Staging Dialogues and Performing Encounters in French AIDS Narratives

Abstract

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) testimonies often stage two different spaces of dialogue, a recurrent and traumatic dialogue with the mirror and a posthumous dialogue with the former lover who has died of AIDS. This article explores how the first of these two "personal" dialogues is rhetorically organized as a site of both subjective positioning and social negotiation for gay writers such as Christophe Bourdin, Gilles Barbedette, Bertrand Duquénelle, and Pascal de Duve—authors who all died of AIDS before or shortly after their books were published.1 Witnessing one's own dying of AIDS represents a provocative gesture through which the author transgresses the silencing injunctions that enforce the "public" death of the testimonial subject by framing AIDS pain and dying as a "private" matter—which is to say a matter that does not really matter. Ultimately, these specular and elegiac dialogues perform various types of encounters, affirming the necessity to reformulate prior forms of social belonging in the AIDS (con)text. I will argue that the specular and posthumous dialogues staged within AIDS diaries not only exhibit the crises that radically alter the relationships to oneself and to one's interlocutors, but perform a social "noise" that no longer allows the reader to witness from a distance or to remain disengaged as to his or her role in the social survival of the testimonial voice. Reading these narratives proves, then, a haunting experience. It requires us to elaborate forms of response that perpetuate the voice and the encounter AIDS testimonial literature seeks to actualize through the practice of reading. As in Duquénelle's L'Aztèque (1993)2 when his lover tells him that [End Page 95] he has AIDS, the testimonial gesture requires from the reader—who, like Duquénelle, is positioned as an interlocutor—a response that no longer denies the discontinuities AIDS imposes. Both the reader and the person bearing witness to his experience of AIDS are individually—which does not mean similarly—affected by the pain they face through the testimonial dynamic: il m'annonce qu'il va mal, qu'il est malade, qu'il a le sida.... J'essaie d'insinuer le doute, si vainement que je n'arrive qu'à me convaincre qu'il est vraiment malade. Je me tais, conscient que je m'enfonce davantage à chaque mot. Il me regarde sans rien dire. Je devine qu'il n'attend rien de moi. Je devine qu'il attend tout de moi. Je suis happé. Je me laisse emporter sans recul. (21) Duquénelle's ambivalent reading of his friend's expectations not only reveals an anxiety about responding to the testimonial address but suggests that the interlocutor is doomed to be inadequate and filled with guilt. In AIDS dialogues, the author faces another enunciative challenge since he or she must provoke social forms of recognition while undoing social denial and indifference: "Avec qui partager l'annonce de cette déchéance? C'est tellement ennuyeux une maladie" (22) asks Barbedette in his posthumously published diary Mémoires d'un jeune homme devenu vieux (1993).3 Since his suffering itself lacks social recognition, Barbedette draws the reader's attention to the testimonial challenge he must overcome. The reader thus becomes aware that bearing witness to AIDS is a social practice that cannot occur without negotiating its conditions of possibility. As Jacques Derrida has shown in his analysis of Maurice Blanchot's short testimony The Instant of My Death, the witness to an experience that has no cultural precedent and is furthermore perceived as a disruption of the social body, must poetically, tactically, and rhetorically create the conditions of its readability.4 Thus AIDS testimonial literature stresses the whole problem of the relation between a supposed culture, a competence without criteria, and the aptitude to bear witness. For the witness must both conform to given criteria and at the same time invent, in quasi-poetic fashion, the norms of his...