The Works of Guillaume Dustan, Volume 1 Read online

  SEMIOTEXT(E) NATIVE AGENTS SERIES

  Originally published as Guillaume Dustan Oeuvres 1, © P.O.L, 2013.

  Dans ma chambre © Editions P.O.L, 1996

  Je sors ce soir © Editions P.O.L, 1997

  Plus fort que moi © Editions P.O.L, 1998

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-copying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

  This book © 2021 Semiotext(e)

  Published by Semiotext(e)

  PO BOX 629, South Pasadena, CA 91031

  www.semiotexte.com

  Special thanks to: Hedi El Kholti, Christine Pichini, Noura Wedell, Brad Rumph, Bruce Hainley and Juliana Halpert.

  Cover: Louis Monier: Guillaume Dustan, Paris, March 20, 2000.

  Design: Hedi El Kholti

  ISBN: 978-1-63590-142-9

  Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England

  d_r0

  The Works of

  GUILLAUME DUSTAN

  Volume 1

  NOVELS

  In My Room

  I'm Going Out Tonight

  Stronger Than Me

  Edited by Thomas Clerc

  Translated by Daniel Maroun

  semiotext(e)

  Contents

  Introduction by Thomas Clerc

  In My Room

  Introduction by Thomas Clerc

  I'm Going Out Tonight

  Introduction by Thomas Clerc

  Stronger Than Me

  Introduction by Thomas Clerc

  Notes

  “I'll never get old”

  — Guillaume Dustan, I'm Going Out Tonight

  Introduction by Thomas Clerc

  The short life of Guillaume Dustan (1965–2005) did not stop him from leaving his mark on contemporary French literature. That said, his collection of works remains rather unknown because of misunderstandings that surround each work, and in particular these days, a devaluation in reading the actual text versus its reputation or what we might have heard about it. Andy Warhol, whom Dustan wildly admired (and who was the subject of one of his novels), had, as we know, coined the perhaps excessively mimetic phrase, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” which meant, of course, eternal anonymity. It is my sincere hope that Guillaume Dustan's works will betray his master's voice.

  The scandalous reputation that surrounded Dustan, which he himself constructed rather recklessly, concealed the essence of his work, either by assigning him the label of pure provocateur, or drowning him in a media maelstrom that, as he admitted, he liked participating in. But if the name Guillaume Dustan deserves to live on within the larger collective memory of French literature at a major turning point in the twentieth century, it is because the strength and richness of his works do not allow themselves to be defined either by his sadly short life or by their apparent concession to the themes of his time.

  Militant homosexual, self-proclaimed hedonist, fervent supporter of drug use, champion of nightlife, political pornographer, fanatic autobiographer, free-spirited continuator of the May ’68 spirit, and supporter of a social project infinitely more ambitious than the Green Party program, Guillaume Dustan, dead at thirty-nine, was one of the very rare bearers of utopia in the very controlled world of turn-of-the-century French literature overcome, like the rest of society, by a wave of nihilism, melancholic cynicism, and ridicule linked to what can only be called a negative version of postmodernism. Seen from this angle, Dustan was a notable exception whose philosophical vitalism was curiously even more snubbed by critics in that he proposed an alternative path to the collective depression. If it is true that he deserves to be studied as the exception of this time period, it is because he did not highlight the sad atmosphere of nihilism: his way of blending the rawest form of self writing with a radical, political undertaking obliterated the prejudice which held that autobiography, formerly criticized by Marxist theory, was a narcissistic, petty-bourgeois genre disconnected from the world. For somewhat superficial reasons, self writing was denigrated due to its self-centeredness. This completely missed the stakes of its generalized use from the ‘70s onward, which many considered a reactionary regression that refused societal transformation. If self writing as a genre, improperly renamed “autofiction,” is the sign of a withdrawal into the self, then how is it that all of the writers who practiced the form were, without exception, at the heart of violent polemics?1

  Reading Dustan's texts requires that we interpret them in a way that is completely opposed to such accusations of narcissism, but such an interpretation demands that readers change their esthetic and ideological criteria in order to appreciate their impact. They are thus contemporary literature, in the Modernist sense of the term, largely renewing ideas and concepts, and disrupting literary expectations in at least two ways: first, by refusing the separation between the self and the world for which critics admonish the genre (as if fiction was liberating in and of itself, and as if writing about oneself was an apolitical act), and secondly, by proposing another way to think about life, one that is totally foreign to the French tradition dominated by humanist intellectualism, with its narrative rules unique to a structured world that maintains its ivory tower with suicidal constancy.

  For Dustan, literature, like politics, took shape through the body as much as through lifestyle: blending an American, or more specifically a Californian approach with the politics of a Nietzschean view on existence, his works could not but be misunderstood by a literary world that had little experience thinking outside of strict separations between forms and ideas, a fortiori when they were expressed disrespectfully. The disapproval of autobiography was all the more pronounced because the genre had become political in the truest sense of the term by associating intimacy with a strong critique of the established order.

  Arguing that Dustan is a new type of intellectual is risky: current French ideology reserves such a title for fancy philosophers. But Dustan wasn't just anybody, as his curriculum vitae shows (and which he would transform into a true literary genre in The Divine Genius): laureate of the Concours Général, awarded a degree in political science, graduate of the National School of Administration, tribunal judge, and, last but not least, essayist and writer. Dustan received a liberal bourgeois education, one largely capable of helping someone decide to be a rebel against the established order. Of course, his first three books are void of intellectual references—there are almost no philosophical names but instead music bands and well-known underground figures. But how could one not notice this was on purpose, not cunning as much as a program? Dustan wanted to highlight what was mistrusted by Western logocentric culture. Like a night-club DJ, Dustan became one of the apostles of Western hedonism even if it meant destroying the essential fact, something David Vrydaghs noted in an article on the author: “No one ever said that Dustan was an intellectual.” 2 May this collected works repair this boorish error due to French intellectual snobbery (that is, unless it's more a matter of their unsophisticated narrow-mindedness).

  The third issue that interfered with Dustan's reception as a writer was that he belonged to the homosexual world. The strategy of French literary circles was to reduce him to an internal troublemaker in that restricted field, as if homosexuals could only be interested in gay problems. The entire history of ideas demonstrates the contrary: if there is any social progress, it's due to marginal groups. Progress is made indirectly from the moment their struggles concern society as a whole. But these groups must fight for a cause that extends beyond themselves, and one that, instead of
being reduced to an issue unique to their class, is beneficial to the community. Dustan's literary activism was entirely motivated by this belief. His biggest success was being able to produce a universal literature from an ultra-minority position within an already marginal group. His action confirmed Pierre Bourdieu's position on the importance of “rendering universal the benefits of the particular,” but at the cost of a very particular place within the gay community.3

  Entering the Scene

  William Baranès died Monday, October 3rd, 2005, of a pulmonary embolism. Known as Guillaume Dustan, he had made his entrance onto the literary scene in 1996 with In My Room, the first of eight novels he would publish in eight years, an oeuvre to which one must also add the enormous amount of unpublished work whose publication will comprise the third and final volume of his Complete Works. Written in small bursts, likely unequal in both quantity and quality but still exemplifying a strong energy and emotional investment that was not only linked to his youth but also linked to the urgency of his fight against death and the need to speak out, Guillaume Dustan's surprising stylistic diversity speaks in his favor. His first three novels reveal a neo-clinical writing style molded by a constant tenderness piercing the raw and cruel vacuity of his sex scenes. His second era is full of political and lustful outbursts, an autobiographical writing style that freely accepts its zany creativity. His third and final epoch, that some might call an ebb, takes up a sort of classicism specific to the moralist tradition whose presence one could barely foresee in his first novels. Although his works are imperfect according to an aesthetics of measure, they are unquestionably alive. These three phases of writing were not at all formal “exercises in style” destined to satisfy the author's skill or the reader's sophistication. Dustan had always been an anti-formalist, vilifying an inherited literature of modernist principles on auto-referentiality. He was, on the other hand, a true experimenter with form, which, in and of itself, should define him as a writer. All of Dustan's works are therefore the condensed fruit of a rapid evolution, remarkable for their aesthetic dimension.

  This first volume is made up of his first three novels published by P.O.L.: In my Room, I'm Going Out Tonight, and Stronger Than Me. The stylistic coherence is clear and easily inferred from simple titles that immediately establish their mark. In this trilogy, which could be considered “explicit” akin to song lyrics or film, the world of homosexual sex and of illicit nightlife pleasures is exhibited without any warnings. Far from being anecdotal, this collection inscribes itself in a true literary tradition at the same time as it asks fundamental questions of contemporary subjectivity. Yet the critical reception of Dustan's works did not meet his own ambitions. Rejected by critics, ignored by universities, Dustan's reception occurred essentially through the media.4 Likewise, the relative silence in which queer studies holds him to this day, more interested as it is in endless questions of gender and strategic battles for representation, can be explained in at least two ways. First, by the esthetic superiority of his novels over those of his predecessors or contemporaries. Second, more objectively, by the fact that Dustan came a little before the explosion of the French reception of queer theory, which he would incidentally comment upon later, favorably, in his last novels. But in 1996, Dustan was first and foremost a man who was looking for salvation in writing, a young author concerned about blasting apart traditional narrative frameworks and representations of homosexual life.

  Questions of Sex

  The fundamental question of (homo)sexual identity rests at the heart of Dustan's work—it holds together the entire first trilogy and nourishes the second. It was logical that he started by writing that which most preoccupied him. The controversial and disturbing characteristics of his first novels are due to this tacit point, which Dustan would only abandon partially and progressively, that homosexuality is a specific identity. This proclamation may indeed bring a smile, but without it, we might not be able to understand Dustan. Before it founds a culture (which Dustan will show in his political trilogy), this identity is of a sexual nature. This is where all the misunderstandings begin.

  My hypothesis is as follows: if it's true that Dustan was hardly or poorly received, it is first because he reaffirms homosexuality as an identity, something which queer studies, inspired by Deleuzian and Foucauldian thought, tried so hard to deconstruct after the start of the twenty-first century. In other words, theorists of queer studies believed that Dustan had remained tied to topics that they wrongly deemed outdated. Refuting the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” has become an obsessive line of argument for disciples of Foucault, who incessantly repeat that these are recent historical constructions (the word “homosexual” dates back to 1869) belonging to a medical discourse whose aim was to monitor homosexuals in order to better punish them. Without going too far into a discussion that is beyond the scope of this preface, it is important to note that a term doesn't get discredited by the context of its production. There's an insistence on the sexual nature of identity within the term “homosexual” that isn't necessarily the sign of an essentialist recruitment and doesn't betray medical or psychiatric connotations. In other words, the word also contains a vitalist affirmation of sexual identity which is exactly what is at play in Dustan's first works. During an interview with Michel Foucault, the director Werner Schroeter admitted to Foucault, “If there's one thing that I've never suffered from in my life, it's my homosexuality.” 5 This is the image of Dustan that we'd like to transmit, rather than enter into a systematic logic of distrust of identities because they would be too restricting.

  Of course, there is definitely something exclusionary in the notion of identity especially for those who don't belong to said group. This is the constant argument made by humanists, for whom identities risk privileging communitarianism, a threat to collectivity as a whole, because it valorizes the notion of identity, which generates dissent at the heart of collective life. Yet despite the fact that this false universalist argument was critiqued less abstractly by modern deconstructionists (Derrida, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault) and by scholars of gay and lesbian studies to whom our author is undoubtedly indebted, for Dustan, the sexual dimension of homosexuality is something that must be valorized and represented. It would be cutting corners to deliver a sophisticated reflection about post-identity while refuting the necessity of a precise exposure of physical pleasures. Deconstructing identity presupposes that we have one: it was impossible for Dustan to even attempt this when the world then, and now, is still constructed upon an undeniable homophobia.6

  In other words, Dustan is “gay” but he is also, first and foremost, a “fag.” For indeed, considering homosexuality outside the framework of sex, as a pure abstraction, removes its truly subversive side. That few heterosexuals enjoy reading Dustan and are understandably reluctant to do so because of the representation of gay sexuality, and that Roland Barthes didn't like Surrealism because of its homophobic and gynophilic elements, is proof that exposing the body necessarily poses the problem of reader address. The major risk of desexualizing homosexuality is to open it up to being considered complete folklore, something perfectly tolerated by a liberal society. For Dustan, sexual representation, especially the hardcore kind, shares a bond with the work of Sade and Bataille not for the underlying system they share, but because of the liberating potential of the rawness of their depiction. It's blunt, therefore it's true it could be said of all successful autobiography. Although Dustan wasn't censored, he ran the risk of being censored by taste, which is equally dangerous. As he often did, he summarized the problem of defining oneself in definitive terms: “I liked fag better. Gay was a bit too clean, too Gringo. It wasn't hard enough. When queer came on the scene, I really started getting pissed. It took ten years to build an identity, and then I had to change everything.” 7

  Condemning the identity-based dimension of sexuality is one of the reflexes of contemporary orthodoxy, shared and constructed by the majority of the literary and theoretical scene. It's not t
hat we believe Dustan was an essentialist, but rather that, in order to construct his own identity, he had to pass through a phase of affirmation, strategic essentialism of sexual differences if you will. Before deconstructing sexual identity, one must first construct oneself. That is to say, accept oneself fully. To do this, he had to find a form of expression for this identity and to leave behind former literary models. In other words, move from a question about sex to a question about gender/genre.8

  Questions about Gender/Genre

  It just so happens that both are intimately linked. Dustan's system of sexuality as principle could not find a better expression than in autobiography because that is in essence the literary genre in which questions of identity can play out. However, by tying a scandalous image of homosexuality to a polemical understanding of writing the self, Dustan faced both literary and theoretical obstacles.

  The usage of the term “novel” regarding the first three works is, in fact, problematic. Only editorial norms could justify its use, norms which come into play all the more strongly for a first book published by an unknown writer under a pseudonym.9 For In My Room is not a novel; neither are the others works. Unless one considers the “novel” not as a specific literary genre but rather as something that has become a synonym for “literature,” the result of an historical evolution that led to the dismantling of literary genres, Guillaume Dustan's works are fundamentally anti-novelistic. This is one of the things that makes him “modern” and carves a place out for him in the larger continuum of French literature of the 1990s and 2000s, a time known for self writing. He touches upon this later in The Divine Genius when he writes, “The novelist is inherently reactionary (as opposed to the auto(hagio)biographer, who is always looking to get better).” It can't get much clearer than that. Dustan belongs to a long line of anti-fictionists in French literature, the avant-garde.10