Textuality and (Homo-)Sexuality in Turnier's 'Les Meteores.'
1995; Columbia University Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2688-5220
Autores Tópico(s)French Literature and Criticism
ResumoThe relations between homosexuality and textuality have been variously analysed. Critics have found no definitive theories of the undeniably intimate bond between sexuality and signification. The sexual relations involved in textual production and the thematics of sexuality have been studied in tandem by Barthes in S/Z, Le Plaisir du texte and Fragments d'un discours amoureux. Barthes may be said indeed to concentrate implicitly on homosexuality, introducing a scenario of a (gay) pickup into his imagining of reading relations: `[l]e lecteur, il faut que je le cherche, (que je le drague), sans savoir ou il est'.(1) Yet the privileged status of the homosexual as possible metatextual signifier merits more detailed examination. In French fictions the gay character is frequently presented as sign to be read; his desire is coded and his (c)overt identity constructed. Equally, in his decoding of reality he appears as hermeneut, mirroring the reader of the text. Tournier creates an intertextual and `archetypal' homosexual character in the insatiable cruiser, aesthete and gay uncle, Alexandre Surin. Tournier comments on Alexandre's excessive encroachment on the text of Les Meteores and confesses: `Je me console de cette excroissance imprevue d'un personnage par deux prestigieux precedents. Balzac et Proust n'avaient certainement pas prevu la place exorbitante que prendraient respectivement Vautrin dans La Comedie humaine et Charlus dans A la recherche du temps perdu'.(2) Reading Balzac and Proust through the deciphering grid of his own fiction, Tournier makes the existence of Alexandre determine his attitude to Charlus and Vautrin. While these two characters differ substantially from Alexandre, the exuberant, erotic and refined refuse-collector, Tournier appropriates them, as well as Rene Meinthe from Modiano's Villa Triste (see VP 251), to form a series of illustrations of the subversive power of a homosexual character within a text. Tournier tries to seduce his reader into the belief that: `Tout romancier doit savoir que s'il lache dans son oeuvre le personnage d'un grand homosexual flamboyant, il devra renoncer a le contenir dans des limites congrues' (VP 251). In Tournier's system the homosexual is pre-determined as a recognized character of excess and artifice, carrying the text beyond the hounds of the novelist's order and structure. Writing about Alexandre in Le Vent Paraclet Tournier shows that his function is envisaged as one of revelation and deconstruction: `Alexandra en devenant mon seul point de vue m'a devoile la societe heterosexuelle. C'est cela sans douse sa nouveaute et ce qui a tent indigne certains critiques' (VP 256). Tournier stresses that he is not at all radical in creating a homosexual character. This has been done by Balzac, Proust, Gide and many others,(3) as Tournier reminds us: `Car il y a beau temps que le roman a mis en scene des personnages d' homosexuels, et si l'homosexuel n'a pas encore droit de cite dans la societe civile, dans la societe romanesque c'est chose faite' (VP 256). Instead, as Tournier has stated in interview, the originality of Alexandre, and implicitly of the writer in creating him, `c'est d'attaquer l'heterosexualite au lieu de defendre l'homosexualite comme Gide dans Corydon'.(4) For Tournier, `[l']audace des Meteores, c'est de nommer l'heterosexualite' (VP 257). The inversion of the relation between heterosexuality and homosexuality is typical of Tournier's attempt not necessarily to privilege one over the other but rather to stress that either sexuality is a set of learned codes of behavior and systems of belief which can be elucidated from the viewpoint of the other.(5) Tournier might be seen to subscribe to Judith Butler's view that `gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy'.(6) Tournier chooses Alexandre as, in the words of Colin Davis, `the gay deconstructor of Les Meteores'.(7) We in turn may take Davis's statement further to question whether he means that Alexandre is the deconstructor of Les Meteores (who happens to be gay), whether Alexandre deconstructs from the basis of some gay ideology (due to his own sexuality or not as the case may be), or whether in fact there may not be some more intrinsic, intuitive or perhaps artificial relation between Alexandre's sexuality and his textual practice. …
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