posted on 27 Aug 2018

Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon

Reviewing Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims, The Guardian called it a “virtuosic memoir of sexual awakening within a French working class that now seems to have deserted the left”. Or, it might have added, a French working class that has been deserted by the left, for this essentially is the crux of Eribon’s memoir.

What we have here is the story of how one gay man, a Trotskyist militant in his teens who rose from a violent, impoverished working class background to become a professor of sociology and a public intellectual. The book has by all accounts been something of a sensation in Europe and is now published by Allen Lane in hardback in the UK.

From both an external, objective perspective as well as from a personal perspective, this is a book that has something important to say about class, political allegiance and the changing nature of politics in France and indeed much of Europe – of how traditional left parties have deserted class as a defining imperative, and of how poor increasingly marginalised working class communities have deserted traditional left parties, typically moving to right or far-right populist parties and movements that almost universally share an anti-immigrant ideology. 

In order to examine these issues, and one might add in order to develop a sociological language with which to describe them, Eribon uses the lens of his own particular experience – and while this gives the book undeniable focus (the terrain it considers might otherwise be too wide, too difficult to grasp), it is also its weakness. Eribon’s personal experience is so particular that it doesn’t necessarily translate well.

For all its claim to be a self-coruscating memoir in which the author critiques his own failures – his own betrayal of his class background – at times it seems an oddly self-satisfied book. It could certainly have been a shorter one. For example, the first couple of dozen pages could easily be paraphrased in a single paragraph:

I finally began to wonder why I was proudly out as a gay man but continued to be closeted as a working class man. I realised that while I idealised and stayed loyal to the political conception of an ‘organised working class’, I had turned my back on actual working class people, including – and perhaps especially – my own family.

This is certainly what Eribon means, but my God it takes him a long time to get the essential point across.

This is an important book but sadly its style, its long-windedness and its sometimes obscurantist sociological vocabulary will I suspect put off all but the most determined readers. I found it to be about one-third fascinating and two-thirds infuriating. But perhaps this is my problem rather than the book’s: I’m still not sure.

Those with an interest in left politics and revolutionary theory will enjoy its description of the writers – Sartre, Genet, de Beauvoir, James Baldwin – that came, against the odds, to fuel Eribon’s intellectual awakening, and the role that political activism and a discovery of radical social theorists played in helping him leave behind the limitations of his family life and especially his violent, homophobic father. But as I say, the language is often academic and is far from being free of sociological jargon. It may also be that the text is not well-served by its translation. Some parts of it seem simply clumsy and there are a few instances of poor copy-editing that stand out – a critical reference to Malthusianism is rendered as “Mathusianism”, for instance.

But if you were to say that I’m focusing on minor irritations because I can’t quite articulate why I found the book so unsatisfactory and so disappointing, you’d be right. It is disappointing, I think, because I assumed it was going to speak lucidly and revealingly of working class experience, perhaps even including my own, and ultimately I don’t think it does. And it is infuriating because it could have. At times Eribon quotes James Baldwin, whose early essays on gayness, the black experience and racism in some respects cover similar territory, and there couldn’t be a better illustration of how to write about such subject matter for a wide, non-academic audience. In Baldwin’s essays the language is ruthlessly lucid, brutally understandable, and memorably clear. Whereas Eribon’s book is important despite rather than because of its prose. It is a missed opportunity, or perhaps worse, a squandered opportunity; and that is a reason for sadness almost as great as the disenfranchisement and class oppression the book describes.

 

Alun Severn

August 2018