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The Inverted Gaze: Queering the French Literary Classics in America

Reviewed by Edward Starkins

By Francois Cusset
Translated by David Homel
Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011;
146 pp.; $17.95

Francois Cusset, a professor of American Studies at the University of Paris, has written The Inverted Gaze: Queering the French Literary Classics in America, a book that is nominally concerned with how French literature is being taught in those boroughs of North American academia where “queer theory” flourishes. Cusset takes pains to explain how “Queerory” differs radically from the more conservative tradition of “gay studies.” His book is in some respects a polemic directed against the French “gay intellectual establishment,” which, says Cusset, has attacked him “a traitor to the gay and lesbian cause.” (The old-line scholars were allegedly outraged not only by the contents of Professor Cusset’s earlier work, French Theory, but by the fact that it was printed with a pink cover.) The Inverted Gaze issues a strident call for “a new lexicon, a code of affinities that will frighten our Sorbonne guardians . . .”

“Queerory had no small ambitions,” Cusset says of the radical critical movement that originated in Michel Foucault’s “sexual constructivism” and a seminal 1990 essay by Teresa de Lauretis. Queerory inspires Cusset’s approach to “homo-reading” as described in a prefatory quotation from Felix Guattari: “In my opinion, it’s not worthwhile asking oneself about homosexual writers. But instead we are better off seeking what is homosexual in any great writer, even if he is a heterosexual.”

What has this to do with “queering” French lit on U. S. campuses? Cusset, a former director of the New York-based French Publishers’ Agency, shows only an occasional, rather dismissive interest in this subject. (“American homo-theoretical jargon is obsessed with the niceties of Marlowe’s rectal grammar and the urinary allegory in Lamartine’s work.”)

In The Inverted Gaze, Francois Cusset focuses on the venerable French gay literary triumvirate of Gide, Genet, and Proust, although there are extensive meditations on Rabelais, Baudelaire, and Flaubert (regarded as a “queer old uncle” solely because his youthful diaries record a diversion with a smallpox-scarred Arab lad in Cairo.) Cusset spends considerable time “queering” that stolid representative of the heterosexual bourgeois norm, Honore de Balzac.

The Inverted Gaze is heavily weighted with doses of French critical ideology, although there are many pleasures in this text for those who are not necessarily inspired by Foucault, Derrida, Barthes et al. Francois Cusset is an elegant, playful, occasionally outrageous writer whose prose abounds with observations that are often obscure but nevertheless interesting: “Homosexuality in Proust’s work is not a fact, an event, but a way of broadcasting, gradual and invasive.” “Exalted prose is always resonant, self-admiring intellectual blasphemy.”

Cusset apologizes for his “aphoristic style” although it fits well with his flare for boisterous intellectual tomfoolery. We are told of “. . . the unexploited potential of peda-gogy, of textual anal-ysis, of works of f®iction and the manipulation of short forms, Japanese and Elizabethan texticules.” Cusset quotes the curious 1749 pamphlet Several Simple Explanations for the Rise of Sodomy in England. Even Cusset’s chapter titles are rollicking good fun: The Liberties of Fuck All, The Bourgeoisie of the Inverted and, my favourite, whatever it means, Renaissance and (De)tumescence. »

From issue #60

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