[NON BLOG] Blogging, Part x
Jan. 1st, 2005 11:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldOne of the more notable books that I picked up in the year past was the Atheneum hardcover edition of Hervé Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, originally published by Gallimard in 1990 and translated into English by Linda Coverdale for Macmillan the following year. To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (originally, À l'ami qui ne m'a sauvé la vie) is perhaps the most prominent literary work relating to the first stages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in French literature. (Guibert himself died in December 1991, voluntarily through a drug overdose to avoid the ravages of terminal AIDS.) Claims the dustjacket:
To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life is a novel dominated by its narrator's conscious effort to construct timelines, to identify his illness' specific origins (in his specific case, in his friend Muzil's case), to trace his illnesses' development over time by episode, and to describe the consequences of this development for himself and his various intimates, in short, to make sense of everything going on as his life hurtles towards an inevitable conclusion. This sort of effort isn't unusual: Good fiction writers, like good writers generally, are concerned with building coherent narratives, with imposing order onto chaos (or alternatively, or at least generously) with recognizing the deep structures and broad patterns that narrative subjects cannot. In the case of the fatally confusing HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, that kind of narrative was needed, imposed or contrived as this narrative might have been.
What was controversial about To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life was the fact that this book is the first HIV/AIDS roman à clef, unexpectedly describing for mass consumption the personal experiences of Guibert with some of the best and brightest of 1980s France. Marine, with her intermittant excursions into a Hollywood career and her Algerian father and the intermittant malicious gossip that she is HIV infected, is a thinly-veiled Isabelle Adjani. Guibert's description of Adjani--cheerful, possessing a strongly collaborative intelligent, capable of being blithe to the cruelties and suffering she inflicts on her friends--might have captured more attention if not for the fact that Muzil corresponds to Michel Foucault.
Guibert tells the reader everything that there is to be known about Muzil/Foucault's fatal illness: his penchant for heavy S&M, for San Francisco bathhouses and Parisien leather bars; his reaction to the earliest reports in 1981 of a bizarre and fatal epidemic among American gays, with laughter; the persistent dry hacking cough cured only briefly by enough antibiotics to kill a horse; the dementia and mental collapse; the difficult and protracted death; the evolution of his widower Stéphane into a moving factor behind the foundation of the first major HIV/AIDS NGO in France. Elsewhere, in his short story "The Secrets of a Man" Guibert goes further, claiming to recount three formative episodes from the latter's childhood, passed on from Foucault's hospital bed.
Guibert was widely attacked for betraying Foucault's confidences. Le Monde's reaction seems to have been fairly typical. Foucault couldn't control the commentary on his life after his death for obvious reasons. Then again, opposition to the confessional mode--the biographical mode--was central to his philosophies. For Foucault, the acting of confessing and communicating events of one's own life to an audience identified as needing this information--to submit one's actions to the view of individuals given power over oneself by the fact of one's submission to and dependence upon their approval, in whatever form this approval may be manifested--played a central role in the establishment of various hegemonic discourses, as a way for a society to successfully managed its constituent individuals with their whole-hearted consent. He might not have opposed Guibert's fictions. It seems safe to say that had he not died of AIDS, though, his readers shouldn't have waited for his tell-all autobiography. Certainly this matches up with the portrait of Muzil in Guibert as a man concerned with maintaining as much anonymity about his person as possible. (Writing in 1995, Penelope Ironstone-Catterall goes into more, possibly irrelevant, detail on Foucault's thoughts about writing, working in a Guibert reference at the end.)
Why is any of this relevant to blogging? I obviously can't make any generalizations from my experience, but I began blogging back in May 2002 as a byproduct of my coming-out experiences, which I tend to assimilate in discourse to a considerably broader process of developing a much more active and social personality. I only began commenting on the world around me because, well, it was the world around me. My boundaries simply shifted. I mentioned earlier that some of my friends complained that there isn't enough personal content here, and this is true in a strict sense. In a more accurate sense, everything that I write about here has some connection with me, that this weblog is for me a sort of public self-examination. Assuming that Foucault is correct (and sometimes, I like to think of myself as an optimistic Foucauldian), what kind of hegemonic discourse am I buying into?
More to come later as I think of it.
Written in the form of a journal, this novel offers both an unflinchingly honest examination of daily life under a death sentence, and the impact of the disease [of AIDS] on a group of gifted and artist people--a circle of French artists and intellectuals spinning out of control in shared fear and uncertainty, discovering that talent and genius offer little solace: Muzil, the brilliant young philosopher whose dangerous underground exploits have life-and-death consequences; Marine, the eccentric and unreliable movie star who uses her jet-set life as an escape from reality; [. . .] and the narrator himself, who, upon discovering that he is also infected with the virus, runs from doctor to doctor, searching for answers, terrified and yet fascinated by the changes he and his friends are undergoing.
To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life is a novel dominated by its narrator's conscious effort to construct timelines, to identify his illness' specific origins (in his specific case, in his friend Muzil's case), to trace his illnesses' development over time by episode, and to describe the consequences of this development for himself and his various intimates, in short, to make sense of everything going on as his life hurtles towards an inevitable conclusion. This sort of effort isn't unusual: Good fiction writers, like good writers generally, are concerned with building coherent narratives, with imposing order onto chaos (or alternatively, or at least generously) with recognizing the deep structures and broad patterns that narrative subjects cannot. In the case of the fatally confusing HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, that kind of narrative was needed, imposed or contrived as this narrative might have been.
What was controversial about To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life was the fact that this book is the first HIV/AIDS roman à clef, unexpectedly describing for mass consumption the personal experiences of Guibert with some of the best and brightest of 1980s France. Marine, with her intermittant excursions into a Hollywood career and her Algerian father and the intermittant malicious gossip that she is HIV infected, is a thinly-veiled Isabelle Adjani. Guibert's description of Adjani--cheerful, possessing a strongly collaborative intelligent, capable of being blithe to the cruelties and suffering she inflicts on her friends--might have captured more attention if not for the fact that Muzil corresponds to Michel Foucault.
Guibert tells the reader everything that there is to be known about Muzil/Foucault's fatal illness: his penchant for heavy S&M, for San Francisco bathhouses and Parisien leather bars; his reaction to the earliest reports in 1981 of a bizarre and fatal epidemic among American gays, with laughter; the persistent dry hacking cough cured only briefly by enough antibiotics to kill a horse; the dementia and mental collapse; the difficult and protracted death; the evolution of his widower Stéphane into a moving factor behind the foundation of the first major HIV/AIDS NGO in France. Elsewhere, in his short story "The Secrets of a Man" Guibert goes further, claiming to recount three formative episodes from the latter's childhood, passed on from Foucault's hospital bed.
Guibert was widely attacked for betraying Foucault's confidences. Le Monde's reaction seems to have been fairly typical. Foucault couldn't control the commentary on his life after his death for obvious reasons. Then again, opposition to the confessional mode--the biographical mode--was central to his philosophies. For Foucault, the acting of confessing and communicating events of one's own life to an audience identified as needing this information--to submit one's actions to the view of individuals given power over oneself by the fact of one's submission to and dependence upon their approval, in whatever form this approval may be manifested--played a central role in the establishment of various hegemonic discourses, as a way for a society to successfully managed its constituent individuals with their whole-hearted consent. He might not have opposed Guibert's fictions. It seems safe to say that had he not died of AIDS, though, his readers shouldn't have waited for his tell-all autobiography. Certainly this matches up with the portrait of Muzil in Guibert as a man concerned with maintaining as much anonymity about his person as possible. (Writing in 1995, Penelope Ironstone-Catterall goes into more, possibly irrelevant, detail on Foucault's thoughts about writing, working in a Guibert reference at the end.)
Why is any of this relevant to blogging? I obviously can't make any generalizations from my experience, but I began blogging back in May 2002 as a byproduct of my coming-out experiences, which I tend to assimilate in discourse to a considerably broader process of developing a much more active and social personality. I only began commenting on the world around me because, well, it was the world around me. My boundaries simply shifted. I mentioned earlier that some of my friends complained that there isn't enough personal content here, and this is true in a strict sense. In a more accurate sense, everything that I write about here has some connection with me, that this weblog is for me a sort of public self-examination. Assuming that Foucault is correct (and sometimes, I like to think of myself as an optimistic Foucauldian), what kind of hegemonic discourse am I buying into?
More to come later as I think of it.
