"That is Not What I Meant at All"

Abstract

Someone may be thought of as the third in a trilogy of books on sexuality in French literature by Michael Lucey, following The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (2003) and Never Say I: Sexuality in the First Person in Colette, Gide and Proust (2006). One of the most distinguished scholars in sexuality studies and certainly the most interesting in French studies, Lucey has developed a set of conceptual preoccupations and a methodological approach that are at once idiosyncratic—to use one of his own key terms—and compelling. Methodologically, this has meant an approach to literature as sociological that is inseparable from a Bourdieusian sociological approach to literature, with a constant back-and-forth between the type of sociological thinking carried out in novels, on the one hand, and the external dynamics of the literary field, on the other. Conceptually, Lucey’s work has been attentive to the “misfit,” meaning at once the individual whose sense of self does not fit well with available categories, vocabularies, and representations, as well as the fact and typically uncomfortable experience of that lack of fit. In all three books, Lucey shows that “sexual identity” cannot be thought separately from social positioning, and vice versa, and the feeling of “misfit” often occurs at the intersection of the two. Someone’s productive innovation is to draw on the linguistic field of pragmatics, which studies the context-dependent, nonsemantic, nonexplicit functions of utterances. “Misfit sexualities,” Lucey contends, “sometimes exist in language and culture without ever being explicitly talked about or explicitly laid claim to,” but “leave other kinds of traces, more pragmatic than semantic ones” (9). Not so much loves that dare