Alcibiades at the Door ― Gay Discourses in French Literature

Focusing on works by Rene Crevel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, and Herve Guibert, this book studies how the figures of homosexuality function at the limits of narrative, as part of the deep structure of narrative, and at the border between public and private discourse.
The first three chapters follow the difference between inside and outside, between public and private, between what is known and what can only be surmised. The homosexual Rene Crevel, who is both inside Surrealism and outside it, forces us to reread the marginalized figure of homosexuality in Surrealism. Crevel is discussed in light of his most important work, Mon corps et moi, a sustained effort to negotiate the problems of public and private personae.
Long before concentrating on Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre often turned to the subject of homosexuality in his writings of the 1930s and 1940s. The figures and forms of homosexuality in Sartre's work are shown to relate to a phenomenology of perception, to a persistence of the relation between vision and knowledge, and to a set of narrative ploys that put Sartre's own relation to homosexuality in a new light. The last of these three chapters focuses on Roland Barthes, with a retrospective glance at Andre Gide, through an examination of their travel and confessional writings. Discourses of homosexuality are related to discourse about social power, dominant structures, and a model of colonialism.
The final chapter examines the AIDS-related works of Herve Guibert, which are both a meditation on and an exploration of AIDS, that most public of private phenomena. It also examines the changing relation between public and private, between the outside world and Guibert's inner world, and between the singularity of literary writing and the nomothetic nature of the public document, all of which change in a world and in an individual affected by AIDS.

Lawrence R. Schehr is Professor of French at the University of South Alabama.