Never Say I

Michael Lucey is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of French at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality and translator of Didier Eribon’s Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, both also published by Duke University Press.

“A breakthrough book. Never Say I isn’t just an ‘important contribution,’ as people say. It is a necessary one, disturbing many simplistic assumptions about the writing of same-sex subjectivity in modern France.”-Ross Chambers, author of The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism “In this abundantly helpful work, Michael Lucey retrieves a vital moment in modern culture when saying ‘I’ required not only a certain courage but also a certain art.”-D. A. Miller “Never Say I is a clear, cogent literary history of the articulation of the discourses and representations of same-sex desire and homosexuality in early twentieth-century French literature, and it is an important addition to our understanding of the literature and culture of the period.” - Lawrence R. Schehr (Modern Philology) “Michael Lucey constructs a deft and innovative model for thinking about the problems Colette, AndrÉ Gide, Marcel Proust, and others faced as they struggled to articulate a first person that might aptly speak about - and, just as often, speak for - same-sex sexualities in a fraught linguistic, literary, social, and political arena. . . . This notion of the I as a figure-rather than as a subject-is one of the most important and exciting contributions Never Say I makes. . . . Lucey’s formulation of the I as a figure allows us to see how each I can indeed be read, so long as it is read with care and attention to the fields within which it occurs. And it allows us to see more clearly the sophistication and simultaneous earnestness and playfulness with which these novelists, theorists of the self, handled the critical task of learning to articulate a queer first person.” - David Namie (GLQ) “Though the book’s title highlights the role of Gide, Proust, and Colette in this process, Lucey’s study offers much more than a rereading of these three well-studied figures and their work. Instead, he not only investigates the “position-taking” that came to characterize their literary output but also seeks to understand these positions in the context of an intimate web of writers, critics, and others in the cultural elite in France in this period.” - Patricia Tilburg (Journal of the History of Sexuality)

• Acknowledgments viiIntroduction: Referring to Same-Sex Sexualities in the First Person 11. Gide, Bourget, and Proust Talking 292. Questions of Register in and around 1902 573. Colette, the Moulin Rouge, and Les Vrilles 944. Gide and Posterity 1655. Proust’s Queer Metalepses 1936. Sodom and Gomorrah: Proust’s Narrator’s First Person 215Epilogue 250Notes 259Works Cited 303Index 317