Recto/Verso: Mapping the Popular Novel

A look at a popular cultural phenomenon can often allow the observer to put her or his finger on the pulse of the moment; a generalized popular culture reflects neither canonicity (though often an established status quo) nor an edgy future, but rather it is the sign of the times. I am arguing for an examination of discourses, regardless of level or literary value. As Foucault showed long ago in Les Mots et les choses, emerging discourses – though he did not limit himself to them – appear in an episteme that, while clearly delineating a field, contains contradictions. And I mean “contains” in two senses of the word: the field includes contradictions between competing discourses but, also, the construction of the field allows those competing discourses to be simultaneously maintained.

In France, a growing number of what I shall call “novels of arrival,” rather than coming-out narratives, have appeared in recent years, in the wake of the end of the AIDS crisis. I am calling them “novels of arrival” not only because the coming-out narrative, as Denis Provencher has admirably shown, is different for a French context (and often does not make sense, if we think about the lingering philosophy behind the American term), but also because many of these narratives are not necessarily coming-out stories, but rather the story of the protagonist's arrival in Paris and his establishment there in the gay community in the Marais.