) 0–85323–871–5 (paperback) Typeset in 11/13 pt Sabon by Wilmaset Ltd, Birkenhead, Wirral Printed by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow

To Annabell and Zoe´

Table of Contents Acknowledgements

viii

List of Abbreviations

x

Introduction

1

1 Youthful Writings

13

2 Photographic Writing

41

3 Towards the Novel

71

4 Image and Text

101

5 The ‘Novel’

123

6 ‘Autobiography’

145

7 Towards the roman faux

159

8 The roman faux

191

9 Thanatographical Writing

207

10 The Fictitious, the Fake or the Delirious

235

Conclusion

265

Notes

271

Bibliography

307

Index of Names

313

Index of Notes

315 vii

Acknowledgements I should like to thank the general editor of the ‘Modern French Writers’ series, Edmund Smyth, whose professionalism is matched only by his learning, for the interest he has shown in my work; the publisher, Robin Bloxsidge, for his unstinting support; the Department of Modern Languages at Nottingham Trent University, who granted me sabbatical leave to write this book; and Christine Guibert, who gave me permission to quote unpublished material from Herve´ Guibert’s manuscripts at the Institut Me´moires de l’E´dition Contemporaine, IMEC (‘La Liste noire’; Des Aveugles; Mes parents; Adultes; Le Protocole compassionnel; Le Paradis). I have been privileged to have John Fletcher as my translator; he has made an excellent job of the translation. Without the continual support of Annabell and Zoe´, who put up with my being immersed in Guibert virtually every day, this book would never have been written.

‘Avoir le courage de soi, de se dire, de se montrer et de laisser couler tous les secrets, d’en inventer.’ Herve´ Guibert, La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La Chair fraıˆche, p. 77. (‘To have the courage to be oneself, to say oneself, to show oneself and to let all the secrets ﬂow, to invent some.’)

‘Pour l’autobiographe, comme pour n’importe quel e´crivain, rien, pas meˆme sa propre vie, n’existe avant son texte; mais la vie de son texte, c’est sa vie dans son texte. Pour n’importe quel e´crivain [. . .] le mouvement et la forme meˆme de la scription sont la seule inscription de soi possible, la vraie ‘‘trace’’ inde´le´bile et arbitraire, a` la fois entie`rement fabrique´e et authentiquement ﬁde`le.’ Serge Doubrovsky, ‘L’initiative aux maux. E´crire sa psychanalyse’, Cahiers Confrontations, No. 1 (Spring 1979), p. 105. (‘For the autobiographer, as for any writer, nothing, not even his own life, exists before his text; but the life of his text is his life in his text. For any writer [. . .] the movement and the very form of the scription are the only self inscription possible, the true, indelible and arbitrary ‘‘trace’’, at once entirely made up and authentically faithful’)

List of Abbreviations A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie* AS Les Aventures singulie`res Av. Des Aveugles C Les Chiens Cyto. Cytome´galovirus F Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes FV Fou de Vincent G Les Gangsters HB L’Homme blesse´ HCR L’Homme au chapeau rouge I L’Incognito IF L’Image fantoˆme LA Les Lubies d’Arthur LE´ Lettres d’E´gypte Mes Mes parents MP La Mort propagande MV Mauve le vierge P Le Paradis PA La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La Chair fraıˆche PC Le Protocole compassionnel Photo. Photographies SL Suzanne et Louise SV Le Seul Visage V Vice Val. Mon valet et moi VD Vole mon dragon Voy. Voyage avec deux enfants Ami

To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life The Strange Adventures Blindsight The Dogs Cytomegalovirus You Made Me Imagine Phantoms Obsessed with Vincent The Gangsters The Wounded Man The Man in the Red Hat The Incognito The Phantom Image** Arthur’s Fads Letters from Egypt My Parents Propaganda Death Mauve the Virgin Paradise The Love Injection and other texts followed by Fresh Meat The Compassion Protocol Photographs Suzanne and Louise The Only Face Vice My Valet and I Fly My Dragon Journey With Two Children

*A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie is abbreviated in the text as A` l’ami. **The English translation has since appeared as Ghost Image. Except in the case of La Mort propagande, where the 1991 enlarged edition is used, page numbers refer to the text of the ﬁrst edition. The drawback with the Folio paperback reprints is that the pagination is often no longer the same. x

Introduction ‘Quelque part, j’avais e´crit dans mon journal, avant de savoir que j´e´tais malade: ‘‘Mort du sida. Indication superbe d’une biographie’’ ’1 (‘Somewhere I had written in my diary, before knowing that I was ill, ‘‘Died of AIDS. Superb note to strike for a biography’’ ’). This sentence sums up perfectly the writer Herve´ Guibert’s complete attitude to the disease. In imagining himself dead he can already see the advantages held out to a biographer by the circumstances of his death. There is never any question of wallowing in self-pity over his own fate: in transcending his condition, in reaching towards the ﬁctional enterprise which is what biography is all about, he rejoices in the idea of such an inscription. Herve´ Guibert died on 27 December 1991. He had tried to commit suicide in the night of 12 to 13 December 1991. That date no doubt meant a lot to him. Having been born on 14 December 1955, he probably did not wish to see his thirty-sixth birthday. Fate decided otherwise; he survived another 14 days in hospital. Herve´ Guibert had got AIDS. He had said so in a book called A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie (Ami), published in 1990. This book made him famous and brought him to general public attention, especially after his appearance on television on 16 March 1990 in the books programme ‘Apostrophes’. A whiﬀ of scandal surrounded the publication of A` l’ami: Guibert had made ‘revelations’ about a certain ‘Muzil’ in whom everyone thought they recognised Michel Foucault, and his sales leapt from 5,000 to 150,000 copies. The same happened with Le Protocole compassionnel (PC), published in 1991, when he again appeared on television, this time as the only guest on the books programme ‘Ex Libris’ on 7 March 1991. Three other books appeared in his lifetime (including a new edition of a previously published work); they were followed by posthumous writings and by ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ (‘Modesty or Immodesty’), a ﬁlm shown on TF1, the main French television channel, on 30 January 1992. But there is more to Herve´ Guibert than A` l’ami, which was after all his seventeenth book. He had already been widely talked about, particularly over L’Homme blesse´ (HB) which had upset both the 1

2

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

homosexual community and heterosexual people (the scenario had nonetheless won a ‘Ce´sar’2), as well as over Des Aveugles (Av.) which had started a public debate about whether blind people should be cared for within the communnity or receive separate treatment. He had also caused a scandal with books like Les Chiens (C). In fact he reported that Marguerite Duras’s dislike of the book was such that she threatened to leave the E´ditions de Minuit if Je´roˆme Lindon went on publishing him.3 Herve´ Guibert was a multi-talented individual. He was a photographer, a journalist, a writer, a photographic critic, a script-writer and a video-maker. He wanted above all to be a ﬁlm-maker. Having failed the Conservatoire and the entrance examination for the IDHEC (Institut des Hautes E´tudes Cine´matographiques, the French school for ﬁlm-makers) in 1973, he began writing ﬁlm reviews for various magazines, such as Cine´ma, Had, Les Nouvelles litte´raires, 20 ans and Combat. In 1977 his ﬁrst book, La Mort propagande (MP), was published. He then wrote a stage play Suzanne et Louise (SL) which he read at the Gueuloir in Avignon, and then wrote an article about the experience which he sent to Le Monde. The article was accepted and he took over the column in the paper called ‘Photographies’, an assignment which lasted until 1985. In 1978 he took a series of photographs called Les Coulisses du muse´e Gre´vin and Suzanne et Louise, Bribes for an exhibition the following year at the Remise du Parc. Photography and writing went hand in hand until his death, most strikingly in the case of Le Seul visage (SV) in 1984. From 1979 to 1982 he wrote regularly for the literary review Minuit, later reprinting several of his contributions in book form. As one publication followed another, he and Patrice Che´reau co-scripted a ﬁlm, L’Homme blesse´, which was selected as one of France’s entries in the Cannes Film Festival in 1983. Having had to give up writing for the cultural pages of Le Monde, he contributed a column entitled ‘Photo + texte’ to L’Autre Journal in 1985 and 1986. He was awarded a bursary to stay at the Villa Me´dicis, the French Academy house in Rome, from 1987 to 1989, and in 1990 he published A` l’ami. Since January 1988 Guibert had known that he was HIV positive, and he spoke openly of his condition on the book programme ‘Apostrophes’ and in interviews. He lived for another two years; he went on writing books and travelling abroad until his death in the Becle`re Hospital at Clamart near Paris.4 The question that arises is how best to approach Guibert’s work. In a previous study, Herve´ Guibert: A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie

Introduction

3

and Other Writings,5 I dealt with the themes of literary creation and expression, the writing of the body, Eros and Thanatos, and deception and betrayal. But then in an interview Guibert had disclosed that ‘Ce livre [A` l’ami] n’est pas un testament, mais c’est un livre qui donne des cle´s pour comprendre ce qu’il y avait dans tous les autres livres et que parfois je ne comprenais pas moi-meˆme’ (‘This book [A` l’ami] is not a testament but a book that supplies keys to an understanding of what was in all the other books and which I did not always understand myself’).6 And in talking of his work the narrator of Le Protocole compassionnel makes matters clear: ‘[Mes livres] sont traverse´s, entre autres choses, par la ve´rite´ et le mensonge, la trahison, par ce the`me de la me´chancete´ . . .’ (PC, pp. 112–13) (‘My books are permeated, amongst other things, with truth and falsehood, with betrayal, with the theme of nastiness . . .’). So while not sticking too rigidly to the concept, I consider it prudent to bear this thematic thread in mind as each text is considered in turn. The book’s structure reﬂects this. So as to be able to get to grips with the way the ‘voices of the self’ evolve and develop in Guibert’s work, I have adopted a chronological approach based on a reading that follows the traditional literary genres (novel, short story, stage play, novella, and so on), if only to make the point that Guibert’s work does not conform to them, or rather sits awkwardly with them. He goes so far as to practise an original genre in some of his books (I call these romans faux or ‘fake novels’7), and then to create an entirely new genre, ‘existential thanatography’, using as his vehicle the ﬁlm ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ (see Chapter 9). In two instances the chronological pattern will not be adhered to, ﬁrstly in that of Mes parents (Mes) and secondly in that of Cytome´galovirus (Cyto.): Mes Parents will be studied after Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes (F) so that the two books by Guibert which correspond most closely to his ‘novel’ project can be dealt with in the same chapter, and Cytome´galovirus will be included in the chapter on thanatographic writing, since it reﬂects a concern to write as closely as possible to death. There is one category of Guibert’s writings that will not be examined systematically by me, and that is his journalism, not because it would not beneﬁt from close study, but because, consisting as it does of articles written every day, on commission, to a particular wordlength, it lacks the stature of the creative writing as far as my book is concerned.8 That said, I will not let it stop me from referring to the odd article as I go along where doing so will enable me to show how the

4

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

creative eﬀort deployed by Guibert in his creative writing runs parallel to these journalistic pieces. As a preliminary, before starting to explore the various avenues leading into the world of Herve´ Guibert, I ﬁrst need to sketch in broad outline a reply to the question of what his conception of literary creation is. The ﬁrst point to be made is that, just like Montaigne, he is himself the subject of the book he is writing. When Pascale Breugnot, a television producer on TF1, France’s main commercial channel, asks him whether he is prepared to ﬁlm himself with the aid of a camcorder ‘en re´alisant un ﬁlm dont vous seriez a` la fois l’auteur et le sujet’ (PC, p. 174) (‘making a ﬁlm of which you would at one and the same time be both the author and the subject’), the narrator replies ‘La formule n’e´tait pas mal choisie: a` la limite je n’avais jamais fait que cela, a` part quelques incartades vers la ﬁction’ (ibid.) (‘That was not a bad way of putting it: at a pinch I had never done anything else, apart from a few forays into ﬁction’). It is clear already at the outset that the boundaries between author and subject are blurred and that this deﬁnition is one that the narrator is prepared to apply to virtually the whole of his work. Guibert clariﬁed these remarks further in an interview to mark the publication of Des Aveugles, when he acknowledged: ‘Quand j’ai commence´ a` e´crire, lorsque j’e´tais adolescent, j’ai e´prouve´ beaucoup de diﬃculte´s a` raconter une histoire. Je n’arrivais pas a` imaginer d’autres personnages que moi’ (‘When I started writing, in adolescence, I experienced a lot of diﬃculty in telling a story. I could not get round the problem of imagining characters other than myself’).9 The source of his writings is the diary he kept from 1978 onwards. This is how Guibert himself explained the process of literary creation: Tre`s souvent un e´crit naıˆ t parce qu’il y a, a` l’inte´rieur du journal, un the`me ou un personnage qui, devenant trop insistant, de´se´quilibrait ou brisait cet e´quilibre quotidien [. . .] Mes parents, par exemple, est en partie sorti du journal; Fou de Vincent inte´gralement. Mes livres sont des appendices et le journal la colonne verte´brale, la chose essentielle.10 (Very often a piece of writing is born because there is, within the diary, a theme or character which, by becoming too insistent, was upsetting or disrupting this daily equilibrium [. . .] My Parents, for instance, came in part from the diary; ‘Obsessed With Vincent’ wholly so. My books are appendices and the diary is the backbone, the essential thing.)

There is in Le Protocole compassionnel a sentence which neatly gives the game away on this point: ‘C’est quand ce que j’e´cris prend la forme d’un journal que j’ai la plus grande impression de ﬁction’ (PC, p. 87) (‘It is when what I am writing takes the form of a diary that I have the

Introduction

5

greatest impression of ﬁction’). What is important to note here is that the diary becomes synonymous with ﬁction. A rare instance of Guibert reﬂecting theoretically about literary creation occurs in a text of 1983 entitled ‘Le roman fantoˆme’ (La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La Chair fraıˆche, pp. 129–32). The signiﬁcance of this passage is such that it deserves being quoted in full: Je n’ai pas choisi d’e´crire des romans, ou des nouvelles, ou des poe`mes, plus que des contes ou des billets amoureux. J’ai choisi de raconter des histoires, le plus directement possible, comme de vive voix on les rapporte a` un ami, et d’y mettre un terme une fois qu’elles sont termine´es. (PA, p. 129) (I did not choose to write novels, or short stories, or poems, any more than fairy tales or love letters. I chose to tell stories, in the most direct way possible, as one conveys them in person to a friend, and to put an end to them once they were ﬁnished.)

‘The most direct way possible’ is the phrase to bear in mind, since Guibert was also a photographer who was used to the immediacy of photography. Moreover, he continued his reﬂections on the literary act by noting that he always wrote in a hurry, in the heat of the amorous moment and through lack of time because of his work in journalism. The fact that a freelance is paid by the article (‘by weight’, as it were) sets up a rather particular relationship between this sort of work and creative writing. As a journalist Guibert had to discipline his style (‘[. . .] la brie`vete´, la hantise des re´pe´titions, et [. . .] les longueurs exige´es par cette profession: de deux a` six feuillets’ [ibid.]) (‘[. . .] brevity, the obsession with repetition, and [. . .] the word lengths demanded by the profession: between two and six pages’). There follow reﬂections upon the novel which reveal on Guibert’s part a rather particular conception of it. Having ﬁnished the longest book he ever wrote, Les Lubies d’Arthur (LA), which bears the subtitle ‘roman’ (‘novel’), Guibert then started reading the Russian writer Isaac Babel, who wrote only short texts, and began wondering whether there was any point in going in for length. Continuing in this vein he writes: ‘Le reˆve du roman est un peu un reˆve de mort [. . .]’ (p. 131) (‘The dream of the novel is to some extent a dream of death [. . .]’). Here we encounter Thanatos again in a guise which, as we shall see in the coming chapters, is quite characteristic of Guibert’s work. So far as he is concerned, ‘le roman est la forme imparfaite par excellence, celle dont le labeur, au bout du compte, requiert le bousillage, la monstruosite´’ (p. 132) (‘the novel is the imperfect form par excellence,

6

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

whose toil of writing is best accomplished, in the end, by being botched, by committing atrocities’).11 As these few remarks make clear, it would not be reasonable to expect any opus produced by Herve´ Guibert to be of the conventional sort, and it is legitimate to wonder where he can be placed in the French literary tradition. A partial, preliminary answer is that Guibert himself had no wish to belong to or to be associated with any school. In his discussion of the problem of aﬃliation, Edmund Smyth stresses that the way Guibert intervenes personally in his ﬁctional works sets him apart from the ‘formalist’ schools such as the nouveau roman and the Tel Quel enterprise.12 Nevertheless, nine of his books (if the ﬁlm script for L’Homme blesse´ is included) were published between 1981 and 1989 by Minuit, the nouveau roman publisher. Moreover, he was involved in 13 issues of the review Minuit; the ‘texts’ or ‘narratives’ ﬁrst published there were later collected in other works. As Henk Hillenaar puts it in an article on Guibert which is part of a study called Jeunes Auteurs de Minuit, ‘le ‘‘je’’ autobiographique et romanesque qui me`ne le jeu chez Guibert ne semble nulle part mieux a` sa place qu’au milieu des jeunes auteurs de Minuit dont il partage le narcissisme, le gouˆt du fragment et le culte de l’acte d’e´crire’ (‘the autobiographical and ﬁctional ‘‘I’’ who calls the tune in Guibert appears nowhere more at home than in the midst of the young Minuit authors whose narcissism, taste for the fragment and cult of the act of writing he shares’).13 Hillenaar goes on to diﬀerentiate Guibert from the postmoderns, maintaining that he does not necessarily reject all notion of a ﬁxed, readily speciﬁable self, but is more interested in the unveiling of the self: ‘Structuralisme et poststructuralisme ne sont pas son fait, meˆme si par ailleurs sa pratique litte´raire, fragmente´e et ennemie de toute ide´ologie, pourrait eˆtre conside´re´e comme un beau spe´cimen de production poststructuraliste’ (‘Structuralism and poststructuralism are not his cup of tea, even if otherwise his literary practice, fragmented and hostile to all ideology, could be considered a ﬁne specimen of a poststructuralist production’).14 That in particular was what Owen Heathcote had in mind when he wrote that Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes is ‘le roman postmoderne de l’e´rotique’ (‘the postmodern novel of the erotic’).15 Another part of the answer to the question of Guibert’s place in the French literary tradition lies in a consideration of his working methods and in the realisation that for him intertextuality takes precedence over everything else, not only at the level of the published works, but also of all the art-forms he uses: ﬁlm, photography, drawing, video and, of

Introduction

7

course, literature. In my introduction to the special issue of Nottingham French Studies, Herve´ Guibert, I quoted the text by Roland Barthes on the death of the author16 to stress the fact that Guibert’s work heralded the resurrection of the author.17 It has to be said that this text by Barthes, necessary in its time, had become a literary straitjacket and that one of the signal merits of Herve´ Guibert’s work is to have ignored this restraint. This was well understood by Raymond Bellour, who from the very beginning was perhaps Guibert’s most intuitive critic, when a` propos of contemporary literature he spoke of ‘une phase un peu nouvelle, et des plus inte´ressantes, selon laquelle les rapports de la vie et de l’oeuvre seraient inde´cidables’ (‘a new and particularly interesting phase in which the relationship between life and the work becomes blurred’),18 whereas modern criticism is willing solely to acknowledge in the work the disappearance of the writer.19 Bellour’s reading of Les Gangsters (G) leads him to make the following observation: ‘Si la sensation [de ﬁction] est inde´cidable, le re´cit l’est pareillement, qu’il parle en ‘‘il’’ or en ‘‘je’’, qu’il emprunte la voix du romanesque ou celle de l’autobiographie. Il se situe pre´cise´ment au point de brouillage des deux, il les fait cohabiter, avivant, annulant leur diﬀe´rence’ (‘If the feeling [of ﬁction] is undecidable, the narrative is likewise, whether it speaks as ‘‘he’’ or ‘‘I’’, whether it assumes the voice of the ﬁctional or that of autobiography. Its site is precisely the point of interference between the two, it leads them to cohabit, exacerbating and cancelling their diﬀerence’).20 Mathieu Lindon (another author published by Minuit and a friend and reader of Guibert, indeed his ﬁrst reader21) says about him: ‘[. . .] le rapport particulier qu’il a instaure´ entre son existence et ses livres caracte´rise son travail d’e´crivain, justiﬁant donc qu’on preˆte aussi attention a` celle-ci’ (‘[. . .] the special relationship he established between his life and his books is characteristic of his work as a writer and is the justiﬁcation for paying attention to the former as well’).22 Therefore I too reserve the right, in the chapters that follow, to use this privilege without, I hope, incurring the wrath of certain critics. I could not possibly claim that the man and the work are one and the same, but in Guibert’s case the two are intimately connected and the closeness of the link between them forms part of his conception of literature. Similarly several of Guibert’s books can be seen as intertexts which complement and cross-refer to each other. For example, on the back cover of Le Protocole compassionnel a text signed by Herve´ Guibert informs us that ‘c’est tout bonnement la suite de A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie . . .’ (‘it is quite simply the

8

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

sequel to To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life . . .’), and a passage from Le Protocole compassionnel (PC, p. 172) was later used on the back cover of the revised edition of La Mort propagande. The metaphor of the diﬀerent doors into Guibert’s work which A` l’ami is there to help us unlock can be extended to show that these doors often connect. Guibert makes the same point in a text called ‘L’ours’ (‘The Bear’) (PA, pp. 139–48), quoting something once said by one of his friends: Les livres sont lie´s les uns aux autres, bien suˆr. Un jour un ami me dit: ‘Ce que je pre´fe`re dans ce que tu fais, c’est le lien que tu donnes a` tes livres. C’est comme une maison: il y a ta chambre, et puis il y a la chambre de l’ami, la chambre de tes grand-tantes, et puis des corridors qui relient toutes ces pie`ces.’ (p. 147) (The books are linked together, of course. A friend said to me one day: ‘What I like most about what you do is the way you make links between your books. It’s like a house: there is your room, then the guest room, your great-aunts’ room, and then corridors linking all these rooms up.)

But a fully comprehensive answer to the question of Guibert’s place in the French literary tradition will have to wait: it will emerge over the following chapters as each text is studied in turn and we see what inﬂuences can be discerned and what writers and texts Guibert himself quotes in the paratexts. In doing so we will need to bear in mind the way in which he ‘cannibalises’ the authors he admires. He himself uses the more elegant term ‘phagocytage’ in ‘Apostrophes’, ‘Ex Libris’ and in A` l’ami, in which he declares with reference to Thomas Bernhard: ‘. . . la me´tastase bernhardienne s’est propage´e a` vitesse grand V dans mes tissus et mes re´ﬂexes vitaux d’e´criture, elle la phagocyte, elle l’absorbe, la captive . . .’ (Ami, p. 216) (‘. . . the Bernhardian metastasis has spread with a rapidity spelt with a big R in my tissues and vital writerly reﬂexes, it phagocytes my writing, absorbs it, holds it in thrall . . .’). We can nonetheless list straight away those authors who, according to Guibert himself, have been particularly inﬂuential: A` partir de l’enfance dans l’ordre: Enyd [sic] Blyton, Georges Chaulet (l’auteur des Fantoˆmette [. . .]), Maurice Leblanc et Gaston Leroux, Edgar Poe¨ [. . .] Le Mur de Sartre [. . .] L’Enfance d’un chef [. . .] je devais avoir douze ans et demi; j’ai de´couvert que la sexualite´ e´tait un captivant facteur de re´cit [. . .] Bataille, Sade, Genet, Guyotat et Duvert.23 (From childhood onwards in the following order: Enid Blyton, Georges Chaulet (author of the Fantoˆmette books [. . .]), Maurice Leblanc and Gaston Leroux, Edgar Allan Poe [. . .] The Wall by Sartre [. . .] The Childhood of a Leader [. . .] I must have been about twelve and a half; I discovered that

Introduction

9

sexuality was an enthralling factor in narrative [. . .] Bataille, Sade, Genet, Guyotat and Duvert.)

In a recent article Ralph Sarkonak sees a parallel between some of Guibert’s books and the term ‘(auto)ﬁction’.24 This term deserves closer scrutiny, having been used by Serge Doubrovsky in Fils25 in his reﬂection upon the diﬀerent categories suggested by Philippe Lejeune to describe novels and autobiographies.26 Lejeune classiﬁed these under two headings, ‘le pacte romanesque’ (‘the ﬁctional pact’) and ‘le pacte autobiographique’ (‘the autobiographical pact’). Taking the case of his own writings, Doubrovsky notes that they fall into a category which Lejeune claims contains no actual example (‘Le he´ros d’un roman de´clare´ tel peut-il avoir le meˆme nom que l’auteur? Rien n’empeˆcherait la chose d’exister [. . .] mais dans la pratique, aucun exemple ne se pre´sente a` l’esprit d’une telle recherche’27) (‘Can the hero of a novel which claims to be such have the same name as the author? There is nothing to prevent it happening [. . .] but in practice, no example of such a thing springs to mind’). On the back cover of Fils we read: ‘Fiction, d’e´ve´nements et de faits strictement re´els; si l’on veut, autoﬁction, d’avoir conﬁe´ le langage d’une aventure a` l’aventure du langage, hors sagesse et hors syntaxe du roman, traditionnel ou nouveau’ (‘Fiction, from strictly real events and facts; autoﬁction if you like, from having entrusted the language of an adventure to the adventure of language, outside the wisdom and outside the syntax of the novel, be it traditional or new novel’). Doubrovsky takes the matter up again in ‘Autobiographie/Ve´rite´/Psychanalyse’,28 admitting that he only wrote ‘roman’ (‘novel’) on the front cover because he had to, since his initials, his ﬁrst names, his surname, and the ‘I’ of the narrator are all his,29 and stressing that ‘lieux et dates ont e´te´ maniaquement ve´riﬁe´s [. . .] fausse ﬁction, qui est l’histoire d’une vraie vie’30 (‘places and dates have been checked and rechecked [. . .] false ﬁction, that is the story of a true life’). So, in Guibert’s case, are we dealing with autoﬁction or autobiography? In an article entitled ‘La perversite´, si simple et si douce’ (‘Perversity, so simple and so gentle’), Mathieu Lindon compares Herve´ Guibert and Euge`ne Savitzkaya31 and puts his ﬁnger on Guibert’s distinctiveness when he says: ‘Herve´ Guibert e´crit ‘‘je’’ et le lecteur le croit: le narrateur est bien l’auteur, ses livres sont autobiographiques’32 (‘Herve´ Guibert writes ‘‘I’’ and the reader believes him: the narrator is indeed the author, his books are autobiographical’). That would correspond in principle to Lejeune’s description of the category of autobiography. Lindon admits as much when he writes: ‘Tout se passe

10

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

comme si l’auteur lui-meˆme jouait le jeu de l’autobiographie [. . .] aucun fait ne peut atte´nuer le caracte`re autobiographique de ses textes.’33 (‘It is as if the author himself were playing the autobiographical game [. . .] no fact can lessen the autobiographical character of his texts.’) But the awkward fact is that, apart from Mes parents, most of Guibert’s other works bear the generic subtitle ‘novel’. So are we dealing here with autoﬁctions, as Sarkonak maintains? My answer to this question is no, for two reasons. Firstly, Lindon goes on to say that he imagines Guibert making a number of changes, adjustments and transformations: all is not scrupulously exact and veriﬁed as Doubrovsky says is done in the case of his autoﬁctions. To take an example, Bellour was able to check with reference to L’Homme au chapeau rouge that there was no article on Vigo with a photograph of Lena in the 13 October 1990 issue of L’Aurore. On the other hand, there were in the same issue ‘models’ of Vigo and Lena.34 According to Lindon, what strikes Guibert’s reader is the fact that he seems to have a passion for falsehood and that ‘il jouit de son e´criture trompeuse . . . on joue beaucoup des rapports entre la ve´rite´ et la ﬁction: qui peut dire ce qui se passe vraiment dans un texte?’35 (‘he gets pleasure from being deceitful in his writing . . . much play is made with the relationship between truth and ﬁction: who can say what really happens in a text?’) Widening the discussion to embrace both writers, Lindon goes on: [. . .] ils nous trompent. Ils ont pactise´ avec le romanesque, ils ont choisi d’eˆtre honneˆtes avec le mensonge [. . .] Le roman d’enfance et l’autobiographie leur paraissent si e´videmment respectables qu’on les rattache volontiers a` ces genres, dont ils ne respectent absolument pas les re`gles [. . .] et l’autre dit si souvent ‘je’ qu’on ne remarque plus que le pronom ne de´signe quelquefois qu’un narrateur.36 ([. . .] they deceive us. They have struck a compromise with the ﬁctional and have chosen to be honest with untruthfulness [. . .] The novel of childhood and autobiography seem to them so obviously respectable that they are apt to be associated with these genres, the rules of which they have absolutely no respect for [. . .] and the other says ‘I’ so often that it is no longer noticed that the pronoun sometimes refers to a narrator only.)

As this text appeared in 1982, Lindon cannot here be alluding to Mes parents; the books by Guibert on which his discussion is based end with Les Aventures singulie`res (AS) and Les Chiens. Secondly, I ﬁnd Vincent Colonna’s deﬁnition of autoﬁction particularly apposite: ‘Une autoﬁction est une oeuvre litte´raire par laquelle un e´crivain s’invente une personnalite´ et une existence, tout en

Introduction

11

conservant son identite´ re´elle (son ve´ritable nom)’37 (‘An autoﬁction is a literary work by which a writer invents a personality and an existence for himself while keeping his true identity [his real name]’). If this deﬁnition is applied, there is also a book by Guibert in which the name of the protagonist ‘Lenoir’ is diﬀerent from the name of the author Herve´ Guibert (L’Incognito (I)], without it making the book (the novel?) unashamedly autobiographical.38 So it is clear that Guibert’s books, while still being labelled novels, seem to stand half-way between autobiography and autoﬁction. His readers are not taken in, since, as I have said elsewhere, ‘Il semble que le lecteur lise les romans de Guibert comme des autobiographies et son autobiographie comme un roman’39 (‘It appears that the reader reads Guibert’s novels as autobiographies and his autobiography as a novel’). In an interview published during the winter of 1984, Guibert was asked if his writings could be said to be autobiographical.40 At ﬁrst he agreed that they could—‘Leur point de de´part l’a e´te´ d’abord dans la mesure ou` ils sont ne´s de lettres d’amour et d’un journal’41 (‘Their starting point was such, in so far as they arose from love letters and a diary’—but he then went on to say: Alors ‘autobiographique’, je ne sais pas, ou je sais trop bien: pour moi l’inte´reˆt de l’e´criture est plutoˆt le jeu entre la ve´rite´ et le mensonge [. . .] La base de tout est la ve´rite´, la valeur absolue du re´cit et en meˆme temps il n’y a de plaisir qu’a` la de´jouer. La ve´rite´ de soi, parce que soi est le personnage romanesque principal, le seul dont on puisse a` peu pre`s eˆtre suˆr [. . .]. 42 (Well, ‘autobiographical’, I don’t know, or rather I know only too well: for me the interest of writing lies rather in the play between truth and falsehood [. . .] The basis of everything is truth, the absolute value of the narrative, and at the same time there is no pleasure like giving it the slip. The truth of self, because self is the main ﬁctional character, the only one that one can be more or less sure of [. . .].)

I thought it appropriate to embark on a discussion of this issue at the present juncture, even though it will be taken up and developed further, in accordance with the genres Guibert uses, in the chapters that follow, since it has enabled me to deﬁne the theoretical framework within which he operates. If in certain respects Guibert’s work is more like ‘autoﬁction’ than it is like books in which the scriptor makes either a ﬁctional or an autobiographical agreement with his or her readers (in the latter case, what is of course at issue is that part of his/her work in which the names of the author and the narrator are identical), the basic diﬀerence in Guibert’s case is the fact that he does not seek to tell the truth and check places and dates, but rather to disguise them. If it can,

12

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

at a pinch, be said that a pact exists in his books, it is a ‘pacte du leurre’ (‘pact of delusion’) which also takes in the title and genre displayed on the front and back covers, the epigraph and the dedication, in other words the peritext. The epigraph of the present book, a quotation attributed to Guibert and taken from a text of 1982 entitled ‘Un sce´nariste amoureux’ (‘A Script-writer in Love’), sums up his entire writerly project: to have the courage to own up, in every sense, to all one’s desires, fears, passions and faults, as well as to show oneself and one’s body in all aspects, from every possible angle, and pour out one’s secrets and those of other people, all the while inventing, a key concept in Guibert which corresponds closely to his conception of literature, which is to make the reader into a voyeur and sleuth by drawing him or her into an ever closer relationship with his books. As Barthes famously reminds us, such intimacy does not preclude enjoyment, and where Guibert is concerned I hope nothing I say suggests otherwise: Le texte est un objet fe´tiche et ce fe´tiche me de´sire. Le texte me choisit par toute une disposition d’e´crans invisibles, de chicanes se´lectives: le vocabulaire, les re´fe´rences, la lisibilite´ etc.; et perdu au milieu du texte, il y a toujours l’autre, l’auteur.43 (The text is a fetish object and this fetish desires me. The text chooses me through a panoply of invisible screens and selective quibbles: vocabulary, references, readability etc.; and lost in the middle of the text, there is always the other, the author.)

CHAPTER ONE

Youthful Writings A particular status attaches to an author’s ‘youthful writings’: critics respond to them in one of two ways, either as foreshadowing the works to come, or as having very little in common with them. Guibert’s youthful works show him taking his ﬁrst hesitant steps as a writer. Herve´ Guibert is obviously their creator, but some of the early texts in La Mort propagande date from 1971, when the young Herve´ was only sixteen, so they cannot be approached uncritically; and because the book consists of twelve sections written over a period of eight years, the reader of the present study can expect a multilayered approach rather than a linear argument. So each section will begin with a brief summary of the texts discussed and concentrate above all on the genre used by Guibert to map out the route that will in due course lead him to inscribe the self. Where similarities can be discerned either within a text or between several books, these will be noted, since they throw light both on Guibert’s creative methods and on the way they evolve over time. Then I will analyse the themes of the diﬀerent texts in the light of the statements to be found on the back cover of the 1977 edition but not reprinted in 1991.

LA MORT PROPAGANDE La Mort propagande and other early texts was ﬁrst published in 1977 and reissued in an enlarged edition in 1991. The various texts were all written between 1971 and 1978, even those added in 1991. The book therefore consists of twelve sections in total. To avoid the discussion becoming too diﬀuse, the various titles can conveniently be divided into six groups: 1. ‘The´re`se et son crocodile aile´’ (1971); ‘Le Prince blond’ (1971); ‘Isabella’ (1972); ‘La Pie`ce d’Œdipe’ (1972) (‘The´re`se and her winged crocodile’; ‘The blond Prince’; ‘Isabella’; ‘Œdipus’s Play’). 2. ‘Sans Titres’ (1971–1976) (‘No Titles’). 13

14

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

3. ‘Histoire d’une sainte’ (1976) (‘Story of a Saint’). 4. ‘La Mort propagande’ (1975–1976); ‘La Mort propagande no. 0’ (1976–1977) (‘Propaganda Death’). 5. ‘Machie moderne’ (1976); ‘Au Muse´e Gre´vin’ (1978); ‘Le Journal de l’onaniste’ (1978) (‘Modern Machy’; ‘At the Gre´vin Museum’; ‘The Onanist’s Journal’). 6. ‘ ‘‘Il’’ (un re´cit de la mesquinerie)’ (1977–1978) (‘ ‘‘He’’ [A Story of Meanness]’). On the back cover are two texts, the ﬁrst signed ‘H.G.’ and the second unsigned. In the text signed by Guibert a link is established in the very ﬁrst sentence between language and sex, and then ‘H.G.’ goes on to speak of ‘le corps homosexuel: une e´criture anal-phallique’ (‘the gay body: an anophallic writing’). This body and this writing are never redeﬁned in Guibert’s work again, so it is interesting to speculate at this point whether Guibert abandoned the idea that there is such a thing as ‘the writing of the gay body’. In any event, what is present here and crops up in all his books is the writing of the body tout court: Car c’est bien suˆr le corps qui dit, qui e´crit, qui s’explore et s’inscrit dans le texte. Se the´aˆtralise et s’hyste´rise, se sado-masochise. Dit son de´sir et sa jouissance. S’ouvre, se de´chire et se de´fonce. Inventorie les organes et les fait jouer comme des instruments de musique. Entretenir un rapport sadomasochiste a` l’e´criture: par elle, disse´quer son corps, et la disse´quer ellemeˆme. (Back cover) (For it is of course the body that says, that writes, that explores itself and that inscribes itself in the text. Theatralises itself and hysterises itself, sadomasochises itself. Says its desire and its fulﬁlment. Opens itself, tears itself and staves itself in. Inventories the organs and plays on them like musical instruments. To maintain a sadomasochistic connection with writing: through it, to dissect one’s body, and to dissect writing itself.)

1 These four texts are hard to summarise, but one soon realises that what accounts for their internal coherence is their themes. Thus ‘The´re`se et son crocodile aile´’ is built on the various meanings of the word ‘glace’ (‘ice’, ‘mirror’ and so on), on the look, and on the repetition of characters’ ﬁrst and family names serving as discursive connectors.1 ‘La Pie`ce d’Œdipe’ is built on the white/black dyad both at the level of character and at the level of light and dark as speciﬁed in the stage directions; nor should it be forgotten that Œdipus is blind. Since there are two Isabellas, ‘Isabella’ begins not with a looking-glass but with

Youthful Writings

15

‘two mirrors’ (MP, p. 43). In Guibert’s youthful writings all notion of plot has to be disregarded, since it seems impossible to construct a narrative from a text with such a tendency to shoot oﬀ in various directions, to twist and turn unexpectedly, and to toy with what is usually considered out of place in literary works. Still, so that the reader can follow my analysis, here are the broad outlines of the story. ‘The´re`se et son crocodile aile´´ ’ is a tale (p. 113) that begins with a description of The´re`se’s body. She is then seen examining her body. We learn that she kills birds. Then she leaves on the back of a winged crocodile and lands in a place where she meets Alexandre. She agrees to get on his moped and they meet a professional cannibal, Madame Ellisalde. They put up at a hotel and next day The´re`se sees Madame Ellisalde hiding on the beach pretending to be a statue in the sand. The´re`se ends up biting Alexandre’s neck and sucking his blood as he lies asleep in bed, and the last image is that of The´re`se leaving the bedroom. Looking at this analysis, one has the impression that all that is achieved by sketching the broad outlines of these stories is to provoke in the reader a state of mind in which all perceptiveness is lost. So if summarising the texts under consideration results in any loss of readability, I have chosen not to attempt it. The second text, ‘Le Prince blond’, is more like a play or ﬁlm script than a short story; after the narrative a dream is described and we are then given ‘L’explication de l’e´nigme’. As for ‘Isabella’, it seems to be inspired by a version of Alice in Wonderland in which perversity starts to undermine innocence. In ‘La Pie`ce d’Œdipe’ Oedipus stabs Jocasta after making love to her. Two of the four texts in this group have female protagonists (The´re`se and Isabella), and as for the Prince he is a ‘bird child’ (MP, p. 23). There are several key characteristics at the level of style.2 First there are passages which resemble a diary. Then there are passages in which the narrator seems aﬄicted with logorrhoea and in which the stylistic eﬀect laced with humour is conveyed by a blend of direct and indirect style without any punctuation and with asyndeta. These passages occur throughout Guibert’s work, so it will probably help at this point to give an example: Sur sa lance´e, elle me´lange demain et hier, refuse le temps, se`me le doute, la panique, accuse des vies ante´rieures, il y a dix milliards d’anne´es j’e´tais un petit garc¸on qui disait je suis une petite ﬁlle, cumule, fait trembler, se coincer le hurlement dans la gorge, provoque des paniques conse´cutives qui

16

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self s’entrecroisent au rythme de ses mots, crie et arrive enﬁn a` la chasser. (MP, p. 60) (Continuing in this vein she mixes up tomorrow and yesterday, refuses time, sows doubt and panic, highlights former lives, ten billion years ago I was a little boy who said I am a little girl, builds up the howl and makes it tremble and stick in the throat, provokes one panic after another which intersect in time to her words, shrieks and manages at last to get rid of it.)

Words like these could have been uttered by Antoine Roquentin in the throes of nausea, in Sartre’s novel of the same name.3 With Guibert it can also be said that a photographic style is already manifest in these early texts written when he was sixteen. In ‘Le Prince blond’, for example, the dialogue is peppered with stage directions, usually in brackets, which seem clearly to indicate that the author is blessed with a visual memory: not only does he describe the scene, he also ‘paints’ all its details and hears all the sounds that should accompany it. ‘La Pie`ce d’Œdipe’ could be a ﬁlm script as much as a stage play. The minuteness of the slightest detail already noticeable in ‘Le Prince blond’ is here carried to the limit, since there are stage directions here for the spectators too (‘Les spectateurs (nombre limite´ suivant les dimensions du cercle) attendent dans une petite pie`ce sombre qui donne sur cet espace [. . .]’, p. 67; ‘The audience (numbers limited by the size of the circle) wait in a small room that gives on to this space [. . .]’). In ‘Isabella’ the narrator appeals to the power of the reader’s imagination (‘Pendant cette ce´re´monie, on peut imaginer un certain nombre de repre´sentations, un mariage blanc [. . .] Un repas factice [. . .] [etc.]’, p. 48; ‘During this ceremony, one can imagine a certain number of performances, an unconsummated marriage [. . .] An artiﬁcial meal [. . .] [etc.]’); the text is not written, but the narrator, by means of suggestions, invites the reader to write it in his or her head. Another interesting aspect is the role of the narrator and the games he plays with the reader. ‘Isabella’ has an omniscient narrator who knows what Isabella’s mother thinks4 and who even knows what she is tempted to think.5 At other moments he appears to address the reader and to pass judgement on the story as it unfolds.6 As we have seen, ‘Le Prince blond’ is the only text with a masculine protagonist, and the question arises whether this is a coincidence. What is certainly true is that it is the only text in which are concealed biographical details that can be identiﬁed as resembling Herve´ Guibert’s; indeed, certain features seem so striking that they remind one of Mes Parents. If certain cuts are made in the text, this is what we get:

Youthful Writings

17

Mon pe`re part [. . .] tuer des animaux. Il les ache`ve de ses propres mains et il aime cela. Leur sang a une odeur aˆcre et douce a` la fois [. . .] Le soir, quand il revient, il vient m’embrasser, et il a l’odeur des beˆtes qu’il a tue´es. Alors, j’ai peur de lui. (MP, pp. 32–3) (My father goes off [. . .] to kill animals. He ﬁnishes them off with his bare hands and he likes that. Their blood has a smell that is both sweet and acrid [. . .].When he gets home in the evening he stops by to kiss me goodnight, and he smells of the animals he has killed. Then I’m afraid of him.)

A later version of this ‘autobiographical’ episode can be found in ‘La Mort propagande no. 0’ (pp. 231–32), but here the ﬁctionalising activity is more signiﬁcant: the mother died at the Prince’s birth, a reversal of the situation in Mes Parents where the mother is supposed to have said of the narrator during labour: ‘Pourvu qu’il soit mort! pourvu qu’il soit mort-ne´!’ (Mes, p. 124) ( ‘Let’s hope he’s dead! Let’s hope he’s stillborn!’). So the narrator takes his revenge textually. One of the leitmotifs in these stories is the body, and ﬁrst and foremost the body observed in a mirror. The´re`se gazes at herself in the semi-darkness and kisses her blond lips. Isabella looks at herself in a ‘factice et galopant’ (‘artiﬁcial and galloping’) mirror so as to experience the multiplicity of the self and contemplate the fragmented, disembodied self (‘[. . .] elle ﬁt de´ﬁler tous ses membres un a` un dans le miroir, les regarda attentivement, les mesura mentalement’ [‘[. . .] she paraded all her limbs one after the other in the mirror, observing them closely and measuring them in her head’]).7 The relationship to the other, too, passes chieﬂy through the look: The´re`se gazes at Madame Elissalde who in turn watches her (p. 24). Before biting Alexandre’s neck The´re`se looks at him, as if possession of the other constituted above all a visual experience (p. 25). The body can also be replaced by that of another, and even split in two: the only child worthy of taking the prince’s place is practically his double; his arms are dead, so wax arms and bird’s wings are attached to his body. Isabella’s doll is so like her that the puppets cannot tell one from the other, and the Idol in ‘La Pie`ce d’Œdipe’ has more or less the same characteristics as Isabella in the text of the same name.8 The body can also appear misshapen, as in the case not only of the prince but also of the puppets (they have huge heads and tiny bodies) (p. 45). The sexual act is not described in detail in these texts, but only chastely hinted at (pp. 29–30) through the verb ‘chevaucher’ (to sit astride, to ride) (p. 76). Rather, it is death that hangs over these early texts of Guibert’s. The´re`se and the young woman in ‘La Pie`ce d’Œdipe’ kill birds and The´re`se dreams about a dead little girl (p. 19). During his

18

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

lifetime the bird-child blond prince is half dead since he has arms of wax. Later on he will be found dead. The king will command that on the day of his own death the prince’s embalmed body be exhibited on his throne (p. 36). Isabella mutilates her mechanical doll with a knife, then strangles the two dwarfs. Oedipus makes love to Jocasta and then commits matricide. When Isabella has ﬁnished widening her doll’s slit the narrator analyses her feelings: ‘Isabella trouvait quelque chose d’inde´cent a` ce qu’elle venait de faire, non sans plaisir pourtant [. . .]’ (p. 54, my italics) (‘Isabella found something indecent in what she had just done, not without pleasure however [. . .]’). As for Oedipus, he plunges head ﬁrst into Jocasta’s entrails, and one reads: ‘[. . .] ses cris de douleur sont les meˆmes que ses cris de jouissance’ (p. 80, my italics) (‘[. . .] his cries of pain are the same as his cries of pleasure’). The narrator plays on this ambiguity, walking a tightrope between innocence and perversity. He wants to give his readers textual pleasure and to push back the frontiers of prudishness. It is a dangerous game, though, since the ability to stay upright hangs on a single thread.

2 ‘Sans titres’ is, textually speaking, rather a mixed bag, and it would be futile to try and summarise the plot of these pieces, which were written between 1971 and 1976. As their overall title indicates, the stories have no single guiding theme or hidden thread, and the best way of demonstrating this is to take the ﬁrst four paragraphs. The ﬁrst paragraph seems to be addressed by the narrator to his mother, rather in the manner of a letter, and the second to his sister who, for this purpose, becomes his ‘petite soeur’ (‘little sister’) (p. 84). The third paragraph is devoted to the narrator, and the fourth is longer; all four are built, in the manner of Pe´rec, around the phrase: ‘je me souviens’ (‘I remember’) (my emphasis), and the narrator uses ‘je’ (‘I’). Long sentences are juxtaposed with fragments of sentences beginning with ‘de’ or ‘des’ (‘some’), linked together by semi-colons or full stops, and memory is both visual and olfactory. The mother kisses and fondles the narrator, calling him her ‘petite ﬁlle’ (‘little girl’) (p. 86), and he wants to bite. The father is absent, dead. This ‘autobiographique ﬁctionnelle’ (‘autobiographical ﬁctional’) aberration is soon overtaken by events, since on the next page the characters seem to change: Alice is the greataunt, the parents are called M. and Mme Leplatenier and the children

Youthful Writings

19

Aure´lien and Dominique. The ‘je’ (‘I’) is dropped in favour of the relative anonymity of the ‘il’ (‘he’). Other characters get roped in: Professor Luccioni, Mme Ke´pel, the friends (The´re`se, Kye, He´le`ne, Philippe, Anton), and another great-aunt (Suzanne). The narrative is not linear; for example short paragraphs which resemble newspaper style are inserted. In one of these the narrator returns to ‘je’ (‘I’) (p. 106), and in another he uses the ‘il’ (‘he’) (p. 107). Then an asterisk appears to indicate a break in the text: we move to the story of a certain ‘Darling Fellatio’ (p. 117) before returning, though only for a single paragraph, to the Leplatenier family. This is followed by a passage in capitals; incomprehensible at ﬁrst, it can then be read as a succession of facts, some, later reused in other texts, of a biographical nature. The asyndeta crop up again. It is worth taking a closer look at it. Amongst the incomprehensible words we ﬁnd ‘sodiasme’, ‘orgoisme’, ‘joiver’ (p. 120) which bear a close resemblance to words with a sexual connotation in French. The ﬁrst comprehensible word is ‘oiseau’ (‘bird’). Then the narrator appears in person, using the ‘I’ form to say: ‘je vous de´ teste dit-il a` son pe` re son pe` re e´ tait le con archicon monsieur conformiste . . .’ (p. 121) (‘i hate you he told his father his father was a stupid cunt total cunt mr cuntformist . . .’). This is followed by revelations about the grandmother (who is no longer the great-aunt) and the name ‘herve´ guibert’ (p. 122); the distancing eﬀect remains in operation as the text continues, with the ‘il’ (‘he’) once again being used. It is noteworthy that the narrator needs to have recourse to this textual mise-en-sce`ne in order to write down words of loathing hurled at the father and, by tucking them away in this verbal jungle, to give his name and surname for the ﬁrst time; clumsy though this early attempt is, it shows clearly how the inscription of the self is what interests Herve´ Guibert. Six more asterisks indicate breaks in the text. The narrator goes on to tell the story of Monsieur Archicon (‘Mr Totalcunt’) (note the parallel with the same name juxtaposed with the father’s above), then there is a piece about Anna, followed by the story of Paul, and by Elisabeth Cornelia who dissects her ear-lobe (pp. 134–35), the narrative darting oﬀ into scatological narrational imperatives followed by mutilations. The ‘je’ (‘I’) returns in the last text of ‘Sans titres’ for a sex scene. These last two texts are in sharp contrast to the narrative tone of all the preceding ones. In these pages we observe Herve´ Guibert engaging in experiments

20

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

which result in narrative frictions: the narrator wants at all costs to stand centre stage and write ‘je’ (‘I’) while concealing himself and veering towards the ﬁctional. In his writing, as we have seen, Guibert drew upon his diaries for material, and every time he attempted to write ﬁction this would lead him back to the raw facts in the diary which, as was noted above, he did not always manage to disguise. Other passages read more like a letter sent to a friend (pp. 98–100) in which the narrator addresses the recipient directly: ‘Apre`s la masturbation, tu le sais, quelque chose de terriblement aigre vous prend. Mais j’ai des rencontres fugitives avec le plaisir, et je te l’ai de´ja` e´crit un jour [. . .]’ (p. 100; my emphasis) (‘After masturbation, as you are aware, something terribly bitter takes hold of you. But, as I once wrote to you, I have ﬂeeting encounters with pleasure [. . .]’). As it happens, we know that La Mort propagande grew in part out of letters written by Guibert to ‘T’.9 Moreover, it should not be forgotten that all these texts were written between 1971 and 1976: six years represents a sizeable amount of time in a writer’s development, and the odds are that the last two texts (which, as we noted, contrast sharply in tone with the other pieces) were written in 1976. In the ﬁrst of these, Count Rodolphe tells Cornelia that his body and his head ‘sont de grands ope´ras’ (p. 136) (‘are great operas’). In the second, the body and its pleasures become the plot, or at least the narrative thread. This sexual violence is something not found in Guibert’s youthful writings dating from 1971– 72 whereas it dominates ‘La Mort propagande’ and ‘La Mort propagande no. 0’ written between 1975 and 1977. The new discovery in both texts seems to be the body as narrative spectacle. As to what drives the narration forward in these diﬀerent fragments, it is sometimes set in motion by photography (pp. 90–91), but mostly by love (pp. 106–07): admitting that he cannot speak of the loved one, the narrator (Aure´lien) nevertheless makes a stab at it (p. 109) since only through writing can their mutual love be accomplished. The narrator thus feels he is attaining vicariously a kind of sexual pleasure: ‘Alors Aure´lien prenait sa vieille machine a` e´crire marron, il parlait d’Anton, et il avait l’impression de masturber Anton’ (ibid.) (‘So Aure´lien took his old brown typewriter, he spoke of Anton, and he had the impression of masturbating Anton’). We should not, however, trust the narrator, who lets slip a little further on: ‘Raconter le baiser d’Anton, c’est impossible pour Aure´lien. Alors il e´crit sur une page blanche: Anton. Juste Anton’ (p. 111) (‘It is impossible for

Youthful Writings

21

Aure´lien to relate Anton’s kiss. So he writes on a blank page: Anton. Just Anton’), whereas on the preceding page Anton’s kiss is described in detail! Narrative veracity is short-circuited by the text itself, and to add to the confusion, the narrator mentions that Anton is not the name of the boy he loves and that his own name is not Aure´lien. In this connection it is interesting to note that the narrator seems dissatisﬁed with the narrative voice he has chosen to the point of short-circuiting it himself and letting the one supposed to be the author speak and inform us that what the narrator says is false. These are not isolated episodes: there are other examples of the same thing.10 Some instances are used by the narrator to stand back from his narrative and intervene with his own knowledge at the time of writing (‘Aure´lien, a` sept ans, joue avec sa soeur a` des jeux qu’il ne sait meˆme pas interdits’) (p. 88) (‘At the age of seven Aure´lien plays games with his sister, quite unaware that they are forbidden’). The major conﬂictual relationship in these writings is with the father, who may be absent but who is nonetheless oppressively present; thus the head teacher is judged, not without some glee, because the father is not going to like him (p. 96). Sometimes communication between father and son is conducted via notes left on the kitchen table (p. 97), and it is the father who is responsible for making the son feel disgusted with his own body (p. 97). At other moments the father is transformed in the ﬁction into the devoted escort of his son, named ‘Herve´ Guibert’ in the text.11 When he tries to communicate with his son by asking him how his holidays in Germany have gone, the son withholds the information: what he should be telling him he has already divulged in the preceding text, namely that he was strongly attracted to Kye, that his father feels it ought to be possible to erase the fact that Charles Trenet was a poof (p. 97), and that he himself, coming across a photo of Charles Trenet, thought ‘sale et vieille et abominable tapette’ (p. 98) (‘dirty, old, loathsome poof’). Aure´lien unleashed his mother’s tears and his father’s wrath when he declared: ‘Je suis pe´de´ depuis que j’ai treize ans’ (p. 120) (‘I’ve been queer since I was thirteen’). At other times he takes the opportunity to give free rein to bursts of hatred: ‘Qu’avaient-ils ve´cu eux-meˆmes, ces petits ge´niteurs, pour se donner ainsi dans l’apprentissage de la haine et de la peur?’ (p. 98) (‘What had they lived themselves, these petty progenitors, to justify their giving themselves over in this way to the learning of hatred and fear?’). The narrator even constructs his father as being dead (p. 109), but recognises too that his passion for Anton makes him think of his

22

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

father, ‘amour incestueux, imagine´, jamais re´alise´’ (p. 109) (‘incestuous love, imagined, never realised’). Eros and Thanatos are thus inextricably linked. We ﬁnd in ‘Sans titres’ an eﬀort to ﬁctionalise family life. Aure´lien and Dominique bear an uncanny resemblance to Herve´ Guibert and his sister (he is seven and she eleven) (p. 88); likewise Alice and Suzanne to his great-aunts. The father is a vet (p. 93). An important thing to bear in mind about ‘Sans titres’ is that, glimpsed through the distorting lens of ﬁction, Guibert’s friends and relations represent prime literary material at least as much as he himself does, and that, with all these toings and froings between characters and proper names, ‘il’ (‘he’) and ‘je’ (‘I’), Guibert does not seem to have found a ﬁctional form that satisﬁes him. Indeed the narrator himself, dissatisﬁed with the way his desire to write has caused the narrative to develop, may ﬁnd that the trick has backﬁred. ‘Sans titres’ nonetheless marks a turning-point in Guibert’s literary career since never again would such hesitations trouble him. From ‘Histoire d’une sainte’ (1976) onwards he would always have a clear idea of what he wanted to achieve; even if he did not always pull it oﬀ, he would be the one to call the textual tune. It is nonetheless interesting to study these pieces in the light of Guibert’s later work: books such as Mes parents, Les Gangsters, Les Chiens and some of the stories in La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La Chair fraıˆche are here found in embryonic form, and if these works do come oﬀ, the credit must certainly go to the exploratory writing collected in ‘Sans titres’.

3 In ‘Histoire d’une sainte’ the narrator addresses The´re`se using the familiar ‘tu’ form, almost as if he were writing her a long biographical letter that could be read as a hagiography, but a hagiography with a diﬀerence. There are also passages which resemble diary fragments (p. 171). The´re`se’s story and her life as a Carmelite are narrated, the second ‘chapter’ recounting The´re`se’s existence after she leaves the order and goes to live with her sister Suzanne. The narrator goes on addressing The´re`se, but much greater emphasis is placed on the ﬁctional realm. After strangling her sister, The´re`se herself dies. Sanctity turns into sadism, but The´re`se still reaches ‘le royaume des Cieux’ (p. 180) (‘the kingdom of Heaven’). The driving force behind this story is to be found in the passage where the narrator addresses The´re`se in

Youthful Writings

23

the following terms: ‘Tu parles mal, tu ne sais pas parler. On ne t’as pas donne´ les mots pour raconter ‘‘ton’’ histoire. Le langage divise, hie´rarchise, est un privile`ge’ (p. 170) (‘You can’t speak properly, you don’t know how to speak. You were not given the words to tell ‘‘your’’ story. Language divides, it hierarchises, it is a privilege’). So the narrator takes it upon himself to recount the incredible adventures of Louise/The´re`se by turning himself into a scribe. Out of the real-life experiences of his great-aunt he is able to construct ﬁction. For let there be no doubt about it: this story is based on that of Herve´ Guibert’s great-aunt Louise; on three occasions, indeed, The´re`se is called Louise.12 Her twin sister is Suzanne (p. 146). Delusion and betrayal are nevertheless de rigueur: Guibert is already playing with multiple identity. There are three The´re`ses in this story. The ﬁrst is actually called Louise (p. 144), or rather ‘soeur Louise du Sacre´-Coeur’ (p. 157) (‘Sister Louise of the Sacred Heart’), but she has to drop this name when she leaves the Carmelites. She has to be hidden too when she comes out of the convent, because with her shaven head she looks very like the French women who under the Occupation went to bed with Germans (p. 149). The second is the ‘petite The´re`se, Santa Teressita di Lissieux’ (p. 163) (‘little The´re`se, Santa Teressita di Lissieux’), and the third is the great The´re`se (of Avila) (p. 160). The images of the latter are either multiple or fakes: we learn that The´re`se Martin was too ugly and that a prostitute took her place (p. 164). All the portraits of The´re`se are fakes. The narrator continues his little games, getting involved in the narration himself or reminding us through this or that sentence that he is speculating (p. 153).13 Where the text does gain in maturity as compared with earlier pieces in La Mort propagande is the degree to which the theme of the body is incorporated into The´re`se’s story. The body is out of bounds to The´re`se. She is subject to its mortiﬁcations, but she can neither look at it nor touch it. It becomes the chief character of ‘Histoire d’une sainte’. In the convent she gives it up; as it no longer belongs to her she cannot refer to it as ‘mon’ (‘my’) any more but has to say ‘notre’ (‘our’) (p. 156). There are no mirrors of course; she does not see herself for eight years (p. 157). In order to seduce her and try and get her to return home, her sister leads her to rediscover her body (‘Elle te montre ton corps, te le fait toucher, l’apprendre, en jouir’; ‘She shows you your body, gets you to touch it, learn it, draw pleasure from it’); her brother-in-law dreams of her hands ‘qui prendraient sa bite’ (‘taking his cock’) and of her ‘con non pratique´’ (‘unpractised cunt’).14

24

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

In the last two texts of ‘Sans Titres’, as we saw, the body becomes a spectacle. It is the same story with ‘Histoire d’une sainte’. A` propos of the dead bodies of Suzanne and The´re`se, the narrator writes: ‘Tout sauf se cacher dans l’ombre d’un cercueil. Faire un show permanent, meˆme apre`s votre mort. Non plus montrer vos dessous mais vos inte´rieurs. Exhibitionnisme supreˆme’ (p. 153) (‘Anything but hiding in the shadow of a coﬃn. Put on a non-stop show, even after your death. Not showing your underwear either but your insides. The last word in exhibitionism’). The two sisters decide to leave their bodies to science. There follows a description of the dissection of the bodies. The´re`se had already eyed up the body of The´re`se in Lisieux (pp. 160–61) or rather the few bones that were left. After strangling Suzanne, The´re`se is overcome by a kind of drunkenness in a rave-up that centres around Suzanne’s body (p. 172). She gives verbal utterance to a claim that she has never had an orgasm (p. 173), then, to the sound of Ravel’s Bolero, dramatises her body to the point of exhaustion (p. 174). ’Histoire d’une sainte’ certainly blazons the entry of the body into the Guibertian corpus. From this point onwards it will never really be absent: Guibert has found here a narrative mode worthy of his project for inscribing the self: the body which ‘s’explore et s’inscrit dans le texte’ (‘explores itself and inscribes itself in the text’), as the blurb on the back cover indicates. So this text represents a signiﬁcant advance in Guibert’s literary development. Starting from the same point of departure as always, real family experiences, in this case those of his great-aunts, he invents a murder story and exhibits their bodies. We have not heard the last of the great-aunts: as we shall see in the next chapter, particularly in the case of Suzanne et Louise, they continue to feed Guibert’s imagination and respond to his artistic project.

4 ‘La Mort propagande’ dates from 1975–1976. It is pointless trying to summarise it using traditional parameters; better to quote in its entirety a passage from the book that explains the narrative issue at stake: Mon corps, soit sous l’effet de la jouissance, soit sous l’effet de la douleur, est mis dans un e´tat de the´aˆtralite´, de paroxysme, qu’il me plairait de reproduire, de quelque fac¸on que ce soit: photo, ﬁlm, bande-son [. . .] mettre en marche un me´canisme de retranscription: e´ructations, de´jections [. . .] M’inge´nier a` les photographier, a` les enregistrer. Laisser parler ce corps convulse´, hache´, hurlant. Placer un micro a` l’inte´rieur de ma bouche [. . .] un autre micro a`

Youthful Writings

25

l’inte´rieur de mon cul [. . .] enregistrer mes vomissements [. . .] Mon corps est un laboratoire que j’offre en exhibition, l’unique acteur [. . .] (p. 183) (My body, through the effects of sexual excitement or pain, is put in a state of theatricality, of paroxysm, which it would be my wish to reproduce in any way possible: photography, ﬁlm, soundtrack [. . .] to switch on a mechanism for retranscription: eructations, dejecta [. . .]. To endeavour to photograph them, to record them. To give utterance to this convulsed, hacked, screaming body. To place a microphone inside my mouth [. . .] another microphone inside my arse [. . .] to record my vomiting [. . .] My body is a laboratory that I put on show, the sole actor [. . .])

Here the body becomes the sole actor, to be overshadowed only by death, which becomes a spectacle to be ﬁlmed, the period after death being a source of spectacle too (‘[. . .] je me sens bien, mon corps disse´mine´, multiplie´, exhibe´ [. . .]’, p. 222; ‘[. . .] I feel good, my body scattered, multiplied, put on show [. . .]’).15 What we are witnessing is the development in an extremely radical form of the project of making the body the narrative’s chief character. In turn, the body-actor gets the body of the audience to act or rather make an entrance: ‘Le public sera pris de convulsions, contractions, re´pulsions, e´rections, vibrations, jouissances, de´gueulis de toutes sortes. Son corps ge´ne´ral, a` son tour, se mettra a` parler’ (p. 185) (‘The audience will be seized with convulsions, contractions, repulsions, erections, vibrations, orgasms, puke of all kinds. Its general body in turn will start to talk’). Communication thus takes place, almost against one’s body, between the character-actor and the audience. Never again will Guibert’s writing of the body be as raw, as harsh or as radicalised, making this text perhaps one of the most violent he ever wrote, as he himself said: Je m’e´tais justement mis a` e´crire des textes violents de dissection de corps; j’e´tais tre`s obnubile´ a` l’e´poque par l’art anatomique, tout ce qui ce [sic] tournait autour de la mort; la morgue, les cadavres. Je vivais la`-dedans. Une passion esthe´tique, une passion de voyeur, de collectionneur. C¸a me semblait tre`s vivant. Des textes violents ou` les sce`nes e´rotiques et les actes de dissection e´taient raconte´s comme des actions amoureuses.16 (Indeed, I had started writing violent texts about body dissection; I was very obsessed at the time by anatomical art, everything that hinged on death; the morgue, corpses. It was my world. An aesthetic passion, a voyeur’s, a collector’s passion. It seemed very alive to me. Violent texts in which erotic scenes and acts of dissection were told like amorous actions.)

Two diﬀerent versions of ‘La Mort propagande’ have been published, one in 1977 and the other in 1991. The back cover of the new edition of La Mort propagande reprints a passage from Le Protocole compas-

26

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

sionnel in which the author tells how, owing to a move, he found the notebooks in which he had written these texts. This was his reaction: ‘La rede´couverte de ces textes parfois m’enchantait, parfois m’horripilait, mais surtout ils me faisaient la lec¸on [. . .] apre`s leur repossession [. . .] je ne pourrais plus e´crire comme avant. Ces textes me modiﬁaient comme e´crivain’ (‘The rediscovery of these texts sometimes delighted me, sometimes exasperated me, but above all taught me [. . .] after their repossession [. . .] I could no longer write as before. These texts changed me as a writer’). In her interview with Herve´ Guibert, Sophie Che´rer (who at the time had only the 1977 edition at her disposal) quotes the ﬁrst text of ‘La Mort propagande’ and tells him that everything that was to follow is already foreshadowed in it,17 to which Guibert replies: ‘C’est un texte tre`s violent, d’adolescence vraiment [. . .] le vrai de´but [. . .] e´tait encore plus e´trange et pre´monitoire. J’avais une conscience tre`s grande de la mort a` l’e´poque ou` j’ai e´crit c¸a [. . .]’18 (‘It’s a very violent text, of adolescence really [. . .] the true beginning [. . .] was even stranger and more premonitory. I had a very great awareness of death at the time I wrote that [. . .]’). This true beginning therefore appeared in the new edition of the book, and its importance is such as to merit substantial extracts being quoted from it: A` l’issue de cette se´rie d’expressions, l’ultime travestissement, l’ultime maquillage, la mort [. . .] Moi je veux lui laisser e´lever sa voix puissante et qu’elle chante, diva, a` travers mon corps [. . .] Ne pas laisser perdre cette source de spectaculaire imme´diat, visce´ral. Me donner la mort sur une sce`ne, devant des came´ras. Donner ce spectacle extreˆme, excessif de mon corps, dans ma mort. En choisir les termes, le de´roulement, les accessoires [. . .] Faire ﬁlmer mon corps en de´composition, jour apre`s jour [. . .] Qui voudra bien produire mon suicide, ce best-seller? Filmer la piquˆre qui donne la mort la plus lente, le poison qui pe´ne`tre avec le baiser en coulant d’une bouche a` l’autre (mon nom est Fatalite´)? (pp. 184–85) ([At the end of this series of expressions, the ultimate in dressing-up, the ultimate in make-up, death [. . .] I want to let it raise its powerful voice and sing, diva-like, through my body [. . .] Not let this source of immediate, visceral spectacular get lost. Kill myself on a stage, before cameras. Offer this extreme, excessive spectacle of my body, in my death. Choose its terms, its development, its props [. . .] Get my decomposing body ﬁlmed, day after day [. . .] Who will agree to produce my suicide, this best-seller? Film the injection that gives the slowest death, the poison that enters with the kiss ﬂowing from one mouth to the other (my name is Fate)?)

The text’s genesis was revealed in another interview; during it Guibert told how, having had to undergo an emergency operation to avoid peritonitis, he suﬀered post-operative trauma and experienced intolerable pain; he then began writing the ﬁrst text of ‘La Mort propagande’,

Youthful Writings

27

which he describes as ‘un peu de´lirant’ (‘a bit mad’).19 The ﬁrst point is, it was unbearable pain that got the writing going: perception was changed as a result of post-operative trauma. Nevertheless this text is not unconnected with what we have been able to read about Guibert’s literary project, especially in the last two texts of ‘Sans titres’ and in ‘Histoire d’une sainte’. There is a crowning fascination with death, which itself also becomes a source of spectacle; indeed, we know that Guibert acted out this script in ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’, as described in A` l’ami, part of which is reprinted in the ﬁlm’s commentary: ‘[. . .] je me verserais dans un verre d’eau ces soixante-dix gouttes, je l’avalerais, et puis qu’est-ce que je ferais? Je m’e´tendrais [. . .] combien de temps c¸a prendrait pour que mon coeur cesse de battre?’ (Ami, pp. 218–19) (‘[. . .] I would pour into a glass of water those seventy drops, I would swallow it, and then what would I do? I would lie down [. . .] how long would it take for my heart to stop beating?’). In an extraordinary mise en abıˆme we watch, live, a game of Russian roulette in ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’: Guibert pours a lethal dose of digitalin into a glass of water; then, closing his eyes, he moves this and another glass around on the table before drinking the contents of one of them, and then stretches out in an armchair, expecting either to wake up again later or to be dead.20 That could no doubt explain the importance Guibert attached to these texts which, as he himself put it, changed him as a writer and altered his writing too. He also made the decision to publish them in 1991. That no doubt made it possible for him to ﬁlm ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ and in particular to set up the scene of suicide by poisoning. The fact that this text was written when he was only 20 or 21 is remarkable enough in itself, apart from foreshadowing much that was to come in his work. At the level of voices of the self it is a crucial text since it clearly proves that, as early as this in his career, Guibert had intuited that writing the body was what he was after. All that is lacking here is the thin coating of ‘ﬁction’ which later on he learned how to develop. In another passage, the narrator tells how, after getting beaten up, he ﬁnds the writing triggered by the very violence he has endured; he undresses, then we read: ‘j’e´cris et c¸a me fait bander, je me branle d’une main, j’ai une dent qui branle, il y du sang sur la feuille, pas du sang romantique [. . .]’ (MP, p. 205) (‘I write and that gives me a hard-on, I wank with one hand, I have a loose tooth, there is blood on the page, not romantic blood [. . .]’). Apart from the homonym branle, this

28

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

passage is remarkable too in having the same approach: the narrator writes in order to transcend pain. Writing and sexual desire are linked and are both on the same road to ruin. The inﬂuence of the authors whom Guibert says he read in his youth can be seen at work, especially Bataille in the text entitled ‘L’oeillade’ (‘The Glance’) (pp. 199–201), as Guibert himself conﬁrmed in an interview: Pour ces textes-la`, je ne lisais que des choses sexuelles. Alors je n’e´crivais que des choses sexuelles [. . .] Il y avait e´galement Francis Bacon. Parce que la peinture m’a autant marque´ que la litte´rature. Les tableaux de Bacon, c’e´tait tout ce que j’aimais: la couleur, la violence, la boucherie, le corps, la sodomie, l’e´treinte de deux hommes [. . .] Bataille, Genet, c¸a a e´te´ mon apprentissage.21 (For those texts, I was reading only sexual things. So I was writing only sexual things [. . .] There was Francis Bacon as well. Because painting has marked me as much as literature. Bacon’s pictures, they were everything I loved: colour, violence, butchery, the body, sodomy, the embrace of two men [. . .] Bataille, Genet, that was my apprenticeship.)

Sade too must be added to this list. It is not surprising to hear Guibert mentioning Bacon: as we have seen, some of the texts closely resemble descriptions of paintings. Then, from ‘La Mort propagande. (Une seule repre´sentation)’ onwards, the text resembles a letter; resembles merely, since it is more a question of an orgiastic and deadly incantation. Of course, Guibert has said that this book grew out of letters written to ‘T’, but he also makes clear the following: Les premie`res choses que j’ai e´crites le furent sous le coup de la ﬁe`vre, de la maladie, de l’amour: la lettre, la lettre d’amour. Je ne pouvais les lui envoyer, alors je les gardais pour moi; elles restaient a` sa disposition dans une boıˆ te qu’il ouvrait de temps en temps.22 (The ﬁrst things I wrote were done when I was in the grip of a high temperature, illness, love: the letter, the love letter. I could not send them to him so I kept them for myself; they remained at his disposal in a box he would open from time to time.)

As we can see, the letter is merely a pretext for writing: it will not even be sent. It enables the narrator to write himself in the story, together with his desires and fantasies, without having to invent characters and without recourse to ﬁction, as is conﬁrmed in ‘Les escarpins rouges’ (‘The Red Court Shoes’): ‘Mes histoires s’e´crivaient toutes seules, sous le coup d’une urgence sentimentale, d’un de´placement, elles s’e´crivaient comme des lettres, et parfois le je du narrateur avait tendance a` virer au il, ou a` de´guiser un peu, voila` les seules tentatives de ﬁction qui s’amorc¸aient’ (PA, p. 133) (‘My stories just wrote themselves, in the

Youthful Writings

29

heat of an emotional emergency or a displacement, they came out as letters, and sometimes the ‘‘I’’ of the narrator had a tendency to veer towards ‘‘he’’ or some other form of disguise, these were the only discernible attempts at ﬁction’). La Mort propagande is a rich seam of ﬁctional nuggets which will be mined in other texts.23 Humour plays a large part in the readability of these texts. The narrator seems to relish comparisons with things ecclesiastical: ‘contemplant’ (‘contemplating’) his faeces, he describes himself as ‘agenouille´ comme au bas d’un autel’ (‘kneeling as if at the foot of an altar’) and adoring his dejecta ‘comme des reliques divines [. . .] vins de messe’ (MP, p. 188) (‘like divine relics [. . .] communion wines’). But, some being of insuﬃcient quality, they are not all ‘consacre´es’ (‘consecrated’): ‘Les autres de´fe´cations ne me´ritaient pas l’autel [. . .]’ (p. 189) (‘The other defecations did not deserve the altar [. . .]’). In the ﬁrst text, ‘Prenez et mangez, buvez [. . .]’ (p. 185) (‘Take and eat, drink [. . .]’) are the words used in church to celebrate the eucharist, save for the end of the sentence: ‘(ma paranoı¨a, ma me´galomania)’ (ibid.) (‘my paranoia, my megalomania’). Some consecration! It is important to list all the parallels within the same text and between several books because it shows up the functioning of literary creation in Guibert and the way it evolves. The style is much the same as for the other texts. The use of long unparagraphed passages without quotation marks serves to race the narrative and produce a comic eﬀect (p. 209). Also featured are unﬁnished sentences juxtaposed with a few commas and many full stops (pp. 209–10), and incredibly long sentences (as if Guibert did not need to wait until he read Thomas Bernhard before producing such sentences): one, punctuated only by commas, runs from the top of page 205 to the middle of page 207. We ﬁnd, too, lofty words24 happily cohabiting with scatological vocabulary. This feature of Guibert’s style is worth a closer look. When writing about others, one often ends up talking about oneself: in an article on La Chambre claire by Roland Barthes, Herve´ Guibert describes Barthes’s style in terms that apply equally well to his own: Une des forces de Barthes est d’entrelarder dans un discours riche et assez savant [. . .] des mots jete´s au pied leve´, des images populaires, un peu triviales [. . .] ou de´cale´es d’un vocabulaire autre [. . .] comme des pointes secouantes, sournoises et re´veillantes, et de repropulser a` chaque livre une se´rie de mots nouveaux, inusite´s, de´pre´cie´s, ne´ologiques ou vieillots, qui re´animent le langage, avant de se ﬁger a` leur tour.25

30

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self (One of Barthes’s strengths is to interlard in a rich and learned discourse [. . .] words thrown off at a moment’s notice, popular images, somewhat trivial [. . .] or switched from a different vocabulary [. . .] like unsettling, sly, rousing taunts, and to repropel in each book a series of new, uncommon, depreciated, neological or old-fashioned words which reanimate the language before becoming set in their turn.)

There could not be a more accurate description of Herve´ Guibert’s own style. Dialogue is sometimes used to give a touch of humour (p. 187), as is oxymoron: ‘festin infaˆme’ (p. 210) (‘vile banquet’). On other occasions the narrator is able to soften the harshness of the text by introducing a comparison, by ﬁnding the right word or the right title. In ‘Monologue I: Charcuterie esthe´tique’ (‘First Monologue: Aesthetic Butchery’), the narrator speaks of ‘de´plier les plisse´s roses comme les lamelles d’un e´ventail de Russie tzariste, plumes voluptueuses d’autruche noire caressant la rosette’ (p. 186) (‘spreading the pink pleats like the folds of a tsarist Russian fan, voluptuous black ostrich feathers caressing the rosette’); this is followed by ‘[. . .] j’ai le cul lyrique’ (p. 187) (‘[. . .] I have a lyrical arse’), and the text ends with this injunction: ‘Ne pas ressembler a` une souris blanche, avoir de l’e´le´gance jusque sur la tablette de lie`ge’ (ibid.) (‘Not to resemble a white mouse, to possess elegance even on the cork slab’). If I insist on the role of humour it is because it is what helps make acceptable a text whose subject is, let us not forget, ‘Eˆtre dans une salle de dissection et de´pecer un cul [. . .]’ (‘Being in a dissection room and cutting up an arse [. . .]’). The style is icy, certainly morbid, as in this example: ‘A` l’aide d’un petit ciseau, en de´couper l’inte´rieur, les bords [. . .]’ (ibid.) (‘With small scissors, cut up the inside, the edges [. . .]’); these could be a set of instructions for opening a tin can, whereas in fact the subject is ‘de´pecer un cul’ (‘cutting up an arse’). ‘La Mort propagande no. 0’ dates from 1976–77 and is less extreme. In an interview Guibert claims that he composed ‘La Mort propagande no. 0’ spurred on by Roland Barthes who, it seems, wrote to him to say that he would like to speak with him about the ‘rapport entre l’e´criture et le fantasme’ (‘the relationship between writing and fantasy’).26 It consists of a group of relatively short texts, scarcely ten pages long overall. What sets the discourse in motion here is the theme of dream and imagination: dream of pleasure rooms (the ﬁrst paragraph recalls the text entitled ‘Le hammam’ in Vice [V, pp. 44–48]), ‘reˆve inde´cent’ (‘indecent dream’) (a precursor of Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes), fantasy dreams, dream of labial ﬂesh, imagining one is a

Youthful Writings

31

maiden in a morgue. In ‘E´quarissage’, a founder passage describes the father’s work in the abattoirs and the occasion he showed round his son, who returns of his own free will the next day to expose his body to sexual abuse and ill-treatment of every kind imaginable; among his torturers is an ox; sometimes his father brings home an ox tongue wrapped in newspaper (MP, pp. 231–32). Violence, blood, murder are all themes found in the youthful writings. ’Autoportrait casse´’ tells a story in which the father again adopts the role already mentioned in other texts of his son’s devoted escort. In this ‘Autoportrait casse´’ it is the mother who comes in her knickers (p. 191). There is an episode in La Mort propagande later retold in detail in Mes parents in which the son ﬁnds the condom, still full of semen, which the father has used with the mother (Mes, pp. 67–69). Ten or eleven years separate the two accounts (although it is almost certain that an episode like that was transcribed in the diary). On comparing them, one notes at once that in La Mort propagande the episode is conﬁned to a single paragraph and is framed by a story about the school urinals and the description of a sex act in which the narrator addresses his partner. The episode in question starts like this: ‘Une histoire de´ja` cent fois raconte´e [. . .]’ (MP, p. 215) (‘A story told a hundred times already [. . .]’). You get the impression that the narrator is not at all keen on telling this story, particularly when it comes to verbalising his feelings about his father, in a narrative that is so little ﬁctional. A single long sentence broken by commas, allowing incredible economy at the level of description, ends like this when it should be preparing to describe the narrator’s feelings: ‘ne rien comprendre et tout comprendre, fascination et de´gouˆt, etc.’ (ibid.) (‘to understand nothing and everything, fascination and disgust, etc.’). By contrast, the episode in Mes parents is told over two pages and ends with a paragraph in which the narrator cries out all his suﬀering (Mes, p. 69). It is clear that the narrator of La Mort propagande was not ready for this labour of mourning in 1975/76. In these texts the ﬁgure of woman is bound up with death. In ‘Un pur fantasme’ the narrator writes: ‘Si je reˆve, c’est une femme que je veux tuer [. . .]’ (MP, p. 235) (‘If I dream, it is a woman I wish to kill [. . .]’), and he goes on to recount another dream in which he becomes aroused with another boy and they both get an erection. Then the boy turns into a girl. The sexual act takes place even so, but in a few seconds the woman grows old; it is still going on when she dies, for her sexual organ is cold (pp. 235–36). In ‘Saccage’, the narrator and

32

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

Bertrand decide to have sex while the neighbour’s dead body, watched over by his wife, lies above them. In ‘Re´cit du crime’, a certain ‘H.G.’ is found murdered in a pool of blood (p. 210), the victim of a sex pervert. ‘H.G.’’s cut-up body can still be put on show: On l’avait de´coupe´ en lanie`res et en peaux dont on avait fait une exposition, cloue´es sur les murs de sa chambre. Puis on avait fait bouillir ses os dans une grosse marmite en fer-blanc aﬁn d’obtenir des gele´es diverses, qu’on avait ensuite colorie´es et re´pertorie´es. (p. 210) (They had cut him up into strips and skins which they had made into an exhibition, pinned on his bedroom walls. Then they had boiled his bones up in a large tin pot to extract various jellies which they had then coloured and listed.)

Similarly, in ‘La Mort propagande. (Une seule repre´sentation)’ (‘Propaganda Death. (One Show Only)) ‘ the body’s leftover bones are used by the narrator as ‘des parures’ (p. 218) (‘ﬁnery’). In the closing text of ‘La Mort propagande’, ‘Cinq tables de marbre’ (‘Five Marble Tables’), a post-mortem is carried out on the bodies, including the narrator’s (which he has massacred himself). The body is then ‘disse´mine´, multiplie´, exhibe´’ (p. 222) (‘scattered, multiplied, exhibited’) and the narrator exclaims: ‘[. . .] la mort, c’est mon corps [. . .]’ (ibid.) (‘[. . .] death, that is my body [. . .]’). Inspecting his brain will be the narrator’s most intense form of pleasure (p. 225); he then watches himself in a mirror cutting his throat and sticking the corkscrew point of a drilling machine into his ear. This text, of extraordinary violence and harshness, echoes the one which opens ‘La Mort propagande’. Such is the radicalisation of the body as spectacle that Guibert ends up transcending sexographic, even pornographic, writing. That at least was Foucault’s opinion: ‘Herve´ Guibert prend d’entre´e de jeu le pire et l’extreˆme [. . .] et avec l’infaˆme mate´riau il construit des corps, des mirages, des chaˆteaux, des fusions, des tendresses, des races, des ivresses; tout le lourd coeﬃcient du sexe s’est volatilise´’27 (‘From the outset Herve´ Guibert takes the worst and the extreme [. . .] and with the loathsome material he constructs bodies, mirages, castles, fusions, tendernesses, races, intoxications; the whole weighty coeﬃcient of sex has evaporated’). One gets the impression that Guibert needs to exorcise on paper all these images before being able to move on to something else. 5 ‘Machie moderne’ is made up of nineteen fairly short texts. The

Youthful Writings

33

connecting thread seems to be the story of Lola B., where we have vignettes romanesques (‘ﬁctional vignettes’) which will be made use of in other books.28 ‘Au muse´e Gre´vin’ can be compared with Vice. This ‘lieu de fantasmagories dangereuses’ (MP, p. 268) (‘place of dangerous gothic eﬀects’) sparks oﬀ the narrator’s photographic impulse but also—as the text we are reading proves—the act of writing. In ‘Le journal de l’onaniste’ we notice straight away that the narrator says ‘Je’ (‘I’), though the bulk of the text’s content is repeated elsewhere in the book; for example, the passage on pages 282–83 is substantially reprinted in ‘Le re´cit de la ste´rilite´’ (‘ The Story of Sterility’ ) (pp. 316– 17). But asking the question why Guibert goes over the same ground again here is to miss the point, for the crucial diﬀerence is that in adopting the diary form, the narrator says ‘je’ (‘I’): therein lies the ‘Journal de l’onaniste’’s importance. The hero of the Lola B. show is her body, which is ‘e´tincelant’ (‘sparkling’) and which ‘se fait couper en deux’ (‘gets cut in two’) (MP, p. 243); to be like the crocodiles it has to undergo several operations, in particular to remove all trace of her femininity. In the section ‘Zagato, l’amant espagnol’ she reappears in another form under another name, but her body is still put on display, ‘sacriﬁe´ sur un e´tal de bois’ (p. 246) (‘sacriﬁced on a wooden stall’), while ‘[les poignards peuvent disloquer] volontiers les ossatures des femmes et [. . .] e´clater leur ventre’ (p. 247), ‘(the daggers can easily take] the women’s skeletons apart [. . .] and split their bellies open’). This again is not far removed from the subject of ‘La Mort propagande’, except that everything in this section works by suggestion and threat. ‘L’e´trange rendez-vous’ (‘The Strange Appointment’) describes a masked ball in which the idea is to conceal one’s body; the narrative thread gets a bit lost with fragments that appear to have no connection with the story (for example: ‘X. Toute la ve´rite´ sur l’aﬀaire Walt Disney’, pp. 253–54 [‘X. The Walt Disney aﬀair: we reveal all’]); it can, however, be imagined that putting Walt Disney’s body into hibernation is a continuation of the body theme. We lose Lola B. at the masked ball. The decapitation of Arthur de Lamballe’s parents (p. 256) is told, and goes to show that the body is indeed the narrative thread. The ﬁrst image of ‘Au muse´e Gre´vin’ is that of a child caught ‘entre les glaces de´formantes qui aussitoˆt nanisent et e´crasent sa teˆte dans des pressoirs, remode`lent ses mains, e´carte`lent ses membres’ (p. 267) (‘between distorting mirrors that immediately dwarf his head and squash it in presses, reshape his hands, tear his limbs apart’); we can be

34

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

pretty sure that these mirrors, which rewrite the body and map it anew, are not going to leave the narrator unmoved. Accidentally breaking the little dancer’s arm as he was going to photograph her, the narrator exults in the idea of photographing a broken body, but has not the nerve to ask. Intertextuality comes into play: in Vice, the photograph of the false eyes described on pages 270–71 of La Mort propagande can be seen. The narrator wants to create a veritable mise-en-sce`ne for certain photos by hiring an orthopaedic corset (p. 273) and decides to photograph himself in poses in which he is assassinated (Marat), or looks at a decapitated head (the Princesse de Lamballe; the scene in fact described in ‘Machie moderne’, p. 256), or has a hand ‘passant par une feneˆtre a` guillotine’ (‘passing through a sash window’) (‘Louis XVII’), p. 274. Nothing is left to chance: the narrator reads a book on Louis XVII with a suggestive title: Louis XVII, sa vie, son agonie, sa mort (Louis XVII, his Life, his Agony, his Death) (p. 276). The story then becomes a ‘repre´sentation the´aˆtrale’ (p. 275) (‘theatrical performance’) in which, it will be recalled, the body is the leading actor. In this text historical events provide the ‘ﬁction’ of the body. Another innovation is the entry of photography into Guibert’s writing; a theoretical notion in ‘La Mort propagande’, it here becomes reality. The style here, it goes without saying, reﬂects photographic poses more and more closely. In this section love is once again linked with death. Arthur de Lamballe keeps his mother’s decapitated head as a totem, and ends up kissing it (p. 256). Lola ‘voit de la mort la` ou` il y a de la jouissance’ (p. 261) (‘sees death where there is erotic pleasure’): the men have swallowed the boys and spat them out again into a silver vessel (ibid.). In ‘Au muse´e Gre´vin’ the narrator admires the displays of heads and hands (pp. 269 and 272) which lead him to write: ‘J’ai soudain eu l’impression de me trouver dans un e´tablissement de beaute´, de beaute´ pour les morts [. . .]’ (p. 269) (‘I had the sudden feeling of being in a beauty salon, a beauty salon for the dead [. . .]’). In ‘Le journal de l’onaniste’ the narrator knows that contact with a body in his bed would quickly lead to a desire ‘d’en arreˆter la respiration’ (p. 283) (‘to stop it breathing’). Illusion is everywhere: Lola B. deceives her audience by wearing a crocodile mask during her number (p. 244) and the murderer she is running away from at the masked ball does not perhaps exist (p. 258). In ‘Le journal de l’onaniste’ the narrator wants to rest his body by faking sex and orgy (p. 281). He ends up rejecting his own naked body (p. 283) and is unable to get excited by anyone else’s either: only

Youthful Writings

35

through self-deception can his sexual desire be aroused. He completely depersonalises the body of the other in ‘une bouche[. . .] un sexe [. . .]’ (ibid., my italics) (‘a mouth [. . .] a sex [. . .]’), but he cannot help thinking of the body linked to these organs. There is only one solution: ‘Seul le reˆve me satisfait, par sa brutalite´, par le de´coupage possible des organes, par leur seule connexion, de´tache´e d’une drague, d’une narration’ (p. 283) (‘Only dreaming satisﬁes me, by its brutality, by the possible cutting up of organs, by their sole connection, detached from a seduction, from a narration’). It is no longer simply seduction which bores the narrator, but also narration. He seems to awaken from the illusion of narration because it no longer makes possible erotic pleasure, which henceforth can no longer be textual. As we have seen, in some sections of the book (especially ‘La Mort propagande’), the disembodied, cut up body is a device that has not worked or works no longer. As a last resort, there is mise-en-sce`ne in a photograph, the only narration tolerated being the description of photographic poses (‘Au muse´e Gre´vin’), such photos making it possible for the narrator to ﬁnd his ‘plaisir’ (‘pleasure’) again (p. 276).

6 ‘ ‘‘Il’’ (un re´cit de la mesquinerie)’ was written in 1977–78 but was only published in the new edition of La Mort propagande. It contains seventeen stories of varying length, all bearing titles. Its existence, however, was known about as early as 1986, when the following appeared in Mes parents: ‘Je me mets aussitoˆt a` en e´crire un second: ‘‘Il’’ (un re´cit de la mesquinerie). C’est une suite de textes ou` le je, dans la transcription journalie`re de ses gestes et pense´es, se de´guise un peu mesquinement sous l’identite´ d’un personnage de roman’ (Mes, p. 108) (‘I straight away begin writing another: ‘‘Il’’ (un re´cit de la mesquinerie). It is a sequence of texts in which the I, in the daily transcription of his thoughts and deeds, rather meanly disguises himself behind the identity of a character in a novel’). In an interview, Guibert said of this text that it was ‘la tentative romanesque d’un journal a` la troisie`me personne’29 (‘the ﬁctional attempt at a diary in the third person’). In the two extracts where this text is discussed, the words ‘roman’ (‘novel’) and ‘romanesque’ (‘ﬁctional’) are mentioned, ‘ﬁctional’ being associated with ‘journal’ (‘diary’). Nevertheless, Guibert maintains that it is a ‘re´cit’ (‘story’); in describing his project,

36

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

he speaks of ‘tentative’ (‘attempt’) and not of ‘re´ussite’ (‘success’). Indeed, everything indicates that ‘ ‘‘Il’’ (un re´cit de la mesquinerie)’ is judged by Guibert a failure rather than a success, a failure we can now only speculate about, but attributable no doubt to the literary genre used, the ‘tentative romanesque d’un journal’ (‘ﬁctional attempt at a diary’) (the result, as we have seen, still being called a ‘re´cit’ [‘story’]), and the phenomenon of distantiation involved in using ‘il’ (‘he’) instead of ‘je’ (‘I’). But that is not adequate to the task of creating ﬁction, and if the narrator of Mes parents talks about ‘il’ (‘he’) as a ‘personnage’ (‘character’), it is because apart from the people who revolve around ‘il’ (‘him’), there is no other character. Nothing much happens to him and above all there is no genuine interaction between him and others. He considers getting his character to read a book by Peter Handke and ‘que sa lecture intervienne dans le re´cit, prenne l’importance d’un deuxie`me personnage’ (p. 332) (‘for the reading to intervene in the story, take on the importance of a second character’), but this is the only approximation he manages to the creation of a character, as is conﬁrmed in ‘Les escarpins rouges’: ‘Quand j’ai commence´ a` e´crire, la forme du roman, avec des personnages, m’e´tait e´trange`re, irre´alisable, inde´sirable [. . .] il n’y avait que moi comme personnage, car je ne voyais bien que moi comme connaissance, j’e´tais assez seul’ (PA, p. 133) (‘When I began to write, the novel form, with characters, was alien to me, unachievable, undesirable [. . .] there was only myself as a character, for I could only really see myself as an acquaintance, I was rather alone’). But I would not go so far as to deny all value to this ‘re´cit’ (‘story’); for example, the ﬁrst story ‘Le re´cit de la mesquinerie’ (MP, pp. 287–88) must be considered a founder text. ‘Il’ (‘he’) is grappling with a diﬃcult decision, how to set about his account of the daily round. Various attempts at ﬁction emerge, such as giving himself a man’s identity, misrepresenting his sexual preferences, or calling himself ‘Paul K.’, but none is taken up. What ‘il’ (‘he’) wants is to write ‘son moi [. . .] au jour le jour [. . .]’ (ibid., my italics) (‘his self [. . .] from day to day [. . .]’), and this project, so clearly set out when Guibert was only 22 or 23, sums up his entire work and provides my book with its cornerstone and interpretative perspective. So let us go on analysing this text, since we have here the foundation of what Guibert was later to call taking ‘un socle de ve´rite´ [. . .] [et] [. . .] couler quelques particules de mensonge, comme une greﬀe, un point de suture’30 (‘a plinth of truth [. . .] [and] [. . .]

Youthful Writings

37

casting a few particles of untruth, like a graft, a stitch’), a characteristic process in his work. Il savait qu’il avait plusieurs faits pre´cis a` relater et qu’il devrait les incorporer, le plus sournoisement possible, dans une masse anodine pour qu’ils soient soudain bien clinquants, bien criards. Il augurait de´ja` des tics d’e´criture [. . .] ou de ponctuation. (MP, p. 288)31 (He knew that he had several precise facts to relate and that he had to incorporate them, as slyly as possible, in an anodine mass so that they could suddenly be really ﬂashy, really garish. His writing [. . .] and punctuation mannerisms were already foreshadowed.)

How these writing mannerisms (as Guibert rightly calls them since they recur throughout his work) operate is what I have sought to bring out. As for punctuation mannerisms, it seems to me they concern the use of the parenthesis, which in Guibert’s work merits a fully-ﬂedged study of its own; witness its use in this story where, after having bluntly reported the narrator’s remarks (according to which he loathes writing) using the direct style as if to add to their veracity, a new paragraph begins: ‘(Il mentait. Il avait du bonheur a` e´crire)’ (ibid.) [‘(He was lying. He enjoyed writing)’]. The eﬀect of the bracketed sentence is to shortcircuit what has gone before and to create behind the ring-fence of the parenthesis the illusion of sincerity. It is a punctuation mannerism which will be used throughout the work, even in the most ﬁctional books, whether the narrator is being homodiegetic, autodiegetic or heterodiegetic. It also constitutes a place where the unutterable can be uttered: putting things between brackets will be one of Guibert’s favourite ways of writing the self.32 Finally, it should not be forgotten that this too forms part of the ‘jeu’ (‘game’) that he sets up between himself and the reader, and we also know that he used brackets in his diary, as the extracts published in Libe´ration show.33 The narrator dreams of a style that could be called ‘photographique’ (‘photographic’): Il pense: ne rien inventer, se contenter de photographier, d’enregistrer. Rester assis devant une feneˆtre et de´crire ce qui se passe la`, dans le cadre. E´crire en marchant, dans un cafe´, une gare ou un parc. De´crire minutieusement un corps ou un lieu. E´crire des plans. Ne rien faire que transmettre sa sensation brute. Il se ﬁche de l’imagination. (p. 311) (He thinks: invent nothing, be content with photographing, recording. Remain seated in front of a window and describe what happens there, within the frame. Write while walking, in a cafe´, a station or a park. Describe minutely a body or a place. Write plans. Do nothing but transmit raw sensation. He could not care less about imagination.)

38

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

This extract could serve as illustration to certain passages in La Mort propagande. The body is always at the centre of the narration, even if before starting to write the narrator has to empty his body completely, ‘faire table rase’ (‘wipe the slate clean’) as he puts it, so that his text is ‘atone’ (p. 327) (‘expressionless’). For example, the thread running through ‘Le re´cit de la disparition’ is the dead body (pp. 296–97). The text entitled ‘Le re´cit de la dissimulation’ is also a founder text for the purpose of understanding the entire paradox of body writing in Guibert. The narrator talks of hiding his vulnerability, the pigeon-chest (p. 290), and says that he even ﬁnds it diﬃcult to write the word ‘torse’ (‘torso’), that he wants to conceal his body, his nakedness.34 The word that comes to mind and ﬂows from his pen when he looks at his body in the mirror is ‘horreur’ (‘horror’) (p. 291). Paradoxically he writes: ‘Et parfois il l’aimait ce torse, a` la folie. Il demanda a` un ami de le prendre en photo’ (p. 290). (‘And sometimes he loved this torso madly. He asked a friend to take a photo of it’). He admits on paper what he dare not speak of and cannot stand. In ‘Le re´cit de la vacance’, while his body exasperates him just as much, he puts up with photographing it mentally ‘en dissimulant ou en accentuant ses de´fauts’ (p. 302) (‘concealing or highlighting its blemishes’), referring to it all the time as ‘ce’ (‘this’) body and not ‘mon’ (‘my’) body. This passage was later reprinted in Mes parents (Mes, pp. 115–16). From then onwards Guibert lays bare in writing what he sees as the most shameful secrets, a move made easier perhaps by the other saying to him: ‘Toi tu dissimules (en fait: tu la fais remarquer en la rendant myste´rieuse, en l’interdisant a` l’investigation de l’autre) une zone accessoire dans l’e´rotisme: ton torse’ (MP, p. 291) [‘You conceal (in fact: you draw attention to it by making it mysterious, by not allowing it to be investigated by the other) a secondary erogenous zone: your torso’]. In concealing, one reveals; as one reveals, can one conceal, while being freed? The narrator then hastens to pin up his chest X-ray on the window in front of his desk (p. 292).35 In general the narrator’s life and his vision of the world are regulated by artistic representations, either literary36 or photographic,37 even ﬁlmic: while pondering whether he should father a child, he mentally screens the family ﬁlm, having scaled his decision down to ‘plusieurs bobines de ﬁlm 16mm’ (p. 320) (‘several reels of 16mm ﬁlm’), and it is enough to put him oﬀ the idea. The reality of life for the narrator of ‘ ‘‘Il’’ (un re´cit de la mesquinerie)’ is what is read or seen or

Youthful Writings

39

unfolds before his eyes: literature, photography or video,38 or how the self is to be written. ‘ ‘‘Il’’ (un re´cit de la mesquinerie)’ ﬁctionalises the father in two astonishing stories. In ‘Le re´cit de la vacance’, after the father has said to the narrator that he looks stunning, we read: ‘Il lui dit aussi: ‘‘Le tout c’est que tu ne souﬀres pas’’, et il lui semble que cette phrase re´sume tout ce que son pe`re veut lui dire, tout ce qu’il a jamais voulu lui dire’ (p. 320) (‘He also tells him: ‘‘The main thing is you don’t suﬀer’’, and it seems to him that this sentence sums up everything his father wants to tell him, has ever wanted to tell him’). This passage is one of the most beautiful between the father and the son; in it, all communication is summed up in a single sentence which speaks volumes, but we notice that it is the narrator who speculates about its interpretation (‘[. . .] et il lui semble que cette phrase re´sume [. . .]’). The passage recurs later, word for word, in Mes parents (Mes, p. 116), which would seem to indicate that it is lifted directly from the diary. In ‘Le re´cit du re´cit’ a news item is recounted. We know from the paratext that Herve´ Guibert’s imagination was haunted by this story;39 it recurs in particular in Vice (pp. 56–58). From the paratext we learn ﬁrstly that fantasy triggers writing, secondly that the heroic gesture comes from the father who sacriﬁces himself in an attempt to save his son, and thirdly that Guibert’s imagination enters into the spirit of the narrative for it decides to go and disinter the bodies. In ‘Le re´cit du re´cit’, the narrator—during his third visit to the cemetery—indeed digs the bodies up and ﬁnds them ‘ensemble, le ﬁls couche´ dans les bras du pe`re’ (MP, p. 338) (‘together, the son lying in his father’s arms’) then, having stroked the child’s belly and kissed his lips, he leaves him ‘expose´, creve´ au vent et a` la poussie`re’ (ibid.) (‘exposed, burst open to the wind and to the dust’). It is as if the narrator could not bear the idea of a father, his arms wrapped round his son in touching intimacy for all eternity, with himself left out of the picture; we note that he leaves the father’s body in the coﬃn and that he wishes simply to separate them physically, something which will make him ‘ivre de joie’ (ibid.) (‘deliriously happy’). With these words La Mort propagande ends. When it was pointed out to him in the same interview that the image of a man with a boy runs through the whole of his work, Guibert’s reply underlined its importance: ‘Oui, cela vient du rapport de tendresse inoubliable ve´cu, enfant, avec mon pe`re. Un homme et un enfant, c’est ma ﬁgure; une ﬁgure picturale. Certains de mes livres ne sont que

40

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

pre´texte pour arriver a` ce tableau. Le pe`re et le ﬁls dans un rapport amoureux, e´rotique’40 (‘Yes, that comes from the unforgettably tender relationship I had as a child with my father. A man and a child, that is my image; a pictorial image. Some of my books are only a pretext for getting to this picture. The father and the son in an amorous, erotic relationship’). Guibert says of La Mort propagande that the book is ‘fait de bric et de broc’41 (‘made of bits and pieces’). It cannot be denied that the work is slightly piecemeal. In a sense the ‘bits and pieces’ represent Guibert feeling his way, narratively speaking, but there does seem to be a stable element running through these youthful writings: to inscribe oneself, to inscribe one’s body through such experimentational forms as tales, fragments, narration, stories and diary, oscillating between the third person, with occasionally a diﬀerent identity like Aure´lien, and the ﬁrst person. It seems, too, that this writing of the body is a reaction to his parents taking over his body (p. 282), making literature a way of trying to reappropriate his own body. The text seems also to express the pain felt by the son because the relationship with the father is no longer the same, and we can see in the last texts the project that interests the narrator, the writing of the ‘moi . . . au jour le jour’ (p. 287) (‘self . . . from day to day’). What I hope I have shown is how important this book is, both for the work to come (Bellour sees in it a precursor of Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes42) and for the project of writing the self, and how too we can see at work here what Bellour calls ‘une sorte d’imagination pure qui s’essaye, veut se laisser entraıˆ ner, plus loin que ce que sa maıˆ trise, souvent, lui accordera ensuite’43 (‘a kind of pure imagination which is feeling its way, willing to be carried along, often further than his mastery later on will permit’).

CHAPTER TWO

Photographic Writing In the texts studied in this chapter we shall see the story beginning to be engendered by photographs set alongside the text, ﬁrst of all without any attempt at integration (Vice), then becoming integrated into the narrative (Suzanne et Louise). The writer then proceeds to another stage in the relationship between image and text in L’Image fantoˆme in which photography feeds the text while remaining absent from it. As for themes, they will be similar to those of La Mort propagande but worked out in a more polished way.

LA PIQUˆRE D’AMOUR ET AUTRES TEXTES SUIVI DE LA CHAIR FRAIˆCHE [TEXTS DATING TO 1980] The stories (eight in number, called ‘nouvelles’ [‘short stories’] on the back cover, though the text is not signed Herve´ Guibert) that I shall be discussing were written between 1977 and 1980: ‘La Piquˆre d’amour’; ‘Le Lanceur de couteaux’; ‘Copyright, cine´ma’; ‘La maˆchoire de l’Harski’; ‘Une petite bonne femme sans histoire’; ‘L’ami allemand’; ‘Le critique photo’; ‘Le trio myste´rieux’ (‘The Love Injection’; ‘The Knife Thrower’; ‘Copyright, Cinema’; ‘The Harski’s Jaw’; ‘A little Woman who did not make a fuss’; ‘The German Friend’; ‘The Photographic Critic’; ‘The Mysterious Trio’). As such, it would take too long to summarise them all. Most of them were ﬁrst published in the review Minuit (see Bibliography). The narrator, referring to the one called ‘Une petite bonne femme sans histoire’, talks of a ‘re´cit’ (‘story’) (PA, p. 35). ‘La piquˆre d’amour’, which gives its title to the collection, comes ﬁrst and is the only eponymous text; everything points to Guibert having insisted on this order since the back cover indicates that all the stories were gathered ‘dans un dossier intitule´ La piquˆre d’amour’ (‘in a dossier called La piquˆre d’amour’). Some stories are heterodiegetic (such as ‘La piquˆre d’amour’) while others are autodiegetic (such as ‘Le lanceur de couteaux’); there are no homodiegetic stories, strictly speaking. In the autodiegetic stories the narrator sometimes says ‘je’ 41

42

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

(‘I’) (as in ‘Le Lanceur de couteaux’) but also ‘il’ (‘he’) (as in ‘L’ami allemand’). Elements of a markedly autobiographical nature recur as in ‘Une petite bonne femme sans histoire’, where the little brother is described as ‘un garc¸on eﬀe´mine´’ (p. 32) (‘an eﬀeminate boy’) and the sister’s story is told. As we saw when La Mort propagande was being discussed, some stories exist already in an embryonic state in the preceding book (‘Le Lanceur de couteaux’; ‘Copyright, cine´ma’). Some characters will recur in other books (‘Hans-Ju¨rge’, ‘L’ami allemand’, ‘N.B.’, ‘Le trio myste´rieux’, reappearing especially as ‘Bosmans’ in L’Homme blesse´ and of course ‘Bill’ in A` l’ami). ‘Le critique photo’ will later be reprinted in an abridged form in L’Image fantoˆme (IF, p. 125). An increasingly important part is played by photography in literary creation; in ‘Copyright, cine´ma’, it is the photo on the front page of the newspaper, announcing the cinema star’s arrival, which links her fate to that of the killer whose identikit picture is placed just above hers (PA, p. 20). Moreover, when Angelica is threatened by the killer, words are redundant since the photos will speak for themselves: ‘Les deux photos, qui avaient de´ja` fait la premie`re page de l’e´dition du matin, e´taient re´utilise´es dans la meˆme trame’ (p. 22) (‘The two photos, which had already made the front page of the morning edition, were used again in the same screen’). It is the photo which triggers the writing of ‘Le Lanceur de couteaux’, a photo itself mise en abıˆme by the ‘photo encadre´e [. . .] de son jeune cousin’ (p. 12) (‘the framed photo [. . .] of his young cousin’) to whom he bears an almost perfect resemblance (‘Sosie presque parfait de son cousin mort [. . .]’, p. 14 (‘The almost perfect double of his dead cousin [. . .]’). The nephew of the marshal’s wife lets him into the house, a veritable ‘antre plein de photos’ (ibid.) (‘den full of photos’), where he himself loses no time in taking compromising photos of the nephew. When the latter’s double identity is revealed, particularly on the ‘aﬃchettes’ (p. 16) (‘small posters’) we then know that his stage name is Zagato and that he has dragged our narrator into an odd adventure. The narrator will only be saved by blackmailing the knife-thrower and his impresario with compromising photos, which he will have to hand over in the shape of the rolls of ﬁlm (p. 19), managing nonetheless to keep a black and white photo thanks to which this text is written. Photography is also at the heart of the story ‘Le critique photo’, where we learn that the critic in question views everything before taking notes, then goes back again in front of every photo and puts its visible elements into words: ‘Au moment d’e´crire l’article . . . il repre-

Photographic Writing

43

nait ses notes, et les faisait passer dans une transcription imme´diate’ (p. 42) (‘At the moment of writing the article . . . he went back to his notes and transcribed them at once into the text’). Sometimes words are replaced in his mind by images, and then comes the nightmare of having to put them into words. What he particularly favours is the family picture and the erotic photo: both translate well ‘les aﬀections et les de´sirs’ (ibid.) (‘aﬀections and desires’). Articles on photography are detrimental to the work of the writer: ‘Et il n’e´crivait plus que des notes dans son journal, dont l’e´criture s’amenuisait’ (p. 44) (‘And he was no longer writing anything except notes in his diary, the composition of which was dwindling’). In a sense this preoccupation mirrors Guibert’s production; he too was conﬁning himself to writing a handful of short narratives rather than embarking on more ambitious projects. The style is similar to that in La Mort propagande. Long sentences recur (PA, pp. 27–28); this sentence is particularly striking in that it describes the struggle in the lift between the actress and the killer, and when we have read it through we really do have a mental image of the ﬁght: the writing has become cinematographic. A director is provided with everything needed to ﬁlm this scene (unless the ﬁlm preceded the work of writing; Guibert’s aﬀection for the ﬁlms of Wim Wenders and in particular for The State of Things is well documented, and perhaps accounts for the title ‘Copyright, cine´ma’). As for the images, they are not very numerous but they appear to blend people and the inanimate world (‘chaleur touﬀue’ [‘dense heat’]; ‘ville grouillante’ [‘teeming town’], p. 23). The body and the look are still present as Guibertian themes; in ‘Le Lanceur de couteaux’, when Zagato strokes the blade that is more precious than the others, his own body is put on show (‘[. . .] tout son corps vibrait, dansait ﬂexible et animal, noir et luisant comme le pelage du puma ondulant’, p. 16 ‘[. . .] his whole body was quivering, dancing with animal suppleness, black and glistening like the puma’s rippling coat’). During the knife-throwing rehearsals the narrator forces himself to keep his eyes open; it is when they blindfold him that he cracks. In ‘Le trio myste´rieux’ virtually all communication takes place by means of observation and the look (‘[. . .] ils essayent de´ja` de communiquer avec des expressions d’yeux, en levant par exemple les sourcils [. . .]’, p. 47 ‘[. . .] they already try to communicate with eye expressions, by for instance raising their eyebrows [. . .]’; see also p. 48). But wishing to be discreet, ‘N.B.’ and the youth are fooled: the lady accompanying the youth is a clairvoyant! ‘Cette femme, ainsi que l’homme, ont suivi, sans

44

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

se faire remarquer, leurs e´changes de regards dans l’avion’ (p. 50) (‘This woman, and the man, followed, without being noticed, the looks they exchanged in the aeroplane’). The oddest thing experienced by the body is that described in ‘La piquˆre d’amour’. The injection has a knack of putting people in a binary bath; the body becomes that of another, turned inside out, ‘[. . .] un ﬂux charnel continu [. . .]’ (p. 11) (‘[. . .] a continuous carnal ﬂow [. . .]’). If inadvertently ‘deux personnes se piquent en meˆme temps dans le meˆme endroit, elles veulent tout a` coup s’e´liminer toutes deux [. . .] et les corps qu’on en retire sont [. . .] entaille´s de morsures et de griﬀes, parfois totalement e´nerve´s’ (ibid.) (‘two people inject themselves at the same time in the same place, they suddenly want to eliminate each other [. . .] and the bodies recovered are [. . .] slashed with bites and scratches, sometimes completely denerved’). But a second injection plunges the person into a state of melancholy (p. 12). ‘Le critique photo’ says that he likes photographing ‘les visages et les corps de ceux qu’il aim[e]’ (p. 43) (‘the faces and bodies of those he loves’). His projects are: ‘(les cicatrices sur les visages, les ﬁls de quinze ans avec leurs me`res, les cadavres dans les morgues [. . .])’ (p. 44) (‘(the scars on the faces, the sons of ﬁfteen with their mothers, the bodies in the morgues [. . .])’. Before writing, he must cleanse his body (p. 40) which he economises and puts to rest (p. 44). As in La Mort propagande the same morbid fascination recurs, but the content is tempered by narrative and above all by the presence of characters. Love is still linked to death. ‘Le trio myste´rieux’ takes up the theme of the father-son relationship again in a mimetic story in which N.B. resembles the young man’s deceased father (PA, p. 50); the story ends with them making love. In ‘L’ami allemand’ it is Hans-Ju¨rge’s love for his daughter which prompts his wish to die before the age of thirty so that she can collect his life insurance (p. 39). In ‘La piquˆre d’amour’ the animals are killed with needles at the moment of their ﬁrst coupling, or more precisely ‘de leurs jouissances concerte´es’ (p. 10) (‘of their joint orgasms’). In ‘Le Lanceur de couteaux’ what really interests the narrator in the photographic set-up to which the nephew of the marshal’s wife lends himself is the mise-en-abıˆme of this character with his dead cousin: to underline how closely he resembles the one who has already been described as ‘un sosie presque parfait’ (p. 14) (‘an almost perfect double’), he gets him to wear ‘un cotillon de le´gionnaire qui est la re´plique exacte en papier du ke´pi que porte son cousin sur la photo’ (p. 13) (‘a foreign legionnaire’s party hat which is the exact paper

Photographic Writing

45

replica of the kepi worn by his cousin in the photo’). The cousin was blown to pieces by a bomb. The narrator gets the nephew’s eyes closed. His photographic desire is connected with death: what he really wants is to photograph the blown-up cousin on his deathbed. Similarly, ‘Angelica H.’ has a sudden urge to see the bodies of the four strangled women (p. 22), and they have to be laid out side by side. Postmortems have already been carried out on two of them and they have been dismembered; never mind, ‘elle fut d’abord frappe´e par leur beaute´’ (p. 23) (‘she was ﬁrst struck by their beauty’). There is an aesthetic pleasure in photographing the dead body, either with a camera or mentally. Deception is still present in the text and it operates on several levels. ‘Une petite bonne femme sans histoire’, from which the ‘je’ (‘I’) narrator is more or less excluded, ends with this sentence: ‘Ce re´cit, qui jette les informations comme une de´position de constat d’adulte`re, ne fait aucun e´tat du de´sir de cette femme’ (p. 35) (‘This story, which sets down the facts like a statement in an adultery report, makes no mention of this woman’s desire’). This has the eﬀect of casting doubt on the narrative’s authenticity; moreover, since nothing is said about the woman’s desire, it takes on added importance. In ‘Copyright, cine´ma’, the lift mirror is a deception since the killer is hiding behind it, waiting to leap on the woman and strangle her (p. 27); even the killer’s identikit picture is a deception (‘[. . .] on aura donne´ trop de faux signalements [. . .]’), p. 21 (‘[. . .] too many wrong particulars will have been given [. . .]’). ‘La piquˆre d’amour’ reﬂects betrayal on several levels. The animals are tricked, since the moment they are allowed to couple they are killed. The users of the love injection are fooled since anyone who has a second injection ‘perd la parole, perd ses ongles, perd son travail’ (p. 12) (‘loses speech, ﬁngernails, job’). The users end up getting cheated when the pure blood of a wildcat or bird of prey is blended with chicken’s blood and the injection loses its magic eﬀect. In the end, for want of love injection, this product turns out to be in fact ‘vicieux’ (p. 9) (‘vicious’). Later, in ‘La machine a` fabriquer de l’e´lectricite´ statique’ (‘The machine that produces static electricity’), a text in Vice, the narrator speaks of the novel by Reveroni Saint-Cyr (Pauliska ou la Perversite´ moderne) in which we are to learn ‘comment l’amour peut s’inoculer’ (V, p. 37) (‘how love can be inoculated’), which all goes to show that vice already exists in these texts. ‘Le critique photo’ begins with a note signed ‘(H.G.)’ that points in

46

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

Herve´ Guibert’s direction in the same way as the diary of ‘Paul K.’ has also been recovered. It will be recalled that in ‘Le re´cit de la mesquinerie’ the narrator talks of acquiring for himself the appearance of a man ‘Paul K.’ (MP, p. 287); he seems to manage it in this story, although in the note signed ‘(H.G.)’ we learn that this character’s articles on photography appeared in Die Zeit between 1950 and 1955 (1955 being precisely the birth year of Herve´ Guibert who was indeed also a photographic critic). This text is very important, inasmuch as what we are presented with here is an attempt at ﬁction that starts from true facts and then juggles with them. My approach has enabled me to uncover in most of the stories what Antoine de Gaudemar calls ‘la meˆme fantasque imagination’1 (‘the same fanciful imagination’). And if the narrator is still using ‘autobiographique’ (‘autobiographical’) material, he has been able to juggle cleverly with it in order to obtain stories. Body writing does not dominate as in La Mort propagande; it is here better integrated into the narrative. Eroticism and perversity are from now on only hinted at, but that does not detract from their potency. The photographic temptation which in certain passages in La Mort propagande (such as ‘Au Muse´e Gre´vin’) had threatened to destabilise the narrative, is now used to enrich it; in these stories we have been able to gauge its full importance.

VICE Before concentrating on the content of Vice, let us try to establish where Guibert stands at this point. In the ﬁrst place there is the striking feat of La Mort propagande: how can such a de´but be followed? Then there are the constraints of established literary genres: Guibert is trying his hand at story-writing on the fringe, within the Minuit avant-garde. But his perversity and almost endogenous rejection of literary conformism were to produce Vice, a text so subversive that it did not ﬁnd a publisher until eleven years after it was written. Vice is made up of texts, then of (untitled) photographs, then of texts again. We are informed on page ﬁve that the photos are by the book’s author. No genre is speciﬁed for Vice. There is a photograph on the front cover too, showing a head surrounded by hands, later reused in Photographies under the title ‘Muse´e Gre´vin, 1978–9’; it bears a certain resemblance to Herve´ Guibert, which no doubt explains why it was chosen, particularly alongside a portrait captioned ‘H.G. in 1985’

Photographic Writing

47

signed Carlos Freire. The ﬁrst part is called ‘Articles personnels (Inventaire de la mallette du voyageur Bougainville)’ [‘Personal Articles (Contents of the overnight case of the Bougainville traveller’)] (V, p. 9); then follow quasi-phenomenological descriptions of various ‘articles personnels’ (‘personal articles’) which all have subheadings. The second part is entitled ‘Un parcours’ (‘A Journey’) and contains nineteen texts. It does not seem appropriate to analyse the two parts separately. Il voulut tout a` coup eˆtre transplante´ dans un bain de vice, de´cors et actes. Il marchait dans la rue. Il e´tait preˆt a` payer pour se retrouver dans une ambiance vicieuse. Le cine´ma porno lui semblait indigent. (MP, p. 324) (He suddenly wanted to be transplanted into a bath of vice, de´cors and acts. He was walking in the street. He was ready to pay to ﬁnd himself in a vicious atmosphere. Porno ﬁlms seemed to him a poor substitute.)

With a few changes, this passage taken from La Mort propagande is reprinted on the back cover of Vice and also serves as an epigraph to the text, so the question arises whether we are being invited to an intertextual reading of Vice. Vice, so ardently yearned for and desired in La Mort propagande, is the subject of Guibert’s next book, and as we saw in the preceding section, ‘vice’ recurs in the pages of ‘La piquˆre d’amour’. Indeed, Vice was turned down by Guibert’s publisher2 and did not appear until 1991; we can reasonably assume, too, that it was only accepted then (by the publishers Jacques Bertoin) because its commercial success was assured after the media circus that surrounded the publication of A` l’ami (in 1990) and Guibert’s appearance on ‘Apostrophes’. Nevertheless, in line with the reasoning set out in the introduction, I wish to discuss Vice here, in its correct place (1979) in the chronological order of composition, to help us focus more clearly on the whole enterprise of writing the self. I have already drawn attention to the intertextuality of Vice with La Mort propagande and the texts of La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La Chair fraıˆche that we have studied. Of note too are L’Image fantoˆme,3 Mauve le Vierge (MV) (‘La teˆte de Jeanne d’Arc’, MV, pp. 83–100), and episodes like the eﬀect of the tongue spatula (V, p. 22) which in La Mort propagande was attributed to The´re`se (p. 142) and will be assigned to the narrator of Le Protocole compassionnel, or like that of the ball of wool (V, p. 49) which occurs in La Mort propagande (MP, p. 94) and will recur in Mes parents (Mes, pp. 22–23). In his review of the book, Jean-Marie Planes recognises the following inﬂuences: ‘Ces textes doivent beaucoup a` Barthes, pour l’exploration d’une

48

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

mythologie de salle de bains, a` Ponge surtout—on froˆle le pastiche— pour ce parti pris des choses triviales dont l’e´crivain excelle a` faire apparaıˆ tre la singularite´ troublante’4 (‘These texts owe much to Barthes for the exploration of a bathroom mythology, to Ponge above all—here bordering on pastiche—for that commitment to trivial things, the disturbing singularity of which the writer excels at bringing out’). Sarkonak also cites Robbe-Grillet, Barthes, Foucault and Sade.5 In this ﬁrst part the narrative is heterodiegetic and, to compensate for the anonymity, there are passages where direct speech is used (p. 20) and where the text is peppered with humour, as in the description of the ether mask which, if it were too detailed, could send the reader to sleep (p. 24). Humour is not simply restricted to the ﬁrst part: the description of the ‘hammam’ (‘Turkish bath’) does not fail to stress the incongruity of the de´cor: the television monitor, set above a white plaster angel, showing Queen Elizabeth’s wedding (p. 46). This humour sometimes takes a farcical turn, as when it is suggested that the state should reward the creators of vice (p. 43). The narrator becomes omniscient in some texts like ‘Un Parcours’ (p. 47), and is able to pass from the ‘nous’ (‘we’) to the ‘je’ (‘I’) as in ‘Le Plane´tarium’ (‘The Planetarium’). Still using phenomenological description, the narrative point of view is sometimes passed on to the children. Thus, instead of being told that two workmen weed the cemetery, we read: ‘deux hommes e´tranges, qui portaient sur leur dos, sangle´es sur leurs poitrines, de petites bonbonnes de fer termine´es par des trompes, le visage dissimule´ sous de grosses lunettes d’aviateurs, dirigeaient ces trompes entre les fentes des pierres tombales’ (pp. 57–58) (‘two strange men, carrying on their backs, strapped to their chests, small iron carboys ending in tubes, wearing big ﬂying goggles that hid their faces, were pointing the tubes at cracks in the tombstones’). Elsewhere, big cats enjoy this narrative privilege. Thus, ‘ils exe`crent la foule qui s’e´chauﬀe a` leurs attouchements, ils trouvent son odeur puante’ (p. 60) (‘they loathe the crowd excited by their fondling, they ﬁnd it stinks’). Here again we encounter the economy of style that characterises some passages in La Mort propagande. Thus ‘Le martinet’ manages to conjure up bestiality, silence, violence and pleasure all at once by appealing to hearing and smell: ‘Le martinet est pendu parmi les teˆtesde-loup aux crocs du plafond, dans l’arrie`re-boutique obscure de la droguerie. Il porte en lui, dans ses lanie`res immobiles, la plainte des enfants battus, il exhale le plaisir des amants de´voye´s’ (V, p. 19) (‘The cat-o’-nine-tails hangs among the brushes hooked to the ceiling in the

Photographic Writing

49

dark backroom of the ironmonger’s. It bears within itself, in its motionless lashes, the groans of whipped children, it exudes the pleasure of perverted lovers’). We also encounter long sentences once more (for instance on page 25 where ‘ils’ [‘they’] is used to boost the narration). Some of the descriptions must have required detailed research, for example ‘Le masque a` e´ther’ and ‘Le cabinet d’un taxidermiste’: at least three specialist works are cited.6 Surprisingly for a book called Vice, scatology, which one might have expected to have been one of the ingredients, seems to have disappeared: for example, the virile member is described as ‘l’organe terminal de leur bas-ventre’ (p. 15) (‘their lower abdomen’s terminal organ’). Some descriptions resemble photographic style: we still have the inﬂuence of photography at work in literary creation, albeit in the rough, purged of the narrator’s imagination. As we saw above in the case of ‘Le martinet’ and ‘La fauverie’ (‘The Lion House’), all ﬁve senses are described in these texts. Thus ‘Le coton-tige’ (‘Cotton-Bud’) describes the thrill of feelings of touch, albeit in a passive declension. In other parts of the text the narration is done by ‘la vouˆte plantaire’ (p. 45) (‘the arch of the foot’) describing its contact with various ﬂoor-coverings. ‘Le Palais des Mirages’ (‘The Mirage Palace’) owes it success to the fact that it disturbs the senses; similarly in ‘Le crocodile-bar’ (‘ The Crocodile Bar’) the cocktail given to the English travellers ‘anesthe´sie e´galement l’odorat’ (p. 68) (‘also anaesthetises smell’). The second part shows us deformed bodies (‘Le palais des monstres de´sirables’), (‘The Palace of Desirable Monsters’) pleasure domes (‘Le hammam’) (‘The Turkish Bath’) and lust objects (‘Le magasin de laine’) (‘The Wool Shop’). The clear guiding thread is the preservation of bodies, either animal or human ones (a museum, the way of embalming corpses, an anthropological or anatomical laboratory, a cemetery, a reliquary).7 In the section of the book containing the photographs, we see headless bodies, bodyless heads, eyes, children, mock death’s heads, heads-and-shoulders, children’s skeletons, stuﬀed animals and anatomical ﬁgures. Some, though not all, of these photos relate to texts in ‘Un parcours’; it is as if they were simply fed to the reader’s imagination. In thinking about the theme of love and death, the story entitled ‘Le cimetie`re d’enfants’, a version of which exists in La Mort propagande (pp. 337–39), springs to mind, but having analysed it at length in Chapter 1, I will not discuss it again here, though attention may be

50

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

drawn to the fact that the term leitmotiv is not inappropriate where this theme is concerned. It recurs again in Vice (‘[il] [. . .] montra le de´sir que son ﬁls fuˆt inhume´ dans le meˆme tombeau que lui [. . .]’ p. 89) (‘[he] [. . .] showed a wish that his son be buried in the same grave as himself [. . .]’). We also ﬁnd great aﬀection between the child and the image of the mother.8 The presence of death is strongly felt in these pages, not only in the photographs described above but also at the textual level: murders, stranglers, poisoners, ‘Le daguerre´otype d’enfant mort’ (‘The Daguerreotype of a Dead Child’), ‘La machine a` faire le vide’ (‘The Machine that Creates Void’).9 At one point we ﬁnd a narrator ‘[qui] prend quelques photos a` la sauvette’ (p. 87) (‘surreptitiously taking a few photos’). His photographic desire has been triggered by the sight of ‘coupes de visages disse´que´s’ (ibid.) (‘sections of dissected faces’). It is a rare instance of a character who could be compared to Herve´ Guibert intervening in the text. Deception is part of the vice in ‘Re`glement’ (‘Rules and Regulations’) where ‘de fausses nuits succe`deraient a` de fausses canicules’ (p. 43) (‘false dogdays would give way to false nights’). The text’s key sentence is: ‘D’autres lieux monte´s de toutes pie`ces disparaıˆ traient sitoˆt le vice consomme´ [. . .]’ (ibid.) (‘Other places of pure invention would disappear as soon as the vice was consummated [. . .]’). Has vice been so well consummated by the writing of Vice that it has in turn disappeared? Where does vice hide? Like the voyager Bougainville we are tossed from text to text whereas the back cover’s promise, repeated in the epigraph, was for ‘un bain de vice (de´cors et actes)’ [‘a bath of vice (de´cors and acts)’]. At a pinch the de´cors could be the photographs, but where are the acts? The place of vice in ‘La boıˆ te a` double fond’ enjoyed only a brief existence. The bodies quickly suﬀocated (p. 74). They were in fact photographed, then kept in a museum of vice before the museum closed. Could vice be that of the English travellers faced with the crocodiles (pp. 68–69)? After all, they are the ones the houseboy calls ‘beˆtes puantes’ (p. 69) (‘stinking animals’). That at any rate is one of Sarkonak’s arguments: according to him, vice should be sought in the general area ‘du voyeurisme des spectateurs, que ce soient des visiteurs de muse´es naturels ou d’autres institutions publiques’10 (‘of the spectators’ voyeurism, be it that of the visitors to natural science museums or to other public institutions’). Perversion can be mentioned in a negative way as in ‘Le tirecome´don’ (‘A Blackhead Remover’): ‘[. . .] mais on voit mal quel usage

Photographic Writing

51

plus pervers on pourrait faire de ce petit instrument sans beaute´’ (p. 14) (‘[. . .] but it is hard to see what more perverted use this graceless little instrument could be put to’); this sentence, while not suggesting any perversion, simultaneously challenges the reader’s imagination to think of something perverted that might be done with this object. I believe there is an interesting line here on vice; Raymond Bellour interprets it in the same way when he writes ‘le vice est dans la me´ticulosite´, l’ironie suspendue, qui accompagne des actes excessifs dont les corps sont le plus souvent l’objet [. . .] dont la cruaute´ tient aussi au fait qu’ils ne semblent porte´s par aucun personnage, et sont comme en attente de ﬁctions possibles’11 (‘vice lies in the meticulousness, the suspended irony, that accompanies excessive acts to which bodies are most often subject [. . .] whose cruelty also lies in the fact that they do not seem to be borne by any character, and are as if in expectation of possible ﬁctions’). I said earlier that the de´cors were perhaps supplied in this book but not the acts. This is conﬁrmed by Guibert in an interview: ‘[. . .] Vice [. . .] e´tait un inventaire de lieux et d’objets, entremeˆle´s, destine´s a` des actions vicieuses, sans que celles-ci soient de´crites’12 (my italics) (‘[. . .] Vice [. . .] was an inventory of places and objects, intermingled, intended for vicious actions, without the latter being described’). Vice is left to the imagination of the reader who must create his or her own ﬁctions. Let us take for a moment the analogy of painting. Instead of painting pictures for us where he is the chief character, as in certain sections of La Mort propagande, instead of painting pictures where he steps aside or takes a back seat (the texts I studied in La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La Chair fraıˆche), the author of Vice gives us a palette, a brush and gouaches (de´cor) and lets us paint our own picture. Vice should be seen as a transitional text in which the narrator tries to fade away, a precursor to the novels he will later write, particularly Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes. It should also be seen as a text in which photos and texts cohabit, without an explicit dialogue between the two art forms being initiated.

SUZANNE ET LOUISE Suzanne et Louise was published in 1980. It is a photo-novel which features two characters based on Herve´ Guibert’s great-aunts whose

52

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

ﬁrst names they bear and whom we have already met in La Mort propagande and will encounter again throughout the work, particularly in Les Gangsters. The intertextuality with ‘Histoire d’une sainte’ hardly needs stressing (MP, pp. 139–80), but episodes like the mortiﬁcations, the washing of the ‘cordons’ (‘cords’), etc., may be noted in passing. But in Suzanne et Louise the language is much more reﬁned (‘C’est son gros machin rouge qui le travaille’,13 p. 44) (‘It’s his big red thing that troubles him’). There are themes too that echo other books by Herve´ Guibert like ‘Le cadavre’ (p. 73) where the narrator spells out in detail what will happen to Suzanne’s body once it is handed over to the Medical Faculty. The great-aunts’ dog ‘Amok’, which often in the narrator’s dreams gnaws his hands (p. 48), will later supply the basis of the story ‘La maˆchoire de l’Harski’ (PA, p. 30). As I mentioned in the introduction, Guibert wrote a play called Suzanne et Louise which he read at Le Gueuloir in Avignon, producing an article about the experience which he managed to get published in Le Monde and which marked the start in 1977 of his career as a contributor to the paper.14 In October 1979 an exhibition at the Remise du Parc bore the title: ‘Les Coulisses du Muse´e Gre´vin’ and ‘Suzanne et Louise, bribes’. We know, thanks to the last page of Suzanne et Louise, that this exhibition contained scraps from the photo-novel published in 1980 because the fact is mentioned. In a text called ‘La pose’ (‘The Pose’) the narrator explains how the Suzanne et Louise project was born. The narrator’s ﬁrst idea was nothing less than to make a ﬁlm (p.26), so he began writing a script. It was only when the great-aunts turned this down that he started writing a play ‘en remplacement’ (ibid.) (‘as a replacement’). Side by side with this he began taking photos of them every Sunday, without developing them, in the belief that ‘ce travail’ (‘this work’) would be carried out after their death, ‘this work’ being the original ﬁlm project which the narrator was still thinking of shooting in the great-aunts’ house after their death with their furniture and with the photos he had taken of them framed on the walls. Here it is very important to note for the enterprise of writing the self that the ﬁlm is the narrator’s basic idea: the play is to be written ‘en remplacement’ (‘as a replacement’); as for the photos, they were only to be used after the death of Suzanne and Louise, thereby underlining their fateful signiﬁcance, as Guibert conﬁrmed in an interview: ‘[. . .] je voulais faire du cine´ma avant de vouloir e´crire. J’ai e´crit par impossibilite´ de faire du cine´ma’15 (‘[. . .] I wanted to make ﬁlms before wanting to write. I wrote because I

Photographic Writing

53

couldn’t make ﬁlms’). This desire to create ﬁlmscripts will be encountered again in his quasi-cinematographic style, and this wish is repeated in a passage in Mes parents: ‘[. . .] je me mets a` e´crire des se´quences cine´matographiques. C’est cela que je vois et que j’ai envie de composer: des mouvements de came´ra’ (Mes, p. 82) (‘[. . .] I start writing ﬁlm sequences. That’s what I see and what I want to compose: camera movements’). Coming back to the photo-novel, let us begin with the way it is presented. There is no pagination, making references diﬃcult, and the text is handwritten, the handwriting being that of Herve´ Guibert, who also writes himself in the text by using ‘je’ (‘I’) (for example on page 50) and once only in a photo captioned: ‘A` la ﬁn, ils reviennent pour saluer [. . .]’ (‘At the end, they come back to take a bow [. . .]’), proving that the narrator is indeed the third character in Suzanne et Louise. The texts are punctuated with photographs taken by Herve´ Guibert featuring the great-aunts. Some texts are numbered, but not all; others are captioned. Often the texts serve as commentaries on the photos that follow them (for example ‘La mort du chien’ [‘The Death of the Dog’] p. 40) and remind one occasionally of the style of the diary (‘Les cheveux de Louise’ [‘Louise’s Hair’] p. 58; ‘Le Paradis’ [‘Paradise’] p. 61). Sometimes, as in ‘Tonton-clown’ (‘ Uncle Clown’ ) (p. 38), a text that recounts Andre´’s mysterious escapades, the text is as it were extended by the photo on the next page where Suzanne ‘me`ne l’enqueˆte’ (‘leads the investigation’) with the help of an enormous magnifying glass (p. 39). Elsewhere, as in the sequence ‘Une transformation’ (‘A Transformation’), we have nine pages of photographs of Louise’s hair; some of these pages contain several photos in which Louise is shown gradually letting her hair hang loose. Apart from the caption, the narrator takes a back seat and lets the photos speak for themselves: the novel-photo thus becomes a photo-novel. There is, however, beforehand a text entitled ‘La pose’ where we can read: ‘Louise, qui n’avait jamais voulu me montrer meˆme ses cheveux, qui sont pour elle la chose la plus intime, a accepte´ que je les photographie’ (‘Louise, who had never wanted to show me even her hair, which is for her the most intimate thing, agreed to my photographing it’) (p. 26); so this text indicates what is at stake in these photos. Besides, a little later Louise will cut her hair (something she had never done since 1945!), saying to the narrator that fortunately there are the photos, which leads him to write: ‘(comme si la photographie e´tait une pratique sacriﬁcielle)’ (‘(as if photography were a sacriﬁcial practice)’) (p. 58). So this example

54

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

backs up the impression that the most intense emotions are aroused by photographs and that, in such moments, writing becomes superﬂuous. The narrator always tries to take as the subject of his photos intimate themes that straddle modesty and immodesty, like Louise’s hair or Suzanne’s legs, themes connected with love (the great-aunts’ dog ‘Amok’) or with death (‘Un simulacre’). That is what he himself puts into words in a text entitled ‘La photo’: ‘Je crois que ce sont d’autres choses, que des objectifs, qui font les ‘‘bonnes photos’’, des choses immate´rielles, de l’ordre de l’amour, ou de l’aˆme, des forces qui passent la` et qui s’inscrivent, funestes [. . .]’ (‘I believe that it is other things than camera lenses that make ‘‘good pictures’’, immaterial things, like love, the soul, forces which pass by leaving their death imprint [. . .]’) (p. 15). There are also photos that try to combine intimacy, love and death all together, the pictures of Louise wearing her dead dog’s muzzle (pp. 46– 47). Here the tightrope between modesty and immodesty is stretched to breaking point but just holds, due in part to the ‘paratexte’ (‘paratext’) of the photos represented by the text which prepares one for the photos (pp. 44–45); they are above all extremely moving photographs. In so far as most of the texts are commentaries on photos, it might be thought that photography takes precedence over writing, but that is not always the case. In ‘La mort du chien’, the narrator describes in detail the photos of the dog Whysky in the garden (p. 40). In one the vet is putting him down; in the other the body is being wrapped in a blanket before being removed. But the fact is that these pictures were never taken because Louise did not summon the narrator the day these events actually took place; it is noticeable though that the aborted photographic desire has nevertheless engendered a text. Similarly, following the sequence of photos entitled ‘Simulacre’ (‘Pretence’) which Suzanne considers ‘rate´e’ (p. 76) (‘a failure’), she tells the narrator that he should have described it in advance, so from that day onwards he will pop in their letterbox ‘un texte, comme un petit sce´nario, ou` [il] de´crit la se´ance du lendemain’ (ibid.) (‘a text, like a little script, in which [he] describes the next day’s session’), taking trouble over the smallest details like the clothes and shoes they should wear and even the way Louise should do her hair. The narrator therefore comes back to the ‘petit sce´nario’ (‘little script’)—we are reminded that originally the idea was to make a ﬁlm. At the end of the novel-photo, once the exhibition has been held, the narrator revives the ﬁlm idea too (p. 80) which this time is not rejected by Suzanne and Louise. He then writes the script in a couple of days since he says it had been running in his

Photographic Writing

55

head for a long time; and, oddly for a ‘roman-photo’ but not for Herve´ Guibert’s project for writing the self, the book’s last page reproduces a page from the ﬁlm script ‘Sce`ne 49. Exte´rieur jour’ (p. 81) (‘Scene 49. Exterior daylight’), the last scene; we are back to the original project discussed in ‘La pose’ (p. 26). Bodies provide the narrative in Suzanne et Louise, both for the photos and the text. The ﬁrst body part to be photographed is Suzanne’s legs; moreover she says to the narrator when agreeing to this photo: ‘De toute fac¸on, maintenant, je n’ai plus de pudeur’ (‘In any case, now, I no longer have any modesty’) (p. 13). The ‘impudique’ (‘immodest’) photograph of Suzanne triggers a photographic desire in the narrator which will go still further and will be put centre stage ﬁrst by the act of writing: ‘La prochaine fois, je photographierai les jambes et les pieds nus de Louise, aupre`s de ce gros os aux insertions rouges que ronge Whysky’ (ibid.) (‘Next time I’ll photograph Louise’s legs and bare feet next to that big bone with red insertions gnawed by Whysky’), and it will be carried out (p. 41, uncaptioned). Just as ‘La transﬁguration’ (‘The Transformation’) goes from the ﬁrst photo of Louise wearing her hair in plaits to the last photo in which it is loose, the paradox being that whereas in the ﬁrst photo the face is exposed, here it is hidden by her hair—concealment and revelation going hand-in-hand (with a mise-en-abıˆme similar to that of Guibert’s pigeon chest), we are left in no doubt that the narrator wishes to move from the passport photograph of the two great-aunts on the front cover resembling a photo-booth picture, the most modest imaginable, to their being completely naked. That is moreover what he says to Suzanne in this letter, dated 12 August 1978: ‘[. . .] mon reˆve, bien suˆr, serait de photographier ton corps’ (‘[. . .] my dream, of course, would be to photograph your body’) (p. 53). Failing that, the narrator will take photos captioned ‘Un simulacre’ in which Suzanne’s death will be simulated, writing as the photos are taken: ‘Pour moi, au moment ou` je la fais, cette se´quence est comme l’ache`vement, le point ﬁnal de tout ce travail’ (‘For myself, at the time I am making it, this sequence is like the completion, the culmination of all this work’) (p. 76). As we have seen, the photos’ narrative theme is frequently intensiﬁed by the text; the longest textual passage is the one on ‘Le Carmel’ (‘The Carmelite Convent’) (pp. 17–24). After an introductory ﬁrst paragraph the narrator conveys in direct speech Louise’s remarks, which seem merely retranscribed; he says he has recorded them. The text is not, however, lacking in photos; besides, the main theme of ‘Le

56

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

Carmel’ is—to adopt Michel Foucault’s thematic—the discipline imposed on the body and the fact, as Louise explains, that: ‘Quand je suis entre´e au Carmel, je suis morte au monde’ (‘When I entered the Carmelite order, I died to the world’) (p. 22; my italics). The narrator is also fascinated by the fact that the great-aunts have both decided to leave their bodies to the Medical Faculty: he imagines these bodies oﬀered ‘a` l’e´ventration et au de´pecage’ (‘to disembowelment and dismemberment’) (p. 7) and decides to conduct the most meticulous enquiries (to which we owe the text ‘Le cadavre’ [‘The Corpse’]p. 73) into what will happen to the bodies once they are handed over to science. The narrator serves as mediator to the two sisters who only communicate on Sundays when he is there (p. 5). A whole game of seduction is set up between them: as I have said, the narrator has begun taking photos every Sunday without developing them, in the belief that the ﬁlm will get made after the great-aunts’ death and intending to use them in frames for the ﬁlm, in the manner of daguerreotypes, as a funeral rite.16 The purpose of the photos of Suzanne’s mock death is in a way to exorcise the anguish of losing her, as the narrator recognises when Suzanne suggests he photograph her body at the Medical Faculty, or rather what will be done with it: ‘Je me rends compte que je fais alors cette se´rie du simulacre de la mort de Suzanne, uniquement pour me de´livrer de l’angoisse de ce rapt [. . .]’ (‘I realise that I then take the series of Suzanne’s mock death merely to free myself from the anguish of this abduction [. . .]’) (p. 73). It is entirely the narrator’s love for Suzanne that makes him take these photos mimicking death; similarly the aborted photos of the dog Whysky at death’s door will be replaced by photos of Louise with the muzzle which ‘[a] aide´ a` tuer Whysky’ (‘helped kill Whysky’) (p. 45) and which will be worn by Louise as she croons: ‘Je suis le pauvre chien, je suis le pauvre chien [. . .]’ (ibid.) (‘I am the poor dog, I am the poor dog [. . .]’): love of the dead dog leading even to identiﬁcation with it. According to the narrator, the idea of a ﬁlm following on from the exhibition is a way of defying death: ‘[. . .] repropulser une ide´e de travail avec elles, c’est relancer un motif de vie et un peu de´ﬁer la mort’ (‘[. . .] relaunching an idea for working with them is to rediscover a reason for living and in a small way defy death’) (p. 80). But this ‘Sce`ne 49. Exte´rieur jour’ (‘Scene 49. Exterior daylight’) (p. 81) will itself be a kind of exorcism of Suzanne’s death, since we guess that Suzanne is

Photographic Writing

57

dead as we watch her furniture being moved out before ‘le ge´ne´rique de ﬁn de´ﬁle en transparence sur l’image de Louise’ (ibid.) (‘the ﬁnal credits scroll in back projection against the image of Louise’), who after revealing so much only oﬀers us a view of her back. On the betrayal level, the narrator repeats the tiniest details of the telephone conversation he has with Suzanne, in which she asks him to ﬁctionalise their story so that they do not get recognised and possibly tortured by the gangsters (p. 12), thereby doubly betraying her. The paradox in this anecdote comes from the fact that it is the great-aunt who suggests to him precisely that play of truth and falsehood which will become the hallmark of his writings but which he declines, perhaps because the photographs’ ‘authenticite´’ (‘authenticity’) could shortcircuit any ﬂight of ﬁction. It is again Suzanne who is betrayed when the narrator includes in Suzanne et Louise the letter which he has sent her and in which words like ‘inde´cente’ (‘indecent’), ‘amour’ (‘love’) and ‘photographier ton corps’ (‘photograph your body’) (p. 53) make her go in for a real labour of deception towards her sister Andre´e, who tries for a whole month to unearth this letter at any price, since, as she tells the narrator on the telephone, contemplating what would happen if Andre´e found the letter: ‘Elle aurait tout de suite interpre´te´. Elle aurait parle´ d’inceste’ (‘She would at once have interpreted. She would have spoken of incest’) (p. 54). It is indeed with ‘un peu de tristesse’ (‘a little sadness’) that she points out to the narrator that there was no point in her hiding the letter since he had given it to everyone to read as it formed part of the exhibition and will be in the novel-photo (p. 80). What is remarkable in this round of betrayals is that the narrator does not spare himself in reporting Suzanne’s sadness, unless it indicates that in his eyes disloyalty in a novel-photo is not real disloyalty. This theme of betrayal which begins to make an appearance in Guibert’s work will never really leave him and will culminate in A` l’ami. The narrator quotes the comments on the exhibition made by a journalist from Cine´matographie who sees in that ‘passion pour des vieilles dames [. . .] une inversion de la pe´dophilie’ (‘passion for old ladies [. . .] an inversion of paedophilia’) (p. 80), whereas it is a hymn to love, as Daniel Arsand has perceptively noticed (‘Mais le texte dans sa pre´cision amoureuse n’est que douceur’17) (‘But the text in its amorous precision is only gentleness’). As the analysis in this chapter shows, the texts dating to 1980 in La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La Chair fraıˆche use photography as writing triggers. Vice consists of a series of photos between

58

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

two textual sections whose vice de´cors, as we saw, they were being used to set up whilst not being really integrated in the narrative, and yet giving free rein to the reader’s imagination. Suzanne et Louise is above all only a substitute for a ﬁlm project, and Guibert will never write a novel-photo again. The next book, L’Image fantoˆme, talks about photography without a single image. As has been noted, while Suzanne encourages the narrator to play the game between truth and falsehood (p. 12) and thus give a ﬁctional dimension to the texts, he does not comply and transcribes his words with scrupulous accuracy. Guibert will nevertheless manage to set up a very eloquent dialogue between images and text without the one overpowering the other. Suzanne et Louise represents in my view an important stage in Guibert’s development: he has not lost his desire to make ﬁlms and is still working on the relationship between image and text. Everything points to the fact that he has as it were to exorcise his ﬁlmic yearnings before being able to write novels and short stories. L’IMAGE FANTOˆME Published in 1981, a year after Suzanne et Louise, L’Image fantoˆme is a book made up of 64 sections all bearing a title, but it seems pointless to summarise one by one these 64 sections or fragments. The ghost of Roland Barthes haunts its pages, so I might as well mention him straight away so that he does not go on haunting my book too. Roland Barthes par lui-meˆme and particularly La chambre claire18 are without doubt works that exerted a considerable inﬂuence on the writing of L’Image fantoˆme, as Guibert conﬁrmed in an interview.19 There is also another circumstance to mention, without which the book would perhaps never have been written, and that is Guibert’s work as a journalist on Cine´ma, Had, Les Nouvelles Litte´raires, Vingt Ans and Combat20 between 1973 and 1977 as well as his work as a photographic critic on Le Monde from 1977 to 1985.21 In ‘Les photos pre´fe´re´es’ the narrator speaks of the period when he wrote a column on topical issues for a magazine and discovered photography (IF, p. 121); one thinks of Vingt Ans. Elsewhere, most of the text of a particular story is based on the remarks of ‘La retoucheuse’ (‘The woman retoucher’) reported in direct speech (one imagines that it concerns an interview the author conducted for Le Monde, pp. 137–39); another story is inspired by an exhibition the narrator has been to see (‘Suite,

Photographic Writing

59

se´rie, se´quence’, pp. 98–99). Moreover, if one thinks about it, Guibert was in the unique position, thanks to his job as photographic critic, of having access to the greatest photographers and of being able to interview them.22 L’Image fantoˆme is in fact enriched by his activities on Le Monde: thus the text ‘L’autoportrait’ shows how extensive the narrator’s knowledge is and with what ease and sure grasp of detail he writes about the work of the great photographers (IF, p. 62). Even at the level of the writing, it is diﬃcult to be a photographic critic for nine years without suﬀering a kind of ‘de´formation professionnelle’ (‘job conditioning’) and both in respect of newspaper style and with regard to the length of the pieces we again encounter this journalistic stamp in several of the stories in L’Image fantoˆme.23 A more general comment may be in order at this point: the fact that Guibert was Le Monde’s photographic critic enabled him to frequent not only the greatest photographers but also the French intelligentsia, ﬁlm stars and movie directors. Sticking just to ﬁlm stars, a glance at the list of Le Monde articles in the bibliography reveals the names of Isabelle Adjani, Brigitte Bardot, Gina Lollobrigida, Ge´rard Depardieu, etc., and what is remarkable is that most of these people (with the exception of Brigitte Bardot) will be used by Guibert in his work, even if in Depardieu’s case (Arthur in Les Lubies d’Arthur24) only at the imaginary level. There is no doubt for example that the photographer ‘D.S.’ only asks the narrator to do his portrait because the latter liked his previous exhibition and probably wrote about it, this request giving rise in its turn to an act of writing, ‘La se´ance’ (IF, pp. 93–95). Much work remains to be done, using Pierre Bourdieu’s analyses, on this encounter between Guibert and contemporary culture as attested by these Le Monde articles. I explained in the introduction why I was not going to study systematically Guibert’s journalism in Le Monde but would feel free to refer to the odd article here and there. In ‘Adjani ou les vertus de l’exce`s’, published in Le Monde on 28 May 1981, we have an interesting example of what Guibert could achieve in his critical writing and an opportunity to see how it complements and supplements his work. This article is an attempt at a physical and spiritual portrait of Adjani painted in words. Herve´ Guibert (since the text is signed by him) starts with her eyes, then describes her skin, her voice and ﬁnally her body. This ‘portrait’ is in fact more like a camera tracking out: everything plays on colour, or rather, in Adjani’s case, on whiteness. Before turning to her ﬁlms, Herve´ Guibert wonders why he likes Adjani and

60

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

replies: ‘J’ai de´cide´ qu’elle serait mon mode`le d’identiﬁcation fe´minine, et, chaque fois, elle apparaıˆ t entre les lignes, elle donne corps, successivement, a` Charlotte, a` Nastassia Philipovne, a` Salammboˆ, et elle ne de´c¸oit jamais l’e´criture’25 (‘I decided that she would be my model of feminine identiﬁcation, and, each time, she appears between the lines, she gives substance, in turn, to Charlotte, to Nastassia Philipovna, to Salammboˆ, and she never lets the writing down’). What one retains from this statement is that she feeds Herve´ Guibert’s novelistic imagination not only at the level of ﬁctional characters whom he loves (and reads) but also by being a writerly factor herself in his own work as a writer. It is probably she who is encountered again later in L’Image fantoˆme as ‘I’ (IF, pp. 128–34; pp. 157–60 too), and some people claim that she was the inspiration for ‘Marine’ in A` l’ami. As we have seen, ‘Adjani ou les vertus de l’exce`s’ is a portrait painted in words, and to a certain extent L’Image fantoˆme could be summed up as a series of photographs taken by words, so the question arises whether the work of Le Monde’s photographic critic and that of the writer of L’Image fantoˆme are one and the same. In his review of L’Image fantoˆme Christian Caujolle writes: ‘Son livre [. . .] restitue toutes les re´actions sensibles qu’il ne peut ni dire ni faire ﬁgurer dans une ‘‘critique’’ journalistique. Le texte litte´raire se de´roule alors comme l’envers ve´cu d’une frustration de l’e´criture prise aux reˆts d’un genre’26 (‘His book [. . .] restores all the sensitive reactions that he can neither utter nor display in journalistic ‘‘criticism’’. So the literary text develops as the lived reverse side of a writerly frustration caught in a genre’s snare’). This image of Caujolle’s reminds one rather of the penultimate story in L’Image fantoˆme, ‘L’image cance´reuse’, in which the image does indeed end up being recomposed in reverse, next to the skin (IF, p. 169). This is the most useful analogy for describing L’Image fantoˆme, in which photography too is composed in reverse, through the mediation of writing. With regard to the issue of where to place L’Image fantoˆme in the enterprise of writing the self, an unsigned text on the back cover speaks of ‘une suite de re´cits’ (‘a succession of stories’). It was the ﬁrst book of Guibert’s to appear under the imprint of the E´ditions de Minuit, and their practice of not specifying the genre of the texts they publish no doubt suited Herve´ Guibert’s project very well. As already mentioned, some of the texts—in terms of both style and length—resemble journalistic articles in Le Monde, while others recall the diary (IF, p. 163), and yet others are like stories.27 Nevertheless, even within one of these

Photographic Writing

61

‘re´cits’ (‘stories’) we read: ‘Mais ceci n’est plus une photographie, c’est un roman’ (p. 86) (‘But this is no longer a photograph, it is a novel’), a signiﬁcant sentence in so far as the narrative voice seems to indicate that L’Image fantoˆme is sliding towards the novel, and at the same time, with this observation, the narrator abstains from writing more and cuts the story short. In ‘Photo porno’ the narrator buys a magazine, hoping to fall in love with an image, but straight away conﬁdes, in a bracketed aside: ‘(cela m’excite de´ja` d’un point de vue romanesque)’ [‘(that already excites me from a ﬁctional point of view)’] (p. 100), suggesting that ﬁctional desire is stronger than pornographic desire, and writing than sexual pleasure, unless writing and sexual pleasure are synonymous. When the narrator decides to include all his childhood photos in an album, he writes: ‘[. . .] j’e´tais attentif aux transformations de mon visage comme aux transformations d’un personnage de roman [. . .]’ (‘[. . .] I was attentive to the transformations of my face as I was to the transformations of a ﬁctional character [. . .]’) (pp. 66–67). The back cover also speaks of characters ‘qui pourraient eˆtre ceux d’un roman’ (‘who could be those of a novel’), the real therefore taking over from the virtual via the realm of the dedication and its ﬁrst sentence: ‘A` T., e´chappe´ du roman ge´ne´ral’ (‘To T., an escapee from the general novel’). It is the term ‘general novel’ which is both revelatory and problematic: the question is whether L’image fantoˆme is a novel and, if so, what is meant by the term ‘general novel’: ‘general’ rather than ‘particulier’ (‘particular’) or ‘general’ rather than, for example, ‘romanphoto’ (‘novel-photo’). A parallel could be drawn with the generic nomenclature that is also a problem for Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes: ‘L’intrusion, dans le discours de l’essai, d’une troisie`me personne qui ne renvoie cependant a` aucune cre´ature ﬁctive, marque la ne´cessite´ de remodeler les genres: que l’essai s’avoue presque un roman: un roman sans noms propres’28 (‘The intrusion in the essay’s discourse of a third person who does not refer to any ﬁctive creature highlights the need to refashion the genres, for the essay to grant that it is almost a novel: a novel without proper nouns’). The critical response on the publication of L’Image fantoˆme makes interesting reading. Nicole Zand considered the book ‘une autobiographie par la photo [. . .] a` travers les photos des autres, a` travers les photos qu’il n’a pas prises et qui n’existeront jamais, Guibert ne parle, en fait, que de lui [. . .]’29 (‘an autobiography via photography [. . .] through the photos of others, through the photos he did not take and which will never exist, Guibert is really talking only about himself

62

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

[. . .]’). Bellour also saw in it ‘une tentative de biographie par la photographie’30 (‘an attempt at biography through photography’), while Caujolle came straight out with this deﬁnition: ‘texte inclassable [. . .] autobiographie en forme d’autoportrait, [qui] fractionne— photographie?—restitue toutes les re´actions sensibles [. . .]’31 (‘an unclassiﬁable text [. . .] autobiography in the shape of a self-portrait, [which] breaks up—photographs?—recreates every sensory reaction [. . .]’). In ‘Les photos pre´fe´re´es’ (‘The Favourite Photographs’), the narrator gives a sort of re´sume´ of his book without for all that oﬀering a categorically precise deﬁnition of its generic aﬃliation: Il [mon re´cit] parle de la photo de fac¸on ne´gative, il ne parle que d’images fantoˆmes, d’images qui ne sont pas sorties, ou bien d’images latentes, d’images intimes au point d’en eˆtre invisibles. Il devient aussi comme une tentative de biographie par la photographie: chaque histoire individuelle se double de son histoire photographique, image´e, imagine´e. (IF, pp. 123–24) (It [my story] speaks of photography in a negative way, it only speaks of phantom images, of images that have not been developed, or of latent images, of images intimate to the point of being invisible. It becomes also a sort of attempt at biography through photography; each individual story is coupled with its photographic, imaged, imagined story.)

Suzanne et Louise taught Guibert that the text could prove an attractive substitute for the aborted image, and the lesson was put to good use in L’Image fantoˆme. If ‘L’Image parfaite’ (‘The perfect picture’) cannot be taken because no camera is available, the narrator will make a very beautiful text out of it and admit himself that even if the writing was only started in order to ‘[se] de´faire de [s]on regret photographique’ (IF, p. 24) (‘put out of his mind his photographic longing’), ‘ce travail de l’e´criture a de´passe´e [sic] et enrichie [sic] la transcription photographique imme´diate [. . .] car la photographie est une pratique englobeuse et oublieuse, tandis que l’e´criture, qu’elle ne peut que bloquer, est une pratique me´lancolique [. . .]’ (ibid.) (‘this work of writing went beyond and enriched the immediate photographic transcription [. . .] for photography is an encompassing and forgetful practice, whereas writing, which it can only block, is a melancholy practice [. . .]’). Similarly the photo of the mother that was not taken gives rise to a text (pp. 11–18) and to the following observation: ‘Donc ce texte n’aura pas d’illustration, qu’une amorce de pellicule vierge. Et le texte n’aurait pas e´te´ si l’image avait e´te´ prise [. . .] Car ce texte est le de´sespoir de l’image, et pire qu’une image ﬂoue ou voile´e: une image fantoˆme [. . .]’ (p. 18) (‘So this text will have no illustration other than the trailer of a virgin roll of ﬁlm. And the text would not have existed if

Photographic Writing

63

the picture had been taken [. . .] For this text is the despair of the image, and worse than a blurred or fogged image: a phantom image [. . .]’). Sometimes the ‘Fantasme de photographie’ (‘Fantasy of photography’) will trigger writing.32 The desire of the photo will be linked to the fact that the narrator sees a ‘tableau e´trange’ (‘strange painting’) or a ﬁlm (a sequence from Pasolini’s Salo, p. 32) or a series of drawings (p. 33) which will themselves be substituted by writing. A successful photo will be one that is faithful to the memory of the emotion (p. 24); when the photos no longer remind him of things as expected, the narrator will make up for this deﬁciency by writing them (pp. 36–37). And even when he grants them a ‘pouvoir de re´miniscence assez indicible’ (p. 38) (‘fairly unutterable power of reminiscence’), he will be keen to write this ‘unutterable’ which has to do with the senses. He will also manage to describe the photos he likes: ‘[. . .] les photos loupe´es, ﬂoues ou mal cadre´es, prises par les enfants, et qui rejoignent ainsi, malgre´ elles, le code vicie´ d’une esthe´tique photographique de´cale´e du re´el’ (‘[. . .] the messed up, blurred or badly centred photos taken by children which thus in spite of themselves accord with the vitiated code of a photographic aesthetic out of line with reality’) (p. 40). Thus, in the middle of family photographs, he will think he has found the enigma he is after in discovering three unusual photos on which his imagination will be able to have free rein, seeking his mother’s vulva (p. 44). During another reﬂection he will wonder if the two great attractions of photography are not indeed blood and waste (p. 151). He will also be able to list his favourite photographs (pp. 122–23), and then after saying he thought of including them in the book, gives this as his reason for in the end not having done so: ‘[. . .] au fur et a` mesure que j’avance, elles deviennent e´trange`res a` mon re´cit, qui devient vraiment un ne´gatif de photographie’ (‘[. . .] as I progress they cease to have anything to do with my narrative, which truly becomes a photographic negative’) (p. 123). On other occasions photography will be a stumbling-block for writing. The narrator says he has to free himself from the image in order to be able to write, as in ‘Premier amour’ (‘ First Love’ ) (pp. 19– 21) or in ‘L’exercice barbare’ (‘The Barbaric Exercise’) where it is only after the poster of the girl has been removed from shop doorways that he can write his text (p. 154), or else he will try to put himself into a photographer’s shoes so as to write the text (p. 72) or will write the text of the photographic mise-en-sce`ne that someone else has called for (p. 92). As for trying to deﬁne what photography is, it will always be by

64

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

way of analogy (‘La menace’ [‘The Threat’], pp. 85–86; ‘Les anneaux’ [‘The Rings’], p. 91) or approximation (‘La photo est lie´e au silence’, p. 126; ‘photography is associated with silence’), and the Polaroid will be compared to a writer’s rough draft (p. 119). On the level of literary expression I have already spoken of the journalistic style, but it would be to impoverish the style of L’Image fantoˆme to reduce it to this simple expression. Zand sees in it ‘une e´criture souple, ramasse´e, extreˆmement pre´cise’33 (‘supple, terse, extremely precise writing’). Some episodes are built on contrasts, such as ‘Porno Bis’ on the concepts ‘e´rotique/pornographique’ (pp. 102–04) (‘erotic/pornographic’). The narrator uses ‘je’ (‘I’) throughout the book together with parentheses in order to intervene more frankly (for example p. 14). Some passages consist of dialogues between the narrator and an interlocutor, simply retranscribed, from which the reader is in a way excluded34 but in which he or she has the impression of being privy to the author’s conﬁdences; a veritable game then takes place, remarkably analysed by Bellour: [. . .] ici, d’un petit bloc narratif a` un autre, l’e´vidence d’une identite´ ﬁxe s’efface au proﬁt d’une identite´ ﬂoue et fragmente´e qui de l’auteur au narrateur et du narrateur a` lui-meˆme entretient un jeu glissant de double: comme entre un corps et sa photo, d’une photo a` une autre, de l’image perc¸ue, reˆve´e, a` son double fantoˆmatique.35 ([. . .] here, from one small narrative block to another, the evidence of a ﬁxed identity disappears in favour of a blurred and fragmented identity which from the author to the narrator and from the narrator to himself keeps up a slippery double game: as between a body and its photo, from one photo to another, from the perceived, dreamed image to its ghostly double.)

Indeed, this impression of intimacy pervades the reading of the book and is mentioned in two of the reviews,36 and it is interesting to see how it is arrived at. Apart from the use of the parenthesis, there are passages in which the narrator seems to share the confusion that description throws him into,37 passages in which he reveals Freudian slips written in his rough draft (p. 91), and passages in which he seems to address the reader directly,38 so that one has the impression of watching the process of literary creation at work, something that will be encountered again, very markedly, in A` l’ami and other works. One of the book’s sections is called ‘L’e´criture photographique’ and it gives the present chapter its title; in it the narrator studies the writing of three of his favourite authors, Goethe, Kafka and Handke. In Goethe’s Italian Journey the narrator studies the similarities between letter-writing and diary-writing, two forms ‘d’une meˆme imme´diatete´

Photographic Writing

65

photographique’ (IF, pp. 74–75) (‘of the same photographic immediacy’), quite diﬀerent from the novel: ‘Le paysage du journal est une sorte de croquis bref, te´le´graphique, une carte postale. Le paysage du roman a be´ne´ﬁcie´ d’une pose plus longue: c’est presqu’un tableau par rapport au paysage photographique du journal’ (‘The landscape of the diary is a kind of brief, telegraphic sketch, a postcard. The landscape of the novel has enjoyed a longer exposure: it is almost a painting compared to the photographic landscape of the diary’) (p. 76). The narrator also compares certain pages of Kafka’s diary to pure photographs, his last entries becoming ‘comme des cliche´s de son e´tat inte´rieur, un niveau presque radiographique de son angoisse’ (‘like snapshots of his inner state, an almost radiographic level of his anguish’) (p. 77). As for Peter Handke: Il met son quotidien en e´criture au fur et a` mesure qu’il le vit: la retranscription est presque imme´diate, mais elle est aussi continue, plus que des photos on pourrait imaginer un appareil vide´o qui double sa vue et sa conscience d’une longue bande ininterrompue, dont il ramasse ensuite quelques chutes. (ibid.) (He turns his daily existence into writing as he lives it: the transcription is almost immediate, but it is also continuous, rather than photos one could imagine a video camera paralleling his sight and conscience with a long unbroken tape from which he later collects a few trims.)

I have quoted extensively from this section because it shows clearly what interests Guibert when reﬂecting on the writing of the self. What the three writers he cites have in common is the way their experience is rendered on paper with a photographic immediacy, each radicalising the eﬀorts of the other. If Kafka oﬀers us ‘an almost radiographic level of his anguish’, Handke proposes not a construction but ‘an almost immediate retranscription’ which Guibert compares to video and which he will himself achieve in ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’. What is striking is that as early as 1981, Guibert’s ultimate aim seems to be an immediate retranscription, later indeed to be done through video. Since it is the body that is photographed by the words, it would be labouring the point to say that the inscription of the body is this book’s chief preoccupation. In ‘Premier amour’ the body of the photos is as it were materialised and the narrator makes room for them in his bed and starts talking to them (IF, p. 21). This place of the imagination has a vital role to play in the dialogue between the narrator and bodies: thus the photograph of Claudia Cardinale only excites the narrator through ‘ce qui n’est pas montre´’ (p. 26) (‘what is not shown’) and by imagining

66

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

the contact of her breasts with the fur. The body is also written in the script. ‘Fantasme de Photographie, I’ (‘Photographic Fantasy, I’) depicts the body in disguise, in movement, imagining that the camera touches the actors, encircles them, caresses them.39 Elsewhere the mother is prepared by the narrator who moistens her hair, combs it, chooses what she will wear, powders her (pp. 12–13). For some photos he has her trying on a big straw hat (that of the adolescent in Death in Venice) with the aim of arousing and sharing his own desire (p. 15). Similarly in ‘Inventaire du carton a` photos’ (‘Inventory of the Photograph Box’), after describing the photos in which he says himself that he was tempted to see homosexual relations, he analyses the situation thus: ‘[. . .] ces traces pe´de´rastiques sont e´videmment mes propres projections’ (‘[. . .] these homosexual traces are obviously projections of my own’) (p. 43) before seeking to sexualise his grandparents. The problem with ‘La photo porno’ (‘The Pornographic Photo’) is precisely that the smallest details have been settled, making the image multiple and rendering the narrator incapable of projecting anything else.40 To the porno photo he greatly prefers the erotic photo because the porno photo is often only a body ‘bloque´, hyperre´aliste, gonﬂe´ et sature´’ (p. 103) (‘blocked, hyperrealist, swollen and saturated’) whereas the narrator can get the erotic photo to say ‘autre chose que son texte’ (p. 103) (‘something other than its text’). Similarly the photo censored with red tape on pornographic ﬁlm posters is more erotic than the photo which conceals nothing (p. 105). Even the anthropometric description of the girl murdered and then cut up becomes pornographic (‘L’ensemble des de´tails quitte la photo pour s’animer dans une sorte de cine´ma imaginaire’, ‘All the details leave the photo to come to life in a sort of imaginary cinema’) (p. 155). The photos on the front of novels get up the narrator’s nose because they force him to have a visual representation of an actor whereas he wants to be free to imagine whom he likes in the roles of Prince Myshkin or Julien Sorel (p. 69); hence, the photos giving free rein to the narrator’s imagination are the ones he is most interested in. The representations of the narrator’s body are only possible at ﬁrst at the level of the most widely used but also the most anonymous codes: the photo-booth picture in which usually only the head is shown,41 or else ‘T.’ speaks to him of the ‘Diﬀraction’ which makes it possible to be photographed without having to face the photographer’s gaze (p. 90) and become what Barthes calls the spectrum. What shines through these pages is at once a certain malaise on the narrator’s part where his

Photographic Writing

67

body is concerned and a search for ways of actually exposing this body in the book through photography or radiography (p. 68). The idea progressively develops that the body is as it were held captive by the family’s yoke and that it belongs to them:42 even if he cultivates the illusion that he is happy and free, it is always ‘a` l’inte´rieur du cadre familial, sans fuite a` l’exte´rieur, sans e´change, sans circulation’ (p. 36) (‘within the framework of the family, without escape outside it, without exchange, without movement’). Photography soon becomes closely associated with an amorous, even erotic approach. The ﬁrst photo loved by the narrator is kissed, and at the age of about ﬁve or six he already ﬁnds an image erotic.43 The family photos enable him to get closer to his mother in the belief that he can detect in his mother’s autographed dedications the same adolescent romanticism that actuates him (pp. 41–42). Photography is represented throughout the book as an amorous practice, a way of monopolising the loved body especially with its absence in mind or because one cannot possess it.44 This amorous relationship is frequently exclusive; thus the father is kept out of the photo session with the mother (pp. 14–15), and indeed no photo session with the father is related, their only intimacy being fantasised (‘Mon pe`re mangeait mes crottes de nez’, ‘My father ate the bits of bogey from my nose’), (p. 45). Photography also has ‘la puissance lourde d’un inceste’ (p. 16) (‘the heavy power of an incest’), not only between mother and son but also between father and daughter when the father wishes to photograph his daughter’s burgeoning breasts (p. 40), explained by the narrator as follows: ‘[. . .] entre le pe`re et l’amant, sans doute, le de´sir n’e´tait pas tre`s dissemblable [. . .]’ (ibid.) (‘[. . .] between the father and the lover, no doubt, the desire was not greatly dissimilar [. . .]’). So photography is linked to amorous practice; thus ‘on’ (‘one’) gives the following ‘Conseils’ (‘Advice’): ‘Ne photographie que tes extreˆmes familiers, tes parents, tes fre`res et soeurs, ton amoureuse, l’ante´ce´dent aﬀectif emportera la photo [. . .]’ (p. 96) (‘Only photograph your nearest and dearest, your parents, your brothers and sisters, your sweetheart, the aﬀective antecedent will bring the photo oﬀ [. . .]’). ‘Fantasme de photographie, III’ seems to take the advice literally since the old woman with long hair bears a more than passing resemblance to Louise in Suzanne et Louise; moreover, a photo of Louise in Le Seul visage corresponds exactly to ‘Fantasme de photographie, III’ (SV, p. 29). So, as we see, in both ﬁction and photography Guibert puts himself, his family and his relatives centre stage.

68

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

While being associated with amorous practice, photography is also linked to Thanatos (for example: ‘Holographie’, IF, pp. 53–54). If ‘La retoucheuse’ fascinates the narrator it is because she can make the dead walk (p. 139). The object of the narrator’s aﬀection, the much-coveted photos of Terence Stamp, are themselves placed under the sign of Thanatos too, more precisely the head which in one of them bounces on the broken bridge and the body which in the other is perhaps already dead (p. 21). The photographers’ self-portraits springing to the narrator’s mind all smell of death (pp. 62–63) and the family photos are kept in cardboard boxes like ‘petits cercueils en carton’ (‘little cardboard coﬃns’), the photos themselves being compared to crosses (p. 29); death even emanates from the autographed dedications on their backs. There are many other examples linking photography to death; two others will be analysed. The aborted photo with the mother appeared under the sign of Thanatos before it was taken, the narrator describing the mother ‘comme une reine avant une exe´cution capitale’ (p. 14) (‘like a queen before a beheading’) who was later going to give in to the process of ageing. On reﬂection this photo could not but fail since the narrator wanted to go back in time ‘dans [s]on amour pour sa me`re’ (p. 14) (‘in [his] love for his mother’), and that will be the fate too of the photo of ‘R.B.’ with his mother (who is considered because of the aﬀection in which she is held by ‘R.B.’) which does not take place because the letter containing the request arrived in all probability the day the mother died, the text being moreover entitled ‘La photo, au plus pre`s de la mort’ (‘The photo as near to death as possible’), giving rise to the following reﬂection on the narrator’s part: ‘[. . .] ce que je voulais photographier, ce de´sir qui se de´clenchait tre`s rarement chez moi, c’e´tait toujours tre`s pre`s de la mort, et donc pre`s de l’inde´cence [. . .]’ (p. 150) (‘[. . .] what I wanted to photograph, this desire very rarely triggered in me, was always very close to death and therefore close to indecency [. . .]’). I said above that there was no narrative of photo sessions with the father. Only one photo of the father is contemplated: when the narrator comes across a lock of his hair; he has always known him bald, he thinks of taking a photo of him holding the locket which contains his hair and which is described as being ‘funeste’ (p. 42) (‘related to death’). It is therefore clear that it is the father’s ‘deuil’ (‘mourning’) that the narrator wants to write. Another text on similar lines is the one of the session with the mother in which the narrator asks himself the

Photographic Writing

69

following question: ‘(n’e´tait-ce pas en re´alite´ le de´ce`s de mon pe`re que je voulais mettre en sce`ne?)’, p. 12 [‘(was it not in reality my father’s death that I wanted to stage?)’]. We are reminded that the father was indeed excluded when this photo was posed. In La Mort propagande the narrator wavered between the father’s absence (including his death) and the father’s role as the son’s escort, before ending up with the image (repeated twice in Vice) of the narrator digging up the father and son locked in an embrace. With L’Image fantoˆme one has the impression of watching a painful attempt at transcending the father, as if the narrator felt the need to go into mourning for him. Finally, photography’s keynote is betrayal. The photographer ‘D.S.’ gets the narrator to swear not to disclose his method for taking portraits, which the narrator hastens to put down in writing (pp. 93–95). In the story entitled ‘La trahison’ the narrator recounts a double betrayal: ﬁrst the act of publishing the only photo that ‘I’ asks him not to use (p. 128), then the way he loses no time in selling to a newspaper the photos of ‘I’, whose publication rights she controls precisely because of the earlier unfortunate experience for which he was responsible (p. 129). He retrieves the photos in time and writes that, feeling a bit ashamed, he will take care not to repeat this story to his friends, although, through this narrative, he has done just that. But it is the ‘I’ character who will show the greatest understanding of his actions, telling the narrator: ‘En fait, tu n’as fait cela que pour pouvoir m’e´crire’ (ibid.) (‘Actually you only did that so that you could write to me’); it would seem that betrayal is forgiveable in so far as it engenders a text. L’Image fantoˆme is a homage to photography without a single photograph; in the form of a story, even of a ‘roman fantoˆme’ (‘phantom novel’), the image is put through its paces, and Herve´ Guibert speaks of himself and of his passion for photography, even suggesting that the book is a ‘tentative de biographie par la photographie’ (p. 124) (‘attempt at biography via photography’): the book is permeated by a truly ﬁctional desire. If the image triggers the narrator’s passion, it also bears death within itself and the narrator admits to a taste for photos with a ‘code vicie´’ (‘vitiated code’); it is noticeable through the diﬀerent experiences which the image recounts that it is inscribing the body, but this inscription is problematic, especially where the narrator’s body is concerned. With Guibert ‘photographic writing’ passes through several stages of experimentation: sustaining the narrative in the texts of La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes that we have studied, exposed in Vice,

70

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

balanced in Suzanne et Louise, and in phantom, even in negative in L’Image fantoˆme. The style is still like that of the diary, and all that can be spoken of are writing fragments. The chief characters still seem to be the narrator, his family and friends, and the narrator tends to insert himself, even into the texts where he is not expected; if other characters make an appearance, it is only in the space of a very brief narrative. The theme of La Mort propagande is still present but in less shrill fashion, particularly in the stories of La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La Chair fraıˆche; nevertheless, in these writings a force of inertia is noticeable, due no doubt to Guibert’s frustration at not being able to fulﬁl his dream of making ﬁlms, something he makes up for in texts like ‘Copyright, cine´ma’ (PA, pp. 20–29). As I said in my concluding remarks about Suzanne et Louise, it is as if Herve´ Guibert had to exorcise his desire for cinema before being able to write short stories and novels, and now that L’Image fantoˆme has been analysed it seems clear that he had to exorcise the image, too, so that it did not pop up and short-circuit the text; indeed, if the present chapter had to be summed up in a sentence, it could best be done by citing the various experiments carried out by the writer between image and text, admirably analysed in the section ‘L’e´criture photographique’ of L’Image fantoˆme and clearly foreshadowing the entire work to come.

CHAPTER THREE

Towards the Novel This chapter will study three books, all published in 1982, along with the texts of La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche dating from 1981 and 1982. None of these books bears a generic subtitle. As will be seen, Les Aventures singulie`res is an attempt at ﬁction, and if Guibert does not resolve all the questions that preoccupy him with respect to the creation of a novel, narrative possibilities found here in embryonic form will be developed in other books. With the last text, ‘Le De´sir d’imitation’ (‘The Desire to imitate’), Guibert will ﬁnd a narrative method allowing him to reﬁne further his approach to the novel. The texts of La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche will pursue with renewed vigour the progression towards the novel and will also contain theoretical reﬂections about the genre. Les Chiens will oﬀer a multiplicity of narrative points of view. Voyage avec deux enfants, a work in three parts, is very important from the standpoint of this chapter since it is the ﬁrst book by Guibert in which there is (in the middle of part one) an attempt at ﬁction preceded by a dream of a journey, followed by the journey proper and ending with reﬂections arising from the narrator’s return to Paris. So as can be seen, there is a progression towards the novel, albeit not a strictly linear one. LES AVENTURES SINGULIE`RES Published in 1982, Les Aventures singulie`res is made up of nine stories,1 six of which had already appeared in the journal Minuit. As we saw in the last chapter, the genre is not normally speciﬁed in books published by the E´ditions de Minuit; nevertheless, in ‘Le roman fantoˆme’ (‘The Phantom Novel’) Guibert refers to one of the stories, ‘Le de´sir d’imitation’, in these terms: ‘[. . .] j’ai e´crit une nouvelle qui e´tait, il me semble, le reˆve ramasse´ et avorte´ d’un roman [. . .]’ (PA, p. 129) (‘[. . .] I have written a short story which was, it seems to me, the condensed and aborted dream of a novel [. . .]’). So the word ‘nouvelle’ (‘short story’) is used for ‘Le de´sir d’imitation’ and in ‘Lettres d’amour’ (‘Love 71

72

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

Letters’) the narrator says that he has gone back to the letters to make a ‘nouvelle’ of them (AS, p. 29). On the other hand, the reviews of Les Aventures singulie`res make frequent reference to a quotation from Guibert (‘[. . .] ce sont plutoˆt les e´pisodes d’une vie arrache´s a` la longue trame du journal intime’2) (‘[. . .] they are rather a life’s episodes snatched from the long thread of the private diary’) and connect this publication with the private diary. Guibert himself conﬁrmed the link in 1984 to Arsand and Quiblier, adding ‘les errances re´pe´te´es, lie´es a` des de´placements, des coups de foudre et des inﬁde´lite´s au destinataire principal du journal [. . .] ont donne´ Les Aventures singulie`res’3 (‘the constant wanderings associated with travel, with suddenly falling in love and with being unfaithful to the person to whom the diary is chieﬂy addressed [. . .] produced Les Aventures singulie`res’); elsewhere he will cite the inﬂuence of Peter Handke’s books.4 Evelyne Pieiller says that Les Aventures singulie`res ‘sont a` la croise´e du souvenir et de la ﬁction’5 (‘are at the point where memory and ﬁction meet’) and Rene´ de Ceccatty states: ‘Il s’en faut de tre`s peu que ces re´cits intimes ne deviennent des nouvelles’6 (‘It would take very little for these personal tales to become short stories’). It is therefore clear that the critics are far from agreeing about the book’s genre. Where the project of writing the self is concerned, it is a text of capital importance because it is a transitional text. In Les Aventures singulie`res there are three narrative triggers: letters, photography and travel. Letters are literally present in ‘Lettres d’amour’ since ten of them are retranscribed (AS, pp. 12–20); then the narrator will continue to write letters which will not be sent and in which the familiar ‘tu’ form will change to ‘il’ (‘he’) and the ‘je’ (‘I’) will remain (p. 20). The letters to ‘A.’ are really only a pretext (pre-text) for writing, the means whereby the narrator can write his story. In ‘Surtainville, le 13 octobre’ (‘Surtainville, 13 October’), the title echoes the way a letter begins; the letter weaves in and out of the narrative since the narrator will go every evening to post one to Yvonne (p. 46). In ‘Le voyage a` Bruxelles’ (‘The Trip to Brussels’), a letter will be sent to the photographer (p. 66), and again in a letter the narrator reproduces a passage from his diary which will form the basis of the ‘e´pilogue’ (‘epilogue’) in ‘Le de´sir d’imitation’ (p. 119). When the letter is not present, as in ‘Le baiser a` Samuel’ (‘The kiss to Samuel’), the narrator wonders whether he should introduce it, no doubt to facilitate the writing: ‘Je ne savais pas si je devais me parler, ou si je devais prendre un interlocuteur, cacheter une enveloppe’

Towards the Novel

73

(p. 34) (‘I did not know if I should talk to myself, or if I should take an interlocutor, seal an envelope’). Writing is above all a means of seduction: ‘[. . .] j’e´tais d’abord un garc¸on d’e´criture (qui charmait par elle, dont elle e´tait l’arme amoureuse)’ (p. 23) [‘[. . .] I was at ﬁrst a boy of writing (who charmed through it, whose amorous weapon it was)’]. Writing enriches photographic memory when the latter proves disappointing. The photo of ‘A.’ gives the narrator no satisfaction; rather it blocks the images that he might have of him (pp. 13–14), so descriptive memories of ‘A.’ follow. In ‘Le de´sir d’imitation’ the narrator gives his hostess an empty photographic album as a present, and when she is dressed in a leopard skin he will want to photograph her.7 He will subsequently imagine a photo session that will never take place but will give rise to a text relating how it was set up (p. 105). Travel will mean the hope of developing narrative possibilities (‘Je pensais de´ja` a` ces comptes rendus de la vie d’un voyageur, d’un solitaire [. . .]’ p. 41) (‘I was thinking already of those accounts of a traveller’s life, of that of a loner [. . .]’); thus the narrator will go to Italy three times (on one occasion to a place very like the island of Elba), one time to Surtainville, one time to Switzerland, one time to Belgium and one time to the United States. Once there he will opt for detailed descriptions, as in ‘L’arrie`re-saison’ (‘The Late Autumn’). Sometimes the object of the journey will be photography; thus the trip to Florence is undertaken with a view to photographing the ﬁgures in the anatomical wax museum (p. 33); indeed some of the photographs will be used in Vice. After the third photo the ﬂash will not work any longer, and when the narrator manages to buy new batteries the museum will be shut; this semi-failure will nonetheless give rise to a text. The only activity the narrator will go in for is the photo booth (AS, p. 33), this episode having already been narrated in L’Image fantoˆme (IF, p. 61).8 In ‘Le voyage a` Bruxelles’ the boy accompanying him is a photographer and they both set oﬀ, going to the Museum of Fine Arts and the Wiertz Museum, but they are disappointed in the paintings and prefer the postcards (AS, p. 63). The narrator’s photographic desire is expressed but he knows in advance that what he wants to capture (‘ce mouvement [. . .] cette pose [. . .] cette immobilite´ conjugue´es’, ibid.) (‘this movement [. . .] this pose [. . .] this motionlessness combined’) is not possible; he will not even attempt to take the photo. On the town square the two protagonists will look at people taking photos ‘avec un sentiment d’e´trangete´, de pitie´’ (p. 65) (‘with a feeling of strangeness, of pity’).

74

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

What Buisine writes about ‘Le Baiser a` Samuel’ applies to all the stories involving photos too: ‘Il n’en demeure pas moins qu’aussi lamentable que soit cet e´chec photographique, sa narration par contre constitue un texte. Constation aussi triviale qu’essentielle: l’e´chec meˆme du photographique fait texte, fonde le re´cit’9 (‘The fact still remains that however lamentable this photographic failure is, its narration on the other hand constitutes a text. An observation as trivial as it is essential: the very failure of the photographic becomes text, sets up the story’). This echoes one of the essential points made in my analysis of L’Image fantoˆme in Chapter 2. A truly physical malaise permeates these stories: the body of the other cannot be admired without the narrator thinking with sudden pain of his own body (p. 26; see too p. 20). In ‘Une nuit’ (‘One Night’), the older ‘se repaıˆ t’ (‘feeds on’) the body of the younger, as if cannibalism were the only way of obtaining sexual gratiﬁcation, the narrator for his part refusing desperately to identify with the body of either.10 The sexual act in the toilets does not break the isolation and the only relationship with ‘A.’ is fantasised.11 The narrator, in mourning for ‘T.’, denies himself all sensual pleasure and sleeps with one of his arms barring his whole chest, as if to hide it, even in sleep.12 Getting the other person to touch his chest is contemplated but not acted upon; a little further on the sexual act will only be fantasised.13 Just leaving his face bare is enough to unsettle the narrator who shaves without looking at himself and lowers his head in front of the mirror;14 indeed, when the narrator of ‘Le de´sir d’imitation’ is confonted with mirrors ‘qui reﬂe´taient [s]on corps a` l’inﬁni’ (p. 96) (‘which reﬂected [his] body to inﬁnity’), he will think of suicide. His hostess has not understood that looking at the Polaroid photos showing her naked which she has not let anyone else see does not interest him: what does is imagining ‘le craˆne a` moitie´ chauve [. . .] des bandeaux blancs autour du visage’ (p. 101) (‘the half-bald skull [. . .] with white coils around her face’); he will moreover ask her to do a photo session in that state (p. 105). What interests him is a photographic mise-en-sce`ne that disguises the body and draws it near to death. The narrator’s chief asset when it comes to seduction is writing. ‘La pousse´e amoureuse correspond toujours a` une pousse´e d’e´criture, ou de parole [. . .]’ (p. 15) (‘The upsurge of love always corresponds to an upsurge of writing, of spoken words [. . .]’). The words from Salammboˆ are dreamt as a caress upon the body of the other (p. 19). Disappointment in love also leads to the epistolary genre (‘Lettres d’amour’), if only in an attempt to seduce ‘T.’ again. The hostess in ‘Le de´sir

Towards the Novel

75

d’imitation’ tries to seduce the narrator by showing him her old ﬁlms (‘[. . .] comme c’e´taient des mots d’amour, il semblait qu’elle se servait de l’image et de l’histoire pour me les dire a` moi’, pp. 99–100) (‘[. . .] as they were words of love, it seemed that she was using the image and the story to tell me them’), then by showing him the thousands of photos piled up in the attic, the narrator commenting ‘les photos nous avaient re´concilie´s’ (p. 113) (‘the photos had led to our reconcilation’). Love is linked to morbidity from ‘Lettres d’amour’ onwards since the narrator says that he is in mourning for ‘T.’; we also learn that the ﬁrst examples in the dictionary of the word ‘de´poˆt’ (‘laying’) (which forms part of the subtitle [‘ou le de´poˆt inconside´re´’]) are ‘de´poser une gerbe sur une tombe’ (‘laying a wreath on a grave’) and ‘de´poser son testament chez le notaire’ (‘lodge one’s will with the solicitor’); when he takes the decision to bury the memory of his relationship with ‘A.’ the narrator decides to make a tomb of the inkwell the letters have come from, ‘comme l’inscription fune´raire d’une naissance et d’une mort’ (‘like the funerary inscription of a birth and a death’).15 There will very often be a desire for violence towards the loved one, extending sometimes to the desire to kill him. In ‘Lettres d’amour’ the narrator will dream that his embrace with ‘T.’ is transformed into endless sleep; in another story, ‘Le baiser a` Samuel’, he will remember having wanted to butcher ‘T.’’s nape; in ‘Surtainville, le 13 octobre’, the narrator speaks in the conditional of caressing the child to the point of wanting to strangle him; in ‘Le de´sir d’imitation’ he tells how he strangles his hostess in a passage narrated in the past tense.16 ‘La visite’ (‘The Visit’) is a text placed under the sign of Thanatos: the clinic he goes to in Switzerland is a ‘hoˆtel-mouroir’ (‘hospice-hotel’) with a small morgue in the basement where his grandmother ﬁnds herself stretched out in bed beside her dead husband;17 indeed the narrator tells us: ‘On venait dans cet hoˆtel pour vivre, mais on y mourrait [. . .]’ (p. 73) (‘people came to this hotel to live but ended up dying there [. . .]’). The only room to the narrator’s taste in ‘Le de´sir d’imitation’ is the former cellar where rats had to be cleared out and human bones and remains dug up (p. 95). Having watched the sunset, the narrator in ‘L’arrie`re-saison’ seems to have understood that existence is ‘l’attente familie`re de la mort’ (p. 82) (‘the familiar waiting for death’), and it is as if he had decided that this insight should permeate these texts. Photography will be linked to Thanatos too. The narrator will use the photo booth picture to order his funerary medallion; the portrait the ageing actress will paint of him will be compared to his ‘portrait

76

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

fune´raire’ (‘funerary portrait’) and on the envelope containing the Polaroid photos of herself in the nude she will draw a death’s head.18 The truth/falsehood problematic feeds these stories. In ‘Lettres d’amour’ the narrator tries to betray ‘T.’ through the letters but ends up deceiving himself in trying to love someone else, recognising that writing has perhaps used up all his capacity for feeling (p. 20). The narrator has to devise various ruses to put ‘A.’’s parents oﬀ the scent and prevent the regularity of the correspondence arousing their suspicions (p. 16). ‘T.’ is in no doubt that ‘A.’ is the victim of the narrator who was only looking for a pretext for writing (p. 29); the narrator will in any case give these letters to ‘T.’ who was not their recipient but the narrator’s lover, and as for ‘A.’ he will have his kept by Simone who is the woman he loves.19 The paradox of the liar is that when he tells the truth in describing Alain Delon his description will seem mendacious because it is so stereotyped (p. 37)! If the ageing actress was able when young to defend herself against possible deceptions by using sticking plaster on the parts of her body that she did not wish to be ﬁlmed (p. 102), the narrator’s intentions towards her on the other hand escape her: she will seek on several occasions to persuade him to become her lover, but he will resist each time, and his share of treachery will be to write this text since, as the reviews stress, to name on page 103 the three ﬁlms is amply suﬃcient to identify the Italian actress. So the narrator can be imagined going to see this actress in Italy (if the journey really took place) in the hope of returning with writing material rather than with the intention of becoming her lover; just like ‘A.’ she too can be said to have been the victim of the narrator and of his wish to write. A strong impression of the narrator’s solitude emerges from Les Aventures singulie`res: sometimes the solitude is sought, as when the narrator chooses to go to a lonely spot by himself, and it sometimes has advantages (‘Personne ne me connaıˆ t ici, et je ne connais personne, et peu m’importe de savoir comment les gens me voient, s’ils voient un touriste ou un simple d’esprit, un e´gare´’20) (‘No one knows me here, and I don’t care how people view me, as a tourist or a halfwit, or someone who’s got lost’), but it can also weigh heavily, as when the only human contact is to get ‘encul[e´] par le premier type venu’ (‘fucked by the ﬁrst passing chap’), when the desired contact with ‘A.’ is only through dreams, or when no word will be exchanged with the pale child, only a towel.21 When the narrator attempts to escape this solitude it is the others who let him down; thus at the last minute ‘T.’ will not go to Italy with him, condemning him to loneliness. ‘Le de´sir

Towards the Novel

77

d’imitation’ is also among other things the drama of the ageing actress who ﬁnds herself all alone again.22 This solitude has implications for the narrative: the following extract from ‘Lettre d’amour’ reveals that the narrator has quite a lot of trouble with creating characters, a sine qua non for writing a novel, or at least that he does not envisage any other character apart from himself and the people around him: ‘Je lanc¸ais des propositions romanesques, mais ma teˆte ne s’attelait a` rien, a` aucun enchaıˆ nement, aucune minutie: les ide´es de titres et de soustitres et de couvertures, meˆme de typographies s’entrechoquaient, j’avais des fantasmes de livres, mais l’e´criture s’arreˆtait court. Je lisais des biographies de grands e´crivains [. . .]’ (AS, p. 12) (‘I tossed ideas for novels about but my head would not get down to anything detailed or speciﬁc: ideas for titles and subtitles, jackets and even typefaces jostled together, I had fantasies about books, but the writing stopped short. I read biographies of great writers [. . .]’). This has the eﬀect of impoverishing the narrative and forcing the narrator to concentrate on the smallest details: ‘La solitude, imme´diatement, m’obligea a` une perception plus active, plus taˆtillonne, a` de´piauter des riens. Mon regard achoppait sur tout, mais personne n’achoppait a` ma disponibilite´. Je me regardais excessivement’ (p. 33; my italics) (‘Loneliness, immediately, forced me to a more active, pernickety perception, to dissect nothings. My look stumbled against everything, but no one stumbled against my availability. I looked at myself excessively’). One thinks of the principal activity described in this text, the photo booth, and of the inscription ‘narcissismo’ (p. 35) found on the machine. I should like to look at a passage from ‘Les escarpins rouges’ in the light of the above remarks: Quand j’ai commence´ a` e´crire, la forme du roman, avec des personnages, m’e´tait e´trange`re, irre´alisable, inde´sirable. J’avais rencontre´ une femme e´crivain, en place, qui m’avait dit: ‘Tu veux e´crire un livre? Est-ce qu’il y a des personnages?’ J’avais honte, il n’y avait que moi comme personnage, car je ne voyais bien que moi comme connaissance, j’e´tais assez seul. (PA, p. 133) (When I started writing, the novel form, with characters, was foreign to me, unrealisable, undesirable. I had met an established woman writer who had said to me: ‘You want to write a book? Are there characters?’ I was ashamed, I was the only character, for I could see no other acquaintance than myself, I was rather alone.)

I have analysed Guibert’s diﬃculties in creating characters and the prominence solitude acquires in these pages, and I stressed above how he gets driven to dissecting nothings (AS, p. 33). Such is the job— thankless no doubt and rather unfair—of the critic, who like a wine

78

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

waiter is responsible for deciding between diﬀerent literary vintages: if I ﬁnd a book of Guibert’s less successful than the others, it is up to me to say so. True, these texts were published for the most part separately or two at a time in Minuit and were only put together in order to make up a book. To read them when they ﬁrst appeared must have been very diﬀerent from my experience and I am prepared to admit that, taken individually, these texts are not without merit, but there is an obvious lack of continuity when they are presented in a book bearing the title Les Aventures singulie`res. Nevertheless I recognise that reading them on the publication of Les Aventures singulie`res in 1982, if the laudatory reviews of the time are anything to go by, was very diﬀerent from reading them now; so, for example, Gilles Barbedette writes: ‘[. . .] son ‘‘je’’ n’est pas le sujet de ses textes, mais plutoˆt le lieu par lequel transite toute une se´rie de de´sirs, d’expe´riences, de fantasmes [. . .]’23 (‘[. . .] his ‘‘I’’ is not the subject of his texts but rather the place through which pass a whole series of desires, experiences and fantasies [. . .]’). Barbedette is no isolated example; most of the reviews are complimentary, with the book’s style coming in for special praise.24 From the standpoint of Guibert’s enterprise of writing the self, or rather selves in the postmodern era, seen in its totality, and taking his whole work into account, my reading of the book indicates that Les Aventures singulie`res is a transitional text in which, searching for the hard road to the novel, he loses his way and has to turn back. Torn between the novel and the short story, as is shown by the whole ambiguous business of nomenclature, Guibert has a lot of trouble ﬁnding his ﬁctional voice(s), creating characters and above all getting his writing project to ﬁt into established literary genres. I also ﬁnd the style less ornate than in other books; witness the following passage: ‘J’entendais par intermittence les cris des enfants dans la cour de re´cre´ation, les vaches meuglaient, les poules caquetaient, le tableau e´tait complet’ (p. 45) (‘I heard intermittently the cries of the children in the playground, the cows were mooing, the hens were cackling, the picture was complete’). There is, however, one exception and that is the text called ‘Le de´sir d’imitation’, as Rene´ de Ceccatty perceptively noted when he said that ‘la dernie`re aventure est a` part’25 (‘the last adventure is special’), announcing as it does the interplay between truth and falsehood that was to become a characteristic feature of Guibert’s work; what diﬀerentiates it from the other ‘re´cits’ (‘stories’) is the fact that here the narrator has managed to introduce another leading character, the

Towards the Novel

79

Italian actress, who is not simply a constellation orbiting around the narrator’s star like the other characters in Les Aventures singulie`res, but who plays an important role in her own right. Only one other story more or less succeeds in introducing other characters or at least in reducing the narrator’s prominence somewhat, and that is ‘Une nuit’, in which the narrator describes what goes on between two men from behind a partition wall, a mise-en-sce`ne that will be used again in Les Chiens. Another of the narrative’s assets in ‘Le de´sir d’imitation’ is the double mise-en-abıˆme, ﬁrstly with Sunset Boulevard and secondly and more importantly with Scarlet and Black by Stendhal, which seems to trigger the narrative mechanism in this story, most notably in the following key sentence: ‘Le pre´facier expliquait que Stendhal s’e´tait inspire´ d’un fait divers re´el et l’avait a` peine modiﬁe´ dans son de´roulement [. . .] Stendhal [. . .] s’e´tait contente´ de de´velopper les sentiments qui pouvaient mener a` l’e´vidence de ce meurtre [. . .]’ (p. 92) (‘The preface writer explained that Stendhal had been inspired by a real crime report and had hardly altered the way events actually unfolded [. . .] Stendhal [. . .] had simply developed the protagonists’ feelings in such a way as to render the murder plausible [. . .]’). The narrator will take this advice literally in ‘Le de´sir d’imitation’, which mimics closely the narrative mechanism used by Stendhal.26 In future, whenever the narrator suﬀers from writer’s block, he will need only take up Scarlet and Black again in order to fuel his pen (p. 98). When we recall Guibert’s remark about ‘Le de´sir d’imitation’ being a short story that was the condensed and aborted dream of a novel (PA, p. 129), it seems he has found the way forward: to start from the truth or a real news item and then make a few untruthful deviations; to invent characters diﬀerent from himself that are not secondary. We have here in embryo the ‘romans’ (‘novels’) of Herve´ Guibert; what emerges from this book is a genuine desire for ﬁction which in most of the texts is not realised, so the apprenticeship will continue with the texts of La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche. LA PIQUˆRE D’AMOUR ET AUTRES TEXTES SUIVI DE LA CHAIR FRAIˆCHE [TEXTS DATING FROM 1981 AND 1982] The stories studied in this section are nine in number;27 ﬁve had already appeared in Minuit, and one of the latter, ‘Le testament de Mao Tse´toung’ (‘Mao Tse´-tung’s Will’ ) (PA, pp. 60–62) under a diﬀerent title

80

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

(‘Testament no. 1’) (‘Will no. 1’). Let us try to summarise them in broad outline. ‘La semaine sainte’ (‘The Holy Week’) revolves around pornographic ﬁlms which ﬁre a cure´’s imagination to such an extent that he ends up ‘[a`] substituer les corps peints sur certaines fresques ou certains tableaux de son e´glise’ (PA, pp. 55–56) (‘substituting the painted bodies on some of the frescoes and paintings of his church’); similarly, he will use Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings to visualise angels, ending up with a ‘de´calcomanie sournoise’ (p. 59) (‘cunning transfer’) that recalls ‘L’image cance´reuse’ (IF, pp. 165–69). The narrative will be heterodiegetic here and in the next story, in which there will however be two notes signed ‘H.G.’ (PA, p. 61). To sum up ‘La semaine sainte’, it can be said that it communicates to the reader the cure´’s desire (p. 55). ‘Lettre a` un fre`re d’e´criture’ (‘Letter to a Brother in writing’) is an ode to Euge`ne Savitzkaya, to whom the text is dedicated. Here the narrator is homodiegetic. So the letter recurs as a pre-text for writing, as does the feeling of love as material for writing (‘[. . .] j’ai eu le fantasme de t’e´crire une lettre [. . .]’ p. 64) (‘[. . .] I have had the fantasy of writing you a letter [. . .]’). It is also following a letter which the narrrator sends to ‘Jean L.’ that the narrative of ‘Le roman posthume’ (‘The Posthumous Novel’) is triggered: seven days after posting his letter the narrator learns from a newspaper that ‘Jean L.’ has thrown himself oﬀ a train (p. 68). In ‘Pour P. De´dicace a` l’encre sympathique’ (‘For P. Dedication with Invisible Ink’), the absence of letters or notes leads the narrator to curse ‘P.’. It is only after they have known each other for four years that he will receive the ﬁrst note and the only sign of friendship will be the postcards sent from trips abroad. Writing and the publication of his books will be a way for the narrator to increase his standing in relation to ‘P.’ and a guarantee in his eyes that their work will continue. Photography still plays an important part in the narrative. In ‘Lettre a` un fre`re d’e´criture’ it is the reason for the meeting between the narrator and Euge`ne Savitzkaya and will moreover be the occasion for Savitzkaya’s only smile, ‘prote´ge´ par l’objectif’ (p. 67) (‘protected by the lens’). In ‘Vertiges’ (‘Vertigos’) the narrator thinks of taking a photo called ‘image d’une frayeur’ (p. 95) (‘image of a fright’), but ‘T.’ stops him by smashing the camera; it is of note that the image of fright is conveyed after all by the story. In ‘L’homme qui avait peur’ (‘The Man who was frightened’), the narrator will photograph himself naked with a huge ox tongue so as to exorcise his phobia (p. 120), and ﬁlm will replace photography in ‘La semaine sainte’.

Towards the Novel

81

‘Roman posthume’ ranks in my view among Guibert’s ﬁnest texts. The only way to do it justice is to urge people to read it, but I would like to quote Hector Bianciotti on the subject; he too chose it from among the twenty-six texts in La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche: ‘[. . .] re´cit fantastique ou` les morts pe`lerinent dans les brouillards de l’au-dela`, a` l’aﬀuˆt des phrases jete´es ne´gligemment par les vivants, pour en faire leur nourriture, accomplir l’oeuvre reˆve´e’28 (‘[. . .]fantastic tale in which the pilgrim dead wander in the fogs of the beyond, on the lookout for the sentences tossed negligently aside by the living, in order to get nourishment from them and accomplish the work long dreamt of’). As we have seen previously, the narrator was either heterodiegetic or homodiegetic. In ‘Roman posthume’ there are winks and nods to his readers; sometimes the narrator asks them to believe him and at other times he appeals to their imagination.29 At the end of the text he hands them the ﬁctional pen directly, ‘les ciseaux’ (‘the scissors’): ‘Le lecteur aura toujours la possibilite´ de composer un autre livre a` partir du mate´riau fourni, je lui livre donc avec d’imaginaires ciseaux . . .’ (p. 75) (‘My readers will always be able to compose another book from the materials supplied, so I supply them with imaginary scissors . . .’). There is also in this text a close link between the story and photography: it is a photograph that will reveal the existence of clusters of words, however these are visible only on ‘une pellicule photosensible’ (‘photosensitive ﬁlm’) and the narrator will go so far as to ‘radiographier’ (‘X-ray’) them.30 These words are the food of the dead (p. 71). Humour is again generally present, based inter alia on the oxymoron (‘porno ce´leste’, p. 56, ‘celestial pornography’). The style, as in ‘Roman posthume’, is very polished without becoming bombastic or too clever, whether it be in the description of ‘P.’’s ﬂat (pp. 87–89) or in practically every sentence of ‘Roman posthume’, even in ‘Lettre a` un fre`re d’e´criture’ in which the narrator really succeeds in caressing the letter’s recipient with his langorous sentences like a boa coiling itself around the loved one’s body. A new element is also introduced into the style, the art of understatement: thus, in ‘Pour P. De´dicace a` l’encre sympathique’, there is no indignation at the way he is treated by ‘P.’; for example, after ‘P.’ has told him that he invited his friends round the day before to celebrate his birthday, he writes: ‘Je n’aurai pas besoin de dire l’eﬀet que produisirent ces mots’ (p. 89) (‘It will not be necessary to describe the eﬀect produced by these words’). The same tone will recur,

82

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

notably in A` l’ami where the narrator will not rebel against the character Bill. ‘Lettre a` un fre`re d’e´criture’ is an ode to Euge`ne Savitzkaya whom the narrator tells openly that he loves him through what he writes and that he loves his body in the writing position (PA, p. 64). Eros will also be the subject of ‘Un sce´nariste amoureux’, and love will go through all phases in ‘Pour P. De´dicace a` l’encre sympathique’ since it will get mixed up with longing to grab ‘P.’ by the throat; it will be found, too, between the lines in ‘Roman posthume’, in my view a veritable homage full of pathos to ‘T.’, the narrator describing a pilgrimage ‘jusqu’a` un tre`s e´trange monument qui n’est compose´ que d’une seule lettre ge´ante, un T.’31 (‘to a very strange monument that is made up solely of one single huge letter, a T.’). In ‘Vertiges’ we learn at the end of the story: ‘[. . .] nous de´cidaˆmes de ne jamais raconter cette histoire: personne ne la croirait’ (p. 97) (‘[. . .] we decided never to tell this story: no one would believe it’), but it is open to question whether in telling it in this book the narrator is not showing excessive conﬁdence in us readers or insulting our naivety. In asking the reader in ‘Roman posthume’ to believe in his good faith, the narrator recalls that the madman himself says that he is being reasonable (pp. 70–71), casting doubt in turn on his own good faith. In the example of ‘Un sce´nariste amoureux’ (‘A script writer in Love’) the keynote is falsehood: three false starts of a failed novel are narrated (pp. 76–78) and the narrator will speak next of being betrayed by the person to whom he has confessed a secret. In ‘De´dicace a` l’encre sympathique’, the co-scenarist lies to ‘P.’ who is not deceived and ends up betraying him.32 It could, though, be argued that the narrator’s most signiﬁcant treachery is to set down on paper a text which catalogues ‘P.’’s nastiness when the ﬁctional character is very easily identiﬁable; that, however, would again be not to go to the heart of the matter but to read Guibert in the ﬁrst degree, that is to say to fall into the trap he lures people into. Let us concentrate for a moment on the title of this text: ‘Pour P. De´dicace a` l’encre sympathique’. ‘Encre sympathique’ (‘invisible ink’) is a colourless liquid used for writing a secret text that only becomes legible when heat or a reactant is applied. This secret text is the love for ‘P.’, as is shown by the following sentence taken from the piece which serves as a preface to Le Seul visage: ‘en de´voilant ainsi [. . .] je ne fais qu’une chose [. . .] te´moigner de mon amour’ (SV, p. 5) (‘in unveiling like this [. . .] I am doing only one thing [. . .] testifying to my love’).

Towards the Novel

83

The body is still a ﬁctional obsession. In ‘L’homme qui avait peur’ the narrator is obsessed by the idea of swallowing his tongue and tries to exorcise this thought by all possible means. In ‘La semaine sainte’ the cure´ sees the body as architecture and appears to want to mix desire with morbidity when he projects porno ﬁlms on the ‘sarcophages’ (‘sarcophagi’), or during the sham cruciﬁxion when he will see ‘une bouche d’enfant gonﬂe´e par un phallus’33 (‘a child’s mouth swollen by a phallus’). The body becomes writing’s intimate place, as when the narrator uses the adjective ‘voluptueux’ (p. 66) (‘voluptuous’) to describe Euge`ne Savitzkaya’s tongue. Savitzkaya is indeed loved for his body in the writing position and the narrator lavishes much care on him, but only ‘lorsqu’il est pris par l’e´criture’34 (‘when he is engaged in writing’); it is as if the narrator wished to appropriate his writing. This body washing recurs in the story of the cure´ who also washes the children and in the story of Mao Tse-tung who leaves his fortune to the artisans of his body, to those who have taken care of his vocal cords, of his hair, of his nails, of his ‘se`ve’ (‘sap’) and of his room.35 He requests too that after his death they continue looking after his vocal cords and his nails so that his embalmed body becomes a ‘joyau’ (‘jewel’). All these instructions are set down in a ‘testament anatomique’36 (‘anatomical testament’). The narrator of ‘Pour P. De´dicace a` l’encre sympathique’ decides to give ‘P.’ a present on All Souls’ Day in the form of naked angels (p. 84). Similarly love and death are inextricably linked when the narrator of ‘Lettre a` un fre`re d’e´criture’ describes what he feels when he steals a kiss from Euge`ne Savitzkaya: ‘[. . .] j’ai la sensation d’une chair re´frige´re´e et fuyante, comme d’un cadavre ou d’une petite ﬁlle sournoise’ (p. 67) (‘[. . .] I have the feeling of a refrigerated and elusive ﬂesh, as of a corpse or a sly little girl’). As in Les Aventures singulie`res the narrator lets Thanatos ﬁlter through the body. Let us return to the identiﬁcation between body and writing. What interests the narrator of ‘Lettre a` un fre`re d’e´criture’ is to suck ‘la langue’ (‘the tongue’) of the book with which he is intimate, to melt into it.37 To explain this intimacy he suggests: ‘C’est peut-eˆtre que dans un e´tat ante´rieur cette langue jumelle e´tait entremeˆle´e a` la mienne’38 (‘It is perhaps that in an earlier state this twin tongue was intermingled with mine’). It could be that we have here a narcissism substitute, as in ‘Vertiges’, where the narrator begs his mother to kiss him on the lips and only recovers his reason once he has looked at himself in a mirror (pp. 97–98); there is perhaps a narcissistic temptation here but more

84

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

likely a mimetic desire to possess the writing of the one who above is called ‘fre`re’ (‘brother’) and whose tongue is referred to as ‘jumelle’ (‘twin’). Let us look rather at the vocabulary used: ‘transparaıˆ tre’ (‘show through’), ‘irradie´’ (‘radiated’), ‘transfusion’, ‘j’ai eu le fantasme de t’e´crire une lettre’ (p. 65) (‘I have had the fantasy of writing you a letter’). ‘Lettre a` un fre`re d’e´criture’ is an attempt to describe the eﬀect felt by Guibert on reading Euge`ne Savitzkaya’s books and the desire to appropriate that writing in order to invent his own ﬁctions. As the title of this chapter, ‘Towards the Novel’, indicates, what we have here are ﬁrst steps towards the novel, narrative possibilities that will be developed in Guibert’s novels. Let us take the example of ‘La semaine sainte’; I have spoken of frescoes, church paintings (pp. 55–56) and drawings which gave rise to descriptions. If the paratext of an interview which talks of the creative process in Guibert and of the composition of Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes is juxtaposed here: [. . .] meˆme quand j’inventais des personnages ou des histoires, j’avais toujours des mode`les, des photos, des albums, des articles, des peintures, des notes, des plans. Pour les enfants vole´s de ‘Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes’, j’avais des ﬁches et des photos anthropome´triques d’enfants orphelins ou de´linquants en Angleterre au XIXe sie`cle.39 ([. . .] even when I was inventing characters or stories I still had models, photos, albums, articles, paintings, notes, plans. For the stolen children in ‘Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes’, I had index cards and anthropometric photos of orphans and young delinquents in nineteenthcentury England.)

– we can see that we have in embryonic form in La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La Chair fraıˆche attempts at ﬁction. All we need do is take a passage from ‘La semaine sainte’: ‘Alors, ils se trouvaient, comme des jeunes chiots heureux, a` les humer et a` les le´cher doucement, a` les mordiller, a` les soupeser et a` les suc¸oter, enﬁn a` les pomper de plus en plus vivement pour pouvoir boire leur jus lacte´’ (p. 56) (‘So they found themselves, like happy young puppies, sniﬃng and licking them gently, nibbling them, weighing and sucking them, and ﬁnally pumping them more and more vigorously so as to be able to drink their milky juice’), for this passage straight away to evoke a painting as well as Les Chiens and Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes from which it could quite simply have been taken, and if we bring in Les Lubies d’Arthur we are no longer in the realm of speculation but in that of reality since the passage just quoted can in fact be found in the book’s Chapter ‘L’ which contains other passages from ‘La Semaine sainte’,

Towards the Novel

85

and the next chapter, actually called ‘La Semaine sainte’ (pp. 100–02), is also taken from the story ‘La semaine sainte’ in La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche. ‘Un sce´nariste amoureux’ is a foundation text for my project since it underpins my book’s entire thematic framework, starting with its epigraph (‘Avoir le courage de soi, de se dire, de se montrer et de laisser couler tous les secrets, d’en inventer’, p. 77) (‘To have the courage to be oneself, to say oneself, to show oneself and to let all the secrets ﬂow, to invent some’). We also ﬁnd the ‘couples’ who will dominate several of Guibert’s books, ‘le jeunot et l’aıˆ ne´, le petit et le grand, l’e´chalas et le rond’ (p. 76) (‘the youngster and the older one, the short and the tall, the beanpole and the fatty’): one thinks of Bichon and Arthur, of Suzanne and Louise, of Mon valet et moi (Val.); the ‘e´chalas’ (‘beanpole’) makes his appearance on page 78 and the text’s content, which is already familiar, would tend to suggest that Herve´ Guibert is ‘ﬁctionalising’ himself by way of this description. There is also the photograph used in one of the false starts as a narrative trigger and the theme of betrayal and giving away one’s secrets.40 Finally we learn that the last of the false starts ‘aurait le caracte`re de l’inﬁni, de l’abıˆ me, et de la tentation de se de´truire lui-meˆme’ (p. 77) (‘seems characterised by inﬁnity, abyss and the temptation to self-destruct’). The novel leads inevitably to self-destruction. To recap, we have in these pages Guibert’s ﬁrst attempts at ﬁction, the rough drafts (in a non-pejorative sense) of the future novels, what the narrator of ‘Roman posthume’ calls ‘ﬁcelles romanesques’ (‘ﬁctional pieces of string’) (PA, p. 71), but these novelistic ﬂights of fancy never culminate in a novel: witness the story ‘Un sce´nariste amoureux’ which describes three false starts with characters which are said to be those ‘d’une nouvelle, ou d’un roman rate´’ (p. 76) (‘of a short story, or of a failed novel’). It is important to stress that each time the narrator speaks of writing a novel he only manages approximations to a novel, a ‘roman posthume’ (‘posthumous novel’) or, in the quotation above, a ‘roman rate´’ (‘failed novel’). The ‘Roman posthume’ is that of a writer who has killed himself. Everything is bathed in the macabre and borders on the fantastic. The narrator will discover during his investigation that the sentences of the living are the food of the dead and that it is death that has interrupted the novel.41 This idea of the body sacriﬁced is taken up again by the narrator of ‘Lettre a` un fre`re d’e´criture’ who is ready to make the daily sacriﬁce of a drop of his blood ‘pour qu’Euge`ne e´crive une page’ (‘so

86

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

that Euge`ne can write a page’); the theme of the body bleeding will recur in ‘Ex-voto’ (‘Thanksgiving plaque’).42 It is in the body’s imprint on the grass that the narrator discovers ‘Jean L.’’s last thoughts (pp. 73– 74), as if the novel could only be born at the moment of the body’s death. So the novel’s ultimate aim is seemingly the inscription of death, an inscription not possible as long as the body is alive, and materially impossible to achieve once the body is dead since there is no longer anyone to form the body of the writing, hence the only possible novel, the ‘posthumous’ novel. If now two Guibert texts, ‘Le roman fantoˆme’ (pp. 129–32; written in 1983) and ‘Roman posthume’, are placed alongside each other, it becomes clear that one is a theoretical reﬂection on the novel and the other illustrates the considerations of theory. In ‘Le roman fantoˆme’ (‘phantom’, indeed), we learn that the dream of the novel is in a way a dream of death;43 after all, surely, ‘Jean L.’ died without having decided what form exactly he wished to give his novel, so much so that ‘les circonstances de son suicide et le the`me de son roman, qu’il ne put e´crire, interrompu par la mort, sont intimement meˆle´s’ (p. 73) (‘the circumstances of his suicide and the theme of his novel which, being interrupted by death, he could not write, are closely intertwined’). The narrator of ‘Le roman fantoˆme’ pursues this thought in declaring that dreaming of the novel can make writing live; it is said indeed that ‘Jean L.’ ‘n’avait fait qu’e´crire, comme tant d’autres, que dans le reˆve du roman’ (p. 72) (‘had done nothing but write, like so many others, solely in the dream of the novel’). This sentence could be applied to the writer Herve´ Guibert in 1982. In these texts we are witnessing writing triggered by the dream of the novel and at the same time the impossibility of its realisation at this point in Guibert’s literary development. In the same number of Minuit containing ‘Lettre a` un fre`re d’e´criture’, that text is followed by an ‘Entretien avec [Interview with] Euge`ne Savitzkaya’44 conducted by Herve´ Guibert, who begins by asking Savitzkaya to talk about the subject of his book before putting the following question to him: ‘Tu ne crois pas que la forme du roman-roman est devenue impossible?’45 (‘You don’t think the novel-novel form has become impossible?’) This conﬁrms my argument, namely that even while pursuing the novel form Guibert does not really believe in it and has the feeling that the novel as it presents itself is outdated or at least does not help his literary project. In the next text he will try a completely diﬀerent approach.

Towards the Novel

87

LES CHIENS Les Chiens starts with an ‘I’ narrator imagining a couple making love (C, p. 9). This opening shows the narrator’s concern to give other characters access to his narrative, as we saw with ‘Une nuit’ and ‘Le de´sir d’imitation’ in Les Aventures singulie`res. There will be several ‘faux de´parts’ (‘false starts’) more or less in the manner of ‘Un sce´nariste amoureux’ (PA, pp. 76–79), or rather narrative beginnings inserted between other narrative beginnings: for example, the ﬁrst and third paragraphs imagine the same sexual scene with a diﬀerent story that will recur on page 22; similarly for the second and fourth paragraphs (with a sheet cut in strips to tie the other’s body) and for the ﬁfth and eighth (the purchase of a whip). The narrative is based on the contrast I/they, or I/he and I/you if there are only two protagonists, sometimes using the imperfect and sometimes the future before returning to the imperfect.46 Direct speech is used but without inverted commas; the text would beneﬁt from being read aloud. The narrative then becomes heterodiegetic (pp. 30–31). A third character makes his entry and thereupon the contrast becomes one between ‘le maıˆ tre/nous’ (‘the master/us’) and ‘je/il’ (‘I/he’), still in lovemaking (pp. 31–35). The last paragraph returns to the setting of the ﬁrst except for the fact that the narrator joins the heterosexual couple (p. 36). The image of the dog is present throughout and becomes literal from page 31 onwards. The male sex organ becomes a piece of meat (p. 32). This reading by Heathcote47 is the only linear reading I would accept. The colours which recur most frequently are black and white, often in contrast, and red. The text ends with the couple and the narrator meeting up again; they copulate with feverish impatience, and the reunion of their three bodies results in the woman becoming pregnant. Writing about Les Chiens necessitates wiping the slate clean: in the ﬁrst place, of what we know about the book’s reception. None of Herve´ Guibert’s friends, whether it be Patrice Che´reau or Michel Foucault, liked Les Chiens, and as for Marguerite Duras, she developed, according to Guibert, a ‘ﬁxation ne´gative’ (‘negative ﬁxation’) about him.48 And yet this text was written ‘dans l’espoir de [. . .] plaire’ (‘in the hope of [. . .] pleasing’) Michel Foucault:49 writing as a means of seduction. The text can be read in the way Owen Heathcote does: ‘[. . .] le corps de la femme se transforme en re´cipient pour l’histoire des amours masculines [. . .] Il semblerait donc que la femme dans Les Chiens sert a`

88

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

aiguiser le piquant e´rotique du re´cit tout en faisant passer la pilule aupre`s d’un lecteur e´ventuel plus chatouilleux’50 (‘[. . .] the woman’s body is transformed into a recipient for the story of male loves [. . .] It would seem then that the woman in Les Chiens serves to heighten the erotic interest of the story while getting a possibly more touchy reader to swallow the pill’), or else in the way Murray Pratt does: ‘Cependant, avant de commencer a` entrevoir une identite´ homosexuelle qui puisse s’aﬃrmer face aux re`gles de l’homophobie, il faut avoir, dans un premier temps, internalise´ ces re`gles lors d’un apprentissage he´te´rosexuel’51 (‘However, before starting to glimpse a homosexual identity able to assert itself in the face of the rules of homophobia, one must ﬁrst have internalised these rules during a heterosexual apprenticeship’). These two interpretations stand at opposite ends of the reading spectrum. My concern, though, is with Les Chiens in the context of the project of writing the self. The ﬁrst point to make is that except for its pornographic content, Les Chiens could be one of the stories in Les Aventures singulie`res, even one of the texts in La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche. It should not be forgotten that Les Aventures singulie`res and Les Chiens were published at the same time by the same publishing house; as we have seen, some of the passages in ‘La semaine sainte’ (PA, p. 56) would not be out of place in Les Chiens, in which there are echoes too of the plot of ‘Une nuit’ (AV, pp. 83–87). In Fou de Vincent (FV) the narrator quotes Les Chiens, calling it a ‘plaquette pornographique’ (FV, p. 85) (‘pornographic little book’). The dictionary deﬁnition of ‘plaquette’ is small, slim volume. Once again no genre is speciﬁed, and we can expect no help either from the E´ditions de Minuit’s literary style sheets. Let us recall Guibert’s remark quoted in Chapter 1: ‘There was Francis Bacon as well. Because painting has marked me as much as literature. Bacon’s pictures, they were everything I loved: colour, violence, butchery, the body, sodomy, the embrace of two men . . .’.52 Les Chiens can be considered as an animated painting by Bacon, or several paintings. It is necessary in my view to establish a heterogeneous rather than a homogeneous reading of Les Chiens, so as not to say, like Rene´ de Ceccatty: ‘E´crit avec fre´ne´sie durant des ‘‘jours mauvais’’ ou` l’aime´ s’e´loignait, s’absentait, se refusait [. . .]’53 (‘Written frenetically during some ‘‘bad days’’ when the loved one was going away, disappearing, rejecting him [. . .]’), but to see in the ‘je’ (‘I’), ‘il’ (‘he’), ‘elle’ (‘she’),

Towards the Novel

89

‘nous’ (‘us’), ‘le maıˆ tre’ (‘the master’), ‘les chiens’ (‘the dogs’) brush strokes on an erotic canvas or pencil lines on erotic sketches,54 or else to appeal directly to intertextuality and say that some of the pictures in Les Chiens are the missing part of Vice, giving as example the passage on pages 30 and 31 of Les Chiens that could have been lifted from the text entitled ‘La boıˆ te a` double fond’ in Vice. We saw in Chapter 2 that this text was more or less the nearest one got to ‘vice’ in the whole book and that vice had to be sought elsewhere. Even the ‘trape`zes and anneaux’ (‘trapezes and rings’) are the same (V, p. 73; C, p. 30); similarly, the angora echoes Vice (V, p. 49) and the ‘vapeurs de nitrite d’amyl’ (C, p. 31) (‘amyl nitrite vapours’) that ‘satine[nt] le corps de toutes ﬂuidite´s’ (‘gloss the body with all ﬂuidities’) have the same properties as ‘la piquˆre d’amour’ (‘the love injection’) (PA, pp. 9–12). The body is one of the text’s narrative keys; it is subjected to a lot of ill-treatment, very often in a decidedly ambiguous way: ‘[. . .] je sais que c¸a te de´gouˆte et que c¸a t’excite en meˆme temps [. . .]’55 (‘[. . .] I know that it disgusts and excites you at the same time [. . .]’). The ﬁve senses take part in this bodily assault. The body is divided up into feet, hands, sexual organ and teeth, and just from cutting up the thongs that will be used for this mapping, one of the ‘I’ narrators writes: ‘Cette occupation a suﬃ a` gonﬂer mon sexe et a` le faire s’e´couler en un mince ﬁlet brillant’ (p. 10) (‘This occupation was enough to make my penis swell and a thin shining trickle dribble from it’). Dismembering the body is also a way of accepting its diﬀerent parts for want of the whole, particularly the ‘I’ narrator’s. When it is not broken up, it is split in two by the mirror. ‘Il’ (‘he’) wants to see the desire in the eyes of the other until he squints, before arriving at the following mise-en-sce`ne: ‘Je voudrais que tu te regardes sucer, la bouche emplie par ma bite, que tu te voies de´glutir mon jus. Je te propose comme seul accessoire un miroir carre´ [. . .]’ (‘I would like you to watch yourself sucking, with my prick ﬁlling your mouth, to see yourself swallowing my juice. I oﬀer you a square mirror as sole prop [. . .]’), the look of the other having become a shackle.56 So the body has to be split in the mirror and the ultimate possession is to be found not at the level of the submission of the body but in the look. The body of the other also becomes the place of mediation between a narrative ‘I’ and the woman: ‘[. . .] a` travers ta bite, son jus vaginal me coule dans la gorge’ (p. 24) (‘[. . .] her vaginal juice pours from your cock down my throat’). Lastly, the body becomes the story: ‘[. . .] dans son corps a` elle, il inse´mine notre histoire’ (p. 23) (‘[. . .] in her body he inseminates our story’).

90

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

One of the narrative ‘I’s describes his sheet as a ‘suaire’ (p. 11) (‘shroud’), reminding us that sexual pleasure is reliant on death for its attributes. Everything could be summed up in this sentence: ‘[. . .] veuxtu eˆtre ma victime ou mon bourreau?’ (p. 13) ([‘. . .] do you want to be my victim or my executioner?’). I will not speculate on what constitutes pleasure and what does not. As Rene´ de Ceccatty says: ‘Les textes e´rotiques ont une grandeur qui les isole. Hautains, autoritaires, ils imposent leur rythme, leur violence, leur syste`me’57 (‘The erotic texts have a grandeur that sets them apart. Haughty, authoritarian, they impose their rhythm, their violence, their system’). But what also imposes itself in this little piece of pornography is the image described whilst ‘il’ (‘he’) strives to shock and humiliate ‘je’ (‘I’): ‘[. . .] il a resserre´ ses le`vres pour que son crachat soit pulve´rise´ et au moment un peu pe´nible de la jouissance cette pluie ﬁne et musque´e a e´te´ comme la brumisation d’un mot d’amour’ (p. 22) (‘[. . .] he pursed his lips to pulverise his spittle and at the slightly exhausting moment of orgasm this ﬁne musky rain was like aerosol words of love’). These words of love were what Guibert wanted to write by means of this text to Michel Foucault who, as has been said, did not appreciate it, Guibert himself analysing: ‘Je pense qu’il a trouve´ ce livre en dec¸a de sa propre force masochiste’58 (‘I think he found that this book fell short of his own capacity for masochism’). The relevance of this from my standpoint of the writing of the self can best be illustrated by quoting Pratt’s conclusion to his own study of Les Chiens: Ne´anmoins il est clair que Guibert n’arrive a` formuler ce premier paradis e´rotique qu’en y gommant tout indice de son moi. On commence alors a` discerner l’impossibilite´ de combiner une e´criture caracte´rise´e par une mise en question des donne´es de l’individualite´ qui cherche a` de´stabiliser les rapports entre le moi et son discours, et des livres qui arrivent a` parler de Guibert luimeˆme, de lui permettre de se faire voir.59 (Nevertheless it is clear that Guibert only manages to formulate this ﬁrst erotic paradise by removing all hint of his self. One then begins to discern the impossibility of combining a writing characterised by a questioning of the facts of the individuality which seeks to destabilise the links between the self and its discourse, and the books which manage to speak of Guibert himself, allowing him to make himself visible.)

Although Pratt’s analysis oﬀers a diﬀerent perspective from mine since he is looking for an ‘autobiographique homosexuelle’ (‘homosexual autobiographic’), my argument has several points in common with his. The self indeed takes a back seat in Les Chiens and Guibert experiments at the level of narrative voices, introducing other ‘personnages’

Towards the Novel

91

(‘characters’). But the book soon runs out of steam and we are far from the novel and even the short story. Nevertheless the problematic of the self and its discourse, of how to make oneself visible using the established literary genres, remains unresolved. My investigation continues into the practical steps Guibert takes to ﬁnd answers to such questions.

VOYAGE AVEC DEUX ENFANTS Voyage avec deux enfants (Voy.) was also published in 1982 but later than Les Aventures singulie`res and Les Chiens since the reviews date from November. Un premier voyage se de´roulera d’ici, de ce bureau calme [. . .] parmi mes livres, mes dossiers, dams ma quie´tude, dans mon isolement. La seconde partie du livre sera le journal du vrai voyage [. . .] elle englobera [. . .] le chagrin [. . .] Le chagrin parce que si la premie`re partie doit eˆtre le re´cit du plaisir, la seconde partie menace de´ja` d’eˆtre le re´cit de la souffrance. (Voy., p. 33) (A ﬁrst journey will take place from here, from this calm study [. . .] among my books, my ﬁles, in my tranquillity, in my seclusion. The second part of the book will be the diary of the real journey [. . .] it will include [. . .] sorrow [. . .] Sorrow because if the ﬁrst part has to be the story of pleasure, the second part already looks like being the story of suffering.)

This plan, taken from the book itself, is more or less that of Voyage avec deux enfants, except that there is a third part, very short, set in Paris when the journey is over. As in Les Aventures singulie`res, we have the leitmotiv of the journey feeding the writer’s imagination. As soon as his friend ‘B.’ mentions setting oﬀ with him and two children, the expression ‘entre la mer et le de´sert’ (‘between the sea and the desert’) starts him dreaming (p. 23); it will become one of the book’s narrative structures, indeed ‘B.’ invited the narrator because he found a note intended for the latter’s diary in which this was written: ‘impression de me couper un peu plus du monde, alors que le but de toute tentative cre´atrice, inversement, doit eˆtre de s’en rapprocher’ (p. 50) (‘impression of cutting myself oﬀ a bit more from the world, whereas the aim of every creative attempt should be the opposite, to get closer to it’). So the narrator, oﬀered the chance of not cutting himself oﬀ from the world while still pursuing his project of artistic creation, seizes it with both hands. He turns for inspiration to another travel diary, that of a man who loves children, and buys up old

92

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

travel diaries; everything is most methodically prepared: ‘j’ai pris huit feuilles en haut desquelles j’ai marque´ une des dates de la semaine prochaine, comme des cases qu’il me reste a` remplir, en prospection du voyage’ (pp. 32–33) (‘In preparation for the journey I have taken eight sheets and entered at the top one of next week’s dates, like boxes left for me to ﬁll in’). The journey seems a really golden narrative opportunity. This ﬁrst part of the book is a kind of ﬁctional limbering-up presented in the form of a diary with dates as subtitles in which the narrator also goes backwards (for example from Friday 19 March to Saturday 13 March), time being dictated by the theme of the journey which gives the narrative its internal cohesion. Thus the ﬂashbacks to ‘une anne´e pre´ce´dente’ (‘an earlier year’) are incorporated because they narrate the events of a journey,60 news items dealing with children kidnapped or murdered by adults, and serving as a warning to our narrator against his story perhaps veering towards murder; he does his best, though, to turn it towards love. I used above the expression ‘ﬁctional limbering-up’: everything points to the narrator drawing up a ﬁctional training programme which he progressively carries out so that his pen is ready on the day of travel; just as boxers are reported to watch boxing matches before the big ﬁght, he reads travel diaries. But there is an almost insurmountable problem: he admits to preferring teenagers and does not feel drawn to children. No matter; he submits to a strict training programme: ‘Je me force a` jouir en pensant a` un enfant’ (p. 18) (‘I force myself to have an orgasm thinking of a child’). But this exercise does not have the desired eﬀect since the narrator starts feeling sick and tells himself that he must give up these images of sexual gratiﬁcation, writing, as if to conﬁrm my argument: ‘[. . .] leur substituer dans les meˆmes postures des corps che´tifs, est un excellent dressage, et une autre sorte de pre´paration au voyage’ (p. 19; my italics) (‘[. . .] substituting for them in the same postures puny bodies is excellent training and another kind of preparation for travel’). The only thing that works is to think of the child’s blood and thus trigger a whole ﬁctional process: imprisoning it, incising it, making holes in its skin. In another fantasy the children are sacriﬁced, castrated and their feet eaten (p. 34) and the narrator sees himself being tortured by the children (pp. 35–37) in a game with erotic overtones, especially when he imagines himself being photographed. In the passage which begins with ‘La plage’ (‘The beach’) he tries urging his imagination on, and by using drawing ﬁnally manages to imagine

Towards the Novel

93

‘l’enfant ravissant’ (‘the ravishing child’) dancing naked for him the following day, the body in action being the most eﬀective way of making the narrator desire it. He will also arrange to draw them while they are playing with a kite, but the drawing comes to nothing (p. 79). Only fantasy will enable him to imagine sexual gratiﬁcation (p. 83). Nevertheless, in spite of all the demands the narrator makes on himself, it is as if the text was writing itself without him and tending towards a fantastic tale with analogies to a short story which, I believe, is to be found in embryonic form when we read, dated ‘Samedi 20 mars’ (‘Saturday 20 March’): ‘J’ai commence´ a` faire des listes, mais je ne sais si ces noms aligne´s (veˆtements, couleurs, nourritures, jeux, pie`ges, animaux, reˆves, ﬁe`vres) paralysent mon projet, ou au contraire deviennent des ordres eﬀectifs d’e´criture’ (p. 26) [‘I have started making lists, but I do not know if the names thus strung together (clothes, colours, food, games, traps, animals, dreams, fevers) paralyse my project or on the contrary become eﬀective writing orders’]. The whole ambiguity of this list lies in whether it serves as a writing plan or as a reminder to the narrator of things he has to take with him on the journey, an ambiguity in my view cleared up when, from page 33 onwards, story openings get under way interspersed with passages continuing with travel preparations and culminating in a ‘conte’ (‘short story’) which starts on page 39 and of which it could be said that its themes are those listed above (‘clothes, colours, food, games, traps, animals, dreams, fevers’), the main link being ‘la ﬁe`vre’ (‘fever’). The four protagonists are present, but in ﬁctional form, and it is likely that the story was inﬂuenced by Saint-John Perse, whom the narrator admits he read. Death is an important narrative trigger: ‘l’enfant couche´’ (‘The Child Lying Down’) has been bitten by a dead man whose soul is imprisoned in his body (pp. 52–53); that is how the plot of this short story can be summarised. The narrative is not linear; once again the story is interspersed with passages telling directly of travel preparations and even analysing the writing form represented by this short story: ‘Pour la premie`re fois j’invente, j’aﬀabule, je ne relate pas un fait re´cent, un sentiment frais’61 (‘For the ﬁrst time I invent, I make things up, I do not describe a new feeling or something that happened recently’). These remarks will be conﬁrmed in ‘L’ours’ (‘ The Bear’ ) (PA, p. 143). What we have in this story is Herve´ Guibert’s ﬁrst attempt at ﬁction, an analysis conﬁrmed in an interview when he said: ‘Dans le Voyage, j’ai fait le re´cit d’un voyage en Orient juste avant de partir, j’ai fait le re´cit d’un reˆve de voyage . . .

94

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

Cela a e´te´ la de´couverte de la ﬁction’62 (‘In Le Voyage I told the story of a journey to the Orient just before leaving, I told the story of a dream of a journey . . . That was the discovery of ﬁction’). This story will take up almost the whole of the narrative up to the second part of the book beginning on page 65 and will be presented in the same form as the bulk of the book, with dates like a diary. When the last word of the story has been written (Voy., p. 61) the following can be read just underneath: ‘Fin du journal anticipe´. Demain le de´part. Je n’ai plus aucune envie de partir’ (p. 61) (‘End of the diary written in advance. Departure tomorrow. I no longer want to go at all’). The nearer the time comes to set out, the more the narrator worries about leaving. There are several warning signs, such as on meeting a boy whom he desires, the narrator writes: ‘[. . .] j’ai senti s’eﬀondrer tout l’e´chafaudage du voyage, et par la` l’e´chafaudage romanesque’ (p. 31) ([. . .] ‘I felt the journey’s entire construction collapsing, and the ﬁctional construction with it’), because his desire for this young man has cruelly reminded him of his lack of desire for the children. And then imagination is always more satisfying than reality, as the narrator himself says: ‘[. . .] si la premie`re partie doit eˆtre le re´cit du plaisir, la seconde partie menace de´ja` d’eˆtre le re´cit de la souﬀrance’ (p. 33) (‘[. . .] if the ﬁrst part has to be the story of pleasure, the second already looks like being the story of suﬀering’). This harks back to the reﬂections in L’Image fantoˆme on writing and photography in which writing, ﬁrst engaged upon in order to mitigate photography, ends up enriching the narrative (IF, p. 24). Here the part on the fantasised journey will no doubt be richer than the journey itself. As we have seen, the narrative of this ﬁrst part resembles a diary. What the narrator of La Mort propagande called ‘des tics d’e´criture . . . ou de ponctuation’ (MP, p. 288) (‘writing . . . or punctuation mannerisms’), which I explained in Chapter 1 as being the use of the parenthesis, and recalled at the beginning of this chapter in note 4 as having been used by Peter Handke, really do become writing mannerisms in Voyage avec deux enfants. Such parentheses are found on practically every page of the book; the reader gets the impression that the narrator is conveying his thoughts directly or else clarifying them, that he is declaring his ﬁctional intentions, that he is telling the truth, that he is speculating, that he is asking questions.63 Running like a thread through the whole book is the metaphor of the desert and the sea found on the ﬁrst page, notably sandstorms and a boat adrift.64 A transgressive aesthetic is also established in the text (‘La beaute´

Towards the Novel

95

classique du premier ne peut que faire ressortir la beaute´ de la laideur du second’) (‘The classical beauty of the ﬁrst only serves to bring out the beauty of the ugliness of the second’) and progressively conﬁrmed: ‘l’enfant disgracieux acquiert la plus grande beaute´, et l’enfant gracieux se pare de balourdise [. . .]’65 (‘the unattractive child acquires the greatest beauty and the attractive child takes on an air of awkwardness [. . .]’). The second part begins with an epigraph identifying ‘B.’ as the photographer Bernard Faucon by quoting excerpts from an interview he gave Herve´ Guibert for Le Monde (Voy., p. 67). The style is terser since the travel diary is found more directly in this second part. Thus, on page one of the second part, three words trigger three descriptive passages (‘Taxi’; ‘Ae´roport’; ‘Cabines te´le´phoniques’, p. 69) (‘Taxi’; ‘Airport’; ‘Telephone boxes’). Elsewhere the economy of the style does not detract from its suggestive power: ‘A` l’ae´roport, photos du roi, cavalcades de chameaux, burnous bariole´s. Chevrolets bleues a` l’arreˆt, enfants mendiants’ (p. 74) (‘At the airport, pictures of the king, camel cavalcades, motley burnouses. Stationary Blue Chevrolets, children begging’). This recalls the analysis by the narrator in L’Image fantoˆme of the writing of Goethe’s diary which could be applied here: ‘Le paysage du journal est une sorte de croquis bref, te´le´graphique, une carte postale’ (IF, p. 76) (‘The landscape of the diary is a sort of brief, telegraphic sketch, a postcard’). For other passages (for example Voy., p. 78, the paragraph beginning ‘Sur la route de Tiznit’), the sentence Guibert applies to Savitzkaya could be applied to what he writes: ‘A` ces moments le livre prend la forme d’un catalogue, comme d’une nomenclature animalie`re, ou d’un registre voluptueux, botanique, ge´ologique’66 (‘At these moments the book takes the form of a catalogue, like an animal nomenclature, or of a voluptuous, botanical, geological register’). As soon as he gets to the airport, writing burns the narrator’s ﬁngers inasmuch as he describes himself as ‘tanne´ par les mots’ (p. 71) (‘obsessed by words’) and forced to get his notebook out. But once the journey has begun he will only be able to write by getting up early in the morning before the others. It looks as if his worries about the journey will turn out to be justiﬁed: ‘J’he´site a` e´crire: voyage de merde, enfants de merde. Le de´but du mensonge: l’e´crire, ce serait renoncer au roman’ (p. 97) (‘I hesitate to write: journey shite, kids shite. The onset of lying: to write it would be to give up on the novel’). For the narrator notebook and travel are so intertwined that writing threatens to gain

96

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

the upper hand: ‘Mais j’ai l’impression que le voyage est de´ja` ﬁni, et le carnet s’arreˆte bientoˆt, il est peut-eˆtre ma ve´ritable e´che´ance’ (p. 100) (‘But I have the impression that the journey is already over, and the notebook stops soon, it is perhaps the true date for settling up’). As we have seen, the dream of the journey diﬀers from the journey itself, and the same thing occurs at the level of the body’s thematic. From the travel invitation onwards the narrator projects his body ‘entre le de´sert et la mer’ (p. 13) (‘between the desert and the sea’). The body seems for once as if it will not fear nakedness and will no longer hide, and the narrator concludes that this liberation of his body is what he anticipates will give him the most pleasure during the journey.67 The reason for this sudden freedom is made clear a little further on: the narrator thinks that the children are not going to desire him and so will not look at his body. Once the journey has begun, all the above plans will come up against reality. The narrator will refuse the chaste child the magnetic massage for which one has to undress, stressing a little further on that that would be ‘lui livrer un secret pre´mature´’68 (‘betraying a premature secret’); one immediately thinks of the pigeon chest. The physical ‘bonheur’ (‘happiness’) will be limited to no longer needing to keep clean during the journey and to hearing the ‘bruit du pet de l’enfant’69 (‘the sound of the child’s fart’), an exception being the last scene before the return home which begins with this sentence: ‘Final sur le toitterrasse de l’hoˆtel Aladin’ (‘Finale on the terrace roof of the Aladin Hotel’) which I see as betraying the intentions of the narrator wanting to give us an apotheosis by way of a ﬁnale, but this scene, which is not unlike a ﬁlm sequence, is no doubt a product of his imagination.70 As the ﬁrst part of the story had foreshadowed, desire is situated more at the level of photography. While describing the children’s nakedness he mentions having stuﬀed his camera at the bottom of his bag (p. 77). This move is a sign of his too pressing desire to photograph them naked, which he compares to a form of sexual pleasure. When they are on the beach at dusk he will rapidly use up all his exposures since he knows that the moment he wishes to capture is untakeable (‘[. . .] la mer monte, sur la bordure des criques elle tisse dans la lumie`re des ﬁls d’or incandescent [. . .]’, p. 81) (‘[. . .] the sea rises, on the inlets’ fringes it weaves incandescent gold threads in the light [. . .]’). No need to labour the point: the untakeable moment can be ‘pris’ (‘taken’) by words. By way of epigraph to the third part we have a dialogue between

Towards the Novel

97

two people, one of whom seems to be the narrator, in which he says that if he were to touch a child’s body it would be in relation to the disgust his own body inspires in him (p. 113). That constitutes perhaps the whole drama played out during the journey. Let us recall the jubilation as soon as the journey was announced of the narrator who ‘projetai[t] une certaine assise de [s]on corps’ (p. 13) (‘projected a certain easiness with his body’); in reality his body has only caused him disgust, and at the end of the book the narrator has not learnt to live any better with it. Indeed the whole journey ends in failure: the ‘chaste’ child has become ‘l’enfant souille´’ (p. 115) (‘deﬁled child’), the narrator no longer recognises ‘T.’’s body and will end up saying he no longer loves him,71 and to crown it all, even the travel photos will be a letdown (p. 117). Voyage avec deux enfants is above all a book about ‘T.’: when the narrator writes: ‘Ce premier temps de projection e´liminait la pre´sence de l’autre adulte dans le paysage’ (p. 14) (‘This ﬁrst period of planning eliminated the presence of the other adult in the landscape’), my ﬁrst reading of the book made me think of ‘B.’, but that is probably part of the deception: the other adult to be eliminated is no doubt ‘T.’. Let us look more closely into this. When ‘B.’ raises the travel idea, the narrator tells him that he would like to go with ‘T.’ but that the latter’s work prevents him leaving; ‘B.’ then invites the narrator to join him and the narrator writes at once (in parentheses) that he knows that ‘T.’ will not be pleased.72 From then on the journey is tilted against ‘T.’ in order to betray him, or rather to take revenge. Indeed the evening before departure will be spent with ‘T.’ who will disapprove of the journey (p. 61). When the narrator makes himself have an orgasm thinking of a child, it is at ‘T.’’s expense (p. 18), and on page 51, in a passage worth quoting in full, we learn that what is at stake in this book is not simply mourning for ‘T.’ (which had already motivated the writing of Les Aventures singulie`res and, according to the critic Rene´ de Ceccatty, of Les Chiens), but literary creation: Et pour la premie`re fois aussi j’e´cris a` l’e´cart de ‘T.’, a` son insu, presque en cachette, sans lui en rendre compte, un texte qui ne lui est pas de´die´. J’e´chappe a` la norme d’e´criture qu’il a institue´e, car c’e´tait un peu lui qui re´glait le de´bit, par phase d’abandon et de recaptivite´, comme une ﬂamme qu’on baisse ou qu’on monte a` volonte´. Ce que j’e´crivais, jusque-la`, ses tromperies l’enﬂammaient, ses circonstances le mettaient en suspens. (p. 51) (And for the ﬁrst time too I write apart from ‘T.’, without his knowledge, almost in secret, without telling him about it, a text not dedicated to him. I

98

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self escape from the writing norm that he instituted, for it was to some extent he who regulated the ﬂow, abandon alternating with recaptivity, like a ﬂame lowered or raised at will. What I was writing up till then was enﬂamed by his deceptions and put on hold by his circumstances.)

So ‘T.’ was the essential material of the writing until Voyage avec deux enfants, but the really important point will only be made in the following sentence: ‘Mais, puisqu’il me prend ce soir le besoin de l’immiscer dans cette e´criture e´mancipe´e, c’est qu’il reste, sans doute, le personnage d’origine, le repe`re, la mire, la mesure’ (‘But since I feel the need this evening to involve him in this emancipated writing, it is because he remains no doubt the original character, the benchmark, the reference point, the measure’). This lucidity conﬁrms my analysis of Voyage avec deux enfants. Thus, in the airport departure lounge, the narrator longs solely to phone ‘T.’ to give him a word of love (p. 69). One of the only instances of physical contact with the two children that gives the narrator any pleasure is precisely the one conjuring up the lover whom the narrator tries to betray with the ‘disgracieux’ (‘unattractive’) child (‘Ces enfants emmeˆle´s sous mes yeux et pris de soubresauts deviennent lui et moi (T. sur cette plage comme la mer le´gendaire revient au galop)’), p. 81 (‘These children muddled up and jerking about before my eyes become him and me (T. on this beach like the legendary sea returns at a gallop)’). When the child gets him to read a sentence from his diary about the other child in which he says that despite his eﬀorts he just cannot get him out of his mind, the narrator writes: ‘(je pense a` T.)’ (p. 93) ‘(I think of T.)’. Arguing with ‘B.’ about distance provides him with the opportunity of re-evaluating ‘T.’’s attitude and concluding that the latter does indeed show him the greatest respect (pp. 96–97). As the end of the journey draws nearer he cannot stop himself thinking about what ‘T.’ is doing and counting the hours until he will at last see ‘T.’ again.73 So, as I have shown, ‘T.’ runs right through the book, at least up until the last part. For the irony is that we learn in the third part that things turn out very diﬀerently once the journey is over. According to the passage on page 33 which I quoted at the very beginning of my study of this work, it was at ﬁrst expected to consist of only two parts, and everything points to the fact that the narrator could not foretell what he would feel on seeing ‘T.’ again and that this experience gave the book its third part. The narrator no longer recognises ‘T.’’s body and at the moment of orgasm asks ‘T.’ to slap him (p. 116), indicating next that all further exchange of the sort will be impossible. On the following occasion he

Towards the Novel

99

will confess to ‘T.’ that the caresses he gives him are no longer expressions of love; this change of attitude is explained by the narrator himself when he describes his feelings on seeing ‘T.’ again: ‘[. . .] je mis entre lui et moi toute la distance d’une aﬀection de´funte, nous e´tions tous deux revenants, deux amants qui n’avaient plus aucune chair sur leurs os pour se manifester leur passion’ (p. 115) (‘[. . .] I put between him and myself all the distance of a dead aﬀection, we were both ghosts, two lovers who no longer had any ﬂesh on their bones to express their passion for each other’). As it draws to an end the book starts taking oﬀ into a veritable reverie in which the body of the deﬁled child appears mixed with its smells and in which the narrator is no longer afraid to face the mirror inasmuch as he tries to reshape his face so as to look like Vincent.74 It is at this point, in my view, that the novel is in process of being born, but it is the moment chosen by the narrator to close it. So, to recap, we have in this chapter a ﬁrst book (Les Aventures singulie`res) which, except in the last short story ‘Le De´sir d’imitation’ based on Scarlet and Black, proves that Guibert is still feeling his way. This narrative method (taking a sample of reality and surreptitiously disguising it) will in large measure characterise Guibert’s work. The texts of La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche are all drafts of novels, called more eloquently by the narrator ‘ﬁcelles romanesques’ (PA, p. 71) (‘ﬁctional pieces of string’). What emerges, though, is a fairly negative view of the novel, lumbered with the epithets ‘rate´’ (‘failed’) or ‘posthume’ (‘posthumous’). In so far as it needed to be, my chronological approach has been vindicated: studying these texts dating from 1981 and 1982 enables Guibert’s creative work and its evolution to be appreciated. Les Chiens echoes a multiplicity of voices but the narrator’s disidentiﬁcation process does not simplify the project of the writing of the self. Voyage avec deux enfants is a book that illustrates the diﬀerent writing registers analysed in ‘L’e´criture photographique’ (IF) and the one for which, for sentimental reasons, Guibert felt the most aﬀection.75 From my standpoint its middle section, which resembles a short story, is a ﬁrst attempt at ﬁction; this ‘short story’ perhaps owes its existence to the ﬁctional limbering-up represented by the ﬁrst part. Voyage avec deux enfants is also a kind of exorcism of ‘T.’, linking it with the texts in La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche which are also written for or against ‘T.’, ‘P.’ or ‘Euge`ne’. Nevertheless what should be noted, in addition to a certain disgust

100

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

still felt by the narrator for his own body, is that if Guibert has glimpsed the method that will lead him towards the novel (the play between truth and falsehood), what is still lacking is the notion of creating characters; his books still as a rule feature himself or close friends and arise from what could be called ‘l’espionnage romanesque’ (‘ﬁctional espionage’). The creation of characters is the activity Guibert will concentrate on over the next two years, since it is still the main element lacking for writing novels.

CHAPTER FOUR

Image and Text Since L’Homme blesse´ served as point of departure for Guibert in his quest towards the novel, this chapter begins with a study of that experiment and links it with the text ‘Les escarpins rouges’, which tells the story of the writing of L’Homme blesse´ and provides us with important information about the process of literary creation. Les Lubies d’Arthur is the ﬁrst of Guibert’s books to bear the subtitle ‘roman’ (‘novel’), so I will be asking if this text, which was to have been issued in instalments with illustrations, is really a novel, and linking it to a text entitled ‘L’Ours’ (PA, pp. 139–48), which tells how Les Lubies d’Arthur came to be written. I will then turn to the texts in La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche published in 1982 and 1983 to see if their analysis reﬂects the writer’s preoccupations and tallies with the Guibertian thematic. Since in Le Seul Visage and Lettres d’E´gypte we have two diﬀerent ways of combining image and text, I shall be asking if these two projects lead Guibert away from the novel or whether, on the contrary, they share the same perspective as the other books. So as to make my study more synthetic, I will be analysing the last three works together. L’HOMME BLESSE´ L’Homme blesse´ is a ﬁlm script written by Herve´ Guibert and Patrice Che´reau and published by Minuit in 1983. The book is subtitled ‘Sce´nario et notes’ (‘Scenario and Notes’) and begins with the scenario (HB, pp. 9–150) which is then followed by notes (pp. 151–99). The ﬁlm, which represented France at the Cannes ﬁlm festival in 1984, is the story of a young man, Henri, who lives in a stiﬂing family. One evening, he meets Jean in a station and becomes obsessed with him. It is not made clear whether Jean is involved with drugs or prostitution, but he drags Henri into some strange adventures. Henri tries to follow him everywhere and, at the end of the ﬁlm, goes to bed with him and strangles him, in a plot bearing a certain resemblance to those of Jean 101

102

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

Genet (Journal du voleur and Miracle de la rose1) but also, as Guibert puts it in a sentence in ‘Les escarpins rouges’, turning on the question of love: ‘Et s’il n’y avait qu’une seule chose a` garder, dans cette histoire, ce serait bien suˆr l’amour’ (PA, p. 135) (‘And if there were only one thing to be kept in this story, it would indeed be love’). This sentence conjures up in my mind one of the last images of the ﬁlm, showing Henri consummating his passion for Jean until they are both destroyed: love unto death. Love is also present in the relationship between the two scriptwriters of L’Homme blesse´, as we saw in ‘Un sce´nariste amoureux’ and ‘Pour P. De´dicace a` l’encre sympathique’ (PA, pp. 75– 92), and it is interesting to read Guibert’s account of this amorous quest in the Globe interview.2 Why study a ﬁlm script? In ‘Les escarpins rouges’ we are told that Guibert learnt to create characters thanks to Patrice Che´reau (PA, pp. 133–38), through the medium of their work together on the ﬁlm script for L’Homme blesse´, so we can see how important this apprenticeship was for Guibert in the project that my book is concerned with, even if including a ﬁlm script can pose certain methodological problems in that it is the result of the collaboration between two people and it becomes practically impossible to attribute this or that aspect of the ﬁlm to this or that author. For example, Guibert says that Che´reau used to clean and prune the pages of dialogue he brought him, that it was Che´reau who wrote nearly all of the woman’s part, that the bridge scene does not exist in the script, and even that what he will come to consider as ‘les plus beaux dialogues du ﬁlm’ (‘the most beautiful dialogues in the ﬁlm’) were in fact written by the assistant.3 So I shall be concentrating on the genre chosen, a ﬁlm script, and on the way the characters evolve, but not on a comparison between the ﬁlm and the script, even though that would no doubt reveal numerous diﬀerences between the two.4 Let us read rather the back cover, from which I will quote extensively since it is very signiﬁcant: Au lieu d’e´crire une pre´face ou une postface [. . .] nous avons pense´ qu’il serait mieux d’y faire entrer le lecteur de plain-pied, un peu comme dans un roman, puis de lui de´voiler certaines des notes que nous avons prises [. . .] pour lui montrer comment l’histoire s’e´tait construite [. . .] comment d’un re´cit entier il ne pouvait subsister qu’une seule re´plique [. . .] En publiant ces notes, souvent intimes, nous ne voulons pas eˆtre les prestidigitateurs qui retournent leurs accessoires, mais plutoˆt laisser a` la surface de la toile les quelques coups de pinceau rugueux qui ont fait le travail. (My emphasis) (Instead of writing a foreword or an afterword [. . .] we thought it better to let the reader straight in, a bit like in a novel, then to disclose some of the notes

Image and Text

103

we had taken [. . .] to show him how the story was built [. . .] how from an entire story only one line could be left [. . .] In publishing these often intimate notes, we do not wish to turn our props inside out like conjurors, but rather to leave on the surface of the canvas the few rough brush strokes that did the work.)

No foreword or afterword, but a vague comparison with the novel, so we should read L’Homme blesse´ a bit like a novel,5 for what the two co-authors reveal to us are the mechanisms of writing, precisely that which informs my project. Still on the back cover, we learn that they took six years to write this story ‘en e´cumant, au fur et a` mesure de nos deux vies, paralle`lement, le meilleur de nos e´motions pour en faire vivre nos deux personnages [. . .]’ (‘in skimming, as our twin existences unfolded in parallel, the best of our emotions, in order to breathe life into our two protagonists [. . .]’). In L’Homme blesse´ we ﬁnd the following characters: the father, the mother, the sister (Jacqueline) and the brother (Henri), together with Bosmans, Jean and E´lisabeth. In writing ‘our two protagonists’ the stress is laid on Henri and Jean to the exclusion of the others, the ‘our’ betraying a singular empathy, and it is not surprising either to ﬁnd in the script a number of autobiographical elements from Guibert’s life together with, in the case of some episodes, echoes of other books.6 With regard to L’Homme blesse´, what do we learn about the evolution of the voices of the self? One of the most interesting aspects of the script for me is the choice of characters. In ‘Les escarpins rouges’ Guibert stresses that he envisaged only two main protagonists and that it was at Che´reau’s insistence that the female character was created (p. 134). So, in a mise-en-abıˆme of the ﬁrst and last narrative parts of Les Chiens, we encounter once again in the scenario the ‘heterosexual’ couple (Henri/E´lisabeth), with Henri desiring Jean. We also read in ‘Les escarpins rouges’ that the Bosmans character is based on a friend of Guibert (‘P.’): ‘pendant les anne´es ou` nous l’avons e´crit mon amitie´ est devenue une sorte d’espionnage narratif’ (ibid.) (‘during the years we wrote it my friendship has become a sort of narrative espionage’). As has already been remarked, this character popped up in ‘Le trio myste´rieux’ under the initials ‘N.B.’ (PA, pp. 46–50) and will recur in the guise of ‘Bill’ in A` l’ami. If we add to all that the autobiographical elements alluded to above (particularly the sister’s departure for Germany and the son being left behind all alone with his parents during the summer), we can get an idea of the important place of those close to Guibert in his attempts at ﬁction, and conclude that at this stage in his

104

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

development Guibert still found it diﬃcult to invent ﬁctional characters. If we now turn to the ‘Notes’ of L’Homme blesse´, they extend from 1975 to 1980. Each passage is signed either ‘P.C.’ or ‘H.G.’ followed by the year; Herve´ Guibert only intervenes from 1977 onwards. What strikes one straight away is that whereas ‘P.C.’ invents, then from 1976 onwards uses, the ﬁrst names ‘Jean’ and ‘Henri’ within a heterodiegetic narrative, ‘H.G.’ uses at ﬁrst ‘Patrick’ and ‘Angelo’ in a text in which, somewhat surprisingly, a ‘je’ (‘I’) narrator appears;7 thereafter ‘Jean’ and ‘Henri’ will be used, but the narrative will remain homodiegetic. It becomes increasingly noticeable that ‘H.G.’ reports conversations, meetings, travel experiences, books read, and stories told by friends, and that the ‘je’ (‘I’) is progressively more closely identiﬁed with Herve´ Guibert.8 This is all the more striking in that ‘P.C.’ does not do the same thing at all: he gives the impression of putting his imagination to work, whereas with ‘H.G.’ it is daily life that is transposed into ‘notations de ﬁction’ (‘ﬁctional notations’), to use ‘H.G.’’s expression (HB, p. 182). Here we have a demonstration of the ﬁctional espionage which Guibert made his friends ‘endurer’ (‘endure’) and we see the process of creation of ‘ﬁctional notations’ really at work at this stage of his output: ‘Pour moi, une re´plique e´tait ﬁable si je l’avais entendue un jour prononce´e dans une conversation’ (PA, p. 134) (‘For me a line was valid if I had heard it one day said in conversation’). So he draws on everyday life for his ﬁction. In ‘Les escarpins rouges’ we learn that as soon as ﬁlming on L’Homme blesse´ was completed, Guibert wrote the script for another movie (‘Quelque jours apre`s, je suis parti, en Italie, et j’ai e´crit un autre sce´nario’, PA, p. 137; ‘A few days later I went to Italy and wrote another ﬁlm script’). Now, as we shall see, Guibert’s writing method does not change: it is in fact the ﬁlm ‘La liste noire’, discussed at length in A` l’ami in connection with what the narrator regards as being a real betrayal on Marine’s part. The manuscript is at the I.M.E.C.; it consists of 133 typed pages signed and dated at the end ‘H.G. septembre 1983’ and is subtitled ‘Sce´nario d’un ﬁlm non tourne´ avec Isabelle Adjani’ (‘Script of a ﬁlm not made with Isabelle Adjani’). It features two main characters called in the manuscript ‘Marine’ and ‘Richard’ in a fairly autobiographical story. From this study’s standpoint it is interesting to note that Guibert chose to write another ﬁlm script while he was progressing towards the novel, and that to invent characters he simply ‘ﬁctionalised’ Isabelle Adjani and her partner. In A` l’ami the narrator

Image and Text

105

describes how horriﬁed ‘Richard’ is when he reads the ﬁlm script (no doubt because of its realism) and reports him as saying that it is dreadful to have been spied on like that for years (Ami, p. 82). Once again, as in L’Homme blesse´, the characters are friends of Guibert whom he has ﬁctionalised.

LES LUBIES D’ARTHUR Published in 1983, Les Lubies d’Arthur is made up of 59 chapters, all of which have a title. It is Guibert’s ﬁrst book to bear the generic subtitle ‘roman’ (‘novel’), clearly meant as a declaration of intent. In 1985 there appeared in the journal Autrement a text entitled ‘L’ours’,9 reprinted in La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche (PA, pp. 139–48), which describes how Les Lubies d’Arthur came to be written. I shall be looking at ‘L’ours’ as closely as at Les Lubies d’Arthur since it is fundamental for my project. We shall see that even though it is called ‘roman’ (‘novel’), Les Lubies d’Arthur does not readily lend itself to a linear reading. It presents us with two main characters, ‘Bichon’ and ‘Arthur’, one of whom is young and the other adult. What happens?: ‘[. . .] de grands de´placements, des de´sastres, des naufrages, des cataclysmes’ (PA, p. 143) (‘[. . .] distant travel, disasters, shipwrecks, cataclysms’). Minor characters gravitate around these two protagonists.10 The narrative seems to be heterodiegetic, but becomes homodiegetic when the ‘je’ (‘I’) of the narrator is inserted in the section entitled ‘Une famille lugubre’ (‘A Gloomy Family’) which includes the father, the mother, the daughter and the son who starts writing ‘mon pe`re’ (LA, pp. 37–38). In the section ‘Les e´puise´s’ (‘The Exhausted’), Bichon and Arthur meet in Naples a young man writing a diary from which a fairly long section is quoted in direct speech (pp. 62–64), and the reader begins to wonder about the identity of this young man who bears a close resemblance to Herve´ Guibert. ‘Re´apparition de T.’ ends up removing us from the novel altogether (pp. 91–92) since ‘T.’’s letter is quoted, also in direct speech. In the reﬂections in ‘L’ours’ Guibert tells us that his characters were born in a letter by ‘T.’ from America, doubtless the one presented to us here, since they had seen them in Naples while all three were sheltering ‘sous l’auvent d’un hoˆtel pour e´chapper au de´luge’ (PA, p. 146) (‘under a hotel awning to escape the deluge’); it is the episode entitled ‘Les e´puise´s’ and, as had been suspected, the diary is no doubt Guibert’s. So we notice that Les Lubies

106

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

d’Arthur is less a novel than a sketch for a novel in which Guibert reveals all his pencil strokes. He still incorporates material from letters and diaries into his narrative. A linear reading of the novel would paint a portrait of travel adventures. Another reading would be based on the title in an attempt to ﬁnd out what Arthur’s various fads were.11 One cannot, however, help noticing that the book does not take the form of what is generally thought of as ﬁction but resembles rather one of Guibert’s earlier books, L’Image fantoˆme. The titles of the ‘sections’ are like pictures and trigger the narrative which seems dependent on them;12 besides, some of these sections could be small autonomous stories. A few titles go beyond even this role to launch the narrative: ‘Ou` nos tourlourous ce`dent leur barque a` une jeune ﬁlle fatale’ (‘ where our artists give their boat to a fatal young lady’ ) (p. 70); one could almost imagine a list of these 59 titles with the narrator ﬁlling them in as he went along to make a ‘roman’ (‘novel’). It could hardly be put better. In ‘L’ours’ Guibert reveals that at ﬁrst he wanted the book to be published in instalments with illustrations for each episode, even giving examples, including the ﬁrst and last illustration.13 He goes on to cite 13 other illustrations (PA, p. 146). It is not only the form of L’Image fantoˆme that one ﬁnds in these pages, but also its content; thus ‘L’autoportrait’ (‘ The self portrait’ ) (IF, pp. 62–65). We learn too in another part of ‘L’ours’ that at the time he was writing Les Lubies d’Arthur, Guibert had in mind a book about painting (LA, p. 140), and as it happens paintings weave in and out of the novel. Similarly certain books were very inﬂuential when it came to the writing of Les Lubies d’Arthur.14 This accumulation and assimilation of various documents was undertaken knowingly by Guibert, who said that he had observed and copied Che´reau’s work for L’Homme blesse´ (PA, p. 143). This is further justiﬁcation for including L’Homme blesse´ in the present chapter, since the experiment served as point of departure for Guibert in his quest towards the novel. In the same way as (to quote Guibert again), if there were only one thing to be kept in L’Homme blesse´, it would be love (PA, p. 135), Les Lubies d’Arthur is also a love story. We learn in ‘L’ours’ that before writing Les Lubies d’Arthur, Guibert was out of love, wondering ‘si cette activite´ de l’e´criture [. . .] n’e´tait pas morte a` jamais’ (PA, p. 139) (‘if this writing activity [. . .] was not dead for ever’). A review that appeared on the publication of the book one assumes to have been Voyage avec deux enfants gave Guibert the courage to contact the child

Image and Text

107

(called Vincent) again (LA, p. 140) and they went on a journey together. There the writing took oﬀ when the narrator tried to tell the child the ‘histoire du massacre des oiseaux’ (p. 141) (‘the story of the birds’ massacre’). There is also ‘T.’’s irruption into the narrative in the middle of the book, giving rise to the following analysis: ‘[. . .] lui que Voyage avec deux enfants avait mis a` mort, voila` qu’il ressuscitait a contrario, comme personnage e´ternel que meˆme la ﬁction ne pouvait ignorer’ (p. 146) (‘[. . .] he whom Voyage avec deux enfants had put to death was, conversely, coming back to life as an eternal character whom even ﬁction could not ignore’). So it proves impossible to put ‘T.’ to death. To pursue intertextuality with other works, there are, as we saw in Chapter 3, the passages from ‘La semaine sainte’ (PA, pp. 51–59) reprinted word-for-word (LA, pp. 98–104); ‘Monsieur Luccioni’ (pp. 22–23) was already in La Mort propagande (MP, pp. 94–95), the same episode being more or less repeated, with the chief diﬀerence that Bichon was ‘je’ (‘I’) and Arthur the narrator’s mother; similarly for the passage on ‘l’enfant hypocrite’ (‘the hypocritical child’), Bichon (LA, p. 23), which was already to be found in La Mort propagande (MP, p. 95). Moreover, in ‘L’ours’ Guibert says that the characters of Bichon and Arthur had slipped into those of Jean and Henri in the script of L’Homme blesse´ (PA, p. 142), and one cannot help noticing that ‘le burnous ou l’agneaudou’ (‘the burnous or the baa-lamb’) of Bichon (LA, p. 57) will form part of Mes Parents and Photographies. The birds and the eagle are massacred, recalling ‘The´re`se et son crocodile aile´’ and ‘Le prince blond’ (MP, pp. 9–40). Another echo of La Mort propagande is the episode in which the two protagonists go to the morgue and steal bits from corpses for the eagle (LA, p. 30). The thematic of the work takes up again the main themes already identiﬁed in the preceding books. The body has a special place in Les Lubies d’Arthur. It is often disguised or masked and strange things happen to it.15 The relationship between Bichon and Arthur is a very chaste one, conﬁned to an outstretched hand, or else everything happens at an unspoken level;16 it is only through a third party that they will manage to give each other imaginary caresses: ‘Ils ne pouvaient pas se toucher l’un l’autre, mais ils pouvaient tenter de s’atteindre a` travers le corps d’un autre [. . .]’ (p. 65) (‘They could not touch each other, but they could try to reach each other through the body of another [. . .]’). I believe, though, that the most interesting aspect of Les Lubies d’Arthur concerns deafness. When Bichon is miraculously cured, we read: ‘Bichon s’habitua aux bruits et pleura le

108

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

deuil de ses musiques familie`res, qu’ils recouvraient: de´sormais ni les pierres ni le soleil ni aucun objet ne faisaient plus parvenir jusqu’a` lui, a` travers ses yeux ou ses doigts, leurs ondes sonores’ (p. 22) (‘Bichon got used to the noises and shed tears as he mourned his familiar musics which they drowned out: henceforth neither the stones nor the sun nor any object got their sound waves to reach him through his eyes and his ﬁngers’). Here we have in embryonic form the narrative vein that will be mined in Des Aveugles: narration from the point of view of a deaf person who suddenly begins to hear, and the resulting diﬀerences in auditory perception. At the end of the book Arthur will become deaf too (p. 92): from this point of view Les Lubies d’Arthur is in a way the foretext of Des Aveugles. Guibert seems to realise the narrative potential of a story in which perceptions are distorted. Love and death are linked. All the girls courted by Monsieur Luccioni are buried a fortnight later (p. 23). As he gets someone to caress him, Arthur describes the other’s heavy breathing as ‘putride’ (‘foul’); he will ﬁnd sexual gratiﬁcation in skinning ‘en rondelles, l’anus d’un oiseau’17 (‘in slices, a bird’s anus’). The young man’s head, at the moment of orgasm, changes into a ‘teˆte de mort’ (‘death’s head’) and Arthur has the impression of being ‘l’aile noire du manteau d’un fossoyeur’18 (‘the black wing of a gravedigger’s cloak’), and he will end his days resurrecting corpses by embracing them (p. 115). Bichon is impaled; Arthur ﬁnds himself as if dead for ﬁve minutes every night.19 More than ever death hangs over the narrative and gains ground increasingly within it, in the end invading it. At the level of writing we learn in ‘L’ours’ that Guibert uses ‘un autre type d’e´criture, glissante, coulante, gratuite, d’un enjeu presque indiﬀe´rent’ (PA, p. 142) (‘another kind of writing, smooth, free-ﬂowing, gratuitous, almost indiﬀerent to its stakes’). I could not put better myself the impression made by the book’s writing. The stylistic richness to be found in some of the texts in La piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche and in Voyage avec deux enfants is absent; it is as if the book were staking all not on the content but on the form (I mean by that the novel genre). At this stage in my argument it is necessary for me to look into the problematic of the novel form, ﬁrstly to make sure it is clearly understood that Herve´ Guibert was truly driven to write a novel: ‘L’e´diteur disait: ‘‘Maintenant, il vous faut e´crire un roman’’, le critique e´crivait: ‘‘Maintenant nous attendons de lui l’e´preuve de la longue distance’’ ’ (PA, pp. 129–30) (‘The publisher would say: ‘‘Now you have

Image and Text

109

to write a novel’’, the critic would write: ‘‘Now we wait to see how he performs over the long distance’’ ’). I cannot emphasise this real pressure strongly enough.20 Despite his personal beliefs, Guibert launched himself on the novel: ‘Apre`s, j’ai essaye´ de disparaıˆ tre moi-meˆme de la ﬁction, je ne me trouvais plus tre`s valable comme personnage [. . .] J’ai essaye´ de faire reculer le ‘‘Je’’, qu’il apparaisse toujours mais le plus tard possible’21 (‘Afterwards, I tried to disappear from ﬁction myself, I no longer found myself very legitimate as a character [. . .] I tried to push the ‘‘I’’ back; he could always appear, but the later the better’). That is exactly what one ﬁnds in Les Lubies d’Arthur, in which the ‘je’ (‘I’) appears on page 38, never again to disappear. The narrator will oﬀer in the last section, ‘Le Tableau’, a ‘petit autoportrait sardonique’ (p. 117) (‘a little sardonic self-portrait’) and Arthur’s body will disappear, leaving a self-portrait behind. Is not Guibert’s intention to reveal himself? The Rembrandt illustration that was to accompany the last scene22 echoes indeed ‘L’autoportrait’ in L’Image fantoˆme in which the narrator cites the portraits of Rembrandt as being the only selfportraits that he would accept of himself (IF, pp. 63–65). Looked at this way, Les Lubies d’Arthur oﬀers a self-portrait in anamorphosis. Je viens d’achever les quatre-vingt-sept feuillets serre´s—le texte le plus long que j’aie e´crit jusque-la`—d’un roman d’aventures, Les Lubies d’Arthur, et voila` que par hasard je tombe sur Babel, que j’adore, et qui n’a e´crit que des choses tre`s courtes. Ce bonheur a` le lire de´sarc¸onne un peu toute velle´ite´ de ﬁction, comme une entreprise vaniteuse. (PA, p. 130) (I have just ﬁnished the 87 closely-written pages—my longest text up till now—of an adventure story, Les Lubies d’Arthur, and lo and behold I chance upon Babel, whom I adore, and who has only written very short things. My happiness at reading him rather throws off balance any inclination towards ﬁction as merely an exercise in conceit.)

The quotation above shows that Les Lubies d’Arthur was supposed to be an adventure story, but Guibert also uses the term ‘velle´ite´’, a French word meaning a weak, hesitant, ineﬀectual desire to carry out some project or other, which is precisely the impression we get from reading Les Lubies d’Arthur: Guibert goes along with the business of writing a novel without being at all sure that that is what he wants to do. In ‘L’ours’ Guibert will ask himself whether Les Lubies d’Arthur is a novel, and this is how he answers the question: ‘S’il fallait lui apposer une e´tiquette, je pre´fe´rerais celle de conte, ou de le´gende. Il ressemble d’ailleurs e´trangement aux toutes premie`res choses que j’ai e´crites, qui e´taient des contes pour enfants’ (PA, p. 147)23 (‘If I had to put a label on it I would prefer that of tale or legend. It certainly bears a curious

110

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

resemblance to the very ﬁrst things I wrote, which were children’s stories’). The deﬁnitions of ‘conte’ (‘tale, fairly short, of imaginary adventures’), and of ‘le´gende’ (‘traditional story, the fabulous events of which may be based on historical fact but have been transformed by folk imagination’) both stress imagination’s preeminence over reality, and it is true that Les Lubies d’Arthur could be read like a tale or a legend. Does not Bichon get pregnant after drinking ‘dans son gobelet de bapteˆme’ (‘from his christening cup’) Arthur’s tears (LA, p. 18) and does not Arthur perform miracles with his saliva (pp. 20–21)? As we have seen, though, there are suﬃcient references to the author for him to be present in the story as explicit biographer. In 1984, that is after the publication of Les Lubies d’Arthur, Guibert declared: ‘Le roman reste un reˆve. On me dit que je fais des livres trop petits, qui ne sont pas vraiment des romans. Moi j’aime les livres petits et je crois que les meilleurs livres sont des romans rate´s, inacheve´s, monstrueux . . .’24 (‘The novel remains a dream. They tell me I make books that are too small, that are not really novels. But I like small books and I think that the best books are failed, unﬁnished, monstrous novels . . .’). So with Les Lubies d’Arthur Guibert situates himself this side of the novel. It is no accident if, in the next texts I will be looking at, we see that he is preoccupied with reﬂections on the novel, and that these essays will in turn engender ﬁction, just as that magniﬁcent text ‘L’ours’ tells quite simply how Les Lubies d’Arthur came to be written. If one thinks about it, the two parts of Voyage avec deux enfants (the dream of the journey, then the journey) are a mirror image of the two parts that are Les Lubies d’Arthur and ‘L’ours’: the attempt at ﬁction and the behind-the-scenes account of how the story was constructed. It can be argued at a pinch that, up to 1983, Guibert’s most successful texts are those in which he explains the process of literary creation, rather than his ﬁctional attempts. It is important to bear in mind that, following the photographic writing (Chapter 2), Guibert is still preoccupied by the relationship between images and texts, and photography continually haunts his books like a ghost. This image/text relationship was something he intended to render here through the illustrated serial, and he will work on it in his writings ﬁrst for Le Monde and then L’Autre journal, in Le Seul visage, and in the project that will become Lettres d’E´gypte, as we shall see in the next section.

Image and Text

111

LA PIQUˆRE D’AMOUR ET AUTRES TEXTES SUIVI DE LA CHAIR FRAIˆCHE (TEXTS DATING FROM 1983 AND 1984); LE SEUL VISAGE, 1984; LETTRES D’E´GYPTE, PHOTOGRAPHS BY HANS GEORG BERGER, TEXTS BY HERVE´ GUIBERT (THE JOURNEY TOOK PLACE IN 1984) For La piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche, we have six texts left to study.25 In ‘Sur une manipulation courante’ (‘On a Common Manipulation’) Guibert continues the tradition of ﬁctionalising his life and his friends, since the narrator is on holiday with ‘T.’ and ‘H.G.’ on the isle of Elba (PA, p. 102). Similarly ‘L’e´diteur’ (‘The Publisher’) takes up again remarks that Guibert’s interviews have made us familiar with;26 in ‘Ne´crologie’ (‘Obituary’) the narrator is a journalist on a big daily and must wipe his body’s slate clean before he can write (that is also one of the ‘tics d’e´criture’ [‘writing mannerisms’] of ‘Le critique photo’). ‘Les rivaux’ (‘The Rivals’) is about a novel project marked by several starts which comes to an abrupt end; it seems that the image (which ought to have got the narrator’s imagination going) short-circuits the story: ‘[. . .] cette histoire se re´duisait a` une image—un tableau [. . .]’ (p. 108) (‘[. . .] this story amounted to an image—a picture [. . .]’). Each time the narrator tries to write this story, he moves away from this representation and stops, dissatisﬁed (‘[. . .] la broderie au lieu du motif, le bavardage au lieu de l’aveu’, ibid., ‘[. . .] embroidery instead of motif, chatter instead of confession’). So what he wants is to unveil. It is then that he gets a written request and his reply will include the story he wanted to tell. As in Chapter 3 in the study of Les Aventures singulie`res, the letter recurs as a writing trigger. The pretext of putting ‘P.’, whom he is in love with, in a text (PA, p. 114) is what triggers the narrative in ‘Ne´crologie’. The entire thematic of literary creation in Guibert, as analysed thus far, is seen to recur here. With the publication of Le Seul visage, the ﬁrst line on the back cover sets the tone: ‘Un livre avec des ﬁgures et des lieux, n’est-ce pas un roman?’ (‘A book with faces and places, is it not a novel?’), suggesting right at the outset the way the book should be read. Once again it is placed implicitly under the inﬂuence of Roland Barthes, who had already written a` propos of his Roland Barthes: ‘Tout ceci doit eˆtre conside´re´ comme dit par un personnage de roman—ou plutoˆt par plusieurs. Car l’imaginaire [. . .] est pris en charge par plusieurs masques [. . .]’27 (‘All this must be considered as said by a character of a novel—or rather by several. Because responsibility for the imagination

112

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

[. . .] is taken by several masks [. . .]’). Apart from the introductory text (SV, pp. 5–7), the only written communication is each photo’s caption; so the dialogue is conducted by the image. The back cover is also an invitation to link this ‘roman’ (‘novel’) to the episodes in the preceding books. In a way, Le Seul visage is the phantom image of a text like ‘Diapos’ (‘ Slides’ ) (IF, pp. 142–44) which conjured up the loved ones’ faces, what Barthes called the ‘noe`me’ (‘noema’) of photography.28 In a pastiche of the roman a` clef, we are told that we are going to discover the faces of the characters who up till then were known only by their initials. What is fundamental in Le Seul visage is the way the images stimulate the reader’s imagination. Thus, ‘Le reˆve du de´sert’ (‘The Dream of the Desert’) and ‘Le reˆve du cine´ma’ (‘The Dream of Cinema’) (SV, pp. 52–53) are there to cater for the imagination of the person who looks at the image but also to recall the place of the various objects in Guibert’s creative process, since for him the narrative can be triggered by looking at a photo, a postcard or a picture. It is noticeable, still at the creative level, that Guibert tries to arouse the photographic desire in himself in the same way as we have seen him getting the writing going, through letters as well as through travel.29 That explains why, although the loved body is available in Paris, often photos are taken of it only during the journeys in which it becomes ‘le personnage d’un journal de voyage’ (p. 5) (‘the protagonist of a travel diary’). Of note too is that, as with the narrative principle of L’Image fantoˆme in which the aborted photos give rise to a text, in the introduction a real story gets under way (SV, pp. 5–7) which would not have been out of place in L’Image fantoˆme, the only obvious diﬀerence being that, for the ﬁrst time, story and photo are simultaneously present (p. 17). The inclusion of a study of Lettres d’E´gypte (LE´), particularly at this point in my book, deserves some explanation. At the level of chronology, the volume came out in 1995, making it a posthumous work. The journey, however, took place in 1984 (according to the chronology in Photographies), and for that reason I want to study it here and view it in the context of the turbulent evolution of the voices of the self. It may be a commonplace, but it is a necessary one: travel and correspondence recur in tandem and, as we saw in Chapter 3, they constitute two of the three narrative trigger mechanisms in Les Aventures singulie`res. Moreover, a book oﬀering photographs by Hans Georg Berger and texts by Herve´ Guibert is not unprecedented: one has

Image and Text

113

only to think of the photo-novel Suzanne et Louise, or Vice. What for me is more problematic and makes me hesitate to include the book is the fact that it is posthumous. It is all very well for us to be told in an afterword signed ‘Christian Caujolle’ that the two friends had embarked on their journey with a promise of publication from a publisher (LE´, p. 69) but that until 1995 it had not been possible to ﬁnd a publisher. I am inclined to doubt this: I ﬁnd it hard to believe that if Guibert had decided to publish Lettres d’E´gypte he could not have done so, as is shown by the fact that in 1988 William Blake E´ditions brought out L’image de soi, ou l’injonction de son beau moment?, a book consisting of a text by Herve´ Guibert and sixteen photos by Berger, some of which derived from the Egyptian trip; nothing prevented Guibert from publishing his texts at that moment. The reasons why he did not do so must remain a matter of speculation at this stage, but it is a question I shall be returning to. In Lettres d’E´gypte the division between the texts and the photographs means that I can concentrate on the ‘lettres’ (‘letters’). It is obvious that between images and texts a dialogue is established. It is important too to note that Guibert accepts the inscription of his body on these photos, even if what is frequently on oﬀer is his body broken up, concealed, furtively observed, or just his silhouette. But strictly speaking Guibert is only the author of the letters, even if he lends himself with good grace to the photos and without doubt agreed to the concept of the book. We learn in fact that these letters were never sent (LE´, p. 70; just like some of the missives in ‘Lettres d’amour’, AS, p. 20), being a simple pretext for writing. One of the letters (‘A` qui?’, LE´, p. 65) will not even have an addressee (or should I perhaps say narratee?). Caujolle puts it very aptly when he describes Guibert’s text as ‘de´coupe´ sous forme de ﬁction e´pistolaire’ (p. 70) (‘cut up in the form of epistolary ﬁction’). Lettres d’E´gypte is unsatisfactory on two counts, in my view. Firstly, there is on the narrator’s part a certain detachment from his experience. He conﬁdes to Suzanne that he is too young or too old to travel and that he no longer has any illusions; to ‘Thierry’ that the ‘e´clats d’imagination’ (‘bursts of imagination’) that he has just described are genuinely real but give him no pleasure; to ‘Michel’ that he feels like a hostage transferred to a foreign country and subjected to ordeals of all kinds.30 Then—and herein no doubt lies the cause of his malaise—the narrator notes a discrepancy between his vision of things and its artistic representation. He writes on 22 March: ‘Il me semble que ce que j’e´cris, meˆme des balivernes, a plus de justesse que ce qui

114

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

s’est propose´ a` ma vue et que je ferais mieux de de´crire des choses que je n’ai pas vues [. . .]’ (p. 25) (‘It seems to me that what I write, even nonsense, has greater aptness than what has been oﬀered to my sight and that I would do better to describe things I have not seen [. . .]’); therein lies the whole problem of the artistic representation of the world which Guibert faces as soon as he makes a stab at ﬁction. My reading of Lettres d’E´gypte comes down to this: the preoccupation just mentioned is one of the book’s fundamental considerations, running as it does right through the letters. The problem is set out in a passage from a letter to Thierry in which he says he is dissatisﬁed with what he described the day before: ‘J’ai si souvent l’impression d’eˆtre juste en dessous de ce que je veux e´crire’ (p. 29) (‘I so often have the impression of falling just short of what I want to write’); he therefore sets about reﬁning his description of the day before. Elsewhere he recounts an event which happened in the past ‘l’autre soir’ (‘the other evening’). At the end of his narrative, he wonders if more time ought not to have been allowed to pass before he told this story, explaining his working methods up to that point: ‘Ces choses e´trange`res, j’aurais aime´ qu’elles se glissent plus tard dans un autre travail, que le compte rendu ne soit pas si fe´rocement momentane´ [. . .]’ (p. 14) (‘These strange things, I would have liked them to slip later into another work, I would have liked the account to be less ﬁercely instantaneous [. . .]’) since what is lacking is the work of memory, as he will later put it: ‘[. . .] il faut laisser a` la me´moire le temps de remplir le tableau’ (p. 30) ‘[. . .] memory must be given time to ﬁll out the picture’. In the last letter addressed to the travelling companion ‘Hans Georg’, we learn that at one point during the journey the narrator stopped writing his letters (whereas the initial idea was to write one a day, p. 25), adding this very revealing sentence: ‘Et pourtant, les choses ont continue´ a` passer. Sans bien savoir pourquoi, j’ai refuse´ de les raconter. L’as-tu fait, toi?’ (p. 67) (‘And yet things have still gone on happening. Without really knowing why, I refused to recount them. Have you done so?’). So we learn that the initial project has been abandoned, leading even to a sort of incommunicability (‘je ne peux te dire les choses que j’aimerais te dire’, p. 51; ‘I cannot tell you the things I would like to tell you’). But the sentence ‘Have you done so?’ recalls a crucial point, all too easy to overlook, that in parallel with Guibert’s attempts at epistolary narration Berger has written his own dialogue in taking the photos. Once again the photo-text juxtaposition sabotages the immediate transcription that writing a letter a day makes necessary.

Image and Text

115

As if trying to ‘keep at bay’ this short-circuit, the narrator writes in a postscript to the last letter, the only one written after his return to Paris: ‘(P.S. Ce matin, j’ai relu toutes mes lettres, et je les ai noue´es avec un ruban. Puis j’ai photographie´ le tas: c’e´tait ma dernie`re photo)’ (p. 67) (‘(P.S. This morning I reread all my letters and tied them with a ribbon. Then I photographed the pile: it was my last photo)’). Guibert will have had the last word in the dialogue with this phantom photo. After this analysis I can now return to what I said above about Lettres d’E´gypte not being published until 1995. I am tempted to conclude that Guibert felt that the project had failed, not rendering the immediate transcription of the travel experience and at the same time not ‘ﬁctionalising’ enough for his taste his lived experience because there was not time for the work of memory to be carried through: the writing was too raw. Moreover, the enterprise clashed with the ﬁctional ediﬁce built by him up to 1984, his normal approach being very well put in the sentence already quoted: ‘These strange things, I would have liked them to slip later into another work, I would have liked the account to be less ﬁercely instantaneous [. . .]’ (p. 14). These remarks should not, however, disguise the importance of this book and its signiﬁcance in the search for the voices of the self. Guibert’s fundamental concerns recur, justifying the inclusion of Lettres d’E´gypte in this study, judiciously put by Caujolle: ‘[. . .] une e´criture pre´occupe´e en permanence par la ne´cessite´ de la transformation litte´raire de l’expe´rience ve´cue’ (p. 70) (‘[. . .] a writing continuously preoccupied with the need for the literary transformation of the lived experience’). At this point we should not forget either that Guibert’s work as photographic critic on Le Monde was on-going, his articles and his creative writing progressing in tandem. It is worth quoting one such article by way of illustration: in 1984, in the ‘Portrait’ column, Herve´ Guibert signed a text on Sophie Calle entitled ‘Splendeurs et mise`res d’une espionne photographe’31 which would scarcely be out of place in La piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche. This ‘Portrait’, accompanied by a photo illustrating one of the aspects of Sophie Calle’s work, is also an exercise in writing by Guibert who, thanks to his job as photographic critic (as was pointed out in Chapter 2), conducted a dialogue with the greatest contemporary artists. There is also no doubt that the creations he likes are able in turn to nourish his own work, or that he uses journalism to reveal himself, as was shown in Chapter 1 in the case of his review of Barthes’s La Chambre claire which is also a description of his own style.

116

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

This ‘Portrait’ is a founder text in so far as it heralds the ‘Photo + Texte’ formula adopted by Herve´ Guibert in L’Autre journal which he will work for in 1985 and 1986.32 It is interesting to note that in these pieces a photo will give rise to a text. Apart from the experiment ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ (where in any case a moving, not ﬁxed, image is involved), ‘Photo + Texte’ represents perhaps the only point in the whole of Guibert’s work where photo and text meet in harmony, whereas in the other books their association will lead to the collapse of the fragile equilibrium, so that no overt attempt will be made in Vice to integrate the photos with the text and no photo will be included in L’Image fantoˆme. In these ‘Photo + Texte’ pieces Guibert continues to pursue the same project: ﬁctionalising his friends (Isabelle Adjani, Euge`ne Savitskaya), photographers he knows (Cartier-Bresson, Lartigue), his masseur, even himself or a photo that looks like him. As a general rule in the texts of La piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche a stylistic trait recurs, characterised by the way the text is peppered with very ‘literary’ or little-used words, the only diﬀerence being that here Guibert seems to outdo himself.33 In Lettres d’E´gypte the language regales the eyes and ears (‘le tintinnabulement des ve´los’ ‘the bicycles’ tintinnabulation’), like a postcard.34 Humour is always present, as when the narrator, altering the set French expression, talks of handing himself over ‘corps et intestins’ (‘body and intestines’, not ‘corps et aˆme’ ‘body and soul’) to an American tourist organisation, or when he remarks: ‘Le Coran interdit les lynchages de touristes, alors on les pousse dans le pie`ge de la pyramide [. . .]’35 (‘The Koran forbids the lynching of tourists, so they are pushed into the pyramid trap [. . .]’). There is a broken rhythm: the alternation of long sentences followed by very short ones (LE´, pp. 7–8), giving the text a panting rhythm, perhaps betraying the narrator’s anxiety about his great-aunt, whom he suspected of being dead. One of Guibert’s traits, as has already been noted, is the personiﬁcation of the inanimate world (‘[. . .] la feneˆtre grande ouverte et les volets a` l’espagnolette ﬁltraient la rumeur et les senteurs du jardin [. . .]’, p. 31 ‘[. . .] the wide open window and the shutters on the latch let the sounds and scents of the garden ﬁlter through [. . .]’). The writing is delightfully ornate. The same themes reappear. In the texts of La piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche, the theme of the body is very present, particularly in ‘Sur une manipulation courante’ which I am going to concentrate on. This story is in a way a blend of Vice and of L’Image fantoˆme. Prince Palagonia suﬀers from a deformity and builds

Image and Text

117

his palace ‘en temple de la contrefac¸on’ (PA, p. 103) (‘as a temple of forgery’). Inside, everything has been faked by the play of diﬀractions: see the text of the same name in L’Image fantoˆme (IF, p. 90), which has the eﬀect of making ‘les corps les plus conformes des visiteurs d’une monstruosite´ semblable’ (PA, p. 103) (‘[turning] the most standard of visitors’ bodies into a matching deformity’). In such a palace the narrator exults, seized—as he puts it—‘d’une sorte d’ivresse froide’ (p. 104) (‘with a sort of cold intoxication’) and he throws his clothes oﬀ, even letting ‘T.’ take a photo of him. His body has become an oﬀering (‘J’honorais ce lieu, de´die´ a` la te´ratologie, de ma propre monstruosite´’, p. 104, ‘I was honouring this place, dedicated to teratology, with my own deformity’). Deformity here means Herve´ Guibert’s pigeon-chest, which is a kind of ‘biographe`me’ (‘biographeme’).36 Thus the body can be written for the ﬁrst time naked but also photographed in this temple of forgery. By contrast in ‘Les rivaux’, the narrator will seek for ten years to write a novel summed up by this biographeme.37 To return to this ‘liberation’, it will not last for ever because, back in Paris, the narrator will be seized by a feeling of horror when he looks at the contact sheets, concluding: ‘Ma nudite´ me faisait toujours horreur [. . .]’ (p. 104) (‘My nudity still horriﬁed me [. . .]’). Years later he will only consider publishing a photo of this episode to accompany a text about a suicide (p. 105), but not before faking the photo so as to make his body ‘indistinct’. This text conveys the whole problematic of the modesty or immodesty of the body in Guibert. He wants to write, therefore to reveal and if necessary to photograph the most shameful secret, whereas everything stops him doing so and the greatest resistance to this project is oﬀered by none other than himself. This problematic of modesty and immodesty is central to the introductory text of Le Seul visage: ‘Dans l’e´criture je n’ai pas de frein, pas de scrupule, parce qu’il n’y a que moi, pratiquement, qui est mis en jeu (les autres sont rele´gue´s, en abstractions de personnes, sous forme d’initiales) [. . .]’ (SV, p. 5) (‘In the writing I have no curb, no qualm, because it is practically only I who am involved (the others being reduced to abstract individuals by way of their initials) [. . .]’). What this text reveals is that for Guibert writing the other is always a chaste exercise: the initials ensure that henceforth the other is only an ‘abstract individual’. These are astonishing remarks, but what they do prove is that, having chosen to designate his friends by their initials, he does not consider that he is getting them involved in his books. With photography in mind Guibert asks himself the question: ‘[. . .] dans la photo il

118

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

y a le corps des autres, des parents, des amis, et j’ai toujours une certaine appre´hension: ne suis-je pas en train de les trahir en les transformant ainsi en objets de vision?’ (p. 5) (‘[. . .] in photography there is the body of the others, parents, friends, and I am always a little apprehensive: am I not betraying them by transforming them in this way into objects of vision?’). He will reply to this question in the negative by invoking the principle of love (‘[. . .] je ne fais qu’une chose—et c’est une chose e´norme je crois, c’est en tout cas le but de toute mon activite´, de toute ma pre´tention cre´atrice—: te´moigner de mon amour’, ibid., ‘[. . .] I only do one thing—but it is a huge thing I believe, it is in any case the aim of everything I undertake, of my entire creative ambition—: to bear witness to my love’). The gaze of the face of the other is very rarely turned towards the camera, and where it is, it is hidden, as if this communication between object and subject at the instant of the picture being taken was problematic. Some photos bear the trace of writing or reading and the marks of the body writing, others straightforwardly show the body in a writing posture.38 Taking up the invitation made on the back cover to link this ‘roman’ (‘novel’) to the episodes in the books which went before it, we at once think of ‘Fantasme de photographie, III’ (IF, p. 127), which describes the photo of Louise that will be found in Le Seul visage (SV, p. 29), and of ‘Lettre a` un fre`re d’e´criture’ in which the narrator tried to capture and then lavish attention on the writing body (PA, pp. 63–67), something he achieves in Le Seul visage. In play in Lettres d’E´gypte is the writing of Guibert’s friends, who are called by their ﬁrst names and no longer simply designated by initials (though since the book appeared only in 1995 this should not be got out of proportion): ‘Thierry’, ‘Michel et Daniel’ and the corpse of ‘Euge`ne’.39 In the latter case all it needs for the text to get under way towards a story resembling a tale whose content is worthy of Vice and of some of the texts in La Mort propagande, even of the story found in the last part of Voyage avec deux enfants, is for the narrator to conjure up Euge`ne’s sarcophagus (LE´, pp. 10–11). No better illustration than such examples could be found to see at work what triggers ‘ﬁction’ in Guibert. It should also be stressed that at the time when Guibert embarks on his apprenticeship in the novel, the body and therefore its writing remain central to his concerns. It is, however, noticeable that if the narrator manages to write an episode between a young mother and her big son in which ‘les deux corps en contrebas se sont enlace´s en tournoyant’ (LE´, p. 55) (‘the two

Image and Text

119

bodies below locked together as they whirled’), it is very diﬃcult for him to write his own body. Having to look at himself every morning in the mirror in front of his writing-desk, the narrator reveals: ‘Je de´visage un homme de trente ans qui ressemble a` mon pe`re’ (p. 25) (‘I stare at a man of thirty who looks like my father’). The enthusiasm for The Charterhouse of Parma will be all the more pronounced in that the ‘he´ros’ (‘hero’) of the book ‘a un me´chant pe`re, copieusement laid, dont il n’a pas l’air d’eˆtre le ﬁls [. . .]’ (ibid.) (‘has a wicked, extraordinarily ugly father whose son he does not at all seem to be [. . .]’), a bit like an antidote to his own reﬂection. And if his body in the bathroom manages to give him pleasure, it is thanks to the eﬀects of light since the shutters are ‘a` l’espagnolette’ (p. 31) (‘on the latch’), recalling the photos of Le Seul visage in which light density plays such an important part, almost becoming one of the novel’s characters (‘Et quand les lieux meˆmes s’e´vanouissent, et que les objects s’escamotent, il reste la lumie`re, ses simples manifestations, pleines de myste`re, proches du re´confort le plus intense’, back cover of Le Seul visage (‘And when the places themselves vanish and the objects disappear, the light remains, its simple manifestations, full of mystery, close to the most intense comfort’). For what we learn from the episode of the body in the bathroom is that to the extent that he is able to ‘tricher’ (‘cheat’) with the light, the narrator is ready to let his body be photographed rather than writing it on paper. A photographic mise-en-sce`ne, it seems, is all the letter writing amounts to. The narrative prism does not pass through the narrator’s memory (something, as we have seen, that he complained about) but through the camera’s viewﬁnder; at a pinch, what the letters of Lettres d’E´gypte oﬀer us, albeit reluctantly, are photographic shots. The photographer of Le Seul visage (or perhaps one should say the novelist) follows to the letter the precepts of L’Image fantoˆme in a text rightly called ‘Conseils’ (‘Advices’): ‘Ne photographie que tes extreˆmes familiers, tes parents, tes fre`res et soeurs, ton amoureuse, l’ante´ce´dent aﬀectif emportera la photo [. . .]’ (IF, p. 96) (‘Only photograph your nearest and dearest, your parents, your brothers and sisters, your girlfriend, the emotional antecedent will bring the photo oﬀ [. . .]’). For these photos and their titles are above all a hymn to love (we learn on the back cover that the faces are ‘nomme´s, aﬀectueusement, par leurs pre´noms’ (‘named, aﬀectionately, by their ﬁrst names’, my italics). In the introductory text it is to some degree the same perception oﬀered by the story of the journey to Prague that gives rise to the photo ‘Le seul

120

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

visage’ (SV, p. 17). The narrator remarks that for Cartier-Bresson, photography is linked to death (‘[. . .] je vis le regard d’une mise a` mort, d’un abandon apre`s la mise a` mort’, p. 6 ‘[. . .] I saw the look of a kill, of a withdrawal after the kill’) whereas for him it is linked to love (‘[. . .] la photo n’e´tait qu’un instant de ma relation avec le visage, et d’un attachement sentimental’, p. 7; ‘[. . .] photography was only an instant of my relationship with the face, and of a sentimental attachment’) and to the desire to reduce, through the mediation of photography, the distance between himself and the photographic object. One of the facts learnt in this text is that the narrator’s mother is hospitalised, since she has just had an operation for cancer; this, as it happens, is exactly the same reason that impels the narrator not to photograph his mother in hospital, since he ﬁnds that photography would be too close to death, her head resembling ‘une teˆte de mort’ (‘skull’). For the same reasons he will not proceed with the idea of drawing her. The desire to photograph her will only revive the day the light bathes her face and the narrator ﬁnds her beautiful, the same light that on the back cover is compared to ‘the most intense comfort’. This approach based on love could also be applied to several of the photos in Le Seul visage: photographing those close to him is for Guibert a request for intimacy. Lettres d’E´gypte is, by implication, a declaration of love on the narrator’s part to his friends, whom he misses terribly; according to Caujolle, distance enabled him to measure the strength of his feelings.40 ‘Thierry’ still remains the chief driving force behind Guibert’s narrative despite the attempts to forget him in Les Aventures singulie`res, to exorcise him in Les Chiens and to betray him in Voyage avec deux enfants. In the case of ‘Suzanne’, aﬀection is connected with death since the narrator dreads her dying far away from him (LE´, pp. 7–8). Similarly the narrator envisages that the medal given by ‘Euge`ne’ will adorn his own corpse (p. 9). He next tells him about the visit to the Cairo museum which in his eyes conjures up death and will trigger a story (pp. 10–11). In a process now familiar,41 the narrator of ‘Le bal des coeurs solitaires’ (‘The Ball of Solitary Hearts’) casts doubt in the last sentence on the truth of the story.42 The temple of forgery in ‘Sur une manipulation courante’ is obviously an ode to deceit and betrayal since everything is registered as false, from the ‘perspectives fausse´es’ (‘distorted perspectives’) to the photos the narrator cheats with.43 ‘Ne´crologie’ is shot through with deceit, deceit which will extend to betrayal

Image and Text

121

in the story of the death of the ornithologist by ‘l’ornithose’ (‘ornithosis’) as soon as the idea takes shape in the narrator’s mind of sullying the ornithologist’s memory and dictating only false information. Then begins the story of an ‘aﬀabulation insense´e, ridicule’ (‘mad, ridiculous fabrication’) which pulls the wool over everybody’s eyes, including the editor of the paper who will telephone the narrator to congratulate him on his article.44 Another betrayal would be that found in ‘L’e´diteur’, as there is no diﬃculty in attaching these remarks to one of the leading ﬁgures in French publishing, especially since until 1984, with the exception of his ﬁrst two books, Guibert had been published by the same person. Thus this theme conﬁrms its importance in Guibert’s works. ‘Image et texte’ (‘Image and text’): Guibert’s various stabs at ﬁction could be summed up in this way. With L’Homme blesse´ we have a text conceived as a support for the image; with Les Lubies d’Arthur, a text which was to have been published as an illustrated serial and which, while bearing the label of novel, is more like a tale or a legend; with the texts in La piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche, narrative triggered very often by a picture or an image; with Le Seul visage, the image becomes the text; with Lettres d’E´gypte, texts that according to Guibert fail in their ﬁctional project, perhaps through being short-circuited by Berger’s images; and with his work on Le Monde and L’Autre journal, Guibert continues to experiment with the image/text relationship. Love is a recurrent theme in all these projects and we get the impression that it is the writing of his body and that of his friends which still interests Guibert (even if the act remains very problematic). All these texts contain autobiographical elements, including the one subtitled ‘roman’ (‘novel’). Even when he is engaged in writing, this, as we have seen, can sometimes boil down to photo shots (Lettres d’E´gypte) or the appearance of a letter or a diary in the middle of a novel (Les Lubies d’Arthur). On the other hand, we are encouraged to read L’Homme blesse´ and Le Seul visage, which are not novels, as novels. In tandem with these reﬂections, Guibert is working in his writings on the relationship between truth and falsehood. He also says he learned to create characters thanks to the joint project with Patrice Che´reau. The writer seems ready to face up to the novel even if we note a certain resistance to the very idea of the novel, which remains a ‘reˆve’ (‘dream’).

CHAPTER FIVE

The ‘Novel’ The two books studied in this section are subtitled ‘novel’. Going by what has been said in the preceding four chapters, we can bet that a novel written by Guibert will deal with bodies and death and that it will be motivated by a sentiment of love. We can also wonder what role the image will play in this novel and what the relationship between truth and falsehood will be. It will also be interesting to see whether a ‘je’ (‘I’) narrator makes an appearance and, if so, under what identity(ies).

DES AVEUGLES Des Aveugles was published by Gallimard in 1985. It tells the story of a sightless couple (Robert and Josette) who live in an institution, the calm of which will be disturbed the day the masseur ‘Taillegueur’ appears on the scene and becomes Josette’s lover. The ‘re´cit d’e´pouvante’ (‘horror story’) announced on the back cover does not materialise; it could be said at a pinch that a roman noir is triggered from page 110 onwards, Josette having sworn to kill Robert if her coat is ruined. The murder plan will only be discussed on page 122 and Josette will quickly drop it once she ﬁnds out that Taillegueur has made love to a little boy (p. 128). It is Taillegueur who will die accidentally, trying to trap Robert, and Josette will be swallowed by the lagodon;1 the roman noir will have taken up only twenty pages or so. Love will lead to death. If one refers to what is written on the back cover (‘la femme, le mari, l’amant’), one has however to wait until page 82, more than halfway through the novel, for the Taillegueur character to appear. It will not be the last time that the back cover forms part of the deception (one thinks in particular of Mes parents and L’Incognito). Guibert gives the discrepancy a logical explanation: ‘Je me souviens d’avoir beaucoup lutte´ contre l’arrive´e de ce personnage [. . .] A` un certain moment, l’histoire policie`re, l’histoire d’e´pouvante a` laquelle j’avais d’abord pense´, et qui repre´sente un des aspects du livre, a cesse´, au fond, de m’inte´resser’2 (‘I remember having put up quite a struggle against the 123

124

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

arrival of this character [. . .] At a certain point the detective story, the horror story that I had thought of at ﬁrst and that represents one aspect of the book, basically stopped interesting me’). There exist characters too outside this trio such as ‘Kipa’ and ‘le jeune homme’ (‘the young man’). ‘The young man’, who is described as ‘un esthe`te’ (‘an aesthete’) or rather ‘un saint’ (‘a saint’), has a wax head of Joan of Arc in his house.3 The book is made up of ‘sections’ (since there are indented paragraphs) but, unlike in Les Lubies d’Arthur, they have no titles and are not numbered. There are no chapters either. One wonders whether these sections might not originally have had a title that served as a ﬁction trigger: thus the ﬁrst could have been called ‘Le Carnaval’ (‘The Carnival’), the second ‘Gris, rose’ (‘Grey, pink’), the last ‘Le lagodon’ (‘The lagodon’), etc. The narrative is not chronological: following the ﬁrst two sections set in the Institute and introducing Robert and Josette into the story, there is a ﬂashback to the three-year-old Josette’s childhood (AV, p. 17), and to Robert’s. Some elements of their respective lives will be related next, but these episodes will be interspersed with sections about life at the Institute. Time will embrace the landmarks of the blind (‘[. . .] [l]es aveugles [. . .] commentaient avec ironie le passage du monde enfantin au monde adulte par la simple traverse´e d’un couloir’, p. 47; ‘[. . .] the blind [. . .] made ironic comments about moving from childhood to adulthood by simply crossing a corridor’). Flashbacks, interspersed ‘sce`nes’ (‘scenes’) mean that we are not far from the narration of a ﬁlm script; indeed, Guibert was to declare that when he had spent a week at the Institute ‘c’e´tait comme lorsqu’on fait un repe´rage pour un ﬁlm’4 (‘it was like choosing the location for a ﬁlm’). Guibert, it should be noted, had changed publisher and was now published by Gallimard, whose practice it is to specify the genre in a subtitle (on the front cover of Des Aveugles it says ‘roman’ (‘novel’) and to have a back cover blurb. Gallimard’s press oﬃce seems to have been instrumental in getting the book reviewed more widely and in arranging more interviews on publication than had been the case with previous works. I shall therefore be quoting Guibert’s remarks more often than I could before, since this paratext, allied to the back cover’s peritext, serves much the same function, in so far as Guibert dwells at length on the book’s creation, that ‘L’ours’ does in the case of Les Lubies d’Arthur. I shall be turning my attention to this creative process since it informs my project, the analysis of the voices of the self.

The ‘Novel’

125

The back cover5 indicates that this work of ﬁction originated in a report which Guibert wrote for Le Monde on the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles, the French national institute for blind juveniles.6 He then worked in a voluntary capacity at the Institute for a year as a reader, going there every week. But in an interview we learn that the article was only a pretext for gaining access to the Institute7 since Guibert had been thinking for a long time of writing about the blind, in fact ever since he had seen the cover of a copy of Oui Police dealing with a crime committed by a blind person.8 Des Aveugles is closer in spirit to photography or even cinema (ﬁlms like Les Diaboliques, Le Corbeau, L’assassin habite au 219) than to literary antecedents. Guibert informs us that, especially at the beginning, he used photographs from the 1930s by August Sander.10 For once this is not a book written directly under Barthes’s inﬂuence; one thinks rather of what Derrida will do after Guibert in his Me´moires d’aveugle—L’autoportrait et autres ruines.11 If working on Le Monde opened certain doors or, as has been seen, made it possible for Guibert to interview contemporary artists, the job could also interfere with his writing. He shares these diﬃculties: J’ai toujours du mal a` faire ‘durer’ une ﬁction. Du fait que je travaille dans un journal, que j’ai donc de la copie a` fournir re´gulie`rement, mon temps d’e´criture personnelle est toujours compte´ [. . .] En dehors de cela [le journal], je suis oblige´ de laisser croıˆ tre une ﬁction pendant onze mois [. . .] je ne me consacre a` l’e´criture proprement dite qu’un mois par an.12 (I always ﬁnd it difﬁcult to make a ﬁction ‘last’. Because I work on a newspaper and so have to provide copy on a regular basis, the time left for my own writing is always limited [. . .] Apart from that [the newspaper], I have to let a ﬁction grow for eleven months [. . .] I can only devote myself to writing proper for a month each year.)

These remarks are conﬁrmed by the genesis of Des Aveugles. Guibert had taken notes for this novel in 1979; during summer 1983 he wrote a ﬁrst version which was more like an article, ﬁnishing it in summer 1984. Rather than revise this ﬁrst version he began writing a second, more ‘symbolique’ (‘symbolic’) one, and the book’s dynamic was obtained through the juxtaposition of the two.13 A lived experience has therefore served as the basis for a ﬁctional enterprise, but in a much less clear-cut way than seems to be the case. Let us heed rather what he says about Des Aveugles: ‘Parfois, la` ou` on croit a` la fantasmagorie, c’est du documentaire et la` ou` on peut croire a` du documentaire, c’est une pure aﬀabulation que la ve´rite´ de´mentirait. C¸a c’est un jeu qui m’inte´resse plus que jamais dans ce que

126

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

je fais, ces moments d’e´quilibre ou de de´se´quilibre entre la ve´rite´ et le mensonge’14 (‘Sometimes, where one thinks it is phantasmagoria, it is documentary and where one could imagine it is documentary, it is a piece of pure fabrication belied potentially by the truth. In what I do this is a game that interests me more than ever, these moments of equilibrium or disequilibrium between truth and falsehood’). We have not yet reached the roman faux, but when Guibert writes novels he is already stressing the interplay between truth and falsehood. Certain passages from the article in Le Monde recur almost word for word in the book (Av., pp. 62 and 68)15 and whole sections are devoted to the topography of the Institute (pp. 24–26). Nevertheless, bearing the above quotation in mind, if one takes the example of the description of the ‘petite maquette en bois qui repre´sentait la pie`ce a` son e´chelle la plus re´duite’ (‘small wooden model which represented the room reduced in scale to the furthest extent’) and which is a key element of ‘l’intrigue’ (p. 58) (‘the plot’), these maquettes are, according to Guilbard, a Guibert invention.16 My view of what motivated and interested Guibert in the writing of Des Aveugles was that he deliberately courted diﬃculty in trying to imagine what blind people’s perceptions might be like. In the interview for L’Autre journal he described his way of proceeding: ‘Je n’ai pas cesse´ de faire des listes de proble`mes touchant a` leur perception de la distance, de la transparence de l’inﬁni, de la lumie`re et de l’ombre, toutes questions ﬁnalement qui sont celles du photographe’17 (‘I made endless lists of problems relating to their perception of distance, of the transparency of inﬁnity, of light and shade, all in the end photographer’s questions’). As we saw above, Guibert stated having used the photographs of August Sander taken in the 1930s to trigger his narrative.18 Des Aveugles is also a reﬂection on painting and photography. Kipa’s parents, suspecting that he may be blind, ask him to describe them and he, being blind, does a portrait of them that is depicted as being ‘criant de ve´rite´’ (Av., p. 49) (‘of striking accuracy’). Photography also comes in when a photographer arrives to take photos of the blind people (this is one of the passages in the article for Le Monde). One of the diﬃculties to which attention is drawn throughout Guibert’s work, the problematic relationship between the photographer’s look and the subject, is eliminated: ‘La prise de la photo ne les eﬀrayait pas [. . .]’ (p. 68) (‘They were not afraid of having their photo taken [. . .]’). The puzzling question for the blind is how a camera can do the work that their eyes cannot do (‘Ne devait-on pas plutoˆt greﬀer ces machines a` la

The ‘Novel’

127

place de leurs yeux?’, ibid.; ‘Should not rather these machines be grafted on in place of their eyes?’). There are also memorable passages like the one in which Josette describes her dream of the light, and the one in which Robert describes his nightmare when ‘la noirceur e´tait devenue claire’19 (‘the blackness had become pale’). Here the remarkable continuity of Guibert’s work needs to be stressed, the way his reﬂections about photography are carried forward. I have often enough mentioned the fragile balance between photos and texts in his work. In these pages, the problematic of photography is integrated into the narrative and is, I believe, what accounts for its success, as Guibert himself conﬁrms: ‘Je suis tre`s sensibilise´ aux images, aux photographies. Je pratique aussi la photo, je m’inte´resse a` la lumie`re, et cela me paraissait vertigineux de chercher a` ‘‘voir’’ les images vivaces de l’obscurite´’20 (‘I am very sensitive to images, to photographs. I also practise photography, I am interested in light, and it seemed staggering for me to try and ‘‘see’’ in all their vividness the images of darkness’). My analysis is conﬁrmed by the conclusion he drew in another interview: ‘Et c’est alors que je me suis aperc¸u, apre`s coup, que ce livre n’e´tait pas une lubie mais e´tait tout a` fait lie´ a` mon activite´ de photographe et de regardeur de photos’21 (‘And then it was only afterwards I realised that this book was not a whim but tied in completely with my work as a photographer and photo connoisseur’). Another factor contributing to Des Aveugles’ success is the way Guibert met with one diﬃculty after another. First of all he described the way the blind perceive television and sounds, and their phobias.22 Then things became trickier when he introduced the character of Mlle Keller, a blind and deaf person who speaks in images she has never seen and whose ﬁngertips never stop tingling because ‘tous les lexiques de tous les apprentissages qu’elle avait rec¸us s’e´taient imprime´s la`’ (p. 40) (‘all the vocabulary of all the training she had received had been imprinted there’). Not content with having overcome that diﬃculty, the narrator introduced the character of Kipa who is blind but claims to be sighted (‘Il e´tablit lui-meˆme secre`tement un syste`me pour les reconnaıˆ tre, me´moire de signes au croisement des odeurs et des sons, des e´chos, des vibrations’, p. 48; ‘He set up secretly himself a system for recognising them, a memory of signs where smells and sounds, echoes, vibrations intersect’). Finally, we have the viewpoint of blind people on the sighted: according to Taillegueur, their soul is ‘confuse et encombre´e’ (p. 105) (‘confused and cluttered’) and they are afraid of death. It must not be forgotten that Des Aveugles has in fact two narratees:

128

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

sighted readers and non-sighted readers, since one of Guibert’s projects was to return to the Institute and give a public reading of his book. He then tackled particular issues: ‘Ils ne voyaient pas, ils n’avaient pas de fantasmes image´s’ p. 63 (‘They could not see, they had no pictorial fantasies’). So how do the blind fantasise, on what basis? It is obvious if one thinks about it: they dream that they have eyes: ‘Quand il baisait [. . .] il reˆvassait aux e´toiles, a` la lune, a` la me´taphysique, aux yeux’ (p. 94) (‘When he had sex [. . .] he thought dreamily of the stars, the moon, metaphysics, eyes’). What nightmares do they have? ‘Il avait reˆve´ que les objets n’e´taient que des greﬀes de son corps, des excroissances embarrassantes ou le´ge`res [. . .]’ (pp. 119–20) (‘He had dreamt that objects were only grafts on his body, embarrassing or light excrescences [. . .]’). Even the narrator has the spotlight turned on him: his adored texts collapse ‘dans l’e´coute des aveugles’ (‘in listening by the blind’); the solution he comes up with is to crunch ‘du gros sel pour torturer la lecture’23 (‘coarse salt to torture reading’). The main theme of Des Aveugles is writing the body, itself an activity linked to love. As we have seen, it was for Guibert a question of describing the perceptions of the blind. These descriptions hinge on the four senses. Robert and Josette’s whole encounter is based on the senses and perhaps even on the complementarity of the senses (pp. 32–34): we learn that Josette deﬁnes things with the tip of her tongue, so she uses taste and touch, while Robert gauges objects’ resistance by rubbing then sniﬃng them, so he uses hearing and smell (pp. 32–33). Likewise the teacher recognises the pupils by their hip bones, Mlle Keller teaches a course on smell and Kipa delights Robert by describing cakes to him as ‘sorte de sonorite´s sucre´es’ (‘sort of sugary sonorities’); afterwards they both enjoy feeling books to make them give oﬀ their perfumes.24 Kipa, who is blind but claims to be sighted, has to learn seduction’s secret code: to charm people by inﬂexions of the voice or to oﬀer to become their mirror, as Taillegueur does to Josette.25 Sexual desires are associated with desires for warmth or ‘de matie`res, de peaux, d’objets’ (p. 63) (‘for materials, for skins, for objects’). They are also associated with the sense of smell: although she has not yet been introduced to Taillegueur, Josette has already picked up his smell which ‘l’e´mut’ (p. 82) (‘aroused her’). Whereas the relationship between Robert and Josette is described very chastely26 and vulgarity is not tolerated,27 that between Taillegueur and Josette is explicit and tinged with a certain coarseness (pp. 101–02), and whereas Robert and Josette use the sandpit for a symbolic inaugural body touching, during their ﬁrst

The ‘Novel’

129

meeting in the gym Taillegueur asks Josette if she likes his penis before putting it in her hand and saying: ‘Il en a chatouille´ des chattes, et lime´ des culs’ (p. 93) (‘He has tickled quite a few pussies and rasped quite a few arseholes’). He could be a character straight out of Rabelais.28 Des Aveugles, dedicated ‘A` l’ami mort’ (‘To the dead friend’), is also a discreet homage to Foucault and his work, in particular to Histoire de la sexualite´ and Surveiller et punir.29 The whole discipline of the body is set out, most notably in the episode of Robert with the physicist Kunz.30 Kipa has clearly understood what is truly at stake if his blindness is found out: ‘[. . .] on l’enre´gimenterait [. . .]’ (p. 51) (‘[. . .] he would be regimented [. . .]’) no doubt to turn him into a ‘corps docile’ (‘docile body’). We learn from one of Guibert’s interviews that a love story emerges from the book: ‘[. . .] je suis tombe´ amoureux d’un aveugle qui n’e´tait pas dans ma classe: je suis persuade´ que cette histoire d’amour secre`te et sans issue se trouve en ﬁligrane dans le re´cit’31 (‘[. . .] I fell in love with a blind person who was not in my class: I am convinced that this secret, hopeless love story can be read between the lines in the narrative’). There are some traces of it in the book, and in a second episode, the loved face leads the operation against the narrator; he ends up having his eyes gouged out.32 But the love story is perhaps also the one between Robert and Kipa, described as the adult and the child, that dares not write itself (p. 66)—there are echoes here of Les Lubies d’Arthur. It is also the story of ‘T.’. ‘T.’ is the abbreviation of Taillegueur, and in their secret codes to decide on their sexual mises-ensce`nes Josette and Taillegueur will use a ‘T’ for trampoline (Av., p. 106). We have once again a reconstruction of the trio of Les Chiens (‘la femme, le mari, l’amant’) (‘the wife, the husband, the lover’) with the lover who is bisexual. Does not Robert say, as soon as Josette introduces him to Taillegueur and when the latter suggests that he could play with them: ‘Je ne suis pas suˆr qu’on puisse jouer a` trois [. . .]’ (p. 93) (‘I am not sure that three can play [. . .]’)? In fact the only games all three will be able to play will be those which feature them outside their realities and in the world of the sighted (busy describing what they saw or thought they saw before losing their sight, pp. 95–96; describing what they would have liked to have been or done had they been sighted, p. 111). In these two situations the trio is only possible outside the real. Thanatos has a quite diﬀerent role in Des Aveugles. In ‘Roman posthume’ we saw that the sentences left in the landscape were in fact the works and the novels of the dead (PA, p. 71). This odd narrative

130

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

possibility is again developed in Des Aveugles but this time, ‘les aveugles pourraient eˆtre les vrais messagers entre les vivants et le monde des morts’33 (‘the blind could be the true messengers between the living and the world of the dead’) for, unlike the sighted, they do not fear death (Av., p. 105). This is very important as regards the narrative for it is as if Guibert had freed himself from the obsession with death on the grounds that the latter holds no terrors for the blind. To the extent that death no longer enjoys a great screen presence (to use cinematographic terminology again), it can be better integrated in the theme and it forms part of the plot. Just as at the level of the narrative use of deafness Les Lubies d’Arthur was mentioned as a foretext of Des Aveugles, the colour already present in Les Lubies d’Arthur is continued here (‘[. . .] Il y a des e´pisodes dans Les Lubies d’Arthur ou` le sang envahit tout, ou` c¸a bouillonne, le sang de´ferle [. . .]’34 ‘[. . .] There are episodes in Les Lubies d’Arthur in which blood swamps everything, in which it gushes out, blood pours out [. . .]’). Blood swamps Des Aveugles in its turn. Mice have red eyes and the male will spill his blood before starting to copulate; the new-born will be compared to ‘betteraves’35 (‘beetroots’). When Robert tries using a mirror to make out his face he will see only ‘des vagues de sang’ (p. 19) (‘waves of bood’), and the motorbike leathers he is so proud of will have red in them (p. 77). In an interview Guibert explained that he had a horror of blood and fainted at the thought of it. Writing it in these pages is a kind of vengeance,36 literature as exorcism. Des Aveugles is also, by implication, a document about the discrimination suﬀered by visually-handicapped people. Thus it is said that Josette is blind because her mother fell into a tank of liquid manure when young; the children are kept scrupulously clean to excuse ‘leur inﬁrmite´’ (p. 29) (‘their inﬁrmity’) to visitors; the philosophy teacher asks questions that always relate to sight; the man in the fur shop takes advantage of Josette’s disability to sell her a coat which has suﬀered ‘une audace imprudente de teinture’ (p. 103) (‘ill-advised experimentation in the dyeing process’) and which he had not been able to get rid of; and lastly, in a long monologue which reads like a potted version of all the research Guibert undertook, Taillegueur traces the history of discrimination against the blind over the centuries (pp. 111–13). For all that, though, it should not be thought that Guibert describes visuallyhandicapped people as victims, far from it: ‘Je ne me suis pas prive´, donc, de faire commettre par mes aveugles toutes sortes de vilenies: ils

The ‘Novel’

131

se trompent, se volent et se tuent’37 (‘So I made no bones about making my blind people commit all kinds of wickedness: they betray, rob and kill each other’). The disguise theme, heralded in the book’s very ﬁrst paragraph, has an important role to play: motorbike leathers for Robert, mink coat for Josette.38 Deceit is so rooted in the narrative that it is diﬃcult to say who tricks whom. From the outset Robert and Josette’s relationship is characterised by mendacity with Robert lying about the colour of his hair (Av., p. 33), but he fools no one since Josette knows he is not being truthful and tells him so. He will go on lying to her about the mice (but she will not be taken in) and cheating at cards.39 Josette will betray Robert with Taillegueur. Kipa deceives his entire entourage, parents included, by convincing them that he belongs to the sighted, but it is questionable whether the blind are taken in (‘[. . .] les aveugles l’avaient adopte´ comme un des leurs [. . .]’40 ‘[. . .] the blind had adopted him as one of their own [. . .]’). Whatever the case, Robert does not suspect the trick. As for Taillegueur, he passes himself oﬀ as a masseur. He lies to Josette and Robert and fools Robert. He will get his comeuppance when he cheats on Josette with a lad (p. 128); she will not forgive him, going and breaking it to Robert that Taillegueur wants to kill him, only to be told that Robert knows already. While Taillegueur is preparing the snare meant to kill Robert (by moving the models placed near room doorways) his memory betrays him and it is he who plunges into void and dies (p. 131). The priest who is to give the funeral sermon will not ﬁnd much to say since all the information he has managed to glean about Taillegueur is false (p. 134). Finally, one of the essential factors in Des Aveugles’s success is obviously the writing as deﬁned by what is called on the back cover ‘les visions de l’obscurite´’ (‘the visions of darkness’), already mentioned above. Des Aveugles is a book written with a concern for style which enables us to enter the world of the blind and share their perceptions (‘[. . .] avec ses suites de phrases se´pare´es seulement par des virgules, parce qu’interde´pendantes, avec son me´lange e´galitaire de registres et ses liberte´s syntactiques, le texte de Guibert [. . .] [devient] une pure aﬀaire de mots, de ﬁgures, de sons’41 ‘[. . .] with its sequences of interdependent sentences separated only by commas, with its egalitarian mix of registers and its syntactic liberties, Guibert’s text [. . .] [becomes] a pure aﬀair of words, ﬁgures, sounds’). The style is also able to dress up (taking up Guibert’s expression) the ‘vilenies’ (‘wickedness’) committed by the blind. Barbedette recalls Guibert’s words about the

132

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

deputy head of the Institute who on reading the book is said to have exclaimed: ‘[. . .] je me suis dit: il est cingle´, comple`tement cingle´. Heureusement qu’il y a le style. Sinon j’aurais jete´ le livre a` la poubelle’42 (‘[. . .] I said to myself: he is crazy, totally crazy. Fortunately there is the style. Otherwise I would have thrown the book in the bin’). At a pinch it could be said that the style deconstructs the horror story. It would be futile to try and detail this writing since nothing can replace the reading experience, but to give an example, Poirot-Delpech quotes the description of a bow (‘tibia lime´ dans lequel on aurait inse´re´ des cheveux de femme malade’, ‘ﬁled tibia in which a sick woman’s hair had been inserted’) to prove that Guibert is one of the ‘grands manieurs de mots’43 (‘great word-handlers’). Smyth has analysed another aspect of the text that also needs stressing, its oral character, drawing this conclusion: ‘[. . .] il suﬃt de le lire a` haute voix pour en appre´cier les modalite´s discursives, les variations des voix, le jeu de contrastes’44 (‘[. . .] reading it aloud is all it takes to appreciate its discursive modalities, the variations of the voices, the play of contrasts’). In 1986, not long after its publication, the novel was in fact staged by Philippe Adrien.45 How does the narrator situate himself in this novel? He rouses the reader’s curiosity (‘Par quels travers ces enfants myste´rieux e´taient-ils devenus, en apparence, d’aussi triviaux adultes?’, p. 34; ‘Through what failings had these mysterious children to all appearances become such coarse adults?’). Of note too is the use of the parenthesis which, as we have seen, very often in Guibert signals a more direct intervention on the narrator’s part.46 The ‘je’ (‘I’) appears too in the text on page 71, where the narrator enters straight into the narrative (pp. 71–75), not to return thereafter until page 134. In an interview Guibert sheds light on this: ‘Ce personnage qui dit ‘‘je’’, e´videmment, n’est pas tout a` fait moi [. . .] [Le narrateur] voit meˆme en permanence de tre`s pre`s. Il est entre eux tous, comme un esprit. Il peut aussi prendre la place de chacun. C’est un voyeur’47 (‘This character who says ‘‘I’’ is obviously not entirely me [. . .] [The narrator] observes all the time even, from very close. He is between them all, like a spirit. He can also take each one’s place. He is a voyeur’). So far as my project is concerned it should be noted that, just as in Les Lubies d’Arthur in which the ‘je’ (‘I’) appears on page 38, the ‘I’ surfaces here too, and even if this ‘I’ is not quite Guibert it is nonetheless possible to speak of voices of the self: ‘Il y a en somme deux histoires entremeˆle´es: celle des aveugles [. . .] et puis, celle que moi-meˆme j’entretiens avec le re´cit’48 (‘There are in short two

The ‘Novel’

133

intermingled stories: that of the blind people [. . .] and then, the one that I myself conduct with the narrative’). Deception and betrayal also involve the narrator, thus carrying on with this theme in Guibert’s work. He shows those who run the Institute a reading list that is not the one he intends using (p. 71). He disguises his voice so as to hide ‘le ve´ritable timbre de l’aˆme’ (p. 72) (‘the true timbre of the soul’). When he is given young pupils who only went blind four years previously, he complains (‘je sentais qu’il serait plus diﬃcile de les tromper’, ibid.; ‘I felt that it would be more diﬃcult to deceive them’), thereby revealing his intentions. Referring to the paratext it could also be said that the back cover pulls the wool over our eyes since, under the novel label (expected by his readers and publisher), Guibert has continued to explore the links between photography and text, to write the body and the self, and to communicate with ‘T.’ through this book. As we have seen, the ‘re´cit d’e´pouvante’ (‘Horror Story’)announced on the back cover no longer interested Guibert, so what label can Des Aveugles be given? According to Smyth, what comes out on top in Des Aveugles is the plurality of discourses and of reading levels (‘[. . .] le roman noir est interrompu par le discours pe´dagogique, qui ce`de la place a` un re´cit pornographique [. . .]’49 (‘[. . .] pedagogical discourse interrupts the roman noir and is followed by a pornographic story [. . .]’). I think Des Aveugles is a success to the extent that Guibert has managed to integrate the themes of photography, perception, death and the body into a narrative plot rather than hitting against them in a way that seemed in his earlier works to prevent his writing ﬁction. He has also succeeded in creating characters, although it is noticeable that, as in Les Lubies d’Arthur, he cannot stop himself intervening subjectively in the narrative. Great mastery in the writing should also be noted, reﬂecting as it does the whole problematic of distorted perceptions. This writing has without any doubt been enriched by a photographer’s sensibility and by Guibert’s various experimental forays around the images/text interface. VOUS M’AVEZ FAIT FORMER DES FANTOˆMES Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes was published in 1987. Attempting a brief summary would be a tour de force. It is in three parts50 and there is a back cover too: this paratext, like that of Des Aveugles, is

134

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

very informative, explaining for example the origin of the subtitles. The ﬁrst is a quotation from Rousseau’s E´mile, but the education of children in Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes has to be seen as the diametrical opposite of that advocated by Rousseau. The second subtitle comes from a seventeenth-century saying by the Japanese Saikaku, the third from a nineteenth-century textbook for adolescents. As for the book’s title, a sentence spoken by ‘Pirate’ (F, p. 104), it comes from a letter the Marquis de Sade wrote to his wife from prison: ‘Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes qu’il faudra que je re´alise’ (‘You made me imagine phantoms that I will have to make real’). It is undoubtedly to Sade’s work that Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes must be compared. What is the plot of this novel? ‘Des hommes infaˆmes hantent les cre`ches et les orphelinats pour capturer des innocents et les dresser au combat’ (back cover) (‘Loathsome men haunt cre`ches and orphanages to capture innocents and train them for combat’). As Guibert will later explain to Donner, in order to describe corridas he replaced bulls with children,51 and in an interview with Jean-Michel Minon, Guibert says that when travelling in Mexico in 1983 he went to see a bullﬁght. The shock he felt amounted to ‘une vision’ (‘a vision’).52 Visiting an Aztec temple the next day a sentence sprang into his mind as he was putting his hand into a vase and thinking about the loved one (‘arracher ton coeur et l’y jeter’53 ‘rip your heart out and toss it into it’). This is the only book I shall not be discussing in chronological order (since in the meantime Guibert published Mes parents), for the following reasons: Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes is labelled ‘roman’ (‘novel’) whereas with Mes parents, published in 1986, Guibert will move away from the novel, and at the level of the image/text relationship Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes is in the tradition of Des Aveugles; that, at any rate, is how I propose reading it.54 ‘[. . .] Je reˆve d’e´crire un livre de pur fantasme, d’image brute, de mirage, ou` des diamants de ﬁction se disposeraient dans un grand diorama, un peu comme les deux romans de Guyotat, Eden Eden et Tombeau pour 500.000 soldats’55 (‘[. . .] I dream of writing a book of pure fantasy, of raw image, of illusion, in which ﬁctional diamonds are arranged in a big diorama, somewhat like the two novels of Guyotat, Eden Eden and Tomb for Half a Million Soldiers’). That book is obviously Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes. In the quotation above, Guibert speaks of a ‘diorama’, the dictionary deﬁnition of which is: panoramic picture on canvas, without visible edges, shown in a darkened room in such a way as, through the play of light, to give the

The ‘Novel’

135

illusion of real bodies in movement. In this deﬁnition the major themes of the Guibertian oeuvre (as I have identiﬁed them) crop up again: picture, play of light/darkness, reality and illusion. As it happens we learn from Barthes in La Chambre claire that the diorama, like the perspective picture and photography, are stage arts associated with the camera obscura; he argues, in the case of photography in particular, that it should in fact be associated with the camera lucida.56 So Guibert is still involved in representations of stage arts; he will also develop the narrative possibility opened up but not exhausted by Des Aveugles, the writing of the body when perceptions are distorted, and it is this possibility I shall be combining with the reading of the diorama. There exist all sorts of narrative episodes linked to the binarism see/ not to see. For the sake of clarity I am going to analyse them by taking up the diﬀerent parts of the book. ‘I. Beaucoup de jeux de nuits’ (‘I. Many night games’) The captured children, still blindfolded (F, p. 14), are put in jute sacks in total darkness, and their blindfolds will only be removed when they go to the Turkish baths and when they enter the bullring.57 As soon as they are captured their goitre is cut out, depriving them of speech, so that spittle comes out instead of words. A moment’s reﬂection shows up what new diﬃculties await the narrator compared with Des Aveugles: sighted people who no longer see; children who, not born dumb, had the use of speech but possess it no more. When at the Turkish baths and in the bullring their blindfolds are ﬁnally taken oﬀ, the narrator will be concerned to describe their eyes’ rediscovery of light, ‘leur virginite´ exerce´e et leur re´activite´ au viol de la lumie`re’ (‘their exercised virginity and their reactivity to the rape of light’) and their sensations.58 The narrative experimentation begun in Des Aveugles here goes one better; just as in Des Aveugles, the nod in the direction of Foucault’s work lies in the press-ganging of the bodies of the children who will become ‘dociles’ (‘docile’) (‘Tonsure, e´tuve, tatouage [. . .] nume´ros [. . .]’, back cover; ‘Tonsure, sauna, tattooing [. . .] numbers [. . .]’). The children released for training rely on hearing, the child in the sack on taste and hearing,59 and all of them on smell and touch too.60 Just as in Des Aveugles we enter the imagination of the ‘non-voyants’ (‘the non-sighted’): in the face of ‘[les] odeurs qui inﬁltraient le coﬀre [. . .]’ (p. 64) (‘the smells seeping into the box [. . .]’) the children ‘[. . .] faisaient se dresser sous leurs bandeaux des gratte-ciel et des e´tangs’

136

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

(ibid.) (‘[. . .] made skyscrapers and ponds rise up behind their blindfolds’). To communicate they have invented ‘[des] codes secrets’ (p. 16) (‘secret codes’). ‘5’ and ‘2’ (the children are called by a number) are the only children who can see.61 ‘5’ has to try and act as if he saw nothing, whereas what he sees does not ring true (p. 43); he is the equivalent of Kipa in Des Aveugles. In the Turkish baths, without their blindfolds but in a room where nothing could be made out because of the steam, the children ‘jouaient aux aveugles taˆtonnants’ (‘played blind people groping’) and, to revert to their normal perceptions, blindfold themselves again with turbans.62 Just as in Des Aveugles, the blind cannot stand the broken line (Av., p. 37), which recurs in the bullring to produce one of the most beautiful narrative passages in the book. Here it is ‘une ligne d’ombre et de lumie`re’ (F, p. 75) (‘a line of shadow and light’), a moving ‘ligne de partage’ (‘dividing line’) that ﬁnally breaks: ‘La lumie`re reculait, comme eﬀraye´e par ce qu’on la contraignait a` e´clairer, et la ligne franche se brisait en courbe qui re´habillait les contours du public d’une fausse douceur’ (p. 76) (‘The light was backing oﬀ, as if scared by what it was being made to illuminate, and the free line was breaking in a curve by which the audience’s outline was revamped with a false softness’). In contrast to the children, ‘Lune’ and ‘Loup’ under the inﬂuence of drink ‘se voient double ou triple et parfois ils ne voient plus qu’un’ (p. 27) (‘see themselves double or treble and sometimes they only see one’): for them the paradox is seeing too much. Lune begins hallucinating a bloke (p. 28) before initiating Loup into his night game. Besides, is not this game a means of not seeing and of making the other senses work, like the children? (‘Approche tes le`vres de ce sac-la`, reniﬂe, cherche [. . .] laisse-toi remplir la bouche [. . .]’, p. 29; ‘Put your lips near that sack, sniﬀ, search [. . .] let your mouth be ﬁlled [. . .]’). Or rather of having a diﬀerent vision? Thus Loup only starts taking pleasure in sucking when he sees a butterﬂy in place of the small piece of pink ﬂesh; he will only enjoy being sucked by Lune and ‘2’ by dreaming ‘que c’est le vagin d’une pute’63 (‘that it is a whore’s vagina’). ‘Lune’ suﬀers from diﬀerent vision, due in all probability to his feelings for ‘2’, but unlike Loup it does not allow him to fulﬁl the tasks needed to satisfy his accomplices. Given the job of kidnapping a child to replace ‘2’, he will be incapable of carrying it out, and his second attempt at the kindergarten will also end in failure. To punish Lune for his weakness, Pirate will make him wear ‘2’’s blindfold and think that it is ‘2’ whom he must beat to death, the whole thing taking place under the eyes of the rest of

The ‘Novel’

137

the gang (pp. 54–55). Lune will then have to rely on hearing to ﬁnd out what is happening around him, but having diﬀerent bearings from the chidren’s since he is used to being sighted. It is ironical that Pirate too will suﬀer from diﬀerent vision, due in all likelihood to his feelings for the twins. We read that the ﬁrst time he sees them he ‘tomba en arreˆt’ (‘stopped short’) in front of them (p. 59), precisely because they had ‘le regard perdu’ (‘a lost look in their eyes’); in fact they are non-sighted without being blind: ‘[. . .] leur regard e´tonnait par son absence d’expression, et son vide pourtant intense´ment habite´: ils semblaient toujours contempler d’autres choses que celles qui passaient sous leurs yeux, comme si une plaque de verre les empeˆchait d’y participer et les engloutissait dans les reﬂets de la vitre’ (p. 61) (‘[. . .] what was surprising about their look was its absence of expression and yet its intensely peopled emptiness: they seemed always to be gazing at diﬀerent things from those happening before their eyes, as if a pane of glass were engulﬁng them in its reﬂections and stopping them joining in’). They see diﬀerently. Their gaze is described as ‘translucide’ (‘translucent’); they look at Pirate without seeing him,64 and he gives them the numbers ‘2’ and ‘5’ which are those of the two sighted children, and arranges for them to see through their blindfolds. So Lune’s story will be duplicated by that of Pirate with the children called 2 and 5. Pirate will identify to such an extent with Lune (whose murder, let us not forget, he has orchestrated) that he will see him (or his double) preparing to rob him of the twins’ aﬀection (p. 72). Lune will also come back to haunt Pirate when he takes the twin’s dead body with all the violence described, up to the point ‘ou` la bouche de Lune [. . .] se regreﬀait dans la sienne’ (p. 101) (‘where Lune’s mouth [. . .] regrafted itself on his own’), thereby rendering complete the identiﬁcation between Lune and Pirate. Just as Lune could not capture children any more, Pirate becomes incapable of cutting their hair oﬀ, even down to suﬀering the same nausea as Lune experienced.65 Pirate too has to be re-educated, and it is ‘Hombre’, the ‘grand boss’ (p. 13) (‘big boss’) (whom we heard of at the very beginning and who reappears on page 65) who will take this on: there are echoes of Taillegueur in his description. He has to choose one of the twins for the spectacle but the twin’s eye begins to make him uncomfortable too (p. 67). The dramatic tension when the child is let loose in the bullring is orchestrated by the light which will become a wave attacking the whole body (pp. 76–81). In these pages the narrator’s diﬃculty is at least as great as that of Des Aveugles. In the bullring, true to form, the twin will not screw up his

138

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

eyes and the ravaged face of his brother will be grafted on to the reverse side of his own.66 It is this binary opposition, to see or not to see, which carries the action forward in this ﬁrst part of Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes. ‘II. S’abandonner au jeu des garc¸ons, c’est, comme un loup, se coucher sur un lit de ﬂeurs mourantes’ (‘II. To surrender to boys’ game is, like a wolf, to lie down on a bed of dying ﬂowers’) What propels the narrative in the second part of Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes is a progressive journey towards sight. If the ﬁrst part concentrates on those who cannot see, the second part pulls free of the dark in order to walk towards the light. We meet the character ‘Mickie’, obsessed with owning ‘un habit de lumie`re’ (p. 109) (‘a garment of light’): he wants to become an ‘infantero’, and ﬁght in an arena. When he learns that an infantero is dying, he is ‘enivre´ par l’annonce de cette mort imminente’ (p. 121) (‘intoxicated by the announcement of this imminent death’), understanding after the event that what ﬁred him was the ‘garment of light’ in which the latter was no doubt due to be buried. Once again, the look plays a very important part in the narrative. Bobo explains to Mickie that if the child’s gaze touches the infantero at the moment of execution, ‘il y a dans ce regard une me´lancolie qui rend fou, c’est la` qu’est le vrai poison’ (p. 111) (‘there is in this look a melancholy which causes madness, that is where the true poison lies’). Mickie tells Furtif the bear-keeper about his obsession with being an infantero, this being limited to a visual image (‘Je les vois [. . .] je les vois [. . .] je les vois partout [. . .] je vois des enfants partout [. . .]’, p. 116; ‘I see them [. . .] I see them [. . .] I see them everywhere [. . .] I see children everywhere [. . .]’). The man Mickie meets next is listening to a ‘tempeˆte’ (‘storm’) transistor for ‘il n’y avait rien a` voir’ (p. 118) (‘there was nothing to see’). Mickie nevertheless manages to squeeze some information out of him and to ﬁnd out where the infantero is buried. In a passage reminiscent of that in La Mort propagande, Vice and La piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche of the narrator digging up father and son wrapped in each other’s arms for all eternity, there is a scene in which Mickie will dig up the infantero. As we saw above, he wanted the latter’s garment of light. As it happens, when he uncovers his face he has eyes only for him and wants to know what he did to brave the child’s look.67 He will next meet Baleine the headhunter, who will almost hypnotise him with his

The ‘Novel’

139

words (p. 135). Mickie then gets a high temperature68 and here too he is concerned to badger the children until they beseech him ‘de leurs pauvres yeux’ (p. 145) (‘with their poor eyes’), and if need be get himself ‘seconder d’aveugles qui ne peuvent craindre l’horreur’ (p. 148, my italics) (‘assisted by blind people who can have no fear of horror’). When he meets Rudy, the great infantero, he is told by the latter that he gives swords only to ‘ceux dont le regard bruˆle . . .’ (p. 155) (‘those whose look burns . . .’), since more than the garment of light Radiateur readjusts for him Mickie longs to own the sword whose link with the look is rapidly established: ‘[. . .] la seule chose qui lui importait e´tait l’e´trange entente qu’il reˆvait entre son regard hallucine´ et sa main tremblante’ (p. 163) (‘[. . .] the only thing he cared about was the strange understanding he dreamt of between his wild-eyed look and his trembling hand’). When he enters the bullring, he will look at the child and win (p. 170). However, the advice given him by Homard, backed by Rudy, is not to show himself, to be seen by as few people as possible.69 Homard, it seems, has a look that is other. Thus, when he takes Mickie to the brothel, he tells him: ‘[. . .] tu ne devras pas les regarder tels qu’ils apparaıˆ tront [. . .] tu ne dois pas les regarder comme des eˆtres re´els, mais comme des statues [. . .]’ (p. 175) (‘[. . .] you must not look at them as they appear [. . .] you must not look at them like real beings, but like statues [. . .]’). Finally, everything will go wrong on the day Mickie enters the bullring, hardly seeing the child he has to face; he will then be getting buried by the mud, which harks back a little to the end of Des Aveugles in which Josette is killed by the lagodon. ‘III. Le jeu ﬁnit lorsque tous les animaux ont e´te´ pris par le diable et sont devenus ses chiens’ (‘III. The game ends when all the animals have been taken by the devil and have become his hounds’) In the third part, which is very short, Baleine tells Mickie stories about child sacriﬁces and ends up relating the ﬁrst part of the book (p. 205), making this third part no longer a journey towards sight but towards lucidity: ‘Toutes ces horreurs [. . .] ce n’est pas si loin de nous, c’est ce qui est le plus incroyable [. . .]’ (p. 204) (‘All these horrors [. . .] it is not so far from us, that is the most incredible thing [. . .]’). A quite diﬀerent reading would be called for if this third part did not exist, for at the end of the book Baleine takes Mickie with him in the hunt for the gang of child rustlers. And the sentence quoted above calls us readers to order

140

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

too: barbarism is nearer to us than is supposed. The text exposes its own delirium. Apart from the body/diorama combination, the major themes of the Guibertian oeuvre recur in Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes. The book’s dedication (‘A` T.’) (‘To T.’) continues to write ‘T.’ in Guibert’s ﬁction and proves that the narrator is still writing either for him or against him and has been doing so since La Mort propagande. As we saw, the trigger for Guibert’s story was a sentence he thought of after visiting an Aztec temple: this sentence, ‘rip your heart out and toss it into it’, referred to the loved one. In the text the relationship between love and hatred is ambiguous: thus Lune wonders as he sucks ‘2’ ‘si c’e´tait l’amour ou la haine qui ainsi le rassasiait’ (‘if it was love or hatred which thus satisﬁed him’) and if Be´be´ wrote hatred on his knuckles he had thought of writing love.70 The marks of aﬀection showered on ‘2’ by Lune and on the twins by Pirate will lead to their ruin. Lune had already proved that he was ready to suck Loup if the latter would spare ‘2’ (p. 40). Lune will also consider passing him oﬀ as his son. Once again the father–son couple, encountered already with Arthur and Bichon in Les Lubies d’Arthur and Robert and Kipa in Des Aveugles, here recurs. The back cover speaks of Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes as being ‘un sac de me´tamorphoses’ (‘a bundle of metamorphoses’), a description that can in fact be applied to the whole novel. ‘5’ fools the brigands by managing to see, and ‘2’ ‘mime sa captivite´’71 (‘mimes his captivity’). When they go hunting for children the robbers deck themselves out in masks and equip themselves with six snares they have constructed, all of which are works of deception (for example: ‘un faux lac fait d’un miroir peint’, ‘a false lake made of a painted mirror’). Pirate pulls the wool over Lune’s eyes in convincing him that he must thrash ‘2’’s body to death whereas the sack is full of leaves and clay, and then makes him suck the prick and drink the ‘foutre’ (‘spunk’) of another dead child, kidding him that it is ‘2’ (p. 56). Pirate will also deceive his companions by letting the twins see through their blindfolds (p. 63), and the twins too will be capable of fooling even Pirate since the numbers tatooed on their foreheads are artiﬁcial and interchangeable (p. 89). Rudy will cheat Mickie by not telling him that he recognises him as a true infantero (p. 155). The buttons on the garment of light that Mickie risks so much to acquire will in fact be only ‘vulgaire plastique’ (‘vulgar plastic’), and the eighteenth-century construction Homard lives in is a sham through and through.72 The very principle of

The ‘Novel’

141

the bullﬁght and the bolero is a snare to weary the children, as is the legend of the infanteros’ cocaine orgies.73 But the greatest delusion for Mickie is the mysterious character Baleine, who reveals only in the book’s last sentence that he is in fact a headhunter of brigands whose network he wants to break up. If he saves Mickie from the mud he is getting sucked into, he also makes him give up his infantero activities for good by forcing him to help catch the people who traﬃc in children. The writing of Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes is on a par with that of Des Aveugles. Guibert associates his style with that of Guyotat and of Savitskaya and with the word ‘baroque’:74 irregularity of registers and of narrative points of view (sighted/non-sighted, but also the point of view of ringworm, a fungus, pp. 37–38). As we saw above, Guibert told Donner that he had simply replaced bulls with children, and this metaphor can be said to run through the whole book. There are no bullﬁghters, there are infanteros who kill the children in the ring and become ‘danseuses’ (p. 85) (‘dancers’). The narrative of the bullﬁght runs from page 76 to page 94; part of it is told from the point of view of the bull (especially pages 83–85). Just as in Des Aveugles, diﬃculty is again looked for: what does a bull feel on being let loose in the ring, what goes on in its head? That is what is described for us in these pages. The bulls charge ‘la teˆte en avant’ (‘head ﬁrst’) but are fooled by the boleros.75 Bobo is a gelder, because just as for the dead bulls, the children’s ‘couilles’ (‘balls’) are eaten.76 The descriptions, based on prior in-depth research, are highly detailed.77 Lastly there are expressions to treasure, like that describing the children having become ‘grossistes en glaires’ (p. 31) (‘mucus wholesalers’)! If in the last part of Les Lubies d’Arthur and in Des Aveugles red dominated, in the ﬁrst part of Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes it is blue, with a slight tendency towards grey in the second part. How does Guibert manage to get away with a text which—to adopt his own description—replaces bulls with children to recount bullﬁghts? By the phenomenon of distanciation. Let us take the example of the epithets. The ‘hommes innommables’ (‘unnamable men’) become ‘forbans’ (‘crooks’), then ‘les quatre salopards’ (‘the four bastards’) and ﬁnally ‘les voleurs d’enfants’ (‘the child snatchers’);78 these epithets are a means for the narrator of distancing us from these characters and of distancing himself. The same device will be used for the children, the innocent and Homard;79 another method will be to depersonalise the parts of the body to add to the distanciation: ‘une jambe’, ‘un coeur’ (p. 36) (‘a leg’, ‘a heart’), or else to sum up the body in a single organ.80

142

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

The value of a body will be no more than its weight and will be measured in money (p. 70). The deformed body will make its appearance and so will the ‘de´pece´ et e´visce´re´’ (‘dismembered and eviscerated’) body.81 There is a major diﬀerence not only with Des Aveugles but also with Les Lubies d’Arthur, the two other books before Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes that bear the label ‘roman’ (‘novel’): it is the ﬁrst occasion that the ‘je’ (‘I’) of a narrator, to whom biographical details referring to the writer Herve´ Guibert can be attached, no longer appears in the narrative, and it is the ﬁrst occasion too that Guibert steps aside from the pages of the novel, or else does not appear at one time or another. The ﬁrst point to make is that at a chronological level this book comes after Mes parents in which the ‘je’ (‘I’) is written in the most visible manner possible. Moreover, as Pratt remarks, Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes ‘pousse l’oeuvre de la de´sidentiﬁcation au point ou` non seulement les attributs du ‘‘moi’’ mais tout indice social et historique disparaissent entie`rement’82 (‘pushes the work of disidentiﬁcation to the point where not only the attributes of the ‘‘self’’ but also every social and historical clue entirely disappear’), wondering further on how such writing could be displayed in an autobiographical form.83 This distanciation and this disidentiﬁcation, according to Barthes, characterise texts of pleasure: ‘Texte de jouissance: celui qui met en e´tat de perte, celui qui de´conforte (peut-eˆtre jusqu’a` un certain ennui), fait vaciller les assises historiques, culturelles, psychologiques, du lecteur, la consistance de ses gouˆts, de ses valeurs et de ses souvenirs, met en crise son rapport au langage’84 [‘Text of pleasure: that which precipitates a state of loss, that which causes unease (perhaps even a certain boredom), shakes readers’ historical, cultural and psychological foundations, the consistency of their tastes, values and memories, provokes a crisis in their relationship with language’]. Bellour will see in Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes Herve´ Guibert’s most beautiful text, recalling that it is found in embryonic form in La Mort propagande.85 To see Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes as a text of pleasure implies interpreting all the atrocities committed against the children as ‘faits de langage’86 (‘facts of language’). Asked about the violence of his text, Guibert quoted Sade in self-justiﬁcation: ‘[. . .] a` mes yeux ne subsistent du livre que des impressions de tendresse. Sade reste une re´fe´rence pour moi, selon qui la plus singulie`re des fantaisies remonte toujours a` un principe de de´licatesse que je cherche a` exprimer dans ce re´cit ou` la cruaute´ n’est qu’apparente [. . .]’87 (‘[. . .] in my view only

The ‘Novel’

143

impressions of tenderness subsist in the book. Sade remains a reference for me; according to him the most peculiar of fantasies can always be traced back to a principle of delicacy that I seek to express in this story where cruelty is more apparent than real [. . .]’). As McCaﬀrey points out, however, in his frenzied monologue Mickie passes from the ‘je’ (‘I’) to the ‘nous’ (‘we’) (pp. 145–46), and McCaﬀrey concludes: ‘[. . .] Guibert nous pie`ge en nous faisant croire [. . .] qu’en tant que lecteurs, nous sommes actifs dans la construction de ce pie`ge, aussi coupables et innocents que l’auteur’88 (‘[. . .] Guibert traps us by persuading us [. . .] that we, as readers, no less guilty or innocent than the author, participate actively in the trap’s construction’). So we are not very far from being implicated in the narrative, something which, according to Bersani,89 is the mark of any selfrespecting erotic text. Is Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes the novel announced on the cover? Twice in the text in the book proper ‘le´gende’ (‘legend’) is the term used (F, pp. 133 and 173). Bellour speaks of a historical and psychoanalytic heritage, of a large imaginary fund of tales and legends.90 Bernstein describes Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes as ‘un conte fantastique contemporain [. . .] un conte de fe´es, aussi me´chant que le furent jamais les contes, et beaucoup plus pre´cis’91 (‘a contemporary gothic tale [. . .] a fairy story, as cruel as such stories have ever been, and much more speciﬁc’). So, as can be seen, this book, like Les Lubies d’Arthur and Des Aveugles, is more in the tradition of tales and legends than of the novel. Bellour speaks of ‘eﬀets de ﬁction’ (‘eﬀects of ﬁction’) in Guibert, which is not the same thing as the novel92 but which, in my view, is a better description of what Guibert was up to. On the publication of the ‘roman’ (‘novel’) Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes Guibert stressed that what he was really interested in was the search for the balance between truth and falsehood: ‘La ve´ritable oscillation, c’est plutoˆt dans le passage entre la re´alite´ et la ﬁction, entre le documentaire et l’imagination. C’est le chemin que j’ai parcouru dans mon travail’93 (‘The true oscillation is more in the movement between reality and ﬁction, between documentary and imagination. That is the path I have followed in my work’). What lessons can be drawn at the end of this chapter preoccupied with the novel? We saw in the preceding chapter that Guibert considered Les Lubies d’Arthur a tale or a legend (PA, p. 147), as he declared to Sophie Che´rer: ‘[. . .] toutes mes tentatives de ﬁction, ‘‘Les Lubies d’Arthur’’, ‘‘Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes’’ sont des contes’94

144

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

(‘[. . .] all my attempts at ﬁction, ‘‘Les Lubies d’Arthur’’, ‘‘Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes’’, are tales’). The same thing can be said of Des Aveugles. As Edmund Smyth reminds us in his article on Des Aveugles, there are echoes in the book of Voltaire’s tales, even at the level of style;95 Richard Smith calls Des Aveugles a ‘conte’96 (‘tale’) in describing Kipa as a ‘personnage de conte philosophique’97 (‘character in a philosophical tale’), and Barbedette writes: ‘Comme Les Lubies d’Arthur, Des Aveugles est davantage un conte qu’un roman [. . .]’98 (‘Like Les Lubies d’Arthur, Des Aveugles is more a tale than a novel [. . .]’). In Des Aveugles and Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes, the image/text relationship still feeds Guibert’s writing. We have seen too a number of similarities between the characters, the ends of the texts, and also at the narrative level where perceptions are distorted. The only acknowledged diﬀerence is the fact that in Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes there is no escapade by a ‘je’ (‘I’) whom Guibert could be associated with. This experiment seems to have had a liberating eﬀect on the writer: he proved, and proved to himself, that he could write a ‘roman’ (‘novel’) without subjective interventions on his part. But before giving this experiment an importance it does not possess, let us hear rather what Guibert has to say: ‘J’ai fait des livres avec un souci de style, comme Des Aveugles ou Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes, qui e´taient en ge´ne´ral lie´ a` la tentative et je dirais a` l’e´chec de la ﬁction, parce que ﬁnalement on s’aperc¸oit que c¸a n’a aucun inte´reˆt d’inventer des personnages [. . .]’99 (‘In a concern for style I wrote books like Des Aveugles or Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes which were in general linked to the attempt, and I would say the failure, of ﬁction, because in the end you realise that inventing characters is not in the least interesting [. . .]’). It is true that Guibert had the beneﬁt of four to six years’ hindsight when he said this (the interview having taken place in February 1991), but the fact remains that he describes his escapades in the direction of the novel as ‘failure of ﬁction’. And I myself have adopted inverted commas when using the word novel since, as I have shown, Guibert’s ‘romans’ (‘novels’) are more like tales.

CHAPTER SIX

‘Autobiography’ In analysing Mes parents we will see from the outset that its contents are found in other books, pointing us in the direction of what is fundamental in this work, its form rather than its content. Indeed on the back cover the book is called ‘autobiographie de jeunesse’ (‘autobiography about his youth’), and the author will write the ‘je’ (‘I’) of a narrator who is identiﬁable with Guibert. Will the book fulﬁl its desired function? That is the question which my analysis, backed by the thematic of the text, will seek to answer.

MES PARENTS The chronological order was not respected for Mes parents because it made sense to study the books bearing the label ‘roman’ (‘novel’) in the same chapter, but that does not mean the work’s publication date (between Des Aveugles and Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes) will be ignored: on the contrary, this book proves that in 1986 Guibert was writing more than just ‘romans’ (‘novels’). At the same moment as he was trying to eclipse himself from the narrative, he was about to write himself into a book in the most compromising manner possible. The deception is present from the paratext onwards. The back cover of Mes parents announced ‘une autobiographie de jeunesse qui, comme une enqueˆte, a la charge d’e´tayer indices, accusations ou de´mentis’ (‘a youthful autobiography which, like an investigation, involves backing up clues, accusations or denials’), but it is noticeable that despite the interest generated by the eight questions on the back cover, this plot covers roughly 15 pages, that is less than a tenth of the book.1 There is no doubt at all that this ‘investigation’ served as scaﬀolding in the construction of the book, and it seems equally certain that Guibert lost interest in it thereafter. What the book is in fact about is the relationship between the narrator and his parents. Like Des Aveugles, it is made up of untitled and unnumbered ‘sections’ or 145

146

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

‘fragments’; although there are no chapters or parts, the text is broken up into paragraphs. For the purposes of analysis I have decided to distinguish three diﬀerent parts: from the beginning to page 109, then from page 109 to page 114, and ﬁnally from page 114 to the end. The second section consists of a passage entitled ‘Le re´cit de l’inceste’ (‘The Story of Incest’) which formed part of ‘Il (Un re´cit de la mesquinerie)’ (‘He (A Story of Meanness’)) which the narrator recopies in Mes parents (Mes, pp. 109–14). When ‘Il (Un re´cit de la mesquinerie)’ was published in the expanded re-edition of La Mort propagande, ‘Le re´cit de l’inceste’ was not reprinted. The third part begins with the narrator copying out what he wrote during the summer of 1977, the text being introduced with a colon. Then he writes: ‘A` partir de 1979, mes parents occupent a` peu pre`s un cinquie`me de mon journal. Je vais recopier ici les passages qui les concernent, rajoutant entre eux les e´pisodes qui sur le moment m’ont fait de´faut’ (p. 119) (‘From 1979, my parents take up about a ﬁfth of my diary. I am going to recopy here the passages that concern them, adding in between the episodes which were lacking at the time’). In this last part, the narrator notes his dreams (for example, p. 149), occasionally speculates (p. 125) and indeed adds the passages which he lacked when he wrote the diary (for example, pp. 165–67 in which the remarks reported were exchanged with the father during a dinner on 15 December 1984). The text also undergoes another intervention, its actualisation: ‘Moi je sens dans mon craˆne les abce`s qui ont de´truit le cerveau de M., ils me font mal’ (p. 169) (‘I feel in my skull the abscesses which destroyed M.’s brain, they are hurting me’); this sentence could not have been written in 1979 but was without doubt added at the time Guibert was working on his manuscript since ‘M’ was HIV positive in the 1980s (for further details, see Chapter 8). My reading of Mes parents will turn on the following argument: in my opinion Mes parents is more or less already written in Guibert’s work. To be quite explicit: in the ﬁrst part of the book (remembering that its division into three parts was my idea), apart from the handful of pages on ‘l’enqueˆte’ (‘the investigation’)—which we have seen are simply the scaﬀolding for the ﬁctional construction—practically all the episodes have been or will be narrated2 in a more or less similar form in other books by Guibert, as has been seen and pointed out in each chapter as we have gone along.3 The third part, which concentrates on the mother’s illness and her battle to survive, is not previously unpublished either, since there was already a much shorter version of

‘Autobiography’

147

this episode in the text ‘Le Seul visage’ accompanying the book of the same name (SV, p. 7). As for the remaining, inserted story, ‘Le re´cit de l’inceste’, that was not previously unpublished either since it will recur, admittedly in a much more abridged version, in La Mort propagande (MP, p. 302). So why did Guibert publish a work whose diﬀerent episodes were scattered about in other books? Because what is important in Mes parents is not necessarily the content but the form. The narrator, who as the back cover reminds us is not quite Herve´ Guibert but a ‘character’, says ‘je’ (‘I’), and this constitutes an important milestone in the evolution of the voices of the self. On reﬂection, though, the passages on pages 114 to 119, which according to the narrator are copied out of the diary, use the ‘il’ (‘he’), and this leads one to suppose that even in his diary Guibert used the ‘he’. In the manuscript of Mes parents, from the start of what I have called the ﬁrst part, the only corrections made by Guibert are ‘je’ (‘I’) and ‘ma’ (‘my’) in place of ‘il’ (‘he’) and ‘la’ (‘the’) and the present in place of the imperfect. This transition from ‘he’ to ‘I’ was not made without hesitation: in a radio programme in January 1987 Guibert admitted having ‘tangue´’ (‘wobbled’) between the two, adding that he had diﬃculties writing Mes parents, that it had to be the ﬁrst or the last work, that he wrote it quickly and that he had to do it, viewing it however in a diﬀerent light from the rest of his work, as a book between parentheses.4 The aspect to be borne in mind arising from the above remarks is the urgency to write Mes parents; to take up one of Herve´ Guibert’s favourite expressions again, Mes parents pestered him. We now need to see, through a study of the book’s thematic, to what necessities the writing of the book was a response. The back cover of Mes parents announced, as a somewhat tentative aside in the ﬁnal sentence: ‘Mais plus fort encore, peut-eˆtre, est le trouble de ces e´tranges relations charnelles, e´trangement inoubliables, qu’avaient invente´es ses parents, et qu’il tente de retrouver dans sa vie d’adulte’ (‘But stronger still, perhaps, is the embarrassment of these strange carnal relationships, strangely unforgettable, invented by his parents, that he attempts to rediscover in his adult life’). This sentence is the true bearer of the ‘signiﬁant’ (‘signiﬁer’) of Mes parents: Guibert writes the physical relationship with the father and the mother, in all its ambiguity, in all its hatred and passion.5 For the story of Guibert and his parents is the story of the body, imprisoned, disciplined but also loved, which then rebels, before being taken unawares by the mother’s

148

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

body which suﬀers from cancer of the breast and makes the narrator reexamine his relationship with them. What lies behind the writing of Mes parents is the wish to exorcise all parental interdicts, and the ‘hatred’ inscribed in these pages is as good a way as any of trying to exorcise the inﬂuence of the parents and above all of the father. As a rule the memories are linked to the senses6 and, very often, triggered by the attention the father lavishes on his body (Mes, pp. 32–33). The father is presented as petty and sly, violent towards his children, stingy and tight-ﬁsted, so much so that in the third part the narrator writes that their relationship has become one long quarrel about money.7 He will turn this relationship upside down by planning to use the father’s money ‘pour acheter un corps, un sexe’8 (‘to buy a body, a penis’). In the book’s last paragraph the narrator will kill his father oﬀ. As to the relationship with the mother, apart from the promise of ‘ignominie’ (‘ignominy’) and ‘infamie’ (‘infamy’) which excites the narrator—or at least his ﬁctional imagination—at the very beginning, her portrait is not written in the same tradition as the father’s but rather at the level of the unutterable.9 There is also in ‘Le re´cit de l’inceste’ the amazing portrait of a sacriﬁced woman. Hatred is quite often the reverse of love.10 ‘Quand je me pencherai sur vos cadavres, mes chers ge´niteurs, au lieu de baiser votre peau je la pincerai, et je leur arracherai une touﬀe de cheveux’ (p. 93) (‘When I bend over your corpses, my dear progenitors, instead of kissing your skin I will pinch it, and I will pull out a tuft of their hair’) is what we read after the account of the parents’ reaction to the revelation of the narrator’s homosexuality, but it should be borne in mind that their reaction will have terrible consequences for the narrator: he will stop loving Jean-Franc¸ois as a result of having to go in for so much deception to prevent his parents ﬁnding out about their relationship (p. 92). A second passage is situated just after the mother has told the story of what she is supposed to have said as Herve´ was being born: ‘Pourvu qu’il soit mort! Pourvu qu’il soit mort-ne´!’ (p. 124) (‘Let’s hope he’s dead! Let’s hope he’s stillborn!’). This is followed by the narrator’s reply to his mother when he tries to reappropriate his body and even talks of committing suicide (p. 125). With hindsight he himself writes: ‘Je m’aperc¸ois maintenant de la durete´ eﬀroyable de ces mots’ (ibid.) (‘I now realise how terribly harsh those words were’). But those words only made sense in so far as they were intended to counteract those other words of his mother who, in a death-wish, was appropriating the body (‘Let’s hope he’s dead! Let’s hope he’s stillborn!’, p. 124). It is on

‘Autobiography’

149

the basis of this passage that Suzanne will address her remark to the narrator’s mother: ‘Je pense que tu viens de faire a` ton ﬁls une de´claration d’amour . . .’ (ibid.) (‘I think you have just made your son a declaration of love . . .’). The intense pain linked to the loss of a loved object entails the appearance of Thanatos in the narrator’s world from his earliest childhood. Thus, when his burnous is sent to the cleaners without his knowledge, the narrator discovers an object for which he no longer feels any aﬀection, before going on to write: ‘[. . .] premie`re ide´e de mort, premier me´pris’ (‘[. . .] ﬁrst idea of death, ﬁrst contempt’); death then starts haunting him through images and dreams, killers excite him and he will have murderous ideas.11 Another episode when the family are in the car and the narrator wants his father to plunge them into a ravine is followed by this comment: ‘Il n’y a rien au monde que je de´sire plus que ce ravin et je sais que ce de´sir a un rapport e´troit avec l’amour que j’ai pour mon pe`re’ (pp. 44–45) (‘There is nothing in the world I want more than this ravine and I know that this desire is closely linked to the love I feel for my father’). Love translates into death-wish. The book’s dedication ‘A` personne’ (‘To nobody’) is contradicted on the last page (‘La haine de la de´dicace du livre, bien suˆr, e´tait ﬁctive’, ‘The hatred of the book’s dedication was of course ﬁctional’), which recalls the whole ambiguity in Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes between love and hatred, an ambiguity that recurs here in relation to the parents. Thus, after discovering the condom used by his father, the narrator writes that the latter passed from being the creature he most adored to the one he most hated (p. 69), and he began refusing all bodily intimacy with him too. Similarly, after tearing up the mother’s letter, the narrator says he is afraid of having to look for the pieces in his dustbin (p. 148). And in ‘Ex-Libris’, when Poivre d’Arvor said that in fact Guibert loved his parents, the latter agreed. One of the identities one expects to ﬁnd in Guibert’s ‘youthful autobiography’ is homosexuality, particularly with regard to the degree to which the parents are prepared to accept it. One of the moments of crisis occurs when the narrator plans to go on holiday with Philippe; up till then, before the prohibition and the condemnation, we were oﬀered a portrait of the father as an accomplice and lovers’ go-between.12 In this story, after making enquiries about Philippe, the father exclaims: ‘C’est un pe´de´raste’ (‘He is gay’); the narrator replies: ‘Moi aussi’ (‘Me too’) and the mother cries out: ‘[. . .] un ﬁls pe´de´raste, qu’est-ce que j’ai pu faire au Bon Dieu!’13 (‘[. . .] a homosexual son, what could I have

150

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

done to deserve this!’). The father tells him to return to the ‘droit’ (‘straight’) path, that of heterosexuality: ‘[. . .] c’est a` toi maintenant d’accomplir ton noble roˆle de garc¸on aupre`s d’une jeune ﬁlle’ (‘[. . .] it is up to you now to fulﬁl your noble role as a young man with a young lady’), even adding: ‘Les garc¸ons c’est bien, mais les ﬁlles c’est encore mieux’ (p. 119) (‘Boys are ﬁne but girls are better’) after predicting: ‘Tout c¸a ﬁnira par un crime, ou par une syphilis!’ (‘All that will end in crime, or syphilis!’). I have quoted substantial chunks of these conversations to show clearly that they are reported in direct speech. It seems that the work of ﬁction is almost nil and that the narrator conﬁnes himself to transcribing the dialogues that took place. Two other episodes are signiﬁcant. In one, the narrator has bought Le Crapouillot, ‘qui se promet de lever le voile sur le monde de l’homosexualite´’ (‘which means to lift the veil on the world of homosexuality’) before throwing it in the bin for fear that it will be found.14 In the other, while he feasts his eyes on the sight of the two brothers in their underpants, he has the feeling of being a traitor (p. 95). In these two incidents the narrator is, however, far from his parents (he is travelling in England and in Germany), which proves he has so internalised their taboos as to have his own self-censoring mechanisms. The work of ﬁctionalisation, especially when the ‘je’ (‘I’) is used, is powerless to reconstitute a sexual identity which might be lived in a positive fashion. From page 109 onwards the narrator lets his parents completely take over his book, as Pratt indicates: le personnage de Guibert devrait donc ﬁnir par occuper une position autobiographique [. . .] Tentative vaine puisque la revanche que Guibert cherche a` prendre sur ses parents (pour avoir de´sapprouve´ sa relation avec un jeune homme rencontre´ sur la plage) consiste ne´anmoins a` consacrer ce qui lui reste du livre aux opinions et aux actes des parents.15 (so the character of Guibert ought to end up occupying an autobiographical position [. . .] The attempt is vain, though, since the revenge Guibert seeks to take on his parents (for having disapproved of his relationship with a young man met on the beach) consists of devoting the remainder of the book to what the parents think and do.)

Pratt also points out that homosexuality is only mentioned in positive terms in the inserted story ‘Le re´cit de l’inceste’, which is my second part, thanks no doubt to the phenomenon of distanciation resulting from the move from the ‘je’ (‘I’) to the ‘il’ (‘he’) which ‘implique e´galement une ﬁctionnalisation de la famille. L’ide´e du pe`re qui commente la beaute´ de son ﬁls, en lui disant des mots qu’il n’a jamais adresse´s a` sa femme introduit une dimension homoe´rotique au sein des

‘Autobiography’

151

interdictions familiales’16 (‘also implies a ﬁctionalisation of the family. The idea of the father commenting on his son’s good looks, saying words to him that he has never spoken to his wife, introduces a homoerotic dimension in the midst of the family taboos’) (the ‘il’ [‘he’] will also be kept in ‘Le re´cit de la vacance’, MP, p. 302). It is in this story too, and nowhere else, that in an astonishing passage the mother is described as a victim, a prisoner in her own house, subjected to the husband’s libido, having sacriﬁced a possible career as a ﬁlm actress for her children (MP, pp. 109–13). To quote Pratt again, ‘Le re´cit de l’inceste’ ‘repre´sente donc, non seulement une expe´rience ﬁctive qui permet a` Guibert d’e´laborer une identite´ hors des normes ﬁxe´es par ses parents, mais en meˆme temps le re´cit [. . .] qui cherche a` mesurer l’e´tendue de l’ide´ologie parentale, les re´sistances qu’elle oﬀre a` son propre exercice de de´rangement’17 (‘therefore represents, not only a ﬁctional experience which allows Guibert to elaborate an identity outside the norms ﬁxed by his parents, but at the same time the story [. . .] which seeks to measure the extent of the parental ideology, the resistances it oﬀers to his own unsettling exercise’). I have noted one or two episodes in which the narrator transgresses the parental taboos by using the ‘je’ (‘I’), but it is true that these episodes are located either at the level of the imagination (the narrator imagines that his parents ﬁnally put up with his homosexuality because his name appears in a newspaper ‘comme une assise d’autorite´, d’importance, de pouvoir’, pp. 129–30; ‘like a foundation of authority, importance, power’) or at the level of dreams (the narrator dreams about his father in these terms: ‘[. . .] j’ai envie qu’il m’encule, il vient derrie`re moi et en me pe´ne´trant il me dit: ‘‘Celui qui se fait remplir le cul est un damne´’’, il dit cela en riant un peu, comme pour m’exciter’ (p. 135); ‘[. . .] I want him to fuck me, he comes up behind me and as he penetrates me he tells me: ‘‘He who gets his arsehole ﬁlled is damned’’, he says that laughing a little, as if to excite me’). What is striking about this last example is that the taboo and the punishment (being damned) are pronounced by the father ‘laughing’ and have the eﬀect of intensifying the ‘I’’s state of excitement. Apart from these examples, it is true that ‘les normes ﬁxe´es par ses parents’ (‘the norms ﬁxed by his parents’) progressively become real shackles from which even the writing cannot extricate itself, no doubt because the ‘I’ is not suﬃciently ﬁctional, all the more so since just after ‘Le re´cit de l’inceste’ there begins that other story by which the whole narrative will be caught unawares: the mother’s illness. That illness will threaten the book’s project, even down to the writing.

152

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

Towards the end of the book the narrator remarks that when he returns to his parents for the holidays and sees his body taken charge of by them, he is so overwhelmed by such passivity that he can no longer read or write (p. 115). This remark is very important for the signiﬁcance of the act of writing for Guibert in relation to his parents: writing Mes parents is for him an attempt to reappropriate for himself his childhood, to ‘construire’ (‘construct’) his parents and, ﬁnally, to accept them on his own terms: the mother emaciated and dematerialised from her body (p. 169); the father gaunt and skeletal (p. 171). But beware: through the body of the parents it is his own body which haunts the narrator. Even from the angle of the ‘he’ in ‘Le re´cit de l’inceste’, he cannot bear to look at his body before transferring his anxiety on to his parents: ‘[. . .] ce sont eux qui ont fait ce corps [. . .] Parfois il leur en voulait de lui avoir donne´ ce corps’18 (‘[. . .] it was they who made this body [. . .] Sometimes he resented their having given him this body’). Moreover the fact that he leaves the emaciated body of the parents at the end of the book shows clearly that the reconciliation with his own body has not taken place. Narrated in what I have called the third part, the occurrence of the mother’s illness reverses the direction taken by the book with ‘Le re´cit de l’inceste’. The narrator ends up practically identifying his body with that of his mother. When he learns that she has had a breast removed he will begin to feel ‘un mal fou’ (pp. 138–39) (‘a terrible pain’). A few days later he will no longer be able to sleep on the side where it hurts for his mother and his skin will burn like hers; he will even end up seeing what she has never seen.19 This identiﬁcation will not end until he depicts her, emaciated and dematerialised; it will be the price to be paid for rediscovering between them the ‘diapason de l’aﬀection’20 (‘compass of aﬀection’). This love is however only conceivable at the moment in time when the narrator has not yet got an autonomous body and projects himself into that of the mother (‘[. . .] mesure-or du ﬂux maternel, comme un cordon ombilical’, p. 170; ‘[. . .] gold measure of the maternal ﬂow, like an umbilical cord’). So we see that the body in Mes parents which wishes to be written against the parents, in an attempt to exorcise what Suzanne calls the ‘rapport charnel’ (‘carnal relation’) which characterises their relationship and from which the narrator has to free himself at all costs in order to live his life and write his books, ends up by identifying itself with the body of the dying mother and rediscovering love.21 In that sense, Mes parents fails in its original project.

‘Autobiography’

153

Love is again linked to death; witness this passage by the narrator: ‘[. . .] il faille qu’elle soit ampute´e pour que je lui te´moigne mon amour. Je lui dis que je l’aimerai plus, que je l’aime plus, mais le lendemain je pense avec horreur que cela veut dire: meurs et je t’aimerai encore plus, tu sais’ (pp. 139–40) ‘([. . .] [that] it be necessary for her to be amputated for me to show her my love. I tell her that I will love her more, that I love her more, but the next day I am horriﬁed to think that this means: die and I will love you even more, you know’) and witness the mother who, thinking no doubt that her last hour has come, will tell him that she loves him and that she is proud of him (p. 121). The occurrence of the mother’s illness reverses the eﬀect of ﬁctionalisation. Thanatos takes over and becomes the end of the book’s chief character, the narrator seeing dire signs pretty well everywhere, the mother’s cancer being described as ‘un suicide conventionne´’22 (‘a suicide on the national health’). Thanatos reaches its paroxysm in the following passage: ‘Mort du corps, mort du plaisir, mort de l’e´motion, mort de l’aventure, mort de l’e´criture, mort imminente de la me`re’ (p. 156) (‘Death of the body, death of pleasure, death of emotion, death of adventure, death of writing, imminent death of the mother’). The mother’s imminent death threatens the writing and thus the very existence of Mes parents: ‘Note e´crite avec trois semaines de retard: trop d’e´motions au de´jeuner avec la me`re’, p. 149 (‘Note written three weeks late: too many emotions at lunch with the mother’); the ‘note’ will end with ‘Une e´motion presque intenable’ (‘An almost unbearable emotion’). The mother’s imminent death heralds the disintegration of the narrator and of his text. What should be said of the writing of Mes parents? ‘Mes parents est un livre qui me bruˆlait les doigts, donc je l’ai fait tre`s, tre`s vite, je l’ai e´crit avec les pieds; on pourrait dire que c’est un livre un peu baˆcle´’23 (‘Mes parents is a book that was burning my ﬁngers, so I did it very, very fast, I wrote it with my feet; you could say that it is a somewhat botched book’); Guibert seems a bit hard on himself. It can certainly be said that the concern for style apparent in Des Aveugles and in Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes is not present in Mes parents. This book resembles nonetheless what in the same interview Guibert calls ‘une volonte´ de transparence’24 (‘a desire for transparency’), something he admires in Knut Hamsun. For readers keen to get a peep inside Guibert’s diary, which according to him was the true backbone of everything he wrote, Mes parents represented a golden opportunity: ‘Ce journal est le principe de ce que je fais [. . .] Chaque livre est une

154

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

excroissance, une ramiﬁcation. Chaque fois que, dans le journal, quelque chose devient obsessionnel, de´porte l’ensemble, c’est la naissance d’un livre. Des Aveugles, Mes parents sont ne´s comme c¸a [. . .]’25 (‘This diary is the principle of what I do [. . .] Each book is an excrescence, a ramiﬁcation. Every time that, in the diary, something becomes obsessional, overturning the whole thing, a book is born. Des Aveugles, Mes parents started life that way [. . .]’). Elsewhere he will admit that Mes parents comes in large part from the diary.26 One can get an idea of the way Guibert’s diary is written from the third part, where the diary is copied out. A tendency to self-betrayal is particularly noticeable.27 So it can be deduced from this that in his diary Guibert mentions the unmentionable as well as his shame, his obsessiveness and his harshness towards his mother.28 The writing becomes a lot more economical and fragmented, being conﬁned in certain passages to a single, albeit eloquent, sentence: ‘Ablation d’un sein de la me`re’ (p. 137) (‘Removal of a breast from the mother’). This economy of style will recur in that other diary (of hospitalisation), Cytome´galovirus. Certain writing mannerisms recur too, such as oxymoron, narrative from the point of view of a child, distanciation, understatement, humour and even black humour29 and the amalgam of the two kinds of humour in the episode of going on holiday (pp. 41–45). The intrusion of the parenthesis with diﬀerent functions is also more and more frequent: in one the narrator leaps into the future and speaks of his adult body, indeed locates himself in the present time of the book’s writing, and in another he authenticates the expressions he reports from his mother to add to their veracity.30 Let us now turn to the reception of Mes parents. Pratt has analysed it, and he stresses that despite the biographical project of the title, the book was perceived as an investigation into Guibert’s own life and thus as an autobiography.31 Only Marsan labelled it a ‘roman’ (‘novel’).32 Poivre d’Arvor told Guibert on ‘Ex-Libris’ that when he read Mes parents he truly believed his parents were dead, implying that one does not write such things about one’s parents if they are alive. The same argument was put forward by Gaudemar who stressed that Guibert had not, as he could have done, disguised the names, distorted the facts, smoothed things over, and spoke of immodesty, saying that Guibert provoked ‘comme s’il voulait, de´libe´re´ment, casser les re`gles du jeu litte´raire’33 (‘as if he wanted deliberately to break the rules of the literary game’). Lecarme in an article entitled ‘L’autoﬁction: un mauvais genre?’ refers to Vale´ry’s remark that one should not confuse

‘Autobiography’

155

‘le ve´ritable homme qui a fait l’ouvrage, avec l’homme que l’ouvrage fait supposer’ (‘the actual person who created the work with the person implied by the work’), adding that the confusion arises from mythifying and mythomanic autobiographies that he will not be dealing with in his study, though he does touch on Mes parents in a footnote: ‘Cette autobiographie d’allure ve´ridique fait mourir les parents du narrateur alors qu’ils sont bien vivants. L’auteur ne se sent nullement tenu par les usages du pacte autobiographique. Cette tricherie e´vidente pre´sente des be´ne´ﬁces litte´raires conside´rables’34 (‘This seemingly truthful autobiography kills oﬀ the narrator’s parents while they are still very much alive. The author feels in no way bound by the conventions of the autobiographical pact. This obvious cheating confers considerable literary beneﬁts’). So Lecarme lays stress on the imaginary side and on the tendency to falsehood. Breaking the rules of the literary game and ﬂouting the conventions of the autobiographical pact is all it takes to realise that with Mes parents Guibert has transgressed the ‘re`glement’ (‘regulations’). Gaudemar stresses that Herve´ Guibert prefers ‘les lieux cruels et le re´cit d’e´pouvantes intimes’ (‘cruel places and the story of intimate terrors’) to the traditional story of childhood.35 This reads like a description of Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes. The problem, which is really a question of genre, is deﬁned by the following sentence: ‘Ce qui serait largement tole´rable dans un roman [. . .] devient ici quasiment insupportable parce que cela pie`ge le lecteur a` son propre voyeurisme’36 (my italics) (‘What would be broadly tolerable in a novel [. . .] becomes practically unbearable here because it traps readers in their own voyeurism’). So the genre of Mes parents needs to be studied seriously. We have seen that Guibert viewed Mes parents in a diﬀerent light from the rest of his work, calling it a book between parentheses, but it seems to me on the contrary an essential element leading Guibert towards the use of the ‘je’ (‘I’) in the novel and towards the invention of a new genre, the roman faux. De´but d’un roman qui s’appellerait Mes parents (un peu a` la manie`re d’Emmanuel Bove) et qui commencerait ainsi: Maintenant que mes parents sont morts, enﬁn (mais je mens), je peux bien e´crire tout le mal que je pense d’eux ou que j’ai pense´ d’eux, en priant seulement le ciel de ne me jamais donner ﬁls aussi ingrat et malveillant. (Mes, p. 154) (Beginning of a novel which could be called Mes parents (a bit in the manner of Emmanuel Bove) and start like this: Now that my parents are at last dead (but I tell a lie), I can freely write all the bad things I think about them or have

156

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self thought about them, only praying heaven never to give me such an ungrateful and spiteful son.)

The above extract comes from my third part. It is conceivable that it belongs to the transcribed diary and therefore aﬀords a preliminary idea of the conception of Mes parents. The book was envisaged as a ‘roman’ (‘novel’). Immediately, the word novel is associated with falsehood, and it was perhaps in these diary pages that the idea of the roman faux ﬁrst took shape in Guibert’s mind. By using the expression ‘roman faux’ the latter is at once placed at a disadvantage with respect to the ‘roman vrai’ (‘real novel’).37 My purpose however is not to maintain that there exists a real, authentic novel that like the platinum standard enables the truth of novels to be measured. But just as Philippe Lejeune talks of an autobiographical pact, I will speak of a ‘pacte romanesque’ (‘ﬁctional pact’). A roman faux is a novel which does not respect the ﬁctional pact. One could almost lift from the above extract the deﬁnition of the ‘roman faux’: a novel in which ‘je’ (‘I’) lies. Another deﬁnition could be taken from a sentence spoken by Lenoir, the chief character in L’Incognito, when he compares himself to a famous writer come to give a lecture: ‘[. . .] est-ce que moi, dans vingt ans, je serai autant a` coˆte´ de la plaque quand je referai dans un institut savoyard ma fameuse confe´rence sur la falsiﬁcation de la re´alite´ dans l’e´criture romanesque?’ (I, p. 77, my italics) (‘[. . .] will I, in twenty years, be as wide of the mark when I give once more in an institute in the Savoie my famous lecture on the falsiﬁcation of reality in ﬁctional writing?’). A third approach would lie in quoting the sentence used for the epigraph of my book: ‘Avoir le courage de soi, de se dire, de se montrer et de laisser couler tous les secrets, d’en inventer’ (PA, p. 77, my italics) (‘To have the courage of one’s convictions, to say oneself, to show oneself and to let all the secrets pour out, to invent some’). Coming back to the ﬁrst question I asked: why publish a work whose diﬀerent episodes are scattered through other books? A ﬁrst factor was the importance of form over content (the use of the ‘je’ [‘I’]). A second marks an innovation in Mes parents: the ﬁctionalisation of the self as chief character, in a register sitting awkwardly between autobiography and ﬁction, thanks to the skilful balancing of truth and falsehood. Thus in a way Mes parents could be Guibert’s ﬁrst roman faux (a novel in which ‘je’ (‘I’) lies and ‘je’ falsiﬁes reality in the ﬁctional writing), apart from the fact the word ‘roman’ (‘novel’) is not used in the generic subtitle, and apart from the more signiﬁcant fact that it is

‘Autobiography’

157

when the narrator uses ‘il’ (‘he’) that he ‘ment’ (‘lies’); as we have seen, when he uses ‘je’ (‘I’), he ﬁnds it much more diﬃcult to ﬁctionalise his self. At a pinch, Mes parents could be the novel where ‘il’ (‘he’) lies; and if in this chapter I have used inverted commas for the term ‘youthful autobiography’ it is because Mes parents is not a youthful autobiography. I wondered at the outset if this book fulﬁlled the function the writer desired, and I am now in a position to say that it did not: ﬁrstly because Guibert could only reconstruct a positive sexual identity by abandoning the ‘je’ (‘I’) for the ‘il’ (‘he’), and secondly because the book did not reconcile him with his own body. He was unable to reappropriate the latter at the level of ﬁction, the project having been short-circuited by the mother’s illness invading the text. As we have seen, critics had diﬃculty in deﬁning Mes parents and particularly, as readers, in positioning themselves with regard to it. Ferenczi even called Mes parents ‘une autobiographie-pie`ge’ (‘a snareautobiography’) and used eleven diﬀerent expressions in an attempt to deﬁne the book.38 It is clear that all Guibert had to do was insert, as the generic subtitle, the word ‘roman’ (‘novel’), or better still ‘roman faux’ (to be deﬁned in the next two chapters), and he would have ensured that all the critics were satisﬁed with the consumer ‘produit’ (‘product’) and stopped throwing accusations of fraud about in respect of what is presented as an ‘autobiographie de jeunesse’ (‘autobiography about his youth’).39 Instead of being a book in parentheses, Mes parents is rather, in my view, an extremely important book in the evolution of the voices of the self and, as the next chapter will show, in the progression towards the roman faux.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Towards the roman faux The books studied in this chapter vary from a collection of short stories (Mauve le vierge), a stage play (Vole mon dragon), two books without generic subtitle (Les Gangsters/Fou de Vincent), a novel (L’Incognito), and lastly a text between short story and novel (La chair fraıˆche). We can already see that between 1988 and 1990 Guibert uses a whole variety of genres. I shall therefore try to evaluate them with respect to the project of the voices of the self by concentrating on the identity of the narrator and on the narrative voices, and since the chapter is called ‘Towards the roman faux’, I shall also concentrate on the relationship between truth and falsehood.

MAUVE LE VIERGE/VOLE MON DRAGON Published in 1988, Mauve le vierge bears the generic subtitle ‘nouvelles’ (‘short stories’).1 It was the ﬁrst time a book of Guibert’s bore the appellation ‘short stories’. But the question arises what generic diﬀerences there are between these short stories and the stories in Les Aventures singulie`res, especially when some of them like ‘Le de´sir d’imitation’ (‘The Desire to Imitate’) are called ‘nouvelles’ (‘short stories’) by Guibert. The only diﬀerence in my view between Les Aventures singulie`res and Mauve le vierge is that there is a thread running through Les Aventures singulie`res, the singularity of the adventures, whereas there is none in Mauve le vierge, which allows Guibert to juxtapose more freely short stories with diﬀerent subjects in the same volume. So we will not be seeing in Mauve le vierge a fresh chapter in the enterprise of the voices of the self, but a chapter partially written already, especially since, although the book was actually published in 1988, everything indicates that some of the ten short stories were written several years before.2 Why lay such stress on the dating of the short stories? Because this information is of capital importance for my study. Instead of being confronted with a move by Guibert to compose short stories after 159

160

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

writing and publishing three novels, then an ‘autobiographie de jeunesse’ (‘youthful autobiography’) which, as we have seen, is more like what I have dubbed a roman faux, eveything indicates that we are faced with a collection of short stories, some of which predate the writing of the novels. And this makes a big diﬀerence for my analysis and for the place given to Mauve le vierge in the project of the voices of the self. The same argument can be put forward for Vole mon dragon (VD), a text written for the theatre which was not published until 1994. Its composition was however completed in January 1987 (VD, p. 71). A lot of the scenes in Vole mon dragon are found in other books by Guibert,3 so I will not study their thematic since it has already been dealt with or will be dealt with in the other texts where they are located. The back cover of Mauve le vierge asks whether the short stories’ characters are not in fact Herve´ Guibert, ‘ayant change´ ses identite´s pour mieux se de´guiser’ (‘having changed his identities the better to disguise himself’), and replies that this is not quite certain, because of the three portraits of women sketched in these pages. This thought prompts me to study the position and the identity of the narrator in these short stories. The narrator seems absent from ‘L’auscultation’ (‘The Examination’) and from ‘Les trois quarts du monde’ (‘Three Quarters of the World’); the ‘il’ (‘he’) of the narrator is found in ‘Mauve le vierge’ (‘Mauve the Virgin’), portrayed as ‘Mauve’; in all the other short stories a narrator who says ‘je’ (‘I’) is written into the narrative even if sometimes his inscription in the story is belated (for example ‘Me´me´e Nibard’ [‘Granny Nibard’], MV, p. 55). The narrator of ‘Mauve le vierge’ presents an interesting identity. He describes himself in an aside as Mauve’s biographer (p. 16); that could explain why he knows him so well. A little further on, though, while Mauve is recounting a dream, we are told that he is lying (p. 20), and then we read this: ‘Il reˆvasse maintenant en pensant a` un plan pour raconter cette histoire [. . .] et s’il se relevait il aurait trop froid pour e´crire’ (ibid.) (‘He muses now, thinking about a plan to tell this story [. . .] and if he got up he would be too cold to write’). The ﬁrst remark seems to come from an omniscient narrator, Mauve’s biographer. In the second passage quoted, Mauve is identiﬁed as the author of the story we are reading. In certain texts or passages a link can be established between the narrator and Herve´ Guibert. In ‘Les secrets d’un homme’ (‘A Man’s Secrets’), the narrator uses ‘il’ (‘he’) in one of the fragments and ‘je’ and

Towards the roman faux

161

‘Herve´’ in another; in ‘Le citronnier’ (‘The Lemon Tree’) he will be called ‘Lulu’.4 In ‘Mauve le vierge’, we are told about the small piece of wool Mauve is friendly with (p. 14), leading us to think at once of the burnous encountered in Mes parents and therefore make the association between Mauve and the narrator of Mes parents. Biographical clues play a part in linking the ‘je’ (‘I’) of the narrator to Herve´ Guibert; Guibert’s friends continue to be written, either without ﬁrst names, or with ﬁctitious ﬁrst names. or with initials, or with their real ﬁrst name.5 There are references too to the job of a journalist, and in ‘La jeune ﬁlle d’a` coˆte´’ (‘The Young Woman Next Door’) to that of a writer who is also a photographer and who has to put on a show in the bullring at Arles.6 He writes on his great-uncle’s typewriter (p. 136) just like the narrator of ‘Sans titres’ (‘ No Titles’ ) (MP, p. 113), and goes on holiday to the island of Elba (MV, p. 61; it is there too that the plot of ‘Les trois quarts du monde’ begins). We should always remember that these characters are not quite Herve´ Guibert, whether the narrator uses ‘je’ (‘I’) or ‘il’ (‘he’), just as his friends are not quite the same as they are depicted in ﬁction: ‘Quoi qu’il en soit, Herve´ Guibert poursuit sa marotte, de tout dire, sur lui et sur les autres, ce qu’on pense et qu’il ne faudrait pas, et parfois meˆme un peu plus que la ve´rite´’ (back cover) (‘However that may be, Herve´ Guibert carries on with his trademark, of saying everything, about himself and others, what one thinks and should not think, and sometimes even a bit more than the truth’). What matters is the literary project to say everything about oneself and others and to play on the balance between truth and falsehood. To illustrate this project I will concentrate on ‘Les secrets d’un homme’. It is in these pages that Guibert writes himself most openly since the ﬁrst name Herve´ appears. Numerous clues indicate that the ‘philosophe’ (‘philosopher’) in question resembles a portrait of Michel Foucault;7 I stress ‘resembles’ since the character has of course been ﬁctionalised.8 Apparently we are given three images which it is claimed are secrets,9 but I think these three ‘secrets’ are tricks10 to disguise the most important secret: the one more or less revealed here, in my view, is the philosopher’s illness, ‘le nom de la le`pre’ (p. 108) (‘the name of the plague’), and the justiﬁcation for disclosure is given in the preceding sentence: ‘On lui vola sa mort, lui qui avait voulu en eˆtre le maıˆ tre, et on lui vola jusqu’a` la ve´rite´ de sa mort, lui qui avait e´te´ le maıˆ tre de la ve´rite´’ (‘They stole his death from him, he who had wished to be its master, and they stole even the truth of his death from him, he who had

162

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

been the master of truth’). This gesture then begins to look like a true declaration of love, a mark of respect. The work pursued in Mauve le vierge is more or less paralleled by L’image de soi, ou l’injonction de son beau moment? which appeared the same year. In the text signed by Guibert (‘L’image de soi, ou l’injonction de son beau moment?’) the latter compares Berger’s work more to a ﬁctional enterprise than to a photographic one, before admitting that while recognising himself in the photos, he can speak of the ‘il’ (‘he’) of the photos (who is in fact a ‘je’, ‘I’), for ‘he’ resembles a ﬁctional character (‘he’ is also the photographer’s model). He then sows doubts about the work of biography that could be carried out in the book since the latter could be either exact or apocryphal.11 So the same approach of ﬁctionalisation of the self recurs, as does the play between truth and falsehood. At the thematic level, ‘Les trois quarts du monde’ is based on the problem of distorted perception, a theme made familiar from Des Aveugles and Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes. Still, one of the themes that emerges most clearly from the book is that of painting. The father, Mony, Uriel and the ‘je’ (‘I’) of the narrator all paint,12 and this introduces painting into four of the ten short stories. Similarly in ‘L’image de soi, ou l’injonction de son beau moment?’, Guibert advances the hypothesis that in common with Berger picturality could be the hallmark of his work.13 ‘La jeune ﬁlle d’a` coˆte´’ recounts more or less the failure of the enterprise of combining, this time no longer image and text as in Chapter 4, but sound and photo. The photographic desire has been triggered by the carousel of lights (MV, p. 138) but the project will come to nothing, just like the mother’s photo narrated in L’Image fantoˆme and in Mes parents. Banal, but true, as we have already seen with the failure of the photo of the mother: the ‘son et photo’ (‘sound and photo’) debacle will trigger the writing and give rise to ‘La jeune ﬁlle d’a` coˆte´’, enriching perhaps there too the immediate transcription. The body is at the centre of a number of short stories in Mauve le vierge. What fascinates the narrator of ‘La teˆte de Jeanne d’Arc’ (‘Joan of Arc’s Head’) is the wax head which he immediately wants to kiss, just as he will kiss that of Louis XVII; we will learn afterwards that the two heads were in fact cast from the same model.14 Not daring to kiss Jeanne d’Arc’s head, the narrator will photograph it and this photo will be described as a kiss (p. 89). That of the ‘philosophe’ (‘philosopher’) will be trepanned and its description will be the narrative’s chief topic (pp. 103–06). The ultimate possession will consist of eating Cistou’s

Towards the roman faux

163

ﬁnger (p. 155). The body still drives the narrative with the theme of the double and that of possession which is seemingly realised by photography. The look plays an important role too. The child refuses to let the doctor see his body, particularly at chest level, since he has something to hide; so he makes the doctor blindfold his eyes, the look being synonymous with possession.15 Often, sexual pleasure is linked to the activity of looking, an activity which even continues during the kiss.16 Beauty is read in the look, and the fact that half of Donatus’s right eye is without sight does not stop Uriel ﬁnding his right proﬁle more attractive than his left.17 Very great tenderness towards the philosopher on the narrator’s part emanates from the short story ‘Les secrets d’un homme’; likewise in ‘La jeune ﬁlle d’a` coˆte´’, the narrator will say that the story is the only way of declaring his love to the girl (p. 144). Nevertheless, swaying between love and loathing recurs throughout the short stories; thus the caresses between Donatus and Uriel are replaced by hatred, and the narrator’s feeling for the piano tune will swiftly be transformed into detestation.18 When they meet in the street the narrator will get the impression that his woman neighbour stares at him with loathing (p. 144). As for the writing in Mauve le vierge, it fully lives up to expectations; Poirot-Delpech declared that ‘de la langue franc¸aise . . . [Guibert] fait un instrument de sensibilite´ e´corche´e’19 (‘[. . .] [Guibert] makes of the French language an instrument of ﬂayed sensitivity’). In the project of the voices of the self’s enterprise, the question is whether Guibert was satisﬁed with the short story genre. The answer lies in ‘Papier magique’, a short story born of the decision by the narrator and Fernand to write a tale based on what they have lived through together. The respective titles of these stories are even put forward (p. 78). In this story the narrator admits that he longs to write Fernand a letter (p. 79). This ‘Lettre a` un fre`re d’e´criture’ was published in the review Minuit in 1982 and reprinted in La piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche (PA, pp. 63–67), which would seem to date ‘Papier magique’ around 1982 and so conﬁrm what I said above about the date of composition of the short stories in Mauve le vierge. What is important here, though, is that the narrator is not satisﬁed with ‘Papier magique’ in its short story form; at the end we read: ‘De nouveau c’e´taient les lettres que chaque jour imprudemment je lui e´crivais qui prenaient le pas sur le re´cit. C’e´taient elles le vrai re´cit’ (p. 82)20 (‘Again it was the letters I unwisely wrote him daily that took

164

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

over from the story. They were the real story’). This recalls Guibert’s statement which applies to the writing of Voyage avec deux enfants, published—that is the point—in 1982: ‘Jusque-la`, j’avais toujours e´crit mes livres comme une lettre ou un journal, avec une exigence de ve´rite´ aussi naı¨ve qu’absolue’21 (‘Up till then I had always written my books like a letter or a diary, with a requirement for truth as naive as it was absolute’). What is seen at work here is the struggle to achieve eﬀects of ﬁction while not managing to tear oneself away from the letter seen as synonymous with ‘ve´rite´’ (‘truth’). Bellour too lays stress on this aspect of Mauve le vierge: ‘Il se situe pre´cise´ment au point de brouillage des deux [la voix du romanesque ou celle de l’autobiographie], il les fait cohabiter, avivant, annulant leur diﬀe´rence’22 (‘He situates himself precisely at the point of interference between the two [the ﬁctional voice and the voice of autobiography], he makes them cohabit, exacerbating, nullifying their diﬀerence’) and, according to Marsan, the book ‘fait trembler tous les e´chafaudages des structures romanesques e´prouve´es’23 (‘shakes the framework of all tried and trusted ﬁctional structures’). With short stories like ‘Papier magique’, Mauve le vierge represents a stage in Guibert’s evolution in which he is still trying to tear himself away from the letter. At the thematic level, the body still recurs. It is also noticeable that Guibert still hovers between ‘je’ (‘I’) and ‘il’ (‘he’). What is new are the multiple identities assumed by the narrator in the diﬀerent short stories, the creation of characters (even if they are based on people he has met) and forms of experimentation between truth and falsehood.

LES GANGSTERS/FOU DE VINCENT Published at the same time as Mauve le vierge, Les Gangsters appeared under the Minuit imprint without back cover blurb or generic subtitle. Putting together various clues scattered through the book, one notices that it was written by Guibert from 25 April 1986 onwards24 and that its narrative in time starts on Tuesday 14 April and ends on 1 May; Guibert will later say that he wrote the book in ten days.25 Its composition must have taken place just after that of Mes parents and at about the same time as that of Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes, i.e. between the ‘autobiographie de jeunesse’ (‘youthful autobiography’) and the only novel where Guibert does not write himself in the

Towards the roman faux

165

form of a ‘je’ (‘I’). So what is on oﬀer in Les Gangsters? A kind of roman noir: some men have extorted 74 million francs from Suzanne and Louise (G, p. 77); the police have launched an investigation. The point to be made immediately is that Suzanne and Louise recur as principal characters for the ﬁrst time since Suzanne et Louise, though it nearly happened at the beginning of Mes parents before that book took a diﬀerent direction. This gangster story takes up two-thirds of the volume before petering out, as if the narrator had lost interest in it. He will then start telling his father three stories (pp. 78–88) and, to end, will set oﬀ with Vincent on a journey during which he will write four letters to ‘T.’ (pp. 98–107) before reviving the roman noir aspect of the book after a fashion in his last sentence: ‘Je ne l’ai pas entendu venir, je sens les mains de Vincent dans mon dos. Est-ce qu’elles me poussent ou est-ce qu’elles me caressent?’ (‘I did not hear him coming, I feel Vincent’s hands on my back. Are they pushing me or are they caressing me?’). In my view, it is not Mes parents that is a book ‘entre parenthe`ses’ (‘between parentheses’) as Guibert said, but rather Les Gangsters. Again in my view, it was not ‘programmed’ so to speak when a story about swindling (no matter if it be the one told here) made Guibert catch a glimpse of a book.26 He conﬁded to Gaudemar that he began Les Gangsters three days after the facts were uncovered, and then conﬁrmed my artiﬁcial division of the book into three sections: ‘Mais c’est un livre qui a pris sa vitesse spe´ciﬁque et a de´passe´ sa propre histoire’27 (‘But it is a book that acquired its own speciﬁc speed and overtook its own story’). Let us remember Guibert’s creative desire to take real facts and transform them through ﬁction: this news item presented him with a golden opportunity. Whereas he was going to remove himself from the pages of Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes, here he had a chance to write the ‘je’ (‘I’) and his ﬁrst name.28 Feeling no doubt that he could not repeat the literary experience of Mes parents (one cannot write every year an ‘autobiographie de jeunesse’ [‘youthful autobiography’] that is not one), he was keen in spite of everything to preserve the writing of the self. There is another very important factor in the writing of Les Gangsters, and that is Knut Hamsun’s inﬂuence on Guibert. Or rather, Knut Hamsun’s inﬂuence on Guibert has become so large29 that he needs to eliminate it, to exorcise it through the writing of Les Gangsters and through pastiche. I have spoken of two kinds of writing in Guibert.

166

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

The ‘transparent’ side is represented by Hamsun. Let us hear Guibert’s way of putting it: ‘Le mode`le de simplicite´ absolue [. . .] la purete´, la simplicite´ de son e´criture est devenue un mode`le pour moi’30 (‘The model of absolute simplicity [. . .] the purity, the simplicity of his writing has become a model for me’). This sentence could indeed be applied to the writing of Les Gangsters. Hamsun makes his entrance on page 65 with Mysteries but, in conﬁrmation of my remark above, the narrator says that this story which he nevertheless read with enthusiasm no longer appeals to him ‘comme si elle concurrenc¸ait la mienne’ (G, p. 65) (‘as if it were competing with mine’). Hamsun recurs on page 72 with the last work he published, On Overgrown Paths; we are oﬀered extracts from it on the following pages, since there is no longer any danger of its subject competing with that of the narrator. Finally, on page 78, the narrator gives his father a copy of Pan. The third basic factor in the writing of The Gangsters is the phantom character Vincent. Even if ten of the narrator’s friends are named in the book,31 not counting the family, the one who is missing and is found between the lines is Vincent. Communication with him is established by telephone or it fails.32 The narrator wants to make contact with him and travel. During this journey, set at the end of the book, Vincent sleeps most of the time and the ﬁrst words he utters to the narrator are: ‘Va te faire foutre’ (G, p. 104) (‘Fuck oﬀ’). As we have seen, in the last third of the book the story of Les Gangsters will no longer interest the narrator. Besides, during the journey with Vincent he will send letters to T. which will be transcribed in the book. As it happens, we learn from the interview with Gaudemar that this journey did not take place: ‘La ﬁn, le voyage en Vende´e, est entie`rement fausse. J’avais fait la meˆme expe´rience avec Voyage avec deux enfants’33 (‘The end, the journey in the Vende´e, is entirely false. I had had the same experience with Voyage avec deux enfants’). We note that Guibert does not manage to break with this writing tradition since he still needs to use the letter—the four letters to T.—even if they are made up. This analysis is much the same as that of ‘Papier magique’ in Mauve le vierge where, rather than the story being written, the narrator admits that he wants to write ‘Fernand’ a letter, the letters always taking the story over.34 So we still have in Les Gangsters this tug-of-war between truth and ﬁction; the book Guibert really wanted to create in writing Les Gangsters was the book published the following year: Fou de Vincent. In Fou de Vincent the same tug-of-war will recur, with one diﬀer-

Towards the roman faux

167

ence: it will no longer be the letter which will serve as narrative prop but the diary. According to Guibert, the whole of Fou de Vincent came from the diary;35 he explains in the same interview that a book is born when a character in his diary threatens to unbalance or break the everyday equilibrium. One could go so far as to say that Vincent threatened to unbalance and even break the equilibrium of Les Gangsters. So Guibert has to try and exorcise him once and for all from his diary and hence from his books, as he attempted to do with his parents in Mes parents; to bring this about he begins by ‘tuer’ (‘killing’) him on the second page of the book (FV, p. 8). So it is no longer a question here of exorcising a writer (like Hamsun in Les Gangsters) but rather a character who threatens to swamp Herve´ Guibert’s literary production. My analysis is in any case conﬁrmed by the last sentence of Les Gangsters in which the narrator has the feeling that Vincent is about to push him into the abyss and thus destroy him both as narrator and as writer (G, p. 109). After all, the narrator already has the experience of ‘T.’ for whom he began to write (La Mort propagande), then he tries to write against him, without him even (Les Aventures singulie`res and Voyage avec deux enfants), but ‘T.’ always crops up again in the writing (for example ‘Roman posthume’) to the point where Guibert gives up the struggle (Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes). One character who crosses the whole opus suﬃces; there is no need of a second. This does not mean though that Fou de Vincent is not inﬂuenced by a writer; on the contrary. Fragments d’un discours amoureux36 so inspired Guibert37 that the narrator writes after rereading this text: ‘[. . .] l’impression que je poursuis souvent des choses indique´es par Barthes’ (FV, p. 51) (‘[. . .] the impression that I am often following up things pointed out by Barthes’), conﬁrming the remarks I made in earlier chapters about Barthes’s inﬂuence on Guibert. So the book is presented in the form of fragments, with very short sentences in which there is economy of expression38 and in which the narrator practises understatement,39 with snatches of conversation and longer passages too.40 The ‘je’ (‘I’) is written in the text from the very ﬁrst page of the book. He is then identiﬁed with ‘Guibertino’, ‘mon Guibert’ (‘my Guibert’) and ‘Herve´’,41 so we cannot but associate this ‘I’ with Herve´ Guibert, being careful though to view him as a character in a book telling stories, prepared to fake reality only to own up to it afterwards, and above all seeing in Vincent a character42 as well as into himself: ‘(je suis, comme toujours dans l’e´criture, a` la fois le savant et le

168

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

rat qu’il e´ventre pour l’e´tude)’ (p. 52) (‘(I am, as always in writing, both the scientist and the rat slit open for his research)’), even when he does not knowingly wish it: ‘(la` encore c’est le personnage de roman qui s’insinue en moi)’, p. 55; ‘(here too it is the ﬁctional character insinuating itself into me)’. I have mentioned the importance of Guibert’s diary in the creation of Fou de Vincent, but moving from that to the belief that Herve´ Guibert’s diary lies open before us would be going too far. This, rather, is the way he puts it: ‘[. . .] Fou de Vincent [. . .] c’est une couture, c’est raccorde´, j’ai pris ces pie`ces de´tache´es et je les ai cousues [. . .] il y aussi des e´bauches [. . .]’43 (‘[. . .] Fou de Vincent [. . .] is a sewing job, it’s joined up, I took these spare patches and sewed them together [. . .] there are also sketches [. . .]’). The fact that the narrative takes the form of a ﬂashback invites comparison with cinematographic special eﬀects.44 The action of sewing and creating special eﬀects is far from being the same as transcribing the truth. Firstly, this book is based on a false premise: Vincent did not die falling from a third ﬂoor (FV, p. 7); he will reappear for example in Le Protocole compassionnel (PC, pp. 92, 142) and in Cytome´galovirus (Cyto., p. 78). But the fact that the narrator describes him as dead on the very second page of the book certainly proves my hypothesis about the need for Guibert to write Fou de Vincent so as to put to death this character swamping the diary and his other books, to ﬁnish with him once and for all, to expel him through literature, to stop being obsessed with Vincent. As Czarny puts it: ‘E´crire reste donc, comme dans Mes parents, le seul recours pour ‘‘ﬁxer’’ l’obsession comme on le ferait d’un ne´gatif photographique, l’exposer et la mettre a` distance pour continuer de vivre’45 (‘So writing remains, as in Mes parents, the only recourse for ‘‘ﬁxing’’ the obsession, as one would with a photographic negative, exposing it and putting it away from one so as to carry on living’). The ‘sewing’ and the ‘sewn spare patches’ at the root of Fou de Vincent are sometimes visible to the naked eye. The narrator explains on the very second page of the book that he met Vincent in 1982, and adds: ‘Depuis six ans, il envahissait mon journal. Quelques mois apre`s sa mort, je de´cidai de le retrouver dans ces notes, a` l’envers’ (FV, p. 8) (‘For the last six years he has been swamping my diary. A few months after his death I decided to ﬁnd him again in these notes, backwards’). Six years after takes us to 1988. As it happens, the fragments dated 1988 will only begin on page 30 and end on page 60, so making up a little more than a third of the book; then it will be in reverse order from 1987

Towards the roman faux

169

to 1982.46 In fact, 1982 is the year of publication of Voyage avec deux enfants, Vincent being the model for one of the characters in the book, as a textual reference reminds us (FV, p. 33). The part situated between page 8 and page 30 is the one where the joins are most visible; the tenses of the verbs can shift on the same page from the imperfect to the present, which seems to be the tense used for the diary (p. 8), and we travel too in time. In the fragment on pages 10 and 11, the narrator is in Rome where he is a boarder at the Acade´mie de France; he only went there in 1987. On page 13 he is also in Rome and Vincent phones him from Paris, asking him if the time is the same where he is. Between these two fragments we return to 1982 since the narrator shares with us the ﬁrst sentence written in his diary about Vincent. This to-ing and fro-ing will continue up to page 30. Some fragments seem added when the book was being ‘tailored’ (‘Qu’est-ce que c’e´tait? Une passion? Un amour? Une obsession e´rotique? Ou une de mes inventions?’, p. 8; ‘What was it? A passion? A love aﬀair? An erotic obsession? Or one of my inventions?’). These remarks are conﬁrmed by another fragment in which we read: ‘Curieuse impression de continuer a` e´crire un livre qu’on a remis a` l’e´diteur six mois plus toˆt [. . .] l’e´crire sur des feuilles volantes [. . .] et l’apporter ou le poster a` l’e´diteur [. . .]’, p. 13 (‘Curious feeling of going on writing a book handed in to the publisher six months earlier [. . .] writing it on loose sheets [. . .] and taking it or posting it to the publisher [. . .]’). One may wonder if the content of these loose sheets is this ﬁrst part or else the year 1988, written ‘au fur et a` mesure des joies et des malheurs’ (‘as the joys and misfortunes unfolded’). Throughout the book the narrator also notes his dreams.47 Although the book deals with the relationship between the narrator and Vincent, the narrator’s other friends drop in on the book,48 as in Les Gangsters. The intertextuality with Les Chiens is apparent, especially at the level of the sadomasochistic thematic (FV, pp. 38, 55, 72), in a fragment about one of the scenes in Les Chiens (FV, p. 31). Besides, Vincent will read Les Chiens (FV, p. 85). There are also two precise references to The Gangsters: shingles and betrayal over Pierre’s letter.49 One could almost speak of a fully-ﬂedged narrative possibility in Les Gangsters with the story of the narrator’s shingles.50 This story is less benign than is thought,51 ﬁrstly because it heralds books like A` l’ami, and secondly because it embroils the reader in the narrator’s physical suﬀering: ‘Il raconte, comme si on y e´tait, le cheminement de la de´mangeaison, la bruˆlure enveloppante, la monte´e des paroxysmes. Ailleurs, il rendra presque palpables d’autres atteintes physiques [. . .]’52

170

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

(‘He describes, as if one were there, the progression of the itch, the enveloping burning sensation, the rise of the paroxysms. Elsewhere, he will render almost palpable other physical symptoms [. . .]’), and ﬁnally because suﬀering (‘[. . .] la chose la plus obsce`ne de l’existence [. . .]’, G, p. 51; ‘[. . .] the most obscene thing in life [. . .]’) is there to be eliminated (p. 11): literature as exorcism. In Fou de Vincent the narrative is very often limited to the body and sexual acts53 with occasional gustatory memories (FV, p. 38). Even when Vincent is absent, the narrator prepares his body, indeed is concerned to regulate the temperature of the bedroom so that Vincent is eager to undress, which should allow the narrator to see his body.54 He says too that the absence of this body is more or less bearable and that he wishes to know everything there is to know on Vincent’s body.55 The new deﬁnition of the narrator’s aesthetic desire, already set out in Voyage avec deux enfants, is taken up again here, and the erotic situations described by the narrator resemble pictures or allow him to have an orgasm because he feels with regard to such and such a position an ‘aveuglement pictural’56 (‘pictorial blindness’). Elsewhere he compares the desire for sexual organs with the desire for a book or a picture (p. 82). If we take the book backwards, that is the right way round, in 1983, Vincent does not want the narrator to touch his penis and complains that he is the only one of his friends who wants to touch it, so the narrator is condemned to dream about what he would like to do.57 His ﬁrst caress dates from 1985 (p. 80). Vincent likes telling his girlie stories, only comes to see the narrator because his girl has dropped him, and only yields to the narrator’s advances when the latter plays videos about girls.58 He will even tell the narrator: ‘Tu sais y faire, si tu avais des seins je t’e´pouserais tout de suite’ (‘You know how to go about it, if you had breasts I would marry you at once’), trying more or less to get him to assume a heterosexual identity: ‘Pour me branler, Vincent m’oblige a` reˆver tout haut aux maıˆ tresses que je n’ai jamais eues’ (‘To jerk me oﬀ, Vincent makes me dream aloud about the mistresses I have never had’) or else letting himself be given a blow job because he carries on him the taste of his girlfriend whom he had sex with that same morning and has not washed since.59 Apart from girlie videos, there is another situation where the narrator can touch Vincent, and that is when the latter takes drugs (p. 75). So he ﬁnds him again thanks to a small white powder, and possessing drugs becomes synonymous with snatching Vincent’s body from him.60 Let us not forget, as the narrator reminds us, that all that which has gone before is transformed by the

Towards the roman faux

171

prism of ﬁction: ‘Obsession (toujours la verge de Vincent, comme une folie, comme une ﬁction)’ (p. 79) (‘Obsession (always Vincent’s penis, like a folly, like a ﬁction)’). Guibert always writes the body as ﬁction in his work. Les Gangsters rests on a fragile balance between love and hatred, symbolised by the book’s last sentence in which the narrator is unsure whether Vincent is pushing him or caressing him (G, p. 109). With Gottfried, the narrator will pass from desiring his body to disgust (p. 83). At the beginning of the book, the narrator says he is the friend of Suzanne, and yet we read on page 98: ‘Pour la premie`re fois de ma vie, je la hais [. . .] je la hais, mais elle est mon personnage’ (‘For the ﬁrst time in my life, I hate her [. . .] I hate her, but she is my character’). This sentence is very important with respect to the attitude of the narrator towards his characters, for reality becomes ﬁction. Guibert is prepared to disregard feelings like hatred once he has material to write (the most striking example beyond doubt is Bill in A` l’ami). Love will bring death in its wake. The gangsters will have the money within reach as soon as Louise falls in love: her ﬂame will blind her. Similarly the narrator notes in his diary a fragment on the meeting with a young boy which will turn into a trap (p. 75). That way the feeling of love leads to one’s undoing. The threat of death hangs more or less over Les Gangsters and is far from being dispelled by the three stories the narrator tells his father (pp. 78–88): real death threats to the narrator,61 intensiﬁed by his father’s informing him of a clairvoyant’s prediction that he would get himself killed, and aroused by the narrator’s own thoughts of suicide.62 Is shingles not a way for the thirty-year-old body to get acquainted with the corpse it will become (p. 103)? The narrator starts worrying that his diary will disappear; he says it is as important to him as one of his hands, and concludes: ‘Je n’ai jamais eu aussi peur pour un manuscrit, j’ai l’impression que c’est lui, pas moi, qui risque sa vie’ (‘I have never been so afraid for a manuscript, I feel it is it, not me, who is risking its life’) for the narrator relies on the power of literature not to feel himself any longer ‘dans des positions de danger’63 (‘in positions of danger’). One certainly feels that from now on something is at stake which goes beyond the conﬁnes of literature. In Fou de Vincent love hangs by a single thread. The balance between happiness and unhappiness is soon broken, and the narrator knows he must not let Vincent see that he is happy.64 Sometimes, love turns to hatred: ‘Quand est-ce que je le rayerai de la carte, ce minable

172

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

petit con?’ (‘When will I wipe him oﬀ the face of the earth, this miserable little shit?’), but this seems written without much conviction, even if the narrator knows what he must do in order to exorcise Vincent’s grip on him.65 For the narrator loves Vincent (FV, p. 36); there is the rub. He will end up losing all dignity and love will quickly be compared to despair before turning into masochism.66 The real reason for writing about Vincent is given in one of the fragments: ‘E´crire sur lui est un assouvissement’ (p. 41) (‘Writing about him is soothing’). Writing about him is a way of possessing him. Writing about him is also a way of putting down on paper the unsayable and the unmentionable.67 Herve´ Guibert’s textual courage is impressive. Czarny will write in his review of Fou de Vincent that Guibert advances ‘dans la voie de ce que Leiris appelait ‘‘la litte´rature conside´re´e comme tauromachie’’, qui par le risque qu’elle implique, me`ne l’e´crivain aux conﬁns de la litte´rature’68 (‘on the path of what Leiris calls ‘‘literature considered as bullﬁghting’’, which through the risks it involves, takes the writer to the very limits of literature’); Bellour will compare him to Sade in his project to say everything69 and Braudeau will say that Guibert is a real writer, that is ‘un homme qui s’expose’70 (‘a man who exposes himself’). We are going to see that this courage on the part of Herve´ Guibert does not apply merely to his relationship with Vincent but that it may well prove with hindsight to have foreshadowed a book like A` l’ami. To illustrate this we need to ask why the book was written backwards. I am well aware that I shall be committing what certain theorists would consider a crime of le`se-majeste´ in relating the ﬁctional heterocosm to extradiegetic facts, but it is the only way of dealing with Thanatos in Fou de Vincent. We know from the ‘Repe`res biographiques’ (‘Biographical Notes’) in Photographies that Guibert found out in January 1988 that he had AIDS, which means that the whole 1988 narrative in Fou de Vincent, as well as the fragments on pages 8 to 30 written (so far as one can tell) after 1988, are all steeped in the knowledge of this, as Guibert conﬁrms in the paratext: ‘Dans Fou de Vincent, [le sida] apparaıˆ t e´norme´ment [. . .]’71 (‘In Fou de Vincent, [AIDS] is hugely present [. . .]’). Of course the articles on Fou de Vincent of the period do not practise a reading on these lines since such information was not available to them. I too would no doubt have oﬀered a diﬀerent reading from the one that follows, inspired no doubt by Fragments d’un discours amoureux and particularly the notion of ‘catastrophe’72 (‘disaster’) or else that contained in ‘Ide´es de solutions’

Towards the roman faux

173

(‘Ideas for Solutions’).73 Yet, if one thinks about it, there was already in Les Gangsters a whole discourse on the threat hanging over the narrator, and this premonitory sentence in the diary: ‘Un jour, un jeune garc¸on apparaıˆ tra dans ma vie, qui sera un pie`ge’ (G, p. 75) (‘One day, a boy will appear in my life, who will be a trap’). Let us take the fragments presented between pages 30 and 86 in their chronology, that is to say oﬀer a reading in reverse of Fou de Vincent, a reading that will in fact re-establish the chronological order. In 1985, the narrator says that he feels he has been infected (FV, p. 81). In 1987, the word ‘sida’ (‘AIDS’) is mentioned between Vincent and the narrator (p. 76); it appears in fact on page 12 of the book, then on page 26, but because of its lack of chronology, it is really towards the end of the book that it is uttered for the ﬁrst time. The narrator even wonders if one of literature’s purposes is not to learn to be silent (p. 74). The same year he goes to the dermatologist and they discuss AIDS since Vincent has a fungal infection and wonders if it is not AIDS.74 Even so the narrator insists Vincent come up that evening and the latter calls him a ‘kamikaze’ (p. 68). Between pages 30 and 60, that is in 1988, the references multiply; thus the narrator recalls in the third fragment for 1988: ‘Vincent disait: j’ai des champignons, il disait: j’ai la gale, il disait: j’ai une syph, il disait: j’ai des poux, et j’attirais son corps contre le mien’ (p. 30) (‘Vincent would say: I have a fungus, he would say: I have scabies, he would say: I have the syph, he would say: I have lice, and I was drawing his body towards my own’). Elsewhere one ﬁnds enigmatic passages.75 Death haunts this book’s pages: in another fragment, the narrator seems to give himself two years then speaks of staying alive.76 The more the months pass, the more morbid his thoughts are: he thinks of smashing Vincent’s head in, then again of suicide.77 My retrospective ends with the year 1988. If the book had been written chronologically it would no doubt have concluded with the suicide. The narrative technique used by Guibert means that the book ends with the year 1982. As it happens, ﬁnishing the book at a time when in all likelihood Guibert was not HIV positive was no doubt a sine qua non for being able to write the self in the book and ﬁctionalise his illness by exorcising it. On page 16 of Fou de Vincent, the narrator shares with us his plans for another book: ‘un faux journal de voyage, ou un faux roman, un tour du monde en Camper avec Vincent, une arme, et peut-eˆtre Vincent deviendrait une femme dans le re´cit, s’appellerait Jane? Comme Jane Mansﬁeld’ (‘a fake travel diary, or a fake novel, a round-the-world

174

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

Campervan tour with Vincent, a weapon, and perhaps Vincent would turn into a woman in the story, would be called Jane? Like Jane Mansﬁeld’). The narrator speaks in this quotation of a fake travel diary or a fake novel a` propos of something that resembles the plot of Le Paradis (P), pointing us towards the notion that Fou de Vincent could be a fake diary. As we have amply seen above, what is told in this book is not ‘vrai’ (‘true’), and the ‘je’ (‘I’), Vincent and the bodies are all ﬁctions. The deﬁnition of the fake diary would be the same as that of the roman faux: a diary in which je (I) tell lies. Sure enough, this deﬁnition applies to Fou de Vincent. To recap on the analysis of these two books by Guibert. As has been seen, the gangster subject is dropped in the course of Les Gangsters, being rather a pretext for writing, ‘se raconter [. . .] lui, son homosexualite´, ses peurs, ses amitie´s, les accidents qui le traversent, son travail d’e´crivain—et l’e´criture meˆme de ce livre, qu’on voit naıˆ tre a` partir de l’e´ve´nement, et lui donner corps’78 (‘recounting [. . .] himself, his homosexuality, his fears, his friendships, the accidents he encounters, his work as a writer—and the very writing of this book, which one sees being born of the event, and giving it substance’). With Les Gangsters, Guibert takes us behind the scenes of literary creation rather than of the criminal underworld. What should we call Les Gangsters with its tone of an ‘enqueˆte’ (‘investigation’) which leaves us up in the air, the copying out of its four letters and its lack of back-cover blurb and generic subtitle? Bellour, as usual, shows remarkable perceptiveness in describing this book: ‘l’eﬀet de ﬁction—diﬀe´rent de la croyance au roman’79 (‘the eﬀect of ﬁction—diﬀerent from the belief in the novel’). To come back to the phenomenon of publishing two books a year in 1988 and 1989, with the works published by Gallimard, the short stories and the novel (Mauve le vierge and L’Incognito), Guibert pursues the task of writing in the literary tradition. With the books published by Minuit, having already said that the gangsters were not the subject of Les Gangsters, we have the fake roman noir and the fake diary (Les Gangsters and Fou de Vincent). That is where Guibert’s real work in pursuit of the writing of the self and the interplay of truth and falsehood takes place. My choice of chapter title has been vindicated: we are indeed on the way to the roman faux. In Guibert’s enterprise of the voices of the self we are at a turningpoint (and it is diﬃcult to concentrate on literature at such a moment and not think of the man). Guibert knows he is more or less doomed. A period of literary crisis is awaiting him.80 Fou de Vincent could have

Towards the roman faux

175

been the last book written by Guibert. Everything indicates that he asked himself the question: ‘Le (un) travail de la litte´rature: apprendre a` se taire’ (FV, p. 74) (‘The (a) role of literature: learning to say nothing’). It is however at this time that Guibert conceived the project of writing Adultes, the ‘biographie romance´e de l’aˆge adulte’ (I, p. 22) (‘the novelised biography of adulthood’), the drafting of which was apparently started in autumn 1987 (Ami, p. 220), to be published no doubt by Gallimard. It would probably have been read as the ‘suite’ (‘sequel’) to Mes parents, the ‘autobiographie de jeunesse’ (‘youthful autobiography’), and the marketing strategy would have been rapidly put in place. In fact, instead of falling silent, Guibert is going to indulge in a veritable bookish bulimia, as we are about to witness.

L’INCOGNITO Published in 1989 by Gallimard, L’Incognito takes up the tradition of the back-cover blurb and the subtitle ‘roman’ (‘novel’) once again. Most of the action takes place in ‘l’Acade´mie espagnole’ (‘the Spanish Academy’) in Rome (I, p. 11) where the narrator, a certain Hector Lenoir, lives. L’Incognito recounts his life and what links it and the murder of Guido Jallo. Just like Les Gangsters, it is a book that borders on the roman noir with murder thrown in; that at least is what is heralded on the back cover. But just as for the investigation announced on the back cover of Mes parents, which in fact took up less than a tenth of the book, the one foreshadowed in L’Incognito is mentioned for the ﬁrst time on page 119 only, then again on page 180, and a third time two pages later before getting under way only on page 186. The story of Bisserier and Guido Jallo will come to a deﬁnitive end on page 211. The book will conclude with an episode, already begun on page 17, that could be called ‘Le Gitan’ (‘The Gipsy’) (I, pp. 212–27). So it can be seen that the story of the murder announced on the back cover takes up hardly more than a tenth of the book. In fact, this back cover represents a collage of fragments of L’Incognito not reproduced in any chronological order, but with an extremely detailed timetable (from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m.). Like Les Gangsters, L’Incognito is in my view a book that was not planned; witness the following: ‘[. . .] j’ai commence´ ce livre inattendu dans la journe´e du 15 [. . .] j’ai entrevu un livre d’une centaine de pages, a` e´crire en une dizaine de jours [. . .] mais ce livre n’a plus ﬁni de se

176

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

de´vider devant moi, il me tanne, je l’e´cris la nuit a` blanc au cours de mes insomnies [. . .]’ (I, p. 180) (‘[. . . I began this unexpected book on the 15th [. . .] I anticipated a book of a hundred or so pages that would take about ten days to write [. . .] but this book keeps on unravelling before my eyes, it drives me up the wall, I write it at breakneck speed when I cannot sleep at night [. . .]’). Just like Mes parents, the book drives the narrator mad. Just like Les Gangsters, it is a news item that resurfaces in writing: ‘L’Incognito, par exemple, je ne savais pas comment le terminer. Une histoire criminelle est arrive´e dans ma vie quand je ne l’attendais plus: c’e´tait la ﬁn de mon livre’81 (‘L’Incognito, for example, I did not know how to end it. A crime story occurred in my life when I least expected it: it was the end of my book’). Through the Spanish Academy in Rome the readers of the time could recognise, if only by perusing the back cover of Mauve le vierge published the year before, the Acade´mie de France in Rome where Guibert was a bursary-holder. To be accepted he had—like all other candidates—to submit a particular project in support of his application (pp. 20–22). This project was the writing of a book that never saw the light of day but which haunts the pages of L’Incognito; it is at once present and absent from L’Incognito. There exists a manuscript at the I.M.E.C. entitled Adultes, consisting of one typed page followed by 186 handwritten sheets; I want to draw attention to a couple of features in it. Firstly, the narrator says ‘il’ (‘he’) and not ‘je’ (‘I’). Then we ﬁnd in the margin a sentence written by Herve´ Guibert and circled: ‘faire des personnages’ (‘create characters’). These two elements are very important for my study. Not using the ‘I’ is going against the writing of the self in Mes parents, Les Gangsters and Fou de Vincent. ‘create characters’ is a metaphorical knotted handkerchief (a reminder not to overlook something one intends doing), what one intends doing, i.e. what one has decided to do, not necessarily what one wants to do. That is the problem. When Guibert was asked about his past, he referred to Adultes in reply. After putting down a few biographical markers, he went on: Tout c¸a, j’ai essaye´ de l’e´crire dans un gros livre dont je parle dans L’Incognito et A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie [. . .] c’est quatre cents pages, dont seulement deux cents dactylographie´ es. Un livre qui me semble rate´ de bout en bout par son principe meˆme, par sa platitude, par sa chronologie qui fabrique une sorte d’ennui!82 (I tried to write all that in the big book I talk about in L’Incognito and A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie [. . .] it is four hundred pages long, of which only two hundred are typed. A book which seems to me a failure from end to end

Towards the roman faux

177

by virtue of its very principle, by its platitude, by its chronology which produces a kind of boredom!)

What has to be borne in mind in this declaration is that Guibert is dissatisﬁed with the content, form and basis of Adultes. Needless to say, he insisted that the book remain unpublished, even asking Jules to burn it (Ami, p. 220). To ﬁnd out more, let us look at the references to the composition of Adultes in L’Incognito. When the narrator of L’Incognito refers to Adultes, he says that he is writing the story of his life (I, p. 81). We have already had the ‘autobiographie de jeunesse’ (‘youthful autobiography’) with Mes parents, so we could suppose that Adultes deals with the next stage in the narrator’s life. The narrator gets down to work, but is unable to devote more than two hours a day to Adultes (I, p. 61). On page 106 we are told that the story of his life is going marvellously well, and further on that he is in a good mood because it is going well (p. 123). We learn a bit more about the content: ‘C’est l’histoire de ma vie, ces quinze dernie`res anne´es, juste avant d’arriver ici, et de celle de mes amis qui ont gravite´ autour’ (p. 124) (‘It is the story of my life, these last ﬁfteen years, just before arriving here, and of the lives of the friends who revolved around me’). The narrator then starts typing his manuscript (p. 132). But all at once there is the odd false note. The narrator is a prey to boredom, saying that this boredom is connected with this story of his life, now bound up in a narrative, and concluding: ‘Je ne suis plus personne’ (p. 176, my italics) (‘I am no longer anyone’). The disidentiﬁcation which was the narrative choice of Adultes has functioned so well that ‘je’ (‘I’) is no longer anyone. We are at the opposite pole here of the voices of the self but also of the roman faux (‘[. . .] je suis devenu un personnage, je m’appelle machin-chose, je m’embrouille dans la chronologie [. . .]’, p. 61; ‘[. . .] I have become a character, I am called thingummy-whatsit, I get muddled in the chronology [. . .]’). We learn from this quotation that Guibert fabricated a false identity for himself in Adultes; that in my view is the chief explanation for the work’s failure. Guibert has abandoned for the time being the deﬁnition and composition of the roman faux to write a book awkwardly balanced between autobiography, biography, novel and roman faux (‘the novelised biography of adulthood’, p. 22). There is however a second reason for the failure of Adultes. The stumbling block seems to be the book’s ﬁrst paragraph: ‘Cela fait plusieurs mois que je triture mentalement mon premier paragraphe, du

178

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

coup il ne veut pas sortir, je me force, tout ce que je pose sur le papier me re´pugne, je de´chire, je recommence, je de´chire, de´chire [. . .]’ (pp. 52– 53) (‘For several months now I have been mentally ﬁddling with my ﬁrst paragraph, so it refuses to emerge, I force myself, everything I set down on paper puts me oﬀ, I tear it up, I start again, I tear it up, tear it up [. . .]’). We will have to await A` l’ami, published a year later, to learn what was in that ﬁrst paragraph. It is so important it has to be quoted in its entirety: [. . .] je n’avais pas le courage d’affronter sa vraie premie`re phrase, qui me venait aux le`vres, et que je repoussais chaque fois le plus loin possible de moi comme une vraie male´diction, taˆchant de l’oublier car elle e´tait la pre´monition la plus injuste du monde, car je craignais de la valider par l’e´criture: ‘‘Il fallait que le malheur nous tombe dessus.’’ Il le fallait, quelle horreur, pour que mon livre voie le jour. (Ami, p. 221) ([. . .] I did not have the courage to face up to its true ﬁrst sentence, which sprang to my lips, and which I pushed away from me each time as far as I could like a real curse, trying to forget it since it was the most unjust premonition in the world and because I was afraid of validating it through writing: ‘It was intended that misfortune should befall us.’ It was intended, what a ghastly thought, in order that my book should see the light of day.)

The sentence to be written is truly the one that speaks of misfortune. Let me quote again the epigraph of my book: ‘To have the courage to be oneself, to say oneself, to show oneself and to let all the secrets ﬂow, to invent some’ (PA, p. 77). This declaration represents Guibert’s writerly demands. Let us not forget that if the stay in Rome and therefore the beginning of the writing of Adultes dates from autumn 1987 (I, p. 119), Guibert will learn in the middle of writing Adultes and L’Incognito too that he is HIV positive (in January 1988). If Adultes was never published it is because Guibert could not write the misfortune on the very ﬁrst page, as he will be able to do in A` l’ami (‘J’ai eu le sida pendant trois mois’, Ami, p. 9; ‘I have had AIDS for three months’). This revelation has repercussions, too, on my reading of L’Incognito. If one rereads, in the light of the declarations above, the ﬁrst page of L’Incognito, one ﬁnds a direct reference to AIDS: ‘[. . .] trois ans plus toˆt, j’avais arreˆte´ de travailler, j’e´tais persuade´ d’avoir le sida, je ne voulais pas e´crire n’importe quoi avant de mourir’ (I, p. 11) (‘[. . .] three years earlier, I had stopped working, I was convinced I had AIDS, I did not wish to write any old thing before dying’). Stopping writing is associated with being HIV positive and reﬂects like a mise-en-abıˆme the impossibility of writing the ﬁrst paragraph of Adultes (pp. 52–53). The

Towards the roman faux

179

other factor paralysing the writing is the fear of writing any old thing. Indeed what should one write when one knows one is doomed? Should one even carry on writing at all? That was the question the narrator of Fou de Vincent asked himself.83 On closer analysis, the sentence quoted above seems to indicate, by the choice of the imperfect, that the narrator is no longer convinced he has AIDS. As it happens, this impression is short-circuited by the following sentence: ‘Il y a quatre ans de´ja`; le sida vous laisse un peu de temps pour crever’ (‘Four years ago already; AIDS leaves you a bit of time to snuﬀ it’). By returning to the present (and in passing gaining a year), the narrator seems to indicate that he still feels he has AIDS and that he has perhaps had it for four years. Having written the illness on the very ﬁrst page of L’Incognito, Guibert could be thought to have cause to be pleased. Still, with an element of hindsight he will say: C’est une blague, L’Incognito, un jeu de massacre, quelque chose de syste´matique dans sa me´chancete´, dans sa fausse me´chancete´ [. . .] je l’ai e´crit a` cause des livres de Mathieu Lindon [. . .] L’Incognito a e´te´ un de´rapage, je ne l’ai pas tout a` fait controˆle´, c’est le seul de mes livres pour lequel je n’ai pas d’affection.84 (It is a joke, L’Incognito, an Aunt Sally, there is something systematic about its nastiness, its fake nastiness [. . .] I wrote it because of the books of Mathieu Lindon [. . .] L’Incognito was a slip-up, I did not keep it quite in check, it is the only one of my books that I feel no affection for.)

Let us note in passing that the book is inﬂuenced by the works of Mathieu Lindon, and more precisely by ‘ses formules d’esprit, d’humour’85 (‘his witty, humorous way of putting things’). There is another writer who seems inﬂuential, and that is Gogol. When ‘la Crevette’ asks him if he is going to recount everything that happens at the Academy, the narrator says no, denying imitating Gogol in Adultes (I, p. 55), which implies that he ‘fait du Gogol’ (‘imitates Gogol’) in L’Incognito. Finally, continuing the tradition established in the earlier works in which Guibert tries to exorcise one author per book, Chekhov haunts these pages (‘[. . .] je ve´ne`re ce type qui m’empoisonne [. . .]’, p. 61; ‘[. . .] I worship this chap who drives me nuts [. . .]’). Chekhov will be called a ‘petit con’ (‘little twat’) and, ﬁnally, the narrator will write himself down as ‘l’anti-Tchekhov’86 (‘the anti-Chekhov’). One can hardly fail to grasp that Guibert adored Chekhov (hence the phrase ‘fake nastiness’ to describe L’Incognito).87 That said, and to pick up the thread of my argument again, let us

180

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

try to throw some light on Guibert’s reasons for saying that L’Incognito was the only book he felt no aﬀection for. To understand his statement we need to compare it with the following passage from the book: ‘[. . .] je n’arrive pas a` comprendre ou` je me place moi-meˆme pre´sentement a` l’inte´rieur de la dure´e de ce livre, je crains qu’il me de´passe, ou qu’il reste inacheve´’ (I, p. 180, my italics) (‘[. . .] I cannot manage to understand where I place myself at the moment inside this work’s timescale, I am afraid the book will prove beyond me, or remain unﬁnished’). What poses a problem in L’Incognito, clearly, is the place of the ‘je’ (‘I’) of Hector Lenoir, whose ﬁrst name we will only learn on page 111 (let us note in passing that the pseudonym Lenoir had already been used in La Mort propagande). In expressing himself so openly in this passage, the ‘je’ (‘I’) seems to transcend the character of Lenoir to let Guibert inﬁltrate the text beyond the pseudonym. As it happens, what ‘Guibert’ tells us is that the fact of getting inside Hector Lenoir’s skin leads to a process of disidentiﬁcation. The pages of L’Incognito testify to a real moment of crisis for the writer. The Adultes project, undertaken before the conﬁrmation of the diagnosis but when Guibert strongly suspected that he was HIV positive, no longer made any sense, except if he wrote the ﬁrst sentence bearing on the misfortune. The project glimpsed through the experience of the Villa Me´dicis (L’Incognito) is inﬁltrated on all sides by AIDS and death: J’ai de´ja` duˆ laisser de nombreux paragraphes en suspens pour courir jusqu’a` cette page. A` la joie d’e´crire a succe´de´ la terreur d’en eˆtre interrompu. Ce livre menace ma raison [. . .] on dit que le virus se tapit dans le cerveau et e´puise le syste`me nerveux. Je me sens a` la veille d’un coma. Avec le livre j’ai l’impression d’effacer le temps, au fur et a` mesure, de plus en plus vite, pour laisser le moins de marge possible entre le temps conscient et le temps perdu de la mort. (pp. 180–81) (I have already had to leave a number of paragraphs in the air in order to hurry to this page. The joy of writing has been succeeded by the terror of being interrupted. This book is a threat to my sanity [. . .] the virus is said to lurk in the brain and exhaust the nervous system. I feel on the verge of a coma. With the book I have the feeling of obliterating time more and more rapidly as I go along, so as to leave as little leeway as possible between conscious time and the lost time of death.)

So it can be seen that the virus threatens the very existence of L’Incognito. AIDS inﬁltrates and writes itself in the book, to Guibert’s reluctant body almost. I will oﬀer a reading of the book which will concentrate on the premonitions (all the premonitions of Les Gangsters and of Fou de Vincent come back to mind and are now explained), the

Towards the roman faux

181

allusions to AIDS or to a fatal illness and the equation between sex and death. My analysis will agree with that of Darrieussecq who sees in L’Incognito a deception-novel, ‘faux roman policier et vrai roman du sida’88 (‘fake detective novel and true AIDS novel’). At the level of allusions, as early as on the back cover murders by exchanges of ﬂuids are spoken of without one being able to tell if it is a matter of contamination through needles or sperm. There are no less than ten allusions to an illness that threatens the narrator’s life89 and is called either ‘malheur’ (‘misfortune’) or ‘mon destin’ (‘my fate’).90 It gives the book its internal cohesion. For example, an entire passage made up of diﬀerent stories is in fact linked by the themes of superstition and of premonition (pp. 181–85). At the level of direct references to AIDS, apart from the ﬁrst page of the book, the narrator admits as early as page 54 to being terriﬁed of the disease. Later on he will say that the scarf which he has thrown away and which he rubbed himself against contained AIDS in such concentration that he should have donated it to the Institut Pasteur (p. 76). The word AIDS is written a further eight times.91 Human relationships are described as problematic. Social contact with other members of the Academy is sterile on the whole, whether it be with the architect couple Dan and Linser or with Cerisy and ‘sa copine’ (‘his girlfriend’).92 Lenoir will only feel at ease at the Academy when he is disguised, as on the day of Mardi Gras, since he will have become The Incognito: ‘Personne ne nous a vus, personne ne nous a reconnus [. . .]’93 (‘Nobody saw us, nobody recognised us [. . .]’). A strong feeling of loneliness exudes from the narrator, who only seems able to communicate with longstanding friends like Bibi, Clarinette, Mateovitch and Matou,94 perhaps because they know. Thus, when he sleeps in the same bed as Mateovitch, the narrator whispers to him that he must have AIDS (p. 12). When Matou asks to share the big bed with him, the narrator replies: ‘Je ne veux pas que tu attrapes ma gale’ (p. 98) (‘I do not want you to catch my mange’). And yet even with his friends the narrator does not manage to ﬁnd comfort, admitting to Gustave that he was bored to death with Bibi, Christinou and their children, conﬁding to his writing that he cannot stand the faults of his friends Mateovitch and Gustave any longer, and concluding: ‘Je suis devenu incapable d’aimer’95 (‘I have become incapable of love’). The only people he will indentify with will be Gallo, Bisserier and the Gipsy; this phenomenon needs to be looked into more closely. The narrator will identify instantly with Guido Jallo (‘Et c’e´tait

182

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

e´vident que ce Guido Jallo aurait pu eˆtre moi, c’e´tait eﬀarant’, p. 182, ‘And it was obvious that this Guido Jallo could have been me, it was unbelievable’), realising at once that he is made to be the character in his novel. Let us not forget that this Jallo has been murdered (p. 186), so the narrator associates himself with a dead man. Later on in the narrative he will associate his body with Jallo’s (‘Mon corps e´tait devenu celui de Guido Jallo [. . .]’, p. 197; ‘My body had become that of Guido Jallo [. . .]’). But in a subtler way the narrator identiﬁes also with Bisserier. The moment he sees him he notices that Bisserier has red blisters and wonders whether he is ill, concluding: ‘Quoi qu’il en soit, Bisserier et moi, au premier regard, on s’est compris’ (p. 70) (‘Whatever it was, Bisserier and I understood each other at ﬁrst glance’), as if communication between human beings now passed through this death threat. That is exactly what Bisserier will say of his ﬁrst meeting with Jallo, reported further on (p. 187). Lenoir will indeed see the same blisters as on Bisserier’s face appearing on his own and will then compare himself to Bisserier before telling Matou that they must be a sign of AIDS (pp. 97–98). Lenoir’s identiﬁcation with Bisserier is such that when the latter speaks of a sword of Damocles hanging over his head, the narrator will say he does not know if he is talking about the virus or the Guido Jallo aﬀair (p. 185). Similarly, at the end of the book, the narrator will learn that Jallo’s story could be a monumental con engineered by Bisserier and aimed at playing him a nasty trick. He will then say: ‘Comme j’aimerais que cette histoire soit fausse! Pour moi, elle tourne tellement au cauchemar . . .’ (p. 209) (‘How I would love this story to be false! For me it is becoming such a nightmare . . .’), without our knowing once again if he is talking about Jallo’s story or that of the AIDS diagnosis. The Gipsy represents also for Lenoir a new fantasised threat of death. In the ﬁrst place, he has taken an Englishman’s eye out (p. 17) in an episode recalling that of Des Aveugles, since that is what is held in store for the ‘je’ (‘I’) narrator by his favourite blind person (Av., p. 135). Then, given his taste for girls and porn videos featuring girls, he reminds one somewhat of the Vincent of Fou de Vincent. At their very ﬁrst meeting the narrator wonders if the Gipsy is not going to knock him down when he makes a slip between ‘de´sir’ (‘desire’) and ‘air’ in German (p. 217). For the narrator is drawn to the Gipsy like a magnet, to the extent of putting on his clothes when he is away and feeling ‘parfaitement bien dans ses veˆtements’ (p. 221) (‘feeling perfectly at home in his clothes’) before going for a stroll round the village,

Towards the roman faux

183

intoxicated by his rig-out; never had he felt so at ease. Once again, as for the Mardi Gras at the Academy, it is only when he gets inside someone else’s skin, when he is disguised, that he accepts himself. That could serve as a mise-en-abıˆme for the book’s narrative choice: it is only in taking on Hector Lenoir’s identity that Guibert can write the illness. That said, he also needs humour. After the episode in which Lenoir has disguised himself as a ‘Gitan’ (‘Gipsy’), Gustave tells him that the Gipsy has a stubborn fungus that is probably on his clothes, which leads the narrator to reﬂect: ‘Ce n’est pas ma veine: j’attrape tout ce que je touche, tout ce que je lis qui existe. C’est en lisant les journaux que j’ai contracte´ le sida. Je suis immuno-de´ﬁcitaire’ (p. 222) (‘I am jolly unlucky; I catch everything I touch, everything I read that exists. It was through reading the newspapers that I contracted AIDS. I am immunodeﬁcient’). Through comedy and humour the narrator manages to write that he has contracted AIDS; moreover, by linking sexual desire and the AIDS disease in this way, he establishes an association between desire and fear and, by implication, between love and death. When, lying in bed, he hears a crash, he will think at once that the Gipsy has knocked Gustave out and has just now split his head open (p. 225), whereas it will be learnt through Gustave that one of the bed legs has given way. The dialogue at the moment of the Gipsy’s departure also corresponds to the end of L’Incognito; when the narrator tells the Gipsy that they will meet again, the latter replies: ‘Oui, dans une autre vie’ (p. 227) (‘Yes, in another life’). Does he know something that we do not about the death threat weighing down on both the narrator and himself? In any event, the question is left hanging in the air. Although sex is one of the driving forces in L’Incognito and the Gipsy episode is shot through with it, the narrator is curiously detached from it. The sexual experiences recounted in the book happen to others: to Gustave, Matou or the cats.96 At other times the narrator wallows in the spectacle of young men on the game (pp. 169 and 177). He copulates with his radiator or makes do with substitutes like the gigolo’s aftershave or the Gipsy’s clothes.97 When he gets into contact with one of the rent boys he will submit to the rituals of this sort of encounter, but in reversing the roles; it is he who will suck the tart oﬀ, and taking a johnny from his pocket will ask the boy if he would like to be buggered, before conﬁding to his writing: ‘je n’en ai pas envie mais je ne vois pas ce qu’on peut faire d’autre [. . .]’ (p. 172) (‘I am not keen but I do not see what else we can do [. . .]’). The rent boy will instead suggest reversing the roles (or rather re-establishing them) but the

184

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

narrator will refuse, ending up converting all his pleasure into a kissing scene (already recounted in L’Homme blesse´ and Les Aventures singulie`res), as if he had lost all desire to engage in the sexual act. On reﬂection it is clear that at no time in the book is he actively involved in the sexual act, even with Bibi, the latter being the active partner there. When they meet a boy who appeals to them, the narrator thinks: ‘Si on a le sida, on va tout de meˆme pas saloper ce garc¸on’ (p. 121) (‘If we have got AIDS, we are surely not going to infect this lad’). The way the narrator perceives his body, which after all is the locus of identiﬁcation par excellence, is doubtless not unconnected with this sexual apathy: ‘Nos corps sont devenus des cobras, des mygales, des piranhas, des tarentules, des scorpions’, p. 222 (‘Our bodies have become cobras, mygales, piranhas, tarantulas, scorpions’). The narrator’s experience of sexuality is found rather in Fou de Vincent, published the same year, conﬁrming my analysis regarding the choice of ﬂashback narrative in that work, as if the narrator were able to regain his sexuality in all its carefreeness only by ﬁctionalising himself in the form of a ﬂashback from 1988 to 1982. By ending the book in 1982 he revisited, through the writing, a time when he was not HIV positive and could express his sexuality freely. There is another area that deserves attention, and that is photography and pictures. As he watches the cats mating, fascinated for hours, the narrator has a revelation: ‘En un e´clair de fascination ou d’exaspe´ration, un ensemble d’e´le´ments a remonte´ a` la surface, comme un bouillonnement dans un typhon [. . .]’ (I, p. 152) (‘In a ﬂash of fascination or exasperation, an ensemble of elements rose to the surface, like a seething mass in a typhoon [. . .]’). At the sight of this spectacle, the narrator has become aware of what had up till then been unconscious or repressed, namely that the little picture of the couple throwing themselves in the water, the double suicide in the Morbelli picture and the photo stolen from Doria all write the crime,98 and the scene of the narrator and Mateovitch acting out a hanging could be added to the list (p. 12). The narrator falls head-over-heels for the picture of the couple jumping into the sea until it turns out that the work is a fake, a coverup for a hoax (p. 99), but he has drawn some lessons from it for the photo sessions he is planning (‘[. . .] des crimes, et des doubles suicides’, p. 152; ‘[. . .] some crimes and double suicides’): he might as well start from imitation, artiﬁce and faking in order to succeed in representing the real. He will execute these photos with the other boarders at the

Towards the roman faux

185

Academy, using knives and revolvers as props: Fistounette murdering Matou by sticking a dagger in his back, the double suicide of the painter Coda and his wife Cathy, and the photo of Dany threatening Linser with his revolver. The photographic gesture will be linked to death, and what is more the narrator will only photograph couples; this is no doubt connected with the fact that it was of these same couples that he had been thinking when watching the cats mating just before his ‘re´ve´lation’ (‘revelation’). This included visions ‘de ces couples qui poursuivent les gestes paisibles de leur vie commune’ (p. 152) (‘of these couples who carry on the peaceable activities of their life together’). He will need to transform these ‘peaceable activities’ into murders and suicides in order to enable Thanatos to enter the homes of these apparently heterosexual couples; it will also be for him an incognito way of getting into contact with the other boarders and, by means of the photos, writing what preoccupies him. We saw above the many diﬃculties the narrator encountered in making social contact with the other boarders. He will manage through photography to communicate in all its violence his overwhelming sense of death; this stratagem, though, will undermine even his grasp of reality. When he meets a couple in a street in Rome he immediately thinks of the only conceivable method of communicating with them: ‘Ils me feraient tous les deux un si bel assassinat sur une terrasse a` Ravello, Bernard e´tranglerait Gabriella sur fond de coucher de soleil’ (p. 163) (‘The two of them would do such a nice murder for me on a terrace at Ravello, Bernard would strangle Gabriella against a sunset backdrop’). This piece of impromptu staging is revelatory in as much as the narrator can no longer envisage any relationship with others that does not involve crime and in which, incognito, he reveals his illness. As with the episode of the picture above, deception will never have the last word in L’Incognito and, in a sense, this will serve as a lesson in the writing of A` l’ami. Thus the narrator invents a lie that backﬁres because he is believed (I, p. 103). The lie to Linser slides into cruelty: the narrator says he is repelled by lies and is tortured by them in his turn, but he cannot put the clock back: ‘je me de´couvre bourreau torture´ par sa propre technique’ (p. 210) (‘I ﬁnd myself a torturer tortured by his own methods’). On the other hand, when he tells the truth neither Matou nor Gustave will believe him, hence he draws this conclusion: ‘Comme quoi il ne suﬃt pas de dire la ve´rite´’ (pp. 137–38) (‘That shows it is not enough to tell the truth’); perhaps he should pull out both stops and use the roman faux.

186

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

L’Incognito is the true turning-point in Guibert’s work. The discovery that he was HIV positive represented for Guibert a moment of crisis: he had to confront his mortality, knowing that he was doomed. As the narrator of L’Incognito himself says on the very ﬁrst page of the book: ‘I did not wish to write any old thing before dying . . .’ (I, p. 11). In so far as he has been able to write AIDS on the very ﬁrst page of the book, Guibert has succeeded in writing himself incognito in the novel, but it is precisely the fact of donning Lenoir’s identity that does not satisfy him. The major step he still has to take is to rid himself of pseudonyms and write a narratorial ‘je’ (‘I’) identiﬁable with the writer Herve´ Guibert. From this viewpoint L’Incognito is almost a roman faux, the only diﬀerence being that L’Incognito is a novel in which ‘il’ (‘he’) (Hector Lenoir) is telling the lies and not a novel in which ‘je’ (‘I’) tell them. It seems that Guibert set several projects in motion before writing A` l’ami. We learn in an interview that as soon as he had ﬁnished L’Incognito he threw himself into the writing of another book before his friend Savitzkaya ordered him to stop by telling him he would go mad otherwise. During the summer he then began another about his three best friends who were making him cross, choosing them as material for his book in order to ‘les de´biner, dire du mal d’eux’ (‘run them down, say nasty things about them’). It was only when one of these friends collapsed at the thought of the book he was writing that Guibert abandoned the project.99 If this information is set alongside remarks made in another interview it transpires that the ﬁrst abandoned work was called in fact ‘La Mort de Gaspard’100 and that the book about his friends was inspired by a book of Thomas Bernhard’s, Trees to Fell, and particularly a story entitled ‘An Irritation’.101 Guibert ﬁnished this narrative but never published it. There is a third book mentioned in this interview, which Guibert calls an ‘espe`ce de roman villageois’ (‘kind of rural novel’), claiming that it was inspired by reading Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest after Simenon’s death.102 This short novel is part of La piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche (PA, pp. 149–96). It is the only one of the three projects to have been published, so I need to examine its content. Even if the back cover appears to indicate that La chair fraıˆche was ‘probablement’ (‘probably’) completed in 1990, Guibert seems to date this text before the composition of A` l’ami,103 which explains my reasons for studying it in this chapter. He says too that he has decided not to publish it but that this will be done one day when he has the time

Towards the roman faux

187

to go over it.104 We will never know if Herve´ Guibert did or did not have the time to revise La chair fraıˆche, but that need not stop us considering the genre used and the text’s content, so long as we bear in mind that this is a posthumous piece of writing. La chair fraıˆche is a story of three French priests (Abbe´ Sandre, Abbe´ Rosier and Abbe´ Billot)105 involved in a truly latinate imbroglio. Abbe´ Sandre has disappeared, leaving behind him the memory of the ritual of the washing of boys’ feet in front of the altar as well as the mystery of the pornographic videos and of the purchase of scores of mattresses.106 Abbe´ Rosier does not last long either and disappears; it will be said that he was in the habit of shooting up (p. 158). He´le`ne sees in the Abbe´ Billot something deeply phoney and the children will accuse him of treachery.107 The villagers will then try to ‘de´meˆler le vrai du faux’ (p. 162) (‘disentangle truth from falsehood’). Then a whole series of anonymous letters starts arriving, interspersed with the attempted murder (dressed up as suicide) of Ve´ronica, and interrupted only by the death of the old bishop,108 but no one will ﬁnd out that he it was who sent them. The only two themes that could link La chair fraıˆche to L’Incognito are loneliness and death: loneliness characterises the life of the three priests and death is inserted in the text with the disappearance of Abbe´ Sandre at the beginning and of the old bishop at the end, with in the middle of the text the death of love in whose memory the builder has erected a tomb (p. 188). In the only interview where La chair fraıˆche is mentioned, Guibert is, to put it mildly, unsure about genres. As was seen above, he speaks of an ‘espe`ce de roman villageois’ (my italics) (‘sort of rural novel’). He will also say that the text is ‘une sorte de re´cit policier, avec des fantoˆmes, des re´apparitions’109 (my italics) (‘a sort of detective story, with ghosts and reappearances’) which he has transposed to France with Italian models taken from the village he holidays in (it is of course Elba). Here we have again the play of truth and falsehood, with ﬁction being produced by the tension arising from it. It is the relationship between truth and falsehood which characterises the diﬀerent texts studied in this chapter, with a tendency to disclosure. When Les Gangsters was published Guibert aﬃrmed his literary credo: ‘Mon expe´rience, c’est peut-eˆtre cela: quand je disparaıˆ trai, j’aurai tout dit’110 (‘My experience, it is perhaps this: when I disappear, I will have said everything’). Thus in Mauve le vierge it will be learnt that the philosopher’s illness was ‘le nom de la le`pre’ (‘the name of the plague’). The narrator will take risks, too, in Fou de

188

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

Vincent, since the coating of ﬁction will be very thin. These risks wil be all the greater if one refers to my reading of the text showing that the illness is already being written in these pages. In the same interview Guibert will go on to say: ‘Je me serai acharne´ a` re´duire cette distance entre les ve´rite´s de l’expe´rience et de l’e´criture’111 (‘I will have striven to reduce the distance between the truths of experience and of writing’). As it happens, this eﬀort will be dependent upon the genre used by Guibert. In Mauve le vierge, as he is composing ‘Papier magique’ (‘Magic paper’), the narrator says that it is the letters he writes to his friend which constitute the real story. Mimicking Hamsun, Guibert speaks a` propos of Les Gangsters of the transparency of the writing; there too he will end up resorting to the letter. This same concern for transparency is in my view the driving force behind Fou de Vincent (‘re´duire la distance entre soi et le livre’, FV, p. 13; ‘reduce the distance between oneself and the book’), since Guibert has recourse to the diary in that work. He does not however seem to have found the literary genre best suited to his project of saying all. Just as with the letters in Lettres d’E´gypte, the immediate transcription in Fou de Vincent impoverishes the ﬁction and the narrator is driven to postponing the day of reckoning: ‘Je garde en moi la soire´e des heures et des heures, des jours, avant de la raconter’ (FV, p. 33) (‘I keep the evening within myself for hours and hours, for days, before recounting it’), ending up getting behind in his notebook even (p. 65). The dream of immediate transcription does not allow the work of memory which is the chief ingredient enriching the ﬁction. Neither the short story, nor the letter, nor the diary will satisfy him. With L’Incognito Guibert had a go at ﬁction; even if he later felt no sympathy for the book, L’Incognito is a necessary stage in the writing of A` l’ami, for the lessons Guibert was able to draw from it if for no other reason, and they were that he must not invent an identity for himself like that of Hector Lenoir. ‘[. . .] Je n’arrive pas a` comprendre ou` je me place moi-meˆme pre´sentement a` l’inte´rieur de la dure´e de ce livre [. . .]’ (‘[. . .] I cannot manage to understand where I situate myself at present in this book’s timescale [. . .]’) exclaims an indignant voice which resembles that of Herve´ Guibert inserting himself in the text (I, p. 180). This experiment will be intensiﬁed by that of Adultes in which the narrator, expressing himself through ‘il’ (‘he’), had found himself bereft of any identity (‘Je ne suis plus personne’, p. 176) (‘I am no longer anybody’). But the main lesson of L’Incognito is the mise-enabıˆme represented by the picture of the couple throwing themselves in

Towards the roman faux

189

the water: the depiction of AIDS by the work of art becomes a real possibility112 before the narrator realises it is a fake. So it is perhaps better, as with the series of photos that will be taken in L’Incognito, to start from imitation, artiﬁce and fake in order to arrive at the representation of the real. Guibert learnt that the illness was swamping the text whether he had resolved to let it or not, so he might as well control it by deciding himself to write it, with all the ‘avantages’ (‘advantages’) of the roman faux which were being dangled before him by that fake diary Fou de Vincent and that almost roman faux, L’Incognito.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The roman faux When A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie appeared in 1990, a scandal erupted in the press, a sort of trial by media, pointing the accusatory ﬁnger at Herve´ Guibert and at his publisher because it was thought that behind some of the characters real people could be recognised, in particular Michel Foucault under the guise of ‘Muzil’. L’E´ve´nement du jeudi set the tone with a special report entitled ‘La litte´rature a-t-elle tous les droits?’ (‘Can literature do just as it pleases?’) with the suggestive subheading: ‘Herve´ Guibert raconte l’agonie de Michel Foucault’ (‘Herve´ Guibert’s account of Michel Foucault’s deathagony’). On the next page the summary heading reads: ‘Michel Foucault est mort en 1984, oﬃciellement du cancer, en ve´rite´ du sida. Dans un livre d’un re´alisme parfois insoutenable, Herve´ Guibert raconte les derniers jours du philosophe. En a-t-il le droit? E´tait-ce a` Gallimard, e´diteur du philosophe, de publier ce livre? De´bat’1 (‘Michel Foucault died in 1984, oﬃcially of cancer but in fact of AIDS. In a book of frequently unbearable realism, Herve´ Guibert gives an account of the philosopher’s last days. Does he have the right to do so? Was Gallimard, the philosopher’s publisher, entitled to publish this book? We debate the issues’). On 16 March 1990 Guibert was one of the guests on ‘Apostrophes’, the book programme hosted on French television by Bernard Pivot.2 There too the accent was placed on the revelations about Foucault (‘Est-ce que vous aviez le droit de raconter l’agonie et la mort de Michel Foucault, qui e´tait votre ami?’3 ‘Did you have the right to give an account of the last moments and the death of Michel Foucault, who was your friend?’) This media exposure of Guibert’s book and his appearance on television had the eﬀect of catapulting his book into the best-seller lists, thereby conﬁrming Re´gis Debray’s analyses in his study Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France.4 From then on, Guibert was and remained ﬁrmly in the public eye until his death. Indeed, it is from this point onwards that the majority of people started to know of him and of his work. The name Guibert became synonymous with A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie, and with a PWA (Person With AIDS). 191

192

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

At this point in my argument it is important to summarise the ethical problems facing the critic in dealing with a novel about AIDS, as set out in my study of A` l’ami.5 To quote Lee Edelman6 and Lawrence Schehr,7 AIDS fragments the identity of the subject; moreover, new challenges appear both for the critic and for the reader: ‘[. . .] the fear is that the eﬀect of AIDS will be the destruction of the text as text [. . .] AIDS is a signiﬁer that is so all-consuming that we must keep it at a distance to prevent it from overwhelming the text.’8 So it is not the role of the critic or the reader to enter into a Protocole compassionnel which would cloud all judgement.9 Even if, in an indirect way, A` l’ami shows what living with AIDS is like and the discrimination suﬀered by people who are HIV positive, homosexuals in particular,10 it should be noted in passing that Guibert’s book was not very well received in gay circles, especially by groups like ‘Act-Up’. Guibert’s response was very individualistic, circumscribed by a Parisian coterie to which he belonged. I would add that the attitudes displayed in the book with regard to AIDS relate to social phenomena speciﬁc to French culture and its attitude towards the illness in 1990; such a book written by an American or British author would have been diﬀerent.11 For the purposes of this study I am going to try and separate the reception of A` l’ami from its content, analysing it from the viewpoint of the voices of the self as a roman faux in the tradition of Guibert’s other works, carefully eschewing at this stage in my argument a description of the book’s subject so as not to fall into the sort of interpretative traps illustrated above; on the contrary, the subject of A` l’ami will only emerge at the end of my analysis. A` L’AMI QUI NE M’A PAS SAUVE´ LA VIE As we saw in Chapter 7, the Adultes project failed because the narrator was unable to write his ﬁrst sentence (‘It was intended that misfortune should befall us’, Ami, p. 221). Guibert was dissatisﬁed with L’Incognito because it was not a ‘je’ (‘I’) narrator but a character (Hector Lenoir) who, on the book’s very ﬁrst page, said that he was convinced he had AIDS. The step he had to take was that decisively taken in A` l’ami where an ‘I’ which is identiﬁed in the text with Herve´, Hervelino, Guibert and with two of his earlier books12 writes by way of a ﬁrst sentence:

The roman faux

193

‘J’ai eu le sida pendant trois mois’ (Ami, p. 9) (‘I have had AIDS for three months’)

It is noticeable at the outset that AIDS is written through the agency of the roman faux (a novel in which je (I) tell lies) by virtue of the perfect tense, since there is no cure for AIDS. This distanciation, this play of truth and falsehood, allow Guibert to write the self, a phenomenon termed ‘avowed disavowal’ by Emily Apter.13 The book takes the form of 100 fragments of varying length which are numbered but not titled. The generic subtitle is ‘roman’ (‘novel’) and there is no back-cover blurb, a break with tradition—doubtless not without importance—where Guibert’s books published by Gallimard are concerned. When A` l’ami appeared, Gaudemar asked Guibert why he had called it a ‘novel’. This was his response: [. . .] au moment ou` j’ai rec¸u les e´preuves, j’ai eu un doute. Est-ce que c’e´tait vraiment un roman? Tout est scrupuleusement exact et je suis parti des vrais personnages, des vrais noms, j’avais besoin des vrais noms pour e´crire. Mais, au fur et a` mesure que j’e´crivais, et bien que je n’aie rien retravaille´ (je n’ai meˆme pas eu le courage de relire les e´preuves), j’ai brouille´ les pistes . . . Cela dit, le livre est aussi un roman. Muzil, Marine et les autres sont quand meˆme des personnages, ils ne sont pas tout a` fait ce qu’ils sont en re´alite´. Meˆme celui qui est Herve´ Guibert dans le livre est un personnage.14 ([. . .] when I got the proofs I had doubts. Was it really a novel? Everything is scrupulously accurate and I started from real characters, real names, I needed real names to be able to write. But as I wrote, and though I did not rework anything (I had not the heart even to go over the proofs), I covered my tracks [. . .] That said, the book is also a novel. Muzil, Marine and the others are characters after all, they are not quite as they are in real life. Even the person who is Herve´ Guibert in the book is a character.)

‘Confusing the reader’ is another way of expressing ‘la falsiﬁcation de la re´alite´ dans l’e´criture romanesque’ (I, p. 77) (‘the falsiﬁcation of reality in ﬁctional writing’) and therefore of deﬁning the roman faux and of putting the accent on the play and balance between truth and falsehood.15 As we saw in Chapter 6, Gaudemar’s and Lecarme’s objections about the content of Mes parents related to issues of genre.16 Braudeau’s reaction was much the same where A` l’ami was concerned; on the choice of the name ‘Muzil’ he had this to say: ‘Si c’est pour se me´nager une plage de ﬁction entre deux zones de ‘‘faits vrais’’, le proce´de´ n’est pas tre`s honneˆte, rien ne permettant de distinguer la frontie`re du faux’17 (‘If the idea is to keep an area of ﬁction for himself between two zones of ‘‘true facts’’, the process is not very honest, there being nothing to enable one to make out where the true ends and the false begins’). Braudeau may not have intended to, but he could not

194

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

have put it better: it is precisely this blurring of the dividing line between the true and the false that the writer Herve´ Guibert seeks to achieve. As for claiming that ‘the process is not very honest’, this could only be justiﬁed in relation to the ‘sacro-sainte’ (‘sacrosanct’) deﬁnition of the novel which is openly ﬂouted by A` l’ami. All Guibert needed to do to make the several heads of indictment cited above collapse was inscribe as the generic subtitle the words ‘roman faux’. Rereading A` l’ami for the nth time before writing this chapter, it seems to me that the book in its entirety is only a pretext for uttering its ﬁrst sentence, a sentence written in the same spirit as the epigraph chosen to head this study. The narrator of A` l’ami’s own analysis is as follows: ‘[. . .] il e´tait de l’ordre des choses, moi qui avais toujours proce´de´ ainsi dans tous mes livres, de trahir mes secrets, celui-ci fuˆt-il irre´versible, et m’excluant sans retour de la communaute´ des hommes’ (Ami, p. 203) (‘[. . .] it was in the nature of things, I who had always done it that way in all my books, to betray my secrets, even where this could never be undone, driving me without recall from the community of men’). So it can be seen that this ‘re´ve´lation’ (‘revelation’) is in the tradition of Guibert’s entire work. As he put it in an interview: ‘Et ce fut comme un barrage qui, d’un seul coup, ce`de, c¸a m’a envahi: c’e´tait la`-dessus que je devais e´crire’18 (‘And it was like a dam that suddenly gives way, it swamped me: it was on that that I had to write’). All that is needed to back up my remarks is to quote from the information provided by the paratext about the dealings between Guibert and his publishers. Guibert ﬁrst took his manuscript to Je´roˆme Lindon at the E´ditions de Minuit, who turned it down on these grounds (among others): ‘Attention, une imposture romanesque, c¸a peut porter pre´judice a` la carrie`re de Guibert!’19 (‘Let’s be careful, ﬁctional deception, that could harm Guibert’s career!’). Franc¸oise Verny (for Gallimard) and Peter Handke both thought that Guibert was not ill, leading Guibert to comment: ‘C’est vrai que j’aurais pu faire ce livre en recueillant le te´moignage d’un ami malade. C¸a n’aurait pas e´te´ impossible, ni spe´cialement mensonger, ni e´loigne´ des me´thodes d’e´criture que j’ai pu avoir auparavant, avec des bases documentaires ou journalistiques’20 (‘It is true I could have written this book by asking a sick friend for his account. That would not have been impossible, nor particularly mendacious, nor greatly removed from the writing methods I may have had before, using documentary or journalistic material as a basis’). This passage is very important in as much as it refers to the composition of

The roman faux

195

other writings by Herve´ Guibert, such as Des Aveugles for example. The approach is the same as that operating in the other books, merely pushed to the limit, that is, as close as possible to death. To back up my remarks about the importance of the ﬁrst sentence of A` l’ami, I shall focus on the way the texts ends and on its title. The book’s last fragment harks back to the ﬁrst sentence to make it quite clear that therein lies the nub (‘La mise en abıˆ me de mon livre se referme sur moi’, p. 267, ‘The mise-en-abıˆme of my book closes upon me’). As it happens, we learn from an interview with Donner that the book’s ﬁrst ending ﬁnished with a detective story in America, like The State of Things by Wim Wenders, that threw some light on the book’s title which was apparently to have been Le Dresseur de singe (‘The Monkey Trainer’).21 This informatiom is very important since it clearly shows that the book would then have been built on the same model as other books by Guibert, such as Voyage avec deux enfants for example, or even L’Incognito, in which a last part triggered another development in the narrative. The title according to Guibert was going to be ‘comple`tement saugrenu, un titre myste´rieux’22 (‘completely weird, a mysterious title’). We can bet that, just like Adultes or L’Incognito, it would not have satisﬁed the writer’s demands of Herve´ Guibert, for in calling his book A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie, Guibert stresses the fact, just as with the last fragment, that he has AIDS and that his life is in danger. Before looking into the book’s thematic, let us see what the advantages are of writing illness and of taking oneself as writing’s subject by ﬁrst of all answering the following question: what happens when the narrator believes himself no longer only HIV positive, but with AIDS? Let us rather quote his reaction, which some have found diﬃcult to understand: Cela modiﬁait tout en un instant, tout basculait et le paysage avec autour de cette certitude, et cela a` la fois me paralysait et me donnait des ailes, re´duisait mes forces tout en les de´cuplant, j’avais peur et j’e´tais grise´, calme en meˆme temps qu’affole´, j’avais peut-eˆtre enﬁn atteint mon but. (Ami, p. 39) (That changed everything in an instant, everything was altered, the landscape included, in the wake of this certainty, and this both paralysed me and lent me wings, reduced my strength and simultaneously increased it tenfold, I was afraid and I was intoxicated, calm and in a panic at the same time, I had perhaps at last achieved my aim.)

The aim is ‘tout dire’ (‘saying everything’), and saying everything goes through the ﬁrst sentence of A` l’ami, an unavoidable staging-post in the

196

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

self’s unveiling; witness the following analysis: ‘[. . .] le sida [. . .] aura e´te´ pour moi un paradigme dans mon projet de de´voilement de soi et de l’e´nonce´ de l’indicible [. . .]’ (p. 247) (‘[. . .] AIDS [. . .] will have been for me a paradigm in my project of unveiling the self and spelling out the unsayable [. . .]’). Having replied to the question above through ﬁction, let us try bringing out another strand of the answer through the paratext. What happened when Guibert, having always been prompted by the project of ‘saying everything’ and writing his self, discovered he had AIDS? Le sida m’a permis de radicaliser un peu plus encore certains syste`mes de narration, de rapport a` la ve´rite´, de mise en jeu de moi-meˆme au-dela` meˆme de ce que je pensais possible. Je parle de la ve´rite´ dans ce qu’elle peut avoir de de´forme´ par le travail de l’e´criture.23 (AIDS enabled me to radicalise a little further yet certain systems of narration, of relationship with truth, of self-involvement even beyond what I thought possible. I refer to the way the work of writing can distort the truth.)

We have seen progressively in each chapter that Guibert had great diﬃculty creating characters in his work, since until the composition of L’Homme blesse´ with Patrice Che´reau, he could not imagine any other character than himself. He had then tried to create characters in the novels, retaining the right to make subjective appearances as in Les Lubies d’Arthur or Des Aveugles. As it happens, when threatened with AIDS, Herve´ Guibert could at last become the hero of his book, as his own analysis in the interview with Donner makes clear: ‘J’ai l’impression que le Sida m’a permis de devenir, par la trage´die, de devenir un he´ros. Alors que j’e´tais un personnage je suis devenu un he´ros. Au sens vieillot du terme, au sens classique’24 (‘I have the feeling that AIDS made it possible for me to become, through tragedy, to become a hero. Whereas I was a character, I became a hero. In the old-fashioned sense of the term, in the classical sense’). A` l’ami represents the uniﬁcation of the oeuvre. This uniﬁcation is intensiﬁed by the theme of death. As we have seen, Thanatos was a true leitmotiv in Guibert’s work, featuring from the youthful writings onwards (La Mort propagande). As it happens, the announcement of his approaching end will also precipitate the spectre of death. In section 50 of the book, that is to say half-way through, the narrator, knowing for certain at this stage that he is HIVpositive, oﬀers this analysis: ‘[. . .] je tirais une sorte de jubilation de la souﬀrance et de la durete´ de notre expe´rience [. . .]’ (p. 149) (‘[. . .] I drew a sort of jubilation from the suﬀering and harshness of our

The roman faux

197

experience [. . .]’). This thought, dubbed ‘inavouable’ (‘unmentionable’), is laid down on paper, so that writing serves to admit to the unsayable. The ‘jubilation’ is associated with the approach of death since the narrator admits that, from the age of twelve, death has been his pet hobby. He then says that he has moved to a diﬀerent stage of the love of death. In another passage, he will say that AIDS gives death the time to live, and that it is in this sense that the following sentence has to be understood: ‘Le sida m’avait permis de faire un bond formidable dans ma vie’25 (‘AIDS had enabled me to take a fantastic leap forward in my life’). Throughout the book the narrator will also preserve the possibility of committing suicide.26 So, as can be seen, writing the illness allows Guibert to take himself as main character and to write in the closest possible proximity to death. As he says himself, he has been able to radicalise narrative systems already present in other books (writing the body, Eros and Thanatos, betrayals and delusions etc.). There is, however, a real danger when life and work meet. For at this point of intersection, Guibert seems to confuse reality and ﬁction (even though I am aware that this confusion forms an integral part of Guibert’s ‘radical’ enterprise for enhancing life/art). At the same time as backing up this statement I will contribute to the analysis of the text and its composition. Let us take the character Bill. It is Bill who dangles in front of the narrator the prospect of a vaccine that may cure him of AIDS. The narrator wonders if such a salvation may not be a delusion, pure science ﬁction for him to feature in as one of the heroes (p. 10). For three months, from 23 January to 18 March 1988, he believed himself to be doomed. Then, in the next few months, waiting to be vaccinated, he will think he is about to be saved. This dramatic twist is linked to Bill, seen by the narrator as ‘un des monstres absolus du sort’ (p. 179) (‘one of the absolute monsters of fate’). Progressively, the narrator’s ability to react to events becomes a function of the consequences they entail for his book . . . rather than for his life. Thus, pondering the fact that there has been no sign of Bill since the narrator’s admission that he was ill, the latter observes: ‘[. . .] je m’en frottais les mains, car par ce silence abrupt, qui aurait pu sembler a` quiconque une monstrueuse de´mission, Bill acce´dait cette fois au rang de personnage ambigu¨’ (p. 187) (‘[. . .] I rubbed my hands with delight at this, since by his sudden silence, which to anyone else would have seemed a monstrous abdication of responsibility, Bill was now acceding to the rank of an ambiguous character’). What is remarkable about this sentence is the fact that the narrator is conscious that Bill’s action

198

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

would be seen by anyone else as a ‘monstrous abdication of responsibility’ whereas he does not wish to face up to this but rather to see in Bill a character who, by his ambiguity, becomes very interesting for his narrative. This approach can be observed in several other passages. Thus, when the narrator realises that Bill will not come to Elba and that his attitude is highly reprehensible, he will add: ‘[. . .] si elle e´tait re´ellement criminelle [son attitude] il va de soi tel que je suis que je ne m’en rengorgeais que davantage [. . .]’ (p. 196) (‘[. . .] even if it [his attitude] was truly criminal, it goes without saying that, being me, it puﬀed me up all the more [. . .]’). What we are meant to understand is that the more loathsome Bill is and the less help he gives, the more this will produce interesting ﬁction. Jules has, however, told him he ought not to ‘e´touﬀer le sentiment de l’urgence sous des divagations romanesques’ (p. 247) (‘stiﬂe the feeling of urgency beneath ﬁctional ramblings’). In one of the most emotional passages in the ‘roman’ (‘novel’), the narrator will refuse to contaminate Bill’s blood when they dine out together: J’ai de´cide´ d’eˆtre calme, d’aller au bout de cette logique romanesque, qui m’hypnotise, au de´triment de toute ide´e de survie. Oui, je peux l’e´crire, et c’est sans doute cela ma folie, je tiens a` mon livre plus qu’a` ma vie; je ne renoncerais pas a` mon livre pour conserver ma vie, voila` ce qui sera le plus difﬁcile a` faire croire et comprendre. Avant de voir le salaud dans Bill, j’y vois un personnage en or massif. (p. 257)27 (I resolved to be calm, to push to the limit this ﬁctional logic which hypnotises me, to the detriment of all idea of survival. Yes, I can write it down, though no doubt this is madness on my part, I care more about my book than about my life; I would not give up my book to preserve my life, that is what will be the hardest for people to believe and understand. Before seeing the bastard in Bill, I see in him a character made of solid gold.)

When the narrator learns that Bill has in fact had Eduardo vaccinated although he has known him for only a few months, he will set aside his own feelings so that during the dinner that follows, Bill, not suspecting his resentment, will supply him with all the details to be used later in the writing (‘Je continuai de me de´doubler au cours du dıˆ ner, en remettant sur le tapis l’aﬀaire Eduardo’, p. 263; ‘I went on splitting myself in two during the dinner by bringing the Eduardo aﬀair up again’). This ‘de´doublement’ (‘splitting oneself in two’) concerns the being of ﬂesh and blood disregarded in favour of the ﬁctional character who is betrayed. By sidelining his feelings the narrator manages, for the purposes of his narrative, to listen to Bill. It could be said at a pinch that one possible way of interpreting the book’s title, framed like a

The roman faux

199

negative dedication in appearance, is to take it as sincere (are we not dealing after all with a roman faux?): To the friend who did not save my life (Bill) but who nevertheless gave me a pretext for writing, particularly by his behaviour . . .28 That said, it must not be forgotten either that A` l’ami is a textual act of revenge on Bill. In that sense, the book comes from the same stable as works like Mes parents. Betrayal is indeed one of the main themes in Guibert’s work (‘La trahison est peut-eˆtre le ressort principal de ce que j’ai fait’29 ‘Betrayal is perhaps the chief impulse behind what I have done’). In A` l’ami his only consolation lies in telling himself that he is going to betray Bill through ﬁction (‘[. . .] quel traıˆ tre en puissance j’e´tais moi aussi’, Ami, p. 263; ‘[. . .] what a potential traitor I was too’) And it is true that Bill, and Marine too, are progressively betrayed in the book.30 The theme of betrayal is also developed against the narrator himself, adding to the phenomenon of distanciation. Thus he reports those actions of his that he considers the most shameful with regard to Marine and to Muzil, as well as things he said about him.31 Whilst viewing Bill’s attitude towards him as highly reprehensible (it is indeed a question of life and death, p. 196), the narrator is content to take revenge through ﬁction, as Guibert will tell Gaudemar: ‘Le livre est mon arme pour le tuer’32 (‘The book is my weapon for killing him’). Guibert has such faith in literature that his conviction gives a very particular strength to his work, a blend of admiration and disbelief at one and the same time.33 The attitude above also relates to the book’s very existence, since the taking of AZT will be delayed so that the book can be ﬁnished (p. 228). It is only on the day the narrator thinks he has ended his manuscript that he will take the ﬁrst two capsules, having waited three months before starting the treatment, and this in spite of his doctor warning him that, if he does not take AZT, ‘ce n’est plus une question d’anne´es, mais de mois’ (p. 52) (‘it is no longer a question of years, but of months’). Everything points to the view that for Guibert the book is becoming one of the ways of battling against illness.34 Besides, the choice becomes progressively very much clearer: either the writing of a new book, or suicide (pp. 201–02). The book is raised to the status of friend: ‘[. . .] j’entreprends un nouveau livre pour avoir un compagnon, un interlocuteur, quelqu’un avec qui manger et dormir, aupre`s duquel reˆver et cauchemarder, le seul ami pre´sentement tenable’ (p. 12) (‘[. . .] I am embarking on a new book to have a companion, someone to talk to, someone to eat and sleep

200

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

with, to share my dreams and nightmares with, the only friend at present bearable’), even replacing human beings (‘[. . .] je m’aperc¸ois de´ﬁnitivement que je n’aime pas les hommes [. . .]’, p. 10; ‘[. . .] I am ﬁnally realising that I do not like human beings [. . .]’). On the very ﬁrst page we learn that the narrator has told only a few close friends about his illness; the book will convey the news to everyone, his parents especially, because he has realised that he has interesting relationships only with people in the know. To conclude the above remarks, it is quite clear that the news that he has AIDS is welcomed almost as a godsend by the narrator: death becomes a concrete proposal while not being imminent; Herve´ Guibert can at last legitimately take himself as main character in his work, the fact that he has AIDS giving him the status of a hero; Bill becomes hateful, which makes it unlikely that he will vaccinate the narrator but, on the other hand, this anecdote will make the story more exciting. All this is possible only in so far as the character of the novel A` l’ami takes precedence over the creature of ﬂesh and blood. Fiction becomes reality and vice-versa. But this ‘salut par la litte´rature’ (‘salvation by literature’) is a delusion, which I shall illustrate by continuing my analysis of the book’s thematic, since one way of reading the work is to view it as illusion. This idea would chime in with one of the interpretations of the title: the friend who did not save my life is my book. It should not be forgotten that if ‘l’oeuvre est l’exorcisme de l’impuissance. En meˆme temps la maladie ine´luctable est le comble de l’impuissance’ (p. 248) (‘the work is the exorcism of impotence. At the same time the ineluctable illness is the height of impotence’). The book’s last fragment brings back to mind that it is the narrator who has been deluded by the narrative which has closed on him like a trap, just as the vaccine has perhaps also been only an illusion.35 In any event, it functions itself on the principle of deception (pp. 259–60). As it happens, it is this same deception that backﬁred on Herve´ Guibert, as we saw with the book’s reception. I would like now to turn to the book’s content, since I want to challenge the interpretation which sets out to show that the subject of A` l’ami is the account of Michel Foucault’s death-agony. I have already said that this book was only a pretext for writing the ﬁrst sentence (‘I have had AIDS for three months’, p. 9) which was the logical culmination of the enterprise of the voices of the self as I have been analysing it throughout the present study. The driving force behind the narrative is AIDS, and the thread running through the

The roman faux

201

narrative is disease and doctors.36 It is AIDS, too, which governs the narrative structure, the style, time, space and the characters of A` l’ami, as I pointed out in an earlier study.37 Let us take the example of the narrative structure. On the very ﬁrst page, this is what we read: ‘[. . .] un hasard extraordinaire me ﬁt croire, et me donna quasiment l’assurance que je pourrais e´chapper a` cette maladie mortelle que tout le monde donnait encore pour incurable’ (p. 9) (‘[. . .] an extraordinary combination of circumstances led me to believe, indeed gave me the practical certainty that I could escape this fatal illness which everyone still thought was incurable’). So it is to be expected that the book will tell us this story. Indeed, this ﬁrst fragment could serve as the volume’s back-cover blurb (and was perhaps originally intended to feature as such): it would be in tune with other texts by Guibert fulﬁlling that function. The book’s ﬁrst sentence would then have been that of the second fragment (‘Ce jour ou` j’entreprends ce livre, le 26 de´cembre 1988 etc.’, p. 10; ‘On this day, 26 December 1988, when I embark on this book, etc.’). But such a layout would have relegated the sentence ‘I have had AIDS for three months’ to the domain of the peritext and not that of the novel. As it happens and we have seen, it was essential for the narrator to write that sentence within the framework of his novel. Getting back to the book’s subject, the story broached in the ﬁrst fragment will not begin properly speaking until page 173, that is to say more or less two-thirds of the way through the volume. It is not the ﬁrst time that a story announced early on ends up occupying only a secondary part of the book (viz. the back covers of Mes parents and L’Incognito). If the narrative motif launched on the very ﬁrst page of the book only gets going on page 173, what is the driving force behind the story? One of the elements of the book’s narrative tension is provided by the countdown that is set in motion. On 4 January 1989 the narrator informs us that he will know a week later (on 11 January 1989) his test results; so he has only seven days left to go back over his story (p. 48). The purpose of these tests on his T4 level is to ascertain whether he remains above the fateful ﬁgure of 200 or whether his T4 level is dropping: he could then no longer derive beneﬁt from Mockney’s vaccination. The deadline this imposes will determine the book’s fate since he could well decide to ‘faire rouler son barillet’ (p. 57) (‘top himself’). In fact, the closer the deadline approaches, the more diﬃcult it becomes for him to devote himself to writing. He will spend the last two days drawing (pp. 70–71). He will get the results not on 11 January

202

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

1989 but the next day, and will wait another ten days before admitting the fact in his book (p. 216). Ten more days, that is ten days’ reprieve for the writing, which in concrete terms means 157 pages of text (pp. 58–215). This passage in which he admits to himself and to us his T4 level is fundamental: next to the book’s ﬁrst sentence it is no doubt the most important. He is plunged in the middle of a pastiche of Thomas Bernhard’s style, based on very long sentences, which turns to invective. As in other books by Guibert, the writing serves to exorcise an author whose inﬂuence becomes too threatening. ‘T.B.’ is ‘un diable’ (‘a devil’) who has slipped into the narrator’s hold (p. 12), but it is also Bernhard who, thanks to his own literary courage, shows Guibert the way.38 If we look into fragment 76, it conﬁrms that A` l’ami is indeed a roman faux: the narrator is describing his book, there being no doubt at all that A` l’ami is the work in question, as ‘un livre essentiellement bernhardien par son principe [. . .] comme lui-meˆme a fait de faux essais de´guise´s [. . .]’ (p. 217; my italics) (‘an essentially Bernhardian book in its basic principle [. . .] as he himself wrote fake disguised essays [. . .]’). Comparing the Bernhardian metastasis to the HIV virus, the narrator introduces his ‘aveu’ (‘confession’) by the sentence ‘mes T4, soit dit en passant au de´tour d’une phrase’ (p. 215) (‘my T4s, a word in passing in the course of a sentence’). We are to understand that what is said in passing, ‘in the course of a sentence’, buried in the middle of a fragment on Bernhard, is the main thing: the awareness of the disease and of its inexorable progress in the bloodstream of the narrator who will soon no longer be able to hope for salvation through Mockney’s vaccine. In once again comparing what happens to his body with a literary metaphor, the colonisation of his prose by that of Bernhard, the narrator enters a new phase of acceptance of his illness. Literature here transcends its function of mimicking reality and becomes a mediator between Guibert and his non-ﬁctive self. If before it made sense for me to write that Guibert seemed to confuse reality and ﬁction, it can now be said that he uses ﬁction to accept reality. This is the narrator of A` l’ami’s analysis: ‘Mais l’aveu comprenait quelque chose d’atroce: dire qu’on e´tait malade ne faisait qu’accre´diter la maladie, elle devenait re´elle tout a` coup, sans appel, et semblait tirer sa puissance et ses forces destructrices du cre´dit qu’on lui accordait’ (p. 164) (‘But the avowal had something truly dreadful about it: saying one was ill only served to give credence to the disease, it became suddenly real, irrevocable, and seemed to draw its strength and its

The roman faux

203

destructive forces from the credence awarded it’). It can clearly be seen that the literary avowal has consequences outside ﬁction. Similarly the narrator knows that betraying his secrets could exclude him from the community of his fellow human beings (p. 203). So what is at stake in A` l’ami transcends literature, and the two most important sentences in the book are probably the ﬁrst sentence and the passage in which the narrator admits, both to himself and to others, his T4 level. A` l’ami is not the betrayal of Michel Foucault, but rather the acceptance by the writer Herve´ Guibert that he is suﬀering from AIDS. As the examples above have shown, A` l’ami may be seen as the story of the writing of the narrator’s self and of his illness. To back up my analysis, let us now look into the function of the characters. AIDS may be seen as the chief star orbited by several constellations (the characters) who all have some connection with the disease. Although the story of the vaccine only gets under way on page 173, Bill is present well before this page. Thus he is mentioned on page 21 because it was he who ﬁrst spoke to the narrator about AIDS. The remarks about ‘Marine’ have been criticised because people thought that through them they recognised Isabelle Adjani, but it needs to be understood that she is only present in the narrative by virtue of her connection with the disease. For it is ‘ce phe´nome`ne’ (‘this phenomenon’), as the narrator calls it, which links ‘Muzil, Marine et tant d’autres’ (p. 46) (‘Muzil, Marine and so many others’). Marine appears in the text for the ﬁrst time when she, like the narrator, is being treated by Dr Le´risson (p. 42). When the narrator describes his reaction to the rumour that Marine is suﬀering from AIDS (‘Le sida de Marine, qui, je dois l’avouer maintenant, m’a fait plaisir [. . .] non tant par sadisme que par ce fantasme que nous e´tions de´ﬁnitivement ligue´s [. . .] par un sort commun [. . .]’, p. 130; ‘Marine’s AIDS which, I must now admit, I was pleased about [. . .] not so much through sadism as for the fantasy that we were united forever [. . .] by a common fate [. . .]’), it needs to be clearly understood that it is located at the ﬁctional level. My analysis is conﬁrmed by Guibert in the paratext: ‘Il re`gne une espe`ce de conspiration du sida dans ce groupe de personnages, ce groupe ﬁctif, puisque c’est moi qui les relie entre eux— moi et le sida’39 (‘There reigns a kind of AIDS conspiracy in this group of characters, this ﬁctional group, since it is I who am the link between them—I, and AIDS’). Similarly, Muzil only appears in this narrative because of his link with the disease: ‘Il est la` parce qu’il a e´te´ un proche absolu, le premier touche´ par cet e´ve´nement. Donc c’e´tait mon histoire et il e´tait force´ment un personnage capital’40 (‘He is there because he

204

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

was the very closest of friends, the ﬁrst aﬀected by this event. So it was my story and he was inevitably a crucial character’). The narration of Muzil’s death-agony in his diary poses ethical questions for the narrator since he is perfectly aware that Muzil would be hurt (pp. 97–98). But he has a ‘re´ve´lation’ (revelation) after putting down on paper one of his particularly unmentionable actions after kissing Muzil: Je ressentis alors, c’e´tait inouı¨, une sorte de vision, ou de vertige, qui m’en donnait les pleins pouvoirs, qui me de´le´guait a` ces transcriptions ignobles et qui les le´gitimait en m’annonc¸ant, c’e´tait donc ce qu’on appelle une pre´monition, un pressentiment puissant, que j’y e´tais pleinement habilite´ car ce n’e´tait pas tant l’agonie de mon ami que j’e´tais en train de de´crire que l’agonie qui m’attendait, et qui serait identique, c’e´tait de´sormais une certitude qu’en plus de l’amitie´ nous e´tions lie´s par un sort thanatologique commun. (pp. 101–02) (I then experienced, it was amazing, a sort of vision, or of vertigo, which gave me carte blanche over it, which delegated me to these shabby transcriptions and which legitimated them by telling me, so this was what is called a premonition, a powerful foreboding, that I was fully authorised to do it since it was not so much the death-agony of my friend that I was describing as the death-agony which awaited me, and which would be identical, from now on it being a real certainty that in addition to friendship we were bound by a common thanatological fate.)

Writing Muzil’s death-agony is a way of preparing himself for his own, just as watching the young boy coming to collect the HIV test results is ‘un exorcisme a` peu de frais’ (p. 146) (‘an exorcism at little cost’) of the situation that Jules and the narrator must face the following week. The narrator will only be able to write himself in the book and have the progress of his disease shared once he has written that of Muzil which ends on page 135, that is more or less halfway through the book. Noone can fail to understand that far from betraying ‘Muzil’, A` l’ami is, rather, a hymn to love; will not the narrator be ‘fou de douleur’ (‘mad with grief’) at the idea of Muzil’s death (p. 104)? Time, aside from the chronological time of the writing, also follows the rhythm of the illness. Take, for example, section 19 in which the years are only mentioned in accordance with the diseases that could in some way be connected with AIDS. Some years are left out because there is nothing of interest to say that might be linked to the disease (‘Je ne situe rien en 85 de relatif a` notre histoire’, p. 59; ‘I put nothing in 85 relating to our story’). The narrator will indeed write at the end of this section: ‘C’est cette chronologie-la` qui devient mon sche´ma, sauf quand je de´couvre que la progression naıˆ t du de´sordre’ (‘That is the chronology which becomes my model, except when I ﬁnd that the progres-

The roman faux

205

sion comes from a random-order pattern’). Aside from the ‘randomorder’ element, the disease itself has an impact on the narrative because ‘le livre lutte avec la fatigue’ (p. 66) (‘the book struggles with fatigue’) as well as on the style. The rest of A` l’ami’s thematic is also linked to AIDS and its consequences. The project of writing the body crops up once again and indeed reaches its paroxysm, since the narrator reveals his blood (p. 13). As the narrator says about Bill (the same applying to the relationship between the narrator and the reader): ‘[. . .] devoir re´pondre a` tout moment du taux de ses T4 qui de´gringolent, c’est pire que de montrer ce qu’on a dans la culotte’ (pp. 247–48) (‘[. . .] having at every moment to answer for the level of one’s plunging T4s is worse than showing what you have got in your pants’). Guibert conﬁrms this in the paratext: ‘A` l’ami [. . .] radicalise encore les choses: rendre compte de l’e´tat de de´te´rioration de son sang implique un mouvement d’impudeur qui va au-dela` du corps’41 (‘A` l’ami [. . .] further radicalises things: to give an account of the deteriorating state of one’s blood implies a movement of immodesty that goes beyond the body’). The look plays an important part too, ﬁrstly that of the other: the narrator wonders if ‘c¸a se voit dans les yeux’ (‘it can be seen in one’s eyes’), and secondly his own: ‘J’ai senti venir la mort dans le miroir, dans mon regard dans le miroir [. . .]’42 (‘I felt death coming in the mirror, in my look in the mirror [. . .]’). The look will become the favoured method of communication with doctors (in order to get at the truth), but also with Jules, since it will convey the unmentionable.43 It is the look in the mirror, too, that will enable the narrator to glimpse the means of accepting himself: ‘[. . .] il aurait fallu que je m’habitue a` ce visage de´charne´ que le miroir chaque fois me renvoie comme ne m’appartenant plus mais de´ja` a` mon cadavre, et il aurait fallu, comble ou interruption du narcissisme, que je re´ussisse a` l’aimer’ (p. 242)44 (‘[. . .] I would have to get used to this haggard face which the mirror reﬂects back at me each time as no longer belonging to me but to my corpse, and I would have, as the epitome or suspension of narcissism, to try and get round to loving it’). Thanatos insinuates itself not only into the mirror but also into all human relationships and into painting (pp. 72–75). The narrator is moreover thinking about a work to be called ‘La peinture des morts’ (‘Paintings of the Dead’) (p. 27). As for sexual relations, the narrator describes how the virus rears up between his body and Jules’s, or else makes both their bodies lose all notion of otherness; he will substitute ‘safer sex’ for them, even the acquisition of pictures and art objects.45

206

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

A` l’ami stands out both as the summit and the point of implosion of Guibert’s work. It is the summit in that Guibert has been able to choose himself as the main character and write his self by means of the roman faux, thereby continuing to meet a writerly requirement, present from La Mort propagande onwards, in which sex, death and the desire to write were inextricably linked (witness this remark: ‘Si je ne l’avais pas e´crit [A` l’ami], tout ce que j’ai fait serait reste´ incomplet. J’ai l’impression qu’il y a une clef, dans ce livre, pour comprendre les autres’46, ‘If I had not written [A` l’ami], everything I have done would have remained incomplete. I have the feeling that this book holds the key to understanding the others’). A` l’ami is a radicalisation of the narrative choices and of the thematic of Guibert’s other books. It is the point of implosion in that, once he has ‘enﬁn atteint [s]on but’ (‘ﬁnally achieved [his] aim’) (Ami, p. 39), how can he invent himself anew? As soon as A` l’ami appeared, Guibert commented: ‘Je ne pense pas que sur un sujet comme le sida il puisse y avoir une suite. Si je faisais un autre livre, j’aimerais qu’il n’ait aucun rapport avec c¸a’47 (‘I do not think that on a subject like AIDS there can be a sequel. If I did another book, I would not like it to have anything to do with that’). To judge the truth of this statement, we need to study the books published after A` l’ami.

CHAPTER NINE

Thanatographical Writing A year-and-a-half elapsed between A` l’ami and Le Protocole compassionnel. It is known from the ‘Ex-Libris’ broadcast that during this period Guibert was very poorly and that he did not write for a year. His survival he then will attribute in part to his readers, who had started writing to him. As the narrator of Le Protocole compassionnel tells us, the readers rallied round after he appeared on ‘Apostrophes’ to ‘[le] maintenir en vie’ (‘keep him alive’) in their own way.1 On ‘Ex-Libris’ Guibert will say that these letters helped him to keep going for a year without writing. A text signed ‘H.G.’ on the back cover of Le Protocole compassionnel informs us that this period was ‘le temps de la renonciation a` l’e´criture’ (‘the time of the renunciation of writing’). There were three reasons behind this renunciation: the ﬁrst was Guibert’s state of physical deterioration; the second was the reason mentioned in the conclusion to the previous chapter, that Guibert had sworn not to write another book about AIDS; and the third was the success of A` l’ami and the attendant large sales which paralysed the writer (‘Apre`s ce livre-la` et son accueil, je ne pouvais pas e´crire une pochade, je me sentais une responsabilite´ par rapport a` ces inconnu(e)s que j’avais e´mu(e)s’, PC, p. 171) (‘After that book and its reception, I could not write a sketch, I felt a sense of responsibility towards those unknown men and women whom I had moved’). Let us try and understand Herve´ Guibert’s position as a writer. He wrote in A` l’ami that he had AIDS, and he conﬁrmed it in interviews and on ‘Apostrophes’. He had also said that he would not write anything else on AIDS, so what possibilities remained open to him? Could the ‘je’ (‘I’) narrator legitimately write that he no longer had AIDS, or had never had it, and still be believed? Could he write about anything other than the ravages of this disease threatening his very existence? Could he go on living without the support of writing? What possibilities were open to him other than writing ‘je’ (‘I’) and getting the narrator to take on the identity of Herve´ Guibert and the weight of his work? In this chapter I will answer these questions indirectly, through a study of Guibert’s production. 207

208

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

In order to justify the layout of this chapter, the question that needs to be asked now is whether Le Protocole compassionnel is a roman faux, the deﬁnition of which the reader must now be familiar with. As it happens, because of the illness and the ravages inﬂicted by it upon the body, the self becomes split up, and a phenomenon of distanciation occurs with regard to the body; the latter becomes a locus of alienation, at the climax of which the narrator will manage to use the third person singular to write about it. We will then be at the opposite pole of ‘je mens’ (‘I am telling lies’). In a sense, the writerly project of the roman faux is transcended by the crisis of identity of the self. ‘C’est quand j’e´cris que je suis le plus vivant’ (PC, p. 124) (‘It is when I write that I am the most alive’); Guibert could not but write Le Protocole compassionnel since his very survival was at stake. Writing will henceforth fulﬁl the function of reconciling the self with its body. It can be said right away that in Le Protocole compassionnel illness invades the book from all directions. The progress of the disease threatens the very existence of the narrator and literature can have only a survival role from now on and, at a stroke, of familiarisation with death. So I need now to study the theme of thanatographical writing in Le Protocole compassionnel, and it is in this perspective too that I will analyse the ﬁlm ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ and Cytome´galovirus.

LE PROTOCOLE COMPASSIONNEL Le Protocole compassionnel bears the generic subtitle ‘novel’, and the back cover conveys the information that the book is the sequel to A` l’ami, with the same characters apart from the entry of Claudette Dumouchel and the fact that the place of AZT is taken by DDI. The book is then summed up as follows: ‘[. . .] Le Protocole compassionnel raconte l’e´tonnement et la douleur, la rage et la tristesse d’un homme de trente-cinq ans dans lequel s’est greﬀe´ le corps d’un vieillard. Mais le bonheur d’une re´mission fait une incursion dans le malheur’ (‘[. . .] Le Protocole compassionnel describes the bewilderment and the pain, the anger and the sadness of a man of thirty-ﬁve on to whom is grafted the body of an old man. But the joy of a remission makes inroads into the unhappiness’). What is the subject of Le Protocole compassionnel? We have seen what the back cover says about it, but we know too that with Guibert these texts must not be taken on trust since they often form part of the

Thanatographical Writing

209

deception. ‘But the joy of a remission makes inroads into the unhappiness’ was the last sentence of this text. The word ‘remission’ has to be understood on several levels, and it will guide me through my reading of Le Protocole compassionnel. There is ﬁrst of all the remission due to a prescribed drug, DDI, which serves as narrative trigger in the ﬁrst section of the book. In A` l’ami it was not so much AZT as the promise of Mockney’s vaccine which triggered the narrative. Here DDI does not pace the narrative properly speaking but is its sine qua non. The narrative structure of Le Protocole compassionnel lends itself, too, to the idea of ‘remission’, even going so far as redemption. Guibert said that he was led to appreciate this through the letters he received: [. . .] certains mots revenaient souvent dans les lettres: ‘saintete´’, ‘vous eˆtes un saint’, ‘Saint Se´bastien’. J’ai gamberge´ et tout a` coup je me suis dit: mais bon sang, je ne m’en suis pas rendu compte, mais Le Protocole compassionnel a un sche´ma christique [. . .] Il y a un chemin de croix avec des e´preuves comme des stations: la cave, la ﬁbroscopie. Ensuite, il y a toutes ces sce`nes ou` je m’accroche autour du cou du masseur, autour du cou du me´decin et qui forment comme des ‘Pieta`’. Et puis, il y a une pseudore´surrection a` la ﬁn.2 ([. . .] certain words often cropped up in the letters: ‘saintliness’, ‘you are a saint’, ‘Saint Sebastian’. I mulled this over, and suddenly said to myself: but damn it, I never realised, there really is a Christlike pattern in Le Protocole compassionnel [. . .] There is a Way of the Cross, with ordeals for stations: the cellar, the ﬁbroscopy. Next there are all those scenes where I cling to the masseur’s neck, the doctor’s neck, to form kinds of ‘Pieta`’. And then there is the pseudo-resurrection at the end.)

Indeed, the narrator calls the person who ﬁnds him in the cellar his saviour; he wants to kneel before him and kiss his hands.3 Added to that there are the oﬀerings (like the DDI laid by Jules at the foot of his bed) which partake almost of the miraculous and about which the narrator will write: ‘[. . .] graˆce au DDI du danseur mort, je crois au mythe de la renaissance [. . .]’ (p. 123) (‘[. . .] thanks to the dead dancer’s DDI, I believe in the myth of rebirth [. . .]’). On Friday 13 July he will speak of the beginning of his resurrection (p. 61). The closer death comes, the more the narrator will try to give himself ‘l’illusion de la survie, et de la vie e´ternelle’ (p. 167) (‘the illusion of the afterlife, of eternal life’). The whole episode entitled, most appropriately,’Miracle a` Casablanca’ (‘Miracle in Casablanca’), will be built around this dramatic tension: the name of the hotel which means ‘mise´ricorde’ (‘mercy’), the ‘Tunisien’ (‘Tunisian’) who has seen the Virgin and cured

210

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

his daughter by telling her: ‘Allez, le`ve-toi, et marche’ (‘Come on, get up and walk’) and who calls the narrator his son.4 This Christ-like pattern is underscored by both the peritext and the paratext. Thus, the ‘Folio’ edition of Le Protocole compassionnel carries on its front cover an illustration entitled ‘Le martyre de saint Tarcise’ (‘The Martyrdom of Saint Tarcisus’). Guibert will tell Donner that when he thought he had lost along with his luggage the parts of the manuscript dealing with the cellar, the ﬁbroscopy and the alveoli lavage, the idea of having to rewrite them was almost like ‘refaire [un] chemin de croix’5 (‘redoing [a] way of the cross’), so it is clear that the story of the ‘pseudo-re´surrection’ (‘pseudo-resurrection’) is well and truly to be read between the lines of the book. In the interview with Sophie Che´rer, Guibert seems surprised by this reading of Le Protocole compassionnel, but it is evident on reﬂection that his work is shot through with a certain fascination for religiosity or at least mysticism (I am thinking in particular of all the texts inspired by Louise’s experiences in the Carmelite convent, and of those featuring priests; at the more fantastic level, there are Les Lubies d’Arthur and Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes). The third strand of my reply about the idea of remission is the ﬁlm project ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ which was eventually shown on the French television channel TF1 on 30 January 19926 but was ﬁlmed between June 1990 and March 1991. Just as Adultes was the phantom narrative of L’Incognito, ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ is the phantom ﬁlm of Le Protocole compassionnel; indeed, Le Protocole compassionnel will end up almost by dissolving into a proto-script of ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’. The narrator discusses possible shots depending on the amount of light they require.7 The very expression is marked by cinematographic language as if the voice of a ‘je’ (‘I’) narrator was gradually being transformed into a camera lens.8 Thus, the angle on the ‘rencontre’ (‘meeting’) with Djanlouka is enirely that of a camera (pp. 162–63), and the story is dictated by the acceptance or rejection by Guibert’s friends and relations of his requests to be allowed to ﬁlm them. For example, the narrator makes do with describing the session with the masseur (pp. 98– 99); in the case of Claudette Dumouchel and the narrator’s sister, who decline to be ﬁlmed, this refusal enters the narrative too.9 A number of scenes in Le Protocole compassionnel will be duplicated in ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ even if they only become shots.10 The end of Le Protocole compassionnel will become more or less part of the ﬁlm and

Thanatographical Writing

211

the book’s coda will be linked to the ﬁlm: the ﬁnal shot of the videotape with the ﬂickering word End closes the story. Guibert will even say in an interview that the video is in a way a character in Le Protocole compassionnel.11 In suggesting a reading of Le Protocole compassionnel based on the idea of ‘re´mission’ (‘remission’) I have perhaps given the impression of a homogeneity that very often is only latent. To back this up, let me look more closely at its composition. We know for instance that the episodes of the cellar, the two ﬁbroscopies and the alveoli lavage, which follow each other in the text, were only written when the book was ﬁnished and then joined together. According to Guibert, recounting these episodes was very painful.12 This gives rise to another thought: we know from Guibert himself that most of his writings grow out of his diary. As it happens, in this particular instance, it seems that the writing of these episodes postdated the diary and was independent of it. Let us take the example of the ﬁrst ﬁbroscopy: ‘Chez moi, j’ouvris mon journal, et j’y e´crivis: ‘‘Fibroscopie.’’ Rien d’autre, rien de plus, aucune explication, aucune description de l’examen et aucun commentaire sur ma souﬀrance, impossible d’aligner deux mots, le siﬄet coupe´, bouche be´e. J’e´tais devenu incapable de raconter mon expe´rience’ (PC, p. 60) (‘Back home I opened my diary and wrote in it: ‘‘Fibroscopy’’. Nothing else, nothing more, no explanation, no description of the examination and no comment on my suﬀering, impossible to string two words together, the wind was taken out of my sails and my jaw dropped. I had become incapable of recounting my experience’). To these episodes must also be added the other story that seems to have been written at a diﬀerent time and could well have been published separately in a collection of short stories, ‘Miracle a` Casablanca’, which takes up 43 pages. Combined with the three other episodes it makes up almost a third of the whole book, which is not negligible. If the writer did not wish to recount the episodes of the cellar, the two ﬁbroscopies and the alveoli lavage, he does not show much enthusiasm either for ‘Miracle a` Casablanca’, for diﬀerent if no less important reasons: ‘Je racontais une histoire dont je connaissais le de´but, le de´roulement et la ﬁn, puisque je l’avais ve´cue, et c’est peut-eˆtre pour cela qu’elle m’ennuyait comme un labeur monotone: parce qu’il n’y avait pas cette marge d’impre´vu re´serve´e a` l’e´criture vivante, a` l’e´criture gaie’ (p. 173) (‘I was telling a story whose beginning, middle and end I knew, since I had lived it, and it is perhaps for that reason it bored me

212

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

like a monotonous task: because there was not that margin of the unexpected reserved for living writing, for cheerful writing’). Throughout the story, this resistance will be felt; witness the following: ‘Il va falloir maintenant raconter, le plus en de´tail possible [. . .]’ (p. 184) (‘I am now going to have to tell, in the greatest possible detail [. . .]’). The feeling is of a chore the narrator has to get down to. All this does not mean these various episodes are glum for all that: a humour,13 sometimes demonic,14 emanates from these stories and restores a certain gaiety to the text.15 If all the scenes bearing directly or indirectly on ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ (see note 10) are added to the three episodes mentioned above and to the story ‘Miracle a` Casablanca’, one can get an idea of the extent to which the book resembles a patchwork quilt. If I have laid so much stress on the book’s composition, this is not because I want to condemn it for all that. Braudeau will write for example about Le Protocole compassionnel that ‘le livre de Guibert tient debout tout seul, passionnant, absolument inoubliable, par le miracle de la liberte´ meˆme qu’il s’accorde’16 (‘Guibert’s book stands up by itself, absorbing, absolutely unforgettable, through the miracle of the very freedom it grants itself’). Bernard Comment will stress the text’s modernity, rejecting the label of novel.17 Bellour will use the expression ‘re´cit documentaire [. . .] aux tournants de ﬁction’18 (‘documentary story [. . .] with ﬁctional touches’). I described above the importance of the relationship between Guibert and his readers during the period when he was no longer writing, and the phenomenon will give rise to new links between the narrator of Le Protocole compassionnel and its readers, beginning with the book’s dedication, as well as the title inviting the reader to be compassionate. A genuine concern to communicate with the readers can be felt in Le Protocole compassionnel, often signalled by the use of brackets, with passages in which the narrator addresses them directly, anticipating their reactions, inviting them to reﬂect, showing that he is making progress in his descriptions, explaining that he has changed the characters’ names, taking them as his sole interlocutors, teasing them, conﬁding what could pass for a paroxysm of narcissism19 and even managing to implicate them directly in the narrative by formulating an implicit reading contract in which the reader has to play an active role: C’est mon aˆme que je disse`que a` chaque nouveau jour de labeur qui m’est offert par le DDI du danseur mort. Sur elle je fais toutes sortes d’examens, des cliche´s en coupe, des investigations par re´sonance magne´tique, des

Thanatographical Writing

213

endoscopies, des radiographies et des scanners dont je vous livre les cliche´s, aﬁn que vous les de´chiffriez sur la plaque lumineuse de votre sensibilite´. (pp.80–81; my italics) (It is my soul that I dissect on each new day of work afforded me by the dead dancer’s DDI. I carry out all sorts of tests on it, section shots, magnetic resonance investigations, endoscopies, X-rays and scanners whose negatives I hand over to you, so that you can decipher them on the luminous plate of your sensibility.)

So the reader is responsible for the ‘de´veloppement’ (‘development’) of Guibert’s text. This concern to communicate also has an impact on the style. The narrator of Le Protocole compassionnel writes this about A` l’ami (but his analysis applies equally well to Le Protocole compassionnel): ‘En fait j’ai e´crit une lettre qui a e´te´ directement te´le´faxe´e dans le coeur de cent mille personnes, c’est extraordinaire. Je suis en train de leur e´crire une nouvelle lettre. Je vous e´cris’ (p. 121) (‘In fact I have written a letter which has been faxed directly to the hearts of a hundred thousand people, it is extraordinary. I am writing them another letter. I am writing to you’) The narrator addresses the readers directly, as if he were writing them a letter (‘J’aime le langage ﬂuide, presque parle´ [. . .] j’aime que c¸a passe le plus directement possible entre ma pense´e et la voˆtre, que le style n’empeˆche pas la transfusion’, p. 105; ‘I like ﬂuid, almost spoken language [. . .] I like it to pass as directly as possible between my thought and yours, I do not want the style preventing the transfusion’), then speaking ‘d’une e´criture gaie, limpide, imme´diatement ‘‘communicante’’, pas d’une e´criture tarabiscote´e’ (p. 172) (‘of cheerful, limpid, immediately ‘‘communicating’’ writing, not of convoluted writing’). This concern is out of line with other works by Guibert in which much weight was given to the pursuit of style (Des Aveugles; Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes). At the level of the style, even if long periods a` la Bernhard (PC, pp. 9–11) still occur as in A` l’ami, a sentence that reads like a diary fragment (‘Un peu de ﬁe`vre ce soir, des crampes dans les jambes, de nouveau l’inquie´tude’, p. 87; ‘A bit of a temperature this evening, leg-cramps, renewed anxiety’) can be followed by this: ‘C’est quand ce que j’e´cris prend la forme d’un journal que j’ai la plus grande impression de ﬁction’ (‘It is when what I write takes the form of a diary that I have the strongest feeling of ﬁction’). My analysis is backed up by something Guibert said to Donner: ‘J’ai fait des livres avec un souci de style comme Des Aveugles ou Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes, qui e´tait en ge´ne´ral lie´ a` la tentative et je dirais a` l’e´chec de la ﬁction, parce que ﬁnalement on s’aperc¸oit que c¸a n’a aucun inte´reˆt d’inventer des personnages [. . .]’20 (‘I made books like

214

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

Des Aveugles and Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes with a concern for style which was generally linked to the attempt and even to the failure of ﬁction, since you realise in the end that creating characters is boring [. . .]’). Towards the end of his literary production Guibert was going back to photographic writing, as manifested by the ‘lettre’ (‘letter’), thereby linking up with his earliest form of expression, the letters to ‘T.’ which gave rise to La Mort propagande, the only diﬀerence being that the chief subject of this photographic writing is death. Le Protocole compassionnel oﬀers a true ‘corpographie’ (‘corpography’).21 On the very ﬁrst page of the book, the narrator describes how his body is wasting away and enumerates the things he can no longer do each day; stopping writing is linked to this degenerative process (p. 11). Whilst he notes a distinct improvement in his condition thanks to taking DDI, the narrator puts living, writing and getting an erection on the same footing.22 The body becomes the corpus: one section begins with the narrator’s weight, another with his temperature.23 The narrator describes his body as being like ‘une sorte de squelette’ (‘a sort of skeleton’) and compares it to that of an old man.24 A phenomenon of distanciation is seen at work between the narrator and ‘ce’ (‘this’) body from which he feels alienated, whose T4 levels he does not even care to ﬁnd out any more (pp. 166–67), whereas these ﬁgures were one of the basic preoccupations of A` l’ami. This lack of interest in T4 levels is analysed in another passage: ‘Arrive un stade de la maladie ou` l’on n’a plus prise sur elle, ou` il serait vain de croire qu’on peut en maıˆ triser les mouvements’ (p. 27) (‘There comes a stage in the disease when one no longer has any control over it, when it is vain to think that one can master its movements’) This reﬂection points up one of the fundamental diﬀerences between A` l’ami and Le Protocole compassionnel: if in the former the narrator still had the illusion of mastering the disease, the latter is completely swamped by it. This is also one of the reasons why Le Protocole compassionnel is not a roman faux. If ﬁnding out that one is HIV positive has been perceived as a way of carrying on inscribing the work within the project of unveiling the self and of ‘tout dire’ (‘saying everything’) through the I that tells lies, the progress of the disease threatens the existence of the writer Herve´ Guibert’s non-ﬁctional self, and literature from now on can only have a survival role and, at a pinch, of familiarisation with death.25 The narrator’s daily life is inﬁltrated by the virus and the approach of death. Every sexual relationship becomes problematic and the sight

Thanatographical Writing

215

of a ‘charnu’ (‘ﬂeshy’) body makes the narrator long to eat it, which would be the only conceivable way at the fantastic level of appropriating it;26 the only substitute worthy of the name will be the purchase of pictures (‘[. . .] je dirais que c’est le corps des fantoˆmes qui se diﬀuse par les tableaux [. . .]’, p. 168; ‘[. . .] I would say that it is the bodies of phantoms that are spread by pictures [. . .]’). At the beginning of the book the narrator rarely uses the possessive pronoun to describe his body or its parts.27 It is no coincidence that the daily confrontation in front of the mirror is described as being ‘une expe´rience fondamentale’ (‘a fundamental experience’): ‘Je ne peux pas dire non plus que j’avais de la pitie´ pour ce type [. . .] parfois j’ai l’impression qu’il va s’en sortir puisque des gens sont bien revenus d’Auschwitz, d’autres fois il est clair qu’il est condamne´, en route vers la tombe, ine´luctablement’ (p. 15; my italics) (‘I cannot say either that I pitied this guy [. . .] sometimes I feel that he will get out of it since a few people did return from Auschwitz, at other times it is obvious that he is doomed, inescapably en route for the grave’). Because of the alienation felt by the narrator with respect to his body, he ends up splitting himself in two by using the third person singular. We have come a long way since the inscription of the ‘je’ (‘I’)28 for the narrator must ﬁrst reconcile himself with his body but also reappropriate the disease. Let us take the example of the inscription of the word ‘sida’ (‘AIDS’) found on the very ﬁrst page of A` l’ami. This approach in itself becomes problematic again for the writing of Le Protocole compassionnel, as he points out to the reader: ‘[. . .] (voyez comme j’ai du mal a` prononcer le mot) [. . .]’ (PC, p. 17) (‘[. . .] (see how hard it is for me to say the word) [. . .]’). As Duncan puts it magniﬁcently: ‘Le sida a ruine´ non seulement le corps de Guibert, mais aussi le de´sir et la capacite´ de se percevoir en transformant le corps en lieu d’alte´rite´ absolue, en lieu de la mort. Son corps est son memento mori [. . .]’29 (‘AIDS ruined not only Guibert’s body, but also the desire and capacity to perceive himself by transforming his body into a locus of absolute otherness, into a locus of death. His body is his memento mori [. . .]’). The ‘protocole compassionnel’ (‘compassion protocol’) is above all what will make it possible progressively for the narrator to embrace his body. The other becomes the mediator between the narrator and his own body (‘[. . .] peut-eˆtre qu’il subsiste un tel narcissisme fuˆt-ce dans la personne la plus abıˆ me´e qu’elle n’est jamais capable que d’estimer les ravages de l’autre’, p. 46; ‘[. . .] perhaps there exists such narcissism, even in people so badly damaged that they are only ever capable of

216

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

appreciating the extent of the havoc wrought in others’). Thus when he describes the bodies of the other patients it is his own that he wishes once again to tame (‘Chaque fois c’est de moi-meˆme que je suis le voyeur, le documentariste’, p. 104; ‘Each time it is of myself that I am the voyeur, the documentary maker’). Progressively, it is the association between the narrator’s body and that of his great aunt Suzanne which will enable him to begin the long apprenticeship of accepting his own body; does he not himself say that like Suzanne he is 95 (p. 10)? Elsewhere we read: ‘Nous sommes presque pareils dans nos corps et dans nos pense´es dans l’expe´rience du tre`s grand aˆge’ (p. 111) (‘We are almost the same in our bodies and in our thoughts in the experience of extreme old age’). This mediation is intensiﬁed, too, at the level of the look (‘Le regard des autres me fait sentir moi-meˆme une autre personne que celle que je croyais eˆtre, et qui l’est sans doute pour de vrai, un vieillard qui a du mal a` se relever d’une chaise longue’, PC, p. 121; ‘The look of others makes me feel myself a diﬀerent person from the one I thought I was, and who is no doubt that in actual fact, an old man who has diﬃculty getting up from a deck chair’). This identiﬁcation is in sharp contrast to the end of A` l’ami: ‘J’ai enﬁn retrouve´ mes jambes et mes bras d’enfant’ (Ami, p. 267) (‘I have at last recovered the legs and arms I had as a child’). If in the latter text the narrator seems to return to childhood, here he progresses towards premature senescence. In A` l’ami the narrator knew already what he had to go through in order to accept himself: ‘[. . .] il aurait fallu que je m’habitue a` ce visage de´charne´ que le miroir chaque fois me renvoie comme ne m’appartenant plus mais de´ja` a` mon cadavre, et il aurait fallu, comble ou interruption du narcissisme, que je re´ussisse a` l’aimer’ (Ami, p. 242) (‘[. . .] I would have to get used to this haggard face which the mirror reﬂects back at me each time as no longer belonging to me but to my corpse, and I would have, as the epitome or suspension of narcissism, to try and get round to loving it’). He will ponder his reaction to the photo of Mapplethorpe on the front page of Libe´ration, telling himself that ‘[il] fallait trouver de la beaute´ aux malades, aux mourants’ (PC, p. 115) (‘[one] had to ﬁnd beauty in the sick, the dying’), adding: ‘Je ne l’avais pas accepte´ jusque-la`’ (‘I had not accepted it up till then’). This acceptance is a real turning-point at the level of self-identiﬁcation. The narrator is now ready to face the ordeal of his own body, and it is in this sense that the projects of allowing himself to be painted in the nude by Barcelo and of appearing naked on stage at a performance in Avignon should be interpreted: they both betray a concern to ‘aller au

Thanatographical Writing

217

bout d’un de´voilement’ (p. 25) (‘take an unveiling to its limit’), an unveiling which, the narrator himself says in passing, was heralded already in some of the texts in La Mort propagande (p. 26). Similarly, whilst he turns down Jules’s proposal to photograph him ‘nu et vivant’ (‘nude and alive’), he will accept Gustave’s to take his picture on Elba.30 The ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ project will start with the massage session in which the masseur works on Guibert’s body. In what Duncan calls ‘peut-eˆtre l’e´pisode le plus important du roman’31 (‘perhaps the most important episode in the novel’), that of Djanlouka, we witness the reappropriation of the body by the narrator who once more uses the possessive pronoun to describe his body as it appears to him: ‘mon squelette’ (‘my skeleton’) and ‘ma de´pouille’ (‘my remains’) (pp. 162–63); superimposing death on his body. What should be noted, as I have already pointed out, is that the whole of this episode is narrated using ﬁlm terminology (‘On aurait dit qu’il enregistrait chaque parcelle de ma de´pouille, que son regard la ﬁlmait pour pouvoir s’en souvenir, se la repasser’, p. 163; ‘One would think that he was recording each particle of my remains, that his look was ﬁlming it to be able to remember it, to play it back again’). Duncan sees in this episode a way of inscribing the self which will hasten Guibert’s decision to begin using video: ‘Guibert semble convaincu du pouvoir reconstituant du visuel qui permettrait au sujet de retenir l’ide´e d’un moi fonctionnel, quoique re´alise´ par l’intervention d’un moyen artistique et une identiﬁcation intense avec lui’32 (‘Guibert seems convinced of the restorative power of the visual which can enable the subject to hold on to the idea of a functional self, albeit realised by the intervention of an artistic device and an intense identiﬁcation with it’). One of the ﬁrst representations of his body to be tolerated by the narrator of Le Protocole compassionnel will be Euge`ne Smith’s photo of the ‘vieillard irradie´ et de´charne´’ (p. 13) (‘irradiated and emaciated old man’). Taking up photography again on his arrival in Elba, the narrator remarks that if he had brought the video camera with him he would have ﬁlmed the objects he makes do with photographing (p. 119). Similarly, he says that he has to go to Elba to give up video and write his love story with Claudette (p. 108), thereby setting up the noncomplementarity of video and writing. This pre-eminence of video over writing and photography is perhaps explained by something Guibert said to Poivre d’Arvor on ‘Ex-Libris’: ‘C¸a fait trois ans que je [ne] me fais plus photographier parce que c¸a m’angoisse [. . .] le ﬁlm, a` la limite [. . .] c’est vivant [. . .]’ (‘It is three years now since I last had my

218

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

photograph taken because it distresses me [. . .] ﬁlm, at a pinch [. . .] it is alive [. . .]’). Throughout this book I have often enough written that for Guibert photography was closely linked to death not to be able to see the diﬃculties of using such an art form at this stage in his illness. This does not mean for all that that Thanatos is not present in Le Protocole compassionnel; on the contrary, death is everywhere. Following a sudden improvement due to the taking of DDI, the narrator starts writing again (p. 54). The book struggles with the disease, sometimes gaining the upper hand, ready to throw in the towel at other moments.33 If DDI facilitates the production of the narrative, it is inexorably linked to death as early as the back-cover blurb, which tells us that it has already killed 300 people, and the same applies from the third fragment onwards, where we learn that the narrator is only able to beneﬁt from it because the dancer has died. Finally, according to the narrator, it is responsible too for the book’s very existence: C’est le DDI du danseur mort, avec le Prozac, qui e´crit mon livre, a` ma place. Ce sont ces 335 milligrammes de poudre blanche [. . .] et cette ge´lule quotidienne de 20 milligrammes [. . .] qui me redonnent la force de vivre, d’espe´rer; de bander, de bander pour la vie, et d’e´crire [. . .] c¸a me fait quelque chose de savoir que ce sont des substances chimiques qui e´crivent un livre. (p. 84) (It is the dead dancer’s DDI, with Prozac, that is writing the book for me. It is those 335 milligrams of white powder [. . .] and that daily 20 milligram capsule [. . .] that give me back the strength to live, to hope; to get an erection, to get an erection for life, and to write [. . .] it does affect me, knowing it is chemical substances that are writing a book.)

So the remission granted the narrator is like a pact with death. The narrator tries getting used to this death but, just as for his body, he needs to ﬁnd mediators. It is in this sense that the various episodes of the cellar, the alveoli lavage and the man collapsing at the bus stop need to be interpreted.34 The experience closest to death seems to be that of the cellar. Once again ﬁlm terminology is used: ‘Je visionnai nettement ma mort dans cette cave [. . .]’ (p. 71) (‘I viewed my death clearly in that cellar [. . .]’). So we see that the entire thematic of Le Protocole compassionnel leads straight to ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’. If the narrator does not use mediators, he has to give himself the illusion of dominating death by hastening it, that is by contemplating suicide. Thus what is truly at stake in the narrative of the ﬁrst ﬁbroscopy is that his experience ‘fait imme´diatement surgir la ne´cessite´ du suicide’ (p. 56) (‘immediately raises the necessity of suicide’). Being incapable of recounting his experience, the narrator will instead think

Thanatographical Writing

219

of ﬁlming it:35 once again ﬁlm takes precedence over writing. Throughout the book, from the ﬁrst fragment onwards, the narrator will reiterate that he has the means of committing suicide (p. 11), and the action of killing himself will be balanced by the writing of a book and of this book. Would that be thanks to the various mediators and to the possibility of suicide? The narrator, on holiday in Elba, ends up writing that he is no longer afraid of death; he will then prepare his funeral with Gustave.36 Elsewhere, we will learn that he leafs through a book with anatomical nudes looking like corpses or that he thinks at night of Turner’s picture Death on a Pale Horse.37 As with the body, the work of art crops up again as representation of death, and yet this obsession with death gradually changing into an incontrovertible fact is made all the more painful by the narrator saying: ‘Oui, il me faut bien l’avouer [. . .] apre`s avoir tant reˆve´ a` la mort, dore´navant j’ai horriblement envie de vivre’ (p. 167) (‘Yes, I do have to admit [. . .] after having dreamt so much about death, from now on I have a terrible longing to live’). Having carried out a reading of Le Protocole compassionnel based on the concept of ‘re´mission’ (‘remission’) and then explored its thematic, I can now turn to the play of truth and falsehood. The back cover makes it clear that the protagonists are all ‘personnages’ (‘characters’), including Herve´ Guibert. To prove my point I need only take the example of the relationship between the narrator and Claudette Dumouchel: ‘Une e´trange relation va s’inventer a` chaque examen entre cette femme tre`s belle et le narrateur. Une relation peuteˆtre proche de l’amour, on ne sait jamais’ (back cover) (‘At every examination a strange relationship will be invented between this very beautiful woman and the narrator. A relationship perhaps close to love, who knows’). ‘H.G.’, the text’s author, stresses the word ‘inventer’ (‘invent’), the word ‘amour’ (‘love’) being introduced in a very hesitant manner as if to tease the reader. From that to enquiring, as did one of Guibert’s female interviewers, if he discovered women through Claudette Dumouchel38 is a step I am not prepared to take. The narrator speaks within the text of ‘inventing’ his relationship with Claudette (p. 103). When he introduces this character in the ﬁfth fragment he says he could just as well have hated her. Everything points to the fact that from the moment he saw this person appear, this ‘raˆleuse aux cheveux e´bouriﬀe´s gomine´s et aux chaussons plats de boxeur, championne de l’eﬃcacite´ par la de´sensibilisation des rapports me´decinmalade’ (p. 29) (‘moaning minnie with dishevelled Brylcreemed hair and

220

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

ﬂat boxing boots, champion of eﬃciency through the desensitisation of the doctor-patient relationship’), she could only be one of his characters. Everything, down to her name, ‘un peu vieillot’ (‘a bit old-fashioned’), makes him think that she could be the heroine of a novel. A whole game starts up between them that even spills over into their perfectly legitimate activities.39 Following an examination aimed at testing his memory in which he got six out of ten, the narrator writes that Claudette is his new mistress (p. 108), without one being able to tell whether he means schoolmistress or lover. The word ‘maıˆ tresse’ (‘mistress’) is used because the narrator had confessed as early as page 47 that he was already married, and we ﬁnd another allusion to this fact on page 137 before the marriage is described (pp. 151–52); there the narrator will play on the ambiguity between functional marriage and love match. At the end of the book, when he says that he cannot stand men any longer, the narrator will report the comment made by his psychiatrist: ‘Guibert vire sa cuti’ (p. 226) (‘Guibert has changed his sexual orientation’) This allusion to a possible change in sexual orientation is part of the game. Moreover, whereas he has just written: ‘Mon pe`re avait raison, j’aurais duˆ devenir me´decin de province, marie´ a` une Claudette [. . .]’ (p. 107) (‘My father was right, I should have become a provincial doctor, married to a Claudette [. . .]’), the narrator corrects himself: ‘[. . .] il va me croire par-dessus le marche´, et s’eﬀondrer en larmes’ (‘[. . .] he will believe me, what is more, and collapse in tears’). This passage shows clearly that he must not be believed. The narrator also tries to delude himself. Thus, he increasingly wonders, and ends up asking Dr Chandi, whether Claudette is a lesbian.40 What a ﬁctional development can be glimpsed with this narrative possibility! The gay narrator who ends up falling in love with a woman who turns out to be a lesbian . . . Perhaps aware that the writing will not manage to inscribe the ‘amoureuse’ (‘amorous’) relationship with Claudette, the narrator not surprisingly turns once more to ﬁlm. Thus he imagines her taking his socks oﬀ on screen to the accompaniment of Christophe’s song, Avec les ﬁlles j’ai un succe`s fou (‘I Pull Girls as I Want’) (p. 226). Even the ﬁctional play of truth and falsehood turns to video for help. The narrator deceives his readers too; to give but one example, the ‘ﬁn’ (‘end’) of the book is supposed to take place on ‘13 aouˆt 1990’ whereas in the preceding section the narrator speaks of the announcement of the war against Iraq (p. 222). As it happens, the Gulf War was only declared in January 1991! Indeed on reﬂection the whole book is under the inﬂuence of delusion or at least of the improbable, beginning

Thanatographical Writing

221

with the episode of the dead dancer’s DDI and the story of the millionaire whose aunt works for the Ministry of Health and who agrees to help him on condition that he writes a text to celebrate a young novillero he is in love with, but also the episode of the cellar and ‘Miracle a` Casablanca’! However, these four episodes are authenticated in the paratext,41 which does not mean that they are true! As for Mockney’s vaccine, spirited away whilst the nurse was getting ready to give the narrator his second booster (pp. 164–65), he is well aware that the reader will ﬁnd it hard to believe (‘Cette histoire est incroyable, et pourtant elle n’est que la stricte ve´rite´’, p. 165; ‘This story is unbelieveable, and yet it is quite strictly true’). He will then report, via Ste´phane, what Muzil often said about the narrator’s books: ‘Il ne lui arrive que des chose fausses’, (ibid.) (‘Only things that never happened happen to him’). In telling the story of the vaccination the narrator betrays, according to his own statement, someone whose behaviour towards him was ‘d’une ge´ne´rosite´ sublime’ (‘of sublime generosity’), and oﬀers this in self-justiﬁcation: ‘Mais je ne peux plus davantage faire l’impasse sur ce re´cit’42 (‘But I can no longer ﬁnesse against this story any more’), as if trust had to be sacriﬁced to the logic of the narrative and to the ﬁctional aspect of the story. That is precisely what happens in the DDI episode: Jules gets the narrator to swear to say nothing, forcing the narrator to lie to his two best friends;43 but he ‘balance tout par e´crit’ (‘chucks it all through writing’). As the present study has shown, for Guibert betrayal by writing or photography is not betrayal. In any case the narrator calls the friend who has made it possible for him to be vaccinated a ‘personnage admirable’ (p. 164) (‘admirable character’). From the description of this individual onwards, by the sole fact of entering the ﬁction, he is transformed in the narrator’s eyes into a ‘character’. Coming back to the above stories, it matters little whether they are true or not. To take the example of ‘Miracle a` Casablanca’, it is not the fact that the writer has a hope of being cured so much as the fact that the journey will give him a chance to start writing again that makes him decide to go (‘[La lettre] portait autant l’entrevue d’un re´cit que d’un espoir’, p. 176; ‘[The letter] brought a glimpse as much of a narrative as of a hope’); that is what Louise has clearly understood (p. 177). The proposal contained in the letter is judged ‘romanesque’ (p. 176) (‘ﬁctional’) by the narrator. Just like the ﬁrst description of Claudette above, that of the ‘Tunisien’ (‘Tunisian’) holds out the invitation to a story (‘[. . .] un boxeur, industriel a` la retraite, qui ope´rait des miracles a`

222

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

Casablanca [. . .]’, p. 183; ‘[. . .] a boxer, a retired industrialist, who carried out miracles at Casablanca [. . .]’). By ‘protocole compassionnel’ (‘compassion protocol’) can be understood the one linking Guibert progressively to his body, the ultimate reconciliation being death. If the most important sentence of A` l’ami was ‘J’ai eu le sida pendant trois mois’ (‘I have had AIDS for three months’), that of Le Protocole compassionnel is the one the narrator would like to write by way of last sentence for his book: ‘La mort c’est la re´conciliation’ (p. 227) (‘Death is reconciliation’). But we note (and the narrator also draws attention to the fact) that he will not manage to make this the last sentence of his book. Should this be seen as the failure of literature? In any case, as has been shown, the book’s entire thematic calls for the ﬁlm project: through video, to which I now turn, Guibert perhaps envisages a new means of writing the body and death.

‘LA PUDEUR OU L’IMPUDEUR’ It is because he was telling people he had stopped writing that the television producer is supposed to have got in touch with Guibert, suggesting he make a ﬁlm in which he would be ‘a` la fois l’auteur et le sujet’ (‘both author and subject’), the narrator commenting: ‘La formule n’e´tait pas mal choisie: a` la limite je n’avais jamais fait que cela, a` part quelques incartades vers la ﬁction’44 (‘That was not a bad way of putting it: at a pinch I had never done anything else, apart from a few forays into ﬁction’). Let us pause a moment over these remarks. They suﬃce by themselves to conﬁrm the entire analysis developed in this study: ﬁrstly in so far as Guibert has always taken himself as object of study and has had a great deal of diﬃculty inventing characters; secondly because, in choosing the term ‘incartade’ (literally ‘swerve’) to speak of ﬁction, Guibert has introduced the idea of a swerve deﬂecting him from his trajectory. That, as it happens, is precisely what my analysis has brought out: feeling himself under an obligation to gain literary respectability by writing ‘romans’ (‘novels’), Guibert was diverted from the project of writing the self until the time he decided to make his HIV infection the subject of A` l’ami by using as narrator a ‘je’ (‘I’) identiﬁable with the writer Herve´ Guibert, while still protecting himself by means of the roman faux. So if the approach of ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ is in the tradition of Guibert’s work, before proceeding with my analysis I must discuss the issue of the identity of the ﬁlm’s author.

Thanatographical Writing

223

The ﬁlm’s author is as much the editor Maureen Mazurek as Guibert himself, not forgetting the producer Pascale Breugnot. True, it was Guibert who ﬁlmed the video cassettes (25 45-minute cassettes). He then contented himself with handing them over to Mazurek. Returning from his journey to Japan he viewed the montage she had begun working on and was reassured; it amazed him because it was diﬀerent from what he had envisaged, which would no doubt have been ‘encore plus morbide’45 (‘more morbid still’). After that he trusted her and viewed nothing else.46 Herve´ Guibert is also the main character in the ﬁlm since it is he whom we follow in his struggle with the disease and in his relationships with people. ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ goes back to the way of writing of L’Image fantoˆme in which, speaking of Peter Handke’s diary, the narrator oﬀered this analysis: ‘Il met son quotidien en e´criture au fur et a` mesure qu’il le vit: la retranscription est presque imme´diate, mais elle est aussi continue, plus que des photos on pourrait imaginer un appareil vide´o qui double sa vue et sa conscience d’une longue bande ininterrompue, dont il ramasse ensuite quelques chutes’ (IF, p. 77) (‘He turns his daily existence into writing as he lives it: the transcription is almost immediate, but it is also continuous, rather than photos one could imagine a video camera paralleling his sight and conscience with a long unbroken tape from which he later collects a few trims’). The paratext tells us also that Guibert did not want any other dialogue in the ﬁlm apart from the two interviews with his great-aunts; in the end he decided to read passages from his diary which were recorded on cassette.47 Nouchi analyses this choice in the following manner: ‘Guibert, photographe, connaıˆ t trop le sens de l’image pour en marteler la signiﬁcation. Il laisse l’image parler, meˆme si cela peut parfois choquer’48 (‘As a photographer Guibert knows the meaning of the image too well to hammer its signiﬁcance home. He lets the image speak for itself, even if that is liable on occasion to give oﬀence’). In this, ﬁlm practises the same art of understatement as that found in the books and photographs, so as not to give rise to an outpouring of emotion. So, to recap, we have in addition to Guibert the ‘personnage’ (‘character’) the voice of Guibert the writer, and passages from the diary that recur in A` l’ami, Le Protocole compassionnel and L’Homme au chapeau rouge.49 It can be said, to sum up, that Guibert is the ﬁlm’s director, cameraman and scriptwriter all in one. Let us begin by talking of what can be attributed to Guibert, his body, even if the latter is above all a ﬁction in the ﬁlm. As we have seen,

224

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

the episode with Djanlouka in Le Protocole compassionnel convinced Guibert that he had to turn to video to alleviate the identity crisis resulting from his illness. Here, as Duncan analyses it, ‘la quasi omnipre´sence du corps de Guibert dans l’image invite le spectateur a` conside´rer le corps comme un texte qui fonctionne comme une signature, comme le me´tonyme du moi’50 (‘the quasi-omnipresence of Guibert’s body in the image invites the reader to consider the body as a text functioning like a signature, like the metonym of the self’). So this body is followed in its most banal activities which, because they are paralleled by a struggle for life, become very important, like the scenes with the masseur or those of bodily hygiene. On listening, the identiﬁcation of Guibert’s body is intensiﬁed by the voice oﬀscreen one knows to be his reading passages from the diary. As stated above, he is the ﬁlm’s director, cameraman and scriptwriter all in one: it is a way of trying to exercise control over his illness, something that had proved impossible in Le Protocole compassionnel. In Le Protocole compassionnel, I noted, there was at the beginning of the book a real split between the narrator and his own body. Just as in Le Protocole compassionnel, the narrator will identify with his greataunts and with Suzanne in particular, talking to them about diseases, old age and AIDS. What is new with respect to Le Protocole compassionnnel is that the mediation occurs through the ﬁlm itself. Thus, having ﬁlmed his operation, a throat biopsy, the character Guibert goes home and starts viewing the operation; we are oﬀered a close-up of Guibert watching the television screen, together with his own commentary in which he says that in playing the videotape he really grasped what had been done to him. This episode will also be narrated in L’Homme au chapeau rouge (pp. 41–43) as well as in an interview;51 in the latter, Guibert informs us that on seeing his operation his pain kept getting worse. Thanks to projecting himself on to the television screen he has been able to identify himself with his body’s pain: not content with being the director, the cameraman and the scriptwriter of the ﬁlm, he has also become the spectator of his own show. We note, too, that what moves him most in this operation is ‘le moment du danger, du danger supreˆme, de la menace, ou` c¸a pourrait mal se passer d’un seul coup [. . .]’52 (‘the moment of danger, of supreme danger, of threat, when it could suddenly go wrong [. . .]’). Never has Guibert been so prompt to ‘inscrire’ (‘write’) his own death (if the operation had gone badly) and, in the case of the ﬁlm projection, such a close spectator of his own death. It should be remembered, too,

Thanatographical Writing

225

what he conﬁded to Donner about his own conception of the ﬁlm’s montage which would have been ‘more morbid still’;53 for example, one of Guibert’s two readings aloud is a Walter de la Mare text on death. Viewing ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ again for the nth time before writing this section, I was struck by an obvious fact to which I had not given the importance it deserved, even in the chapter I wrote about the ﬁlm.54 It seemed to me all of a sudden that, through this ﬁlm, Guibert was preparing his great-aunts for his suicide. Just as the ﬁrst sentence of A` l’ami was the most important to write, and that of Le Protocole compassionnel was ‘Death is reconciliation’, the two most signiﬁcant sentences in the ﬁlm are when Herve´ Guibert turns to Suzanne and asks her: ‘Est-ce que tu penses qu’il faut se suicider quand on a tre`s mal?’ (‘Do you think one ought to kill oneself when one is in great pain?’) and when he asks Louise: ‘Est-ce qu’il faut se suicider quand on est comme moi?’ (‘Should one commit suicide when one is like me?’) and further on: ‘Si par exemple un jour, t’apprenais que je me suis suicide´, qu’est-ce que tu penserais? [. . .] Tu m’en voudrais?’ (‘If for example one day you learned that I had committed suicide, what would you think? [. . .] Would you be angry with me?’). They are perhaps the only two moments in the ﬁlm which are more immodest than modest. Originally Guibert did not want there to be any other dialogues in the ﬁlm than these two interviews with his great-aunts, which emphasises the importance of the content of these remarks and the place he wanted to assign them in the ﬁlm. At other moments Guibert is however careful not to become immodest: ‘Je me suis dit qu’on ne pourrait pas ﬁlmer ces cadavres ambulants comme j’y avais pense´ un moment [. . .] que ce serait ﬁnalement un vrai scandale, un scandale ininte´ressant’ (PC, p. 46)55 (‘I told myself that one could not ﬁlm these walking corpses as I had thought of doing at one point [. . .] that it would be a real scandal when all is said and done, an uninteresting scandal’) he writes about the other patients he mixed with. According to Gaudemar, the ﬁlm is situated between the practices of writing, where Guibert said he knew no restraint, and photography, which he practised with cautious reticence.56 Just like the body, ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ tries to write death, or at least have the illusion of mastering it by the temptation of suicide; indeed, the Guibert character mimes a suicide scene live in the ﬁlm. With respect to A` l’ami, with respect to Le Protocole compassionnel, with respect to Guibert’s entire work and particularly to La Mort

226

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

propagande, there is a certain logic to this suicide scene: witness the passage from La Mort propagande, which I shall not quote in full since I did so in Chapter 1. In it the ‘je’ (‘I’) narrator speaks of reproducing his body in a ﬁlm as he goes about his usual activities (MP, p. 183) before bringing death on stage: ‘Me donner la mort sur une sce`ne, devant des came´ras. Donner ce spectacle extreˆme, excessif de mon corps, dans ma mort. En choisir les termes, le de´roulement, les accessoires’ (p. 184) (‘Kill myself on a stage, before cameras. Oﬀer this extreme, excessive spectacle of my body, in my death. Choose its terms, its development, its props’). The truly amazing aspect is that this premonitory text was written before 1977. Thirteen years later it will become reality. As for the ‘sce´nario’ (‘script’), it was already to be found in A` l’ami (pp. 218–19), except for one detail: in the ﬁlm, as in a game of Russian roulette, the character uses two glasses, only pouring the dose of digitalin into one of them, then, after moving them around with his eyes shut until he no longer knows which contains the lethal dose and drinking the contents of one of them, he sinks into an armchair to await either an eventual reawakening or death. Once he is awake the oﬀscreen voice of Guibert explains: ‘Je suis sorti e´puise´ de cette expe´rience, comme modiﬁe´. Je crois que ﬁlmer c¸a a change´ mon rapport a` l’ide´e du suicide’ (‘I came away exhausted from that experiment, altered as it were. I think ﬁlming that has changed my attitude to the idea of suicide’). As I have written elsewhere, with ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ Guibert invented a new autobiographical ‘e´criture’ (‘writing’): existential thanatography.57 Just as in L’Image fantoˆme we learnt that what interested Guibert was photography as close to death as possible, it is the same in the ﬁlm: making a spectacle out of his suicide. I use the word ‘spectacle’ advisedly since there is obviously a whole mise-en-sce`ne, starting with ‘l’Arlequin en damier colore´ en e´quilibre sur son jeu de massacre’ (PC, p. 117) (‘the Harlequin in coloured check balancing on his Aunt Sally’) who is present at that other potential Aunt Sally, the act of drinking from one of the two glasses. To this should be added, too, the way Guibert is positioned; stuck to the wall behind him is a kind of dome which, depending on the way his body moves, invests him with a halo! It should not be forgotten that the ‘je’ (‘I’) of La Mort propagande spoke of choosing death’s ‘terms, development and props’. It has been established that some of the ﬁlm’s passages already existed in the written work, and this makes it possible, too, to see the extent of the deception practised by Le Protocole compassionnel. The

Thanatographical Writing

227

Elba trip took place during the 1990 summer holidays, the same year as that given in Le Protocole compassionnel. As it happens, we read in Le Protocole compassionnel that the narrator ends up not writing Claudette Dumouchel a postcard (PC, p. 131); in the ﬁlm, he is shown being examined by Claudette Dumouchel on his return to Paris, and the conversation turns on the postcard he has sent her! We learn in Le Protocole compassionnel that the narrator took neither a video camera nor digitalin to Elba (p. 119); in the ﬁlm there are a number of shots taken of Elba, including the ﬂight there, and digitalin is supposed to play a very important role in the suicide scene, which is central to the ﬁlm! Staying with Le Protocole compassionnel, we learn that the interviews with Suzanne and Louise were not recorded, which leads the narrator to write that he has ‘commis une image fantoˆme [. . .] un chef d’oeuvre invisible’ (PC, p. 102) (‘created a phantom image [. . .] an invisible masterpiece’). This entirely ﬁctional suggestion is in the tradition of the photo of Guibert’s mother which was never taken, and yet, though the exact words supposed to have been uttered by Louise do not recur (‘[. . .] Je t’aime, ﬁgure-toi’, ibid.; ‘[. . .] I love you, you realise’), the content of the dialogue is certainly to be found in the ﬁlm. But in the end none of this matters: the play between truth and falsehood is still being carried on, even in ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’. This game creates a certain complicity between Guibert and his readers/spectators: ‘H.G. trompe [. . .] ses lecteurs (qui le savent, le supposent et en jouissent)’58 (‘H.G. deceives [. . .] his readers (who know it, accept it and get pleasure from it)’). It should not be assumed either that the book is false and the ﬁlm is ‘vrai’ (‘true’). Editing apart, the narrator of Le Protocole compassionnel writes of the ﬁrst ﬁlmed massage session that one has to act to forget the camera, and that he and the masseur are ‘acteurs’ (‘actors’) (p. 99). While the camera is ﬁlming, the narrator hears a barrel organ being played under the windows and comments: ‘[. . .] il faudra peut-eˆtre le supprimer au mixage, il aurait l’air par trop calque´ sur la bande son, dommage’ (ibid.) (‘[. . .] we will perhaps have to drop it at the mixing, it would seem far too obvious on the soundtrack, pity’). This remark betrays Guibert’s concern to make a ﬁlm that does not sound too artiﬁcial, so as to keep it credible. At the end of the ﬁlm the narrator is seen at his desk typing, and his voice is heard oﬀering this analysis: Il faut de´ja` avoir ve´cu les choses une premie`re fois avant de pouvoir les ﬁlmer en vide´o sinon, on ne les comprend pas, on ne les vit pas. La vide´o absorbe

228

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self tout de suite et beˆtement cette vie pas ve´cue. Mais elle peut aussi faire le lien entre photo, e´criture et cine´ma. Avec la vide´o, on s’approche d’un autre instant, de l’instant nouveau avec, comme en superposition, dans un fondu enchaıˆ ne´ purement mental, le souvenir du premier instant. Alors l’instant pre´sent a aussi la richesse du passe´. (One has to have lived things once already before being able to ﬁlm them on video, otherwise one does not understand them, one does not live them. Video simply absorbs at once, stupidly, this life not lived. But it can also bring together photography, writing and ﬁlm. With video, one gets close to another moment, to the new moment with, as if in superimposition, in a purely mental fade-in fade-out, the memory of the ﬁrst moment. Then the present instant has the past’s richness too.)

In a way Guibert became disenchanted with video; thus, when he is about to go and see Claudette, he decides not to take the camcorder: ‘Mais je n’avais pas envie de mettre ce machin entre nous. C’est encore trop toˆt, il faut laisser la relation se baˆtir toute seule [. . .]’ (PC, p. 103) (‘But I did not feel like putting this thing between us. It is still too soon, we must let the relationship build up by itself [. . .]’). According to Duncan, Guibert twice has diarrhoea and plunges his head in his hands: ‘[. . .] Guibert, son propre spectateur, est incapable de supporter le poids du regard [. . .] ces moments [. . .] repre´sentent aussi la limite ou` le corps n’est plus disponible pour l’art, pour la repre´sentation’59 (‘[. . .] Guibert, his own spectator, is incapable of sustaining the weight of the look [. . .] these moments [. . .] represent too the limit where the body is no longer available for art, for representation’). When its limits have been accepted, Guibert says that video can provide the link between photography, writing and ﬁlm. We have here the three art forms that he used. Neither must it be forgotten that originally Guibert wanted to be a ﬁlm-maker (‘Je voulais faire du cine´ma avant de vouloir e´crire’,60 ‘I wanted to make ﬁlms before I wanted to write’) and that he often aspired to photographic writing (see Chapter 2 in particular), dreaming of immediate transcription. So in my view ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ forms part of Guibert’s work despite all my reservations about the problematic of this ﬁlm’s ‘auteur/auteurs’ (‘author/authors’). During the ﬁlm’s last monologue, as I have indicated, the narrator is shown at his desk typing a text which we suppose to be the one he is reading, but as soon as he has said the words ‘fondu enchaıˆ ne´’ (‘fade-in fade-out’) he gets up and leaves the room. The image accompanying Guibert’s last words is that of an empty desk and armchair, with, on the back of a chair in front of the desk, what we suppose to be Herve´ Guibert’s jacket. This superimposing of presence and absence recalls

Thanatographical Writing

229

that of ‘L’image cance´reuse’ (IF, pp. 165–69) whose closing words were: ‘Le transfert l’avait de´livre´ de sa maladie . . .’ (IF, p. 169) (‘The transference had freed him from his illness . . .’). If the character of ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ cannot hope for the fade-in fade-out to free him from his illness, a transference nevertheless occurs through the mediation of the ﬁlm: the character Guibert has inscribed his body and his disease on the videotape, playing also with death, and avoiding—with two exceptions—the threatened break-up of the subject at the end of A` l’ami and Le Protocole compassionnel. CYTOME´GALOVIRUS Published in January 1992, Cytome´galovirus is, according to the generic subtitle, a ‘journal d’hospitalisation’ (‘hospital diary’); the diary was kept between 17 September and 8 October 1991. The title refers to a virus which attacks the eye and can cause blindness. In a sense, by choosing ‘cytome´galovirus’ as title, Guibert clearly shows that the book’s raison d’eˆtre is this cytomegalovirus. Herve´ Guibert becomes once more the main character of his writings:61 there is no doubt here about the narrator’s identity, since he is called ‘Monsieur Guibert’ and people know that he has written Le Protocole compassionnel and Des Aveugles and is aﬀected by AIDS.62 Guibert’s friends also get their initials back for the occasion, the pseudonyms used since L’Incognito being abandoned, which can lead to confusion, particularly for ‘H.G.’ (Cyto., p. 10) since these initials recur on the back cover. The chief character becomes, too, by force of circumstance a sort of threatened ‘he´ros’ (‘hero’) as in A` l’ami or Le Protocole compassionnel. In publishing his book, it is as if Guibert had followed to the letter Peter Handke’s advice: ‘Peter Handke a e´crit que les seuls he´ros sont les enfants et les agonisants. Et que, pour lui, le lieu de l’agonie, de la ce´le´bration de cette capacite´ d’he´roı¨sme, ce n’e´tait pas le roman mais le journal’63 (‘Peter Handke has written that the only heroes are children and the dying. And that, for him, the locus of the death-agony, of the celebration of this capacity for heroism, was not the novel but the diary’). There are several narrative strands in this text, particularly that of a boxing match. The narrator describes hearing the news of his condition like getting a punch in the stomach (p. 24). The reader has a ringside seat for the ﬁght between his body and the ‘traitement d’attaque’

230

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

(‘attack treatment’) in one corner and the opponent, the cytomegalovirus, in the other. Does not the narrator suggest that his diary be called a war diary (p. 18) and, at the end of the text, write: ‘Rien. C’est dimanche. Vaincu par l’hoˆpital a` la longue?’ (p. 90) (‘Nothing. It is Sunday. Defeated by hospital in the end?’)? It is true that an important element in the book is the ‘lutte’ (‘ﬁght’) between the narrator and the hospital staﬀ, also described in boxing terms: ‘Vide´ ce soir, comme si j’avais boxe´, malade, pendant deux jours et deux nuits, contre une cinquantaine de personnes en principe en bonne sante´’ (pp. 43–44) (‘Drained this evening, as if I had been boxing, ill as I am, for two days and two nights, against ﬁfty-odd people supposedly in good health’). As a general rule, the narrator ﬁghts for hygiene but also for respect for his dignity.64 A strong impression is given that this live broadcast of the blows exchanged on both sides has the eﬀect of ﬁring the narrator with enthusiasm and that such ﬁsticuﬀs form part of his struggle for life (pp. 41–43). Moreover, by interspersing this narrative element with the description of his physical and psychic condition, the narrator makes the gravity of his situation easier to grasp.65 The other ingredient used to ‘de´dramatiser’ (‘make less dramatic’) the situation is humour. Even if ‘c’est diﬃcile d’avoir de l’humour en position couche´e’ (‘it is diﬃcult to be witty when supine’), the narrator will draw up a ‘dictionnaire humoristique des termes du sida’ (‘humorous dictionary of AIDS terms’) and will lament the fact that ‘Bon de´ce`s’ (‘Good death’) is never said.66 The style too sometimes reﬂects boxing, with uppercuts like: ‘L’hoˆpital, c’est l’enfer’ (p. 20) (‘Hospital is hell’). But most of the time the narrator tries using understatement: ‘Il y a un oeil en jeu’ (p. 19) (‘There is an eye at stake’). To take the example of the diary’s ﬁrst sentence: ‘Vision de l’oeil droit bousille´e; diﬃcile de lire’ (p. 7) (‘Sight in the right eye ruined; diﬃcult to read’); that says it all. Among the other narrative strands there is the progressively recurring sound of the neighbour’s howling, a kind of accompaniment that is such a strong presence in the story because it heralds perhaps the narrator’s future cries.67 Progressively recurring, too, is a sensitivity to nature, to sun, to the moon, and to the sky, in which the narrator will search for water-colours (p. 44). Here, too, ﬁction seeks to embellish the narrator’s situation; witness this claim: ‘Je prends des bains de soleil en re´gion parisienne, derrie`re des doubles vitrages’ (p. 75) (‘I sunbathe in the Paris suburbs, behind double-glazing’). Indeed, it should not be forgotten that everything is distorted by the prism of ﬁction; thus the narrator comments that, just as in fairy tales, there are good and bad

Thanatographical Writing

231

people (p. 19). From the point of view of ﬁction, as an unknown situation, he would not mind becoming blind since, as he points out, he wrote a book in which he attempted to transcribe the sensory experiences of the blind;68 he would then agree to be photographed again (p. 71). It seemed to me, wrongly, that Cytome´galovirus showed all the characteristics of a narrative in which the ‘je’ (‘I’) seemed detached from its body, carrying on as in Le Protocole compassionnel writing the body’s alienation and trying at the same time to reconcile the self with its body. True, it appears that the possessive pronoun is not used once for the parts of the body, which is anonymous like the members of the medical staﬀ who ﬁle past in front of the narrator’s bed and whose ﬁrst names we will never discover. But that is not what is at stake in this text. Cytome´galovirus is located beyond the attempt to write the body: it is the narrator’s anguish conveyed in instantaneous transcription, as was clearly understood by some reviewers. Danie`le Brison spoke of ‘comprendre de l’inte´rieur’69 (‘understanding from within’) and Bertrand Poirot-Delpech of ‘voir du dedans’70 (‘seeing from inside’). The narrative of the operation (the insertion of the Hickman line) also illustrates what I have been saying (Cyto., pp. 61–63). True, what has happened to the body is conveyed on paper, but that is not what interests the narrator: he wants to reveal his anguished state of mind: ‘[. . .] soudain une douleur intole´rable au niveau du coeur, je crie, je supplie qu’on me de´livre de cette douleur, pendant quelques secondes je pense que je vais mourir [. . .]’ (p. 62) (‘[. . .] suddenly an unbearable pain in the region of the heart, I scream, I beg to be relieved of this pain, for a few seconds I think that I am going to die [. . .]’). It is the fear of death that has to be written down. The book in any case bears the marks of this struggle between the writing of dread and the dissolution of the subject. Just before the fragment of 25 September which describes the operation (the insertion of the Hickman line), this is what we read: ‘Rien e´crit ce soir. Trop choque´. J’essaierai demain’ (p. 59) (‘Wrote nothing this evening. Too traumatised. I will try tomorrow’). Just as for the narration of the ﬁrst ﬁbroscopy (PC, p. 60), the narrator is incapable of describing his experience. Elsewhere he notes that the diary could end ‘pour cause de de´couragement absolu’ (‘owing to absolute discouragement’), even owing to ‘traumatisme’ (‘trauma’), but he carries on because it is a way of punctuating time, of minimising the mental torture, of forgetting, of confessing to the writing what he dare not admit to friends: it also acts

232

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

as a sort of antidepressant.71 The diary comes progressively to symbolise much more than just a diary: it becomes synonymous with survival. A passage in L’Image fantoˆme dealing with Kafka’s diary could be applied to Cytome´galovirus, particularly its last entries: ‘[. . .] les dernie`res notations sont les plus courtes [. . .] elles sont comme des cliche´s de son e´tat inte´rieur, un niveau presque radiographique de son angoisse [. . .]’ (IF, p. 77) (‘[. . .] the last entries are the shortest [. . .] they are like snapshots of his inner state, an almost radiographic record of his anguish [. . .]’). E´crire dans le noir? E´crire jusqu’au bout? En ﬁnir pour ne pas arriver a` la peur de la mort? (Cyto., p. 93) (Write in the dark? Write to the bitter end? Put an end to it so as not to get to the fear of death?)

What is at stake in Cytome´galovirus is brought into sharp focus by this triple question that brings the diary to an end. Will the writing stop? Will it be possible to write until death? Will suicide be able to stem the fear of death? There are two main characters in this hospital diary: Herve´ Guibert and death. On 19 September the narrator will try to get used to his room, thinking that it is perhaps the one he will die in and saying that he does not like it yet (p. 16). Six days later, when he is in intensive care, he will tell himself—after thinking it hell—that it is perhaps the ideal place to die (p. 64). This dichotomy will recur throughout the book. On 2 October, he will set down his last wishes (throw his ashes in the ﬁrst dustbin, p, 84). Two days later, he will discuss ‘Z.’’s mother’s funeral, concluding: ‘Tout c¸a est bien autre chose que les cendres jete´es dans la premie`re poubelle venue’72 (‘That is all very diﬀerent from throwing the ashes into the ﬁrst dustbin you come to’). In L’Image fantoˆme Guibert characterises the writing of the diary as being of ‘[une] imme´diatete´ photographique’ (IF, p. 75) (‘photographic immediacy’). In this sense, Cytome´galovirus continues the tradition of ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ where, like Peter Handke’s diary, Guibert put his daily life into writing as he lived it. In L’Image fantoˆme, the writing of the diary was compared to that of the letter (IF, pp. 74–75). It will be recalled that the narrator of Le Protocole compassionnel wished for a writing that communicated as well as possible with his readers, a ‘te´le´faxe´e’ (‘faxed’) letter;73 by virtue of this approach Guibert was returning to his ﬁrst writings, based on letters. With Cytome´galovirus,

Thanatographical Writing

233

Guibert was also carrying on this tradition, and there are passages in which the narrator seems to be addressing the reader. By means of the parenthesis we are supplied with certain details, the narrator even making us promises.74 On 19 September we read: ‘A` demain.’ (‘Till tomorrow.’); on 20 September: ‘A` demain?’ (‘Till tomorrow?)’;75 it is noteworthy that in the diﬀerence of punctuation the whole fear of death is retranscribed. In an amazing passage he addresses the reader directly: ‘[. . .] vous, j’espe`re, vous penserez un jour: Je croyais que celui-la` e´tait un chieur, eh bien pas du tout!’ (p. 43) (‘[. . .] you will, I hope, think one day: I believed him to be a pain in the neck, well, not a bit of it!’). A real preoccupation with what he writes is inscribed in Cytome´galovirus: ‘Je ne sais pas si, avec ce journal d’hospitalisation, je fais du bien ou du mal’ (p. 35) (‘I do not know whether, with this hospital diary, I am doing good or evil’). The narrator next speaks of the writers who according to him do good, and of those who do evil, concluding: ‘Je pre´fe´rerais maintenant appartenir a` la premie`re cate´gorie’ (p. 36) (‘I would prefer now to belong to the ﬁrst category’). This admission implies that before he wished to belong to the second category—those who do evil—in which he ranks Sade and, with a question mark, Dostoyevsky. Now he wants to be in the tradition of Hamsun, Walser, Handke and Bernhard. As we saw above, when he addresses the reader, he wants to be a nice person and not a nasty one (p. 43). Love runs through the diary: love for ‘T.’ of course, but also the feeling of love between doctor and patient, sealed by suﬀering, which remains in the realm of the unspoken and, paradoxically, perhaps for his parents too, whom he protects, unless he is protecting himself with regard to them.76 Cytome´galovirus’s impossible wager is to attempt the writing of the fear of death. Guibert had no doubt ﬁnished L’Homme au chapeau rouge when he began to keep his hospital diary, since we learn in the text that he was busy writing what was to become Le Paradis (pp. 11– 12). In this sense, Cytome´galovirus does not correspond to the stage that follows ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ or Mon valet et moi in the enterprise of the voices of the self. It is a book in parentheses, like some of Guibert’s other works, guided by the urgency of the circumstances. And yet, seen in a diﬀerent perspective, it is a book that follows logically from the mad enterprise of the voices of the self pursued by Guibert, writing in a ‘bain de mort’ (Cyto., p. 86) (‘bath of death’), in the closest possible proximity to death. It is perhaps the book in which Guibert will have stuck to the end to his wager to ‘tout dire’ (‘say everything’); some would call this immodesty.77

234

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

Since people speak of a ‘trilogie du sida’ (‘AIDS trilogy’) in Guibert (a not particularly apt expression), if trilogy there is,78 it is to be found in my view in A` l’ami writing the disease (‘J’ai eu le sida pendant trois mois’, ‘I have had AIDS for three months’), Le Protocole compassionnel attempting to write death (‘La mort c’est la re´conciliation’, ‘Death is reconciliation’), ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ suicide (the dialogue with the great-aunts quoted above) and, since I would for my part see a tetralogy, Cytome´galovirus located in the closest proximity to death. There is, however, a lesson to be drawn from these experiments. It is not possible, using the various forms of art, to gain ascendency over the disease, nor to inscribe death, nor to exorcise it. Indeed, Guibert is perfectly well aware that death cannot be written, any more than the body can be written precisely, any more than the self can ever ﬁnally be written either: all one can hope to achieve are representations and approximations. In a sense, the enterprise of the voices of the self is doomed to failure from the outset. Faced with the disease, the writer can merely hope to auto-immunise himself, as Hill puts it: ‘[. . .] c’est comme si celui-ci [son texte], par me´thode home´opathique, essayait de se prote´ger contre le virus en s’e´crivant de´ja` comme vaccin, de´ja` comme maladie, de´ja` comme mort’79 (‘[. . .] it is as if it [his text], through homeopathy, was trying to protect itself against the virus by writing itself already as vaccine, already as disease, already as death’). But, as Hill recalls in quoting Blanchot, what literature reveals to us is the impossibility of death.80 In a particularly lucid passage, Hill oﬀers this analysis: ‘La mort ne peut se contempler ou s’e´crire que graˆce a` des de´tours qui font que tout de suite vous retombez dans le ﬁctif, le faux ou le de´lirant [. . .]’81 (‘Death can only be contemplated or written thanks to a deviousness where you fall back straight away into the ﬁctitious, the fake or the delirious [. . .]’). ‘The ﬁctitious, the fake or the delirious’: that is precisely what will be the point at issue in the writing of Guibert’s last three books, which are the subject of my last chapter.

CHAPTER TEN

The ﬁctitious, the fake or the delirious I discussed Cytome´galovirus in the last chapter despite the fact that it appeared after Guibert’s death, since it formed part of the project of thanatographical writing. With the three books left for me to study, Guibert is in my view still committed to the project of the voices of the self, so their thematic will be that of the body and death also. Of note, too, is the fact that the three bear the label ‘roman’ (‘novel’), with a variant for Mon valet et moi. The only diﬀerence from the three other works published since A` l’ami is that, as we shall see, Guibert tries to tear himself away from his illness and seek refuge in writing. But it is not ‘le divertissement’ (in the Pascalian sense of ‘spiritual nonchalance’) that Guibert is after: by means of subterfuge (the ﬁctitious, the fake or the delirious), he will still manage to put his self down on paper and ‘e´crire jusqu’au bout’ (‘write to the bitter end’).

MON VALET ET MOI Published in September 1991, Mon valet et moi was the last book to appear in Guibert’s lifetime. It bears the generic subtitle ‘roman cocasse’ (‘comical novel’). The strangeness is to be found in the story that is told: a master aged 80, an incontinent author of boulevard stage successes, describes his relationship with his manservant, a 20-year-old screen actor who has made only one ﬁlm. Little more will be learnt about the manservant, except a few details about his childhood at the Mettray reform school (Val., pp. 42–43) which remind one of Jean Genet. The master, whose name is nowhere given, says ‘je’ (‘I’), and the servant, whose ﬁrst name (‘Jim’) is revealed only at the end of the novel, does not speak, or only in the passages where his words are reported in direct speech. However, having concealed from him the fact that he was writing this story based on their relationship, the master will end up having to come clean and dictate the book to his servant 235

236

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

(p. 86), who will thus fulﬁl the function of a scribe, writing his own story while not being the text’s author. Mon valet et moi could correspond to the ‘livre droˆle et me´chant’ (‘funny and nasty book’) that the narrator of A` l’ami thought of writing when noting down his reaction to the announcement of his death, saying that he was seized with a really bookish bulimia (Ami, p. 70). One of the funniest images in the book is of the 80-year-old master putting on Nike-air trainers and ambling along the street dressed in leather jacket and jeans (Val., pp. 20–21). As for the servant’s spitefulness towards his master, the examples are legion, reaching a climax with the valet refusing all night to help his master get up, kicking and urinating on him.1 The servant also dreams of being ‘maıˆ tre’ (‘master’); he would then take on a Japanese manservant and would derive amusement from ill-treating him in all sorts of ways. As for the master, he declares that he is deliberately pushing the valet to the brink to make him interesting (pp. 89–90). The servant keeps a hold over the master by telling him that his probings have led to the uncovering of his family vice (p. 61). Intertextuality operates here on two levels. First because Vice came out at the same time as Mon valet et moi and, as we saw in Chapter 2, one of the chief components of my discussion was ﬁnding the ‘vice’ of the title. Secondly because this ‘vice’ turns on a misappropriated inheritance and that it is precisely a story of inheritance which was at the heart of ‘l’enqueˆte’ (‘the enquiry’) announced on the back cover of Mes parents, whereas the book went in a quite diﬀerent direction.2 The ‘me´chancete´’ (‘nastiness’) exists too with regard to Marguerite Duras in a passage about a factory which pulps old books by Duras ‘pour refaire du bon papier vierge’ (p. 54) (‘to remake good virgin paper’). Where are we to inscribe the Mon valet et moi project in Herve´ Guibert’s work? Let us look ﬁrst at the circumstances of its composition. The book’s dedication tells us that in the plane taking them to Tokyo, ‘Christine’ had cut out the photo of the person who served as trigger to the story; in this way Guibert carries on one of his compositional practices where, as we saw in Chapter 4, it is the image that gives rise to a text. Guibert explains in the paratext how the story originated;3 we learn that he wrote it while working on what was to become L’Homme au chapeau rouge. So, just like Les Gangsters, Mon valet et moi is a book in parentheses, as Guibert himself said.4 When Garcin asked him why he had changed register by writing a humorous book, Guibert replied that the book was conceived in response to an

The fictitious, the fake or the delirious

237

urgent need to ‘changer de peau’ (‘become a diﬀerent person’).5 ‘Becoming a diﬀerent person’, that is to be no longer the HIV positive writer, the narrator of A` l’ami and Le Protocole compassionnel. As L’Incognito had already put it, ‘C’est parce que je suis de´sempare´ que je m’essaye a` des re´cits cocasses, je suis l’anti-Tchekhov’ (I, p. 222) (‘It is because I am distraught that I am trying out comical stories, I am the anti-Chekhov’); so a parallel can be drawn between the tone of Mon valet et moi and that of L’Incognito. Mon valet et moi was probably written in December 1990 during a visit by Guibert to Japan. A` l’ami had already appeared and Le Protocole compassionnel was soon to follow. If in the former Guibert had written the disease and if he was going to try to write death in the latter, it is true that he must have wondered how he was going to write the body since, as we saw in the preceding chapter, AIDS has resulted in the dissolution of the subject and the body has become the locus of death. It appears,too, that Guibert’s project of writing romans faux was literally caught unawares by the experience of his disease, as my analysis in Chapter 9 showed: in connection with Le Protocole compassionnel I said that if Guibert wished to go on writing himself by means of the roman faux, he was constrained by the declaration in A` l’ami (‘J’ai eu le sida pendant trois mois’, ‘I have had AIDS for three months’). The response in the medium term is L’Homme au chapeau rouge; besides, between the lines there is in the text a whole thematic about pictures. Mon valet et moi is a sort of ludic interlude. As readers we cannot fail to notice a certain similarity between this master who gives his age as 80 (Val., p. 80) and the narrator of Le Protocole compassionnel who says he has an old man’s body although he is only 35 (PC, p. 10; see also the back cover).6 In a way, these two people/bodies cohabit in Mon valet et moi; Guibert himself invites us to make such a reading. The narrator of Le Protocole compassionnel (a book published in 1991) is 35, so if he is now aged 80, we must be in 2036, which, as it turns out, is precisely the date found at the end of the novel! Garcin put this question in an interview to Guibert, who replied that it was doubtless true that these two characters were one and the same, but that as far as he was concerned this had not been deliberate: ‘Il y a dans Mon valet et moi quelque chose d’un double autoportrait, mais inconscient’7 (‘There is in Mon valet et moi something of double self-portrait, but unconscious’), and he went on to explain that the book draws rather on diﬀerent models, like Gogol’s Russian serfs, his two great-aunts, his friend Zouc with her majordomo, Marguerite

238

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

Duras with Yann Andre´a, and himself with his cleaning lady.8 One could add others scattered through Guibert’s work: the two male protagonists of Les Chiens, the narrator and the Vincent character (Fou de Vincent), the narrator and the Gipsy character (L’Incognito), where the narrator says about the Gipsy: ‘A` la seconde il serait devenu mon Maıˆtre’ (I, p. 226; my italics) (‘He would instantly have become my Master’), and the narrator and Djanlouka in Le Protocole compassionnel. We learn indeed that Djanlouka takes drugs (just like the valet) and the narrator says that he could become his servant (‘Dans l’e´tat ou` je suis j’ai besoin d’un serviteur, un jeune homme vigoureux qui me conduise, m’habille, me lave, masse mon dos [. . .]’, PC, p. 157; ‘In the state I am in I need a servant, a vigorous young man to chauﬀeur me, dress me, wash me, massage my back [. . .]’). In Mon valet et moi the valet carries out more or less all these functions: ‘Je dois reconnaıˆ tre qu’il me fait faire l’e´conomie d’un chauﬀeur, d’un masseur, d’une inﬁrmie`re, d’un porteur [. . .]’ (Val., p. 38) (‘I have to admit that he enables me to do without a chauﬀeur, a masseur, a nurse, a porter [. . .]’). In that case the servant character in Mon valet et moi could be viewed somewhat like a double or a fantasy: the valet who is supposed to be 20 will progressively become ‘vieux et laid, bedonnant’ (‘old and ugly, paunchy’), so much so that the narrator will no longer know if he is his son or his father.9 In Le Protocole compassionnel the narrator was already saying that his parents had become his children (PC, p. 111). So another fantasy seems to be grafted on to the valet ﬁgure: that of the father. We are reminded that up to a certain point in the story one of the functions of Mes parents was to write the father as the ‘serviteur’ (‘servant’) of the narrator. If the master is described as incapable of getting out of deep armchairs or slipping on a jacket (Val., p. 16), the word AIDS is never mentioned in the book and there is no explicit reference allowing one to aﬃrm that Herve´ Guibert is concealed behind the master. Moreover, the narrator stresses that he is not gay, describing his trip to Bangkok where the women are ready to open up like ﬂowers.10 There is a marked absence of sex in the text, too, reﬂected in the valet who expresses no attraction for either girls or boys (p. 58). When asked about this Guibert told Garcin that, apart from the leg-pulling aspect, ‘si mon personnage avait e´te´ homosexuel, ses rapports avec le valet seraient devenus tre`s banals, genre le micheton et son gigolo’11 (‘if my character had been gay, his relationship with the valet would have become very banal, of the punter-rentboy variety’). On the contrary

The fictitious, the fake or the delirious

239

their relationship is ambiguous; one gets the impression that they need each other. At the very beginning of the text, the master wonders if the valet could love him, thinking he would hate him. Later in the story he will worry a good deal about whether what could pass for manifestations of love are in fact those of hatred, concluding: ‘Nous ne nous aimons plus’12 (‘We no longer love each other’), which seems to indicate that they did love each other once. It is perhaps their interdependence that led to the death of love. The key expression used by Guibert in connection with Mon valet et moi is ‘double autoportrait’ (‘double self-portrait’). As we saw, what took place at the beginning of Le Protocole compassionnel was, inter alia, a dis-identiﬁcation of the self in relation to the body, leading to an alienation of the ‘je’ (‘I’). This situation led to a real splitting of the narrative ‘I’ (PC, p. 15). The text’s function then became the attempt to reconcile the narrator and his body, something not achieved by the text but leading to a ﬁlm project. Does the ﬁlmscript which the valet is asked to direct not resemble that of Guibert the actor who in ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ will also take his clothes oﬀ, ending up in the inevitable shower scene (Val., p. 66)? In Mon valet et moi it is the idea of the double and of the split that is developed, albeit in a comical manner. Thus the body of the Master who ‘laˆche un de ces vents pe´taradants’ (p. 10) (‘lets out one of those noisy farts’) does not have to apologise since it is the elegant young man who is going to ‘s’excuser discre`tement a` [s]a place’ (ibid.) (‘beg pardon discreetly in [his] stead’). A little further on the master describes his valet precisely as being ‘un vrai garde du corps’ (p. 12; my italics) (‘a real bodyguard’), as if the master were free of all responsibilities concerning his body which becomes the young man’s business. Moreover, when they go for a walk together in the street, the master writes, in a comic version of Lacan’s mirror stadium: [. . .] j’ai l’illusion de nous voir en permanence dans un grand miroir qu’un esclave porterait sur son dos en sautillant devant nous [. . .] et parfois je n’arrive plus a` savoir si c’est lui a` gauche, ou moi a` droite, comme si nous e´tions une seule personne de´double´e. Parfois aussi je nous surprends dans le miroir transforme´s en femmes. C’est un tableau assez cocasse. (pp. 59–60) ([. . .] I have the illusion of seeing us forever in a big mirror carried on the back of a slave hopping along in front [. . .] and sometimes I can no longer tell if it is he on the left or myself on the right, as if we were a single person split in two. Sometimes too I catch us in the mirror changed into women. It is rather a comical sight.)

240

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

The master spends his time resembling the valet by dressing ‘jeune’ (‘young’) (Nike tennis shoes, tight jeans, leather jacket, Ray Bans and baseball cap, p. 15), so much so that they ‘[ont] l’air de deux jeunes comme les autres, de deux fre`res’ (p. 14) (‘[look] like any other couple of young men, like two brothers’). In wanting to resemble his valet the master says he has the impression of living a second youth (p. 15). The valet is to some extent the master’s alter ego. He becomes responsible for the master’s body and the latter adopts his appearance. The narrative makes it possible to ﬁlter the narrator’s emotions and transform them through the prism represented by the valet’s attitude towards his body. If the master’s body is described as being ‘de´charne´’ (p. 48) (‘emaciated’), the description of his ‘sexe qui pendouille’ (‘dangling penis’) and of his ‘fesses toutes fripe´es’ (‘buttocks covered in crease-marks’) is tempered by the narrative. In this passage, the master does not identify himself directly with his body, preoccupied as he is with seeking the mot juste to express on paper the way his body is treated by his valet, who is delicate, subtle and discreet, as if bound by a compassion protocol vis-a`-vis the master’s body. One of the book’s most important themes is that of the incognito already made familiar by the novel of the same name: in L’Incognito it was only by disguising himself, as on the occasion of the Mardi Gras festival, or by going about incognito, that the narrator was able to communicate with other people. Everything points to the recurrence of the same approach in Mon valet et moi: it is only by being incognito that the master can write his body. The valet tells him that he always wants to pass unnoticed and the master admits that it is not in his nature to stand out: ‘pour vivre heureux vivons cache´s’13 (‘to live happily let us live hidden’). The clothes worn by the master are reminiscent of the narrator of L’Incognito putting on the Gipsy’s garments, the leather jacket especially, before writing: ‘Ensuite, c’est devenu cool, je ne me sentais parfaitement bien que dans ces veˆtements [. . .]’ (I, p. 221) (‘Afterwards, it became cool, I only felt completely at ease in these clothes [. . .]’). The master in Mon valet et moi also wants to feel at ease with himself. He wrote his plays under a pseudonym (Val., p. 26), just as the ‘je’ (‘I’) narrator of L’Incognito is a certain Hector Lenoir. The genesis of the story constitutes a mise-en-abıˆme for Mon valet et moi. The back cover informs us that the master writes the story hidden from the valet. But at the end of the book it is the valet who will fulﬁl the function of scribe, writing his own story although he is not the

The fictitious, the fake or the delirious

241

text’s author. Incognito, Guibert writes his 80-year-old body without incurring the dissolution of the self which characterised the writing of Le Protocole compassionnel. By means of ﬁction, the end of the text increasingly writes the master’s body’s tribulations. Whereas what drives the narrative in most of the fragments is the valet,14 from page 70 onwards, of the ten remaining fragments, eight write the master’s ‘je’ (‘I’); the two others that begin with ‘mon valet’ (‘my valet’) no longer have the function of triggering a story about the valet but about the master. So what is the content of these ten fragments? The master’s body in its degradation: incontinence, writing diﬃculties, falling down in the middle of the night, morphine no longer working. Witness this remark: ‘J’ai l’impression que la morphine ne me fait plus d’eﬀet. J’ai mal. Mal partout. Je de´teste ces phrases courtes. Je de´teste aussi les phrases longues. En fait je dois de´tester l’e´criture’ (p. 77) (‘I have the impression that morphine no longer works for me. I am in pain. Pain everywhere. I hate these short sentences. I also hate long sentences. Indeed I must hate writing’). In this passage which more strikingly than ever echoes Guibert’s diary style, the ‘je’ (‘I’) seems to transcend the character of the master to enable Guibert to inﬁltrate the text. It is as if all the writer’s despair recurred in these lines. Let us not forget that the narrator of L’Incognito says that it is because he is at a loss that he writes comical stories (I, p. 222); ‘de´sempare´’ (‘at a loss’) meaning ‘qui a perdu tous ses moyens, qui ne sait plus comment s’y prendre pour se tirer d’aﬀaire’ (‘who has completely lost his bearings, who can no longer work out how to extricate himself from his diﬃculties’). So as to be able to reach a conclusion about the role of Mon valet et moi in the project of the voices of the self, I need now to analyse the representations of death in the text. Death provokes a fresh parallel with the ﬁgure of the Gipsy in L’Incognito. Just as the narrator of L’Incognito sees in the Gipsy a potential murderer, the valet has been chosen by the master because he was a potential killer (Val., p. 12). The master does not seem afraid of death: throughout the story he will say that all his friends are dead, that he knows that death is near and that he is tempted to stop taking the tablets that keep him alive.15 The valet’s attitude is diﬀerent. We learn that he ‘n’en parle jamais’ (p. 35) (‘never mentions it’) but that he is afraid of the master dying in his sleep. I listed above the instances of the valet’s apparent spitefulness towards the master. This spitefulness even seems to turn to sadism when the valet does not help his master get up,

242

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

leaving him to spend the night on the ﬂoor. The valet does not see it that way. For him, leaving his master on the ground is a necessary ordeal: ‘Et si je vous inﬂige cette e´preuve, croyez-moi, ce n’est pas pour mon plaisir [. . .] c’est parce que je ne veux pas, justement, que Monsieur se mette dans des e´tats comme c¸a au moment X. Monsieur doit eˆtre serein pour passer de l’autre coˆte´ [. . .]’ (p. 75; my italics) (‘And if I inﬂict this ordeal on you, believe me, it is not for self-gratiﬁcation [. . .] it is precisely because I do not want Monsieur to get into a state like that at the crucial moment. Monsieur must cultivate tranquillity in order to pass over to the other side [. . .]’). With what others could interpret as a manifestation of sadism, the valet would in this way prepare his master for death: does he not say that they are doomed to stick together to the end? In this sense, just like the narrator and Muzil in A` l’ami, they too are bound by a shared thanatological fate. ‘La mort’ (‘Death’): it seems impossible for the valet to utter the word; he talks of the ‘moment X’ (‘crucial moment’) and of ‘passer de l’autre coˆte´’ (‘pass over to the other side’), as if he could not resign himself to the word itself. It would appear that the text’s entire dread of death is embodied in the valet’s attitude; so, as can be seen, the theme of death does not provide an ‘autoportrait double’ (‘twin self-portrait’) between the valet and the master but two contrasting attitudes. Now suﬀering from AIDS, rather than completely abandon the project of the voices of the self, the writer Herve´ Guibert has to take refuge in cunning, in the double, in the ‘roman cocasse’ (‘comical novel’). By featuring these two characters, he is able without experiencing a phenomenon of total alienation to project his 35-year-old body into the valet’s whilst describing through the master’s his own body’s appearance; he can also void his anxieties about death in the character of the valet and paint the portrait of a master who is completely tranquil in relation to it. This is no doubt the sense in which Bellour calls this text a ‘ﬁction autobiographique’ (‘autobiographical ﬁction’).16

L’HOMME AU CHAPEAU ROUGE Published at the same time as Cytome´galovirus (23 January 1992), L’Homme au chapeau rouge is one of Guibert’s ﬁrst two posthumous novels. It seems to have been written during the autumn and winter of 1990–91, immediately after Le Protocole compassionnel. This is how Guibert describes it:

The fictitious, the fake or the delirious

243

Je me disais: je veux me de´barrasser du sida, je voudrais l’arracher. Malheureusement, ce n’est pas possible [. . .] Je ne voulais plus prononcer le mot ‘sida’ dans mes livres. Que ce ne soit plus le moteur de l’e´criture. Alors c’est toujours le meˆme personnage, il est toujours malade, mais pour oublier sa maladie il va vers la peinture. C’est ma passion. C’est peut-eˆtre un substitut a` l’e´rotisme.17 (I said to myself: I want to get rid of AIDS, I would like to tear it out. Unfortunately it is not possible [. . .] I did not want to use the word ‘AIDS’ in my books any more, or let it drive the writing any longer. But it is still the same character, he is still ill, but to forget his illness he turns towards painting. It is my passion. It is perhaps a substitute for eroticism.)

L’Homme au chapeau rouge’s back-cover blurb is written on more or less the same lines: we are told that ‘le narrateur, identique [a` celui d’A` l’ami et du Protocole compassionnel], ose a` peine prononcer le nom de sa maladie. Pour la tromper ou l’oublier, il se lance a` corps perdu dans la recherche, le marchandage et l’acquisition de tableaux’ (‘the narrator, the same [as the one in A` l’ami and Le Protocole compassionnel], hardly dares utter the name of his illness. To fend it oﬀ or forget it he throws himself into the frenetic search for, the haggling over and the purchase of pictures’). With L’Homme au chapeau rouge, Guibert will try going in for the fake. The narrator buys pictures, hunts down art dealers, and goes ﬁrst to Corfu to see the painter Yannis, then to Moscow with the art dealer Lena in search of his lost brother Vigo, and ﬁnally to Africa. We are given the ﬁrst two stories but not the last because the pages of the manuscript have been mislaid, giving rise on the narrator’s part to this thought: ‘De nouveau je pourrais appeler ce livre, comme tous les autres livres que j’ai de´ja` faits, L’Inache`vement’ (HCR, p. 154) (‘Again I could call this book, like all the others I have written already, L’Inache`vement [The Incompleteness]’). These two stories are doubled by two anecdotes about Bacon and Balthus. One of the book’s lessons is that in art matters the truth is impossible to discern. Besides, if Vigo has disappeared, is it not because he is presented as ‘e´pris de ve´rite´ jusqu’a` la de´mence’ (p. 13) (‘in love with truth to the point of insanity’)? Let us take the example of the painter Yannis, who tracks down fakes attributed to him and has them destroyed in the presence of a notary (p. 12). Yannis is nonetheless a ‘menteur’ (p. 70) (‘liar’) and, according to another painter, it is to stop his prices falling that he has his old canvasses destroyed by denouncing them as fakes (p. 50). Who is to be believed? Not the narrator, in any case; on the subject of his relationship with Yannis he draws our attention at the outset to the fact that

244

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

‘le mot faux e´tait tre`s vite tombe´ entre nous’ (‘the word fake had very quickly dropped between us’), but he sums up the whole book nicely when he writes: ‘On butait sur le proble`me du faux de`s qu’on commenc¸ait a` s’inte´resser a` la peinture, a` vouloir en acheter ou en revendre’18 (‘One came up against the problem of the fake as soon as one began to take an interest in painting, to want to buy pictures or sell them on’). The back-cover blurb informs us that the problem of the genuine and the fake which is almost synonymous with painting is ‘peut-eˆtre au coeur de tous les livres d’Herve´ Guibert’ (‘is perhaps at the heart of all Herve´ Guibert’s books’). In L’Homme au chapeau rouge there is according to Bellour no article in L’Aurore dated 13 October 1990 mentioning Vigo’s disappearance with a quarter-page photo of Lena (HCR, pp. 13–14); on the other hand, ‘il y a un 13 octobre 1990, et un nume´ro de L’Aurore, et derrie`re Vigo et Lena des ‘‘mode`les’’, de vrais personnages vivants’19 (‘there is a 13 October 1990, and an issue of L’Aurore, and behind Vigo and Lena ‘‘models’’, real living characters’). Similarly, the story that is told about Balthus at the Venice Mostra (HCR, pp. 82–91) can be checked against the articles in Le Monde.20 The text of the back-cover blurb is unsigned; we are informed that ‘le narrateur [. . .] ose a` peine prononcer le nom de sa maladie’ (‘the narrator [. . .] hardly dares utter the name of his illness’). As it happens, that is not at all the impression given by a reading of the text. The word AIDS is mentioned as early as page 15, the narrator declaring as early as page 18: ‘[. . .] j’ai le sida [. . .]’ ([‘. . .] I have AIDS [. . .]’), and further on this is said: ‘Je ne veux plus entendre parler de sida. Je hais le sida’ (p. 64) (‘I want to hear nothing more about AIDS. I hate AIDS’) before the word recurs in connection with the narrator’s journey to Africa (p. 142). These ﬁve examples in which the word ‘sida’ (‘AIDS’) is written do not account for all the other passages in which the narrator speaks of his illness, his medicines and the state of his body.21 Guibert’s declarations of intent concerning L’Homme au chapeau rouge are in direct conﬂict with the text’s content. The narrator identiﬁes with his published books, too, and is called ‘Monsieur Guibert’.22 Similarly, most of the characters in A` l’ami and Le Protocole compassionnel recur.23 The ‘je’ (‘I’) narrator nevertheless tries to change his identity. In an amazing passage reported in direct speech, the ‘I’ passes himself oﬀ as an American art dealer named Keith (HCR, p. 28). ‘Keith’ will notice that as soon as he adopts this character he is treated diﬀerently, he is not looked at in the same way and other topics of conversation are broached with him (p. 29). This ‘nouvelle identite´’ (‘new identity’)

The fictitious, the fake or the delirious

245

might have allowed the narrator to rid himself of AIDS, to utter the word no longer, as he had hoped in the interview quoted above. The illusion, however, will last only 24 hours: ‘Quand je suis revenu [. . .] j’e´tais le grand homme trop maigre au chapeau rouge’ (p. 30) (‘When I returned [. . .] I was the tall, too thin man with the red hat’). This recurrent identity will also be taken up as the book’s title, which could after all have reﬂected the text’s concern with painting. In choosing L’Homme au chapeau rouge it is as if Herve´ Guibert were himself pointing to a paratextual identiﬁcation: he was indeed wearing a red hat when he appeared on ‘Ex-Libris’. On reﬂection Mon valet et moi succeeds much better in fulﬁlling the declaration of intent made about L’Homme au chapeau rouge since the word ‘sida’ (‘AIDS’) is never mentioned in the text. So, what happens in Mon valet et moi? There are two main characters who cannot be formally identiﬁed with the writer Herve´ Guibert. I am convinced that the idea of the American art dealer named Keith was probably the solution he for a time envisaged. Indeed the whole of the beginning of the book is constructed on the same lines as A` l’ami, in which the narrator was awaiting the results of his blood test due on 11 January, giving him a week to go back over the story of his illness, contemplating in the light of the results to ‘faire rouler son barillet’ (Ami, p. 57) (‘top himself’). Here too the waiting time is a week: the narrator is expecting the results of the ganglion test to ﬁnd out whether he is suﬀering from lymphoma or tuberculosis, having decided, without telling anyone, even his best friend Jules, but conﬁding it to his writing and therefore the reader, that he is going to commit suicide if lymphoma is conﬁrmed.24 Death threatens the book’s very existence. During the broadcast on French radio, ‘Le masque et la plume’,25 a very interesting dicussion took place between the ﬁve guests invited on to the programme to discuss L’Homme au chapeau rouge; two thought the book a success and three a failure. Gaudemar, stressing the humour (as did Brochier), said that it was ‘presque un roman’26 (‘almost a novel’) with a rather mad story of a picture dealer and Guibert’s memories at Le Monde; Brochier added how extraordinary it was that after his two books on AIDS, Guibert could have written ‘deux fantaisies’27 (‘two fantasies’). Savignot on the other hand considered the book a failure. B. de St Vincent agreed, feeling that L’Homme au chapeau rouge was not a book that Guibert carried within him and that he did not need to write it. Wolfromm’s analysis clearly pointed up the diﬀerences of opinion:

246

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self L’Homme au chapeau rouge n’est pas tre`s bon car tre`s e´loigne´ de ce que Guibert nous a appris a` aimer de lui, sa propre lutte contre la mort. Il a joue´ sur les deux tableaux, le tableau de la mort et celui de la vie. Quand c¸a s’interfe`re, c’est prodigieux, comme dans Le Protocole compassionnel; quand il a envie de biaiser, cela donne L’Homme au chapeau rouge.28 (L’Homme au chapeau rouge is not very good because far removed from what Guibert has taught us to like in him, his own struggle against death. He has backed both horses, death and life. When that interacts, as in Le Protocole compassionnel, it is tremendous; when he feels like equivocating, we get L’Homme au chapeau rouge.)

To recap: from the point of view of Guibert’s work, L’Homme au chapeau rouge is a disappointment. It is true that he had accustomed the reader to his struggle for life and that this text seems to break with the continuity of this. However, if the books on AIDS are set aside it is easier to appreciate a book on the genuine and the fake that is spiced with humour. The detective thread, recalls books like Les Gangsters or L’Incognito. The painting thread, linking a fair number of the book’s stories, makes one think of a work like Les Aventures singulie`res in which the adventures were the leitmotiv. The comparison underlines the book’s somewhat disparate nature. To fully appreciate L’Homme au chapeau rouge we have to bear in mind that this text is a meditation on painting in much the same way as L’Image fantoˆme was a meditation on photography. As Bellour puts it: [. . .] jamais on n’avait vu l’image innerver a` ce point, dans tous ses e´tats me´lange´s, un corps, un vrai corps de´sirant et souffrant, pour en faire surgir un corps fantoˆme [. . .] si bien que la peinture, ce qui circule en elle, a` partir d’elle, devient ici l’image d’une e´criture de´vore´e et nourrie par toutes les puissances du faux [. . .].29 ([. . .] never had the image been seen to innervate to this extent, in all its mixed states, a body, a real desiring and suffering body, to get a phantom body to arise from it [. . .] so that painting, what circulates in it, from it, here becomes the image of a writing devoured and fed by all the powers of the fake [. . .]).

The identiﬁcation of the writer and the painter functions at several levels in the text. Firstly the arts they practise are interchangeable currency: a text by the narrator for a portrait by ‘P.F.’.30 When Balthus tells the narrator of L’Homme au chapeau rouge that painting is at one and the same time its own object and its own subject (p. 101), it is easy to see a parallel with the writer Herve´ Guibert (‘[. . .] un ﬁlm dont vous seriez a` la fois l’auteur et le sujet’, PC, p. 174; ‘[. . .] a ﬁlm you would be both author and subject of’): the painter too strives to represent the self. When the narrator writes about Yannis: ‘[. . .] je m’observais moi-meˆme

The fictitious, the fake or the delirious

247

a` travers ce petit bonhomme ge´nial, bourreau de son oeuvre, fou de lui, bourreau de lui pour son oeuvre’ (HCR, p. 69) (‘[. . .] I watched myself through this brilliant little man, his work’s torturer, crazy about himself, a self-torturer for his work’), one cannot help but think of A` l’ami’s narrator: ‘[. . .] je tiens a` mon livre plus qu’a` ma vie [. . .]’ (Ami, p. 257) (‘[. . .] I care more about my book than about my life [. . .]’). When it is learnt that to speak of painting is to be confronted with the problem of the fake (back cover), it would even be possible to adopt this comment as the epigraph to all Guibert’s work. Bellour’s analysis is once again pertinent. It is, however, quite diﬀerent from L’Image fantoˆme, in which the aborted photo of the mother will become a text, that of ‘une image fantoˆme’ (IF, p. 18) (‘a phantom image’); according to the narrator, the story of ‘L’Image parfaite’ (‘The Perfect Picture’) that will never be taken will enrich the immediate photographic transcription (p. 24). On the other hand, the narrative of the modelling session with Yannis, begun and then returned to again, will resist writing since it is a real mystery the narrator has to narrate (‘[. . .] la fuite de la chair dans la peinture, la saigne´e progressive de l’aˆme sur la toile’, ‘[. . .] the ﬂight of the ﬂesh in painting, the gradual bleeding of the soul on the canvas’), it is also the story of an erotic love.31 The narrator will wonder if he must ‘revisionner l’instant’ (‘view the moment again’), which establishes at once a video connotation. It is video that seemed to the narrator of Le Protocole compassionnel the best way of writing the self; it is the language of video that springs to mind when the narrator describes the modelling session. We are reminded that viewing the operation in L’Homme au chapeau rouge will intensify the narrator’s suﬀering and that, against all expectations, he will begin to write a text on the painter Yannis, transcending his pain.32 The writing enriches the photographic transcription but stumbles over any representation of painting, to the extent of being called ‘une trahison’ (p. 108) (‘a betrayal’). Guibert practised photography but was not a painter. Thus in the episode involving his attempt to copy a postcard of Watteau’s Gilles he will only manage to put a few colours on the palette before photographing it to calm himself down (p. 62). So if he has ‘perce´’ (‘penetrated’) the mysteries of photography and can talk about them, he has not ‘penetrated’ those of painting and can only speak of them in terms of photography: ‘On aurait dit que ses tableaux e´taient d’anciennes photographies fossilise´es sous une brumisation de peinture, comme si la peinture n’e´tait qu’une poussie`re, ou une toile

248

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

d’araigne´e, qui ﬁgeait un souvenir de photo’, p. 37 (‘You would have thought his pictures were old photographs fossilised under a spraying of paint, as if painting were only a dust, or a spider’s web, that froze the memory of a photo’). It is no doubt in this sense that Guibert apparently wrote in his diary on reading the typescript of L’Homme au chapeau rouge that the book was a failure.33 Wolfromm, it will be recalled, commented that L’Homme au chapeau rouge is far removed from Guibert’s struggle against death. Where the fake is at its most active and the book in my view is a success is the extent to which, through a book on painting, L’Homme au chapeau rouge writes death. It will also be recalled that in L’Incognito the representations of pictures were those oﬀering the narrator the possibility of writing death; the narrator was however deceived by the picture of the couple throwing themselves in the water because it was a fake (I, p. 99). So for the photo sessions he was preparing he decided to start from the sham, the fake, in order to represent Thanatos. The same approach is used, in my view, in L’Homme au chapeau rouge. Although he hates AIDS and wants to be rid of it (HCR, p. 64), Guibert knows it is not possible. L’Homme au chapeau rouge’s feat is to have taken a gamble on this, knowing it to be impossible. For throughout the whole plot of the novel, it is Thanatos that is written. The narrator’s visit to Corfu describes the hunt for fake pictures, but let’s not forget that one of the narrator’s reasons for agreeing to the trip is with a view to committing suicide ‘si l’hypothe`se lymphome e´tait conﬁrme´e’ (p. 16) (‘if the lymphoma hypothesis was conﬁrmed’). When he goes to bed he dreams that the dead writers make a ring around him and, pulling him by the hand, draw him away in a kindly fashion (p. 79). Even the story about the visit to Balthus is presented as a crime, the accessories to murder being the camera and the blank notebook (p. 95); there is in fact in the text a whole thematic of betrayal.34 When ‘P.F.’ does his portrait, the narrator asks him to draw a small blue death’s head on his cheek (p. 49). With L’Homme au chapeau rouge Guibert writes danger. Thus, on arriving at Corfu airport, he thinks he will be captured and ransomed (p. 62). Whether it be the visits to Corfu, to Moscow or to Africa, the narrator agrees to them because of the element of danger and threat surrounding them. For the journeys to Corfu and Moscow this threat is represented by the maﬁa; for the African trip, it is the Tuaregs and the danger represented by the narrator’s illness (because of AIDS he cannot be vaccinated before departure). On the subject of the business with

The fictitious, the fake or the delirious

249

Lena, we are told: ‘Je ne pouvais pas imaginer que le faible que j’allais entretenir avec cette femme me mettrait a` ce point en danger de mort, alors que j’e´tais condamne´’ (p. 14) (‘I could not have imagined that the soft spot I was going to feel for this woman would put me in such mortal danger, when I was doomed’. This thought emphasises the comicality of the situation. On the subject of his decision to go to Corfu, we are told: ‘Je continuai, comme en voulant accompagner Lena a` Moscou, a` chercher des postures de re´cit dangereuses pour moi, comme le peintre broie l’ocre et le colotar, malaxe inlassablement du rouge sang ou du bleu grec, ou pie´tine sa toile au lieu de l’aﬀronter’ (p. 62; my italics) (‘I went on, as in wishing to go to Moscow with Lena, to seek dangerous story postures for myself, as the painter pounds ochre and colotar and tirelessly mixes blood red or Greek blue, or tramples on his canvas rather than face up to it’). Where should L’Homme au chapeau rouge be placed in the project of the voices of the self? To return to my concluding remarks in Chapter 9, the chief lesson to be drawn from the artistic experiments was that by using the diﬀerent art forms one can neither conquer disease, nor write the body, nor write death, nor exorcise it. So, as Hill’s brilliant analysis shows, the role of literature has to be redeﬁned: ‘[. . .] explorer, d’une toute autre manie`re, le peu de ve´rite´ du faux et le faux-semblant du vrai, qui sont, sous la forme du mensonger, du ﬁctif, et du non-vrai, a` la source meˆme, Guibert le de´montre dans ces textes, de toute authentique entreprise d’e´criture mene´e jusqu’au bout’35 (‘[. . .] to explore, in a quite diﬀerent way, the small amount of truth in the fake and the fakeseeming of the true which, in the form of the mendacious, the ﬁctional and the non-true, lie at the very heart, as Guibert demonstrates in these texts, of any authentic writerly enterprise pursued to the limit’). To illustrate Hill’s comments I need do no more than take the example of the results of the ganglion test which, as we have seen, is an episode that takes up the whole of the beginning of the novel and threatens its very existence, since the narrator has decided to commit suicide if he has a lymphoma. There the prism of the fake colours everything, the disease included, and in a certain sense the book pulls oﬀ its feat of a ﬂight towards ﬁction. The test result, so long awaited, turns out to be ‘incompre´hensible, fallacieux’ (p. 38) (‘incomprehensible, deceptive’), the narrator very soon cashing in on the parallel with his book’s subject: ‘le verdict du re´sultat [. . .] devait s’ave´rer si ambigu et vertigineux, entre le faux et le vrai, un peu comme ceux des tableaux que Lena m’apprit a` examiner [. . .]’ (p. 43) (‘the verdict of the test

250

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

result [. . .] turned out in the end to be so ambiguous and vertiginous, between the fake and the genuine, a bit like those of the pictures which Lena taught me to examine [. . .]’). By mixing life and ﬁction in this way Guibert is able to distance himself from the test results and turn them into ‘matie`re ﬁctionnelle’ (‘ﬁctional material’). It can legitimately be wondered what possibilities the writer Herve´ Guibert, having written death via the ﬁctional in Mon valet et moi and via the fake in L’Homme au chapeau rouge, has left unexploited. The answer to this question is to be sought through a study of the last posthumous novel published in 1992, Le Paradis.

LE PARADIS An ‘I’ narrator, scion of a rich Zurich family and unpublished writer whose father died three months earlier, is travelling with Jayne, former model and swimming champion, great-granddaughter of the inventor of ketchup; they are lovers. The text opens with Jayne’s body, disembowelled on a coral reef. Could this be the start of a detective story? In ﬂashback we visit, rather, ‘paradis terrestres’ (‘earthly paradises’) with Jayne and the narrator: Tahiti, Martinique, Equatorial Africa. The narrative is not linear: the retrospective account of his life with Jayne is interwoven with stories situated in the ﬁctional present. When they get to Se´gou in Mali the ‘paradise’ seems more like a hell and becomes ‘ce pays de malheur’ (P, p. 108) (‘this wretched country’). Jayne gets pregnant, then on her doctor’s advice has an abortion: because of the Protector they take for the gonorrhoea they keep giving each other, the baby risks being deformed. The African trip ends abruptly with the narrator’s great-aunt’s death, then seems to get written from his study in Zurich, with the backup of Rimbaud and Roussel as literary antecedents. In a change of tone, the novel starts to resemble a diary written in the form of fragments. We learn in the unpublished extracts from Herve´ Guibert’s diary that Le Paradis was meant as a sequel to L’Homme au chapeau rouge.36 In a way, a part of L’Homme au chapeau rouge could serve as foretext to Le Paradis, at the level of the travel preparations (for example, HCR, pp. 78–79). The narrator falling asleep lulled by these has the eﬀect of stimulating his imaginative faculties and—one might think—his ﬁctional imagination. It might also be wondered whether Le Paradis does not give us the lost story of the African journey in L’Homme au

The fictitious, the fake or the delirious

251

chapeau rouge, without this hypothesis needing to be considered seriously since Le Paradis certainly recounts Africa ‘d’une autre manie`re’ (HCR, p. 154) (‘diﬀerently’), in sharp contrast to the narrative choices in L’Homme au chapeau rouge. Le Paradis seems rather in the tradition of Mon valet et moi. When in Cytome´galovirus the houseman asks the narrator what he is working on, he replies: ‘Quelque chose qui n’a aucun rapport avec le sida et que je n’ai jamais fait, une histoire d’amour tre`s physique entre un homme et une femme, du roman tre`s exotique [. . .]’ (Cyto., p. 11) (‘Something I have never done, nothing to do with AIDS, a very physical love story between a man and a woman, very exotic ﬁction [. . .]’). Le Paradis takes up again and intensiﬁes the narrative choices of Mon valet et moi in which it was thanks to dis-identiﬁcation that the narrator was able to go on writing death. We have two main characters and narration concentrated on one of them, Jayne,37 just as that of Mon valet et moi focused on the valet. There is almost a master-valet relationship between them, albeit a reciprocal one: ‘J’e´tais son esclave, je baisais ses chevilles et faisais tout ce qu’elle souhaitait. Elle aussi, de son coˆte´, aurait pu dire qu’elle e´tait mon esclave, elle devait m’aider a` m’habiller [. . .]’, p. 71 (‘I was her slave, I kissed her ankles and did everything she wanted. She too, on her side, could have said that she was my slave, she had to help me dress [. . .]’). If in Mon valet et moi sexuality was absent between the two male characters—the master saying he was heterosexual—here the disidentiﬁcation is even more marked. The ‘je’ (‘I’) narrator is Jayne’s partner, and descriptions of their lovemaking (which, for instance at Bora Bora, lasts all day) are freely indulged in; the fact that Jayne is a good lover seems the most important feature of the relationship.38 It is always the same ritual that is described: the narrator strokes Jayne’s clitoris with the revolver before he enters her; it is the ﬁrst time in Guibert’s work that we have an openly heterosexual main character (there is a passing reference to the fact that in his youth he claims to have loved boys, p. 73). Viewed from this angle, Le Paradis is a radicalisation of the narrative choice of Mon valet et moi. The back-cover blurb, so important at the hermeneutic level where other Guibert works are concerned, is an extract from the text (p. 49). It is signed ‘H.G.’ and so one associates the ‘je’ (‘I’) of this text with the writer Herve´ Guibert, until one notices that inside the book these words are in fact spoken by Jayne and that this ‘I’ must be connected with her. In that sense the back cover remains just as important at the

252

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

hermeneutic level: the characters’ identity needs to be treated with caution. So I am going to focus on the problematic of this. In Fou de Vincent, the narrator says that he is thinking of writing another book, ‘un faux journal de voyage, ou un faux roman, un tour du monde en camper avec Vincent, une arme, et peut-eˆtre Vincent deviendrait une femme dans le re´cit, s’appellerait Jane? Comme Jane Mansﬁeld’ (FV, p. 16) (‘a fake travel diary, or a fake novel, a round-theworld Campervan tour with Vincent, a weapon, and perhaps Vincent would turn into a woman in the story, would be called Jane? Like Jane Mansﬁeld’). Vincent hiding behind Jayne (note the change in spelling) is an attractive ﬁctional proposition. Even if the narrator and Jayne are travelling round the world and even if a weapon (a revolver) is one of the narrative possibilities in the text, Le Paradis is not in my view the book Guibert considered writing in 1989 when he was working on Fou de Vincent. The parallel with Fou de Vincent is situated rather at the level of the narrative. Just as Fou de Vincent opens with Vincent’s death, Le Paradis opens with that of Jayne. This is then followed in both cases by a narrative in ﬂashback. I think I can discern in this approach the temptation to take up again the narrative of Fou de Vincent in which, as we have seen, it was only by writing the book backwards, to make it end at a period when he was not yet HIV positive, that the narrator was able to write himself: merely a ‘temptation’, because doing another book modelled entirely on the Fou de Vincent method was doubtless not feasible. If one was determined to look for a character behind Jayne, it would in my view be that of Gertrud in L’Homme au chapeau rouge. We know from the end of L’Homme au chapeau rouge that it was with Gertrud that the narrator left to join Yannis in Africa (HCR, p. 153). Gertrud, as it happens, is Dutch like Jayne, and they resemble each other physically to some extent. But the most seductive hypothesis is to be sought elsewhere. At the fantastic level, Jayne could be the reincarnation of Suzanne; indeed, the narrator learns towards the end of the book that his great-aunt Suzanne is dead (P, p. 109), and from then on loses his ﬁctional identity to become Herve´ Guibert again in the text. Is Suzanne not the woman whom the narrator says he has ‘tant aime´e’ (‘loved so much’) and who asked him to love her until death (p. 123)? At the end of the book the narrator will declare that Jayne has been the greatest love of his life (p. 140). In Le Paradis the psychiatrist’s report about one ‘Herve´ Guibert’,

The fictitious, the fake or the delirious

253

the victim of an acute anxiety crisis, points the ﬁnger at unfulﬁlled grieving with respect to his great-aunt ‘qui a donne´ son corps et sa maison a` la science. Ce qui a vraisemblablement accru la sensation de de´possession’ (p. 122) (‘who gave her body and her house to science. Which probably increased the feeling of dispossession’). The keyword here is ‘dispossession’. Since Suzanne’s body has been left to science, the last image the ‘je’ (‘I’) narrator has of her is that conveyed by her housekeeper who has been to see her in the mortuary: on lifting the sheet covering her she found ‘une immense cicatrice haˆtivement recousue [qui] traversait tout son corps, de la trache´e au pubis’ (p. 111) (‘a huge scar hastily stitched up [that] ran down her whole body, from her trachea to her pubis’). From there to thinking that in fantasy Herve´ Guibert sought to start his book with this image (‘Jayne e´ventre´e [. . .] sa chair ouverte du pubis a` la poitrine [. . .]’, p. 11; ‘Jayne disembowelled [. . .] her body open from pubis to chest [. . .]’) in order to bring Suzanne back to life in a ﬂashback narrative is a step I would happily take. Le Paradis is a way of reappropriating Suzanne. In Suzanne et Louise, published in 1980, Suzanne was already one of the main characters. The narrator was haunted by the idea of photographing her on her deathbed and it drove him to imagine a photographic mise-en-sce`ne aimed at photographing a representation of her corpse. Since it is revealed in Le Paradis that she has left her body to science, the narrator feels doubly ‘de´posse´de´’ (‘dispossessed’) (‘Elle nous avait vole´ jusqu’a` son corps, son cadavre’, P, p. 111; ‘She had robbed us even of her body, her corpse’). It is understandable that he wishes to ‘re´cupe´rer’ (‘recover’) this corpse disembowelled on a coral reef so as to reappropriate it for himself and to make it live again. At the end of the text, as has been seen, it is Suzanne’s housekeeper who is the last to see her body in the mortuary. At the beginning of the text, the narrator is taken by the police to identify Jayne’s body. Despite their horriﬁed reaction he will ﬁnd this body very beautiful and will gaze at the genitals, pondering the fact that Jayne seems to have been raped the night after her death (p. 14). Is the unutterable being put across by Guibert here? Certain passages in La Mort propagande about necrophilia spring to mind again, at any rate. Suzanne et Louise ended with scene 49 of a ﬁlmscript featuring two men moving Suzanne’s things, including her bed, out of her house, thereby hinting at her death; as it happens, a similar scene is described in Le Paradis. On returning to Paris the narrator goes with Elvire to his great-aunt’s place and they both behave like vandals, ransacking her

254

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

ﬂat and carrying oﬀ the furniture (P, pp. 112–13). This scene which, on ﬁrst reading, seems very harsh is in fact a replay of scene 49 of Suzanne et Louise, the two men being replaced by the narrator and Elvire, which explains the fact that instead of keeping photos and private papers, the narrator of Le Paradis rejects them in favour of silver picture-frames and a wooden ﬁling cabinet. The narrator does not at that point identify himself with Herve´ Guibert but with the ‘de´me´nageur’ (‘removal man’) character in Suzanne et Louise. The full import of the psychiatrist’s words with regard to Herve´ Guibert not having ﬁnished grieving for his great-aunt now becomes clear: Le Paradis is Guibert’s way of mourning Suzanne, by restoring her to life. Le Paradis would thus be a kind of memento. On reﬂection, the function of the character ‘Diane’ in the text is a mise-en-abıˆme of the Jayne/Suzanne character, another way of showing us that the identities are not ﬁxed. A fragment of text in which Jayne is dead is followed by this: ‘Le lendemain [. . .] je trouvai Jayne assise sous la tonnelle, en train de potasser ses bouquins, penche´e sur ses cahiers ou` elle prenait des notes [. . .]’ (p. 44) (‘The next day [. . .] I found Jayne sitting under the arbour, swotting away at her books, bent over her exercise-books, taking notes [. . .]’). The reader is confused for a moment and then learns that ‘Jayne’ is Diane, a new character putting in an appearance. The mimicry will extend to their occupation: she too is writing a thesis, not about mad writers but about ﬁshermen, more precisely those engaged in intoxication ﬁshing, that is for ﬁsh that get drunk (p. 48). Diane has a double function: ﬁrstly to alert us to the multiple identities and confusions of the genre, Diane complaining that since the ﬁshermen take her for a man she cannot satisfy her sexual appetite (pp. 51–52), secondly to point us towards the ‘re´incarnation’ (‘reincarnation’) of characters in Guibert’s text (p. 44). We are, after all, in Paradise! However, just as the reincarnation hypothesis is rejected, we learn in the text from a reliable source39 that ‘Jayne Heinz’ does not exist, leading the narrator to write that he too has the feeling of having been a ghost at Jayne’s side and of being dead already when he met her (pp. 32–33). He has to face the truth: when he puts on Jayne’s CDs no sound will emerge, which is after all logical in its way (‘Si Jayne n’existait pas, il est logique que la musique qu’elle e´coutait n’existait pas non plus’, p. 35; ‘If Jayne did not exist, it is logical that the music she listened to did not exist either’). Her funeral will only turn out the more comical for that: ‘[. . .] on enterrait une femme que personne n’avait vue, on n’avait meˆme pas de photo d’elle, meˆme pas de nom

The fictitious, the fake or the delirious

255

[. . .]’, p. 39 (‘[. . .] they were burying a woman no one had seen, they had not even got a photo of her, not even a name [. . .]’). The narrator himself will then start having doubts about Jayne’s existence. With the backing of a photo he will wonder in spite of everything when it was he went on this trip with her, whether he really did go on it and whether he has not already come back from it (pp. 118–19). The text will then progressively disintegrate before our eyes. This is the aspect to which I now turn. From the moment the narrator mentions Suzanne and writes her real death and not the fantasy one of Jayne, he recovers his identity and is called ‘Herve´ Guibert’, complete with date of birth (p. 122).40 Some of the characters that were to be found in his books since A` l’ami recur here: Muzil, David and Jules.41 This sudden change in tone also has the eﬀect of eclipsing the ‘je’ (‘I’) narrator, scion of a rich Zurich family, to bring Herve´ Guibert back into a narrative that has more and more in common with the diary; the two identities then coexist as the fragments dictate. The writing becomes a matter of exhaustion and dispersion, balanced precariously between the wish to recount the African trip with Jayne and the physical impossibility of pulling it oﬀ; indeed, the closer the end of the book approaches, the more the narrator shows signs of ﬂagging, a far cry from the long sentences of the beginning of the book, especially the ﬁrst. Guibert invokes in vain the ﬁgures of Roussel, Savitzkaya and Rimbaud, who all wrote about Africa; he can no longer manage to continue his narrative. His memory falters more and more: ‘Je regarde des photographies de l’Afrique et je vois bien que l’Afrique n’existe pas’ (p. 140) (‘I look at photographs of Africa and realise that Africa does not exist’). The only stratagem for reviving the narrative successfully seems to be the sole object he brought back from Africa, linking ‘des perles de pacotille et des de´bris de coquillage, sur une ﬁcelle fragile’ (p. 125) (‘cheap pearls and bits of seashell, on a fragile piece of string’). He puts it down on a sheet of paper opposite him and the writing starts up or rather bumps along. In the middle of a paragraph about a particular African episode, after writing that his headaches border on amnesia, the narrator tries to get the story going again by rolling this same object between his ﬁngers, before adding: ‘On ne revient jamais d’Afrique, voila` la ve´rite´’ (p. 136) (‘One never returns from Africa, that is the truth’). If Le Paradis is read as a text without extradiegetic reference to the writer Guibert and his condition, it is of course possible to conclude that the ghost of the ‘noir’ (‘dark’) continent exerts a profoundly

256

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

disturbing inﬂuence on French post-colonial culture, making Africa a kind of postmodern black hole, and that Guibert is almost too much aware of the literary precedents.42 But if this text is read as the struggle against the dispersion of writing and the allusions to Roussel, Savitzkaya and Rimbaud as so many mechanisms for attempting to get the narrative going again, a very diﬀerent conclusion is arrived at. As Woods clearly sees, irony is what gives rise to all the allusions in the text to the fact that Africa is a perfect breeding-ground for disease.43 This paradox is in the tradition of the story with Lena (‘Je ne pouvais pas imaginer que le faible que j’allais entretenir avec cette femme me mettrait a` ce point en danger de mort, alors que j’e´tais condamne´’, HCR, p. 14; ‘I could not have imagined that the soft spot I was going to feel for this woman would put me in such mortal danger, when I was doomed’) and of the episode in Le Protocole compassionnel in which the narrator shuts himself up in his cellar and thinks that dying like that when he has AIDS is too comical a situation. Exposing oneself to the ‘mince ﬁlet d’eau tie`de, riche en microbes’ (P., p. 92) (‘thin trickle of warm water, full of germs’) when one is dying of AIDS is just as comical a situation. In general there is a marked presence of humour in the text, particularly in the description of the arrival at Papeete which is described as real torture (pp. 73–75); it should not be forgotten that most of the book is set in reputedly ‘idylliques’ (‘idyllic’) spots, true ‘paradis terrestres’ (‘earthly paradises’) where however the narrator has to ﬂee Charles Pasqua (pp. 74–75). I am not denying that in Le Paradis Africa is seen as a kind of postmodern black hole reﬂected by post-colonial French culture; I simply mean that before Le Paradis ﬁnds itself in textbooks on postcolonialism as a typical example of a book to be condemned, it should be remembered that this work is a sort of memento for Suzanne on her great-nephew’s part that, as I hope to show, also symbolises the writer Herve´ Guibert’s struggle against imminent death. As we have seen, from the moment that Suzanne is written in the text, the ‘je’ (‘I’) narrator transcends identiﬁcation with the scion of a rich Zurich family to allow a glimpse of the writer Herve´ Guibert, who describes how after a fall in the street he was paralysed down his left side and spent three days in a coma (p. 114). It was recent memory that was aﬀected: ‘Je suis devenu amne´sique en une nuit’ (ibid.) (‘I became amnesic overnight’). We then witness the narrator’s struggle to continue his ‘roman’ (‘novel’). The diﬃculties multiply: he nearly writes ‘enfant’ (‘child’) for ‘antan’ (‘yesteryear’), is not sure of being able to go

The fictitious, the fake or the delirious

257

on holding his pen, no longer has the strength to pick up a dictionary, no longer has the same feeling of time, is no longer able to believe he has been to Africa because everything has been wiped out, abruptly ends a fragment because he can no longer recall the name of the beer he used to drink, says again in the following fragment that the name of this beer still escapes him, begins a story about his conversation with a primary school teacher only to realise that he no longer knows why he was narrating this episode and what he was trying to get at, then abandons it.44 He is haunted by the fear of ‘ne plus savoir e´crire’ (‘no longer being able to write’); his headaches border on amnesia.45 That is the context in which the following may be read: ‘Je regarde des photographies de l’Afrique et je vois bien que l’Afrique n’existe pas’ (p. 140) (‘I look at photographs of Africa and realise that Africa does not exist’). What has to be seen in this sentence, rather than a legacy of French post-colonial culture, is the fact that photographs can no longer trigger memory and therefore writing. Writing exhausts itself and dissolves, memory falters. Moreover, it needs to be remembered that there is a whole thematic about Jayne’s non-existence, leading the narrator to write that he too has the feeling of having been a ghost at Jayne’s side and of being already dead when he met her (pp. 32–33). Photo in hand, he will wonder after all when he went on this trip with her, if he really did and if he has already come home (pp. 118–19). At the same time, photos in hand, he will write that Africa does not exist. From page 109 onwards, when Suzanne is written in the text, it is possible, as we have seen, to oﬀer a reading of the end of the book as being exhaustion and dispersion. Let us imitate the ﬂashback narration by looking now at the text up to page 109, since we are going to see that death and disease can also be read between the lines, beginning with an intertextual and extradiegetic reading. Guibert went to Africa without getting vaccinated because the doctors thought that in the state he was in he would straight away catch yellow fever (HCR, p. 142) and risk death, which is what awaits him too if he is stung by a mosquito without having been vaccinated.46 On the African trip the Tuaregs also represent a threat (P, p. 85). In this sense, Le Paradis is clearly the sequel to L’Homme au chapeau rouge since the narrator seeks out positions of danger, as with the Moscow and Corfu trip in L’Homme au chapeau rouge. Let us now look at the whole of the text’s ﬁrst part. It is only in the very ﬁrst pages that the ‘je’ (‘I’) narrator can have a solid, powerful body, kicking open the locked suitcase (P, p. 13). The

258

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

rest of the time his body resembles rather that of the master in Mon valet et moi. As early as page 22 a dust squall throws him oﬀ balance and threatens to drag him into the chasm, the narrator noting: ‘Je suis devenu tellement le´ger’ (‘I have become so light’). This puny body is the one that will accompany the ‘je’ (‘I’) throughout and it also explains the way he will be perceived by others. Thus Jayne decides on a particular walk because the place seems to her fairly easy to get to; the narrator will nevertheless end up falling and will only be able to get up thanks to Jayne, nearly drowning in the process (pp. 24–25). The narrator’s memory is already faltering and he says that with his illness he ought to be dead by now.47 In the middle of the story of the stay at Fort-deFrance there is a narrative break where the ‘je’ (‘I’) describes his coma three days after his return from Africa (pp. 60–67), the right half of the brain being attacked. It is, at the moment when illness threatens the book’s very existence, however, that ﬁction takes over, just as in L’Homme au chapeau rouge: imaging through nuclear magnetic resonance gives no result and the tiny white spots cannot be explained since ‘cette nouvelle machine e´tait tellement sensible qu’elle e´tait en avance sur son temps’ (p. 67) (‘this new machine was so sensitive it was in advance of its time’). After this episode we realise that the narrator can no longer dress himself unaided and becomes incontinent (p. 71), like the master in Mon valet et moi. He thinks he is ‘une beˆte curieuse’ (‘a freak’) when he catches someone looking at him and cannot get to sleep at night.48 The threat of death hovers over the book. The story begins with Jayne’s corpse and the landscape will write death forever since on the beach a ﬂag with a skull and crossbones is added (p. 27). The narrator is the number one suspect with respect to Jayne’s death but, if the newspapers are to be believed, with respect to his father as well (pp. 31– 32). When Jayne wants a tattoo on her body to be dedicated to the narrator, she will think of a death’s head before opting in the end for a revolver.49 The revolver has long since been identiﬁed with the narrator. In their lovemaking the roles get reversed between his penis and a revolver (‘[. . .] je retirais brutalement l’arme pour me mettre a` sa place’, p. 18, ‘[. . .] I pulled the revolver out violently in order to take its place’) and he always carries it about him. When he has thrown it away he will miss it so much he will buy a new one, with which he will talk of killing Bouba and, at the end of the book, of putting a bullet through his head once he gets the courage to do so.50 So as can be seen, both disease and death are present in the ﬁrst two-thirds of the book.

The fictitious, the fake or the delirious

259

However, the episode in which death becomes most concrete is the night of the 23rd to the 24th when, according to the psychiatrist’s report, ‘Herve´ Guibert’ is said to have had the feeling of ‘[une] mort imminente et qu’il devait se prote´ger’ (p. 122) (‘death being imminent and that he should take care of himself’). The psychiatrist then explains that he has treated him with Tranxene. The full signiﬁcance of this ‘acce`s d’angoisse’ (‘panic attack’) in the night of the 23rd to the 24th can only be appreciated in the light of the last theme remaining to be studied in the text, that of madness, to which I now turn. In unpublished extracts from his diary we learn that Guibert wanted to call his book Congolo gaˆte´, explaining ‘c’est l’expression qu’ont les Noirs pour de´signer les fous’51 (‘it is the expression used by blacks to describe the insane’). The manuscript of Le Paradis bears a generic subtitle in brackets: ‘(roman fou)’ [‘(mad novel)’] although only ‘roman’ (‘novel’) is kept on the front cover of the book. As it happens, in so far as the ﬁrst title (Congolo gaˆte´) stressed this concept of madness, repeated in the generic subtitle, that does seem to be what is at issue in the writing of Le Paradis: ‘L’e´criture c’est la folie, c’est a` la fois la folie et la raison, le raisonnement de la folie’ (P, p. 125) (‘Writing is madness, it is at once madness and reason, the reasoning of madness’). ‘J’ai disjoncte´, il n’y a pas d’autre mot’ (p. 60) (‘I ﬂipped, there is no other word for it’) is the way the narrative of the narrator’s coma comes to impose itself in the text in the middle of the story at Fort-deFrance. This narrative, which seems to be treated in a fairly exhaustive manner, was however already broached on page 50 and will be taken up again in the text on page 114. If what the psychiatrist calls the ‘panic attack’ in the night of the 23rd to the 24th is juxtaposed with what has been played out in the narrator’s head during the temporary paralysis he calls ‘la nuit de ma folie’ (p. 128; my italics) (‘the night of my madness’), it conveys some idea of what is at stake in Le Paradis. Three narrative possibilities take up again the insanity theme. Firstly, Jayne is doing a thesis on mad writers (Nietzsche, Strindberg and Robert Walser, p. 12). When the narrator describes a particular incident to Jayne, she tells him that he is doing a Strindberg; of the three writers he is precisely, according to her, the one who is raving mad.52 Diane’s thesis on intoxication ﬁshing details the tactics of the ﬁshermen who use manchineel juice to make the ﬁsh drunk (p. 47). As it happens, the manchineel tree makes people mad. The narrator is obsessed by its properties; he dreams about them every night and keeps asking the landlady of the pension for explanations, until ﬁnally she tells him: ‘Ils

260

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

rendent maboule [ces arbres], nazbrok. Le congolo gaˆte´ [. . .]’ (p. 34) (‘They [these trees] drive you nuts, round the bend. The damaged congolo [. . .]’). The narrator wants to blame his brain seizure on the manchineel tree, but on going to see a doctor about it ﬁnds he will not entertain the idea (pp. 49–51). During the brain scan in Washington the narrator will tell the scientist that he and his machine are searching for madness (p. 66). Likewise with his typewriter Guibert is seeking to ﬁctionalise his ‘folie’ (‘madness’) through the tree story and the characters Jayne and Diane. From page 109 onwards (marked by the sudden change in tone analysed above), it is as if, in resuming his identity, the narrator could not help letting madness swamp the text. The dam breaks precisely after the narration (for the third time) of the crisis which led to a coma lasting three days. For the ﬁrst time the narrator identiﬁes himself with the mad writers Jayne was working on (‘Quand accepterai-je la folie des grands fous, de Nietzsche et d’Artaud [. . .] de Strindberg [. . .]?’, p. 116; ‘When will I accept the insanity of the great madmen, of Nietzsche and Artaud [. . .] of Strindberg [. . .]?’). In the next fragment we read: ‘Je suis fou, fou a` lier’ (p. 117) (‘I am mad, raving mad’). Four fragments further on, the narrator tells himself that he must interrupt his work since otherwise he will go mad (p. 119) and he calls Nietzsche, Artaud and Strindberg his great madmen; the identiﬁcation is complete. There is then an episode in which the stuﬀed monkey jumps on him and the narrator writes: ‘J’e´tais fou’ (p. 121) (‘I was mad’). He will then speak in the middle of the text of his madness and say in the next fragment that he is not mad before concluding that he will remain ‘fou, fou et amne´sique’ (‘mad, mad and amnesic’) and that Nivaquin will make him mad.53 Writing introduces a frenzied element into the text: witness the four fragments from page 120 onwards, where the ﬁrst starts from a conversation between the narrator and the masseur and ends with the image of the blindfold monkey ﬁring a machine-gun into the crowd, the second where the narrator says he ﬁnds in his ‘cul [. . .] des capsules de me´tal, un buste en bronze de Beethoven’ (‘arse [. . .] metal capsules, a bronze bust of Beethoven’), the third where he takes up again with greater assurance the role of the ‘je’ (‘I’) narrator, scion of a rich Zurich family, and ﬁnds himself back in Se´gou in Mali, and the fourth where everything collapses, the ‘je’ (‘I’) becomes the great-nephew of Suzanne again, the stuﬀed monkey jumps on him, he says he was mad and then brings up the subject of Muzil.

The fictitious, the fake or the delirious

261

Despite the fact that the latter declares at another moment in the text that, having had an AIDS test done, neither he nor Jayne are HIV positive (p. 130), it cannot be said as Guibert wished in Cytome´galovirus that Le Paradis has no connection with AIDS. The ﬁgure of the monkey in the ﬁrst fragment ﬁring blindfold a machine-gun into the crowd could be a representation of the ‘en aveugle’ (‘blind’) contamination process, particularly since it is this same green stuﬀed monkey ‘qui a transmis le sida a` l’homme’ (p. 121) (‘which transmitted AIDS to man’) that will jump on the narrator in the fourth fragment. Another similarity with Muzil is the fact that in A` l’ami it is Muzil who was said to have declared on his hospital bed: ‘C’est un machin qui doit nous venir d’Afrique’ (Ami, p. 17) (‘It is a thing that must come to us from Africa’), the narrator blaming green monkey blood (ibid.; see also p. 181). As it happens in Le Paradis the narrator travels to Africa, the alleged source of the disease. When he is in Mali the narrator’s eyes meet those of a small emaciated boy, and the father tells him the child has AIDS (P, p. 89). But the narrator has guessed as much. Even before leaving the room where the boy is he will take his ﬁrst Tranxene, hiding from Jayne and stressing ‘j’en avais besoin, vraiment besoin’ (ibid.) (‘I needed it, really needed it’). The narrator’s entire suﬀering is contained in this taking of medicine. When he narrates in another fragment the beginning of the story of Le Paradis he says: ‘J’ai de´cide´ de remplacer le Tranxe`ne par le travail’ (p. 127) (‘I decided to replace Tranxene by work’). In so far as, faced with the child who has AIDS, the narrator has to take his ﬁrst Tranxene, we know that symbolically if AIDS swamps the text, it will sign its destruction. It is the entire impotence of literature in the face of death that is described. It is the case that writing is frenzied, but through the frenzy what is written is its ‘ve´rite´’ (‘truth’), even if Guibert is conscious of the fact that truth is never anything but a pure ﬁction, as he points out with respect to Muzil’s work (pp. 121–22). Le Paradis is a novel that self-destructs to the point of dispersion of the self and of delirium. I have suﬃciently dwelt in Chapter 9 on the impossibility of writing death and a` propos of L’Homme au chapeau rouge on incompletion for us to expect the end of the text of Le Paradis to be problematical. Bellour has this highly appropriate expression with respect to Guibert’s texts when he speaks of ‘avant-ﬁns’54 (‘proto-codas’). It is the case that one can consider the fragments from page 127 onwards as proto-codas, with the temptation of mimicry with regard to L’Homme au chapeau

262

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

rouge (a ﬁre destroys all the narrator’s papers, especially this novel in progress, P, p. 127) then, in the next fragment, it is the beginning of the story starting on 1 May that is mentioned and that could also close this book, since the opening is the image of Jayne’s disembowelled body which in my view prompted the story. There is also the temptation of mimicry with respect to Mes parents (‘Je suis un enfant. Perdu dans la grande Afrique, sur une pirogue qui de´rive’, P, p. 128; ‘I am a child. Lost in the great Africa, in a pirogue that is drifting’) which recalls the father and his emaciated body adrift. Furthermore, in telling us in the notes accompanying the extracts from Guibert’s unpublished diary that he insisted on such notation being the very end of Le Paradis, Mathieu Lindon implicitly conﬁrms that the manuscript was unﬁnished at Guibert’s death;55 witness abbreviations in the last fragment (‘Rimb.’, p. 140). It is also the entire problematic of a posthumous piece of writing grafted on to this ‘ﬁn’ (‘end’) that symbolically represents the writer Herve´ Guibert’s last words: ‘A` mon retour du Mali, j’avais cru comprendre que l’homme n’e´tait rien ni personne. Et j’aurais pu aussi bien dire qu’il e´tait tout’ (p. 141) (‘On my return from Mali I believed I had understood that man was nothing and nobody. And I could just as well have said that he was everything’). It is the tenses of the verbs that are important in this sentence. By using the pluperfect indicative followed by the past conditional Guibert throws the reader oﬀ the scent; he oﬀers us a reﬂection overtaken by a second proposition which should be written aﬃrmatively either in the perfect or in the imperfect indicative. In having this ﬁrst proposition followed by the past conditional, Guibert writes an unreal hypothetical proposition which contradicts the ﬁrst. Once again it is incompletion that characterises his book and all his books (HCR, p. 154), once again it is the selfdestruction of the text. Le Paradis constitutes a challenge to Suzanne’s death and the ﬁctional reappropriation of her body. Le Paradis is also a way for the narrator to attempt gaining mastery over what he perceives as his madness, by giving it literary expression, seeking the paradise of words (‘Je suis alle´ en Afrique pour trouver l’oubli et m’oublier moi-meˆme’, p. 114; ‘I went to Africa to ﬁnd oblivion and to forget myself’) and perhaps also a deﬁant sense of immortality (‘C’est peut-eˆtre cela que je suis alle´ chercher en Afrique: l’e´ternite´’, p. 124; ‘It is perhaps that that I went looking for in Africa: eternity’). These two projects enjoy a certain measure of success during the ﬁrst two-thirds of the text although disease and death are present, before exhaustion and madness

The fictitious, the fake or the delirious

263

swamp the writing. Le Paradis is a text that deconstructs itself, in which the narrator undermines his own authority, his double (the writer character) comes playing fast and loose with the story, and characters and continents do not exist, any more than paradise or salvation through art. In this chapter we have seen that through the ﬁctitious, the fake or the delirious Guibert had succeeded in writing near death. The sole reality not deconstructed in Le Paradis is the role of literature: ‘A` l’envouˆtement de l’e´criture succe`de un de´senvouˆtement, le vide. Quand je n’e´cris plus, je me meurs’ (p. 130)56 (‘The spell cast by writing is followed by a release from the spell, the void. When I no longer write, I wither and die’). This sentence which, as we have seen, is not the one that will be chosen for the end of Le Paradis, is perhaps the ‘vraie’ (‘true’) conclusion to Herve´ Guibert’s entire work.

Conclusion The enterprise of the voices of the self is at an end. The word ‘enterprise’ reﬂects in my view the whole singularity of Guibert’s work: an enterprise is a major project one carries out without knowing whether it will end one day or perhaps even prove impossible to ﬁnish, whence the entire theme of the work’s incompletion. But an enterprise is also a constant tending to the construction of an ediﬁce from compatible materials, a constant that emerges from the thematic I have been studying. A comparison between La Mort propagande, published in 1977, and ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’, broadcast on 30 January 1992, clearly shows that the baring of the body, and the body as driving force in the narrative, is present in the whole of the work. The body is brought into play in some narratives (for example Les Chiens), in situations (for example Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes), and in relationships (for example Mauve le vierge or Mes parents). The ageing body forms part of the thematic of some books (for example Mon valet et moi), the sick body too (for example Cytome´galovirus), and the reborn body as well (for example Le Protocole compassionnel). Betrayal is another important element in this work: betraying conﬁdences, betraying friendship, betraying urges, betraying fantasies, betraying secrets and betraying despicable acts—not only those of others but one’s own. ‘(Nous deux—le magazine—est plus obsce`ne que Sade)’1 (‘(Nous deux—the magazine—is more obscene than Sade)’). ‘Le fameux principe de de´licatesse de Sade. J’ai l’impression d’avoir fait une oeuvre barbare et de´licate’ (‘The famous principle of delicacy in Sade. I have the feeling of having created a barbarous and delicate work’), the narrator of Le Protocole compassionnel tells us (PC, p. 113). ‘Trahir’ (‘to betray’) is, as we have seen in each chapter, a plea for love, to sort out the false friends from the genuine ones, to feel oneself truly loved. The seeming immodesty hides a very great modesty and writing sickness and death is another way of proclaiming life. Some of Guibert’s works are hymns to love (love of friends: Le Seul visage; love of the great-aunts: Suzanne et Louise, Les Gangsters), while others describe 265

266

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

love to the death (Mes parents; Des Aveugles; Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes) and others again the death of love (the photographic work in general; Fou de Vincent); all speak of death (for example La Mort propagande). Death is written between the lines throughout the work, giving it its internal cohesion: ‘(Un des roˆles de la litte´rature est l’apprentissage de la mort)’2 (‘(One of literature’s roles is the apprenticeship of death)’). If Guibert began writing his books ‘comme une lettre ou un journal, avec une exigence de ve´rite´ aussi naı¨ve qu’absolue’3 (‘like a letter or a diary, with a truth requirement as naive as it is absolute’), it is noticeable from La Mort propagande onwards that he is interested in immediate transcription. He will then launch himself on a cycle of work that I have called ‘l’e´criture photographique’ (‘photographic writing’) in which photography and writing become more and more integrated. Guibert will then embark upon the apprenticeship of the novel: his ﬁrst steps can be retraced in Les Aventures singulie`res and above all in Voyage avec deux enfants. His conception of ﬁction will consist in taking a base of truth and pouring some particles of falsehood on to it,4 but the ingredient lacking will be the creation of characters. The work he will carry out in collaboration with Patrice Che´reau on L’Homme blesse´ will teach him how to create characters. There will then follow a whole host of projects, here grouped together in the chapter ‘Image and Text’. In Des Aveugles and Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes, Guibert will put his name to ‘romans’ (‘novels’) which are more like tales; Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes will be the only ‘novel’ in which, up to 1987, the ‘je’ (‘I’) of the narrator does not appear in the text. With Mes parents we have Guibert’s ﬁrst feat: an ‘autobiographie de jeunesse’ (‘autobiography about his youth’) in which the narratorial ‘je’ (‘I’) is ﬁctionalised. There then starts the long march towards the roman faux that will culminate in A` l’ami, the book that will at once be the climax and the point of implosion of his work. From the point where AIDS makes its entry into the text and where this is conﬁrmed by the paratext, it becomes very diﬃcult to read Guibert in total disregard of the fact that he is HIV positive. As he said repeatedly, AIDS made it possible for him as a writer to radicalise his literary project by becoming his book’s chief character, a sort of threatened hero, and to ‘tout dire’ (‘say everything’); Guibert’s brilliant invention was to bare his soul through the roman faux: ‘J’ai eu le sida pendant trois mois’ (Ami, p. 9) (‘I have had AIDS for three months’), a brave founding sentence that however makes it possible too for the

Conclusion

267

writer to protect himself thanks to the thin ﬁlm of ﬁction it imposes. This approach has not been undertaken without misgivings, and I have thought it appropriate in order to understand Guibert’s development to read the texts that precede A` l’ami, when he knew he was already HIV positive, as so many attempts to write the self(-ves). I found that AIDS was being written by ﬂashback narrative, even incognito, in Fou de Vincent and L’Incognito. Guibert’s decision to turn his illness into material for his book was not automatic, and the following sentence establishes clearly that his work could have ended much earlier: ‘Le (un) travail de la litte´rature: apprendre a` se taire’ (FV, p. 74) (‘The (a) job of literature: to learn to stay silent’). If Guibert rejected Adultes and L’Incognito was the only book he did not like (not to mention all the projects broached and then abandoned which I discussed in Chapter 7), that was surely because he had not applied the precept he formulated as early as 1982: ‘Avoir le courage de soi, de se dire, de se montrer et de laisser couler tous les secrets, d’en inventer’ (PA, p. 77) (‘To have the courage to be oneself, to say oneself, to show oneself and to let all the secrets ﬂow, to invent some’). I am aware of appealing to extradiegetic factors such as the author’s life in my reading of Guibert, a reading that could not have been made at the time when books like Fou de Vincent or L’Incognito came out. That is indeed an objection that could be levelled at my work. But in so far as my standpoint was dictated by the enterprise of the voices of the self, I could hardly have done other than take into consideration the parameters imposed by Guibert’s literary project, and I have pursued that reading in the case of his whole artistic production after A` l’ami. Guibert will then try to write as close to death as possible in the three projects I have grouped together in the chapter entitled ‘Thanatographical Writing’; his experimentation will extend next to existential thanatography in ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’. Writing the ﬁctitious, the fake and the delirious is his ﬁnal culminating feat. Hector Bianciotti’s analysis oﬀers a clear deﬁnition of the whole dichotomy of Guibert’s production after A` l’ami: Une partie de la critique, celle-la` meˆme qui avait ce´le´bre´ ses re´cits au ton glace´ de lec¸on d’anatomie, d’ou` toute morale se trouvait de´loge´e au be´ne´ﬁce d’un re´el de´cortique´ au scalpel mais cependant immerge´ dans le monde resplendissant des mots, en fut de´c¸ue. On attendait l’auteur, on trouvait l’homme.5 (A section of the critical fraternity, the very same that had extolled the virtues of his stories written in the icy tones of an anatomy lesson, from which all morality found itself ousted in favour of a reality dissected with a scalpel but

268

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self nevertheless plunged in the resplendent world of words, was disappointed by it. They expected the author, they were confonted with the man.)

It is true, as we have seen, that Guibert’s style, which had sought to be highly worked in books like Des Aveugles and Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes, becomes limpid, like a faxed letter. As for being confronted with the man when the author was expected, it is the whole tragedy and ultimately the failure of literature that is symbolised by this dichotomy. From Mon valet et moi onwards, the writer Herve´ Guibert tries writing characters, but it is the man who comes back to inﬁltrate the text, whatever narrative method is adopted, and even with a heterosexual ‘je’ (‘I’) making love to someone called Jayne all day long. I am convinced that my approach is an attempt to deﬁne the enterprise of the voices of the self in Guibert. In a sense, as we saw with the reception of L’Homme au chapeau rouge and Le Paradis, by looking for the author (from 1991 onwards) one would come to less ﬂattering judgements about the writer. Let us take Le Paradis, though we could just as well refer to the analyses of all the books published from 1991 onwards. Before seeing in it a novel reﬂecting the whole of French postcolonial culture, it is important to discern in it the struggle against the dispersion and exhaustion of writing. That is Jocelyn’s view, too, which says it all: Si on veut voir un roman policier, ou un roman d’amour, ce n’est pas c¸a, mais si on veut voir comment un eˆtre humain met en oeuvre toutes ses forces pour ne pas abdiquer devant un mal ridicule et me´chant, je crois que c’est la plus belle des re´ussites de la litte´rature.6 (If we want to see in it a detective story, or a love story, it is not that, but if we want to see how a human being deploys every ounce of strength he possesses in order not to abdicate before a ridiculous and nasty illness, that, in my view, is the most beautiful of literature’s achievements.)

It is important clearly to understand that the writer is above all a creature of ﬂesh and blood and that, despite Lawrence Schehr’s warning that I nonetheless tried to put into practice in Chapter 8,7 AIDS well and truly interrupted ‘le ﬂot naturel de tout discours en insistant sans cesse sur sa pre´sence comme sujet et objet de tout discours’8 (‘the natural ﬂow of all discourse by ceaselessly emphasising its presence as subject and object of all discourse’). That in any case is the reading I propose for Guibert’s production after A` l’ami and it is something well understood, too, by the narrator of A` l’ami when he writes: ‘[. . .] l’oeuvre est l’exorcisme de l’impuissance. En meˆme temps la maladie ine´luctable est le comble de l’impuissance’ (Ami, p. 248)

Conclusion

269

(‘[. . .] the work is the exorcism of impotence. At the same time the unavoidable disease is the height of impotence’). This study has concentrated on the genre used because in my view it is there that Herve´ Guibert’s true experimentation is to be found. He has exploited the possibilities inherent in the fragile balance between truth and falsehood and has above all been a deceiver: Guibert’s writing is a play on ‘je’ (‘I’). An uninformed reader might seek to report Guibert’s books to the Oﬃce of Fair Trading: the title, the generic subtitle, the back-cover blurb and sometimes the dedications of his books do not match what is inside. Guibert demolishes all the stereotypes in his books: the image of the blind (Des Aveugles), the image of the parents (Mes parents) and the image of a friend (A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie). He also demolishes all the established literary genres: the image of a travel diary (Voyage avec deux enfants), the image of a novel (for example L’Incognito) and the image of an autobiography (Mes parents). He has innovated by combining his writer’s talent and his photographer’s sensibility and bringing a photographic writing to literature. He also and above all decided as early as 1982 that what he calls the ‘roman-roman’ (‘novel-novel’) form had become impossible,9 and was to declare at the end of his life that ﬁction only deserves to be called ‘e´chec de la ﬁction’10 (‘failure of ﬁction’). Moving away from the traditional ‘roman’ (‘novel’) he has innovated by writing the roman faux that is A` l’ami (a novel in which I lies). This feat constitutes a real advance in the history of literature that will perhaps ﬁnd an echo only in years to come. If Guibert is experiencing the purgatory that is de rigueur in France after any writer’s death, Guibertian studies are alive and well in Great Britain, Germany and North America.11 My introduction ended with a quotation from Barthes. It seems to me legitimate to conclude with another quotation from him, since if there is one author who has inﬂuenced Guibert throughout his work, it is indeed Barthes: ‘C’est au plus profond du leurre que vient se loger bizarrement la sensation de ve´rite´’12 (‘It is where deception is deepest that the feeling of truth comes strangely to rest’). And if as readers we feel that Guibert has given us his ‘ve´rite´’ (‘truth’), it can perhaps be summed up in this unpublished fragment from his diary: ‘(Toute ﬁction est une mystiﬁcation)’13 (‘(All ﬁction pulls the wool over our eyes)’).

Notes to Introduction pp. 1–12 1 ‘Le sida entre en force dans les librairies avec Herve´ Guibert et Dominique Lapierre’, interview with Pierre Maury, Le Soir (Brussels), 2 March 1990. 2 French equivalent of an Oscar. 3 ‘Herve´ Guibert: ‘‘J’ai l’impression de survivre’’ ’, interview with Je´roˆme Garcin, L’E´ve´nement du Jeudi, 26 September 1991, pp. 104–06 ( p. 104), reprinted as ‘Herve´ Guibert: son dernier entretien’, L’E´ve´nement du Jeudi, 2 January 1992, pp. 108–09. 4 Most of these biographical details can be found at the end of the album Photographies (1993), in a section headed ‘Repe`res biographiques’. For an analysis of Guibert’s Obituaries see my article: ‘ ‘‘Tout ange est terrible’’ (A` propos des articles ne´crologiques sur Herve´ Guibert)’, L’Esprit cre´ateur, ‘The Politics and Aesthetics of Contamination and Purity’, ed. Mireille Rosello, vol. 37, no. 3 (Fall 1997), pp. 61–71. 5 Jean-Pierre Boule´, Herve´ Guibert: A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie and Other Writings, Glasgow, University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1995. 6 ‘La vie sida’, interview with Antoine de Gaudemar, Libe´ration, 1 March 1990, p. 21. 7 See Chapter 6. 8 To take an example, ‘Auto-sadique-ﬁction’ (Le Monde, 25 January 1978, p. 22) is a slight article (four tiny paragraphs), but its very title suggests a useful comparison with some of Guibert’s books. 9 ‘Les aveugles d’Herve´ Guibert’, interview with Catherine Francblin, Art Press, no. 91 (April 1985), p. 47. 10 ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurai rien cache´ . . .’, interview with Franc¸ois Jonquet, Globe, April 1992, p. 108. 11 This comment shows that Guibert had a particular regard for Moby Dick, Madame Bovary and Un coeur simple in particular (PA, p. 132). In slightly modiﬁed form he took these remarks up again in an interview by Daniel Arsand and Jean-Michel Quiblier published at the end of 1984 (‘Le roman fantoˆme’ having appeared in 1983): ‘Entretien avec Herve´ Guibert’, Masques, Winter 1984–85, pp. 72–74. 12 Edmund Smyth, ‘Des Aveugles: Modes d’articulation’, Nottingham French Studies, Herve´ Guibert special issue, ed. Jean-Pierre Boule´, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring 1995), p. 8. 13 Henk Hillenaar, ‘Herve´ Guibert (1955–1991)’, in Jeunes Auteurs de Minuit, eds. Miche`le Ammouche-Kremers and Henk Hillenaar, CRIN, no. 27 (1994), p. 95. 14 Ibid., p. 96. 15 Owen Heathcote, ‘L’E´rotisme, la violence et le jeu dans Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes’, in Le corps textuel d’Herve´ Guibert, ed. Ralph Sarkonak, Paris, Minard, 1997, pp. 189–211.

271

272

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

16 Roland Barthes, ‘La mort de l’auteur’, in Essais critiques, IV, Paris, Seuil, 1984, pp. 61–67. 17 Nottingham French Studies, Herve´ Guibert special issue, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. 8. 18 Raymond Bellour, ‘Guibert ou l’inde´cidable’, Le Magazine litte´raire, no. 260 (December 1988), p. 80. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., p. 81. 21 ‘Mathieu Lindon est depuis longtemps mon grand lecteur, la seule personne en qui j’ai vraiment conﬁance. On a travaille´ sur tous mes manuscrits, diﬀe´remment a` chaque fois. Il est passe´ sur tous mes livres. Je n’aurais pas e´te´ tout a` fait le meˆme e´crivain si je n’avais pas eu son regard [. . .] Il me permet de ne pas chuter par me´garde’, in ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurai rien cache´ . . .’, op. cit., p. 108. 22 Mathieu Lindon, Introduction to ‘ ‘‘Le coeur fatigue´’’. Extraits ine´dits du journal d’Herve´ Guibert. Autour du ‘‘Paradis’’ ’, Libe´ration, 14 January 1993, p. 23. 23 ‘Entretien avec Herve´ Guibert’, op. cit., p. 74. 24 Ralph Sarkonak, ‘De la me´tastase au me´tatexte: Herve´ Guibert’, Texte, nos 15– 16 (1994), p. 239 n. 28. 25 Serge Doubrovsky, Fils, Paris, Galile´e, 1977. The term ‘autoﬁctionnaire’ is used by Paul Nizon, Marcher a` l’e´criture, Arles, Actes Sud, 1991, p. 173. 26 Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, Paris, Seuil, 1975, p. 31. Lejeune updates his analysis in Moi aussi, Paris, Seuil, 1986; see especially the ﬁrst two chapters, ‘Le pacte autobiographique (bis)’, pp. 13–35 and ‘Autobiographie, roman et nom propre’, pp. 37–72. 27 Ibid. 28 Serge Doubrovsky, ‘Autobiographie/Ve´rite´/Psychanalyse’, in Autobiographies: De Corneille a` Sartre, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1988. 29 Ibid., pp. 68–69. 30 Ibid., p. 69. For a more recent discussion of this, see Autoﬁctions & Cie, ed. S. Doubrovsky, J. Lecarme and P. Lejeune, Paris, RITM 6, Universite´ Paris X, 1993, and for interesting reﬂections on narrative identity, see Jacques Derrida, Otobiographies, L’Enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre, Paris, Galile´e, 1984. 31 Mathieu Lindon, ‘La perversite´, si simple et si douce’, Minuit, no. 49 (May 1982), pp. 12–15. 32 Ibid., p. 13. 33 Ibid., pp. 13–14. 34 ‘Une entreprise qui n’eut jamais d’exemple [. . .]’, by Raymond Bellour, Nottingham French Studies, op. cit., pp. 127–28. 35 Mathieu Lindon, ‘La perversite´, si simple et si douce’, op. cit., p. 14. 36 Ibid. 37 Vincent Colonna, L’autoﬁction. Essai sur la ﬁctionnalisation de soi en litte´rature, doctorate of the E.H.E.S.S. supervised by Ge´rard Genette, 1989 (Microﬁches no. 5650, Lille, ANRT, 1990), cited by Philippe Lejeune in ‘Autoﬁction & Cie. Pie`ce en cinq actes’, Autoﬁctions & Cie, op. cit., p. 8. 38 Sollers does the same thing in Femmes, Paris, Gallimard, 1983. 39 Jean-Pierre Boule´, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. 4. 40 ‘Entretien avec Herve´ Guibert’, op. cit., p. 72.

Notes to Introduction 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., pp. 72–73. 43 Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte, Paris, Seuil, 1973, p. 45.

273

Notes to Chapter One pp. 13–40 1 For example on page 20 the name of Mme E´lissalde is repeated nine times. 2 I use the term ‘style’ fully aware of the debate launched by Barthes and others on the concepts of style and writing, giving it the following deﬁnition taken from Barthes: ‘Il est la voix de´corative d’une chair inconnue et secre`te [. . .]’, in Roland Barthes, Le degre´ ze´ro de l’e´criture suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques, Paris, Seuil, Coll. ‘Points’, 1953 and 1972, p. 12. 3 Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nause´e, Paris, Gallimard, 1938. We know that reading La Nause´e made a deep impression on Guibert: ‘Il se dit: Antoine Roquentin c’est moi; je n’en ﬁnis peut-eˆtre pas de re´e´crire cette Nause´e mais qu’importe, cette perception conﬁne tellement a` la mienne’ (MP, p. 332). 4 Example: ‘Dans son esprit, une e´vidence a lieu [. . .]’, MP, p. 59. 5 ‘La me`re d’Isabella ne pense pas cela, parce qu’elle est moins vulgaire, mais elle est tente´e de le penser’, p. 59. 6 ‘Cet e´pisode semble comple`tement superﬂu, exte´rieur. A` la limite, tout est superﬂu’, p. 58. 7 La Mort propagande, pp. 12 and 51 respectively for the last three examples. 8 Ibid., pp. 39–40, 44–45 and 68 respectively. 9 ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurai rien cache´ [. . .]’, interview with Franc¸ois Jonquet, Globe, April 1992, p. 108. 10 Example: ‘(question: le slip bleu de Tristan e´tait-il vraiment bleu?)’, MP, p. 113. 11 (‘Il avait juste dit a` son pe`re: je veux que ce soit un grand immeuble blanc et neuf, et qu’il ait un ascenseur tre`s rapide. Son pe`re avait cherche´ un grand immeuble blanc et neuf avec un ascenseur tre`s rapide [. . .]), MP, p. 104. 12 La Mort propagande, pp. 144, 154 and 162 respectively. 13 ‘Certains repre´sentants, ceux qui te donnaient des e´chantillons dont j’he´ritais [. . .]’, p. 170; my italics; see too p. 155. 14 La Mort propagande, pp. 148 and 147 respectively. 15 This theme is echoed in some of Guibert’s writing for Le Monde: ‘Voyage au centre du corps’, Le Monde, 24 October 1977, p. 24. This article gives Guibert’s reactions to Lennart Nilsson’s photos of the inside of the body: ‘En voyant l’inte´rieur de son corps agrandi et projete´ comme sur une coupole de plane´tarium, on est pris d’une sorte de vertige, on glisse sur sol, on meurt et on renaıˆ t. Le corps devient un personnage illimite´ avec sa ﬂore organique, ses mare´es, ses volcans et ses puits, ses masses spongieuses, ses rocs, ses velours, ses cataclysmes, ses cavernes, ses foreˆts, ses cristaux. C’est side´rant.’ 16 ‘Vie a` cre´dit’ by Franc¸ois Jonquet, Globe, no. 46 (April 1990), p. 45. 17 ‘Eˆtre dans une salle de dissection et de´pecer un cul. Autopsier cet endroit de mon

274

Notes to Chapter One

275

corps, dont la pe´ne´tration par une bite, l’ongle du doigt calleux qui e´crit et qui branle, griﬀe avec de´lices mes parois intestinales, ou le raˆpeux d’une langue se durcissant, me fait bander, jouir, pisser mon sperme’ (MP, p. 186). 18 ‘Guibert gagne’, interview with Sophie Che´rer, 7 a` Paris, 24 April 1991, p. 19. 19 ‘Herve´ Guibert et son double’, interview with Didier E´ribon, Le Nouvel Observateur, 18 July 1991, p. 88. 20 See my chapter, ‘Herve´ Guibert: Autobiographical Film-Writing Pushed to its Limits?’, in Autobiography and the Existential Self, eds Terry Keefe and Edmund Smyth, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1995, pp. 169–81. 21 ‘Herve´ Guibert et son double’, op. cit., p. 88. 22 ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurai rien cache´ [. . .]’, op. cit., p. 108. 23 The text on ‘le neveu du Mare´chal’ (p. 208) was later reprinted within the plot of the ‘lanceur de couteaux’ (PA, pp. 13–19). The killer of ‘H.G.’, who is, moreover, called ‘monstre’, has ‘des e´cailles qui lui poussaient sur les mains’ (MP, p. 211), just like the monsters of the ‘palais des monstres de´sirables’ [Vice (V), pp. 96–97]. The multipurpose machine (MP, p. 211) resembles the ‘fauteuil a` vibrations’ of Vice (pp. 30–32). The hole in the middle of the chest hidden by a cardboard ruﬄe (MP, p. 211) recurs in ‘Cinq tables de marbre’ (MP, p. 224). I stress this parallel because we know that Herve´ Guibert had a big complex about his pigeon-chest; what is signiﬁcant here is the way he ‘evacuates’ (‘e´vacue’) this complex by palming it oﬀ on Aure´lien, who is a bird (p. 110), on the ‘monstre’ which kills H. G. (p. 211) and on the ‘on’ (‘one’) undergoing a postmortem on the marble table (p. 224). 24 ‘Lordose’, p. 187; ‘apocryphes’, p. 211; ‘tre´panera’, p. 219. 25 Herve´ Guibert, ‘Roland Barthes et la photographie’, Le Monde, 28 February 1980, p. 22. 26 ‘Herve´ Guibert et son double’, op. cit., p. 89. Against the wishes of Barthes’s literary executors Guibert published a text sent to him by Barthes: ‘Fragments pour H’, L’Autre journal, 19 March 1986, pp. 81–82. 27 ‘Non au sexe roi’, interview with B.-H. Le´vy, Le Nouvel Observateur, 12 March 1977, pp. 92–130; reprinted in: Michel Foucault, Dits et E´crits 1954–1988, eds Defert and Ewald, vol. 3 ‘1976–1979’, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, pp. 256–69; p. 262. 28 Some of these texts reuse titles from the preceding section (‘E´quarissage’; ‘Saccage’). ‘Saccage’ resembles some of Bataille’s texts (MP, pp. 261–62, particularly 4), whereas ‘E´quarissage’ has echoes rather with what was to become Des Aveugles. The protagonist of ‘Zagato’ is taken up again later in ‘Le lanceur de couteaux’ (PA, pp. 13– 19). One ﬁnds, too, literary seams that are subsequently mined in other books, such as the text given the title of the number ‘XIX’ (MP, p. 262), which more or less makes up the plot of the story ‘Copyright, cine´ma’ in La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche (pp. 20–29). The action of some sections is set in the eighteenth century (MP, pp. 256–61), and the theme resembles that of ‘Un reˆve inde´cent’ in the preceding section (the signiﬁcance of Guibert’s readings of Sade is well documented). The theme of the teddy bear in the section entitled ‘XII’ (p. 255) and in ‘Charme ope`re’ (p. 260) was later reused in ‘L’ourson-ﬁole’ in Vice (pp. 28–29). As for ‘Machie moderne’, the ﬁght was of course later to become one of the components in Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes. 29 ‘Entretien avec Herve´ Guibert’ by Daniel Arsand and Jean-Michel Quiblier, Masques, Winter 1984–85, p. 72.

276

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

30 ‘Les aveux permanents d’Herve´ Guibert’, interview with Antoine de Gaudemar, Libe´ration, 20 October 1988, p. xii. 31 One of these ‘precise facts’ is no doubt the revelation about the pigeon-chest (MP, p. 290). 32 The same device is used by other writers, notably Roland Barthes; see La Chambre claire, Paris, Seuil, 1980. 33 ‘ ‘‘Le Cœr fatigue´’’: Extraits ine´dits du journal d’Herve´ Guibert’, Libe´ration, 14 janvier 1993. 34 These ideas are later taken up again in ‘Le re´cit inactif’ (pp. 298–99); see too ‘Le re´cit de la vacance’ (p. 302). 35 Compare this passage with the following in L’Image fantoˆme: ‘[. . .] pour suivre l’exemple de Poe dans ‘‘La lettre vole´e’’, il pense qu’il est pre´fe´rable de mettre en e´vidence et a` la vue de tous un objet qu’on veut dissimuler pour le rendre invisible, plutoˆt que de l’enfouir myste´rieusement, et inviter ainsi les curieux a` en trouver la cachette [. . .]’ (IF, p. 106). 36 ‘Il lui semble que sa teˆte marche au rythme de la machine: chacune de ses pense´es est de´ja` une phrase e´crite’ (p. 305). 37 ‘[. . .] le monde lui parut une photo retouche´e’ (p. 318). 38 Another remarkable similarity with the narrator of Les Mots (see Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots, Paris, Gallimard, 1964, pp. 45–46). 39 ‘[. . .] [c’e´tait] un e´pisode qui me hantait et que j’essayais d’e´crire. Un e´pisode dont je n’avais ve´cu que le fantasme. A` Porquerolles, lors d’une noyade, un pe`re s’e´tait jete´ a` l’eau pour sauver son petit garc¸on et avait e´te´ emporte´ avec lui. On les avait enterre´s dans un meˆme cercueil et je les avais de´terre´s. Une sce`ne que je ressassais, qui revenait . . .’. In ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurai rien cache´ [. . .]’, op. cit., p. 106. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., p. 108. 42 ‘Double jeu’, by Raymond Bellour, Le Magazine litte´raire, no. 292 (October 1991), p. 85. 43 Ibid.

Notes to Chapter Two pp. 41–70 1 ‘Variations Guibert’, by Antoine de Gaudemar, Libe´ration, 15 September 1994, p. 26. 2 ‘Herve´ Guibert, son dernier entretien’, interview with Je´roˆme Garcin, L’E´ve´nement du Jeudi, 26 September 1991, p. 109. 3 Ralph Sarkonak draws attention to this intertextuality in ‘Herve´ Guibert: Vice de formes’, Nottingham French Studies, Herve´ Guibert special issue, ed. Jean-Pierre Boule´, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring 1995), p. 49 n. 4. 4 ‘Ce vice impuni l’e´criture’, by Jean-Marie Planes, Sodimanche, 15 September 1991, p. 35. 5 ‘Herve´ Guibert: Vice de formes’, op. cit., pp. 50–51. 6 Vice, pp. 37, 71, 85 respectively. 7 Ibid., pp. 61–64, 65–67, 70–72, 86–88, 89–95, 75–79, 86–88, 56–58, 83–85, 80–82, etc. 8 Ibid., pp. 12, 20–21. 9 Ibid., pp. 82, 25, 33, 29, 26–27, 39–40. 10 ‘Herve´ Guibert: Vice de formes’, op. cit., p. 58. 11 ‘Double jeu’, by Raymond Bellour, Le Magazine litte´raire, no. 292 (October 1991), p. 85. 12 ‘Entretien avec Herve´ Guibert’, by Daniel Arsand and Jean-Michel Quiblier, Masques, Winter 1984–85, p. 72. 13 To make up for the fact that there is no pagination I have numbered the pages myself, starting with the front cover and including the pages containing photographs. 14 ‘Une lecture au ‘‘Gueuloir’’. Un auteur en queˆte de spectateur’, Le Monde, 11 August 1977, p. 17. 15 ‘Guibert gagne’, interview with Sophie Che´rer, 7 a` Paris, 24 April 1991, p. 19. 16 Barthes spoke of death in photography before Guibert did, of course. See Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, Paris, Seuil, 1980, p. 31ﬀ. 17 ‘Herve´ Guibert. Le seul texte’, by Daniel Arsand, Masques, Winter 1984–85, p. 67. 18 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, Paris, Seuil, 1975; La Chambre claire, op. cit. Of interest too is Guibert’s article on the occasion of the publication of La Chambre claire: Herve´ Guibert, ‘Roland Barthes et la photographie’, Le Monde, 28 February 1980, p. 22. 19 ‘Herve´ Guibert et son double’, interview with Didier E´ribon, Le Nouvel Observateur, 18 July 1991, p. 89. 20 Most of these articles, together with those in Le Monde, are at the I.M.E.C (See bibliography).

277

278

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

21 An interesting account of these years at Le Monde can be found in La vie retrouve´e by Yvonne Baby, Paris, E´ditions de l’Olivier, 1992. 22 Cartier-Bresson for example: ‘Rencontre avec Cartier-Bresson’, Le Monde, 30 October 1980, p. 17. Photographers were not the only people involved, of course. To take the example of theatre directors, we learn that to meet Che´reau, Guibert used an actor, Hugues Quester, whom he had been able to get in touch with in his capacity as writer for a girls’ magazine (it must be Vingt Ans); he then approached Che´reau on the pretext of interviewing him for Vingt Ans. In ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurai rien cache´ . . .)’, interview with Franc¸ois Jonquet, Globe, April 1992, p. 106. 23 Guibert carries out the same analysis in ‘Le roman fantoˆme’ (PA, p. 129). 24 ‘Dans le meˆme livre, je voyais Ge´rard Depardieu dans le roˆle d’Arthur’. ‘Guibert gagne’, op. cit., p. 17. 25 ‘Adjani ou les vertus de l’exce`s’, by Herve´ Guibert, Le Monde, 28 May 1981, p. 19. 26 ‘Herve´ Guibert: l’e´criture amoureuse de la photographie’, by Christian Caujolle, Libe´ration, 24 September 1981, p. 25. 27 L’Image fantoˆme, pp. 57–60, 83–84, 85–86, respectively. 28 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, op. cit., pp. 123–24, in conjunction with which see also Roland Barthes, Le degre´ ze´ro de l’e´criture, Paris, Seuil, Coll. ‘Points’, 1953 and 1972, especially the chapters entitled ‘L’e´criture du roman’, pp. 25–32 and ‘L’utopie du langage’, pp. 62–65. 29 ‘L’amour fou des images’, by Nicole Zand, Le Monde, 16 October 1981, p. 23. 30 ‘Entre les images et les mots’, by Raymond Bellour, Le Magazine litte´raire, January 1982, p. 56. 31 ‘Herve´ Guibert: l’e´criture amoureuse de la photographie’, op. cit. 32 L’Image fantoˆme, pp. 31–33, 87–88 (a version of this text was ﬁrst used in Vice, pp. 50–52), 127, 152–53, respectively. 33 ‘L’amour fou des images’ op. cit. 34 L’Image fantoˆme, pp. 81–82, 89, 113, respectively. 35 ‘Entre les images et les mots’, op. cit. 36 ‘[L’e´criture] reconstitue avec minutie un monde inte´rieur tre`s secret, tre`s intime sur le ton de la conﬁdence’, ‘L’amour fou des images’, op. cit. ‘Et si le lecteur se sent si proche, c’est que l’on est a` la conﬁdence plutoˆt qu’au tragique de la confession’, ‘Le spectre des fantoˆmes’, by Philippe Mezescaze, Masques, no. 1 (Winter 1981–82), p. 187. 37 ‘[. . .] (Je ne sais comment le de´ﬁnir: un avion, un escargot, un he´risson? Tous ces objets sont bien diﬀe´rents, et pourtant ils me semblent de´crire cet objet-la`) [. . .]’ IF, p. 85. 38 ‘L’histoire est troublante, vous ne la croyez pas?’, p. 160. 39 L’Image fantoˆme, pp. 31, 33, 32, respectively. 40 Ibid., pp. 100–01. 41 Ibid., pp. 55, 61. It is what Barthes calls the ‘objective’ photo. In Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, op. cit., p. 27. 42 L’Image fantoˆme, pp. 36, 37. 43 Ibid., pp. 19, 25–27, respectively. 44 Ibid., pp. 11, 14, 164. For a reading of L’Image fantoˆme as visual/ textual representations, reading and desire, see Alex Hughes, ‘Reading Guibert’s L’Image fantoˆme/ Reading Desire’, Modern and Contemporary France, vol. 6, no. 2 (1998), pp. 203–14.

Notes to Chapter Three pp. 71–100 1 ‘Lettres d’amour (ou le de´poˆt inconside´re´)’; ‘Le baiser a` Samuel’; ‘Surtainville, le 13 octobre’; ‘La serviette’; ‘Le voyage a` Bruxelles’; ‘La visite’; ‘L’arrie`re-saison’; ‘Une nuit’; ‘Le de´sir d’imitation’. 2 He´lie Lassaigne, ‘Les chiens de Guibert ont des aventures bien singulie`res’, Libe´ration, 14 May 1982, p. 30; see too Luc Pinhas, ‘Le singulier comme produit de l’e´criture’, La Quinzaine litte´raire, no. 372 (1 June 1982), p. 8. 3 ‘Entretien avec Herve´ Guibert’, by Daniel Arsand and Jean-Michel Quiblier, Masques, Winter 1984–85, p. 72. 4 ‘[. . .] Peter Handke pour Les Aventures singulie`res [. . .]’, in ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurai rien cache´ . . .’, interview with Franc¸ois Jonquet, Globe, April 1992, p. 111; see too Peter Handke, Le Malheur Indiﬀe´rent, Paris, Gallimard, 1972 (1975 for the translation). 5 Evelyne Pieiller, ‘Les errances d’Herve´ Guibert’, Le Monde, 6 August 1982, p. 15. 6 Rene´ de Ceccatty, ‘Le sexe fantoˆme’, Gai Pied, no. 39 (1982), p. 36. 7 Les Aventures singulie`res, pp. 91, 97. A photo entitled ‘Gina’ in which she seems to be wearing such a coat is on page 36 of Le Seul visage. 8 See the article by Alain Buisine, ‘Le photographique plutoˆt que la photographie’, Nottingham French Studies, Herve´ Guibert special issue, ed. Jean-Pierre Boule´, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 34–35. 9 Ibid., p. 35. 10 Les Aventures singulie`res, pp. 86 and 87 respectively. 11 Ibid., pp. 35, 17–18. 12 Ibid., pp. 11–12, 21. 13 Ibid., pp. 59, 64. 14 Ibid. pp. 63, 69. 15 Ibid., pp. 15–16, 11, 27. 16 Ibid., pp. 28, 34, 47, 49, 109–10. 17 Ibid., pp. 70, 73, 72. 18 Ibid., pp. 35, 109, 115. 19 Ibid., pp. 28, 29. 20 Ibid., pp. 42, 79. 21 Ibid., pp. 35, 17–18, 51–54. As we saw in Chapter 1, the genesis of this text was explained in an interview in which Guibert said that having had to undergo an emergency operation to avoid peritonitis, he suﬀered from post-operative trauma and experienced intolerable pain, and then began writing the ﬁrst text of ‘La Mort propagande’ (MP, pp. 183–85) which he describes as ‘un peu de´lirant’ (‘a bit wild’) (in ‘Herve´ Guibert et son double’, interview with Didier E´ribon, Le Nouvel Observateur,

279

280

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

18 July 1991, p. 88). The same event is handled in a completely diﬀerent way in the story ‘La serviette’ (AV, pp. 51–54). 22 Les Aventures singulie`res, pp. 33 and 114 respectively. 23 Gilles Barbedette, ‘Ticket’, Samouraı¨, December 1982, p. 90. 24 Rene´ de Ceccatty, ‘Le sexe fantoˆme’, op. cit., p. 36; Evelyne Pieiller, ‘Les errances d’Herve´ Guibert’, op. cit., p. 15; Luc Pinhas, ‘Le singulier comme produit de l’e´criture’, op. cit., p. 8. 25 Rene´ de Ceccatty, ‘Le sexe fantoˆme’, op. cit., p. 36. 26 It would hardly be betraying a secret to name the star of Les Belles de nuit, Beat the Devil and Trapeze whom Herve´ Guibert had in any case interviewed and who had been the subject of an article: ‘Gina Lollobrigida photographe. (Exposition Muse´e Carnavalet)’ and ‘De´claration au Monde’, Le Monde, 23 October 1980, p. 19. 27 ‘La Semaine sainte’; ‘Le testament de Mao Tse´-toung’; ‘Lettre a` un fre`re d’e´criture’; ‘Roman posthume’; ‘Un sce´nariste amoureux’; ‘De´dicace a` l’encre sympathique’; ‘Vertiges’; ‘Ex-voto’; ‘L’homme qui avait peur’. Guibert dates ‘Vertiges’ 1983 but the story had appeared in Minuit in 1982; he dates ‘Ex-voto’ and ‘L’Homme qui avait peur’ 1984, but they had appeared in Minuit in 1982 under the title ‘Re´cits te´nus’ with ‘Le palais des monstres de´sirables’ later published separately in Vice (V, pp. 96–97). 28 ‘Guibert, par-dela` la mort’, by Hector Bianciotti, Le Monde, p. 3. 29 La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche, pp. 69 and 70, 73. 30 Ibid., pp. 69, 72. 31 Ibid., pp. 80, 72. 32 Ibid., pp. 86, 92. 33 Ibid., pp. 57, 59. 34 Ibid., pp. 64, 65. 35 Ibid., pp. 57, 60–61. 36 Ibid., pp. 62, 60. 37 Ibid., pp. 66, 64. 38 Ibid., p. 66. It must be stressed that when one reads ‘Entretien avec Euge`ne Savitzkaya’, interview with Herve´ Guibert, Minuit, no. 49 (May 1982), pp. 5–12, one is struck by the similarities between Guibert’s writing and what he says about Savitzkaya’s (for example, p. 9). This similarity is evident too in their conception of literature, even down to the notion of betrayal (p. 11). 39 ‘Guibert gagne’, interview with Sophie Che´rer, 7 a` Paris, 24 April 1991, p. 17. 40 La Piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche, pp. 77, 79. 41 Ibid., pp. 71, 73. 42 Ibid., pp. 64, 121–22. 43 Ibid., p. 131; compare this remark with Barthes’s in Le degre´ ze´ro de l’e´criture suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques, Paris, Seuil, Coll. ‘Points’, 1953 and 1972, p. 32. 44 ‘Entretien avec Euge`ne Savitzkaya’, op. cit., pp. 5–12. 45 Ibid., p. 5. 46 Les Chiens, pp. 9, 25, 27. 47 ‘Cette identiﬁcation progressive a` l’animal, a` la beˆte, au fauve, joue donc, elle aussi, un roˆle me´taphorique-me´tonymique capital dans Les Chiens. De manie`re exemplaire, elle montre comment une comparaison me´taphorique se transforme en une me´tonymie ou` le re´el ce`de la place a` l’imaginaire: la me´taphore hommes-chiens devient la me´tonymie chiens-(hommes) qui donne naissance a` un texte fantasmatique et

Notes to Chapter Three

281

mythologique, Les Chiens.’ Owen Heathcote, ‘Les Chiens d’Herve´ Guibert: Analyse d’une plaquette pornographique’, Nottingham French Studies, Herve´ Guibert special issue, ed. Jean-Pierre Boule´, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring 1995), p. 65. 48 ‘Guibert gagne’, op. cit., p. 18. 49 ‘Herve´ Guibert et son double’, op. cit., p. 89. 50 Owen Heathcote, ‘Les Chiens d’Herve´ Guibert: Analyse d’une plaquette pornographique’, op. cit., p. 66. 51 Murray Pratt, ‘De la de´sidentiﬁcation a` l’incognito: A` la recherche d’une autobiographique homosexuelle’, Nottingham French Studies, Herve´ Guibert special issue, ed. Jean-Pierre Boule´, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring 1995), p. 74. 52 ‘Herve´ Guibert et son double’, op. cit., p. 88. 53 Rene´ de Ceccatty, ‘Le sexe fantoˆme’, op. cit., p. 36. 54 Such a reading resembles that of Murray Pratt (‘De la de´sidentiﬁcation a` l’incognito: A` la recherche d’une autobiographique homosexuelle’) and is according to him akin to the concept of interpretation (‘performance’) of Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, Routledge, 1990. 55 Les Chiens, pp. 12–13, 20. 56 Ibid., pp. 17–18, 18, 23, 24 respectively. 57 Rene´ de Ceccatty, ‘Le sexe fantoˆme’, op. cit. 58 ‘Herve´ Guibert et son double’, op. cit., p. 88. 59 Murray Pratt, ‘De la de´sidentiﬁcation a` l’incognito: A` la recherche d’une autobiographique homosexuelle’, op. cit., pp. 74–75. 60 Voyage avec deux enfants, pp. 24–26 (a version of this episode ﬁrst appeared in Vice, ‘Le crocodile-bar’, pp. 68–69), 28–31, 14–16. 61 Ibid., pp. 49–50, 50. 62 ‘Les aveux permanents d’Herve´ Guibert’, interview with Antoine de Gaudemar, Libe´ration, 20 October 1988, p. 12. 63 Voyage avec deux enfants, pp. 18, 15, 14, 15, 13, 21 respectively. 64 Ibid., pp. 19–20, 18. 65 Ibid., pp. 27–28, 78. 66 ‘Entretien avec Euge`ne Savitzkaya’, op. cit., p. 9. 67 Voyage avec deux enfants, pp. 13–14, 13. 68 Ibid., pp. 85, 93. 69 Ibid., pp. 83, 87. 70 Ibid., pp. 105–09, 105. Although I am dealing here with diﬃcult and contentious issues, I want to stress that I am writing about ﬁction dealing with fantasy exploration, and do not feel the need to engage in a moral debate. An anonymous reader for Liverpool University Press made a timely point worth repeating here for others to ponder: ‘I would have liked some of the moral dimension to appear; in fact it is already there in much of what the author does with the later texts. Guibert’s exploration of the places of morality and fantasy is a radical shaking up of how conventional morality has to be rejected or bypassed to ﬁnd a life-aﬃrming jouissance in text or reality.’ 71 Ibid., pp. 116, 118. 72 Ibid., pp. 23, 23–24. 73 Ibid., pp. 103, 109. 74 Ibid., pp. 118–19, 119. 75 ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurai rien cache´ (. . .)’, op. cit., p. 108.

Notes to Chapter Four pp. 101–122 1 Jean Genet, Journal du voleur, Paris, Gallimard, 1949; Le Miracle de la Rose, in OEuvres comple`tes, Paris, Gallimard, 1951. 2 ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurais rien cache´ . . .’, interview with Franc¸ois Jonquet, Globe, April 1992, pp. 105–06. 3 L’Homme blesse´, pp. 134, 136, 137 respectively. 4 For example, the relationship between Henri and his father is more detailed and passionate in the notes to the script (HB, pp. 189–90) than in the ﬁlm. 5 These remarks are conﬁrmed in an interview: ‘Ce sce´nario, nous l’avons e´crit relativement comme un roman. Il y a une forme [. . .] tre`s line´aire, tre`s continue, avec une vraie complexite´ romanesque.’ In ‘Herve´ Guibert, l’e´crivain amoureux’, Gai Pied Hebdo, no. 48 (18 December 1982), p. 33. 6 To illustrate this one could quote the scene where Henri puts on Jean’s clothes, especially his leather jacket (p. 84), a passage that recurs in L’Incognito, and the scene of the kiss (pp. 98–103) which repeats a number of the narrative elements in ‘Baiser a` Samuel’ in Les Aventures singulie`res. 7 L’Homme blesse´, pp. 166, 170–74 respectively. 8 Ibid., conversations (‘Dıˆ ner avec Bernard [. . .]’, p. 184; ‘Dıˆ ner avec P.’, p. 186), meetings (‘Samedi dernier au Se´lect [. . .]’, p. 174; ‘Tabac des Sports’, p. 185), travel experiences (Munich, pp. 179–80; ‘La feˆte foraine du Trastevere a` Rome [. . .]’, p. 185), reading (‘[. . .] le reportage de Libe´ [. . .]’, p. 188), friends’ anecdotes (‘Le bal pre`s de Grenade raconte´ par T. [. . .]’, p. 181; ‘Le re´cit de Hans-Georg sur Naples’, p. 185). 9 Herve´ Guibert, ‘L’ours’, Autrement, ‘E´crire aujourd’hui’, 1985, pp. 98–103. 10 For example: ‘Le pe`re Falconnet’; ‘Monsieur Luccioni’; ‘Lady Bigoudi’. 11 ‘Lubie de´pensie`re’, LA, p. 15; ‘lubie plus aride’, p. 18; ‘lubie plus e´trange’, p. 101. 12 Ibid., for example: ‘La Tempeˆte’, pp. 41–43; ‘Le Tableau’, p. 117. 13 ‘[. . .] la premie`re illustration aurait e´te´ l’autoportrait de Munich de Rembrandt en jeune chien fou—un portrait ide´al d’Arthur—et la dernie`re aurait e´te´ cet autre autoportrait qu’on peut voir a` la Frick Collection de New York, et qui le montre aﬀuble´ d’un chapeau noir, entoure´ d’une couronne d’e´pines [. . .] Souvent les images ont ﬁxe´ la sce`ne d’un chapitre.’ PA, pp. 145–46. 14 Particularly Les aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym by Poe (LA, pp. 47–48). A number of other books are cited in ‘L’ours’, of special note among them being Melville (Moby Dick) and Flaubert (La le´gende de Saint-Julien l’Hospitalier, PA, pp. 139–48). In his master’s thesis Lefeuvre even undertakes a close comparison between passages from Les Lubies d’Arthur and La le´gende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier in order to show how similar they are (‘Pour une lecture d’Herve´ Guibert’, master’s thesis, University of Rennes II, 1988–89, p. 46). 15 Les Lubies d’Arthur, disguised or masked: with a bear skin, p. 15; a monkey

282

Notes to Chapter Four

283

mask, p. 35. The strange things: Bichon gets pregnant, p. 18; he has scales growing on his skin, p. 62, this episode recalling ‘Le Palais des monstres de´sirables’, V, pp. 96–97; Arthur’s wounds are resistant to cauterisation, LA, p. 105. 16 Ibid., pp. 17, 46. 17 Ibid., pp. 39, 23. 18 Ibid., pp. 65, 66. 19 Ibid., pp. 90, 110. 20 This pressure is conﬁrmed in the interview with Franc¸ois Jonquet, ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurais rien cache´ . . .’, op. cit., p. 108. 21 Ibid., p. 109. 22 Les Lubies d’Arthur, ‘cet autre autoportrait qu’on peut voir a` la Frick Collection de New York, et qui le montre aﬀuble´ d’un chapeau noir, entoure´ d’une couronne d’e´pines’, p. 146. 23 The remarks will be repeated in ‘Guibert gagne’, interview with Sophie Che´rer, 7 a` Paris, 24 April 1991, p. 17. See too ‘Entretien avec Herve´ Guibert’ by Daniel Arsand and Jean-Michel Quiblier, Masques, Winter 1984–85, p. 72. In this interview, Guibert speaks of the happiness of ﬁnding the self again in the middle of the story. 24 ‘Entretien avec Herve´ Guibert’, op. cit., p. 72. 25 ‘Le bal des coeurs solitaires’; ‘Sur une manipulation courante’; ‘Les rivaux’; ‘L’e´diteur’; ‘Ne´crologie’; ‘Ici’. 26 ‘Ces conseils e´taient: faire des livres plus gros [. . .]’ (PA, p. 112); see ‘Le roman fantoˆme’ (pp. 129–30) and ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurais rien cache´ . . .’, op. cit., p. 108. 27 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, par Roland Barthes, Paris, Seuil, 1975, pp. 123– 24. 28 Roland Barthes, La chambre claire, Paris, Seuil, 1980, p. 166. 29 Le Seul visage, pp. 5, 61. 30 Lettres d’E´gypte, p. 8 (see in connection with this idea Herve´ Guibert’s text ‘J’ai peur de repartir’, Le Monde, 16 August 1985, p. 19); pp. 14, 53–54. 31 Herve´ Guibert, ‘Splendeurs et mise`res d’une espionne photographe’, Le Monde, 16 August 1984, p. 9. 32 My bibliography lists sixteen ‘Photos + Texte’. 33 Witness: ‘dismorphophobe’, PA, p. 102, ‘gourme´s’, p. 103, ‘te´ratologie’, p. 104, ‘objurgations’, p. 116, ‘biﬁde’, p. 124, ‘engeance’, p. 125. 34 Lettres d’E´gypte, pp. 65, 7, 51. 35 Ibid., pp. 14, 32. 36 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, op. cit., p. 54. 37 ‘[. . .] sa main qui remontait le long de mon torse tomba dans un trou, et la mienne se brisa a` la naissance d’une longue areˆte d’os—comme l’e´chine d’un requin [. . .] l’e´peron dans la fosse’ (PA, p. 109). 38 Le Seul visage, pp. 43–44, 46, 61, 45. 39 Lettres d’E´gypte, pp. 30, 54, 9. 40 Ibid., pp. 53, 70. 41 See for example ‘Une petite bonne femme sans histoire’, PA, p. 35. 42 ‘Il ne soupc¸onne pas un instant que le garc¸on qui lui relate cette triste histoire ait pu faire une me´prise, transmettre une fausse information, ou lui mentir’, PA, p. 101. 43 Ibid., pp. 103, 105. 44 Ibid., pp. 117, 118. There is no trace in Le Monde of any such article.

Notes to Chapter Five pp. 123–144 1 Des Aveugles, pp. 131, 141 respectively. Smith stresses the similarities between this episode and La Le´gende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier, a work of Flaubert’s which, as we have seen, could already be glimpsed between the lines in Les Lubies d’Arthur: Richard Smith, ‘Le pouvoir n’est pas une institution: humour et politique dans Des Aveugles’, in Nottingham French Studies, Herve´ Guibert special issue, ed. Jean-Pierre Boule´, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring 1995), p. 22. Besides, the tone of this episode contrasts sharply with the rest of the book and would be better suited to that of Les Lubies d’Arthur. 2 ‘Les Aveugles d’Herve´ Guibert’, interview with Catherine Francblin, Art Press, no. 91 (April 1985), p. 45. 3 Des Aveugles, pp. 116, 117. This head, which had already featured in Vice, was later to be the subject of one of the stories in Mauve le vierge (‘La teˆte de Jeanne D’Arc’, MV, pp. 83–100). 4 ‘Les Aveugles d’Herve´ Guibert’, op. cit., p. 43. 5 The manuscript deposited at the I.M.E.C. clearly shows that it was Guibert who wrote the back cover note and moreover signed it ‘H.G.’. In his article Smith stresses that the back cover was altered for the ‘Folio’ edition published a year later; for his analysis of this diﬀe´rance, see Richard Smith, ‘Le pouvoir n’est pas une institution: humour et politique dans Des Aveugles’, op. cit., p. 20. 6 Herve´ Guibert, ‘Les jeunes aveugles et la culture: Topographie d’un enseignement ge´ne´ral; Propositions; Le droit au toucher; Vive le braille; Musiques’, Le Monde, 14 July 1983, pp. 10–11. 7 ‘Les Aveugles d’Herve´ Guibert’, interview with Catherine Francblin, op. cit., p. 43. 8 Ibid., p. 44. 9 ‘Herve´ Guibert: Les messagers des morts’, interview with Antoine Dulaure, L’Autre journal, April 1985, p. 54. 10 ‘Les Aveugles d’Herve´ Guibert’, op. cit., p. 47. 11 Jacques Derrida, Me´moires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines, Paris, Muse´es Nationaux, 1990. 12 ‘Les Aveugles d’Herve´ Guibert’, op. cit., pp. 46–47. 13 Jean-Pierre Boule´, Herve´ Guibert: A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie and Other Writings, Glasgow, University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1995, pp. 12–13. 14 ‘Herve´ Guibert: Les messagers des morts’, op. cit., p. 56. 15 ‘Ce reportage que j’ai, par la suite, e´crit—et qui e´tait en meˆme temps un repe´rage, un espionnage—est passe´ a` la ﬁction.’ Ibid.

284

Notes to Chapter Five

285

16 Anne-Ce´cile Guilbard, ‘De la pratique du narcissisme a` la recherche de l’image vraie’, Nottingham French Studies, op. cit., p. 47 n. 6. 17 ‘Herve´ Guibert: Les messagers des morts’, op. cit., p. 56. 18 ‘Les Aveugles d’Herve´ Guibert’, op. cit., p. 47. 19 Des Aveugles, pp. 135–37, 119. 20 ‘Les Aveugles d’Herve´ Guibert’, op. cit., p. 44. 21 ‘Herve´ Guibert: Les messagers des morts’, op. cit., p. 56. 22 Des Aveugles, respectively: ‘voir par transmission de pense´e’, p. 34 and ‘comprendre l’action graˆce au son’, p. 35; ‘la scie musicale’, p. 55; ‘la ligne brise´e’, p. 37. 23 Ibid., p. 73. 24 Ibid., pp. 54, 39, 67. 25 Ibid., pp. 52, 102. 26 ‘Ge´ne´ralement c’e´tait le commencement des e´treintes’, ibid., p. 46. 27 Robert gets a slap in the face for saying: ‘[. . .] salope suceuse de motards!’, ibid., p. 60. 28 It will not have escaped our attention either that the apparatus which graces the debates is perhaps that of ‘La boıˆ te a` double fond’ in Vice (pp. 73–74) which has already been encountered in Les Chiens (p. 30), as have the binary oppositions in the same book. 29 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualite´ 1 La volonte´ de savoir, Paris, Seuil, 1976; L’usage des plaisirs, Paris, Seuil, 1984; Le souci de soi, Paris, Seuil, 1984; Surveiller et punir, Paris, Seuil, 1975. 30 Des Aveugles, pp. 28–30, 31–32 respectively. 31 ‘Les Aveugles d’Herve´ Guibert’, op. cit., p. 44. 32 Des Aveugles, pp. 74–75, 134–35 respectively. 33 ‘Herve´ Guibert: Les messagers des morts’, op. cit., p. 56. 34 ‘Pour re´pondre aux quelques questions qui se posent . . . Herve´ Guibert. Entretien avec Christophe Donner’, La Re`gle du jeu, year 3, no. 7 (May 1992), p. 147. 35 Des Aveugles, p. 14, p. 57, pp. 65–6 respectively. 36 ‘Pour re´pondre aux quelques questions qui se posent . . . Herve´ Guibert. Entretien avec Christophe Donner’, op. cit., p. 147. 37 ‘Les Aveugles d’Herve´ Guibert’, op. cit., p. 46. 38 Robert will only wear these leathers for Taillegueur’s funeral (Av., p. 132)— they will recur in Fou de Vincent (p. 26); Av., p. 103. 39 Des Aveugles, pp. 81, 46 and 96, respectively. 40 Ibid., pp. 48, 51. 41 Richard Smith, ‘Le pouvoir n’est pas une institution: humour et politique dans Des Aveugles’, op. cit., p. 23. 42 Gilles Barbedette, ‘Au royaume des aveugles’, La Quinzaine litte´raire, no. 441 (1 June 1985), p. 10. 43 Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, ‘L’inﬁni du de´sir’, Le Monde, 12 April 1985, p. 20. 44 Edmund Smyth, ‘Des Aveugles: Modes d’articulation’, Nottingham French Studies, op. cit., p. 16. 45 See ‘Guibert/Adrien: Double-vue sur les aveugles’, interview with Michel Barlier, Gai Pied Hebdo, no. 240 (October 1986), pp. 33–34. 46 Des Aveugles, pp. 31, 42 and especially 72–73 in which the ‘je’ appears. 47 ‘Les Aveugles d’Herve´ Guibert’, op. cit., p. 44.

286

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

48 Ibid., p. 45. 49 Edmund Smyth, ‘Des Aveugles: Modes d’articulation’, op. cit., p. 12. 50 ‘I. Beaucoup de jeux de nuits’, pp. 1–104; ‘II. S’abandonner au jeu des garc¸ons, c’est, comme un loup, se coucher sur un lit de ﬂeurs mourantes’, pp. 105–97; ‘III. Le jeu ﬁnit lorsque tous les animaux ont e´te´ pris par le diable et sont devenus ses chiens’, pp. 199–205. 51 ‘Pour re´pondre aux quelques questions qui se posent . . . Herve´ Guibert. Entretien avec Christophe Donner’, op. cit., p. 147. 52 ‘Herve´ Guibert ‘‘Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes’’ ’, by Jean-Michel Minon, Tel Quel, no. 61 (January 1988), p. 9. 53 Ibid. Guibert’s work on Le Monde continued to inﬂuence his writings. See too the article entitled ‘Le week-end d’Herve´ Guibert’, Le Monde, 28 May 1985, p. 13, an account of the feria at Nıˆ mes. 54 Other readings obviously need to be made. See those of Enda McCaﬀrey (‘La superstition dans Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes’, Nottingham French Studies, op. cit., pp. 24–31), of Owen Heathcote (‘L’E´rotisme, la violence et le jeu dans Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes’, in Le corps textuel d’Herve´ Guibert, ed. Ralph Sarkonak, Paris, Minard, 1997, pp. 189–211), of Raymond Bellour who sees especially in the second part the image of the black virgin (‘Oser imaginer’, Le Magazine litte´raire, no. 248 (December 1987), p. 90) and of Murray Pratt (‘De la de´sidentiﬁcation a` l’incognito: A` la recherche d’une autobiographique homosexuelle’, Nottingham French Studies, op. cit.). 55 ‘Les Aveugles d’Herve´ Guibert’, op. cit., p. 47. In another interview, Guibert also annexes ‘le Cobra de Severo Sarduy’ to this book (‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurais rien cache´ . . .’, interview with Franc¸ois Jonquet, Globe, April 1992, p. 109). Barthes is still present between the lines in Guibert’s work since it was allegedly he who drew Guibert’s attention to Sarduy’s book (‘Herve´ Guibert et son double’, interview with Didier E´ribon, Le Nouvel Observateur, 18 July 1991, p. 88.). 56 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, Paris, Seuil, 1980, pp. 56 and 164. 57 Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes, pp. 34–35, 76. 58 Ibid., pp. 14, 77–81. 59 Ibid., pp. 16, 19, 20. 60 Ibid., pp. 24, 26. 61 Ibid., pp. 41–42, 44–55. 62 Ibid., p. 35. 63 Ibid., pp. 30, 41. 64 Ibid., pp. 62, 63. 65 Ibid., pp. 64, 47. 66 Ibid., pp. 91, 93. 67 Ibid., pp. 126, 127. 68 Ibid., pp. 145–49. This fever reminds one to some extent of the temperature the child runs in the ‘story’ part of Voyage avec deux enfants (pp. 39f). 69 Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes, pp. 171, 172. 70 Ibid., pp. 19, 25. 71 Ibid., pp. 41–43, 43. 72 Ibid., pp. 128, 173–74. 73 Ibid., pp. 130, 184.

Notes to Chapter Five

287

74 ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurais rien cache´ . . .’, op. cit., p. 109. 75 Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes, p. 81, p. 130. 76 Ibid., pp. 112, 66. 77 ‘[. . .] meˆme quand j’inventais des personnages ou des histoires, j’avais toujours des mode`les, des photos, des albums, des articles, des peintures, des notes, des plans. Pour les enfants de ‘‘Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes’’, j’avais des ﬁches et des photos anthropome´triques d’enfants orphelins ou de´linquants en Angleterre au XIXe`me sie`cle’, ‘Guibert gagne’, interview with Sophie Che´rer, 7a` Paris, 24 April 1991, p. 17. 78 Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes, pp. 14, 15, 18. 79 Ibid., pp. 13f, 131f, 151f. 80 So, for Radiateur, in Mickie’s case his ‘queue . . . [est] le centre invisible’, p. 109; that is what Baleine will straight away notice too, p. 135. 81 Ibid., pp. 131–34, 202. 82 Murray Pratt, ‘De la de´sidentiﬁcation a` l’incognito: A` la recherche d’une autobiographique homosexuelle’, op. cit., p. 77. 83 Ibid., p. 79. 84 Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte, Paris, Seuil, 1973, pp. 25–26. 85 Raymond Bellour, ‘Double jeu’, Le Magazine litte´raire, no. 292 (October 1991), p. 85. This text has not always met with such approbation: Guibert tells how on its publication no one wanted to read it, not even his best friends, quoting even an ‘explication’ of his father for this ‘e´chec’. (‘Guibert gagne’, op. cit., p. 17). Bellour himself anticipates such reactions in the ﬁrst line of the article he wrote on the book’s publication. Raymond Bellour, ‘Oser imaginer’, op. cit., p. 90. 86 Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Paris, Seuil, 1971, pp. 140–41. 87 ‘Herve´ Guibert ‘‘Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes’’ ’, op. cit. 88 Enda McCaﬀrey, ‘La superstition dans Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes’, op. cit., p. 29. 89 Leo Bersani, A Future for Astayanax, Boston and Toronto, Little, Brown and Company, 1976, p. 302. 90 Raymond Bellour, ‘Oser imaginer’, op. cit., p. 92. 91 Miche`le Bernstein, ‘Herve´ Guibert—Une tendresse d’enfer’, Libe´ration, 5 November 1987, p. 40. 92 Raymond Bellour, ‘Guibert ou l’inde´cidable’, Le Magazine litte´raire, no. 260 (December 1988), p. 80. 93 ‘Herve´ Guibert ‘‘Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes’’ ’, op. cit. 94 ‘Guibert gagne’, op. cit., p. 17. 95 Edmund Smyth, ‘Des Aveugles: Modes d’articulation’, op. cit., p. 11. 96 Richard Smith, ‘Le pouvoir n’est pas une institution: humour et politique dans Des Aveugles’, op. cit., p. 15. 97 Ibid., p. 18. 98 Gilles Barbedette, ‘Au royaume des aveugles’, op. cit., p. 10. 99 ‘Pour re´pondre aux quelques questions qui se posent . . . Herve´ Guibert. Entretien avec Christophe Donner’, op. cit., p. 149.

Notes to Chapter Six pp. 145–157 1 Mes parents, pp. 9–15, 132–35, 164–67. 2 It should indeed not be forgotten that the new expanded edition of La Mort propagande would only appear in 1991. 3 The episodes of the Germans who tortured French people (Mes, p. 20), of the father who leaves notes before going to work (pp. 20–21), of the discovery of the sister’s diary and of her outﬁt at school (pp. 27–28), of the shower sessions run by the mother (p. 31), of the pigeon-chest (pp. 50–52), of the slaughterhouse visit with the father (pp. 56–57), of germs hiding under ﬁnger-nails (p. 62), of the condom’s discovery (pp. 67–69), of the description ‘enfant hypocrite’ (p. 69), of the wish to compose camera movements (pp. 82–83), of the refusal to dissect frogs (p. 83), of the sister in Germany (pp. 94–95), of running away to Paris (pp. 98–99), of the acceptance of responsibility for the body (pp. 115–16), are all in La Mort propagande. Other episodes are in other books of Guibert’s as well. Thus, the bedroom of the deputy prison-governor’s son (Mes, p. 70), the dropped identity card which allows the oﬀender to be traced (p. 99), and the meeting with the man who wants to take him to Africa (p. 103), are consigned to L’Homme blesse´; the story of the rival Olivier (Mes, pp. 100–01) to La piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche (‘Les rivaux’); the delirium that will end with the mother’s kiss (Mes, pp. 103–05) to La piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche (‘Vertiges’); the attempt to take the mother’s photo (Mes, pp. 105– 06) to L’Image fantoˆme. Others again can be found in several books at once: the rubbing of the penis against wool (Mes, pp. 22–23) in Vice and La Mort propagande, the drowning episode (Mes, p. 48) likewise, as well as in La piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche; the episode of the sister coming back from Germany (Mes, pp. 70–72) in La Mort propagande and in La piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche (‘Une petite bonne femme sans histoire’). There is also an extract from La Le´gende de saint Julien l’Hospitalier (Mes, pp. 73–74) that will be an inﬂuential text for Les Lubies d’Arthur and the end of Des Aveugles. 4 All these comments were made by Guibert in Jean Perret’s programme on Mes parents and Des Aveugles in the theatre, broadcast in January 1987 on Radio Suisse Romande with the assistance of Mathieu Pieyre. A cassette of this broadcast is avaible at the I.M.E.C. 5 As we have seen, a lot of episodes in Mes parents occur in other books by Guibert, particularly in La Mort propagande, so I will not dwell on the comments I made in earlier passages that dealt with the body, particularly in Chapter 1. Mes parents; for example, the pigeon-chest, pp. 50–52, and the parents’ appropriation of the body, p. 31. 6 Ibid., either tactile (p. 45), or olfactory (p. 24), or gustatory (p. 23). 7 Ibid., pp. 16–17, 21, 29–30, 133, 13, 129, respectively.

288

Notes to Chapter Six

289

8 Ibid., pp. 120–21. Some will point to the father–son relationship as it is described in Mes parents (Mes, p. 87) to explain the homosexuality, particularly with ‘T.’ (pp. 162–64). I reserve the right not to engage in these kinds of analysis, now largely outdated, for example by the theories of Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, Routledge, 1990; Bodies that Matter, New York, Routledge, 1993. 9 Mes parents, pp. 11, 102. 10 Ibid., pp. 150–51. 11 Ibid., pp. 18–19, 19, 122–23, 147, 149, 70, 126. 12 Ibid., pp. 66–67, 82. 13 Ibid., pp. 91, 92. 14 Ibid., pp. 74–75, 76. 15 Murray Pratt, ‘De la de´sidentiﬁcation a` l’incognito: A` la recherche d’une autobiographique homosexuelle’, Nottingham French Studies, Herve´ Guibert special issue, ed. Jean-Pierre Boule´, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring 1995), p. 75. 16 Ibid., p. 77. Pratt has been the only critic to appreciate the importance and the role of ‘Le re´cit de l’inceste’. The other commentators have seen in it merely an unfortunate break in tone; see for example Gregory Woods, ‘My Parents’, Rouge, no. 16 (1994), p. 12, reprinted in Gregory Woods, This Is No Book: A Gay Reader, Nottingham, Mushroom Publications and Five Leaves Publications, 1994, pp. 104–05. 17 Murray Pratt, ‘De la de´sidentiﬁcation a` l’incognito: A` la recherche d’une autobiographique homosexuelle’, op. cit., p. 76. 18 Mes parents, pp. 115–16, 116. 19 Ibid., pp. 141, 146, 157. 20 Ibid., pp. 169, 170. 21 Ibid., pp. 124–25, 169–70. 22 Ibid., pp. 142, 143. 23 ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurai rien cache´ . . .’, interview with Franc¸ois Jonquet, Globe, April 1992, p. 109. 24 Ibid. 25 ‘Les aveux permanents d’Herve´ Guibert’, interview with Antoine de Gaudemar, Libe´ration, 20 October 1988, p. 12. 26 ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurai rien cache´ . . .’, op. cit., p. 108. 27 Mes parents, for example pp. 127–28. 28 Ibid., pp. 102, 155, 156, 125. 29 Ibid., for example: ‘neuf puant de proprete´’, p. 18; for example: ‘ma petite fontaine’, p. 57; for example: ‘la’ (me`re) and ‘le’ (pe`re) rather than the use of the possessive pronoun, pp. 145–46; for example: ‘elle me dit les mots les plus tranchants qui m’ont jamais e´te´ dits’, p. 138; for example: ‘sans chaussettes de rechange’, p. 12; for example: a` propos of the mother who allegedly ‘sinned’ (‘faute´’) with one of the dogs, p. 11. 30 Ibid., pp. 19, 81, 28. 31 Murray Pratt, ‘De la de´sidentiﬁcation a` l’incognito: A` la recherche d’une autobiographique homosexuelle’, op. cit., p. 75, and note 11. 32 Hugo Marsan, ‘Les mots d’enfant’, Gai Pied Hebdo, 17 May 1986, p. 44. 33 Antoine de Gaudemar, ‘Livret d’infamille’, Libe´ration, 22 May 1986, p. 35. 34 Jacques Lecarme, ‘L’autoﬁction: un mauvais genre?’, in Autoﬁctions & Cie, eds.

290

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

S. Doubrovsky, J. Lecarme and P. Lejeune, Paris, RITM 6, Universite´ Paris X, 1993, pp. 227–49 (the present quotation p. 246 and n. 45). 35 Antoine de Gaudemar, ‘Livret d’infamille’, op. cit., p. 35. 36 Ibid. 37 Some think I should use the expression ‘faux roman’ (‘fake novel’) rather than ‘roman faux’, but the latter would be written against the expression ‘vrai roman’, and the eﬀect of this would be to misinterpret what I am saying, for I do not believe that there is such a thing as a ‘vrai roman’, whilst in the expression ‘roman faux’, there is a degree of intentionality in deceiving readers. 38 Aure´lien Ferenczi, ‘La honte de la famille’, Le Quotidien de Paris, 12 August 1986, p. 12. Ferenczi too will use the term ‘roman’ but, unlike Marsan, he will not make much of it. Let us see rather all the expressions he does use: ‘autobiographie-pie`ge’; ‘une confession’; ‘narration e´trange’; ‘fragments de journal intime’; ‘roman de l’inavoue´’; ‘confession d’un ﬁls indigne’; ‘re´ﬂexion sur le gouˆt et le de´gouˆt de la chair etc.’; ‘re´cit choquant’; ‘impudeur de´mente’; ‘de´ballage’. 39 My book is not a theoretical study of the novel; nevertheless, when one reads for example that of Philippe Lejeune on ‘Autobiographie, roman et nom propre’ in Moi aussi, Paris, Seuil, 1986, pp. 37–72, one is struck by the resemblance between some of the cases he deals with and what I call the roman faux. The novel by Yves Navarre, Biographie, Paris, Flammarion, 1981, which Lejeune discusses in Moi aussi (pp. 44–45), could be included in the list of romans faux even if Navarre does not talk of roman faux but of ‘romance´’ (Biographie, pp. 80–81). One could also add that of Patrick Modiano, Boulevards de ceinture, Paris, Gallimard, 1972. Let us hear the way he justiﬁes himself in an interview: ‘Alors les gens [. . .] me disent [. . .] ‘‘c’est un mensonge’’. En un sens, ils ont raison. Mais en meˆme temps, c’est la ve´rite´ meˆme, pousse´e jusqu’a` ses extreˆmes conse´quences’, quoted in Moi aussi (p. 52). It is the nearest declaration to that of the roman faux. Let us add to this list the novel Les Cheˆnes verts by Sylvie Caster, Paris, BFB, 1980; in an interview, quoted in Moi aussi (p. 54), she says that there is both truth and falsehood in her book. The work of Roland Barthes could almost be appended to this list, especially his Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, Paris, Seuil, 1975, even if this work did not originally bear the generic subtitle ‘roman’.

Notes to Chapter Seven pp. 159–189 1 These short stories are ten in number: ‘Mauve le vierge’; ‘L’auscultation’; ‘Me´me´e Nibard’; ‘Papier magique’; ‘La teˆte de Jeanne d’Arc’; ‘Les secrets d’un homme’; ‘Le tremblement de terre’; ‘Les trois quarts du monde’; ‘La jeune ﬁlle d’a` coˆte´’; ‘Le citronnier’. 2 Thus, ‘Ne´me´e Nibard’ (MV, pp. 45–57) had already appeared in a similar version under the title ‘L’histoire de Me´me´ Grossein’ in the review Minuit in May 1980 (pp. 45– 50); the text entitled ‘Les secrets d’un homme’ had been written in 1984 (‘Le lendemain de sa mort [that of Michel Foucault], j’ai e´crit un texte sur son enterrement. J’ai mis deux ou trois ans avant de le publier [in Mauve le vierge], avant meˆme de le faire lire’ (‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurai rien cache´ . . .’, interview with Franc¸ois Jonquet, Globe, April 1992, p. 110); ‘La teˆte de Jeanne d’Arc’ (MV, pp. 83–100) was already to be found in Vice, written in 1979, then in Des Aveugles (Av., p. 117). The article the narrator alludes to in ‘La teˆte de Jeanne d’Arc’ (MV, p. 85) was in fact published on 2 November 1979 (Herve´ Guibert, ‘La teˆte coupe´e de Mao Tse´-toung’, Le Monde, 2 November 1979, p. 8). 3 A publisher’s note points out that the last scene is reprinted virtually unaltered in Mauve le vierge, ‘Le citronnier’; he could have added scene 10 which will also be reprinted in ‘Mauve le vierge’ (MV, pp. 16–18; the boy makes the body’s phalanxes crack). Another scene (VD, p. 20) refers to Lettres d’E´gypte (LE´, p. 9), that of the gift of the medal that is meant for the corpse. The visit to the doctor who diagnoses dismorphobia (VD, pp. 23–24) will be told in A` l’ami (Ami, pp. 45–47), as will scene 16 (Ami, pp. 64–65) which describes the men drinking ‘from the sexual organ of that woman’ (‘au sexe de cette femme’) (VD, p. 42). Some themes, like that of scene 23 in which the three protagonists play at dogs, have already been dealt with (see Les Chiens). 4 Mauve le vierge, pp. 109–10, 110–11, 152, respectively. 5 Ibid., ‘Un homme / un philosophe’, Michel Foucault; ‘Fernand’ for Euge`ne Savitzkaya, p. 61; ‘Z.’ for Zouc, p. 55 (Guibert published a book of interviews with Zouc at the E´ditions Balland); ‘Bernard’ for Bernard Faucon, p. 68; Vincent, p. 116; Donatus and Uriel, p. 73, who, apart from ‘Papier magique’, will be found again in ‘Les trois quarts du monde’, and the fact that Uriel paints, p. 79, will be authenticated by a photograph of Hans Georg Berger called ‘Le pinceau d’Uriel’ (Herve´ Guibert, L’image de soi, ou l’injonction de son beau moment?, sixteen photographs by Hans George Berger, Bordeaux, William Blake, 1988. The book being unpaginated, I cannot give precise references). 6 Respectively: Mauve le vierge, pp. 85, 133–44, 137. 7 Ibid., pp. 104, 108, 110. 8 Most of the articles dating from the publication of Mauve le vierge either remain tactfully silent about the resemblance with Foucault or fail to notice it. Bellour alludes

291

292

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

to it discreetly in talking of the risks taken by Guibert in his stories (Raymond Bellour, ‘Guibert ou l’inde´cidable’, Le Magazine litte´raire, no. 260 (December 1988), p. 81), and only Bernstein (Miche`le Bernstein, ‘Celui qui parle par sa bouche’, Libe´ration, 20 October 1988, p. 12) and Czarny mention it (Norbert Czarny, ‘Sur ce ﬁl e´troit . . .’, La Quinzaine litte´raire, no. 520 (16 November 1988), p. 12). 9 Mauve le vierge, pp. 105–06. Miller bases himself on this short story and ‘exage`re’ the secrets revealed by the narrator for his own argument in his book: James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1993, pp. 364– 74. But his reading is in my view mistaken since it is completely to misunderstand Guibert’s work to fail to see in it, to quote the back cover, ‘un peu plus que la ve´rite´’. 10 It does not mean they are fake for all that. Guibert will identify them in an interview (which is not of course proof positive). ‘Chronique d’une mort annonce´e’ by Franc¸oise Tournier, Elle, 21 May 1990. 11 Herve´ Guibert, L’Image de soi, ou l’injonction de son beau moment?, op. cit. 12 Mauve le vierge, pp. 23, 53, 79, 115. 13 Herve´ Guibert, L’Image de soi, ou l’injonction de son beau moment?, op. cit. 14 Mauve le vierge, pp. 88, 94, 95. 15 Ibid., pp. 41, 149. 16 Ibid., pp. 17 and 21; 67 and 69. 17 Ibid., pp. 127, 123, 128. 18 Ibid., pp. 129, 143. 19 Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, ‘Herve´ Guibert, pervers polymorphe’, Le Monde, 7 October 1988. 20 The letters of Euge`ne Savitzkaya are deposited at the I.M.E.C. and date from 1984 to 1987. 21 ‘Les aveux permanents d’Herve´ Guibert’, interview with Antoine de Gaudemar, Libe´ration, 20 October 1988. 22 Raymond Bellour, ‘Guibert ou l’inde´cidable’, op. cit., p. 81. 23 Hugo Marsan, ‘Guibert le zonard’, Gai Pied, 27 October 1988, p. 71. 24 Les Gangsters, p. 57; one can be sure of the year on page 67. 25 ‘Les aveux permanents d’Herve´ Guibert’, interview with Antoine de Gaudemar, op. cit. 26 ‘On m’aurait dit il y a quinze jours, avant que j’entre malgre´ moi dans cette histoire, qu’il y aurait ce livre au bout du compte, si rapproche´ de moi dans le temps, alors que j’en ignorais pratiquement tout, je ne l’aurais pas cru’, G, p. 99. 27 ‘Les aveux permanents d’Herve´ Guibert’, op. cit. 28 Les Gangsters, pp. 7, 22. 29 Guibert is supposed to have read him just before writing Les Gangsters; ‘Les aveux permanents d’Herve´ Guibert’, op. cit. 30 ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurai rien cache´ . . .’, op. cit., p. 109. 31 In order of mention in the text: T. and C., Hans Georg, Vincent, Philippe, Michel, Claire, the poet, Mathieu and Bernard. Not all ten characters make an appearance in the text. One is dead, and most are mentioned to say that they are absent. 32 Les Gangsters, pp. 12, 37, 76, 96, 90. 33 ‘Les aveux permanents d’Herve´ Guibert’, op. cit. 34 Mauve le vierge, pp. 79, 82.

Notes to Chapter Seven

293

35 ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurai rien cache´ . . .’, op. cit., p. 108. 36 Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Paris, Seuil, 1977. See for example the fragment on ‘Je suis fou’, pp. 141–43. 37 ‘Herve´ Guibert et son double’, interview with Didier E´ribon, Le Nouvel Observateur, 18 July 1991, p. 89. 38 ‘Il va venir; changer trois fois d’habits; eˆtre amoureux’, Fou de Vincent, p. 52. 39 ‘Il a danse´ dans ma bouche’, ibid., p. 21. 40 Ibid., pp. 18, 27–29, 69–72. 41 Ibid., pp. 10, 37, 62. 42 Ibid., pp. 11, 37–38, 60. 43 ‘Pour re´pondre aux quelques questions qui se posent . . . Herve´ Guibert. Entretien avec Christophe Donner’, La Re`gle du jeu, year 3, no. 7 (May 1992), pp. 138–39. 44 Ibid. Poirot-Delpech already saw in the narration of the third story in Les Gangsters (G, pp. 87–8) a narrative technique associated with ‘l’arreˆt sur image’ in the cinema. In Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, ‘Herve´ Guibert, pervers polymorphe’, op. cit. 45 Norbert Czarny, ‘Sur ce ﬁl e´troit . . .’, La Quinzaine litte´raire, no. 520 (16 November 1988), pp. 11–12. 46 Respectively: Fou de Vincent, pp. 60–78, 78–80, 80–81, 81–83, 83–85, 86. 47 Ibid., pp. 25, 35, 78, 81. 48 In order of their name’s appearance in the text: Pierre, Hans Georg, Hector, Isabelle, T., Bernard, Michel, Euge`ne. 49 Fou de Vincent, pp. 49, 13. 50 Les Gangsters, pp. 8, 11, 16, 40–41, 51, 68–69, 103. 51 The narrator of A` l’ami informs us that Doctor ‘Nacier’ had told him when diagnosing his shingles that a resurgence of this disease was being recorded among HIV positive patients (Ami, p. 18). 52 Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, ‘Herve´ Guibert, pervers polymorphe’, op. cit. 53 Fou de Vincent, pp. 21, 30, 48, 60, 72–73. 54 Ibid., pp. 47, 49. 55 Ibid., pp. 10, 49. 56 Ibid., pp. 11, 53, 55. 57 Ibid., pp. 83, 78, 43. 58 Ibid., pp. 69, 50; ‘[. . .] il se laisse sucer debout en regardant des chattes se faire limer sur la vide´o’, p. 27; see also pp. 21 and 31. 59 Ibid., pp. 30, 61, 59. 60 Ibid., pp. 78, 15 and 32. 61 Les Gangsters, pp. 77, 82 and 84. 62 Ibid., pp. 88, 89. 63 Ibid., pp. 71, 92, 99, 78. 64 Fou de Vincent, pp. 25, 22. 65 Ibid., pp. 34, 44. 66 Ibid., pp. 46, 63; ‘[. . .] j’aime le plus celui qui m’humilie le plus’, p. 69. 67 ‘L’eˆtre qui manque a` ma vie: celui qui saura me battre [. . .]’, ibid., p. 46; pp. 69 and 83. 68 Norbert Czarny, ‘Non sans risques’, La Quinzaine litte´raire, no. 541 (16 October 1989), p. 13.

294

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

69 Raymond Bellour, ‘Folie d’e´crire’, Le Magazine litte´raire, no. 270 (October 1989), p. 124. 70 Michel Braudeau, ‘Les cousins du de´sespoir’, Le Monde, 6 October 1989, p. 38. 71 ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurai rien cache´ . . .’, op. cit., p. 112. 72 ‘Crise violente au cours de laquelle le sujet, e´prouvant la situation amoureuse comme une impasse de´ﬁnitive, un pie`ge dont il ne pourra jamais sortir, se voit voue´ a` une destruction totale de lui-meˆme’, Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, op. cit., p. 59. 73 Ibid., pp. 169–70. 74 Fou de Vincent, pp. 68, 71, 67–68. 75 ‘Dore´navant, sur l’agenda, par superstition, j’ajoute un point d’interrogation a` son pre´nom’, ibid., p. 31; ‘[. . .] il me sembla e´vident que c’e´tait Vincent mon assassin [. . .]’, ibid., p. 39. 76 Ibid., pp. 34–35, 58. 77 Ibid., pp. 45, 48. 78 Raymond Bellour, ‘Guibert ou l’inde´cidable’, op. cit., pp. 80–81. 79 Ibid., p. 81. Marsan for his part will call Les Gangsters a ‘magical novel’ (‘roman magique’). In Hugo Marsan, ‘Guibert le zonard’, op. cit. 80 It is certainly the only one we can speak of while being well aware that it is not the only one to have aﬀected Guibert! 81 ‘Guibert gagne’, interview with Sophie Che´rer, 7 a` Paris, 24 April 1991, p. 19. 82 ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurai rien cache´ . . .’, op. cit., p. 105. The information supplied in this declaration enables one to draw the conclusion that there is only about half the manuscript of Adultes at the I.M.E.C. 83 This is the problematic dealt with in the stylish article by Leslie Hill, ‘E´crire—la maladie’, Nottingham French Studies, Herve´ Guibert special issue, ed. Jean-Pierre Boule´, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 89–99. 84 ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurai rien cache´ . . .’, op. cit., p. 108. 85 Ibid. Humour indeed plays a very large part in Guibert’s novel (for example, I, pp. 11, 14). 86 L’Incognito, pp. 63, 222. 87 ‘Tchekhov [. . .] est un de mes e´crivains pre´fe´re´s.’ In ‘Pour re´pondre aux quelques questions qui se posent . . . Herve´ Guibert. Entretien avec Christophe Donner’, op. cit., p. 149. 88 Marie Darrieussecq, ‘La notion de leurre chez Herve´ Guibert’, Nottingham French Studies, op. cit., p. 83. 89 L’Incognito, pp. 15, 16–17, 24, 25, 48, 129, 156, 185. 90 Ibid., pp. 14, 180. 91 Ibid., pp. 11, 79, 98–99, 114, 121, 180, 195, 222. 92 Ibid., pp. 38–40, 110–11; ibid., 64–65, respectively. 93 Ibid., pp. 188–91, 191. 94 All the familiar characters in Guibert’s work who were identiﬁed as early as Le Seul visage have changed their names (Bibi and Christinou, Mateovitch, Matou, Gustave, Roland Tarbe, Laigle, the baron, Je´rome Lafnac). The people associated with the Villa Me´dicis all have assumed names: Krupp, Palaiseau, Parkinson, Linser, Bisserier etc. But to anyone familiar with Guibert’s work and the Paris intelligentsia, all these characters are transparent, and indeed a good number of reviews will refer to

Notes to Chapter Seven

295

L’Incognito as a roman a` cle´: Ge´rard Meudal, ‘Villa Guibert’, Libe´ration, 19 October 1989, p. 27; Norbert Czarny, ‘Non sans risques’, op. cit.; Michel Braudeau, ‘Les cousins du de´sespoir’, op. cit., p. 38. So why change the names without overdoing the ﬁctionalisation of the characters? No doubt to keep hold of the feeling of protecting oneself and one’s friends in a book which speaks so openly of AIDS. This will be picked up by the article in Gai Pied: ‘Nos e´crivains n’ont plus qu’une inquie´tude [. . .] mais e´norme si l’on songe qu’une maladie pe´ne`tre avec violence dans la litte´rature: le sida [. . .] du sida on en parle a` mots couverts [. . .]’. Hugo Marsan, ‘La folie Guibert’, Gai Pied, 7 September 1989, p. 76. 95 L’Incognito, pp. 175–76, 167. 96 Ibid., pp. 53–54, 134, 151–52. 97 Ibid., pp. 76, 53–54, 220, respectively. 98 For the latter, see the photograph ‘Le comte et la comtesse Klossowski de Rola, 1988’ in Photographies; the album contains several photos taken at the Villa Me´dicis. 99 ‘Pour re´pondre aux quelques questions qui se posent . . . Herve´ Guibert. Entretien avec Christophe Donner’, op. cit., pp. 137–38. 100 The subject of ‘La Mort de Gaspard’ is revealed in Le Protocole compassionnel (PC, p. 92), from which it can be deduced that Herve´ Guibert probably ﬁctionalised himself as Gaspard, ‘dans le coma’, in a hotel room in Lisbon where he would have been accompanied by Jules. 101 ‘Herve´ Guibert et son double’, op. cit., p. 88. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid. 105 There are other characters, notably a lesbian couple (Rome´lie and Iris), a gay couple (the painter and the builder) and a black archbishop (PA, p. 186). 106 Ibid., pp. 160, 176, 163. Abbe´ Sandre, with his porn videos and his habit of washing children’s feet in front of the altar, is virtually indistinguishable from the priest in ‘La semaine sainte’ (PA, pp. 5–59) who, as we saw in Chapter 4, will crop up again in Les Lubies d’Arthur. 107 Ibid., pp. 162, 189. 108 Ibid., pp. 177, 196. 109 ‘Herve´ Guibert et son double’, op. cit., p. 88. 110 ‘Les aveux permanents d’Herve´ Guibert’, op. cit. 111 Ibid. 112 This is Pratt’s reading, too, in ‘De la de´sidentiﬁcation a` l’incognito: A` la recherche d’une autobiographique homosexuelle’, Nottingham French Studies, Herve´ Guibert special issue, ed. Jean-Pierre Boule´, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring 1995), p. 81.

Notes to Chapter Eight pp. 191–206 1 ‘Herve´ Guibert raconte l’agonie de Michel Foucault’ by Je´roˆme Garcin, L’E´ve´nement du jeudi, 1 March 1990, p. 80. This text is followed by an interview with Guibert by Philippe Lanc¸on entitled: ‘Herve´ Guibert: Foucault a e´te´ mon maıˆ tre, je devais e´crire sa mort . . .’, pp. 82–85, followed by an opinion poll among writers, who had not read A` l’ami, asking them if everything should be said in literature. 2 See in this connection my article ‘Herve´ Guibert a` la te´le´vision: ve´rite´ et se´duction’, Nottingham French Studies, Herve´ Guibert special issue, ed. Jean-Pierre Boule´, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 112–120. 3 ‘Apostrophes’, broadcast on 16 March 1990; the transcription of the dialogue is by me. 4 Re´gis Debray, Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France, Paris, Ramsay, 1979. The sales of A` l’ami soon reached 150,000 copies. To give some idea of the scale of sales since then, by 28 September 1994, 202,300 copies had been sold in the ‘Collection Blanche’ format and 155,000 in ‘Folio’ paperback. The book has been translated into 17 languages as well. 5 Jean-Pierre Boule´, Herve´ Guibert, A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie and Other Writings, Glasgow, University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1995, pp. 3–4. In the guide, I analysed the subject-shattering nature of AIDS on identity as well as the reception of A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie; the article by Derek Duncan, ‘Gestes autobiographiques: le sida et les formes d’expressions artistiques du moi’, Nottingham French Studies, Herve´ Guibert special issue, ed. Jean-Pierre Boule´, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring 1995), is also well worth reading in this respect. I have deliberately omitted to delve at length into this here, not to repeat the information already in print, but principally because my book deals with the entire uvre of Guibert. 6 Lee Edelman, Homographesis, London, Routledge, 1994, p. 94. 7 ‘AIDS interrupts the natural ﬂow of discourses by insisting, over and over again, on its own presence as the subject and object of all discourse.’ In Lawrence R. Schehr, ‘Herve´ Guibert under Bureaucratic Quarantine’, L’Esprit Cre´ateur, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring 1994), p. 77. 8 Ibid., p. 76. 9 Patrick Granville speaks of the diﬃculties for the reader of A` l’ami who ‘occupe une position cyclothymique’. In ‘Le livre du constat de la prie`re et des supplices’, Le Figaro, 14 March 1990, p. 34. The humour of the text, in particular on the subject of the narrator himself (for example Ami, p. 41), allows for a shift between ﬁction and reality which helps make a great deal acceptable; the humour is similarly transcribed in the style (for example p. 225). See on this point my book, Herve´ Guibert, A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie and Other Writings, op. cit., pp. 45–47.

296

Notes to Chapter Eight

297

10 See my study, Herve´ Guibert, A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie and Other Writings, op. cit., pp. 43–45. 11 See on this subject Susan Sontag, AIDS and its Metaphors, London, Penguin, 1989, and Simon Watney, ‘The French Connection’, Sight and Sound, June 1993, pp. 24–25. 12 A` l’ami, pp. 128, 210, 255, 164, 254, 217, 22, respectively. 13 Emily Apter, ‘Fantom Images: Herve´ Guibert and the Writing of ‘‘sida’’ in France’, Writing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language and Analysis, eds. Timothy F. Murphy and Suzanne Poirier, New York, Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 85. 14 ‘La vie sida’, interview with Antoine de Gaudemar, Libe´ration, 1 March 1990, p. 19. It will be noted that in the ‘Folio’ edition the subtitle ‘roman’ has disappeared, but that is no doubt due to an oversight. 15 ‘Progressivement, une fois le livre termine´, je suis alle´ vers le brouillage.’ In ‘Herve´ Guibert: Foucault a e´te´ mon maıˆ tre, je devais e´crire sa mort . . .’, interview with Philippe Lanc¸on, L’E´ve´nement du Jeudi, 1 March 1990, pp.82–85, p. 82. ‘[. . .] Il y a aussi de grands ressorts de mensonge dans ce livre’ (my italics). In ‘La vie sida’, op. cit., p. 21. 16 On ‘Ex-Libris’, Guibert will include A` l’ami in the tradition of Mes parents (‘C’est vrai que pour moi ce livre [. . .] est dans la suite de Mes parents’). This statement backs up my analysis that Mes parents is Guibert’s ﬁrst attempt at what will become with A` l’ami the roman faux. 17 Michel Braudeau, ‘E´crire contre la montre’, Le Monde, 2 March 1990, p. 30. 18 ‘Herve´ Guibert: Foucault a e´te´ mon maıˆ tre, je devais e´crire sa mort . . .’, op. cit., p. 82. 19 ‘Guibert gagne’, interview with Sophie Che´rer, 7 a` Paris, 24 April 1991, p. 16. 20 Ibid. 21 ‘Pour re´pondre aux quelques questions qui se posent . . . Herve´ Guibert. Entretien avec Christophe Donner’, La Re`gle du jeu, year 3, no. 7 (May 1992), p. 150. 22 Ibid. 23 ‘La vie sida’, op. cit., p. 21. 24 Ami, p. 145. 25 Ibid., pp. 181–82, 182. 26 Ibid., pp. 56–57, 152, 201–02. 27 These remarks are also conﬁrmed in the paratext. On being asked by Philippe Lanc¸on what he thought of Bill, Guibert replied: ‘C’est un personnage extraordinaire. Je continue a` eˆtre fascine´ par lui et meˆme a` l’aimer, malgre´ tout le mal qu’il a pu me faire.’ In ‘Herve´ Guibert: Foucault a e´te´ mon maıˆ tre, je devais e´crire sa mort . . .’, op. cit., p. 85. 28 For further discussion about the dedicatee of A` l’ami, see my Herve´ Guibert, A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie and Other Writings, op. cit., p. 38, and Ralph Sarkonak’s clariﬁcation in his article ‘De la me´tastase au me´tatexte. Herve´ Guibert’, Texte, nos. 15–16 (1994), pp. 238–39, n. 28. 29 ‘La vie sida’, op. cit., p. 21. 30 Ami, pp. 185, 255–56, 263, and for Marine, pp. 77–80, 81–86, 91–92. 31 Ibid., pp. 129, 101, 226. 32 ‘La vie sida’, op. cit., p. 21. 33 This is what I have tried to explain in an article entitled ‘Herve´ Guibert ou la

298

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

radicalisation du projet sartrien d’e´criture existentielle’, Le Corps textuel d’Herve´ Guibert, ed. Ralph Sarkonak, Paris, Minard, 1997, pp. 25–42. In it I try to unravel (as much for my own enlightenment as anything else) how I have gone from an interest in Sartre to an interest in Guibert. 34 See on this point the article by Lawrence R. Schehr, ‘Herve´ Guibert under Bureaucratic Quarantine’, op. cit. 35 A` l’ami, pp. 10, 248. 36 Thus the narrator’s relationship with Drs Chandi, Nocourt, Nacier, Le´vy, Le´risson and Aron is described. 37 See the chapter entitled ‘Narrative Technique and Style’ in my Herve´ Guibert, A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie and Other Writings, op. cit., pp. 40–48. 38 Two volumes of Bernhard’s autobiography are full of his tuberculosis: The Cold and The Breath. 39 ‘Herve´ Guibert: Foucault a e´te´ mon maıˆ tre, je devais e´crire sa mort . . .’, op. cit., p. 82. 40 ‘Le sida entre en force dans les librairies avec Herve´ Guibert et Dominique Lapierre’, interview with Pierre Maury, Le Soir (Brussels), 2 March 1990. David Macey will see in A` l’ami a book inﬂuenced by Nietzsche which Foucault would have liked as reﬂecting his concerns about the relationship with ‘la ve´rite´’. In David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, London, Hutchinson, 1993, p. 480. 41 ‘Je disparaıˆ trai et je n’aurai rien cache´ . . .’, interview with Franc¸ois Jonquet, Globe, April 1992, p. 108. 42 A` l’ami, pp. 14, 15. 43 Ibid., pp. 136–37, 156. 44 This passage is seen as fundamental by Lee Edelman in his book Homographesis, op. cit., pp. 115–16. 45 A` l’ami, pp. 155, 169, 193, 213. 46 ‘Le sida entre en force dans les librairies . . .’, op. cit. 47 ‘Herve´ Guibert: Foucault a e´te´ mon maıˆ tre, je devais e´crire sa mort . . .’, op. cit., p. 84. See too ‘La vie sida’, op. cit., p. 21.

Notes to Chapter Nine pp. 207–234 1 Le Protocole compassionnel, pp. 171, 178–81. 2 ‘Guibert gagne’, interview with Sophie Che´rer, Globe, 24 April 1991, p. 16. 3 Le Protocole compassionnel, pp. 73, 74. 4 Ibid. pp. 187, 186, 189, 195 respectively. This analysis was already to be found in my book, Herve´ Guibert, A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie and Other Writings, Glasgow, University of Glasgow French and German, pp. 42–43. 5 ‘Pour re´pondre aux quelques questions qui se posent . . . Herve´ Guibert. Entretien avec Christophe Donner’, La Re`gle du jeu, year 3, no. 7 (May 1992), p. 141. 6 For an analysis of the cancellation of the broadcast of the ﬁlm, see my article ‘The postponing of La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur: modesty or hypocrisy on the part of French television?’, French Cultural Studies, no. 3 (October 1992), pp. 299–305. It is worth noting in passing that Guibert’s ﬁlm alarmed amongst other AIDES, the French AIDS patients’ welfare association; see in this connection the declaration of its president, Marty-Lavauzelle, ‘Une image terriﬁante du sida’, Le Quotidien du Me´decin, Thursday 16 January 1992, p. 30, and the interview he gave Eric Favereau, ‘Un ‘‘crudity show’’ aux vertus ambigue¨s’, Libe´ration, 18 and 19 January 1992, p. 17. 7 For example: with Lionel, PC, p. 160; Claudette Dumouchel’s hands, p. 221. 8 ‘Je visionnnai nettement ma mort dans cette cave [. . .]’, ibid., p. 71; ‘Mon regard, depuis l’entre´e, ope´ra un zoom avant sur la chair du de´collete´ [. . .]’, p. 101. 9 Le Protocole compassionnel, pp. 225 and 102 respectively. 10 To quote in no particular order: the gecko (p. 158); the results of the abdominal echography—which represents the telephone conversation of the beginning of the ﬁlm (p. 218); the shower (p. 10); the session with the masseur (pp. 13–14; pp. 98–100); the narrator doing his exercises (pp. 14–15); the confrontation with the body (p. 11) and in the bathroom mirror (p. 15); the swim with Gustave (pp. 149–50); the photo of the elephant (p. 133); taking the sachets of DDI (p. 17); the mise-en-sce`ne of Gustave taking his photograph (p. 121); the tests carried out by Claudette (pp. 45–51, 106–08); the ‘interviews’ with Suzanne and Louise (pp. 100–02, 224); a drive round Elba (p. 131); the indoor de´cor on Elba (p. 117); the way the days were spent on Elba (p. 125) and the narrator’s visual and auditory perceptions (p. 126). 11 ‘Pour re´pondre aux quelques questions qui se posent . . . Herve´ Guibert. Entretien avec Christophe Donner’, op. cit., p. 155. 12 Ibid. 13 ‘Mourir dans cette cave alors qu’on est atteint du sida, il n’y a que moi pour en ﬁnir comme c¸a [. . .]’, PC, p. 72. 14 ‘Le commando des e´gorgeurs de cochons’, ibid., p. 58. 15 For further details see my book Herve´ Guibert, A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie and Other Writings, op. cit., pp. 45–46.

299

300

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

16 Michel Braudeau, ‘E´crire avec son sang’, Le Monde, 22 February 1991, p. 18. 17 ‘Ce n’est sans doute plus tout a` fait un roman mais, dans le de´bordement indispensable du genre, un texte a` proprement parler exorbitant, d’une modernite´ qui interpelle.’ Bernard Comment, ‘E´criture en sursis’, L’Impartial, 21 June 1991. Braudeau too hesitates to use the label of novel; see Michel Braudeau, ‘E´crire avec son sang’, op. cit. 18 Raymond Bellour, ‘Des instants de ‘‘l’espe`ce humaine’’ ’, Le Magazine litte´raire, no. 286 (March 1991), p. 68. 19 Le Protocole compassionnel, pp. 11, 17, 103, 160, 39, 105, 127 respectively. 20 ‘Pour re´pondre aux quelques questions qui se posent . . . Herve´ Guibert. Entretien avec Christophe Donner’, op. cit., p. 149. 21 It would be the only biography to be written on Herve´ Guibert, in the manner of Alain Buisine’s book on Verlaine, Paris, E´ditions Tallandier, 1995. 22 ‘J’e´tais de nouveau vivant. J’e´crivais de nouveau. Je bandais de nouveau’, PC, p. 54; see also p. 84. 23 Ibid., pp. 27, 42. 24 Ibid., pp. 13, 14. 25 This will be what Guibert will analyse on ‘Ex-Libris’: ‘Je crois que je l’ai aime´ a` un moment ce virus [. . .] il m’a fait faire un bond [. . .] mais maintenant j’ai envie de le jeter; si je pouvais l’arracher comme c¸a, hors de moi, le jeter vraiment, c’est ﬁni.’ 26 Le Protocole compassionnel, pp. 89, 90. 27 Ibid., ‘ce corps’, p. 14; ‘le cou’, p. 14; ‘la charpente’, ‘la peau’, p. 15. 28 It will come as no surprise to learn that in the manuscript of Le Protocole compassionnel Guibert’s name is crossed out and replaced by ‘Drapot’. The writer perhaps needed this pseudonym because of the degree of alienation with respect to his body. 29 Derek Duncan, ‘Gestes autobiographiques: le sida et les formes d’expressions artistiques du moi’, Nottingham French Studies, Herve´ Guibert special issue, ed. JeanPierre Boule´, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring 1995), p. 107. 30 Le Protocole compassionnel, pp. 98, 26, 122. 31 Derek Duncan, ‘Gestes autobiographiques: le sida et les formes d’expressions artistiques du moi’, op. cit., p. 107. 32 Ibid., pp. 108–09. 33 Le Protocole compassionnel, pp. 124, 184. 34 ‘Alors je me vis re´ellement, de´couvert des mois apre`s, creve´ dans cette cave [. . .]’, ibid., p. 70; ‘Ce tuyau menait a` la mort assure´ment [. . .]’, p. 78; ‘[. . .] je me suis aperc¸u qu’il e´tait en train de mourir [. . .]’, p. 96. 35 Ibid., pp. 60, 52 and 65. 36 Ibid., pp. 119, 122–23. 37 Ibid., pp. 120, 155. 38 ‘Herve´ Guibert: ‘‘Je n’ai jamais autant aime´ la vie’’ ’, interview with Franc¸oise Tournier, Elle, 11 March 1991. 39 ‘[. . .] je faisais celui qui a assez de sang-froid [. . .]’, PC, p. 43; ‘On joue au me´decin’, p. 47. 40 Ibid., pp. 106, 223. 41 ‘Pour re´pondre aux quelques questions qui se posent . . . Herve´ Guibert. Entretien avec Christophe Donner’, op. cit., p. 142, authenticates the ﬁrst two stories;

Notes to Chapter Nine

301

‘La Vie sida’, interview with Antoine de Gaudemar, Libe´ration, 1 March 1990, p. 21, the third; ‘Guibert gagne’, p. 16, authenticates ‘Miracle a` Casablanca’. 42 Le Protocole compassionnel, p. 164. 43 Ibid., pp. 16 and 19, 20. 44 Ibid., p. 174. 45 ‘Pour re´pondre aux quelques questions qui se posent . . . Herve´ Guibert. Entretien avec Christophe Donner’, op. cit., p. 151. 46 This needs to be qualiﬁed, since the accounts of the producer and the editor in particular indicate clearly that Guibert took an active part in the montage. See the special report in Libe´ration, 18 and 19 January 1992, especially the following articles: ‘Maureen Mazurek: ‘‘Sa fac¸on de regarder un le´zard!’’ ’, by Annick Peigne´-Giuly, p. 23; ‘Du came´scope a` l’e´cran’ by Annick Peigne´-Giuly, p. 22. At the very least it can be said that the extent of Guibert’s participation in the editing of the ﬁlm also forms part of the interplay between truth and falsehood. In an interview Guibert added: ‘[. . .] je m’en sens moins l’auteur que la productrice et la monteuse’. ‘Herve´ Guibert: ‘‘J’ai l’impression de survivre’’ ’, interview with Je´roˆme Garcin, L’E´ve´nement du jeudi, 26 September 1991, p. 106. This interview was reprinted under the title ‘Herve´ Guibert, son dernier entretien’, L’E´ve´nement du jeudi, 2 January 1992, pp. 108–09. 47 ‘Maureen Mazurek: ‘‘Sa fac¸on de regarder un le´zard!’’ ’, op. cit., p. 23. 48 Franck Nouchi, ‘La mort annonce´e’, Le Monde, 22 January 1992, p. 10. 49 Passages quoted directly in order of appearance in the ﬁlm: A` l’ami, pp. 13–14, 15, 218; Le Protocole compassionnel, pp. 17, 102, 9–11, 15, 99–100, 149; indirectly: Le Protocole compassionnel, pp. 14, 48–49, 102, 149, 131, 224–25; L’Homme au chapeau rouge, pp. 41–42. See also note 10. 50 Derek Duncan, ‘Gestes autobiographiques: le sida et les formes d’expressions artistiques du moi’, op. cit., p. 109. 51 ‘Pour re´pondre aux quelques questions qui se posent . . . Herve´ Guibert. Entretien avec Christophe Donner’, op. cit., pp. 151–53. 52 Ibid., p. 153. 53 Ibid., p. 151. 54 Jean-Pierre Boule´, ‘Herve´ Guibert: Autobiographical Film-Writing Pushed to Its Limits?’, Terry Keefe and Edmund Smyth (eds), Autobiography and the Existential Self, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1995, pp. 169–81. 55 This is conﬁrmed by Maureen Mazurek: ‘Il a choisi lui-meˆme [. . .] de ne pas me donner certaines cassettes, les images de la souﬀrance’, ‘Maureen Mazurek: ‘‘Sa fac¸on de regarder un le´zard!’’ ’, by Annick Peigne´-Giuly, op. cit. 56 Antoine de Gaudemar, ‘Guibert, sa mort, son oeuvre’, Libe´ration, 18 and 19 January 1992, p. 22. Guibert’s remarks about writing and photography are to be found in Le Seul visage and were analysed in Chapter 4. In the interview with Donner, Guibert establishes some interesting connections between video and his Rollei 35 camera: ‘Pour re´pondre aux quelques questions qui se posent . . . Herve´ Guibert. Entretien avec Christophe Donner’, op. cit., p. 155. 57 See my chapter ‘Herve´ Guibert: Autobiographical Film-Writing Pushed to its Limits?’, op. cit., p. 177. So far as I am aware the term ‘autobiothanatographie’ was used by Louis Marin in an article that dealt precisely with Barthes: ‘R.B. par R.B. ou l’autobiographie au neutre’, Critique, vol. 42, no. 4 (1985), p. 735. A parallel could once again be drawn between Barthes’s work and Guibert’s: ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ is in

302

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

a way the ﬁlm equivalent of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (a book combining writing and photography) in which everything that is said must be imagined coming from a ﬁctional character. 58 Raymond Bellour, ‘Ve´rite´s et mensonges’, Le Magazine litte´raire, no. 296 (February 1992), p. 69. 59 Derek Duncan, ‘Gestes autobiographiques: le sida et les formes d’expressions artistiques du moi’. op. cit, p. 110. 60 ‘Guibert gagne’, op. cit., p. 19. 61 In between, Mon valet et moi appeared. 62 Cytome´galovirus, pp. 78, 11, 27 and 82; 42, respectively. 63 ‘La vie sida’, op. cit., p. 21. In Sarkonak’s opinion Cytome´galovirus is one of the most Barthesian of Guibert’s texts, recalling Incidents (Paris, Seuil, 1987) in particular. In Ralph Sarkonak, ‘De la me´tastase au me´tatexte: Herve´ Guibert’, Texte, nos 15–16 (1994), p. 254 n. 60. For a recent article that concentrates on a ‘political’ reading of Cytome´galovirus, see Murray Pratt, ‘ ‘‘A Walk along the side of the Motorway’’: AIDS and the Spectacular Body of Herve´ Guibert’, Owen Heathcote, Alex Hughes, James S. Williams (eds), Gay Signatures, Oxford, Berg, 1988, pp. 151–72. 64 Given the plethora of examples, here are two by way of illustration of both cases: Cytome´galovirus, pp. 16–17, 58–59. 65 Ibid., pp. 28–29, 37–38. 66 Ibid., pp. 54, 21, 78. 67 Ibid., pp. 20, 23. 68 Ibid., pp. 40, 27. 69 Danie`le Brison, ‘ ‘‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’’ ’, Dernie`res Nouvelles d’Alsace, 3 February 1992, p. 6. 70 Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, ‘Lire, c’est voir du dedans’, Le Monde, 29 January 1992, p. 10. 71 Cytome´galovirus, pp. 31, 64, 15, 54, 64, 78, 30, respectively. 72 Ibid., p. 88. 73 Le Protocole compassionnel, pp. 172, 121. 74 Cytome´galovirus, pp. 15 and 27; 28. 75 Ibid., pp. 15, 33. 76 Ibid., pp. 74, 68, 31, 80, respectively. 77 Such as Dominique Durand, ‘Impudicite´ comparative’, Le Canard enchaıˆne´, 22 January 1992, p. 2. 78 It is customary to cite L’Homme au chapeau rouge as being the third panel of the AIDS trilogy, but my own belief is that this view is mistaken. Economic imperatives perhaps lie at the root of such a decision, since these three volumes were issued by the same publisher. 79 Leslie Hill, ‘E´crire—la maladie’, Nottingham French Studies, op. cit., p. 98. 80 Ibid., p. 94. 81 Ibid., p. 93.

Notes to Chapter Ten pp. 235–264 1 Mon valet et moi, pp. 74–77, 84. 2 Everything points to the fact that the story of the great-grandfather’s legacy to the SPA (the French equivalent of the RSPCA) was inspired by great-aunt Suzanne who, ‘La Pudeur ou l’Impudeur’ informs us, left all her money to cancer research. 3 ‘Pour re´pondre aux quelques questions qui se posent . . . Herve´ Guibert. Entretien avec Christophe Donner’, La Re`gle du jeu, year 3, no. 7 (May 1992), p. 143. 4 ‘Herve´ Guibert: ‘‘J’ai l’impression de survivre’’ ’, interview with Je´roˆme Garcin, L’E´ve´nement du Jeudi, 26 September 1991, p. 104. 5 Ibid. 6 A number of the reviews adopt this reading. Miche`le Bernstein, ‘Herve´ Guibert. L’homme qui a trouve´ son ombre’, Libe´ration, 29 August 1991, p. 21; Michel Braudeau, ‘La vie cache´e des marionnettes’, Le Monde, 6 September 1991, p. 26. 7 ‘Herve´ Guibert: ‘‘J’ai l’impression de survivre’’ ’, op. cit., p. 104. 8 Ibid., pp. 104–05. 9 Mon valet et moi, pp. 18, 84, 87. 10 Ibid., pp. 21, 55–57. 11 ‘Herve´ Guibert: ‘‘J’ai l’impression de survivre’’ ’, op. cit., p. 104. 12 Mon valet et moi, pp. 9, 13, 85. 13 Ibid., pp. 24, 54. 14 A number of fragments begin with ‘mon valet’ or ‘mon valet et moi’, even ‘mon valet a` moi’. 15 Mon valet et moi, pp. 11, 73, 41. 16 Raymond Bellour, ‘Double jeu’, Le Magazine litte´raire, no. 292 (October 1991), p. 84. 17 ‘Herve´ Guibert et son double’, interview with Didier E´ribon, Le Nouvel Observateur, 18 July 1991, p. 89. 18 L’Homme au chapeau rouge, p. 12. 19 Raymond Bellour, ‘Ve´rite´s et mensonges’, Le Magazine litte´raire, no. 296 (February 1992), p. 69. 20 Herve´ Guibert, ‘Rencontre avec M. Edgar Faure. Les bons sentiments’, Le Monde, 7 September 1984; Herve´ Guibert, ‘Balthus a` la Mostra de Venise. Le dernier dinosaure’, Le Monde, 8 September 1984, pp. 1 and 15; Herve´ Guibert, ‘Le peintre Balthus et les ‘‘Gangsters’’ ’, Le Monde, 14 September 1984, p.7. 21 L’Homme au chapeau rouge, for example, pp. 51, 129, 120, respectively. 22 Ibid., pp. 17, 51. 23 Thus: Jules, Claudette Dumouchel, Berthe, David, Loulou, doctors Nacier and Chandi, Zouc, Bernard, Gustave and Marine. 24 L’Homme au chapeau rouge, pp. 15, 16.

303

304

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

25 Programme broadcast on 16 February 1992 on France-Inter. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Raymond Bellour, ‘Ve´rite´s et mensonges’, op. cit., p. 70. 30 L’Homme au chapeau rouge, p. 49. The reference is to the preface to Denis Laguet’s book Peintre, 1991. 31 L’Homme au chapeau rouge, pp. 105–06, 108–10, 108, 109–10 respectively. 32 Ibid., pp. 42–43. The reference is to the preface to Miguel Barcelo’s cataloguebook Le peintre aux me´tamorphoses, 1991. The deception in the book would be to identify Yannis with the Greek painter Yannis Tsachouris whose work and whose person Guibert was equally fond of. 33 ‘ ‘‘Le coeur fatigue´’’. Extraits ine´dits du journal d’Herve´ Guibert. Autour du ‘‘Paradis’’ ’, Libe´ration, 14 July 1993. 34 In relation to Balthus (pp. 86–87), but also to Yannis (pp. 50, 125), to Nureyev (p. 83), to Jules (p. 114), to Marine (p. 104), to Barthes (p. 93), but also to his ‘mode`les’ (to whom the book is dedicated) since for example Yannis does not know that he is one of the book’s characters (p. 141) nor that the narrator intends to go and commit suicide in his house (p. 16). 35 Leslie Hill, ‘E´crire—la maladie’, Nottingham French Studies, op. cit., p. 96. 36 ‘ ‘‘Le coeur fatigue´’’. Extraits ine´dits du journal d’Herve´ Guibert. Autour du ‘‘Paradis’’ ’, op. cit. 37 For example: ‘A` Bora Bora Jayne e´tait une tout autre personne’, Le Paradis, p. 83. 38 Ibid., pp. 89, 84. 39 ‘[. . .] Interpol est formel’, ibid., p. 32. 40 Already in Mes parents Herve´ Guibert’s project is short-circuited by the mother’s illness which overwhelms the story and pulls it towards delirious writing, the narrator contenting himself with copying out his diary. 41 Le Paradis, pp. 121, 123, 127. 42 Gregory Woods, ‘Ce pays de malheur’, The Times Literary Supplement, 8 October 1993, p. 7. Woods’s precise words are: ‘Guibert is conscious—perhaps rather archly self-conscious—of literary precedent here [. . .]‘‘je vois bien que l’Afrique n’existe pas’’. Tell that to the Africans. The fact is that the phantom of the ‘‘dark’’ continent is profoundly troubling to post-colonial French culture [. . .] Africa thus becomes a kind of postmodern black hole [. . .]’. Reprinted in Gregory Woods, This Is No Book: A Gay Reader, Nottingham, Five Leaves Publications, 1994, pp. 103–04. 43 Ibid. Woods’s precise formulation is: ‘So insistent is Guibert’s characterisation of the world as a breeding ground for disease that, if one did not give him any credit for irony, his narrative might seem to evince the commonplace paranoia of the Western traveller’. 44 Le Paradis, pp. 115, 137, 116, 126, 135, 136, 138 respectively. 45 Ibid., pp. 115, 136. 46 ‘Guibert gagne’, interview with Sophie Che´rer, 7 a` Paris, 24 April 1991, p. 16. 47 Le Paradis, pp. 50, 52, 33 respectively. 48 Ibid., pp. 98, 108. 49 Ibid., pp. 77–78, 79.

Notes to Chapter Ten

305

50 Ibid., pp. 46, 104, 140 respectively. 51 ‘ ‘‘Le coeur fatigue´’’. Extraits ine´dits du journal d’Herve´ Guibert. Autour du ‘‘Paradis’’ ’, op. cit. 52 Le Paradis, pp. 95, 82. 53 Ibid., pp. 125, 126, 136, 137 respectively. 54 Raymond Bellour, ‘ ‘‘Quand je n’e´cris plus, je me meurs’’ ’, Le Magazine litte´raire, no. 307 (February 1993), p. 65. 55 ‘ ‘‘Le coeur fatigue´’’. Extraits ine´dits du journal d’Herve´ Guibert. Autour du ‘‘Paradis’’ ’, op. cit. 56 This sentence chimes in with the following extract from Guibert’s diary: ‘Trois livres en chantier, c’st un peu trop. Mais tant qu’ils resteront en chantier, ils seront un pre´texte pour ne pas me tuer.’ Ibid.

Notes to Conclusion pp. 265–269 1 Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Paris, Seuil, 1977, p. 211. 2 Herve´ Guibert, ‘ ‘‘Le coeur fatigue´’’. Extraits ine´dits du journal d’Herve´ Guibert. Autour du ‘‘Paradis’’ ’, Libe´ration, 14 January 1993. 3 ‘Les aveux permanents d’Herve´ Guibert’, interview with Antoine de Gaudemar, Libe´ration, 20 October 1988, p. 12. 4 Ibid. 5 Hector Bianciotti, ‘Guibert, par-dela` la mort’, op. cit., p. 1. 6 In Je´roˆme Garcin’s programme ‘Le masque et la plume’, broadcast on FranceInter, 7 February 1993. 7 ‘[. . .] the fear is that the eﬀect of AIDS will be the destruction of the text as text [. . .] AIDS is a signiﬁer that is so all-consuming that we must keep it at a distance to prevent it from overwhelming the text’. Lawrence R. Schehr, ‘Herve´ Guibert under Bureaucratic Quarantine’, L’Esprit cre´ateur, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring 1994), p. 76. 8 Ibid., p. 77. 9 ‘Entretien avec Euge`ne Savitzkaya’, interview with Herve´ Guibert, Minuit, no.49 (May 1982), p. 5. 10 ‘Pour re´pondre aux quelques questions qui se posent. . . . Herve´ Guibert. Entretien avec Christophe Donner’, La Re`gle du jeu, year 3, no. 7 (May 1992), p. 149. 11 The most recent example being Ross Chambers, Facing It, AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1998. 12 Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Paris, Seuil, 1977, p, 272. 13 Herve´ Guibert, ‘ ‘‘Le coeur fatigue´’’. Extraits ine´dits du journal d’Herve´ Guibert. Autour du ‘‘Paradis’’ ’, op. cit.

306

Bibliography 1 1 Works by Herve´ Guibert La Mort propagande, Paris: Re´gine Deforges, 1977; second edition 1991 [Expanded edition]. Suzanne et Louise, [Photo-Novel], Paris: E´ditions libres Hallier, 1980. L’Image fantoˆme, Paris: Minuit, 1981. Voyage avec deux enfants, Paris: Minuit, 1982. Les Aventures singulie`res, Paris: Minuit, 1982. Les Chiens, Paris: Minuit, 1982. L’Homme blesse´ (with Patrice Che´reau), Paris: Minuit, 1983. Les Lubies d’Arthur, Paris: Minuit, 1983. Le Seul visage, Paris: Minuit, 1984. Des Aveugles, Paris: Gallimard, 1985. Mes parents, Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Vous m’avez fait former des fantoˆmes, Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Les Gangsters, Paris: Minuit, 1988. Mauve le vierge, Paris: Gallimard, 1988. Fou de Vincent, Paris: Minuit, 1989. L’Incognito, Paris: Gallimard, 1989. A` l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve´ la vie, Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Le Protocole compassionnel, Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Mon valet et moi, Paris: Seuil, 1991. Vice, Paris: E´ditions Jacques Bertoin, 1991. Cytome´galovirus, Paris: Seuil, 1992. L’Homme au chapeau rouge, Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Le Paradis, Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Photographies, Paris: Gallimard, 1993.2 Vole mon dragon, Paris: Gallimard, 1994. La piquˆre d’amour et autres textes suivi de La chair fraıˆche, Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Lettres d’E´gypte, Photographies d’Hans Georg Berger, Paris: Actes Sud, 1995.

2 Prefaces by Guibert Duane Michals, Changements [with a contribution by Guibert: ‘Maintenant et alors’], Paris, Herscher, 1981. Miguel Barcelo, Le peintre aux me´tamorphoses [catalogue-book], 1991. Bernard Faucon, Tables d’amis, Bordeaux, e´ditions William Blake, 1991. Herve´ Guibert, L’Image de soi, ou l’injonction de son beau moment? Seize photo-

307

308

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

graphies de Hans Georg Berger, Bordeaux, e´ditions William Blake, 1988. [Reprinted in 1992 with an afterword by Hector Bianciotti; second expanded edition]. Denis Laget, Peintre, 1991.

3 Articles and Interviews Signed Guibert Except those published in Le Monde3 ‘Les nuits de Re´gine Deforges’, International Had, No. 7 (July 1974), pp. 3–6, [Interview by Herve´ Guibert]. ‘Sleeping Beauty’, International Had, No. 19 (1974), p. 19. ‘Un portraitiste contemporain Serge Lutens’, International Had, No. 22 (AugustSeptember 1974), pp. 3–8. ‘Juliet Berto’, International Had, No. 23 (October 1974), pp. 13–15. Patrice Che´reau: ‘Je suis tre`s attache´ a` un univers de formes’ Cine´ma, No. 196 (1975), pp. 92–103. ‘Libe´ration’, 20 ans, No. 152 (April 1975), pp. 13, 105, [ﬁlms]. ‘Apre`s Cannes’, 20 ans, No. 156 (August 1975), pp. 18, 78. ‘French Connection II’, 20 ans, No. 157 (September 1975), pp. 78, 84. Cine´ma, 20 ans, No. 158 (October 1975), pp. 98, 100–01, 103. ‘Herve´ Guibert a vu pour vous . . .’ 20 ans, No. 165 (May 1976), pp. 19, 22, 26, 30, 34 [ﬁlms]. ‘Contacts’, 20 ans, No. 167 (July–August 1976), pp. 5, 8, 13–14, 16, 18, 20–22, 24, 27, 29–31. Ge´rard Depardieu: ‘Un personnage du temps . . .’ Cine´ma, No. 206 (1976), pp. 82–88. Bernard Queysanne: ‘Trouver un sujet et un ton qui correspondent a` l’attente du public’, Cine´ma, Double no. 212–13 (1976), pp. 224–33 [Interview by Herve´ Guibert and Claude Michel Cluny]. Interview with Coluche about ‘Ginette Lacaze’, Sortir, 27 October 1976. Sortir, 3 November 1976, pp. 13, 16. ‘A propos de Lorenzaccio’, Sortir, 17 November 1976, p. 15. ‘A propos de Barocco . . .’ [Interview with Isabelle Adjani], Sortir, 24 November 1976. ‘Philippe Nahoun: un regard de faussaire’. Les Nouvelles Litte´raires, No. 2563 (December 1976), p. 13 [Interview by Herve´ Guibert]. ‘Miou Miou: ‘‘On peut changer les choses et les lois’’ ’, [Interview by Herve´ Guibert], Sortir, No. 8 (December 1976) + Theatre, p. 10. ‘La course a` l’actualite´’, an interview by Yves Boisset, Les Nouvelles Litte´raires, January 1977, p. 15. [Film review], 20 ans, No. 172 (January/February 1977), pp. 8–9. ‘En ﬁnir avec le fascisme de de´coration’, Interview with Daniel Schmid. Les Nouvelles Litte´raires, 3 January 1977. Rencontre, La mini-interview du mois, Copi; ‘Je continue a` dessiner, mais je deviens de plus en plus bavard’. [Interview with Herve´ Guibert], Plus, No. 1 (1977), pp. 8–9. Books: Les libres impressions par Herve´ Guibert; ‘De la pornographie litte´raire aux joies modestes de la vie campagnarde’, [Includes a review of La Volonte´ de savoir (M. Foucault); Fragments d’un discours amoureux (R. Barthes)], p. 10. ‘Patrice Che´reau entre la sce`ne et l’e´cran’, Les Nouvelles Litte´raires, 24 February 1977.

Bibliography

309

‘Livres: Naine a` barbe et homme chien. Qui sont les monstres?’, Plus, No. 2 (1977) [Review of Les Nains by Martin Monestier]. ‘La fascination e´rotique de la beˆte’ by Herve´ Guibert, Union, No. 57 (March 1977). Zouc, come´dienne: ‘Les yeux ouverts sur le monde . . .’ Elle, No. 1637 (23 May 1977) [unsigned article]. Les Nouvelles Litte´raires, No. 2594, July 1977. ‘Les rendez-vous d’Anna’ by Herve´ Guibert, Cine´matographe, No. 41 (November 1978), pp. 70–71. ‘The´re`se’ and ‘Machie moderne’, Minuit, No. 33 (March 1979), pp. 26–30 [Reprinted in La Mort propagande]. ‘La mort propagande no. 0’, Minuit, No. 34 (May 1979), pp. 9–16 [Reprinted in La Mort propagande]. ‘Journal de l’onaniste’ [Reprinted in La Mort propagande] and ‘La piquˆre d’amour’ [Reprinted in PA], Minuit, No. 36 (November 1979), pp. 58–62. ‘Le baiser a` Samuel’, Minuit, No. 38 (March 1980), pp. 7–11 [Story reprinted in Les Aventures singulie`res]. ‘L’histoire de Me´me´ Grossein’, Minuit, No. 39 (May 1980), pp. 45–50 [Reprinted under the title ‘‘Me´me´e Nibard’’ in Mauve le vierge, pp. 47–57].4 ‘Lettres d’amour’, Minuit, No. 40 (September 1980), pp. 2–14 [Story reprinted in Les Aventures singulie`res]. ‘Surtainville, le 13 octobre’, Minuit, No. 43 (March 1981), pp. 26–31 [Story reprinted in Les Aventures singulie`res]. ‘La semaine sainte’, Minuit, No. 45 (September 1981) [Reprinted in PA]. ‘Testament no. 1’, Minuit, No. 45 (September 1981), pp. 3–4 [Reprinted in PA]. ‘La visite’, Minuit, No. 46 (November 1981), pp. 7–10 [Story reprinted in Les Aventures singulie`res]. ‘Une nuit’; L’arrie`re saison’, Minuit, No. 47 (January 1982), pp. 14–19 [Stories reprinted in Les Aventures singulie`res]. ‘Re´cits te´nus’, Minuit, No. 48 (March 1982), pp. 64–67: ‘L’homme qui avait peur’ [Reprinted in PA]; ‘Ex voto’ [Reprinted in PA]; ‘Le palais des monstres de´sirables’ [this last story was reprinted unabridged in Vice, pp. 96–97]. ‘Lettre a` un fre`re d’e´criture’ [A meeting between Euge`ne Savitzkaya and Herve´ Guibert], Minuit, No. 49 (May 1982), pp. 2–5 [Reprinted in PA]. ‘Entretien avec Euge`ne Savitzkaya’, Minuit, Ibid., pp. 5–12. ‘Vertiges’, Minuit, No. 50 (September 1982), pp. 91–95 [Reprinted in PA]. ‘Les escarpins rouges’, Masques, No. 19 (1983), pp. 131–33 [L’homme blesse´]. ‘Comment fabriquer une e´toile’, L’Autre Journal, October 1985, pp. 42–45. ‘L’Autre Journal d’Herve´ Guibert’, L’Autre Journal, December 1985, pp. 65–76. ‘Le Muse´e de l’Homme’, L’Autre Journal, 26 February–4 March 1986, pp. 60–70. Photo+text [The Lille Wigmaker], L’Autre Journal, Ibid., p. 49. Portrait by H. G., L’Autre Journal, 5–11 March 1986, p. 31. Photo+text [Dominique Sanda], L’Autre Journal, Ibid., p. 31. ‘Qui est le pe`re de Fantoˆmette?’, L’Autre Journal, 12–18 March 1986, pp. 39–40, [Interview]. Photo+text [Euge`ne Savitzkaya], L’Autre Journal, Ibid., p. 67. ‘Vita sexualis, 1910–1930’, L’Autre Journal, 19–25 March 1986, pp. 36–41 [Interview]. Photo+text [Andre´ Tarkovski], L’Autre Journal, Ibid., p. 73.

310

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

‘Jon comme un diable, Johny comme un garc¸on’, L’Autre Journal, 26 March–2 April 1986, pp. 26–28. Photo+text [Orson Welles’ Legion of Honour], L’Autre Journal, Ibid., p. 68. Photo+text [Robert Bresson], L’Autre Journal, 3–8 April 1986, p. 31. Photo+text [Isabelle Adjani], L’Autre Journal, 9–15 April 1986, p. 40. ‘Le Dessinateur d’arcs en ciel’, L’Autre Journal, Ibid., pp. 44–45. ‘Le Livre que le chat ne peut pas lire’ [Interview with Peter Handke], L’Autre Journal, 16–22 April 1986, pp. 25–32. Photo+text [Self-portrait], L’Autre Journal, Ibid., p. 49. ‘Le Piano et l’ordinateur’, L’Autre Journal, 23–29 April 1986, pp. 48–50 [Interview]. Photo+text [The Dutch painter Constant], L’Autre Journal, Ibid., p. 71. Photo+text [Jacques-Henri Lartigue], L’Autre Journal, 30 April–6 May 1986, p. 53. ‘Voitures, maisons et chaussures’, L’Autre Journal, Ibid., pp. 64–66 [Interview]. ‘Corentin boursicote’, L’Autre Journal, 7–13 May 1986, pp. 53–55 [Interview]. Photo+text [Samia Saouma], L’Autre Journal, Ibid., p. 63. Photo+text [His masseur’s hands], L’Autre Journal, 14–21 May 1986, p. 57. ‘La Vraie mort de Bruce Lee’, L’Autre Journal, Ibid., pp. 62–63 [Interview]. ‘L’avons-nous bien me´rite´?’ L’Autre Journal, Ibid., pp. 67–68. Photo+text [Marie-Claude Treilhou], L’Autre Journal, 22–27 May 1986, p. 50. Photo+text [‘Ce sioux de pacotille . . . devenu un bon camarade’]. L’Autre Journal, 28 May–3 June 1986, p. 64. Photo+text [Henri Cartier-Bresson], L’Autre Journal, 4–10 June 1986, p. 75. Photo+text [A photo resembling H. Guibert], L’Autre Journal, 11–17 June 1986, p. 61. ‘Le Musc de la boxe’, L’Autre Journal, 2–8 July 1986, pp. 55–56. ‘James Dean, Avedon et Plossu’, L’Autre Journal, 2–8 July 1986, p. 62. ‘La socie´te´ des rats’, Libe´ration, 19 March 1987, p. 41. ‘Ne´crologie’, L’Inﬁni, No. 31 (Autumn 1990), pp. 3–5 [Reprinted in PA]. ‘Guibert interviewe Handke’, Libe´ration, 11 April 1991, pp. 19–22.

4 Audio-Visual A Television programmes in which Guibert appeared ‘Apostrophes’ Programme of 29 April 1985 (Des Aveugles) Programme of 16 March 1990 (A` l’ami) ‘Ex Libris’ Programme of 28 February 1991 (Le Protocole compassionnel) (Broadcast on 7 March 1991) B Television programmes on Guibert ‘Viva’: Te´le´vision Suisse Romande, 1995, Producer Michel Dami. C Radio programmes on which Guibert appeared Radio Suisse Romande, ‘Espace 2’. Programme by Jean Perret, 9 February 1986. Radio Suisse Romande, ‘Espace 2’. Programme by Jean Perret, January 1987. Herve´ Guibert: Mes Parents. The staging of Des Aveugles with Mathieu Pieyre. R. T. L. ‘Lire’, 9 March 1991.

Bibliography

311

5 English Translations ‘Les secrets d’un homme’ in Mauve le vierge was published in English under the title ‘A Man’s Secrets’, Grand Street, No. 39, (1991). The Gangsters, London: Serpent’s Tail, 1991. To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, London: Quartet Books, 1991. The Compassion Protocol, London: Quartet Books, 1993. The Man in the Red Hat, London: Quartet Books, 1993. My Parents, London: Serpent’s Tail, 1994. Blindsight, London: Quartet Books, 1996. Ghost Image, Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1996.

6 Unpublished ‘Le cœur fatigue´’. Extracts from Herve´ Guibert’s diary. Libe´ration, Thursday 14 January 1993, p. 23.

Notes 1 This bibliography supplements that published in the special issue of Nottingham French Studies. Herve´ Guibert, vol. 34, no. 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 133–58, which I edited and to which the reader should refer, particularly for critical studies of Guibert. A symposium (to which I myself contributed a chapter) recently appeared in France, Ralph Sarkonak (ed.). Le Corps textuel d’Herve´ Guibert, Paris: Lettres Modernes, Collection ‘Au jour le sie`cle’, 2, 1997. Because this volume only appeared in September 1997, I have not, in the present study, been able to take its various chapters into account. 2 The preface is a text by Guibert entitled: ‘Sur une manipulation courante (Me´moires d’un dysmorphophobe)’ [Reprinted in PA]. 3 My bibliography in Nottingham French Studies omitted some of the articles which Guibert published in Le Monde. I was able to list these articles thanks to the IMEC archives but Christine Guibert has drawn my attention to the imminent publication of these articles by Gallimard. So as not to overload my book, I have decided not to catalogue them here. 4 One of the rare examples of rewriting by Guibert in which two diﬀerent texts can be compared.

Index of Names Since all Guibert’s works are studied chronologically in Voices of the Self, it has not been seen as necessary to index individual titles

Comment, Bernard, 212 Czarny, Norbert, 168, 172

Adjani, Isabelle, 59, 60, 104, 116 Andre´a, Yann, 238 Apter, Emily, 193 Arsand, Daniel, 57 Babel, Isaac, 5 Bacon, Francis, 28, 88, 243 Barbedette, Gilles, 78, 131, 144 Barthes, Roland, 29-30, 48, 58, 61, 66, 111-12, 125, 135, 167, 269 Bataille, Georges, 28 Bellour, Raymond, 7, 10, 40, 51, 62, 64, 142, 143, 164, 172, 174, 212, 244, 246, 247 Berger, Hans Georg, 112-13, 114, 121, 162 Bernanos, George, 186 Bernhard, Thomas, 8, 29, 186, 202, 213, 233 Bernstein, Miche`le, 143 Bersani, Leo, 143 Bianciotti, Hector, 81, 267 Bourdieu, Pierre, 59 Braudeau, Michel, 172, 193–94, 212 Breugnot, Pascale, 4, 223 Brison, Danie`le, 231 Brochier, Jean-Jacques, 245 Buisine, Alain, 74 Caujolle, Christian, 60, 62, 113, 115, 120 Calle, Sophie, 115 Cardinale, Claudia, 65 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 116, 120 Chambers, Ross, 306 Ceccatty, Rene´ de, 72, 78, 88, 90, 97 Chekhov, Anton, 179, 237 Che´reau, Patrice, 2, 87, 101–103, 106, 121, 196, 266 Colonna, Vincent, 10

Darrieussecq, Marie, 181 Debray, Re´gis, 191 Delon, Alain, 76 Depardieu, Ge´rard, 59 Derrida, Jacques, 125 Doubrovsky, Serge, ix, 9, 10 Duncan, Derek, 215, 217, 224, 228 Duras, Marguerite, 2, 87, 236, 237–38 Edelman, Lee, 192 Faucon, Bernard, 95 Ferenczi, Marc, 157 Foucault, Michel, 1, 32, 48, 56, 87, 90, 129, 161, 191, 200, 203 Gaudemar, Antoine de, 46, 154, 155, 225, 245 Genet, Jean, 102, 235 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 64, 95 Gogol, Nikolai, 179, 237 Guyotat, Pierre, 134, 141 Hamsun, Knut, 153, 165–67, 233 Handke, Peter, 64, 65, 72, 94, 194, 223, 229, 232, 233 Heathcote, Owen, 6, 87 Hill, Leslie, 234, 249 Hillenaar, Henk, 6 Jocelyn, Jean-Franc¸ois, 268 Kafka, Franz, 64, 65, 232 Lecarme, Jacques, 154–55 Lejeune, Philippe, 9, 156 Lindon, Je´roˆme, 2, 194 Lindon, Mathieu, 7, 9, 10, 179, 262

313

314

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

Mapplethorpe, Robert, 216 Marsan, Hugo, 154, 164 Mazurek, Maureen, 223 McCaﬀrey, Enda, 143 Nouchi, Franck, 223 Perec, Georges, 18 Pieiller, Evelyne, 72 Pivot, Bernard, 191 Planes, Jean-Marie, 47 Poirot-Delpech, Bertrand, 132, 163, 231 Poivre d’Arvor, Patrick, 149, 154, 217 Pratt, Murray, 88, 90, 142, 150–51, 154 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 48 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 134 Sade, Marquis de, 28, 48, 134, 142–3, 172, 233, 265 Saint-John, Perse, 93

Sander, August, 125, 126 Sarkonak, Ralph, 9, 10, 48 Savignot, Euge`ne, 245 Savitzkaya, Euge`ne, 9, 80, 82, 83–84, 86, 95, 116, 141, 186, 255, 256 Schehr, Lawrence, 192, 268 Smith, Richard, 144 Smyth, Edmund, 6, 132, 133, 144 Stamp, Terence, 68 Stendhal, 79, 99 St Vincent, Bertrand, 245 Verny, Franc¸oise, 194 Wenders, Wim, 43, 195 Wolfromm, Didier, 245–46, 248 Woods, Gregory, 256 Zand, Nicole, 61, 64

Index of Names in Notes Adjani, Isabelle, 278 n.25 Apter, Emily, 297, n.13

Flaubert, Gustave, 282 n.14, 284 n.1 Foucault, Michel, 285 n.29, 291 nn.2, 5, 8

Baby, Yvonne, 278 n.21 Barcelo, Miguel, 304 n.32 Barthes, Roland, 272 n.16, 273 n.43, 274 n.2, 275 n.26, 276 n.32, 277 nn. 16, 18, 278 nn.28, 41, 280 n.43, 283 nn.27, 28, 36, 286 nn. 55, 56, 287 n.84, 290 n.39, 293 n.36, 294 n.72, 301 n.57, 306 nn. 1, 11 Bellour, Raymond, 272 nn.18, 34, 276 n.42, 277 n.11, 278 n.30, 286 n.54, 287 nn.85, 90, 92, 291 n.8, 292 n.22, 294 nn.69, 78, 300 n.18, 302 n.58, 303 nn.16, 19, 304 n.29, 305 n.54 Berger, Hans Georg, 291 n.5 Bernhard, Thomas, 298 n. 38 Bersani, Leo, 287 n.89 Boule´, Jean-Pierre, 271 nn. 4, 5, 272 nn. 17, 39, 284 n.13, 296 nn.2, 5, 297 n.33, 299 n.6, 301 nn.54, 57 Braudeau, Michel, 300 n.17 Buisine, Alain, 279 n.8, 300 n.21 Butler, Judith, 281 n.54, 289 n.8

Genet, Jean, 282 n.1 Grainville, Patrick, 296 n.9 Guilbard, Anne-Ce´cile, 285 n.16

Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 278 n.22 Che´reau, Patrice, 278 n.22 Colonna, Vincent, 272 n.37 Comment, Bernard, 300, n.17 Darrieussecq, Marie, 294 n.88 Debray, Re´gis, 296 n.4 Defert, Daniel and Ewald, Franc¸ois, 275 n. 27 Derrida, Jacques, 272 n.30, 284 n.11 Doubrovsky, Serge, 272 nn. 25, 28, 30 Duncan, Derek, 300 nn.29, 31, 301 nn.50, 59 Edelman, Lee, 296 n.8, 298 n.44 Faucon, Bernard, 291 n.5

Handke, Peter, 279 n.4 Heathcote, Owen, 271 n.15, 280 n.47, 286 n.54 Hill, Leslie, 294 n.83, 304 n.35 Hillenaar, Henk, 271 n.13 Hughes, Alex, 278 n.44 Keefe, Terry and Smyth, Edmund, 275 n.20 Laguet, Denis, 304 n.30 Lecarme, Jacques, 289 n.34 Lejeune, Philippe, 272 n.26, 290 n.39 Lefeuvre, Christian Jules, 282 n.14 Lindon, Mathieu, 272 nn.21, 22, 31, 35 Lollobrigida, Gina, 280 n.36 Macey, David, 298 n.40 Marin, Louis, 301 n.56 Marsan, Hugo, 292 n.23, 295 n.94 Marty-Lavauzelle, Henri, 299 n.6 Mazurek, Maureen, 301 n.55 McCaﬀrey, Enda, 286 n.54, 287 n.88 Miller, James, 292 n.9 Murphy, Timothy F., and Poirier, Suzanne, 297 n.13 Nilsson, Lennart, 274 n.15 Nizon, Paul, 272 n.25 Peigne´-Giuly, Annick, 301 n.46 Poe, Edgar Allan, 276 n.35, 282 n.14 Poirot-Delpech, Bertrand, 293 n.44 Pratt, Murray, 281 nn.51, 54, 59, 286 n.54, 287 n.82, 289 nn. 15, 16, 17, 31, 295 n.112, 302 n.63

315

316

Herve´ Guibert: Voices of the Self

Rosello, Mireille, 271 n.4 Sarduy, Severo, 286 n.55 Sarkonak, Ralph, 272 n.24, 277 n.3, 297 nn.28, 33, 302 n.63 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 274 n.3, 276 n.38 Savitzskaya, Euge`ne, 280 n.38, 292 n.20 Schehr, Lawrence R., 296 n.7, 298 n.34, 303 n.7

Smith, Richard, 284 nn.1, 5, 285 n.41, 287 n.96 Smyth, Edmund, 271 n.12, 285 n.44, 286 n.49, 287 n.95 Sontag, Susan, 297 n.11 Tsachouris, Yannis, 304 n.32 Watney, Simon 297 n.11 Woods, Gregory, 289 n.16, 304 nn.42, 43

Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins (Liverpool University Press - Modern French Writers)

Autobiography and Independence: Self and Identity in North African Writing in French (Liverpool University Press - Contemporary French & Francophone Cultures)

Herve Guibert: Voices of the Self (Liverpool University Press - Modern French Writers)

Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins (Liverpool University Press - Modern French Writers)

Business of Music (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Music Symposium)

Words and Music (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Music Symposium)

Autobiography and Independence: Self and Identity in North African Writing in French (Liverpool University Press - Contemporary French & Francophone Cultures)

Rhys Davies (University of Wales Press - Writers of Wales)

Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria (Liverpool University Press - Contemporary French & Francophone Cultures)

Role-Play and the World as Stage in the Comedia (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Music Symposium)

Cassiodorus: Variae' (Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians)

Urban Visions: Experiencing and Envisioning the City (Liverpool University Press - Tate Liverpool Critical Forum)

Charles the Bold and Italy 1467-1477: Politics and Personnel (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Historical Studies)

Bede: On Genesis (Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians)

H.G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

Thing About Roy Fisher: Critical Studies (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

Visions and Revisions: (Re)constructing Science Fiction (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

Michel Tournier and the Metaphor of Fiction (Modern French Writers)

W. S. Graham: Critical Essays (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

Cannibal Hymn: A Cultural and Literary Study (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Music Symposium)

Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

The Laughter of Foxes, Second Edition: A Study of Ted Hughes (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

American Mythologies: Essays on Contemporary Literature (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

South American Independence: Gender, Politics, Text (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Latin American Studies)

Migration, Mobility and Modernization (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought (Liverpool University Press - Studies in European Regional Cultures)

The Laughter of Foxes, Second Edition: A Study of Ted Hughes (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

The Self-assertion Of The German University

Business History in Latin America: The Experience of Seven Countries (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Latin American Studies)

Hispanic-American Writers (Multicultural Voices)

Bede: The Reckoning of Time (Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians)

Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool University Press - Postcolonialism Across Disciplines)

Herve Guibert: Voices of the Self (Liverpool University Press - Modern French Writers)

Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins (Liverpool University Press - Modern French Writers)

Business of Music (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Music Symposium)

Words and Music (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Music Symposium)

Autobiography and Independence: Self and Identity in North African Writing in French (Liverpool University Press - Contemporary French & Francophone Cultures)

Rhys Davies (University of Wales Press - Writers of Wales)

Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria (Liverpool University Press - Contemporary French & Francophone Cultures)

Role-Play and the World as Stage in the Comedia (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Music Symposium)

Cassiodorus: Variae' (Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians)

Urban Visions: Experiencing and Envisioning the City (Liverpool University Press - Tate Liverpool Critical Forum)

Charles the Bold and Italy 1467-1477: Politics and Personnel (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Historical Studies)

Bede: On Genesis (Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians)

H.G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

Thing About Roy Fisher: Critical Studies (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

Visions and Revisions: (Re)constructing Science Fiction (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

Michel Tournier and the Metaphor of Fiction (Modern French Writers)

W. S. Graham: Critical Essays (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

Cannibal Hymn: A Cultural and Literary Study (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Music Symposium)

Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

The Laughter of Foxes, Second Edition: A Study of Ted Hughes (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

American Mythologies: Essays on Contemporary Literature (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

South American Independence: Gender, Politics, Text (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Latin American Studies)

Migration, Mobility and Modernization (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought (Liverpool University Press - Studies in European Regional Cultures)

The Laughter of Foxes, Second Edition: A Study of Ted Hughes (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

The Self-assertion Of The German University

Business History in Latin America: The Experience of Seven Countries (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Latin American Studies)

Hispanic-American Writers (Multicultural Voices)

Bede: The Reckoning of Time (Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians)

Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool University Press - Postcolonialism Across Disciplines)

Recommend Documents