An examination of the connection between sexuality and suffering - Essay Example

Jean Genet and Herve Guibert occupy a unique place in French literature. In Journal du voleur and To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life both produce fictionalised memoirs which interrogate the very essence of truth and correlate love with suffering, rather than with joy. Genet and Guibert, both self-confessed homosexuals, reject traditional notions of normalcy, of love, of friendship and, significantly, of truth. They live within the parameters of their own interpretations of reality and as their memoirs are written from an unapologetically subjective perspective, readers are often left confused as to whether they are reading fiction or fact. They are, indeed, reading fact; fact as subjectively interpreted by either of the authors mentioned. Within the context of these facts, the relationship between love and suffering is immutable, albeit implicitly, rather than explicitly stated. Journal du voleur is the closest Genet came to writing a traditional autobiography. As D'Asciano (1998) points out, though his other novels incorporate names from the author's life experience, the focus of these novels is to create mythical characters out of names pulled from Genet's reality. The character "Genet" figures in these other novels as the creator/narrator, but it is in the Journal that Genet concentrates on recounting his life experience (D'Asciano, 1998). As White has shown in his biography of Genet, the chronology of events in Journal, while loosely followed, does, in fact, correspond with Genet's life in the late 1930's. What is most important to Genet, however, is not a simple recounting of his life story, but rather the elaboration of his aesthetic preoccupations. It is in this narrative that Genet identifies most clearly his means of literary production, and discusses the relationship of body to text. It is within the context of the stated reality, and as influenced by Genet's own sexual proclivities, that the theme of sexuality and suffering asserts itself. Traditionally, autobiography is a narrative form that has as its primary theme the recounting of the life of the author. The key element in identifying a narrative as autobiographical is, to use the terminology of Philippe Lejeune (1975, p. 1), the pacte autobiographie By identifying the pacte the ideal reader realises without a doubt that the character denoted by "I" is indeed a projection of the author on the page. Genet accomplishes this in Journal principally by providing verifiable statistics regarding his "statut civil," - his date of birth and the circumstances which surrounded it. Though a Genet character exists in Genet's other novels, this information appears only in Journal du voleur. What is most remarkable about this fact is that, rather than stabilizing the identity of the author, by its very nature it destabilises. The fact that Genet was orphaned at a young age, and that he knows only the name of his mother, and not that of his father, puts the author character in an awkward position in a society more patrilineal than most. The Journal is in many ways, an aesthetic treatise, an examination of the ideas and practices that have made Genet a creator. The two fundamental concepts that drive his creation are "beauty," and a vertiginous space that we could call the "vide," or, "nothingness." As may be inferred from Barber's (2004) analysis of Journal, Genet's writing exists in a tense space between the aesthetic attractions of the physical world, and the intellectual imperative of the contemplation of the emptiness of existence. Genet attributes his attraction to the physical world to its beauty. Pinning down a precise meaning of beauty is difficult. In the short entry on "beauty" in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Aquinas is quoted as defining beauty as "that which pleases in the very apprehension of it" (Hondrich, 1995, p. 80). This definition, though vague, does point to two components of the assessment of beauty, the observer and the observed. There is no beauty without a subjectivity to apprehend it. The article goes on to note that the physical beauty of a human being is hard to define in the absence of the desire that is aroused by that person in the beholder. Though philosophers have long searched to provide an understanding of the universality of beauty, we must ask if any assessment of beauty can be truly objective. It would seem that, in order for aesthetic judgements such as beauty to be meaningful, they would have to be understood in the context of subjectivity. Aesthetic philosophy, beginning with Longinus, has chosen to focus on the "sublime," that which transcends mere physical beauty and creates a deeper, more mystical meaning. In his treatise On the Sublime, Longinus says, "sublimity in all its truth and beauty exists in such works as please all men at all times" (107). In this case one might ask if any work could possibly live up to such a general definition. Longinus further elaborates on the nature of the sublime in the following quotation: By some innate power the true sublime uplifts our souls; we are filled with a proud exaltation and a sense of vaunting joy (107). Thus, the sublime is that which transcends the rational to reach the human soul, and the true sublime is that which would have this effect on "all men at all times." In the modem era, discussions of the sublime were revived by Boileau and Kant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Boileau invented the famous term "je ne sais quoi" to describe the presence of the sublime in a work of art (cited in Thormann, 1958, p. 351). By its very nature, this term demonstrates the difficulty of pinning down the ways in which the sublime works on the interpreter of art. The source of the effect is mysterious; the "sublime" escapes qualification. For Boileau, the sublime is an effect of style that is neither provable nor demonstrable (Thormann, 1958). Kant discusses his views on beauty and taste in the Critique of Judgement, published in 1790. Beauty is distinguished from enjoyment, which is subjective and individual. Assessment of beauty, however, does not involve a cognitive process, rather it is contemplative, and springs from disinterested judgement. Judgements of beauty for Kant are always made in relation to nature. Artifice always pales in beauty when compared to the natural, but nature tends to conceal its beauty, and art helps reveal a sense of design and purpose to nature. Surpassing beauty, for Kant, is the sublime. The feeling of the sublime is one of sensory overload, being overwhelmed by power. The sublime is not inherent in the object observed, however, but rather is dependent on the subject. It is within the human imagination, when an excess of sensory data blocks understanding, that the sublime is felt. Beauty and the sublime are important concepts to Kant, because he believes in their universality. Genet does not believe in objective criteria for determining the beautiful, and his use of terms of beauty to describe what is traditionally considered ugly by French society is his way of undermining an objective notion of the beautiful. To this effect, Genet makes the following statement to the bourgeois public about his past writing: Si j'examine ce que j'crivis j'y distingue aujourd'hui, patiemment poursuivie, une volont de rhabilitation des Etres, des objets, des sentiments rpute vils. De les avoir nommes avec les mots qui d'habitude dsignent la noblesse, c'tait peut-tre enfantin, facile: j'allais vite. J'uti1isais le moyen le plus court, mais je ne l'eusse pas fait si, en moi-mme, ces objets, ces sentiments (la trahison, le vol, la lchet, la peur) n'eussent appel le qualificatif rserve d'habitude et par vous a leurs contraires. Sur-le-champ, au moment que j'crivais, peut-tre ai-je voulu magnifier des sentiments, des attitudes, ou des objets qu'honorait un garon magnifique devant la beaut de qui je me courbais, mais aujourd'hui que je me relis, j'ai oublie ces garon, il ne reste d'eux que cet attribut que j'ai chante, et c'est lui qui resplendira dans mes livres d'un clat gal a l'orgueil, a l'hrosme, a I' audace. Je ne leur ai pas cherche d'excuses. Pas de justification. J'ai voulu qu'ils aient droit aux honneurs du Nom. Cette opration, pour moi n'aura pas t vaine. J'en prouve dj l'efficacit. En embellissant ce que vous mprisez, voici que mon esprit, lasse de ce jeu qui consiste a nommer d'un nom prestigieux ce qui bouleversa mon cur, refuse tout qualificatif (122). In this passage, it is evident how Genet's valorisation of what others see as vile is central to his aesthetic project. It is also clear how this process is directly inspired by the physical beauty of men, and how this beauty inspires Genet to yield to them. This physical beauty, however, is fleeting, and what remains in its wake is the artistic production that it inspired, and the liberation this production allows of Genet's "esprit." Genet's writing has been a transcription of his experience of the beautiful, of the men who overwhelmed his heart. The way in which beauty as a concept is understood, however, is mutable, changing from one individual to another. This is underlined by Genet's valorisation of the vile. Genet ultimately succeeds in re-placing the notion of beauty in the realm of subjectivity by undermining the supposed "objective" standards of beauty that guide bourgeois culture. The term "beauty," may, of course, also be applied to the abstract. The notion of beauty is first of all physical for Genet, and it is only through understanding physical beauty that Genet can begin to "flesh out" what he understands by the concept "moral beauty." Early on in the Journal, in speaking of a lover, the narrator asserts: De la beaut de son expression dpend la beaut d'un acte moral. Dire qu'il est beau d'ide dj qu'il le sera. Reste a le prouver. S'en chargent les images, c'este-dire les correspondances avec les magnificences du monde physique. L'acte est beau s'il provoque, et dans notre gorge fait dcouvrir, le chant (23-4). In the first sentence, Genet reverses the clauses of a more traditional Christian definition of beauty. In this tradition, the physical manifestation of beauty relies upon the moral goodness/beauty that produces it. Genet here affirms the opposite, that the beauty of the moral act depends upon the physical manifestation of beauty in the face of the young lover. According to Genet, the beauty of the physical world is what gives one ideas about beauty in the first place. What is necessary to provide "proof" of beauty in language is a correspondence with the splendours of the physical world. He completes the quotation with an assertion that the act is beautiful if it provokes song. This song, when transcribed, becomes literature, and opens up a new world of beautiful production. Physical beauty inspires poetic beauty. Physical beauty and language are intertwined, but beauty originates for Genet in the physical. This is the essence of Genet's art, the transcription of his experience of the beautiful into words, which then recreate beauty in the subjectivity of the reader. Genet states: Le but de ce rcit, c'est d'embellir mes aventures rvolues, c'est-i-dire obtenir d'elles la beaut, dcouvrir en elles ce qui aujourd'hui suscitera le chant, seule preuve de cette beaut (232). It is possible for Genet to create beauty, to bring it out of his past adventures. He will discover in these adventures that which will give rise to a song, which will then offer the proof of that beauty. The mark of beauty in the world belongs to its textual recreation. Though Genet's experience of beauty is subjective, there is no proof of beauty without writing. This writing can, in turn, anchor this experience in verbal patterns that will create (ideally) the effect of the beautiful for the reader. Genet's choice of subject matter, however, assures that not all readers will find his work beautiful. A cornerstone in Genet's understanding of beauty is virility. Genet states: Si je voulais qu'ils fussent beaux, policiers et voyous, c'est afin que leurs corps clatants se vengeassent du mpris oh vous les tenez. Des muscles durs, un visage harmonieux devaient chanter et glorifier les immondes fonctions de mes amis, vous les imposer ... Policiers et criminels sont l'manation la plus virile de ce monde. On jette sur elle un voile. Elle est vos parties honteuses, qu'avec vous cependant je nomme les parties nobles (220). It would be easy to see this reliance on the force of male virility as reductive. It may seem that Genet does not offer a true path to the reconsideration of the production of beauty, but rather simply offers the opposite, backed up by bullying, as a substitution for the dominant paradigm. Of course, true physical bullying is not possible through the medium of the written word. Genet believes that the simple fact of describing the overwhelming strength and beauty of these men will subdue bourgeois readers and make them acquiesce. In this way, Genet will have inspired in the reader the same vertiginous feelings that he has when faced with this virile beauty. The reader will be forced (metaphorically) to acquiesce to the force of the male body. Beauty for Genet is firmly linked to the physical, and especially to male bodies. But in order to reproduce this notion of beauty, Genet is forced to use words. It is important to underline here that Genet's project is not primarily to describe the beautiful bodies he sees, but to describe the emotion that is provoked in him by this beauty. In describing this feeling, he wants to communicate to the reader his apprehension of a higher plane of meaning, something that it is difficult to gain access to. He says: Pour obtenir ici la posie, c'est-a-dire communiquer au lecteur une motion que j'ignorais alors-que j'ignore encore-mes mots appellent a la somptuosit charnelle, a l'apparat des crmonies d'ici-bas, hlas, non a l'ordonnance, qu'on voudrait rationnelle, de la notre, mais a la beaut des Coques mortes ou moribondes. J'ai cru, en l'exprimant, la dbarrasser de ce pouvoir qu'exercent les objets, les organes, les matires, les mtaux, les humeurs, auxquels longtemps un culte fit rendu (diamants, pourpre, sang, sperme, fleurs, oriflammes, yeux, ongles, or, couronnes, colliers, m e s , lames, automne, vent, chimres, mains, pluie, crpe), et me dfaire du monde qu'ils signifient (non de celui qu'ils nomment mais de celui qu'ils voquent et dans quoi je m'embourbe), ma tentative reste vaine. C'est toujours a eux que j'ai recours. Ils prolifrent et me happent (190). In order to obtain true poetry, Genet wants to ground his words in carnal sumptuousness, and somehow surpass the cult of the object and strip the objects bare of signification. He wants to remove poetic associations from physical objects, and create them anew. In writing, however, he finds it impossible to escape the accumulated meanings associated with these objects. His ultimate goal is access to an emotion of which he has, so far, been ignorant, a place of meaning which lies beyond what he has yet been able to feel or describe. Ultimately, physical objects represent the core of experience. They are what one can hold onto as a basis for truth and beauty. He writes: Sur les systmes plantaires, les soleils, les nbuleuses, les galaxies, une mditation, fulgurante, ou nonchalante, ne me permettra, ne me consolera jamais de ne pas contenir le monde: devant l'Univers je suis perdu mais le simple attribut d'une virilit puissante me rassure. Cessent les penses inquites, les angoisses. Ma tendresse-la reprsentation dans le marbre ou l'or, et la plus admirable, ne vaut pas le modle de chair-dpose sur cette force des bracelets de folle avoine (229). The power of the reproduction never matches that of the original body, and therefore the power of art has its limits in a philosophical realm. It is the connection to the physical that is most important, and provides consolation to Genet in the face of the anguish created by the contemplation of the universe. The written word will never accomplish the communication of the ultimate experience for Genet, that of having a body to hold onto when faced with the vast universe of meaning. This vast and indefinite space is one that many critics and contemporary philosophers have attempted to describe. This space is similar to the "disaster" which Maurice Blanchot (1986) describes in The Writing of the Disaster. The "disaster" of which Blanchot writes resides in that which cannot be written. It is the disaster alone, he says, which holds mastery at a distance (9). The disaster represents the evacuation of all of the metaphorical associations of language in pursuit of pure truth. Writing about such a phenomenon is inherently difficult. For Blanchot (1986), the ultimate question is, "How many efforts are required in order not to write-in order that, writing, I not write, in spite of everything" (11). Readers are faced in Blanchot's writing with a gaping chasm between writing and non-writing (silence) wherein lies what we can no longer call truth, but perhaps the contemplation of truth; the oblivion that is not silence, but the contemplation of silence: thought, not language. Blanchot (1986) is writing toward a place of expression for that which we cannot express, and form of expression that will lie between language and silence, between presence and absence. This, it is quite possible to argue, is just the sort of space that Genet is referring to when he writes of his project in the Journal du voleur in the following manner: "Ce livre, : poursuite de l'impossible Nullit" (106). In discussing his artistic sensibility, Genet writes the following: Je vous indique, de la sorte, ce que pouvait tre ma forme de sensibilit. La nature m'inquitait. Mon amour pour Stilitano, le fracas de son irruption dans ma misre, je ne sais quoi, me livrrent aux lments. Mais ceux-ci sont mchants. Afin de les apprivoiser je les voulus contenir. Je refusai de leur denier toute cruaut, au contraire, je les flicitai d'en possder tant, je les flattai. Une telle opration ne se pouvant russir par la dialectique, j'eus recours a la magie, c'est-a-dire a une sorte de prdisposition voulue, une intuitive complicit avec la nature. Le langage ne m'eut t d'aucun secours (79). Genet's love for Stilitano throws him to the elements. He finds nature disturbing, and wants to tame it somehow, to incorporate it into his understanding. He realises that this will not be possible through dialogue and reason, and thus will have recourse to magic. Language ceases to be effective to him in this domain. Genet finally reaches a point where he has exhausted what may be expressed through writing, and Journal du voleur is the last narrative Genet wrote until faced with his death nearly 40 years later. Guibert's 1990 novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life follows on the same themes picked up by Genet. As Buot (1999) emphasises, it similarly must be understood, in the context of a fictionalised memoir which interrogates the status of truth in its very form. Just as Genet calls into question the modern notion that sexual desire bespeaks the truth of subjectivity, Guibert plays with the popular genre of the truth-revealing literary memoir. Predicated upon a notion of confessional authorial authenticity, the memoir becomes for Guibert a medium through which this authenticity is given lie. Hence, the confessed "truths" emanating from this book should never be trusted as such. Although a self-identified gay man, Guibert resists the truth-telling imperatives of out-politics. In both form and content, Buot (1999) asserts that To the Friend expresses a desire not to tell its author's truth and a desire to be anonymous. The title itself-which is in fact not a title at all but rather an address-attests to this desire; it resists entitlement, deflects the compulsion to identify oneself and others, and displaces the proper name with a dedication. Indeed, this text skips the formalities of names and titles in favour of a vague dedication. Judging from the first person narrative voice written from the perspective of the character "Herve Guibert," the life not saved is most obviously his, and the friend who did not save it is unreliable Bill, an American who wields power over Guibert by promising, yet never delivering, AIDS-treatment. If Bill is the only friend to which the title refers, why, then, after not saving the narrator's life, is he still considered a friend The protagonist relates to other characters above all as a friend; thus, is there more than one friend, and more than one conception of friendship at work in the title Guibert the protagonist certainly spews bile at his companions throughout the hundred chapters of the novel, and it might even be argued that these expressions of hate frame the narrative itself. Toward the beginning of Chapter Three: "me - a man who has just discovered that he doesn't like his fellow man, no, I definitely don't like them, I rather hate them instead" (4), and then finally in the last chapter: "Just how deep do you want me to sink Fuck you, Bill!" (246). At the same time, Guibert devotes the majority of the book's pages to loving descriptions, portraits and stories of friends. If anything is to be grasped from this contradictory rendering of friendship, it is that love and hate are not mutually exclusive. Similarly, the traditional boundaries between self/other, life/death, singular/multiple, and sexual/non-sexual relations are also blurred if not demolished in Guibert's relations. This raises questions concerning the "my life" of the title/dedication: is it only Herve-the protagonist's life not saved How are we to understand "life" and the possessive pronoun "my" As the plot progresses-disjunctively, disruptively-Herve becomes doubled, multiplied. Concerning his lover-friend Jules (with whom he shares a birthday): "I now had the feeling that we were part of one and the same being" (153); concerning Jules's family (the Club of Five): "the HIV virus had allowed me to become part of their blood" (194); concerning Rainieri, his blood-work accomplice: "So we advanced side by side, like shadows of each other, going at the same speed in the same direction" (218); concerning an episode of mistaken identity at the lab: "we decided that a certain Margherita had provided the contents of Herve Guibert's test tubes" (222); and, finally, concerning Guibert's last meeting with Bill: "I kept splitting into two people during the dinner" (242). Furthermore, this "self' becomes increasingly phantasmal: a ghost rather than a stable and autonomous ego; a self shot through with both memories of friends who have died and encounters with the living whose deaths are imminent; a presence whose absence becomes increasingly visible in the daily confrontation with death. In Guibert's rendering of friendship a shared, spectral self thus effaces individual identity: the possessive pronoun "my" becomes multiple, the life not saved plural. In the face of AIDS, Guibert is forced to reconceptualise the friend and with a new conception of friendship comes a new conception of life and subjectivity. Yet each friend, including Guibert, is left to die his or her own death, and death confronts these friends at every turn. "As soon as he'd gone I felt better: I was my own best nurse, for I was the only person able to cope with my suffering" (154). Though the friends in the novel often merge to the point of where it is impossible to distinguish the one from the other, a recognition of each other's final absence is their sole commonality. This uncomfortable fact, and the ensuing discomfort that manifests itself in each interaction, becomes the ethical backbone of Guibert's conception of friendship. This ethic of discomfort takes on a new meaning when, in the time of AIDS, the finitude of friendship becomes so unavoidable. The idea of a love without transcendence becomes literalised in friendships ending in AIDS deaths. Immersed in death's ubiquity, Guibert-the-protagonist is forced to become a philosopher of friendship, to re-evaluate his understanding of life, subjectivity, and relationality. Not surprisingly, this re-evaluation occurs most intensely through the death of Muzil, the character most likely named after the German writer Robert Musil whose novel The Man Without Qualities resonates in Guibert's text. "I understood for the first time that Muzil was going to die and very soon; a certainty that disfigured me in the eyes of passersby, for my face disintegrated, washed away by my tears and shattered into fragments by my cries" (92). Guibert sees his "selfs" disappearance, his own becoming-man-without-qualities, in the death of Muzil. In the recognition of the friend's death, Guibert mourns his own passing: "it wasn't so much my friend's last agony I was describing, it was my own" (91). The recognition and acceptance of finitude brings with it a new conception of life and relationality: death is no longer the opposite of life, but immanent to it; death and absence are at the very core of life and thus life must be lived as if each and every moment is the last. As a result, friendship emerges at the point where relating with the Other is impossible. This is a difficult, if not disturbing, relation to imagine. Maurice Blanchot's (1997) eulogy for Georges Bataille entitled "Friendship" resonates with Guibert's conception and perhaps helps clarify what Guibert is trying to define. Blanchot (1997, p. 291) writes: We must give up trying to know those to whom we are linked by something essential; by this I mean we must greet them in the relation with the unknown in which they greet us as well, in our estrangement. Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode, yet into which all the simplicity of life enters, passes by way of the recognition of the common strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends but only to speak to them, not to make of them a topic of conversations (or essays), but the movement of understanding in which, speaking to us, they reserve, even on the most familiar terms, an infinite distance, the fundamental separation on the basis of which what separates becomes relation. The finitude that Guibert recognises in himself and others, as Blanchot reminds us, can never be shared. Upon the recognition of the infinite distance between singular lives, however, new relational possibilities emerge. On the status of gay bathhouses amidst the pandemic, Muzil remarks: "The baths have never been so popular and now they're fantastic. This danger lurking everywhere has created new complicities, new tenderness, new solidarities. Before no one ever said a word; now we talk to one another" (22). AIDS merely magnifies the impermanence that is always present in the self, in the Other, and in the friend. For Guibert, HIV is "a disease that gave death time to live and its victims time to die, time to discover time, and in the end to discover life, so in a way those green monkeys of Africa provided us with a brilliant modem invention If life was nothing but the presentiment of death and the constant torture of wondering when the axe would fall, then AIDS, by setting an official limit to our life span made us men who were fully conscious of our lives, and freed us from our ignorance" (164). If AIDS is a "brilliant modern invention" that shortens a life span yet allows Guibert to live more fully and more consciously, is the virus his friend Or, if the friend is one who acknowledges the finitude in another and relates with this other precisely at the point of unrelatability-and thus never truly possesses the power to save the other's life-is the friend not Bill, but perhaps Muzil If so, Sarkonak (2000, p. 107) argues that this entire book could be Guibert's response to the letter from his "Cher Michel," his contribution to the joint production of a discourse of impersonal friendship. In the final analysis, both works are intimately concerned with the exposition of their respective author's interpretation of his own life, friendships and the loves he suffered. The community of friends and lovers which emerge in both novels are ones that intensifies alienation, ones that emphasise that which cannot be shared, and ones that are founded upon estrangement in regard to the unknown. While these friends seem in one way or another united through their marginalised sexual identities and practices, the importance of the sex act is diminished in relation to the bonds that develop out of it; bonds which give rise to suffering and ultimately intensify loneliness and alienation. Bibliography Barber, S. (2004) Jean Genet. London: Reaktion Books, 2004. Blanchot, M. (1997) Friendship. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford UP. Blanchot, M. (1986) The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Buot, F. (1999) Herve Guibert: Le jeune homme et la mort. Paris: B. Grasset. D'Asciano, J.L (1998) La famille, la mort, l'amour dans l'oeuvre de Jean Genet. Villeneuve d' Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. 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