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CHAPTER 1
Colette and (Un)intelligibility
Colette's 1932 publication Ces plaisirs ... (These pleasures ...) has a lot to say about misfits, and it is a misfit text as well. Colette reworked and republished the volume in 1941 as Le pur et l'impur (The Pure and the Impure), the title by which it is mostly known today. (I will mostly refer to it in this chapter as Ces plaisirs ... because I am interested in its presence in the context of 1930s France.) In this first chapter, I reconstruct some of the contexts in which Ces plaisirs ... was written and some of the forms of address in which it was caught up in order to allow certain implicit meanings to emerge out of the interplay between text, context, and public.
In earlier work, I approached this volume of Colette's in a different way. There I was interested in the example Colette's book offered of a particular rhetorical gesture that I noticed regularly coming up in discussions of same-sex sexualities by French writers throughout the twentieth century, a gesture that consists in referencing and describing some such sexuality (even declaring one's allegiance to it or participation in it) but not offering it as a place from which someone could speak: speaking about it, but neither for nor fully as a participant in it. Indeed, in the case of Ces plaisirs ..., Colette seemed to go so far as to insist that certain of these sexualities (ones between women) were not a place from which anyone could ever speak in any authoritative way. As I put it in the epilogue to Never Say I, Colette's purpose seemed to be to describe "an identity that functions as a social category, but not one to which a woman can durably belong, not one with any political potentiality, any future." The first person that was invoked and authorized in order to speak of such identities had somehow to delimit with caution the very terms of their existence, and in such a way that inhabitants of those identities could not ever actually be imagined to speak so as to advocate for themselves.
It was at the end of the pages in Ces plaisirs ... that Colette devoted to the Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, who ran off together in 1778 and lived together in Wales for the next fifty or so years, that she offered a critique of Proust for his way of portraying women interested in other women. The terms of her critique have intrigued and troubled numerous commentators over the years:
Can we possibly, without apprehension, imagine two Ladies of Llangollen in this year 1930? They would own a democratic car, wear overalls, smoke cigarettes, have short hair, and there would be a liquor bar in their apartment. ... Eleanor Butler would curse as she jacked up the car, and would have her breasts amputated. ... And already, twenty years earlier, Marcel Proust had endowed her with shocking desires, customs, and language, thus showing how little he knew her.
Colette here both suggests and also exemplifies the perils of translating certain kinds of identities across time (as well as across geographic and cultural space). Such an act of translation can involve associating an attribute taken as an index of an identity at one moment of time and in one set of cultural circumstances with an attribute taken as an index of another identity at a later time and a different culture, assuming we will concur both in the parallelism of the two identities and the parallelism of the attributes or emblems associated with them. If, for Colette, there was probably little that could be called "democratic" about the lives of Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, what is it that makes the cars of couples of automobile-owning women who are Colette's contemporaries worthy of this attribute? Colette also makes an imaginative link between one member of a couple of women from an earlier time and a surgical procedure that we would nowadays associate with trans-people. (The editors of the Pléiade edition of Colette's works suggest that Colette's contemporaries would most likely have understood her to be making a reference here to the athlete Violette Morris, notably successful in soccer, various track and field events, and race-car driving. Morris had an elective mastectomy in 1929, ostensibly to make it easier to fit behind the wheel of the cars she was racing. Breast-reduction surgery was in fact a topic in the air in various Parisian circles in the late 1920s, and I will return below to a discussion of the cultural work Colette is performing by referencing the topic here.) She disputes the terms of a prior literary representation of the category of persons she is imagining here, the representation found in Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Proust, she claims, knew what he was doing in representing same-sex sexuality among men, but not among women:
When he assembles a Gomorrah of inscrutable and depraved [vicieuse] young girls, when he denounces an entente, a collectivity, a frenzy of bad angels, we are only diverted, indulgent, and a little bored, having lost the support of the dazzling light of truth that guides us through Sodom. ... Puberty, boarding school, solitude, prisons, aberrations, snobbishness — they are all seedbeds, but too shallow to engender and sustain a vice that could attract a great number or become an established thing that would gain the indispensable solidarity of its votaries. (139)
It seems Colette sees no durable and identity-based solidarity among the diversity of women who might, at one point or another of their lives, take a sexual and/or affective interest in other women, and faults Proust for suggesting otherwise.
We might nowadays want to resist the tendency seen here in Ces plaisirs ... to conflate what we would now take to be distinct lesbian and transgender identities; we might also want to stand up for Proust's representations of lesbians and note that the passage of time has amply demonstrated the capacity of lesbians to build durable forms of identity and community. Yet, despite our quarrels, we might also want to find a way to hear something else in Colette's utterances here. Perhaps we could learn to be attentive to her attempt to make a place for another sexuality — or other sexualities — that are being only implicitly referenced in the way she puts her text together. This is where the project of Someone gets going, in an effort simply to notice other sexualities that it is often all too easy to miss. One of the central hypotheses of the present book is that certain kinds of misfit sexualities sometimes exist in language and culture without ever being explicitly talked about or explicitly laid claim to, that in some ways talking about them is nearly impossible given the way a particular language and culture work, that these sexualities leave other kinds of traces, more pragmatic than semantic ones. We might, for instance, know in some practical kind of way that there are important differences between the sexualities of different individuals without having the words to say what those differences are. We might make distinctions in practical dealings with people around sexuality about which we are inarticulate. In short, we often know more about sexuality in practice than we can actually say. What would it mean for an author to write about a phenomenon about which she knows more than she can say, to write about aspects of it that she cannot actually articulate? Often, such writing becomes a space that is meant to activate the implicit pragmatic cultural knowledge of a reader through which inarticulate differences are apprehended. (Of course, the success of such a strategy is only possible should the reader in question have the required practical knowledge available for activation.) Such writing will need to develop techniques to focus readerly attention on some of the myriad ways we regularly draw on inarticulate bits of cultural knowledge in order to act in the world, to understand other people, to interact successfully with them.
One way of glossing Colette's claim about the difference between Sodom and Gomorrah that she says Proust has missed would be to say that she is implicitly asserting that women are more likely to be bisexual than men, and that most women who become involved with other women at some point in their lives are bisexual. (As we shall see shortly, to gloss this statement in such a way involves suggesting that an utterance can be simplified or reduced to some kind of propositional content that can subsequently be restated without distortion using other words.) Implicit in what she might be taken to be suggesting would be that being bisexual is, in her view, not a cultural or personal identity around which women might affiliate, but rather something that is simply observable in people's behavior. Obviously, she does not use this kind of terminology. Such ways of speaking wouldn't really even be possible for several more decades. Colette's register and terminology are decidedly unscientific and unsociological. We might even say that they are determinedly old-fashioned for her time. Evidence of her old-fashioned stance might be her use of words like "vice" and "vicieuse" in the passage just cited in order to mean sexually nonnormative, or her fondness in other places for the word "unisexual," whose vogue in the final decades of the nineteenth century and first few decades of the twentieth had clearly passed by the time she was writing. Ces plaisirs ..., she wrote to her friend Hélène Picard in June 1931, as she worked away at the manuscript and debated what its title should be, "stirs up old things having to do with love, and gets itself mixed up in unisexual love stories."
I am here extrapolating from Colette's text in order to imagine something of the cultural universe out of which it seems to be generated; I am working to imagine the array of cultural concepts regarding sexuality Colette is invoking (perhaps highly idiosyncratic ones that few of Colette's contemporaries even shared with her) as she writes. I have also just called attention to the register in which she couches her observation. Use of a particular linguistic register is itself often a way of making an identity claim. Both the conceptual point of view on sexuality that Colette is putting forth and the register she is using to do so (a register that contributes to the self-positioning Colette is doing without being easily translatable into propositional content) are part and parcel of the presentation of sexuality in Ces plaisirs .... What I mean to pursue throughout Someone are those aspects of sexuality that are not denotated or asserted propositionally in language, but that are conveyed through other aspects of language use such as register, tone, and implicit frames of reference.
Registers, Asif Agha notes, "are historical formations caught up in group-relative processes of valorization and countervalorization, exhibiting change in both form and value over time. For instance, when prestige registers used by upper-class/caste speakers are imitated by other groups, the group whose speech is the sought-after variety often innovates in its own speech habits, seeking to renew or transform the emblem of distinction." There are, of course, many features to a register. What I would like to call attention to in connection with Ces plaisirs ... is register understood as, in Michael Silverstein's words, "context-appropriate alternate ways of 'saying the same thing' such as are seen in so-called 'speech levels.'" At stake in the discourse on sexuality in Ces plaisirs ... is not only the sense of what "context-appropriate" ways of talking about marginal sexualities might be (the range of possible alternatives), but also negotiated agreements as to what constitutes "the same thing" and what doesn't. In speech or writing about sexuality, just as in other forms of speech or writing, registers serve to index different kinds of social distinctions between speakers and to allow for different kinds of social positioning. As Agha puts it, "processes of enregisterment [are] processes whereby distinct forms of speech come to be socially recognized (or enregistered) as indexical of speaker attributes by a population of language users. ... Encounters with registers are not merely encounters with voices ... but encounters in which individuals establish forms of alignment ... with social types of persons, real or imagined, whose voices they take them to be." One assumes (and not always correctly) that one's audience recognizes the import of a selection (not necessarily a conscious one) from a contrasting set of possibilities encompassed in a given set of registers — or one hopes one's audience appreciates the import of an improvisation that adds a new register to a set of otherwise well-known ones. Is or was what Colette was doing with registers in Ces plaisirs ... recognizable as an act of position-taking in relation to the marginal sexualities that are her subject in the book? Of course Colette, through her choice of lexicon, positions herself as old-fashioned, and as resistant to certain newfangled sexual identities she sees around her that she loosely but perhaps revealingly characterizes as "democratic." (Or at least she applies that adjective to the motor vehicle she imagines some inhabitants of those identities to be driving around in.) But we also see a more complex use of register to suggest something about sexuality (about Colette's own sexuality) that it is harder to characterize semantically or taxonomically. My flat-footed gloss of a claim about sexuality Colette may or may not have been making (that women are more likely to be bisexual than men, and that most women who become involved with other women at some point in their lives are bisexual) is clearly reductive of the complexity of what she was communicating about sexuality, both her own and sexuality in general.
Speech about bisexuality (the word existed in Colette's time although the range of speakers who knew it and its range of uses were probably not as wide as is the case today) often highlights the fact that there are forms of cultural knowledge about sexuality that cannot easily be done justice by taxonomies. Consider the following observations from the 2011 report by the LGBT Advisory Committee of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, "Bisexual Invisibility: Impacts and Recommendations":
The term bisexual is imperfect at best. It implies a duality of genders that many people feel erases transgender and gender-variant people. For others, it connotes a requirement of an exact balance between someone's attractions for women and men, or attractions only to women and men who identify with the genders they were assigned at birth. ... The good news is that more and more people are comfortable navigating the complexities of human sexuality and gender as they are actually lived. The bad news is that the English language has not yet caught up in expressing that complexity. At this time, there is no clear "best practice" for terminology that fully honors gender diversity while not reinscribing invisibility for non-monosexuals.
At this moment in the movement for full equality and dignity for people of all sexual orientations and gender identities, bisexual is the term that is most widely understood as describing those whose attractions fall outside an either/or paradigm. It is also (along with MSMW and WSMW) the term most often used in research.
As people become increasingly fluent in the dynamics of gender and sexuality, the language will evolve as well. For now, and with full awareness of its limitations, bisexual is the word used in this report.
We might think of this report and of Colette's text as sharing certain generic features. They intend to communicate official and unofficial forms of knowledge about diverse sexualities, and to provide authoritative language for doing so. They critique previous invocations of lexical items and previous applications of categories. They struggle with denotational language and do other things with language in the meantime. Because language does not work only denotationally, we might hazard a guess that the hope of the authors of "Bisexual Invisibility" that language will someday "catch up" with the complexity of "sexuality and gender as they are actually lived" is a bit of a forlorn one. To imagine a moment when language might have caught up with sexuality seems for the authors of the report to be to imagine the creation of new terms with which to denote a wider range of sexualities and genders. But language will never only function through the denotational application of terms, however conceptually nuanced an understanding those terms may be drawn from. It also does not seem self-evident that the social forms of sexuality extant in a given culture would ever hold still long enough for denotational language to catch up to them.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Someone"
by .
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