Someone: The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities, from Colette to Hervé Guibert

319 Pages·2019·2.159 MB·English

by  Michael Lucey

Someone

Someone
The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities,
from Colette to Hervé Guibert
Michael Lucey
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2019 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in
critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago
Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2019
Printed in the United States of America
28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 60618- 7 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 60621- 7 (paper)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 60635- 4 (e- book)
DOI: https:// doi .org /10 .7208 /chicago /9780226606354 .001 .0001
The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the
University of California, Berkeley, toward the publication of this book.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lucey, Michael, 1960–author.
Title: Someone : the pragmatics of misfit sexualities, from Colette to Hervé Guibert /
Michael Lucey.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018028776 | ISBN 9780226606187 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN
9780226606217 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226606354 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: French literature—20th century—History and criticism. |
Homosexuality in literature. | Sex in literature.
Classification: LCC PQ307.H6 L834 2019 | DDC 840.9/353—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018028776
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48– 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Qu’on me comprenne, qu’on se mette à ma place. Je me demande si quelqu’un
voudrait. Quelqu’un.
(Try to understand me, try to put yourself in my place. I wonder if there’s
someone who would. Someone.)
Robert Pinget, Quelqu’un (Someone)
An essential (constitutive) marker of the utterance is its quality of being di-
rected to someone, its addressivity.
M. M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres”
Narratives about the most “personal” difficulties, the apparently most strictly
subjective tensions and contradictions, frequently articulate the deepest struc-
tures of the social world and their contradictions. This is never so obvious as
it is for occupants of precarious positions who turn out to be extraordinary
“practical analysts”: situated at points where social structures “work,” and
therefore worked over by the contradictions of these structures, these individ-
uals are constrained, in order to live or to survive, to practice a kind of self-
analysis, which often gives them access to the objective contradictions which
have them in their grasp, and to the objective structures expressed in and by
these contradictions.
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Contradictions of Inheritance,”
in The Weight of the World
I’m always compelled by the places where a project of writing runs into things
that I just can’t say— whether because there aren’t good words for them, or
more interestingly because they’re structured in some elusive way that just isn’t
going to stay still to be formulated. That’s the unrationalizable place that seems
worth being to me, often the only place that seems worth being.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “This Piercing Bouquet”
That people are different from each other— I still wonder why and how that
can remain so difficult to know; how best to marshal theoretical resources for
its realization.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Affect Theory and Theory of Mind”

Contents
Introduction: Roadmap to Someone 1
1 Colette and (Un)intelligibility 7
2 Sexuality and the Literary Field 49
3 Metapragmatics, Sexuality, and the Novel:
Reading Jean Genet’s Querelle 85
4 Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality in the Third Person 109
5 The Contexts of Marguerite Duras’s Homophobia 139
6 Multivariable Social Acrobatics and Misfit Counterpublics:
Violette Leduc and Hervé Guibert 170
7 The Talk of the Town: Sexuality in Three Pinget Novels 217
Acknowledgments 253
Notes 257
Bibliography 289
Index 305

Introduction
Roadmap to Someone
In this book I am working out a methodology that draws on a few different
intellectual traditions: Bourdieusian ways of thinking about the functioning of
the field of cultural production and about the functioning of works of litera-
ture within that field and within a larger social field; sociological and sociolin-
guistic (or linguistic anthropological) ways of thinking about how utterances
operate both sociologically and pragmatically to do more than they say, and
how they often do work through features of language that are not semantic in
nature (inspiration comes here from people like Bourdieu, Erving Goffman,
and Michael Silverstein); and finally a way of describing sexuality as, to use a
slightly cumbersome formulation that I’ll explain more fully in chapter 6, an
effect exerted on certain practices by a shifting structure of relations between
a mobile and expansive set of other sociologically pertinent properties. I take
sexuality to be both one sociological variable that we use to identify ourselves
and others and the effect of a cloud of other variables. (In my explanation
of these ideas in chapter 6, I will draw on Bourdieu’s way, in Distinction and
elsewhere, of modeling relations between sets of socially pertinent variables.)
This is a way of doing literary, cultural, and social criticism that I have been
finding my way to across the past fifteen years or so.1 I hope this latest effort
takes a few steps forward in a number of directions.
As I will explain more fully in chapter 1, my focus here is on what I call
misfit sexualities, and the place they hold in a body of texts drawn from the
French literary tradition between roughly 1930 and 1990. Misfit sexualities
do not exactly correspond to any of the names for sexualities that we most
commonly use— lesbian, gay, bisexual, straight, and so on— and sometimes
it takes a serious cognitive effort simply to notice that such other sexuali-
ties exist. They are often all too easy to miss for a variety of reasons that the