AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures , and: La Littérature et le sida: archéologie des représentations d'une maladie (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews Jean-Pierre Boulé. HIV Stories: The Archeology of AIDS Writing in France, 1985-1988. Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 184. With the advent of new treatments, critical work on the literature of AIDS has become scarce. In recent years, international attention has been largely redirected toward developing countries where AIDS rages on beyond the most pessimistic estimates, while a veil of silence has once again fallen upon Western countries where the epidemic is far from over, and from which most AIDS literature , whether fictional or testimonial in form, had originated. Jean-Pierre Boulé's new book, HIV Stories, focuses on the first decade of the epidemic in France where near complete silence about AIDS for years unleashed a public health disaster unparalleled in Europe at the time. It is from this period of so-called dédramatisation that Boulé unearths mostly forgotten texts and gives us a useful warning about what the consequences of our current silence could be. Not surprisingly, and although his theoretical approach is plural and adapted to each text, Boulé is most effective when he analyzes his corpus in the light of the cultural and political context of the period. The first part of the book is devoted to three fictionalized texts whose authors and publishers are revealed to be complicit with dominant exclusionary discourses of the time. Analyzing what he calls the "just punishment" narrative structuring some early AIDS writing, Boulé shows how the French literary establishment and traditions have contributed to the stigmatization of people with AIDS, particularly independent women and gay men whose non-normative sexuality is seen as the cause of their disease. In the second part, the book turns toward testimonial texts by Michel Simonin, Jean-Paul Aran, and Alain Emmanuel Dreuilhe, all three gay men and all three largely neglected today, but who have paved the way for such writers as Hervé Guibert and Cyril Collard, whose work was met with great enthusiasm a few years later. Why were these early gay witnesses ignored? Again the literary establishment , with the active complicity of the media and a seldom acknowledged Catholic tradition, managed to frame these first-person stories within the mode of confession (in the Foucauldian sense) and neutralize them as self-incrimination. It wasn't until the creation of ACT UP-Paris allowed the expression of a collective, combative gay voice that AIDS counterdiscourses started to emerge, and the epidemic was finally confronted with some degree of effectiveness. Sharply focused and often movingly written (particularly when recounting the injustices Simonin had to face), Boulé's study demonstrates the urgent need to periodize and historicize the epidemic. He takes us back to a time that only seems distant today because it uneasily reminds us that discrimination, hatred, and stupidity are not always the sorry prerogative of the fanatic fringe. Indeed, less than fifteen years ago, they were the norm. I hope this book will be translated and read in France, a country so utterly convinced of its inherent enlightenment that it can never face up to its not-so-glorious, not-so-distant past without tearing itself apart. David Caron University of Michigan David Caron. AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Pp. χ + 204. $19.95 soft cover. Stéphane Spoiden. La Littérature et le sida: archéologie des représentations d'une maladie. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2001. Pp. 232. € 16.50. Par les généalogies qu'ils élisent, David Caron et Stéphane Spoiden agencent des regards complémentaires sur les enjeux dont la littérature du sida a été et est toujours le théâtre en France. 98 Fall 2003 Book Reviews En optant pour La Débâcle de Zola et Le Journal du voleur de Genet, Caron démontre brillamment comment la métaphore de la dégénérescence dont l'homosexuel va devenir la figure emblématique a culturellement institué les paradigmes autour desquels les négociations sociales et politiques des identités sexuelles vont se jouer tout au long du XXe siècle. Si cette anxiété identitaire héritée du XIXe siècle joue...