BEYOND SEXUALITY? ERIC JOURDAN'S LE SONGE D'ALCIBIADE

Abstract

Known initially for his sulphurous novel, Les Mauvais anges, written in 1956 when he was sixteen and then banned for nearly thirty years,1 Éric Jourdan has since published some ten novels, collections of stories and plays. Whilst Les Mauvais anges describes the torrid love affair between two adolescents, Pierre and Gérard, ‘double[s] et unique[s] comme des jumeaux’,2 later works, such as the trilogy, Charité, Révolte and Sang,3 recount a different kind of ‘chasse à l'homme’ through the violence done to and by their highly charged young protagonists such as Ian, Roman and Serge. At the same time as releasing some of his earlier texts in new, uncensored versions, such as the combined (re-)publication of two earlier novels, Le Garçon de joie and Sexuellement incorrect in a new ‘texte intégral’ also entitled Le Garçon de joie,4 Jourdan is now also continuing to produce new novels such as Le Songe d'Alcibiade and Aux gémonies.5 Although, in an otherwise positive review of Aux gémonies, Julien Picquart claims that for Jourdan ‘[l]ivre après livre, c'est toujours la même histoire pour lui. […] C'est l'amour du corps masculin, le trouble qu'il fait naître, les envies qu'il suscite’,6 a closer look at Le Songe d'Alcibiade reveals a rather different Jourdan from that of earlier texts – a Jourdan where a stronger radical thrust is, perhaps, undercutting the still refreshingly explicit homosex and where a different kind of socio-historical contextualization is re-framing not only homosex(-uality) but sexuality itself.7