Portraying male same-sex desire in nineteenth-century French literature: Pierre Loti's Aziyade

Twentieth-century French literature has had a remarkable number of major novelists who have focused on homosexuality in their works, beginning with Proust and Gide. Before that, however, male same-sex desire seems to have played almost no role in the French novel.1 There was, of course, Vautrin, of whom Balzac offered an ambiguous portrait in Le pere Goriot and Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes during the first half of the nineteenth century. Other than that, however, while a variety of writers treated female same-sex desire, the male counterpart seems to have attracted the attention of very few novelists.2 Furthermore, as Robert A. Nye remarked, "openly sympathetic homosexual novels were rare indeed" (1993, 119). When J. E. Rivers asserted that "Proust is the first major novelist to deal with homosexuality" (1980, 2), he may have been overstating the case, but not by much.3

On the other hand, during the second half of the last century French science began to devote a great deal of attention to male homosexuality. Starting in 1857 with Ambroise Tardieu's Etude medico-legale sur les attentats aux moeurs, French psychiatrists and physicians undertook a detailed and often widely read study of the male homosexual.4 Their descriptions, at least until the publication of Marc-Andre Raffalovich's Uranisme et unisexualite in 1895, were generally quite negative and hostile, linking homosexuality with criminality, physical degeneracy, and the dissolution of social order. Nonetheless, Proust repeated many of their conclusions in A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27).

This historical context is one of the things that make the work of Proust's immediate predecessor, Julien Viaud, so remarkable. During the several decades before World War I, Viaud, known by his pen name, Pierre Loti, was one of France's most popular and admired authors. In his native country his most successful works went through hundreds of editions, and he was elected to the French Academy (over the perpetually unsuccessful Emile Zola) at the unusually early age of 41. In the English-speaking world he enjoyed similar commercial and critical standing. Most of his works were translated almost immediately upon their appearance; so demanding a critic as Henry James hailed him as a "remarkable genius" (1893, 151). At the time he was generally regarded as an exoticist-his tales are set in locales that were then not readily accessible to most of his readers-and his popularity waned after World War I when exoticism went out of fashion. Most of his novels are worth rediscovery by those interested in what Claude J. Summers (1995) has called "the gay and lesbian literary heritage," however, because, despite the supposedly authoritative negative studies being published by French physicians, Viaud dared to offer largely positive depictions of men who experienced homosexual desire, albeit in a covert way. The best of his writings are particularly compelling narratives, moreover. This is certainly true of his first novel, Aziyade, published anonymously in 1879.5

Those familiar with French new criticism may be aware that Roland Barthes (1980) addressed the issue of male same-sex desire in Aziyade in an essay originally published in Italian in 1971. Unfortunately, rather than examining Viaud's several strategies for presenting the subject in a remarkably positive, albeit somewhat clandestine way, the French critic, despite his concluding praise for the work, spent much time lambasting the author for not being open about incidents that do not, in fact, involve homosexual activity.

Since the publication of Barthes's preface, a few other writers have mentioned the topic, but only in passing. Alain Buisine, for example, asserted, rather along Barthes's exaggerated lines: "Aziyade is above all the narration of fundamentally homosexual debauchery" (1988, 64). Generally, those who have touched on this issue have done so only to speculate on what it might say about Viaud, and not how it is dealt with in the work itself. Lesley Blanch, for example, in what is perhaps the most widely available book on Viaud in English, passed back and forth between the novel and Viaud's diary entries for the period to "refute the legend of Loti's [Viaud's] exclusive homosexuality. This aspect of his nature was clearly only one side of his ardent sensuality, which, at that moment, was centered around Aziyade: but Samuel was the way to Aziyade" (1983, 111).6 She then arrived at the ringing affirmation: "Loti [Viaud] was heterosexual, loving women passionately" (128). Setting aside the question of the validity of Blanch's reconstruction of Viaud's biography, one can see that she did not, finally, focus on what happens in the novel, but rather on what she hoped happened, or did not happen, in Viaud's life. If we focus on the work itself, however, we find that there is much in the novel's presentation of male same-sex desire that is worth our attention.

The work would have struck its initial readers almost immediately as something new and different because of its form. It is presented not as a tale told by one voice, like most traditional novels, but rather as a group of disparate writings, diary entries and letters by and to a young British naval officer, Harry Grant, often referred to as Loti. These were evidently gathered together and arranged posthumously by Grant's friend and fellow officer, Plumkett, who also supplied a preface.