SOURCE: Chambers, Ross. “Pointless Stories, Storyless Points.” In Loiterature, pp. 250-69. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1994, Chambers comments on Barthes's treatment of his homosexuality in Incidents and Soirées de Paris in the context of postcolonialism and historical consciousness.]

Conversely, a book is conceivable: which would report a thousand “incidents” but would refuse ever to draw a line of meaning from them; it would be, quite specifically, a book of haikus.

—Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

Rosencrantz: Incidents! All we get is incidents! Dear God, is it too much to expect a little sustained action?

—Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

When Barthes's Incidents was published posthumously, there was a mild outcry in the world of the Paris literati.¹ There are two relatively unremarkable texts in this volume (“La lumière du sud-ouest” and “Au Palace ce soir …”); the scandal bore on two others, “Incidents,” described by the editor in a cautious preliminary note as “a notation, a collection of things seen and heard in Morocco, essentially in Tangiers and Rabat, and then in the South, in 1968 and 1969,” and “Soirées de Paris,” a series of diarylike accounts of his evenings' insignificant doings that Barthes kept between 24 August and 19 September 1979, just after writing a critical study of the “journal intime” as a genre for Tel Quel and not long before his untimely death. Because these last mentioned texts, especially the latter of the two, are open about the author's homosexuality, it was felt in some quarters that one of the more reticent of France's gay male intellectuals had been “outed,” and in a manner thought (not without homophobia) to demean the great man's memory. I'm interested, though, in the nonnarrative or antinarrative formal qualities of the two texts, as examples of loiterature in its “cruising” mode (chapter 3); and I want more particularly to look at what they tell us about the kind of intellectual I call “critical”—the intellectual who doesn't fit easily into either of the Gramscian categories of the “organic” or the “traditional”—when that intellectual, whose position is normally unaligned, is “on vacation” or “taking time out,” and isn't, ideologically speaking, on guard. More specifically still, I'll ask what these two mildly scandalous texts, written ten years apart and relating to rather different life experiences, have in common. What differences connect them? What incidences—interactions, intersections, intrications, mutual interruptions—join them?

In the heyday of the British Empire, Posh (standing for Port Out Starboard Home) was a notation used by shipping clerks to indicate the most prestigious passengers on the ships that plied the thin red line passing through Suez. Without too much artifice, the acronym might be taken as a way of articulating the intrication of at home and out there, the permeability of contexts, that defines the various economies—commercial, cultural, and in this case sexual—of the colonial enterprise, an intrication that has, if anything, intensified in the so-called postcolonial era. In that sense, we're all posh; and in choosing to look critically at the forgetfulness of the at home/out there intrication that relates Barthes's two texts (one supposedly Parisian, the other patently Moroccan), I'm not attempting, therefore, to make one of modern culture's poshest (most prestigious) intellectuals into some kind of scapegoat. I'm looking for a way to describe the texts, and to read their sadly missed author, as paradigmatic, in the sense of typical as well as listlike. It's not because they're exceptional but because they're ordinary² that these texts—themselves unsystematic explorations of the everyday (the familiar everyday of Paris and the everyday of the Oriental other)—seem interesting and indeed have a certain poignant quality. Not the trivial Barthes, whose bodily desires some would have liked to hush up, nor yet Barthes the cultural icon, but the ordinary Barthes—“R. B.”—is the fellow I want to spend some time with here; and that is because he permits us to grasp something of how the construction of the everyday relates to contextual closure.

The main genres of gay male narrative tend to be autobiographical, but their thematics is no less characteristically one of encounter. For obvious reasons, gay subjectivity can scarcely regard itself as autonomous or fail to take account of itself as a relational phenomenon, traversed by the complex dynamics of alterity. The coming out story (say Paul Monette's Becoming a Man or J. R. Ackerley's My Father and Myself³) has affinities with the Bildungsroman, while the Aids story, which follows a declining curve uncannily symmetrical to the coming out story's mounting curve (as the poignancy of Eric Michael's punning title, Unbecoming, underlines), responds to homophobic mythification of the disease with an equally metaphoric counter-myth: not Aids but a homophobic society is the killer.⁴

The cruising story, though (John Rechy's Numbers or Renaud Camus's Tricks can serve as examples⁵), tends not to have a narrative “curve” at all, and closure is as irrelevant to it as it is defining in both the coming out story and the Aids story. The structure here (if “structure” is the word) is episodic, repetitive (but in a Kierkegaardian sense, in which repetition implies difference) and, in a word, digressive—the “incident” is its narrative material. The goal (encapsulated in the famous seventies T-shirt slogan: “So many men, so little time”) isn't the narrative or argumentative one of comprehension but the encyclopedic one of comprehensiveness, not synthesis but seriality, and the dynamic is therefore that of the etcetera principle. The outcome is a text structured like a list, an enumeration, an inventory or a catalog, a “telling” in the etymological sense of counting out, and corresponding more to a purely descriptive practice of notation than to an art of composition.

This open-endedness of the cruising narrative, of which both Soirées de Paris and Incidents are paradigmatic examples, has everything to do, I believe, with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the social relations (the circumstances of encounter) in which the gay male cruiser is involved. These social relations aren't governed by the clearly legislated, if practically unnegotiable, double bind of the closet, although their semisurreptitiousness gives them a closety feel. They're not subject either to the overt hostility in response to which Aids narratives are so angry a genre, although the “adventurous” side of cruising, the slight sense of danger it can generate, accords with the knowledge that gay-affirming behavior (the constitution of a community of desire, for example) is inevitably pursued in a social context that can prove lethal to it. Cruising activates the range of phenomena that arise from the fraught relation—not fully separable yet anxiously autonomous—that links male homosociality and male homosexuality.

It is, in short, a subcultural (or “private”) phenomenon inhabiting—or, as Michel de Certeau might say, poaching on—a “public” space, that of the subculture's Other. Thus, the desiring community the cruiser “counts out,” encounter by encounter, is potentially limitless, by virtue of the continuum linking gay and straight, the homosexual and the homosocial. But by the same token, the gay cruiser's identity is ambiguous in that it coexists with any number of “straight” identities—respectable middle-class man, college kid or whatever—under cover of which the cruiser's presence on the streets is legitimated. It follows that to believe in a gay male community uniquely constituted by a commonality of desire or in an identity purely defined by erotic object-choice takes quite a bit of forgetting. Yet it's just such forgetting that constitutes the community of desire the cruiser is exploring, and it's as a subject to such forgetting that the figure of the cruiser interests me, therefore, in this essay. For there's something single-minded about sexual cruising, a single-mindedness that's reminiscent of the figure of the collector (think, say, of Balzac's Pons). And this same single-mindedness shows up, albeit in displaced fashion, in Barthes (whose sexual hunting is euphemized in Incidents as touristic curiosity and pursued in Soirées de Paris with a kind of defeated diffidence). It shows up as thematic redundancy, a form of insistence that's very unusual in the digressive art of loiterature, which is more apt to change the subject than to harp on one string. But the cruiser, in Soirées, becomes an obsessive collector of examples of the commoditization of relations, and in Incidents, of what Barthes elsewhere calls the “romanesque.” And it's the forgetting implied by these two forms of single-mindedness that I want to try to identify in what follows.

Not surprisingly, cruising is fast becoming a metaphor for gay research, which picks about in straight culture, in its own single-minded (and so forgetful) way, for often equivocal evidence of gayness, extending the limits of the gay community by collecting the apparently limitless number of “encounters” and trouvailles that seem to qualify. Neil Bartlett (chapter 3) figures his activity as a kind of folk historian of the gay male community in London as a matter of cruising the archives. In Bringing Out Roland Barthes, D. A. Miller likens his critical work to a kind of cruising of the Barthes text in search of “moments” (or incidents?), “responses to a handful of names, phrases, images, themes” that lead the critic to intuit a “gay writing position” that can be thought to inform the whole.⁶ The cruising researcher's haul is predictably incomplete and often a bit dubious, and the writing in turn—an “album,” says Miller, a bulletin board or scrapbook in Bartlett's metaphor—takes on the episodic, fragmented, and digressive quality of cruising narratives themselves, condemned to the incidental but celebratory of the incomplete, as the etcetera principle mandates. Like Bartlett's or Miller's, my own writing is bound, in turn, to be discontinuous and episodic—all stops and starts—and (in its own way) simultaneously rambling and single-minded or forgetful. In short, cruisy.

But I'm not so interested in detecting intimations of gayness, which in fact neither text makes any bones about (their closety character comes from the curious circumstance that each was prepared for the printer but never published in Barthes's lifetime). My antenna is tuned rather to try to pick up something else, of which gay male theory and historical research have been, I think symptomatically, relatively oblivious, namely the incidences that might connect the emergence in the West over the last century or so of a gay male sexual identity with the historical apogee of colonial empires, like the British and the French, that conceived of themselves as modern. I mean by this that, as opposed to the straightforward and unembarrassed exploitation of subject peoples characteristic of earlier empires, the modern empires imagined themselves to be at the service of colonized countries and populations, whose historical development they were furthering. That this doctrine was ideological mumbo jumbo covering invasion and despoliation is one thing; but that it was widely believed is another, as is the fact that “good relations” and “friendship” between metropolitan powers and former colonies—in the guise of commonwealths and associations and privileged trading partnerships—remain today, after the collapse of historical colonialism, as the alibi of our own postcolonial world.

Is the marginalized male homosexual subject at home particularly apt—as Alan Hollinghurst suggests in his novel The Swimming-Pool Library—to put himself at the service of colonial power abroad?⁷ Is there a relation between this desire to be of service (to the colonial other? or to the colonial power?) and the ideology of service that legitimated the whole colonial enterprise (the white man's burden and the rest of it)? What of the element of racism so often manifest in gay male desire (I mean the pertinence of race in so many gay male desiring relations)? Does it derive from some sort of (perhaps mutual) identification between gay white men and subaltern colonial subjects? Rather than approaching such delicate topics, as Hollinghurst's fiction does, through the personage of the gay male colonial administrator (subject to the “service” ethic), I want to look at the at home/abroad intrication in the phenomenon of gay male sexual tourism, which has the merit of focusing attention on the indubitably exploitative character of (post)colonial relations, disguised as they may be as commercial—or even purely friendly-“human” exchanges. For a Wilde or a Gide, in flight from persecution or repression at home, “French” North Africa provided a refuge so relatively comfortable that they may well not have reflected—as the R. B. of Incidents much later seems not to have done—on the degree to which their comfort was that of the colonial master. And in contemporary Thailand—a country that, ironically, maintained a certain political independence during the colonial period “proper”—the economic power of the West has made it impossible now to eliminate a flourishing sex industry fueled by male tourists, gay and straight (who are drawn by the cruel fallacy that the younger the prostitute the less likely he or she is to be infected with the HIV virus).

Cruising is relevant in connection with sexual tourism as a colonial and postcolonial phenomenon because, as I've mentioned, the gay man who cruises, like the sexual tourist, is never a uniquely sexual subject but must acknowledge the possibility of being anamnestically interpellated in other identities as well—as a man, a consumer, a teenager, a businessman, an intellectual, a Westerner. … How, I want to ask, does Barthes, as a (forgetful) gay male cruiser at home and sexual tourist abroad, deal with the problematics of his “other” identity as a colonizing/postcolonial subject, a problematics that becomes inescapable to the extent that he scarcely bothers to disguise his (never explicitly commented on) sexual preference for “boys” of Maghrebi origin? What incidences link the commoditized erotic relations that are so prominent in the cruisy Parisian text with the striking deemphasis of commoditization in the touristic Moroccan text? Does commoditization, in other words, function as a displaced figure for the incidence of colonialism in sexual relations? And, if the stress on commoditization in Soirées de Paris functions as a sign of the sexual cruiser's forgetting of his (nevertheless readable) colonial identity, does the corresponding de-emphasis of commoditization in Incidents indicate (given the functional equivalence of items that can displace one another) another way of forgetting “coloniality,” one that corresponds structurally to the sexual tourist's desire to naturalize his relation to the (commoditized, colonized) cultural other? Finally, does such a desire for natural(ized) relations on the part of the colonialist/tourist subject tell us something about Orientalism itself, as the deluded belief in an “authenticity” of the other but also as a belief in a possible authenticity of contact with the other within the nevertheless commoditized context of colonialism? These are the hypotheses that underlie the comments that follow.⁸

Intellectuals, one might say, are people who are still at work even when, by conventional measures, they're not working. If that's so, there are many more intellectuals than the class is normally held to contain; but also the figure of the “intellectual at leisure” (as Barthes noticed in Mythologies) is a sensitive and perhaps crucial one.⁹ Can the offduty intellectual be permitted a degree of relaxation, or should he or she instead (being never more intellectual than when not working) be held to the highest standards of intellectuality? In the nineteenth century the figure of the flâneur, as a forerunner of the contemporary category of the unaligned or “critical” intellectual (chapter 8), already raised this question of intellectual informality, suggesting that loiterly intellectuality has advantages over disciplined forms of knowledge in its greater openness to otherness and its preference for comprehensiveness over system (or comprehension). But the flâneur was a marginal social figure whose critique of closed context was nourished by the peripheral situation of loiterly subjectivity (chapter 3).

Barthes, though—with his series of books in digressive relation to one another and the general “drift” of his career from Marxist-oriented analyst of power to unaligned professor of desire¹⁰—can stand, given the high cultural and academic status he achieved, for a twentieth-century phenomenon: that of the officialization, and the institutionalization, of the critical intellectual. He thus permits us to ask what happens when a man whose work is that of a critical intellectual (modeled on the leisurely practices of flânerie) takes time out and in so doing rediscovers flânerie itself (as in Soirées) or goes on vacation and becomes (as in Incidents) a sexual tourist. What happens when the circumstances are ripe for an ordinary man to emerge, not in the figure of the intellectual as man of leisure, but in that of the critical intellectual at leisure? I'll argue that it's the apparent neutrality of the critical intellectual, as neither traditional nor organic, that's questioned by the case of Barthes, in his off-duty mode as the author of Incidents and Soirées de Paris. And I'll suggest that the melancholia that surfaces in this Barthes, especially in Soirées de Paris, is a sign of his forgetfulness, as an ordinary fellow, of the critical intellectual's function, which is to remember other contexts and to be conscious of contextual alterity: to recall, for example, that “at home” is linked to “out there” and “out there” to “at home.”

But in the first instance, what happens in Soirées de Paris is that the intellectual at leisure turns his critical powers and the flâneur practice of “notation” onto the very cultural sphere in which, as a working intellectual, he also evolves, a sphere figured by the urban environment of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which is represented as a place where commoditized values are the norm, so that sexual hustlers and young intellectuals on the up-and-up form a single, only partly differentiated, population. What happens in Incidents, though, is that the practice of notation is devoted to recording instances of the “romanesque,” that is (I quote the editor's comment, 8) to “a putting into writing of encounters—incidents—that might have been woven into a romance (novel), were it not that all and any narrative weaving … has been omitted”—in other words, novelistic subject matter without the novel, or pure “tellability” without its attendant narrative. In particular, the editor is at pains to point out, the “romanesque” has nothing to do with “Morocco, its people, culture or social problems,” which are excluded, I take it, along with narrative (and argumentative) elaboration. The romanesque, in other words, is a case of pure intellectual unalignment, although it requires an emphatic denegation to make it so.

D. A. Miller seems to go along in general terms with this theory of the romanesque as pure tellability divorced from narrative. He oddly omits “Incidents” from his commentary, but interestingly reads the romanesque as a site of emergence in Barthes's writing of the gayness that has no place in the narratives of heterosexual culture (43-51). The problem, though (aside from the assumption that gayness is independent of heterosexual “narratives”), is a double one. First, whatever the emergences it may favor, a story that goes untold can't for that reason be regarded as inoperative: rather it becomes significant by virtue of its having been omitted, and as an object of forgetting. Second, the narrative most obviously excluded from Incidents isn't so much that of heterosexuality in general as it is that of colonialism in particular. There's an omission of the colonial story in Incidents that has the same structure of denial, in short, as the editor's overemphatic claim that Morocco and its history (“This is a misunderstanding that must be immediately set aside”) are irrelevant to the romanesque.

If it's necessary, as Miller thinks, to forget heterosexual narratives for gayness to emerge, the gay male sexual tourist, as a cruiser, is also the subject of another, perhaps related, forgetting, which is that of the colonial context of his episodic investigations. That forgetting is also a condition, or part of the condition, of the emergence of his gayness. But there's a name, of course, for European descriptive practices that take “the East” as their object while forgetting their embeddedness in the history of colonialism. That name is Orientalism—and in (mis)naming his “incidentalist” practice of the romanesque as an art of haiku it's almost as if Barthes had forewarned us to expect it to be, like his naming of it, an Orientalist practice. Orientalism, then, in Incidents, can be seen as a condition of emergence of the text's gayness. As for Soirées de Paris, without going so far as to claim it as an Orientalist text, I do want to propose that the link between its stress on commoditization in the Parisian context and the Orientalist cultivation of the romanesque in Incidents lies, again, in the incidences of colonialist power in gay desire, coloniality being repressed, along with commoditization in “Incidents,” but by means of a displacement that substitutes the commoditized for the colonial in Soirées. It's as a subject of the double forgetting of the colonial, which seems to function as a condition of the emergence of gayness in each text, that I see R. B., the ordinary fellow, showing up in the critical intellectual Roland Barthes, in conformity with Michel de Certeau's description of the way the higher flights of knowledge find themselves humiliatingly interrupted by the banality of their everyday involvement in the ordinary histories and mechanisms of power (8).

Let's say, then, that there's a colonialist illusion (or alibi) and a postcolonial illusion (or alibi). The colonialist illusion naturalizes the commoditized relations that colonialism puts in place; in this, I'll argue, it's like the illusion sought by every tourist, including the sexual tourist, and “Incidents” is in this sense the text of colonialist illusion. The postcolonial illusion, though, naturalizes colonial power itself, and in this respect it's like the illusion of the (homo)sexual cruiser who forgets the identities that make him, say, white, middle class, and wealthy, and is thus able to relate on “equal” terms with, say, working-class or racially “other” men, or street kids and hustlers. As in Soirées de Paris, it's only the community of desire that seems relevant. In this latter case, furthermore, it's not inconvenient, to either the cruiser or the postcolonial subject, to acknowledge the commoditization of relations—which thus becomes available as a substitute for the repressed consciousness of coloniality—whereas it's precisely these commoditized relations that must be played down in the colonial situation “proper,” so that, like tourists, colonizing subjects can believe themselves to be linked in some more “natural” or “human” (unmediated) way to the colonized people with whom they have dealings. Soirées de Paris, as a postcolonial text, thus foregrounds the commoditized relations that Incidents is led to de-emphasize, but in each case with a comparable result: the denegation of coloniality at the level of intersubjective relations, a crucial forgetting.

In Soirées (to look first at the chronologically later text), there are a number of tapeurs (people who want something out of you) and other nuisances. Barthes unfailingly treats them with long-suffering tolerance—except on one occasion, when he permits himself the luxury of rudeness. He has been talking a bit wearily with Jean G. about this young man's run-of-the-mill novel (“neither the text nor the boy pushes my buttons”), but now suddenly, when they're interrupted by a “Moroccan ex-hustler” with a hard-luck story and a request for a loan, Barthes reacts (“his rudeness gives me the energy to refuse”) with unexpected intensity: “I refuse … ; he makes an angry gesture and knocks over chairs in his abrupt departure” (65). What should we make of this sudden flurry of violence? Why does a “Moroccan ex-hustler” provoke such a response? Barthes appears to have the (racist) habit of referring to all culturally Islamic Maghrebis as “Arabes” (66-67); but he also seems regularly to specify Moroccans within that group, as though they held a particular interest for him, a fact that recalls the Moroccan setting of Incidents. Moreover, Barthes mentions having known this particular Moroccan ten years before (i.e., in the period of Incidents).

While recalling the Morocco of Incidents, this fellow—a former hustler who is now a tapeur—encapsulates also the main characteristic of the male population of Soirées, which is that there's no clear distinction between “densely packed hustlers” on the street (55) and, say, the importunate Argentinian on the terrace of the Flore (54) or the young men (Eric, Jean, Olivier) to whom Barthes may dedicate an essay or in whose first novel he takes a benevolent interest. The interest all these men show in him is self-interested, and R. B.'s own erotic interest in most of them (the Argentinian is an exception) is itself a commoditized one (indeed, in the case of the hustlers, at least, it seems to be the commoditization of relations that he finds erotic). There are, in short, only different ways to faire du gringue, of being on the make. The rush of psychic energy provoked by the Moroccan recognized from the past has to do, then, with something unwelcome about his integration into the present Parisian scene, as if this were a betrayal of something remembered from another time and place and as if it were important for Barthes to maintain a separation between the “at home” scene of Saint-Germain and the “out there” of his Moroccan excursions of ten years earlier. The ex-hustler whom R. B. so energetically rejects stands, in other words, partly as evidence of an occluded link between the Moroccan text and the Parisian one and of an incidence of the former in the latter and partly also as an emblem of the repressed colonial subtext underlying the cruisy erotics of the commoditized Parisian scene.

For although R. B. is usually unspecific about the “racial” characteristics of the “boys” he notices (and Eric, Jean, Olivier, etc., are clearly European), the one moment when he comments: “a very handsome white hustler stops me” (72, my emphasis), taken together with the references to “Arabes” (66-67) and the habit of specifying “Moroccan” identity on occasion, adds up to an acknowledgment of the sociological fact that a preponderance of the street boys in Saint-Germain are immigrants or the children of immigrants from the Maghreb, and of the psychological reality that it's to these that R. B. is predominantly drawn. Although the world of Saint-Germain is presented to us as generally cruisy and more specifically a commoditized world of universal hustling (both sexual and intellectual), it turns out, on closer reading, to be also a colonialist world—one in which the fact of colonialism (the historical reason why there are so many Maghrebis in Saint-Germain) is so taken for granted by the narrative subject that its omnipresence can be deduced only from scattered clues.

This (the repression of colonialism itself) is what I call the postcolonial illusion. So it's faintly ironic that the middle-aged R. B. among the young so often seems to strike dated Gidean poses, stubbornly reading his Monde (“very difficult to read one's paper in peace,” 66) or “a little of Pascal's Pensées” (61) while the terrace jumps all around him, or going home to read Chateaubriand in bed (“I go back with relief to the Mémoires d'outre-tombe, the real book,” 55) as Gide read Bossuet in the Congo jungle. R. B.'s postcolonial Africa, in short, is the rue de Rennes with its “densité des gigolos,” or the rue Saint-André-des-Arts where one night the natives seemed restless, “there were so many young people out it was actually hostile” (70). It's as if the initially blotted out colonial context returns, in transformed guise, in the person of all these “jeunes.” And the need to repress it becomes so intense that it finally leads R. B. into forms of insensitivity considerably more egregious than Gide's (who, as an earlier Barthes noticed, blithely obliged his poor bearers to struggle daily with heavy packing cases containing bound volumes of Shakespeare and Goethe). “I do not like,” he writes like a true curmudgeon of a heavy-handed documentary on the problems of youth, “that very contemporary sort of message in which you have to sympathize with down-and-outers (limited horizon of the young, etc.)” (72).

Such irritation with the young, I'm arguing, indicates that the occluded horizons may be those of the writer, and that they include a wider range of “paumés” (down-and-outers) than he thinks: in particular, the context that is blocked out is in large measure colonial. (Not coincidentally, straight after the reference to the handsome white boy on this same page, two “Laotian creatures” (72) are mentioned—Barthes is attracted to one of them.) But the alibi for this is of course that R. B. has woes of his own to concentrate on. The genre of his writing isn't travel writing (like Gide's Voyage au Congo) or even the memoir (like Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe): it's the “journal intime,” and accordingly it focuses on its narrator's own depressed mood, “exhausted and enervated” (61), “in despair too at not feeling at home [anywhere]; without real refuge” (60), unable to work in the afternoon (59, 63) but going out only to face a wasted evening, a “vaine soirée.” D. A. Miller is perceptive in saying that the death of “his” mother has made “the” mother (writing, for instance) unavailable to him; but R. B.'s sense of being at a loose end, of existing desultorily and randomly, has to do also with what he calls his hesitation with respect to “the management of desire” (69). With hustlers he's forever paying in advance and not being surprised when they fail to show (59) or making a “vague rendez-vous” that neither will keep. His more intellectual young friends he “convinces” to leave town—and then feels abandoned (“and yet that is what I would like, anxious to clear my life of all these messes,” 62). A whole afternoon goes by in fruitless cruising: “first of all at the Bain V, nothing … it occurred to me to go looking for a hustler in Montmartre, which is perhaps why, in bad faith, I found nothing. … At La Nuit, absolutely nothing. … I hang around the house … leave the house again and go see the new porn film at Le Dragon: as always … dreadful” (66-68). And the upshot of this dreary day is as follows: “I dare not cruise my neighbor. … Downstairs into the black room; I always regret this sordid episode afterward, each time suffering the ordeal of my abandonment” (68).

This vocabulary of ordeal and the euphemistic “descente à la chambre noire” show us that R. B.'s solitude in the crowded orgy room is paradigmatic of the Soirées as a whole, which are tinged with the experience of the infernal (Barthes is thinking of Dante) because the middle-aged narrative subject (he's thinking of Proust) is caught in the mechanism whereby to desire is to become undesirable, so that in the end it's easier—less painful—to disengage from a connection than to undergo the hurt of rejection. Thus with Olivier: “I sent him away, saying I had work to do, knowing it was over, and that more than Olivier was over: the love of one boy” (73). And it's in this self-inflicted délaissement that he thinks of Chateaubriand, the true model of melancholy (le vrai livre), but adding quickly the self-denigrating rider so typical of the loiterly tradition: “But suppose the Moderns were wrong? What if they had no talent?” (55).

There's a homology, then, I'm proposing, between this depressive self-enclosure among the young and the foreclusion of the colonial from the Parisian everyday. But if this self-pitying, self-enclosed personage is “R. B.,” it's not just because Barthes is playing ordinary man to Chateaubriand's “Enchanteur” in a manner characteristic of loiterly writing. Rather it's because, in so doing, he's yielding to the banality of allowing personal misery to displace the consciousness one might expect of a critical intellectual and committing the everyday lapse of failing to see that the commoditized intersubjective relations that make the management of Desire so painful for him are part and parcel of relations of global power that makes things painful for those he calls “paumés.” Forgetfulness that there's “a context” (that is, an unrecognized “other” context) is the most ordinary lapse of all—but it's just such a decontextualization, in turn, that makes things seem pointless. For the genre of these “vaines soirées,” finally, isn't only the diary or “journal intime” (with its focus on the individual subject). They're also, as foreshadowed in the dinner table conversation of the first evening (53), a series of “histoires plates,” or stories that fall flat—the point of which quite obviously lies in their absolute pointlessness. But pointlessness arises precisely when a story is divorced from the context that holds the key to its significance. The “histoire plate” lacks narrative energy (the romanesque: the element of tellability) just as its listless narrator lacks psychic energy. But it does so, indeed, because of this self-involvement on the narrator's part, and as a function of the “limited horizon” that prevents this forgetful, cruisy subject from grasping the missing dimension of his experience.

To restore this missing point(edness) ought to mean restoring the repressed element, then: the missing context of the colonial. And indeed, what Incidents suggests when read in relation to Soirées is precisely that for R. B. the possibility of (an illusion of) reciprocated desire and of an erotics of (apparent) simplicity, naturalness, and directness, in which “the management of Desire” would become innocent and easy because removed from the complexities of commoditization, is bound up with a restoration of the romanesque. That is, it's dependent on restoring a form of tellability that's lacking in the “histoires plates” of the Parisian “vaines soirées” but is generated away from the familiar and dreary everyday of home, as a function of the touristic gaze on the everyday of the (colonial) other. But here too there will be foreclosure, for although the romanesque is restored in this colonial text, it's restored as pure punctum, as a point(edness) without a story that actually repeats the forgetfulness of the “histoire plate” as a genre, a story that's pointless because of its repressed context. So the missing point, it seems, can only be restored at the price of forgetting the story in which it's embedded. Which can only mean that the “point” missing from one narrative (the “histoire plate”) is the same as the “story” that's suppressed in the other (productive of the romanesque), its name being, in each case, colonialism.

What's called the context of a given story is always another story. Thus it is that colonialism, as the context that's missing from the aimless stories of Soirées de Paris, is also the colonialism as (hi)story that's missing from Incidents, whose pure tellability, as a collection of points without a story, is as inane as the collection of stories without point that constitute Barthes's “vaines soirées.” It's the same omission, in other words, that makes home so dreary and abroad so piquant, so exotic.

The tourist's dilemma derives from being sold access to another culture that's (presented as) desirable only to the extent that it's authentic and natural, that is, directly accessible. If one is to be content with packaged “Englishness,” say, there's absolutely no need to go to England (as Des Esseintes in Huysmans's À Rebours demonstrated): one can stay home and read the brochures. The reason tourists actually travel to other countries can only be that they have a desire—contradicted, of course, by the touristic circumstances—for unmediated contact, a noncommoditized experience of the other. Thus, their main business seems often to be to forget their status as tourists: they avoid “touristy” places and things, they love carnivals (Munich, New Orleans, Rio, Sydney), when it's easier for tourists to “mingle” because the locals are themselves behaving like tourists; they put their faith in “seeing” the sights, mistaking vision for a direct, unmediated mode of contact; and, finally, they seek sex with the natives, confident that it provides “natural” access to the other in her or his “naked” reality. …

However, it's the very desire for authenticity that marks the tourist as a tourist, since such authenticity is not a concern of anyone else: locals (who may be intent on turning a buck or having a good time) are the last people to ask, or to care, whether what they're doing is genuine or not. And the same desire for authenticity is what links tourism, as the denegation of commoditization, to Orientalism and related isms, in which denial of the alienated relation of colonizer to colonized and the affirmation of the possibility of unmediated and authentic knowledge of the other depend on forgetting the status of the colonizing subject (who becomes “simply,” say, a sexual subject). “Incidents,” as an album of touristy verbal snapshots divorced from any narrativization that might situate them in a history of global power, and as a series of brief objectivized perceptions whose subject is only rarely represented, falls squarely into this pattern of denegation and forgetting that makes touristic and colonial “self”-forgetting homologous practices.

When the observer does come into focus in “Incidents,” it's in the role of off-duty intellectual, reading Lacan a little self-consciously in the Moroccan South (39) or, a bit more frequently, functioning as a linguist who notes features of the French spoken by carpet salesmen and street boys and on one occasion achieves a kind of community-in-philology with a group of kids through a common interest in the fact that, in French, “the genitalia form a paradigm of occlusive consonants: cul/con/queue” (57). Mainly, though, the apparent neutrality of the observer is produced by a kind of absence of the writing subject from the scene that's being described, so that the focus of interest falls on the population that is the object of his observation. This population, in turn, falls into three main groups: European hippies (portrayed satirically, 16, 18, 34), colons and pieds noirs (observed unsympathetically, 24, 26, 31, 32), and finally Muslims (usually drawn sympathetically if amusedly and—haiku oblige—in somewhat aestheticized fashion). But whereas the coolness of the portrayal of the Europeans signals that the observing subject is functioning here as a critical intellectual, aligned neither with the dominant colonial class nor with the Islamic other (and practicing with respect to each a kind of policy of critical neutrality), the fact that his description of Islamic culture lapses so often into a kind of Orientalist shorthand—a naturalized language of the authentic—nevertheless shows us that, within the carefully critical Roland Barthes, there resides a less self-conscious, more banal, touristic and colonialist R. B.

Barthes's Orientalist predecessors—Chateaubriand (again), Nerval, Gautier, or Flaubert—all had stories to tell, and, often enough, stories of sexual initiation: Loti is their natural successor, and the Gide of The Immoralist, inventing the coming out genre in a context of Orientalist travel, provides the link with R. B. as a gay male sexual tourist. But these stories (Nerval being a partial exception) are rarely the colonialist story, and it's through his own suppression of this story, replaced by eroticized “haikus,” that Barthes continues this tradition, while suppressing narrative altogether, in the storyless “points”—the punctum without the plot—that constitute for him the romanesque. Oddly enough (since the concept of the punctum arose in connection with photography¹¹), Barthes's “haikus” reproduce the scènes et types postcard genre of the colonial era¹² whenever they focus on an anonymous Moroccan: thus we get “a young Moor,” “a young Black,” “my shoeshine boy,” “and old peasant in a brown djellaba,” “four men from the country,” various students and so forth. Stereotypically, Oriental brutality (21, 23, 37-38) and inefficiency (43) are noted alongside pied noir insensitivity and bêtise; practices of Ramadan are noted, but for their incoherence (29) and picturesqueness (29-30). Mainly, though, what we're given is a collection of Orientalist genre scenes, whose unspoken point is that this is typical of the other's everyday, something one wouldn't see “at home”:

The child I find in the corridor was sleeping in an old cardboard box, his head sticking out as though cut off.

(15)

Sitting on the balcony, they wait for the tiny red lamp to be lit on the tip of the minaret, marking the end of the fast.

(29)

Medina: at six in the evening, in the street studded with peddlers, one sad fellow offers a single chopping board on the edge of the sidewalk.

(32)

M., sick, huddled in a corner on a mat, concealed his bare, burning feet under his brown djellaba.

(39)

Two naked boys have slowly crossed the wadi, their clothes in bundles on their heads.

(41)

The supposed romanesque, here, is a version of the picturesque, then, and a product of the tourist's desire for instant (immediate) authenticity; like the man with the single chopping board, these little pictures propose one endless item, the “eternal” Orient, chopped up into a series of telling details.

Concomitantly with this fantasy of immediate access to the life of the other, R. B. seems as happy in his sexuality here as he is miserable in “Soirées de Paris.” The excruciatingly alienated negotiations of Parisian Desire have become idyllic encounters, candid and engaging, rather touching and even natural: “Visit from an unknown boy, sent by his friend! ‘What do you want? Why are you here?’—‘It's nature!’ (Another boy, on another occasion: ‘It's love!’)” (23). I'm not suggesting, of course, that R. B. doesn't know that these kids are hustling in their fashion: what makes them attractive to him is the blandness of their denial of commoditization, a denial that makes it feasible for him to deny it in turn. “C'est la nature!” “C'est la tendresse!”—whether he believes them or not—are the words he wants to hear, words that by Orientalist definition, since they're quoted here as instances of the Moroccan romanesque, he couldn't expect to hear in Paris. By the same token, the (one-way) gift economy that governs sexual relations between the Parisian visitor and the Moroccan kids functions as a (barely credible) denial of the commodity economy that makes Desire such a hellish torment. Mustafa keeps the sandals he was asked to hold (24); Farid, having warned R. B. against beggars, proceeds to beg a pack of cigarettes and then five thousand francs (22-23). One imagines the outburst such mendacity might provoke in Paris (deadbeats are arrogant in our day and age; 72); here, it's as engaging as the gesture of the child who brings R. B. a bouquet as thanks for having typed his name (40). Indeed, it signifies that, even in their impudence, all these Moroccans are engagingly transparent, readable, and childlike. The Orientalist illusion of innocence is complete.

So when R. B. is tapé in Morocco, it doesn't have the same meaning as on the terrace of the Dome. All the panhandling that goes on can be treated—naturalized and indeed sentimentalized—as evidence of the other's desire for the European subject, and so of the reciprocity of desire that was so absent in Paris. Even the most banally commercial approach can be (mis)taken, thanks to the polysemy of the verb taper itself, which means “to put the bite on, to fuck,” for a sexual invitation, as in the case of the carpet seller whose approximate French is the occasion for some erotic titillation, thinly disguised as linguistic analysis: “A demonstration of phonological pertinence: a young man in the bazaar (with an appealing glance: tu/ti (non pertinent) veux tapis/taper (pertinent)?” (Want a/wanna carpet/fuck?; 19). Barthes the intellectual is very visibly inhabited here by a touristic and colonialist R. B. anxious to misread blatantly commoditized relations as a natural expression of desire. But in this respect the two most typical boys in the text are the half-French Gérard (38), so anxious to offer his Oriental charms (for only in Islam does it count as a “final, irresistible, argument” that he is “uncut”), and young Mustapha, described with breathtaking candeur (or colonial self-deceit?) as “un être blanc de toute hostilité” (devoid of all hostility, the choice of the word blanc [white] being startlingly overdetermined; 32). If Europe's Orientalist dream is of a colonized other offering itself willingly, openly, and above all spontaneously (naturally) to be fucked (or, in Barthes's more euphemistic vocabulary, niqué or tapé), in a desiring relation assumed to be unmarked by asymmetries of wealth and power, then that's the dream we find personified in R. B. as a sexual tourist in Morocco, transforming the other's everyday into a magically idyllic site where something freely given (called the romanesque) becomes available, something on which the painful narratives of history have no bearing.

But it was, of course, Roland Barthes himself, in Mythologies, who taught us, long before he was to write either “Incidents” or “Soirées de Paris,” that the denial of history is the beginning of ideology and the myths of ideology serve only the distribution of power that's in place. That there's an R. B. forgetful of Barthes's lesson doesn't mean, though, that critical intellectuals are any more hypocritical or lacking in self-knowledge than other mortals. What it does mean is that spottiness comes naturally to them (as we saw in chapter 7), and that therefore vigilance has to be their stock-in-trade; moreover, such vigilance never needs to be exercised more carefully than when they are on vacation or taking time off. For, as I've said, being at leisure for them is indistinguishable from being at work.

The theoretical upshot of the preceding comments might be an understanding of the everyday, not as something that is “just there” but as the ideological product of decontextualization, in the sense of a failure to recognize that there is a context other than the “present” context. Such decontextualization splits the everyday into two apparently opposed versions: the familiar everyday (Barthes's Saint-Germain), figured in Soirées de Paris as a pointless story or “histoire plate,” and the other's everyday (Barthes's Morocco) that furnishes in Incidents a storyless point(edness), as a site of the exotic. If the everyday is that which we decontextualize by dehistoricizing it, then to restore the missing, or forgotten, “other” context is, in each case, to reinsert what's seen as purely local (or present) into a global (or historical) framework—in the present case, the framework of (post)colonialism—and this recontextualization gives point to the pointlessness of the familiar while it simultaneously furnishes the (hi)story missing from the decontextualized poignancies of the Barthesian romanesque, the Orientalist, the exotic. And, furthermore, if identity (that of gay man, for instance) is the product of forgetting (the forgetting of other possible identities), this forgetting can be connected, in turn, to the decontextualization that produces the everyday. One's everyday, in other words, is selected by the identity (or the set of identities) one assumes, in both senses of the word (“accedes to” and “takes for granted”), and such identities are the product of a limitation that excludes our potential to be other. Barthesian melancholy might be described as an effect of such foreclosure.

To approach the same issue from another angle, one might also say that in the everyday, whether familiar or exotic—and concomitantly in the construction of identity—a certain connectedness is lost; and, as the case of R. B. demonstrates, this connectedness can be that of the subject and the object when either one of these comes to embody an “other” context, such as the (post)colonial context, that gets ideologically forgotten. Thus we've seen that, in the case of the exotic, it's the object that becomes disconnected and is emphasized, therefore, over the (touristic, colonialist) subject, whose presence on the scene is “omitted” (and with it the question of how this European subject came to be the witness of the other's Moroccan everyday). Correlatively, in the familiar world of Soirées de Paris, it's the (commoditized, colonial) object that becomes an amorphous, poorly differentiated mass of “tapeurs” and “jeunes,” lacking in relief (the romanesque) because nothing and no one stands out, while the narrative focus falls heavily on the subject and his subjective problems. The concluding sentence, in which Barthes observes morosely that “the love of one boy” is henceforth over for him, captures perfectly this interdependence of an object become anonymous and a subject consumed with self-pity. It follows from this analysis that the restoration of context, the opening of the present and the local onto otherness, at the same time that it links in a historical and global framework the domains of the everyday that are illusorily perceived as distinct (on the one hand Paris, on the other Morocco), also reconnects the subject (say, R. B.) and the object (say, the “boys” of Paris and Morocco), establishing the “how come” of their being brought together in one place and demonstrating that the one can't rightly be thought to the exclusion of the other. Not only are we all “posh,” as I said at the outset, but we're also, in the same sense, all “paumés” as well, since “at home” and “out there” are inextricably linked.

Where Baudelaire (chapter 8) had to learn with difficulty to acknowledge his affinity, as a loiterly intellectual, with the marginalized figures of the nineteenth-century street (the “paumés” of his era), the most obvious sign of Barthes's forgetfulness of the lessons of loiterliness, in Incidents and Soirées de Paris, is his anxiety to distinguish himself from the losers, deadbeats, and down-and-outers (whether these be the hustlers and tapeurs of Saint-Germain, or the cute kids of Morocco) who populate his now (post)colonial world. “L'arrogance du paumé,” he writes in curmudgeonly mode, “voilà l'époque,” (deadbeats are arrogant in this day and age). But it is precisely the arrogance he attributes to them that signals something about our own day and age: that it is no longer easy to forget other contexts and that the history that brings together a “posh” if melancholy intellectual and the “paumés” of a Parisian quartier de nuit will return and insist—even, and perhaps especially, when it is ignored.

Notes

1. Roland Barthes, Incidents, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) (Incidents [Paris: Seuil, 1987]). I silently modify Richard Howard's translation on occasion. On the outcry over Incidents see Svetlana Boym, “The Obscenity of Theory: Roland Barthes's ‘Soirées de Paris,’ and Walter Benjamin's ‘Moscow Diary,’” Yale Journal of Criticism, 4, 2 (1991). On “Incidents” and its place in Barthes's personal and intellectual evolution, see Lawrence R. Schehr, “Roland Barthes' Semierotics,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, March-June 1994, 65-79.

2. On the ubiquity of the banal, especially in intellectual discourse, see Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, esp. 8 [22-23].

3. Paul Monette, Becoming a Man (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992); Ackerley, My Father and Myself; and see chapter 6.

4. Eric Michaels, Unbecoming (Sydney: EMPress, 1990); see also, for example, Hervé Guibert, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (New York: Serpent's Tail, 1994) (A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie [Paris: Gailimard, 1990]), and David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives (New York: Vintage, 1991).

5. John Rechy, Numbers (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1976); Renaud Camus, Tricks (New York: Serpent's Tail, 1996) (Tricks [Paris: Mazarine, 1979]).

6. D. A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 7.

7. Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library (New York: Vintage, 1989).

8. These reflections arise in part from Jonathan Dollimore's point, in Sexual Dissidence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), that “over and again in the culture of homosexuality differences of race and class are intensely cathected” and the “crossing” of gayness with race and class has “a complex, difficult history, from which we can learn” (250). This chapter was written before the appearance of Christopher Lane's The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), which examines the “crossings” of masculinity, homosexual desire, and empire in British colonialist and imperialist writing.

9. See “The Writer on Holiday,” Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Noonday, 1991), 29-31. (“L'Écrivain en vacances,” Mythologies [Paris: Seuil, 1957], 30-33).

10. I borrow the phrase from Steven Ungar's title, Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).

11. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). (La Chambre claire [Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1980]).

12. See Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). (Le Harem colonial [Genève: Slatkine, 1981]).