Confessing and Withholding Secrets: Masculine Anxieties in Gide and Proust

Abstract

Confessing and Withholding Secrets: Masculine Anxieties in Gide and Proust Keith Cohen WHAT A MAN DOES WITH HIS SEX ORGAN (and with whom)—beginning with the discovery of masturbation, including pre-martial sexual relations, marriage, and extra-marital affairs— has been the object of intense anxiety for the male subject. Moreover, this topic has been subjected to equally intense scrutiny by proponents of telling all. In another realm, Jane Austen's contention that any young prosperous man must be in search of a wife, or Freud's contention that all novel plots belong to a broad over-arching mega-genre he called "the family romance," suggests that literature is the perfect locus for dealing frankly with this seemingly delicate issue. It is in the novel that characters divulge and withhold information from one another in order to motivate the story; this literary form thus becomes the vehicle for a secularized confession, which Foucault claims to be the fountainhead for our modern compulsion to talk about sex. Tracing a line of development from the religious sacrament to a quasi-scientific study of sexuality, or "scientia sexualis," Foucault discerns what he calls a "screendiscourse ," a mode by means of which sexuality was talked about as an avoidance mechanism making it possible not to confront "the unbearable, too hazardous truth of sex."1 What makes the deception of confession all the more scandalous is that it fosters a cockeyed view of power. One has to be completely taken in by this internal ruse of confession in order to attribute a fundamental role to censorship, to taboos regarding speaking and thinking; one has to have an inverted image of power in order to believe that all these voices which have spoken so long in our civilization—repeating the formidable injunction to tell what one is and what one does, what one recollects and what one has forgotten, what one is thinking and what one thinks he is not thinking—are speaking to us of freedom. (Foucault 60) Thus, far from liberating the confessing subject from the burden of a putative sin, confession reinforces a power relation in which the subject remains vulnerable to exposure. On the other side of this relation is the interlocutor, an authority figure in whose presence, or virtual presence, one always confesses (Foucault 61). In what follows I aim to use the confessional power relation as the foundation for my analysis of the way Gide's and Proust's masculinities are 68 Fall 2003 Cohen enacted. Since we are dealing with a narrative framework in L'Immoraliste and À la recherche du temps perdu, we have in both cases a speaking subject and a virtual listening subject (or group of subjects). By superimposing these narrative structures over the power relations of the confession, I aim to generate a means of addressing the following questions: To what extent do the first-person narrations operate as screen-discourses, in which what is talked about serves to disguise the substance of the narratives? How does the act of confessing implicate, or fail to implicate, the subject speaking in an act he regrets, and how does this act unburden him, if it does so at all? How does the interlocutor function as actual or virtual listener, and, since the interlocutor does not speak, how, if at all, can this relative inaudibility be empowered? Few works of the modern era resonate so clearly in the confessional mode as Gide's L'Immoraliste (1902). Structured in the manner of an "impressionist " tale, a form favored by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford around the turn of the century, it could be interestingly compared to the most famous of these, Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899). In both works the main part of the story is narrated by the protagonist to a number of interlocutors ; and the scene of telling is framed by a brief description of how speaker and listeners have gathered together. In Gide, the implied reader is actually figured by the président du conseil, brother of one of Michel's interlocutors, who has requested a full account of Michel's story. Accompanying the structure of self-avowal is a dynamic of libidinal...