Review of Naomi Segal, André Gide, Pederasty and Pedagogy, Oxford: Clarendon 1998

Author & source unknown; 2004.

I found a book about André Gide's sexuality which might be useful as evidence for the influence of victim-feminist thought in the academy. It makes me wonder how much more there may be. Forgive the length, but I wanted to collect my thoughts should I do a review of Gide's delightful and only recently published Le Ramier (*1).

• (*1) Paris: Gallimard 2002

In André Gide, Pederasty and Pedagogy (*2), Naomi Segal's lack of understanding of the male gender borders on antipathy. According to her, in ancient Greece the youth in adult-adolescent male relationships had a feminine — and thus abject — role. 

• (*2) Oxford: Clarendon 1998. Segal is a French Studies professor at the University of Reading.

She seems ignorant of the youth's proto-masculinity, viz, that he is the coveted love object for a man because of the combination of his pre-adult male beauty and his warrior ability, fighting and, if need be, killing. Moreover, by conceiving of the youth in only feminine terms, she essentializes gender, rendering it fixed and immutable, its negativity ineluctable.

In discussing Greek paederastia, she describes the younger partner as feminine, referring to the "quasi-feminine body of a young boy" (p. 14). "Feminine" implies lack of power:

• "In the loves of adult men, the 'other' could belong to any of a variety of inferior groups: women, slaves, foreigners and children…" (p. 14);
• "the other lets himself be wooed, pursued, talked to or at, taught, paid for, and finally (maybe) penetrated." (p. 15).

Sex acts are degrading:

• "Penetration may [also take the form of the] less demeaning form of intercrural intercourse…" (p. 15).

There is also the common semantic tactic of infantilizing the younger partner, conflating adult-adolescent eroticism and modern-day "pedophilia":

• "Classical pederasty is one version of the desire of an adult for a child" (p. 22).

Underlying Segal's analysis is an offshoot of Freudian theory that posits a hydraulic view of sexuality, wherein the exchange of bodily fluids drives much of erotic desire. This grossly simplistic idea privileges a phallocentric view of sexuality and, again, essentializes gender, supporting a conception of "feminine" as flawed.

The sources for Segal's treatment of man-boy love as pathological include what might be victim-feminist texts on child abuse:

• Vikki Bell, Interrogating Incest,
• Jean La Fontaine, Child Sexual Abuse,
• Beatrix Campbell, Unofficial Secrets,
• etc.

I have not read these

• (nor will I: to quote the Gide biographer Alan Sheridan (*3),
  "I have wasted too many long hours wrestling with such problems, hours better spent in the company of particular human creations").

• (*3) André Gide: A Life in the Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1999

Her sources for man-boy love in ancient Greece and other times/places are scattershot: she includes the early work of Kenneth Dover (*4) but ignores the excellent contemporary scholarship of Michael Rocke (*5) and Stephen O. Murray *(6), let alone, for ancient Greece, Thomas Hubbard (*7) or Andrew Calimach (*8). 

• (*4) Greek Homosexuality, London: Duckworth 1978
• (*5) Rocke, Michael, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence, New York and Oxford: Oxford 1996
• (*6) E.g., Murray, Stephen, et al., Latin American Male Homosexualities, Albuquerque, New Mexico: U. of New Mexico Press 1995; Murray, Stephen and Roscoe, Will, Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature, New York: New York U. Press 1997. Murray summarizes these and his book about same-sex conduct in Asia/Oceania in his Homosexualities, Chicago: U of Chicago Press 2000
• (7) Homosexuality in Greece and Rome, Berkeley: U of Calif. Press 2003
• (8) Lovers' Legends: The Gay Greek Myths. New Rochelle, New York: Haiduk Press 2002.

A cursory search of hist. sex would have turned up more references supporting the conception of younger partner as masculine (*9). 

• (*9) Segal's sources are in note 49 p. 14. Hubbard and Calimach's books were published after Segal's but perhaps their work was available earlier in journal articles.

These authors as well as scholars of Japanese nanshoku understand that the younger partner's masculine gender provided him substantial agency. Generally, for freeborn male youths in Greece and Japan, a sustained relationship with an older man was a sign of status. There is no evidence in any source I have seen that male youths believed their relationships or sexual acts with older partners demeaned them. Judging by Murray's wide-ranging anthropological surveys, this has been and is still the case throughout most of the world, except in some -- but not all -- instances of prostitution. It is arrogant of Segal to overlook this work, the more so given paederastia is fundamental to Gide's argument in Corydon, his defense of adult-adolescent male eroticism.

Segal's book is flawed in other ways. Not least is her ignoring Gide's long-term amorous relationships, giving short shrift even to Marc Allégret, whom Gide when met when he was 47 and Marc 16. She mentions Allégret several times but just in passing, and characterizes their relationship only as that they remained friends.

In reality, each described their lifelong love for each other as the most important event in their lives, intense and profoundly felt.

Columbia University Professor Richard Howard, praising Alan Sheridan's bio in the Los Angeles Times, says that it illustrates the inclusive nature of Gide's life with a 1951 photograph of Gide, his daughter Catherine and her husband, Jean Lambert, their children and Allégret. Taken a few months before Gide's death, the snapshot shows them having what looks to be a simple meal in the kitchen; their mutual affection obvious. Sheridan's caption says the photograph demonstrates

• "a perceptive tolerance, even a Goethean, or call it a Gideani reverence for all the dimensions of experience…" (*10)

• (*10) "A Present of All Things Past", 25 July 1999

My criticisms notwithstanding, Segal provides a fascinating look at Gide's life as does Emily Apter's interesting and non-judgmental André Gide and the Codes of Homotextuality (*11).

• (11) Saratoga, Calif: ANMA LIBRI 1987

They and Sheridan make clear Gide's erotic interests centered on young adolescent males and that he actively pursued this -- and them! -- all his life. They provide many accounts of what Gide called his rôder (prowling) for sex as late as his 70s. Not just cruising when he could fit it in to his busy schedule as a leading literary figure, but devoting hours and hours to it.

He documented much of this in his Journals and autobiographical writings such as Si le grain ne meurt

• (in which beautiful passages key to understanding his embracing of his sexuality were deleted for the English translation).

Segal, Apter and Sheridan's examples of Gide on the prowl range from noble to comical, but all of these underscore his humanity (*12).

• (*12) Gide and his friends marveled at how he escaped censure, attributing this "grace" to his fame and to the Nobel. In 1947, Gide predicted that within 15 years things would change for the better. He died in 1951 and so didn't live to see 1968, and San Francisco's summer of love and the student rebellion in France. I have seen no evidence he foresaw the repression which followed.

A fascinating point in Apter's work is her citing famed grammarian Roland Barthes' observation, in his preface to Renaud Camus' 1979 collection of same sex-themed récits (short stories), Tricks (*13), that these descriptions of sexual encounters

• "devraient faire penser à des Haïkus; car le Haïku unit un ascisme de la forme (qui couple net l'envie d'interpréter) et un hédonisme si tranquille, qu'on peut dire seulement du plaisir qu'il est la (ce qui est aussi le contraire de l'Interprétation)". (p. 15; Barthes' emphasis)

• (13) Paris: Mazarine, p. 15

Apter observes,

• "This pure, unmediated enunciation of the sexual act — beyond Interpretation — finds its corollary in Gide's Carnets d'Egypte and Ainsi soit-il in which Gide, self-portrayed as a homosexual Robinson, openly recounts the vagaries of his sexual exploits…" (p. 104)

How cool of Barthes to compare the Japanese medieval aesthetic of resonances — "scents" as Shirane described them [*14] in his discussion of the poet Basho — which reached their peak in Basho's haikai, to sexual acts, "tranquil hedonism". This purity, simple and profound, shines through every paragraph of Le Ramier.

• (*14) Shirane, Haruo. (1992). "Matsuo Basho and the Poetics of Scent." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. Volume 52:77-110

Notes

(1) Paris: Gallimard 2002

(2) Oxford: Clarendon 1998. Segal is a French Studies professor at the University of Reading.

(3) André Gide: A Life in the Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1999

(4) Greek Homosexuality, London: Duckworth 1978

(5) Rocke, Michael, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence, New York and Oxford: Oxford 1996

(6) E.g., Murray, Stephen, et al., Latin American Male Homosexualities, Albuquerque, New Mexico: U. of New Mexico Press 1995; Murray, Stephen and Roscoe, Will, Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature, New York: New York U. Press 1997. Murray summarizes these and his book about same-sex conduct in Asia/Oceania in his Homosexualities, Chicago: U of Chicago Press 2000

(7) Homosexuality in Greece and Rome, Berkeley: U of Calif. Press 2003

(8) Lovers' Legends: The Gay Greek Myths. New Rochelle, New York: Haiduk Press 2002.

(9) Segal's sources are in note 49 p. 14. Hubbard and Calimach's books were published after Segal's but perhaps their work was available earlier in journal articles.

(10) "A Present of All Things Past", 25 July 1999

(11) Saratoga, Calif: ANMA LIBRI 1987

(12) Gide and his friends marveled at how he escaped censure, attributing this "grace" to his fame and to the Nobel. In 1947, Gide predicted that within 15 years things would change for the better. He died in 1951 and so didn't live to see 1968, and San Francisco's summer of love and the student rebellion in France. I have seen no evidence he foresaw the repression which followed.

(13) Paris: Mazarine, p. 15

(14) Shirane, Haruo. (1992). "Matsuo Basho and the Poetics of Scent." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. Volume 52:77-110