AIDS and Melancholia in Paris: Edmund White's Textual Incorporation of His Dying Lover

Monica B. Pearl (University of Manchester, UK, monica.pearl at man.ac.uk)

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DOI: 10.1191/0967550704ab003oa

Abstract

Edmund White's book Sketches from memory, `a little book', written with accompanying drawings by White's lover Hubert Sorin, is a departure for Edmund White, a pioneer of realist gay literature. Unlike the writing that White is best known for - his autobiographical fiction that makes up the trilogy of A boy's own story, The beautiful room is empty and The farewell symphony sketches from memory is a collection of anecdotal stories of his daily life with his lover Hubert in Paris. In this paper I argue that the dialogic nature of White and Sorin's text is a manifestation of the internalized ambivalence that is a component of melancholia. When Sorin is dying, White (an American) increasingly incorporates the French language and a Parisian lifestyle as a way to work through the anticipated loss of his (French) lover. What distinguishes this effort of incorporation (a psychoanalytic term that refers to the adoption of attributes of the mourned other) is that it is the language and culture of the other that is textually incorporated into a literary text. The internal dialogue that White engages in that he can no longer pursue with his dying and then dead lover, is manifested in White's negotiations in the text with expressing in English a life that he lives with his French lover in a French-speaking world. This internalization is a melancholic gesture that both attempts to work through and refuses to accept the loss of his lover, and also allows White to reconcile his life alone in Paris.

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