Relationship Secrets

Guibert’s `To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life’ – A Textual Analysis of A Fictional Memoir

Guibert’s 1990 novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life must be understood, in the context of a fictionalized memoir which interrogates the status of truth in its very form. Just as Genet calls into question the modern notion that sexual desire bespeaks the truth of subjectivity, Guibert plays with the popular genre of the truth-revealing literary memoir. Predicated upon a notion of confessional authorial authenticity, the memoir becomes for Guibert a medium through which this authenticity is given lie. Hence, the confessed “truths” emanating from this book should never be trusted as such. Although a self-identified gay man, Guibert resists the truth-telling imperatives of out-politics. In both form and content, To the Friend expresses a desire not to tell its author’s truth and a desire to be anonymous. The title itself-which is in fact not a title at all but rather an address-attests to this desire; it resists entitlement, deflects the compulsion to identify oneself and others, and displaces the proper name with a dedication. Indeed, this text skips the formalities of names and titles in favour of a vague dedication.

Judging from the first person narrative voice written from the perspective of the character “Herve Guibert,” the life not saved is most obviously his, and the friend who did not save it is unreliable Bill, an American who wields power over Guibert by promising, yet never delivering, AIDS-treatment. If Bill is the only friend to which the title refers, why, then, after not saving the narrator’s life, is he still considered a friend? The protagonist relates to other characters above all as a friend; thus, is there more than one friend, and more than one conception of friendship at work in the title? Guibert the protagonist certainly spews bile at his companions throughout the hundred chapters of the novel, and it might even be argued that these expressions of hate frame the narrative itself. Toward the beginning of Chapter Three: “me – a man who has just discovered that he doesn’t like his fellow man, no, I definitely don’t like them, I rather hate them instead” (4), and then finally in the last chapter: “Just how deep do you want me to sink? Fuck you, Bill!” (246).  At the same time, Guibert devotes the majority of the book’s pages to loving descriptions, portraits and stories of friends. If anything is to be grasped from this contradictory rendering of friendship, it is that love and hate are not mutually exclusive. Similarly, the traditional boundaries between self/other, life/death, singular/multiple, and sexual/non-sexual relations are also blurred if not demolished in Guibert’s relations. This raises questions concerning the “my life” of the title/edication: is it only Herve-the protagonist’s life not saved? How are we to understand “life” and the possessive pronoun “my”? As the plot progresses-disjunctively, disruptively-Herve becomes doubled, multiplied. Concerning his lover-friend Jules (with whom he shares a birthday): “I now had the feeling that we were part of one and the same being” (153); concerning Jules’s family (the Club of Five): “the HIV virus had allowed me to become part of their blood” (1 94); concerning Rainieri, his blood-work accomplice: “So we advanced side by side, like shadows of each other, going at the same speed in the same direction” (218); concerning an episode of mistaken identity at the lab: “we decided that a certain Margherita had provided the contents of Herve Guibert’s test tubes” (222); and, finally, concerning Guibert’s last meeting with Bill: “I kept splitting into two people during the dinner” (242). Furthermore, this “self’ becomes increasingly phantasmal: a ghost rather than a stable and autonomous ego; a self shot through with both memories of friends who have died and encounters with the living whose deaths are imminent; a presence whose absence becomes increasingly visible in the daily confrontation with death. In Guibert’s rendering of friendship a shared, spectral self thus effaces individual identity: the possessive pronoun “my” becomes multiple, the life not saved plural. In the face of AIDS, Guibert is forced to reconceptualize the friend and with a new conception of friendship comes a new conception of life and subjectivity.

Yet each friend, including Guibert, is left to die his or her own death, and death confronts these friends at every turn. “As soon as he’d gone I felt better: I was my own best nurse, for I was the only person able to cope with my suffering” (154). Though the friends in the novel often merge to the point of where it is impossible to distinguish the one from the other, a recognition of each other’s final absence is their sole commonality. This uncomfortable fact, and the ensuing discomfort that manifests itself in each interaction, becomes the ethical backbone of Guibert’s conception of friendship. This ethic of discomfort takes on a new meaning when, in the time of AIDS, the finitude of friendship becomes so unavoidable. The idea of a love without transcendence becomes literalized in friendships ending in AIDS deaths. Immersed in death’s ubiquity, Guibert-the-protagonist is forced to become a philosopher of friendship, to re-evaluate his understanding of life, subjectivity, and relationality. Not surprisingly, this re-evaluation occurs most intensely through the death of Muzil, the character most likely named after the German writer Robert Musil whose novel The Man Without Qualities resonates in Guibert’s text.  “I understood for the first time … that Muzil was going to die and very soon; a certainty that disfigured me in the eyes of passersby, for my face disintegrated, washed away by my tears and shattered into fragments by my cries” (92). Guibert sees his “selfs” disappearance, his own becoming-man-without-qualities, in the death of Muzil. In the recognition of the friend’s death, Guibert mourns his own passing: “it wasn’t so much my friend’s last agony I was describing, it was my own” (91). The recognition and acceptance of finitude brings with it a new conception of life and relationality: death is no longer the opposite of life, but immanent to it; death and absence are at the very core of life and thus life must be lived as if each and every moment is the last. As a result, friendship emerges at the point where relating with the Other is impossible. This is a difficult, if not disturbing, relation to imagine. Maurice Blanchot’s eulogy for Georges Bataille entitled “Friendship”‘ resonates with Guibert’s conception and perhaps helps clarify what Guibert is trying to define. Blanchot writes:

We must give up trying to know those to whom we are linked by something essential; by this I mean we must greet them in the relation with the unknown in which they greet us as well, in our estrangement. Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode, yet into which all the simplicity of life enters, passes by way of the recognition of the common strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends but only to speak to them, not to make of them a topic of conversations (or essays), but the movement of understanding in which, speaking to us, they reserve, even on the most familiar terms, an infinite distance, the fundamental separation on the basis of which what separates becomes relation. (Friendship 29 1)

The finitude that Guibert recognizes in himself and others, as Blanchot reminds us, can never be shared. Upon the recognition of the infinite distance between singular lives, however, new relational possibilities emerge. On the status of gay bathhouses amidst the pandemic, Muzil remarks: “The baths have never been so popular and now they’re fantastic. This danger lurking everywhere has created new complicities, new tenderness, new solidarities. Before no one ever said a word; now we talk to one another” (22). AIDS merely magnifies the impermanence that is always present in the self, in the Other, and in the friend.

For Guibert, HIV is “a disease that gave death time to live and its victims time to die, time to discover time, and in the end to discover life, so in a way those green monkeys of Africa provided us with a brilliant modem invention … If life was nothing but the presentiment of death and the constant torture of wondering when the axe would fall, then AIDS, by setting an official limit to our life span … made us men who were fully conscious of our lives, and freed us from our ignorance” (164). If AIDS is a “brilliant modern invention” that shortens a life span yet allows Guibert to live more fully and more consciously, is the virus his friend? Or, if the friend is one who acknowledges the finitude in another and relates with this other precisely at the point of unrelatability-and thus never truly possesses the power to save the other’s life-is the friend not Bill, but perhaps Muzil? If so, this entire book could be Guibert’s response to the letter from his “Cher Michel,”‘ his contribution to the joint production of a discourse of impersonal friendship.

The community of friends that emerges in the novel is one that intensifies alienation, one that emphasizes that which cannot be shared, and one that is founded upon estrangement in regard to the unknown. While these friends seem in one way or another united through their marginalized sexual identities and practices, the importance of the sex act is diminished in relation to the bonds that develop out of it. If sexuality is the primary means by which the state deploys its power over life, is friendship a difficult relation to administer? If the reference is to male claimant/rival friendships, sexless relations of emotional attachment and competition, the answer is a resounding No. These friendships are crucial to the homosocial boy’s club network which comprises most contemporary governmental and corporate hierarchies, hence crucial for the functioning of the state and capital. What about Guibert’s friendships? Ones that blur the lines between the sexual and the non-sexual?;  friendships that begin where most others end, that is to say, in a recognition of the Other’s finitude? Friendships that form new alliances between members of different generations, classes, and races? Are these friendships valuable to the state and capital? Deleuze and Guattari are helpful here. Writing obliquely about their own prolific collaboration, the authors assert in What is Philosophy? that friendship is “a condition for the exercise of thought,” (5) that is to say, immanent to philosophical thought itself. They continue:

The philosopher is the concept’s friend; he is potentiality of the concept. That is, philosophy is not a simple art of forming, inventing, or fabricating concepts, because concepts are not necessarily forms, discoveries, or products. More rigorously, philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts. Does this mean that the friend is the friend of his own creations? Or is the actuality of the concept due to the potential of the friend, in the unity of the creator and his double? (5)

The philosopher, the friend of knowledge, the one who seeks wisdom yet does not formally possess it, needs the friend to practice his or her work, to create concepts. The friend lies at both the etymological and the practical roots of Greek philosophy and is perhaps, then, the originary conceptual persona of thought in the West. Yet the friend embedded within philosophy is not an externality: thought needs the thinker as the friend to actualize the concept. Thought, in its process of actualization, is divided: thought and thinker become claimant and rival and vice versa, reversible and indistinguishable from each other. The problem for philosophy in modernity, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is that the classical claimantlrival conception of friendship can no longer be the conceptual persona of thought, for two reasons: first, powerful rivals have emerged in the forces of advertising and marketing-the new “idea men” of our time-transforming friendship’s relation to thought and putting philosophy to work in the service of capital; second, after the “inexpressible catastrophe” of modernity (in historical terms, the atrocities committed under totalitarianism, the Holocaust, Stalinism, etc.; in philosophical terms, the Heideggerean mistake of confusing the German fascists for the Greeks), the friend as conceptual persona of philosophy has changed irrevocably. Homosocialized, commodified, and fascistic, classical conceptions of friendship have become disgraceful and untrustworthy. The Relationship of friendship to thought is now one of shame. In order to be viable again, friendship must undergo a metamorphosis.

Unless we are led back to the ‘Friend,’ but after an ordeal that is too powerful, an inexpressible catastrophe, and so in yet another new sense, in a mutual distress, a mutual weariness that forms a new right of thought (Socrates becomes Jewish). Not two friends who communicate and recall the past together but, on the contrary, who suffer an amnesia or aphasia capable of splitting thought, of dividing it in itself. (What is Philosoph~? 7 1)

And where Deleuze and Guattari leave off, Guibert begins. In To the Friend Who Did Not Save MY Life, he grapples with the classical understanding of thought as friend and ultimately attempts to conceptualize a new friendship in the face of AIDS. Deleuze and Guattari’s vague summoning of an “inexpressible catastrophe” which prompts a rethinking of the relation between friendship and thought is realized in the mathematically sublime number of AIDS corpses. Guibert becomes the new philosopher of a very different form of friendship. At the outset of the text, he claims that the book he is writing, the thought he is actualizing on the page, is a friend: “I’m beginning a new book to have a companion, someone with whom I can talk eat, sleep, at whose side I can dream and have nightmares, the only friend whose company I can bear at present” (4). Yet this book, this friend, eventually becomes the rival and can no longer be trusted.

Caught in a race to “save his life” in a contest similar to his rivalry with Bill-another figure who promised salvation-Guibert the thinker competes with Thought in an attempt to ward off death. In the end, his book, the friend that was once trusted, the classically conceived friend at once claimant and rival, turns on Guibert. “My book is closing in on me. I am in deep shit” (246). Both Bill and Thought, as friends in the claimant/rival sense, have failed him: the friends that did not save his life, the friends who withheld the prize of salvation, are multiple. Yet the friends who did not save his life in a creative and positive sense (e.g., Muzil, Rainieri, and even the virus), the friends who helped transform his conception of life and death, the friends who have helped him abandon his life and his self to finitude, are also multiple. The friend that did not save my life, in this sense, then, is simultaneously at least two types of friend at once. As a philosopher grappling with the status of friendship in the face of a catastrophe, Guibert leaves behind a classical notion of friendship in order to invent a new one. No longer besmirched by shame, the new conceptual persona of thought is still a friend: but this one greets the other only in the acknowledgment of a mutual estrangement which can never be shared.

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