Genet’s book comes to Leduc through unofficial channels, we might say, and her reading of it resembles her youthful reading of Gide’s The Fruits of the Earth, involving a combination of secrecy, sensuality, and sacredness. There is a lesson to be learned about the combination of these two phenomena, unofficial modes of circulation and a certain kind of fervent reading: they link both Genet and Leduc to what we might call a sexual counterpublic, a very specific kind of readership with a correspondingly particular kind of authorship and a particular experience of reading. Perhaps prominent display windows of imposing bookstores are not the most hospitable homes for books seeking that kind of readership, or offering that kind of experience.
Leduc’s early work, with all the difficulties of its style, its subject matter, and its way of perceiving and thinking about the world, comes to be admired by much the same set of people who admired Genet’s early work. The book-collecting industrialist Jacques Guérin would even arrange for the publication of a private, luxury collector’s edition of L’Affamée, similar to the private editions of Genet’s early novels. It was, in fact, in the form of this private edition that Leduc’s book would find itself where she had dreamed it would be. As her biographer Carlo Jansiti notes, the private edition “comes off the presses in September 1948. Paul Morihien, rue de Beaujolais, dedicates a window to it” (Jansiti 1999, 210); Morihien was also the publisher of the private edition of Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. The more affordable Gallimard edition of L’Affamée, published a few months later, sold poorly.
Unlike Genet, Leduc was slow to find a wider readership. De Beauvoir’s understanding of why Leduc’s Ravages was censored more rigorously than anything by Genet ever was is simple and convincing: the men who chose what to publish, the men who reviewed what was published, the men who demanded that this or that passage be censored were made uncomfortable by the idea and by the example of a woman finding a vibrant new language in which to explore instances of female same-sex sexuality (the topic of Thérèse and Isabelle), or to recount the experience of a botched abortion, or to describe bemusedly what it is like to handle a penis during a taxi ride. Yet, there is perhaps more to be understood about the difficulty Leduc has had finding readers, the slowness with which they have found their way to her writing. Perhaps there is a kind of complexity to the reading experience she offers that has been difficult to take in, perhaps there is a complexity to her exploration of the way sexual experience is constructed, and to the way sexual and literary experiences intermingle that have been difficult to access. What to do? Find more of her books and make special arrangements to read them: polish your shoes, hide under the sheets with her books, display her books wherever likely readers might find them. Speak to others fervently about your obsession, about the unsettling complexity of the sexual and literary experiences that Violette Leduc offers.
MICHAEL LUCEY
WORKS CITED
Beauvoir, Simone de. 1998. A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren. New York: The New Press.
Jansiti, Carlo. 1999. Violette Leduc. Paris: Grasset.
Leduc, Violette. 1994. La Chasse à l’amour. Paris: Gallimard-Imaginaire. [Original edition 1972].
——. 1999. Mad in Pursuit, trans. Derek Coltman. New York: Riverhead Books. [Original edition 1970].
——. 2003. La Bâtarde, trans. Derek Coltman. [Normal, IL]: Dalkey Archive Press. [Original edition 1964].
——. 2007. Correspondance 1945–1972, ed. Carlos Jansiti. Paris: Gallimard, 2007.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Violette. 2014. Directed by Martin Provost. Diaphana. DVD.
Violette Leduc: La Chasse à l’amour. 2013. Directed by Esther Hoffenberg. Les films du poisson. DVD.
TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Deborah Levy, Zoe Crisp, Sophie and Jean-Dominique Langlais, Clémence Sebag, Cécile Menon, and Hilary Kaplan; your contribution to this translation was essential.
SOPHIE LEWIS, 2011
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Championed by Simone de Beauvoir and admired by Jean Genet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Albert Camus, VIOLETTE LEDUC has been referred to as “France’s greatest unknown writer.” She is best remembered for her autobiography La Bâtarde (1964).