Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature

Modern Language Review, The, July, 2003 by David Houston Jones

Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature. By EDWARD J. HUGHES. Cambridge, London, and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001. xii 209pp. 40 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-5216-4296-5.

The opening of Edward Hughes's book sets up Genet's rousing call to 'betray the whites that we are' (p. 1) as the model for an enquiry into self-critical and self-contemplative engagements with otherness. Genet is seen as both a highly committed writer and a purveyor of self-indulgent rhetoric, aptly opening Hughes's debate on the limits of critical engagement and self-congratulatory exoticism. Hughes is concerned to examine the element of self-aggrandizement implicit in the projects of Genet and Camus as much as in those of Loti, Montherlant, Proust, and Gauguin. The presentation of Loti's 'aggressive promotion of surface textures' (p. 16) is persuasive, and does indeed anticipate the parodic sexual-exotic of Proust's Charlus. Charlus, as Hughes argues, creates a secret homosexual language through his fake xenophobia, playing off one social prejudice (racism) against another (homophobia). Gauguin's Noa noa, meanwhile, is both exoticist fantasy and critique of colonialism: Hughes explores the tension between Gauguin's criticism of Western values and his apparently naive personal myth of savagery. With Camus, the double bind is that between the critique of colonialism and the defence of the pieds noirs. The line this time is drawn between political critique and a relapse into a fantasmatic version of home space, but the central argument is the same, and just as persuasively made: the centre is crucially implicated in its periphery. The marginal perhaps characterized Genet's thought more than that of any other twentieth-century writer, and the heavily committed, but also implosively ironic, engagement with the marginal, and specifically with the Palestinian cause in Genet's Un captif amoureux, forms the subject of Hughes's last chapter. Genet's descriptions of cross-dressing suicide bombers have lost neither their raw power nor their impact on our sensibilities. They take the relatively well-known undermining of social reality through the exposure of its inherent theatricality in Genet's plays into new territory while posing intractable ethical problems, and Hughes's excellent account of Genet's last book is a very welcome contribution to the field. Is this, however, really the same self-aware 'malaise' with which the argument opens? Although the theatrical persists, surely it is of an entirely different kind from that seen in Loti's delighted performance of otherness, as he wraps himself in a fox-skin overcoat and imagines he is a dervish. One may have reservations about Hughes's claim that the different versions of otherness discussed here arise from a comparable 'cultural malaise in which the insufficiency of Self regularly awakens a desire to explore as well as to police the exotic horizon' (p. 7). Ultimately, however, the comparison is an illuminating and deeply provocative one. Hughes's emphasis on alternative cultural geographies and differing degrees of affiliation with the exotic is always thought-provoking and frequently inspiring. In deploying this avowedly 'eccentric' and self-destabilizing corpus, Hughes has produced a very valuable book.

DAVID HOUSTON JONES UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL