The Extreme In–Between by Anna–Louise Milne

Author:Anna–Louise Milne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Keeping it amongst Men

In many respects the evolution of both Paulhans written work and his editorial activities reveal an ever stronger belief that the health of language, literature, and society requires recirculating the unspeakable, particularly in the wake of the Second World War, and it is this aspect of his work that I shall turn to in the next chapter. But throughout his writings there are also recurrent references to tightly guarded secrets where we can detect greater complicity in sanctioned norms. Nowhere is this more striking than in his essay about the death of Groethuysen in Luxembourg, where he went with Jean Dubuffet to be with their mutual friend in his final moments. It is this text that enables us to pick up again on the homosocial impulse that underpins Aytré qui perd I'habitude.

The essay 'More de Groethuysen à Luxembourg' is a heterogeneous collection of reflections about marriage, fidelity, and homosexuality, as well as a description of Groethuysen's physical deterioration. There is not a lot in it to alleviate the mediocrity of life, of human relationships, of dysfunctional bodies — except, that is, the experience of driving with Dubuffet in his car:

Travelling with a woman (and especially a woman one loves) has its joys, which are known to all. Travelling with a man — and even more so with a male friend — brings a very different sort of pleasure, a more serious pleasure, which in a sense is also dangerous. What is there about life that is so strange or difficult that one finds oneself (even at quite an advanced age) feeling that one still has to learn its essential feature, its most secret facet? And what makes one think that this secret is not without connection to the confidences that a man is quite naturally led to share during a journey when he is alone with another man? Is there not something one is always on the verge of saying, without quite managing? Let me now say this: it has always been observed that men, when they are among men, as we say — as on those occasions when they used to withdraw to a special chamber to smoke (even though I have never seen such a chamber and I don't quite know what it would look like) — tend rather regularly to start telling frivolous or obscene tales, generally of a vulgar nature. (And this prompts the conclusion that such is the way of things, that men are more haunted by questions of the nether regions than is generally acknowledged and seize on the first occasion to give themselves free rein. And this may be right — although I also detect here something of that tendency, which is also very human, of self-deprecation.) 1 would be readily inclined however to believe that this situation also offers a much rarer sensation, something approaching a quest for a conversation that one is alone in conducting, and that obscenity would ultimately interest us less if it were not by

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