SubStance

In his new book, Lawrence Schehr examines the portrayals of "overtly gay male characters having social and often sexual relations with one another" (1) in French narratives from the first four decades of the twentieth century. Schehr's latest study is unique in that he analyzes these discursive strategies in selected works by both canonical French literary figures—Marcel Proust, André Gide and Jean Cocteau—and popular writers—Francis Carco, Francis de Miomandre, Abel Hermant, Willy (Henri Gauthier-Villars), and Suzanne de Callias (Ménalkas).

In his introduction, Schehr echoes John D'Emilio's observations on gay identity formation under capitalism,¹ when he claims modernism and modern articulations of male same-sex desire emerged along the backdrop of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban landscape. In this context, the (gay) individual experienced new-found freedom, anonymity and subjectivity in the openness of the city separate from traditional familial constraints. Although Schehr does not promote an inherent link between modernism and representations of same-sex desire, he credits modernism with the ability to facilitate new narrative strategies. For example, Proust and Gide abandon the unitary voice of the omniscient, third-person narrator in realism and reintroduce a first-person narrator who presents a "fragmented, multi-layered subjectivity" (4). In point of fact, Schehr's current volume builds on his previous work on realism to examine how "figures of alterity" come into view as homosexual subjects in French modernism.²

Schehr devotes his first two chapters to an in-depth analysis of Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927) where he examines the dismantling (forgetting) and reestablishment (remembering) of knowledge and truth in the social order of this narrative world. Proust [End Page 178] is essential to the modernist project, and Schehr devotes almost half his attention in this book to him, because he offers "literature's most complicated depiction of male homosexuality, a distinct and dynamic multiple representation and hermeneutic that has never been equaled before or since" (9). For Schehr, this is due to two specificities in Proust's narrative: 1) the notion of a gay relationship (i.e. Charlus and Morel) not reduced to sexual acts, but an "emotional dynamic" that draws on opposite-sex models; and 2) the fluidity of sexuality exhibited by Morel (10). In turn, Schehr illustrates throughout the volume how many other French writers adopt these specificities.

In these first chapters, Schehr traces the complex Proustian representational system of desire including references to vision, sound, perspective, writing and reading that "invoke the possibility of homosexuality" (21) in an otherwise heterosexual and aristocratic milieu. He demonstrates how Proust's heterosexual narrator develops a "system of differentiated knowledge about homosexuality" (9) in which he knows about the sexual discovery of his characters (Charlus; Morel) but never explicitly reveals them to Marcel during the first part of Recherche. To this end, the signs of homosexuality are often mitigated through discussions of class difference or class-based signifiers related to appropriate social behaviors. For example, Charlus's sexual tendencies often emerge in relation to his affiliation with and aid to working-class characters (read here as sexual favors). Furthermore, the scenes of homosexual interest between Saint Loup and Marcel involve discussions of writing and literature and the polite exchange of calling cards. The "gaydar" ("coup de sonde" [33]) emitted between Marcel and Saint-Loup or Marcel and Charlus is also couched in the bonds of social amiability. Once the individual enters the aristocratic realm or comes under the gaze of another spectator, such alleged homosexual behaviors disappear or are reinterpreted as "normal" aristocratic acts of Platonic friendship, homophilia and homosociality (63). Hence, Marcel never exhibits an informed understanding of such glances nor does he ever name such desire because this would disrupt the integrative nature of the bourgeois narrative project.

In his second chapter, Schehr continues his examination of sexuality and homosexual desire in Recherche which becomes increasingly apparent to Marcel with the introduction of Morel. For example, Schehr illustrates how Morel appears in a brothel scene in which he participates...