R.M.Gillett

Queen Mary, University of London

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Now that you have had time properly to digest Elza's excellent 'Exquisite Excrement', I should like if I may briefly to raise the tone a little and to bring us back to the business of literary criticism proper. To that end, I want to throw myself shamelessly on the mercy of the French experts among you and ask you please to establish for me the meaning and the metre of the line:

Le vent qui roule un coeur sur le pavé des cours.

Up to the caesura, I think, the line presents no difficulties. But the swirling second half, it seems to me, is not nearly as clear. Can we read it as continuing the iambic pattern of the first? Or as a neat pair of anapaests? Or as indeterminate and contradictory?

The reason I ask is that this is the opening of Jean Genet's 'Le condamné à mort' 'The man condemned to death'.[1] On page 482 of Saint Genet Comédien et Martyr, Jean-Paul Sartre finally gets round to interpreting this first line of Genet's first work.[2] He scans it as follows: x/x///xxxx//. Thirty years later, Hubert Fichte notices the footnote and comments: 'Das ist toll!'.[3] Now this word 'toll' in German, apart from having overtones of madness (the German for rabies is 'Tollwut') is a hackneyed and colloquial expression of enthusiasm, which has been known to cause instant mirth in my Austrian acquaintances and which does not usually find its way into the reviews sections of serious publications. With it, Fichte is drawing attention to himself as a maverick and to Sartre as the opposite thereof. And if, as I suspect, Sartre's reading of Genet's line is madder than it is clever, that would mean that Fichte, with his shrill praise, is actually cocking a snook at the French 'maître à penser'. Here a man who left school at fourteen, who in his fourth novel coquettishly claims he is unable to learn foreign languages and who posthumously parodies the genre of the research report, is effectively accusing the famous French thinker, whom he pointedly apostrophizes as a former Professor at the Lycée Condorcet, of philological inexactitude. He is doing so quite consciously and deliberately, as we know because in another text on Genet's poem, probably written earlier, though broadcast later, he actually quotes alternative versions of the metre of that first line.[4] And he is doing so not decently or privately, in an academic journal, but in the public arena provided by the German news magazine Der Spiegel.[5] And that, as my pupils used to say when I was still teaching 'A'-level, is wicked.

Unfortunately, the relevant editor somehow managed to misquote the Sartre, replacing the final // with a puny x.[6] This not only makes nonsense of Fichte's whole argument and destroys his whole strategy ¾ it also creates the impression, which could not be more wrong, that this kind of nit-picking doesn't matter. But as luck would have it, the piece is now also available as part of Fichte's eccentrically incomplete collected essays, in a book published after his death under the confusing title of Homosexualität und Literatur II. There the editor, Torsten Teichert, following Fichte's manuscript, manages to quote the Sartre correctly, restores a passage in which Fichte briefly challenges the philosopher on his own turf, and reverts to Fichte's original title of 'Wortwurst und Strichmännchen'.[7] This ¾ to give the game away right at the outset ¾ I have taken the liberty of translating as 'porridge and straw men'.[8] Moreover, Teichert conferred on his text the designation 'Polemik'. Which is how I come to be here.

In fact there are two further texts in the collection Homosexualität und Literatur which both bear the designation 'Polemische Anmerkungen' or 'polemic remarks'. One of them is also concerned with Genet, though focused this time on Querelle de Brest. It shares material with the essay on Sartre, though formally it is much more of a mess, and seems indeed to have its origins in the radio essays mentioned earlier. Teichert claims that Fichte said that this essay was originally conceived for Le Monde. It was then offered to Die Zeit, but even Fichte's friendship with the then literary editor of that newspaper Fritz Raddatz was not enough to secure publication.[9] So the text eventually appeared in the relatively obscure, relatively left-leaning periodical Freibeuter, edited by Klaus Wagenbach. Its title is 'Die Sprache der Liebe', 'The Language of Love'.1[10]

The second set of polemical remarks is concerned with Claude Lévi-Strauss, and especially with his self-deprecating travelogue Tristes Tropiques. Like so much else by Fichte, this was originally broadcast on German radio, before being published in the vaguely institutional-oppositional Literaturmagazin sponsored by Fichte's former publisher Rowohlt. The title of this piece is 'Das Land des Lächelns'.1[11] Because it was published in the first volume of Homosexualität und Literatur, it had the misfortune to be translated into American by Kevin Gavin. Incredibly, Gavin (German speakers, shut your ears) rendered 'Lächeln', which means 'smile' by 'laughter'.1[12] And since this sick joke of a laughter suited both my polemical and my rhythmic purpose, I couldn't resist taking it over into my title.

Taken together, these three polemical pieces tell us a great deal about Hubert Fichte. Even the simple roll-call of those attacked and defended, for example, makes it very clear that he is writing his polemics from the partisan perspective of a homosexual. Clearly the maverick quality played up in the Sartre essay is bound up with this, as is the choice of the figure of Genet as a battle ground. So too I suspect is the unusual sensitivity to National Socialist and other totalitarian echoes, which Fichte rightly seems to find in abundance in the work of Lévi-Strauss. And there is something too about the tone of these pieces, about their ductus and their rhetorical gestures, which is unusually vehement, even exaggerated. The extent to which, in all three essays, Fichte goes against the orthodoxy and the conventions of well-mannered discourse can be judged from the deprecating attitude not infrequently adopted by his critics in this regard, when they claim for example as Reinold Werner does that an uncritical acceptance of existentialism was somehow in the air in Fichte's Germany, or when they disingenuously suggest, as Wolfgang von Wangenheim does, that Lévi-Strauss's practice isn't all that different from Fichte's own.1[13] For this reason it seems possible, in the light of their subjects and their objects, their manner and their bad manners, to qualify these essays as 'queer' polemics. Quite what I mean by that will I hope become clearer in the course of my remarks. These will be focused in the main on the Sartre essay, which I shall be holding up at various points as a exemplary piece of polemic. But there will also be side-swipes from the other two pieces which I hope to use to clarify Fichte's own position and to build a narrow bridge to Algeria.

Now it is abundantly clear that the precocious Fichte came across both Sartre and Genet at a very early stage in his career. Indeed in his second novel he puts a date on it:

Bei Hans Henny Jahnn noch Jean Genet, der saß immer im Gefängnis und klaute bei seinen Bekannten die Luxusausgaben. Jean-Paul Sartre schrieb 600 Seiten als Vorwort zu einem Roman von Jean Genet. Mit dreizehn hattte Jäcki furchtbare Angst, im Gefängnis sitzen zu müssen und er hätte es auch nie gewagt, Luxusausgaben bei Hans Henny Jahnn zu klauen ¾ wenn es da welche gegeben hätte.1[14]

At Hans Henny Jahnn's also Jean Genet, he was always in prison and stole de luxe editions from his acquaintances. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote 600 pages as a preface to a novel by Jean Genet. At 13 Jäcki was terribly afraid of having to do time in prison and besides he would never have dared to steal de luxe editions from Hans Henny Jahnn ¾ even if the latter had had any.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of possible identification between the Jäcki figure and Genet, it is noticeable that the same point about the preface is also to be found in the header at the start of the Spiegel article.1[15] In the body of the essay, Fichte not only asks the rhetorical question as to whether it is a joke that the first ¾ and longest ¾ volume of Genet's collected works is by Sartre ¾ he also suggests an answer to it. And between the question and the answer the whole horror of what Sartre has done to Genet is unobtrusively outlined. Fichte goes on to suggest that the length of Sartre's text may be serving as a surrogate for sexual potency. At first sight this might look like a cheap joke, comparable to Sartre's. But in fact Fichte, like Sartre, but far more self-aware, is using the trope for serious polemical ends. For of course the object of Sartre's tumescent labour of love is not, say, Simone de Beauvoir, but Jean Genet. Which would make of the whole huge enterprise, and many another like it, a classic act of sublimation. The straw man of the homosexual, on whom Sartre lavishes such astonishing 'mauvaise foi' or bad faith, may, Fichte briefly suggests, be a grotesquely distorted self-portrait, a 'Selbstkarikatur'. In this marvellous knowing game with popular psychology, the grotesque distortions would of course be the result of repression:

Indem Sartre Genet den Regeln seines philosophischen Systems nach mißt, drängt er ihn weg, und Sartre kann einmal mehr seine eigene homosexuelle Praxis, die eigene poetische Praxis ¾ oder das Fehlen beider eskamotieren.

In judging Genet according to the rules of his philosophical system, Sartre is repressing him away and can once again brush under the carpet his own homosexual practice, his own poetic practice ¾ or the absence of either.

From a polemical point of view this is a very wicked 'or'. But the truth behind it is carefully grounded in a minute analysis of the last pages of Sartre's book, in which a late paean of praise leads via a sub-Baudelairean reference to brotherhood (mon frère) into a very revealing designation of the homosexual as a 'monstrous and miserable beast that we are at any moment in danger of becoming.'(p. 34). As we know, this danger is all too often liable to be transferred outwards. That the result of such repression has something to do with violence is ironically institutionalized in American law with the legitimate defense of 'homosexual panic'.1[16] In that sense what Sartre is doing to Genet by cathecting the first volume of his collected works is much more plausibly a symbolic murder than that which, according to Sartre, homosexuals commit every time they have sex with each other. To show this, though, Fichte has no need to cross the Atlantic or read Kosofsky Sedgwick. All he needs to do is to refer us to Genet, whose murderer Querelle is also initially in denial:

Niemand hat eindringlicher nachgewiesen als Genet, daß Liebe mit Diebstahl, Verrat und Mord zu tun hat. Was waren nun die Folgen der Affäre des Philosophen mit dem Verbrecher...?

Noone has demonstrated more forcefully than Genet that love has to do with theft, betrayal and murder. So what were the consequences of the affair of the philosopher with the criminal...?

As a piece of polemic, it seems to me, this repressed syllogism is hard to better. And its place in the structure of Fichte's piece corresponds exactly to the 'synthèse' of a classical French essay. In other words the answer to the question has already been provided in the text which is here drawing towards its conclusion. Thus Fichte has indeed been concerned to describe for us the literary death of Genet brought about by Sartre's monstrous preface. He notes for example that after the appearance of Sartre's book, Genet published no further major prose works but instead, according to the essence imputed to him by the existentialist's title, concentrated on theatre (comédien) and ritual (martyr). He notes too that the whole project of the collected works has the effect of perpetuating and disseminating texts of Genet which are distorted, even censored. And he suggests that the reason so little proper analytical work has been done on Genet may have to do with the existence of this formidable portcullis at the gateway to his work. In all these points, the fate imputed to Genet's work has close parallels in Fichte's own experience. Thus, although several of the works he writes about are out of print, Hartmut Böhme's huge and horribly clever book on Fichte is still available, and does indeed seem to have forced subsequent scholars to throw themselves like lemmings into the few gaps Böhme left unoccupied.1[17] The vaingloriously stupid response of critics like Marcel Reich-Ranicki to Fichte's extraordinary third novel may well have contributed to Fichte's decision to stop publishing novels in his lifetime.1[18] And because he wasn't around to supervise their publication, a number of the texts associated with the posthumous Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit are textually imperfect. The text of the Freibeuter article, for example, is reprinted with all its errors of French intact, but with a lineation for which there is no manuscript basis.1[19]

But of course it is not only with the consequences of Sartre's book that Fichte is concerned, but also with its nature and with its content. Thus the reason why Fichte dwells at length on the sheer number of texts which Sartre was able to produce in a short time again has to do with damning with shrill praise. For the tenor of that praise is a charge of carelessness. Effectively Fichte is accusing his antagonist of a kind of intellectual laziness which fails to examine its premises or to check its assumptions. One of the ways in which he does this is by playing a game of one-upmanship. For although Sartre may have been instrumental in getting Genet out of prison and securing the publication of his collected works, it was with Fichte that Genet shared his proclivities and his secrets when in 1975, he exceptionally consented to be interviewed at length.2[20] In the Freibeuter article and the radio essays Fichte actually begins with a quotation from the interview.2[21] And in the Spiegel article he can rely on its authority in order flatly to contradict a statement made by Sartre, contrasting the subjunctive of reported speech with the straightforward authoritative 'tatsächlich', 'in fact'.2[22] Elsewhere, Fichte is able to undermine Sartre's authority with simple references to the texts he quotes, or to the axioms of elementary logic. And all these errors of fact, textual misunderstandings and sloppy thinking turn out to be anything but innocent or neutral. On the contrary, the lazy default positions which Sartre adopts with such apparent thoughtlessness are shown to be redolent of ideological prejudice. It is no accident that they have to do with questions of influence and hence of stature, with Genet's relationship to nature, and the problem of evil. For these are precisely the areas where Genet's statements and his practice are most surprising and most unconventional. And in misrepresenting them, Sartre is showing himself to be an unreconstructed representative of heteronormativity.

In this context, it is worth noting how Fichte, who seems anyway to have been exercised by the overtones of the use of 'nous' in French rhetoric, unpacks the 'wir' with which Sartre sues for accomplices in his transformation to a miserable and monstrous beast. There seems little doubt but that Sartre's 'we', precisely because of its possible roots in abjection, has more to do with majesty than modesty. At one point (p. 34) Fichte points out the silliness of its use in conjuring an alibi academic community. And at another he notes the presence in the text of explicit (and possibly over-determined) gestures of heterosexist conspiracy:

wie oft zwinkert er dem heterosexuellen Leser zu!

¾ Eine Frau empfängt soviel Lust, wie sie schenkt. (205)

Er scheint die Arbeiten von Frau de Beauvoir nur flüchtig studiert zu haben.

(ibid.)

How often he tips a wink at the male heterosexual reader!

¾ A woman receives as much pleasure as she gives. (205)

He seems to have studied the works of Madame de Beauvoir only superficially.

Again the allusion is wonderfully cruel, but not, I think, unfair. The page reference is to the German translation by Ursula Dörrenbächer. And this translation gives Fichte another opportunity to damn with ¾ this time fulsome ¾ praise. For by stressing the conscientiousness with which Dörrenbächer went about her task, Fichte is able to reinforce his charge against Sartre of careless inexactitude at the level of language. Here Fichte's criticism works in two directions. On the one hand, in an extension of the point about metrics with which we began, he accuses Sartre of falsifying Genet's language. Thus a simple mention of nappies in the context of a discussion of the word 'chiard' ('little shitter') is enough to reverse the co-ordinates of alleged authenticity and make Sartre appear hopelessly arrogant, patriarchal and out of touch.2[23] In volubly refusing to quote Genet in certain instances, Sartre makes himself actively complicit in censorship, and thus aligns himself not with Genet, but with Mauriac.2[24] Similarly, the distinction Fichte draws between 'argot' and 'slang', while it may not satisfy pernickety linguisticians, makes it possible to see beyond Sartre's simple snobbishness to crucial ideas of community and identity which the Professor knows nothing about.2[25] And where Genet, in Le condamné à mort for example, does deliberately and with queer malice aforethought, mix examples of the vulgar jargon of the reformatories into classical verse forms, Sartre, according to Fichte, affects not to notice. Instead he feels empowered to 'translate' Genet, with the result that, as Fichte laconically establishes: 'Sartre braucht 40 Wörter, um Klarheit und Schönheit zu vernichten' 'Sartre needs 40 words in order to annihilate clarity and beauty.' (p. 33).

At the same time, Genet is not shy about criticizing Sartre's own language which he describes as 'hastig hingeschrieben', 'hastily jotted down' (p. 36). In particular he is concerned to contrast the inauthentic academic jargon used by Sartre with the poetry of Genet. Indeed the one is presented in Fichte's text as a deliberate attempt to destroy the other:

Die Sprache der Wissenschaft sollte ein für allemal die Sprache der Genet'schen Dichtungen zerstören. Um was bittet, betet Sartre? Um den richtigen »Gebrauch« Genets.

Hat Walter Heist also recht, wenn er Sartre einen faschistischen Schriftsteller von Rang nennt?

The language of academia was to destroy once and for all the language of Genet's poetic writings. What is it that Sartre asks, nay prays for? For the right 'use' of Genet.

So is Walter Heist then right to call Sartre a fascist writer of distinction?

Again from the point of view of polemic, this last remark deserves some attention. For in it Fichte is not only appealing to an outside authority ¾ he is also including in his rhetorical question two elements, and thus opens up the possibility that Heist might be right about the fascism but not about the distinction. And again by the time he comes to insert this barb, Fichte has already been at pains to illustrate the sort of academic language he has in mind ¾ showing in the process that Sartre is not above vulgar psychologizing of the worst possible kind and qualifying what he produces as 'der litaneienhafte Schmäh des Wissenschaftsbetriebs in der Nachfolge von Freud', 'the gobbledegook litany of the post-Freud theory industry' (p. 32). Elsewhere, Fichte is concerned to turn against Sartre the charge of 'inauthentic' language which the latter had levelled at Genet. Symptomatically, the example that he chooses is the word Sartre applies to homosexuals: 'pédéraste'. Not only does Sartre have a strong tendency to use the word where that is not what he means. But since the word comes from the Greek and has overtones of Platonism, this grotesque error of judgement betrays in Sartre the unthinking recipient of centuries of prejudice. And it is above all this prejudice which Fichte is concerned to point up in Sartre's language. At one point for example he simply lists a series of epithets applied by Sartre to Genet (p. 33). It was from this list that the editor of Der Spiegel drew his title, thus neatly turning the evidence of Sartre's unregenerate homophobic hatred back on their originator. At the upshot is that by the end of the article Fichte really does not need to appeal to the authority of Walter Heist to support his claim that with specific reference to Sartre's presentations of homosexuals:

Darüber hätte sich Sartre mit jeder Diktatur und mit der Bischofskonferenz einigen können.

On this point Sartre could have been in agreement with every dictatorship and with the bishops' conference.

Again, from the point of view of polemic, this conjunction is wicked and brilliant. And it takes us right to the heart of what Fichte is doing in his polemic against Sartre. By suggesting that Sartre's book has the effect of incarcerating Genet in a prison walled round by Mugabe-speak, Fichte is insistently drawing a parallel between academic discourse, existentialism, homophobia and totalitarianism. To this end, of course, though as I have tried to suggest the structure of the Spiegel essay is almost classical and although in it evidence and authority is adduced in a way which can more than satisfy the requirements of academic critics, Fichte programmatically refuses to adopt the spurious objectivity with which academics constitute their cabals. Instead he produces a polemic which, in its knowingness and its rhetorical control, in its vehemence and its almost camp ironies, I persist in regarding as not only wicked, but queer.

In his other essays on Genet, Fichte goes at once further and less far. There instead of the control, there is a more programmatic engagement with Genet's actual texts. For our purposes, there are four or five respects in which Genet appears as an antidote to Sartre and thus linked by elective affinity to Fichte himself. In the first place, he is at pains to note that Genet, who in Miracle de la Rose actually wrote about collaboration with Nazism, is never complicit in the language of totalitarianism.2[26] He draws attention to the way in which Genet plays games with the pronoun of the first person plural.2[27] He insists on the way in which, through doubling, quotation, ritualization and performativity Genet radically calls into question the categories of the natural and the authentic, and how, by his deliberate mixing of discursive levels he repudiates the snobbishness of the Marxist Sartre. He plays games with psychological summary and is thus able to insist that the one thing Genet never does to his characters is subject them to the torture of psychoanalysis. He detects in Genet a programmatic use of notions of inversions and perversion which ironize precisely the terms in which Sartre and those like him sought to categorize homosexuals. And to the monstrous monument of hate which is Saint Genet comédien et martyr he opposes 'die Sprache der Liebe', the language of love.

Now one of the peoples whom Fichte most insistently loved were the Brazilians. And his opposition of 'Das Land des Lächelns' 'the land of the Smile' to the sadness, in both senses, of Lévi-Strauss's book, is a similarly deliberate act of inversion and perversion. Had I had but world enough and time, I would have wanted to show you how, in that book, Fichte levels the same charges at the master structuralist as he does at the famous existentialist. The procedures of reprobation, approbation, and repression which he so virulently criticiszes in Sartre are even more flagrantly present in Lévi-Strauss. His language is even worse than that of Sartre. And his complicity in totalitarianism is presented so explicitly that Fichte actually accuses him of providing an intellectual justification for the torture carried out by the French in Algeria. But I don't have world enough, or time; and the essay on Lévi-Strauss is available in English ¾ even if only in Gavin's American English, so you can all read it for yourselves. Trust me, it's wicked.

Thanks.

Love-sick Laughter, Porridge and Straw Men.

Quotations

1. Le vent qui roule un coeur sur le pavé des cours.
2. Das ist toll!
3. Bei Hans Henny Jahnn noch Jean Genet, der saß immer im Gefängnis und klaute bei seinen Bekannten die Luxusausgaben. Jean-Paul Sartre schrieb 600 Seiten als Vorwort zu einem Roman von Jean Genet. Mit dreizehn hattte Jäcki furchtbare Angst, im Gefängnis sitzen zu müssen und er hätte es auch nie gewagt, Luxusausgaben bei Hans Henny Jahnn zu klauen ¾ wenn es da welche gegeben hätte.

At Hans Henny Jahnn's also Jean Genet, he was always in prison and stole de luxe editions from his acquaintances. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote 600 pages as a preface to a novel by Jean Genet. At 13 Jäcki was terribly afraid of having to do time in prison and besides he would never have dared to steal de luxe editions from Hans Henny Jahnn ¾ even if the latter had had any.

4. Indem Sartre Genet den Regeln seines philosophischen Systems nach mißt, drängt er ihn weg, und Sartre kann einmal mehr seine eigene homosexuelle Praxis, die eigene poetische Praxis ¾ oder das Fehlen beider eskamotieren.

In judging Genet according to the rules of his philosophical system, Sartre is repressing him away and can once again brush under the carpet his own homosexual practice, his own poetic practice or the absence of either.

5. That monstrous and miserable beast that we are at any moment in danger of becoming....

6. Niemand hat eindringlicher nachgewiesen als Genet, daß Liebe mit Diebstahl, Verrat und Mord zu tun hat. Was waren nun die Folgen der Affäre des Philosophen mit dem Verbrecher...?

Noone has demonstrated more forcefully than Genet that love has to do with theft, betrayal and murder. So what were the consequences of the affair of the philosopher with the criminal...?

7. wie oft zwinkert er dem heterosexuellen Leser zu!

¾ Eine Frau empfängt soviel Lust, wie sie schenkt. (205)

Er scheint die Arbeiten von Frau de Beauvoir nur flüchtig studiert zu haben.

How often he tips a wink at the male heterosexual reader!

¾ A woman receives as much pleasure as she gives. (205)

He seems to have studied the works of Madame de Beauvoir only superficially.

8. Die Sprache der Wissenschaft sollte ein für allemal die Sprache der Genet'schen Dichtungen zerstören. Um was bittet, betet Sartre? Um den richtigen »Gebrauch« Genets.

Hat Walter Heist also recht, wenn er Sartre einen faschistischen Schriftsteller von Rang nennt?

The language of academia was to destroy once and for all the language of Genet's poetic writings. What is it that Sartre asks, nay prays for? For the right 'use' of Genet.

So is Walter Heist then right to call Sartre a fascist writer of distinction?

9. Der litaneienhafte Schmäh des Wissenschaftsbetriebs in der Nachfolge von Freud

The gobbldygook litany of the post-Freud theory industry

10. Darüber hätte sich Sartre mit jeder Diktatur und mit der Bischofskonferenz einigen können.

On this point Sartre could have been in agreement with every dictatorship and with the bishops' conference.

Footnotes

[1] Jean Genet, 'Le condamné à mort', in: J.G., Œuvres complètes (Paris, Gallimard 1951), vol 2., 211-220, p. 211.

[2] Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet comédien et martyr. Œuvres complètes de Jean Genet, vol. 1 (Paris, Gallimard 1952).

[3] For the publication details of Fichte's text, see notes 5 & 6, below.

[4] Hubert Fichte, 'Der Autor und sein Double. Anmerkungen zu Jean Genet', in: H.F., Homosexualität und Literatur (Frankfurt am Main, Fischer 1988) vol 2, 310-348, p. 325.

[5] Hubert Fichte, '"Homunkulus, Schwätzer, Matratze". Über Jean-Paul Sartre: "Saint Genet, Komödiant und Märtyrer"', Der Spiegel (1982) nr 43, 258-262.

[6] Ibid, p. 258

[7] Hubert Fichte, 'Wortwurst und Strichmännchen. Polemik zu Sartres Essai über Genet', in: H.F., Homosexualität und Literatur (see note 4), vol 2, 29-37. Hereafter this edition will be referred to simply by page number.

[8] The full extent of this liberty ¾ rightly stressed at the colloquium by Andreas Kramer ¾ should perhaps be made clear here. 'Wortwurst' literally means 'word sausage'; and sausages have rather more obvious phallic overtones than 'porridge'. Similarly, the 'Strich' of 'Strichmännchen' refers not only to the hastily drawn lines of a sketch, but also to rent boys and the trade they ply.

[9] Torsten Teichert, 'Editorische Notizen', in: Hubert Fichte, Homosexualität und Literatur (see note 4), vol 2., 353-359, p. 353.

[10] Hubert Fichte, 'Die Sprache der Liebe. Polemische Anmerkungen zu Querelle de Brest von Jean Genet', Freibeuter 14 (1982) 32-45. reprinted in Homosexualität und Literatur (see note 4), vol. 2, 7-28.

[11] Hubert Fichte, 'Das Land des Lächelns. Polemische Anmerkungen zu "Tristes Tropiques" von Claude Lévi-Strauss', Literaturmagazin 13 (1980) 87-116. Reprinted in Homosexualität und Literatur (see note 4), vol. 1 (1987) 319-351.

[12] Kevin Gavin (trs), 'The Land of Laughter: Polemical Remarks on the Tristes tropiques of Claude Lévi-Strauss', in: Hubert Fichte, The Gay Critic, trs. by Kevin Gavin (Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan Press 1996) 277-305.

[13] Reinold Werner, '"Ich zog los, um die menschlichen Überreste aufzusuchen": Fichte und Frankreich', in: Hartmut Böhme & Nikolaus Tiling (eds), Medium und Maske. Die Literatur Hubert Fichtes zwischen den Kulturen (Stuttgart, M & P 1995) 269-285, p. 279. Wolfgang von Wangenheim, 'Hubert Fichtes Geschichte. Zum Erscheinen der "Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit", Merkur 41 (1987), nr. 11, 1001-1012, p. 1010.

[14] Hubert Fichte, Die Palette (Frankfurt am Main, Fischer 1981) p. 41.

[15] Homunkulus, Schwätzer, Matratze"' (see note 5), p: 258: 'Sartre war vor mehr als 30 Jahren eingeladen, zur geplanten Genet-Gesamtausgabe ein Vorwort zu schreiben. Aus dem Vorwort wurde ¾ versehentlich ¾ ein ganzes Buch, das erst jetzt auf deutsch erschienen ist.'
'More than 30 years ago Sartre was invited to write a preface to the planned Complete Works of Genet. This preface became ¾ by accident ¾ a whole book, which has only now appeared in German.'

[16] On 'homosexual panic', see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf 1991), p. 19. For a dramatic illustration of what is meant, see Neil Labute, 'A Gaggle of Saints', in: N.L., Bash. Latterday Plays (London, Faber and Faber 2000) 31-68.

[17] Hartmut Böhme, Hubert Fichte. Riten des Autors und Leben der Literatur (Stuttgart, Metzler 1992).

[18] Marcel Reich-Ranicki, 'Aus kindlicher oder aus kindischer Sicht? Hubert Fichte, "Detlevs Imitationen 'Grünspan'"', in: M. R-R., Lauter Verrisse. Erweiterte Neuausgabe (Stuttgart, DVA 1985), 161-165. For some indication of how Fichte might have been affected by this, see Hubert Fichte, Explosion. Roman der Ethnologie (Frankfurt am Main, Fischer 1993), 215-227.

[19] See Teichert, 'Editorische Notizen' (= note 9), p. 354.

[20] The publication history of these interviews in characteristically complicated. An allegedly complete facsimile, in French and German, was published as: Hubert Fichte, Genet/Hubert Fichte (Frankfurt am Main & Paris, Qumran 1981). An English translation by Richard Mills, Kristiane Zappel & Rhodes Barnett appeared in: Winston Leyland, ed., Gay sunshine Interviews Volume 1, 2nd printing (San Francisco, Gay Sunshine Press 1984) 67-94. Teichert (= note 9), p. 353 insists that these are not in fact complete transcriptions of the original tapes.

[21] Compare Homosexualität und Literatur (=note 4), vol. 2, pp. 7 & 310: 'wenn ich mit jemandem zusammen bin, lüge ich'; Genet/Hubert Fichte (= note 20), p. 104: 'si je suis avec quelqu'un, je mens'; and Gay Sunshine Interviews (= note 20), p. 94: 'I tell lies when I am with someone'.

[22] Homosexualitä und Literatur (= note 4), vol 2., p. 33: 'Genet habe sich aus Fortsetzungsromanen gespeist. (490) / Tatsächlich hat Genet sich aud den Brüdern Karamasoff gespeist, aus Proust und Verlaine und Ronsard'.

[23] Homosexualitä und Literatur (= note 4), vol. 2, p. 329.

[24] Compare Homosexualität und Literatur (= note 4), vol 2, p. 25.

[25] See note 23

[26] Homosexualitä und Literatur (= note 4), vol 2, p. 28: 'Es fällt auf, daß Genet [...] in seinem Roman nicht haßt, nicht verachtet, nie zynisch schreibt', 'it is noticeable that Genet in his novel does not hate, despises noone, never writes cynically.'

[27] Homosexualitä und Literatur (=note 4), vol. 2, pp 332-334.

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