Abstract
This article reads Hervé Guibert’s 1989 novella Fou de Vincent in dialogue with his writings on photography to analyze the novella’s representation of homosexual intimacy in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The peculiar narrative form of the novella—diary entries organized in reverse chronological order (“à l’envers”)—leads the reader to see the past through the lens of the present. By infusing the past with a sense of imminent loss, the novella reinscribes moments of intimacy (signified by the diaristic fragments that make up the text) as moments of anticipatory mourning. The motif of inversion (reading and looking “à l’envers”), as this article shows, relates directly to earlier texts by Guibert in which he writes about photography as a corruptible medium, as an art of imperfect preservation against the passage of time, and as a site of entanglement between viewer, photographer, and referent. Guibert’s lover Vincent, as an object of Guibert’s photographic attention, comes to signify the vulnerability of youth in an era of untimely death. Guibert’s diaristic writing preserves, in turn, his attachment to a fragile form of life and testifies to the ambivalence of looking back at the past in a time of personal and collective catastrophe.
