The Works of Guillaume Dustan, Volume 1 Read online

  As nitpicky as some may find it, the debate around genre is crucial to grasping what Guillaume Dustan brought to the literary world of his time as well to understanding the necessity for truth that was at the center of his project: describing his life as directly as possible, practically live. This was the only way for him to ward off death, with which he had begun to cross swords since he discovered his seropositivity, and which he had indirectly started in his first work. Of course, he was not the first to use literature in this cathartic manner; the entirety of Dustan's works is part of a larger corpus of AIDS literature that belongs to a specific historical moment, and is close to first-person documentary. But whereas fiction protects its author by means of a narrator dissociated from its author's own experience, autobiography renders its subject vulnerable to all sorts of risks, something whose theorization goes back to the 1930s in the preface of Michel Leiris's Manhood. But the choice of autobiography was, above all things, the sign of a strong acknowledgment of the esthetic stakes of Dustan's era, characterized by a “post-Freudian, post-May ’68 context of linguistic emancipation and freedom of mores.” 11 Understanding Dustan from the sole angle of his writing narratives of illness would therefore be reductive, if not a complete misrepresentation. For what came out of his work, which can neither be summed up as characteristic of the novel nor of the literature of testimony, was an extraordinary vitality held up by a unique writing style and a totalizing project that became clearer after his fourth book, Nicolas Pages. Dustan was undoubtedly the heir of a French autobiographical tradition, but he renewed it through direct exposure.

  Dustan Face to Face with Gay Literature

  Dustan found the appropriate literary form for such direct exposure: it's what makes him unavoidable for those who want to study this moment in literature, largely because Dustan killed bad gay literature—the kind that had never found the proper means of representation. Of course, there are interesting texts from this time, but they are few and far between, examples such as Cargo Vie by Pascal de Duve, or Corps à corps by Alain-Emmanuel Dreuilhe, which Dustan mentioned.12 But these texts fell under a sort of pathetic isolation that was foreign to the birth of a true gay context of which Dustan was one of the main actors, whether his naysayers like it or not. Incapable of escaping the deploratio associated with AIDS, these accounts were, in the best of circumstances, a sort of psychological self-analysis, for example the emotional This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death by Harold Brodkey, or the more debatable Savage Nights by Cyril Collard, a realist novel full of complacency.13 Dustan's literary angle, which was both direct and phenomenological, changed everything. In contrast to this, we can measure the obsolescence of Gilles Barbedette who continued to believe in the infinite potential of fiction, which of course has its own value,14 but remained an old way of writing about a new phenomenon. Thus, the literature of the mid-’90s found itself revived by a young unknown whose story has not been including in any overarching study of this time.15

  There is often a delay between literature and theory: whereas the proclamation of homosexual identity appeared a given for North American critics and their French counterparts, there was no literary representation in 1996 that painted a strong picture of it. Besides a few aficionados, who really had read Renaud Camus, one of Dustan's inspirations, before the scandal that gained him popularity and discredit at the same time?16 Only Hervé Guibert had attained mainstream popularity, but for our author, his vision of homosexuality remained imperfect as it called for a certain form of compassion indexed on AIDS and showcased a predilection for betrayal of which we have hardly seen a satisfying reading thus far. Guibert presented a vision of homosexuality that was in all likelihood not homosexual enough and certainly not “gay,” (by which I mean subversive and political) which explains his notoriety. Or, in other words, according to Philippe Mangeot as quoted in Frédéric Martel's history of homosexuality, “I joined Act Up to fight against Hervé Guibert.” 17 Dustan would go on to radicalize the author of To the Friend Who Didn't Save My Life by politicizing him; he became his successor but with an infinitely more explosive style. Whereas Guibert would associate a form of writing whose quality was based on its classicism to an acceptable image of homosexuality, in particular regarding AIDS presented as an unjust tragedy, Dustan's reception was problematic. Adopting an esthetic closer to Dennis Cooper or Bret Easton Ellis's, authors who were not widely accepted in France, Dustan was downgraded as a writer. He was seen first of all as a provocateur (of course he was guilty of contributing to this persona in his media appearances), but, and this is one of the reasons for this collected works—it's impossible to mask the literary quality of his writing or the motives of a struggle that extended beyond himself. The radical nature of Dustan's style, inherited from a literary and political history, made all the difference between him and others.

  A Liberating Endeavor

  For Dustan, the idea that homosexuality was well-accepted was intolerable. He therefore refused a discrete conception of it. He first had to represent his condition as he was living it, an unembellished sexual celebration, both joyful and grim but through which Dustan constituted himself as a subject. This first trilogy is the story of a liberation from the heterosexual, puritan, and normative world from which Dustan had already broken as a man, but not yet as a writer, and makes us witness to his birth. The most important characteristic of his work is this form of simplicity or brutalism that puts expenditure at the forefront. It was an almost Bataille-like position where the worshipping of pleasure was mixed with a sort of confidence in his own destiny that was the other side of an identity threatened but also constituted by AIDS. Although Dustan didn't shrug off the question of his illness (the word “AIDS” is nonetheless quite rare in the first three texts), it was diverted into a paradoxical power of life. As thorny as it might appear, the fact of knowing he was ill drove Dustan towards a literary birth, the urgency to write having been freed by the threat of death.18

  By not tying the question of homosexuality to AIDS but rather to sex, which was the opposite of what his great predecessor Hervé Guibert had done, Dustan occupied an ambiguous position regarding the communitarian-like doxa according to which homosexuality couldn't be dissociated from AIDS and responsibility would be the watchword. It was the very representation of homosexuality that was at stake with Dustan's vitalism in entering literature in such an intensely subjective manner. Such intensity was able to open his work to a readership for whom it hadn't been destined. But for all that, this hedonistic vision was in no way a denial of the actual reality of AIDS in the years 1996–2000, a time marked by a strong resurgence of the disease. However, and this was the deciding factor, one could not enter literature through the sole question of sufferance, guilt, and death. Although this was of course present in his work to the point of functioning as a kind of negative, Dustan refused to reduce homosexuality to this ethos, and therefore put up a smokescreen. In opposition to the arguments that look to minimize the homosexual act to the benefit of homosexual culture, Dustan, from the very start, incarnated an ambivalent position within the homosexual world, revealing niche internal quarrels that he would exacerbate through certain positionings that eventually exiled him from his own community.19

  Dustan was a troublemaker working to undo certainties. Even though he acted in some ways to further ideas inspired by Foucault in terms of gay culture, in no way can can they be compared on the double question of literature and sexuality. This contradictory situation regarding intellectual expectations is without a doubt the most fascinating aspect of what Guillaume Dustan brings to literature.

  Foucault or Not Foucault?

  Dustan's position concerning the choice of autobiography is clear, since it relies on a necessity which is the criteria for its literary value. What is not clear is its intellectual expectations. Let us try to untangle this delicate situation. Through a brilliant paradox, in his History of Sexuality Michel Foucault showed that with the paradigm shift that occurred with modernit
y, far from being repressed by Western society, sex had become the center of its discourse: “Man has become a confessing animal.” 20 Foucault suggested abandoning what he called a repressive hypothesis that consisted of thinking of sex as the object of a major taboo, in favor of considering it a verbal incitement. “An imperative was established: Not only will you confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse.” 21 The birth of the autobiographical genre, dating from the end of the eighteenth century, stems from the will to knowledge. But if self-expression replaced a literature of imagination, we can sense that Foucault perceived this as a threat. This point has rarely been discussed even though it is of paramount importance.22 Indeed, writing the self can only be understood from a Foucauldian perspective as a trap destined to lead the producer of such a discourse to link sex and truth, and therefore, to fall victim to a subjection that is favorable to power all the while giving the subject the illusion of existence. According to Foucault, far from telling us to suppress sex, the modern Western world enjoins us to talk about it—a subtle way that power has found to control sex through the production of inexhaustible and sophisticated discourses such as law, psychoanalysis, or medicine. Literature couldn't escape this movement of interiorization that stemmed from Christian notions of confession, influencing autobiographical production in a judicial manner: “Evil had to be confessed in the first person.” 23 However, the entirety of Foucault's conception stemmed from a mistrust regarding the idea that subjects could liberate themselves by narrating their sexuality, the reason for which the author of The Order of Things would continue to valorize other, impersonal forms of literature. Very suspicious of the notion of the subject, the early Foucault was marked by a structuralist heritage. Profoundly influenced by Maurice Blanchot, for whom “I” was always “he,” in the first half of his career Foucault chose authors who were considered marginal, such as Hölderlin or Raymond Roussel, because he was interested in the entwined nature of literature and madness. He would later evolve, accepting examples of self writing as long as they were anonymous or authors who were considered to be outside of the literary establishment.24 He would become increasingly disinterested in literature the more he studied power.

  Self Writing, Sex Writing

  With the sexualist motif that was passionately his own, Dustan ran up against the Foucaldian doxa according to which the overly simplistic repressive hypothesis would be better forgotten. Indeed, Dustan never stopped reaffirming what he felt to be the intrinsically repressive dimension of modern Western society: the repression of the body, of sex, and of homosexuality. Dustan's political struggle was to contest repression in action; his literary struggle was to disintegrate its justification. From the point of view of society, suppression is inevitable (Freud proved it), but Dustan, an engaged writer, looked to limit its effects at the risk of a clear naivety (as his adversaries would say), but also more tragically at the risk of his own life. Of course, Foucault did not say that repression didn't exist in society, but that the dialogue surrounding sex was itself the actual political tool of subjectivation, a term to be understood in two contradictory ways, as the production of subjects and their domination. In this respect, Dustanian literature threw off the Foucaldian paradigm. For Dustan not only believed in the possibility of beating back repression (maybe this was one of his deep motivations for writing) but also that autobiography was the best literary way to do this—another point of difference from Foucault, according to whom self writing was doubly problematic.

  Firstly because of its confessional mechanism. For Foucault, confession was an ensnaring genre because it repeated the coercion that subjects thought they were escaping. The discursive framework would contradict the eventual affirmation of homosexual subjects, as if, by designating themselves as such, they gave society a public guarantee of their identity and eventually, of their domestication. The exteriorization of interiority that defines autobiography would therefore be the procedure by which power pretended to liberate the subject from the very situation it had itself constituted. Secondly, modernist thought had completely discredited the triple alliance of Truth-Subject-Author that the autobiographical genre presupposed. However, one can't understand the 1980s without acknowledging that this triple prohibition had had its day. Although Dustan was an heir of the 1960s in terms of counterculture (and affirmed the heritage of May ’68), it is impossible to connect him to structuralist modernism and/or Marxism which considered that they had eliminated the genre of self writing as pure illusion, a petty-bourgeois myth, or a reactionary counter-movement. For a man born in 1965, anti-subjectivist principles had become such injunctions that their favorite zealots, Barthes or Foucault, would go on to question them during the second part of their lives by initiating a paradoxical “return of the subject.” 25 Dustan, like Guibert, was influenced by Barthes and Foucault, but contrary to their disciples, he understood that the best way to transmit their principles was to betray them: the direct exposure of the autobiography incarnated this betrayal.

  The literary and cultural context that surrounded our young author would make this double grievance obsolete. For Dustan, like many in my generation, the structuralist framework hadn't been operational for some time and self writing as a genre would be the historical literary form to bury it. The success of self writing was, among other things, an internal reaction to a literary field governed by the outdated tyranny of the hypothetical “death of the author.” This theoretical reversal occurred in the 1980s. The thesis of the ensnaring nature of autobiography obliterated the specificity of literary discourse and silenced the decisive consequence of autobiography; the power of autobiography is measured in light of its capacity to produce a self, to create a self-image that is allergic to Power. Through its desire for freedom and its effects on the reader, it draws its esthetic and political strength from its own constraints. Perhaps all autobiographical texts moved by this necessity to speak are destined to fail, but where, in literature, do we situate failure?

  Literature or Philosophy

  The question of whether autobiography is fiction, a lie, or a discursive trap is perhaps acceptable on a theoretical level, but literature is superior to philosophy because the practice of writing questions the certainties of thinkers who, as we have seen, themselves shifted their views on the issue.26 In other words, as long as it hasn't been experienced, self writing seems to be a naïve theory, a conceptual trap whose limits structuralism assumed it had shown. From the very moment one seriously engages in it (and it's clear that writing was far from a simple game for Dustan) things change completely. Reason being that the effect produced on the reader, if writers were truly engaged in their practice, shattered the intellectual constructions of critical thinkers whom Dustan admired like any good child of the 1960s but who had provoked reservations among Dustan's generation because of their pronounced intellectualism.

  One of the numerous reasons neo-modernists misunderstood (or ignored) Dustan was his passion for transparency, which they found suspicious because it supposed that the subject was too much in agreement with itself. This direct expression of the self seemed to have been condemned by the philosophical tradition of deconstruction. But what is true for philosophy isn't always true for literature: “truth” in literature is impossible because of its intrinsic subjectivity which, by means of a crafty flick of the switch, makes it necessary and touching in the second degree. The unconscious of Philosophy is Rhetoric; the unconscious of Literature is Truth. This truth effect gives Dustanian discourse its unique, distinct tone by throwing us into the center of a world he knew so well, but also because of the authentic expression of the one who guides us through it. To condemn Dustan in the name of anti-autobiographical ideology is to purposefully skip over the reasons behind this discourse, its context, and the means by which Dustan enacted them in his work. A philosophical approach to literary texts often collides with the same theoretical obstacles because it immediately invalidate
s the idea of speaking about oneself and considers it an illusion, even more so if the notions of truth and sex are intertwined.

  Reclaiming one's homosexuality might very well be considered “outdated,” according to the analyses that consider homosexual and heterosexual identities to be discursive creations that are more cumbersome than liberating, however, at the individual level, that is to say at the literary level, for Dustan, a young, thirty-year-old writer, there was no other option than his liberating autoscopic experience. Today, we know that queer theory seeks to create unattributable identities— gender identities more so than sexual ones. But when Dustan arrived on the literary scene during the 1990s, these sophisticated nuances were largely unknown. But mostly, they don't stand up against Dustan's creative urgency. It was unthinkable that Dustan not pledge allegiance to both identity and truth—even if it meant criticizing and outgrowing them later.

  It was therefore because Dustan experienced the stigmatization of homosexuality in his flesh that he had no choice but to express it in an outrageous manner. Seeing in his (homo)sexual preference the key to his ego, he felt the need to produce an offensive discourse against a society he considered to be normative. Faced with this salutary self-affirmation, speculations about the legitimacy of Foucault's repressive hypothesis do not seem to hold much weight, to say the least. The history of modern homosexuality is one of repression/liberation; autobiography was understood as the “art for those who aren't artists.” 27 Today, it is easy to use the normalization of homosexuality (and of “autofiction”) to put Dustan aside. One of the most astounding recorders of his time, he was also ahead of it. He was “modern” in the Baudelairian sense, a man who did not scorn fashion or the ephemeral since they expressed the truth of a period. Dustan was always searching for ways to go beyond it through the perpetual questioning of the self.