Numbered Days (“To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life”) | Be Sovereign

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MARCH 3, 2010 · 1:44 PM

Numbered Days (‘To the Friend Who Did Not SaveMy Life,’ part 10)In these terms, living with AIDS is an apprenticeship, or more precisely a series of unique apprenticeships, instructing usin what we know already but are too apt to ignore: that our days are numbered, our time counted. If AIDS takes time,subtracting it from life expectancy, it also gives time – time dedicated to living and dying freed from the amnesia thatplagues us, that plagues Herve, for example, as he recollects the stroke of midnight, December 31, 1987:

It’s strange to wish someone Happy New Year when you know the person might not live all the way through it: there’sno situation more outrageous than that, and to handle it you need simple, unaffected courage, the ambiguous freedomof things left unsaid, a secret understanding braced with a smile and sealed with a laugh, so in that instant your NewYear’s wish has a crucial but not weighty solemnity. [E 125; F 139]

In truth, this situation is neither strange nor outrageous, or rather only as strange and outrageous as our mortality. Forwe always know – though we are liable to forget – that the friend to whom we offer the wish may not live long enough tosee its fulfillment, with which it can never coincide. (In Seneca’s stark reminder in “The Brevity of Life,” “You are living asif destined to live forever…though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may beyour last.”) To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life is a labour of writing dedicated to making that knowledge freshlylegible, reminding Herve and his readers alike that human life is the presentiment of a death that, whenever it comes, willarrive prematurely.

To this extent, Guibert’s text “is but a gloss, a justification and expansion of a title that speaks of itself and for itself” (Derrida, Demeure, 53). As Roland Barthes has observed, “‘To dedicate’ is…’performative’..[the] meaning merges with thevery act of enouncing… ‘I dedicate’ has no other meaning than the actual gesture by which I present what I have done (mywork) to someone I love or admire…[through] the act of giving…and this modicum of writing necessary to express it”(“Sagesse de l’art” in Cy Twombly: Paintings and Drawings 1954-1977, 12).

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Like its first sentence, the work’s title adopts the first person (“my life”) and the past tense (“did not”), signaling inadvance what the narrative finally spells out: that in the end Bill failed to make good on “his promises, which he’d beenmaking for a year and a half now but had never honored…. Bill told me he’d sensed all this, admitting that my reproacheswere justified, that he’d misjudged the timing involved [qu'il n'avait pas bien mesure le temps] [E 220; F 240]. The timethat Bill misjudged, his friend’s henceforth counted time, eventually runs out. And in the dedicatory title, the titulardedication, the friend he did not save addresses him as if from beyond the grave, through a rhetorical structure proper tofiction rather than autobiography or testimony, in the text’s first and ultimate instance of a non-coincidence, animpossibility of coincidence between the time inscribed in the text and the time of lived experience. To the Friend WhoDid Not Save My Life, the dedication that arrives as if from the far side of a death that came too soon, already guaranteesthe work’s status as fiction, a full 257 pages before the narrative, nearing its end, glosses the generic stamp roman:

I’ve decided to be calm, to follow to the end this novelistic logic that so hypnotizes me, at the expense of all idea ofsurvival. Yes, I can write it, and that’s undoubtedly what my madness is – I care more for my book than for my life, Iwon’t give up my book to save my life, and that’s what’s going to be the most difficult thing to make people believe andunderstand. [E 237; F 257]

More than his life, it is his book that counts. Hence the difficulty will be to convey this madness to the reader, through anexperience of reading that does not yield knowledge of what right to confer on a text that, not only from its first sentencebut from its very title, renders problematic an effort to secure its referential and rhetorical modes once and for all, toascertain what remains as permanently elusive as the “perhaps.”

When I learned I was going to die, I’d suddenly been seized with the desire to write every possible book – all the ones Ihadn’t written yet, at the risk of writing them badly: a funny, nasty book, then a philosophical one – and to devourthese books almost simultaneously, in the reduced amount of time available [dans la marge retrecie du temps], and towrite not only the books of my anticipated maturity but also, with the speed of light, the slowly ripened books of my oldage. [E 61-2; F 70]

Hastened by HIV/AIDS into the category of the books of a young writer’s premature old age, To the Friend Who Did NotSave My Life emerges, if not as “every possible book,” then at least as one readable by turns as a testimony, as an archive,as a document, as a symptom, and indeed as a work of literary fiction that simulates all of these, “almost” (but not quite)“simultaneously.”

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· 12:44 PM

Numbered Days (‘To the Friend Who Did Not SaveMy Life,’ part 9)But the modality of the “perhaps” is also inscribed in the “something completely unexpected,” the hasardextraordinaire invoked in the first paragraph and repeatedly thereafter, that punctuates the fictional three months whenHerve “had AIDS.” It inhabits the possibility of a reprieve from his death sentence afforded by an experimental vaccinethat, by an extraordinary chance, Herve’s friend Bill has a hand in developing. On that fateful March 18, 1988 comes thenews flash: “[Bill] tells us right off the bat that in America they’ve just come up with an effective vaccine against AIDS,well not really a vaccine, since in principle a vaccine is preventive, so let’s call it a curative vaccine, obtained from the HIVvirus and given to patients who are seropositive but don’t display any symptoms of the disease…to block the virus andkeep it from beginning its destructive process….” [E 156; F 173]. In no time, the constative content of the unexpectedbulletin is translated into the performativity of a promise, albeit one that is never issued as such, according to thelinguistic laws that govern speech acts. Bill’s unspoken promise is nothing less than a pledge to save the life of his dyingfriend by providing access to the experimental treatment (whose still unproven efficacy as a “curative vaccine” wouldcome belatedly, after the fact of infection, since it is not properly preventive). And the force of this implicit performativeexceeds the limits that might be ascribed to the text’s self-declared genre, in keeping with the circumscription in somespeech act theory of the gravity and consequence of fictional utterances. For Bill’s tacit offer, sustained over a year and ahalf as Herve’s health suffers a precipitous decline, allegorizes, as part of a “work of fiction,” the very real promise of moreeffective treatment and, in the event, a cure for HIV/AIDS that has underwritten the history of the pandemic over nearlythree decades. It is the intervention of time into the configuration of the promise and its redemption that invites theperhaps, and with it the risk that time will run out before redemption can take place.

As we are now in a position to recognize, Herve’s terrible ambivalence as he enters the “new phase” inaugurated by Bill’sannouncement prefigures the effect on many PLWAs of the advent of more promising treatment options, and specificallythe new generation of combination therapies including protease inhibitors that became selectively available in and after1996, transplanting death’s near horizon to a newly uncertain distance.

…I was afraid this new pact with fate might upset the slow advance – which was rather soothing actually – ofinevitable death…. For though it was certainly an inexorable illness, it wasn’t immediately catastrophic, it was an illness

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in stages, a very long flight of steps that led assuredly to death, but whose every step represented a uniqueapprenticeship. It was a disease that gave death time to live and its victims time to die, time to discover time, and in theend to discover life [c'etait une maladie qui donnait le temps de mourir, et qui donnait a la mort le temps de vivre, letemps de decouvrir le temps et de decouvrir enfin la vie]…. And unhappiness, once you were completely sunk in it, was alot more livable than the presentiment of unhappiness, a lot less cruel, in fact, than one would have thought. If life wasnothing but the presentiment of death and the constant torture of wondering when the axe would fall, then AIDS, bysetting an official limit to our life span – six years of seropositivity, plus two years with AZT in the best of cases, or a fewmonths without it – made us men who were fully conscious of our lives, and freed us from our ignorance. If Bill were tofile an appeal against my death sentence with his vaccine, he’d plunge me back into my former state of ignorance. [E164-5; F 181-2]

· 11:17 AM

Numbered Days (‘To the Friend Who Did Not SaveMy Life,’ part 8)“That instant” [ce moment], which precedes the receipt of the results of the seropositivity test that should itself precede“the blood analyses that are done after a seropositive result,” would seem to mark the onset of the three-month periodinvoked in the first sentence when Herve “had AIDS,” or “more precisely” believed he “was condemned to die of thatmortal illness called AIDS.” But a more exact reckoning, a recounting of his now and henceforth numbered days, rendersthe opening sentence and what follows newly problematic.

I’ve re-counted the days on my calendar: between January 23 [1988], when I’d received my death-sentence at the littleclinic on the Rue du Jura, and this March 18, when I’d received another news flash that might prove decisive insweeping away what I’d been officially told was irreversible, fifty-six days had gone by. I’d lived for fifty-six days,sometimes cheerfully, sometimes in despair, alternating between sweet forgetfulness and ferocious obsession, trying toget used to my impending doom. Now I was entering a new phase, a limbo of hope and uncertainty, that was perhaps[peut-etre] more terrible to live through than the one before. [E 159-60; F 176-7]

Not three months, then, but fifty-six days: the belated recount gives the lie to, or rather fictionalizes the claim, uttered in

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the first person and the past tense, that opens the narrative of To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, a claim aboutHerve’s lived experience. The “perhaps” that surfaces in this tacit confession turns out to inform the entire text, from firstto last. This is the case most obviously where the word makes an appearance, as it does here and in the passage, alreadycited, that recounts how, in October 1983, “I told myself that we both had AIDS. In an instant, this certainty changedeverything…. I had perhaps finally achieved my end” [E 30-31; F 39]. “Perhaps” plays a role, too, in the translation ofHerve’s justification for arriving late at Muzil’s funeral, thereby practically missing another appointment and courtingfurther suspicion of irresponsibility: “Perhaps it was a partial transportation strike that kept me from arriving on time onthe morning of the brief funeral service” [E 99] (“Le matin de la levee du corps…fut-ce une greve partielle des transportsqui m’empecha d’arriver a l’heure….” [F 112]). In each instance of its occurrence, the “perhaps” “unleashes a trembling inthe assertion, in the certainty, a trembling that leaves its mark and its essential modality on the entire discourse of thepossible perhaps” [Derrida, Demeure, 68], and on the experience of reading To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life.

MARCH 2, 2010 · 5:19 PM

Numbered Days (‘To the Friend Who Did Not SaveMy Life,’ part 7)It is five years and several months later that, not yet having achieved his end, he notes “in a passing remark” that

6. (…today on the twenty-second of January, 1989, which means it’s taken me ten days to bring myself to admitit, to decide thereby to put an end to the suspense I’d created, because on January 12 Dr. Chandi told me over the phone

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that my T4 count had dropped to 291, from 368 to 291 in one month, which suggests that in another month, the HIVvirus will have ground my T4 count down to – I’m doing the subtraction at the bottom of the page - 214, therebyplacing me…close to the catastrophic threshold that’s supposed to be staved off by AZT, if I choose to go with thatinstead of the Digitaline….) [E 197-8; F 215-6; emphasis added]

The passage, whose English translation first adds, then subtracts a set of parentheses to and from the French text, itselfenacts “a sort of parenthesis of time that recalls the parenthesis: namely, that time passes without passing, like aparenthesis, in parentheses, the measure of time remaining here an absolutely heterogeneous measure…. What willhappen will have opened another time. Absolute anachrony of a time out of joint” [Derrida, Demeure, 61]. Moreover, thedisjointed narrative here links the disclosure that the January 11 deadline was not met to the prospect of suicide (“theDigitaline”), which holds out the seduction of an agency that could determine the limit of its own life expectancy, choosingthe day of death’s arrival. This ultimate self-imposed deadline is likewise deferred – that decision, if it comes, will comelater, always later. As his physician reminds him when Herve broaches the question of suicide, “each person’s relationshipwith his illness changes constantly in the course of this illness, and…it’s impossible to know beforehand how you’ll feelabout these things when the time comes (et qu’on ne pouvait prejuger des mutations vitales de sa volonte)” [E 137; F152]. For the time being, Herve continues counting days (“it’s taken me ten days”) and T4 cells (“I’m doing thesubtraction at the bottom of the page,” cette page) – adding and subtracting with survival itself at stake.

The unsettling passages on the antigen tests and their devastating results have as their pretext the account of whathappened a year earlier, in January 1988, on the occasion of another set of blood tests, these for seropositivity. Thataccount, which arrives belatedly in the sovereign disorder of the narrative sequence, emphasizes the agonizing wait for theresults, another parenthesis of time dictated by the non-coincidence of the procedures themselves and the diagnosticknowledge they eventually yield.

After we’d had our blood samples taken…we saw one boy come out again absolutely in shock…paralyzed at the newswritten all over his face…. It was a terrifying vision for Jules and me, which projected us one week into the future, andat the same time relieved us by showing us the worst that could happen, as though we were living it at the same time,precipitously, second-hand…. Suspecting [prevoyant] that our results would be bad and wishing to speed up theprocess…Dr. Chandi had already sent us to the Institute Alfred-Fournier for the blood analyses that are done after aseropositive result, specifically to ascertain the progress of the HIV virus in the body…. Looking over my lab slip, thenurse asked me, “How long have you known that you’re seropositive?” I was so surprised I couldn’t answer her. Theresults of the blood analysis were to be sent to us in about ten days, before the results of the seropositivity test would beknown, in that precise interval of uncertainty [d'incertitude ou de feinte incertitude]…. [On the morning we went to findout the results of the seropositivity tests] he told me my blood workup wasn’t good; that they’d already seen the badnews [le signe fatal] there even without knowing the results of the other test. At that instant [a ce moment] I understoodthat a calamity had hit us, that we were beginning a period of rampant misfortune from which there would be noescape. I was like that poor boy devastated by his test results. [E 130-32; F 145-47]

· 1:36 PM

Numbered Days (‘To the Friend Who Did Not SaveMy Life,’ part 6)5. As a matter of fact, I haven’t done a stitch of work on this book these last few days, at the crucial moment for thedeadline [delai] I’ve given myself for telling the story of my illness [pour raconter l'histoire de ma maladie]; I’ve beenpassing the time unhappily, waiting for this new verdict or this semblance [simulacre] of a verdict…but today,




January 11, which should have been the day of the verdict, I’m biting my nails down to the quick, having been leftentirely in the dark about something that is perfectly clear to me [sur ce que je sais deja], because I tried calling Dr.Chandi at his office, but couldn’t reach him…. So here I am tonight without the results, upset at not knowing them on theevening of January 11 the way I’ve been expecting to ever since December 22, having spent last night, I might add,dreaming that I wouldn’t have them…. [E 59; F 68-9; emphasis added]

Even “at the crucial moment,” chronology yields to radical temporal disorder. Not only does the scheduled simulacrum ofan appointment that is to deliver the simulacrum of a verdict fail to take place; not only does his dream prophesy thatfailure before the fact; but we are reminded that Herve knows already [deja] what he is supposed to find out “today,January 11.” Indeed, he has perhaps known it for years, as we have already read thirty pages earlier, where he attests thatin October 1983 “I told myself that we both had AIDS. In an instant [en un instant], this certainty changed everything,turned everything upside down, even the landscape, and this both paralyzed and liberated me, sapped my strength whileat the same time increasing it tenfold; I was afraid and light-headed, calm as well as terrified. I had perhaps finallyachieved my end” [E 30-31; F 39].

MARCH 1, 2010 · 6:46 PM

Numbered Days (‘To the Friend Who Did Not SaveMy Life,’ part 5)4. It was on the afternoon of December 22 that I decided, with Dr. Chandi, not to go to that appointment on January 11,which he would keep for me in order to obtain the anticipated medication, playing a role on both sides, if he had to, ormaking me think that this was the only way to get the drug, through this pretence of my presence [ce simulacre de mapresence], by using up the time assigned for our appointment to fool the monitoring committee. I’m supposed to callhim on the afternoon of January 11 to find out my test results, and that’s why I’m saying that as of today, January 4,I have only seven days left in which to retrace this history of my illness, because whatever Dr. Chandi will reveal to meon the afternoon of January 11, whether it’s good news or bad (although it can only be more or less bad, as he’s takencare to let me infer), might well threaten this book, risk crushing it right at the source, turning my meter [compteur]back to zero and erasing the fifty-seven pages already written before kicking my bucket for me. [E 49; F 56-7,emphasis added]

In the throes of lingering uncertainty about the status of “today, January 4,” we are here given to understand that Herve’sdeadline, the term of the dishonorable pact he makes with himself to recount the history of his illness, coincides with thesimulacrum of an appointment, which is to say with another contract destined to be broken (this one recalling how hisdying friend Muzil blithely dictated acceptances to invitations to lecture in far-flung locations for dates, often overlapping,that he would not live to see). A scheduled meeting between doctor and patient yields to a conspiracy between them to

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obtain the “anticipated” AZT through this ruse that seeks, not to use the time assigned, but to use it up.

The complications accrue. If his days are henceforth numbered, his time counted, so too are the pages of “this book” weare still attempting to read. And counted, recounted more than once, certainly, with results that are bound to vary. For if,on the fifty-seventh page of the French edition, we read that fifty-seven pages have already been written and are nowthreatened with erasure by the news he expects to receive over the phone on January 11, that number would have beendifferent in the draft, the manuscript, and only subsequently revised to correspond to page proofs. Moreover, thedisjunction in the belated English translation, where we read about “the fifty-seven pages already written” on page forty-nine, serves as a reminder of these calculations and their disparate times and dates.

What follows Herve’s musing on the threat to his work-in-progress is an effort to provide a succinct chronology of hisillness from 1980 to 1988, a narrative time-line that winds up calling the chronological model itself into question, whetheras story or as history.

1988 brought the revelation of my illness, a sentence without possibility of appeal, followed three months later by thatchance event [ce hasard] that managed to persuade me I could be saved. In this chronology summing up andpinpointing the warning signs of the disease over a period of eight years, when we now know that its incubation periodis between four and a half and eight years… the physiological accidents are no less decisive than the sexual encounters,the premonitions no less telling than the wishes that try to banish them. That’s the chronology that becomes my outline,except [sauf] when I discover that progression springs from disorder. [E 51; F 59]

“Sauf,” whose grammatical function here is as preposition, in the manner of the English “except,” resonates powerfully inits adjectival sense ["Qui a echappe a un tres grave peril, qui est encoure vivant apres avoir failli mourir"], alluding tothe “pas sauve” of the title. That “disorder” – in temporal terms, a certain anachrony - proves the rule rather than theexception as Herve seeks to retrace the perilous history of his illness is by this point unmistakable.

· 12:10 PM

Numbered Days (‘To the Friend Who Did Not Save

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My Life,’ part 4)2. Today, January 4, 1989, I tell myself I’ve got only seven days, exactly seven days to tell the story of myillness [qu'il ne me reste exactement que sept jours pour retracer l'histoire de ma maladie], and of course I’ll never meetthe deadline [delai], which is going to play havoc with my peace of mind, because I’m supposed to call Dr. Chandi on theafternoon of January 11 so that he can tell me over the phone the results of the tests I had to have on December 22…thusbeginning a new phase of the illness…plus I’d hardly slept at all for fear of missing the appointment made a monthearlier…and when I did get any sleep that night before those awful tests when they drew off an appalling amount of myblood, it was only to dream that I’d been prevented for various reasons from keeping this appointment that was sodecisive for my survival…and I’m actually writing all this on the evening of January 3 [et ecrivant toutcela en realite le 3 janvier au soir] because I’m afraid I’ll collapse during the night, pressing on fiercely toward mygoal and its incompletion…. [E 40; F 48; emphasis added]

In this instance – cited for brevity’s sake as elliptical fragments of a single agitated sentence that runs for three and a halfpages in the English translation as in the French text – the initial date provided passes as “today,” the day that institutesHerve’s contract with himself (and with it a self-division in the grammatical subject), a vow to tell the story, retrace thehistory of his illness in the “seven days, exactly seven days” that remain before he is to receive the results of the blood testsfor the antigen P24. While seven days may be a resonant time frame for an author’s work of creation, this is a contractthat he knows in advance will be broken, an effort that is bound to fall short. He knows this as well as he knows even as hewrites that “Today, January 4, 1989″ is a fiction, tomorrow masquerading as today, and that he “actually” [en realite] haseight days to fail to keep his pact with himself. What can be the reason for dissimulating the date, post-dating theprovenance of “all this,” then confessing to the deception in the same sentence and thus disrupting the experience ofreading the text, whether as work of fiction or as testimony? Is it, as he claims, because he fears he will suffer the sort ofdisabling “collapse” that consigned his friend Muzil (the unmistakable figure for Foucault) to the hospital, and shortlythereafter (in June, 1984, another date provided, another referent linking the roman to a confirmed historical reality) tohis death?




At a minimum, the dissimulation and confession bring to the experience of reading To the Friend Who Did Not Save MyLife the suspicion of a certain irresponsibility on Herve’s part, consistent with his willingness to enter into a contract, ifonly with himself, and make public a pact that he knows he cannot and will not honour. Perhaps more fundamentally, “hecould be suspected of the abuse of a fiction, that is, of a type of text whose author is not responsible, not responsible forwhat happens to the narrator or the characters of the narrative, not answerable before the law to the truthfulness of whathe says. One might insinuate that he is exploiting a certain irresponsibility of literary fiction in order to pass off, likecontraband, an allegedly real testimony” (Derrida, Demeure, 55). The integrity of the author’s implicit contract with hisreadership is likewise at stake.

The self-imposed deadline (the French delai, whose primary sense is the interval of time rather than its term or limit,derives from the older form deslaier, “differer”) set to coincide with the phone appointment with his physician thusassumes further significance with reference to a prior engagement at an earlier date: December 22, the vexed occasion ofthe “decisive” blood tests. On the previous day, he confers with Dr. Chandi:

‘Oh yes, your blood test. Is it time for your appointment already? Tomorrow, my God – how quickly time flies! [commele temps passe vite!]“ Later [par la suite] I wondered if he’d said that intentionally to remind me that my days werenow numbered [mon temps etait desormais compte], that I shouldn’t waste them writing under or about another name[plume] than my own, and I remembered that other, almost ritual phrase he’d used a month before, when he’d studied

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all my latest blood analyses, noted the sudden inroads the virus had made, and asked me to have a new blood test tocheck for the presence of the antigen P24…so that we could set in motion the administrative procedure required toobtain the drug AZT, currently [a ce jour] the only treatment for full-blown AIDS. “Now,” he remarked, “if we donothing, it’s no longer a question of years, but of months.” [E 44; F 52]

“How quickly time flies.” The cliché will subsequently serve as a reminder (whether intentional or not) that his fleetingdays are numbered, not simply “now,” as the translation has it, but henceforth: “mon tempts etait desormais compte,” mytime was henceforth counted, “which signifies ‘from now on and in the future,’ thus later, always later, the future alwayslater, the permanent future” (Derrida, Demeure, 102). (Earlier in the narrative, Muzil learns that the days remaining tohim are likewise numbered: Realizing his days were numbered [Une fois le temps compte], he began to reorganize hisbook with absolute clarity [E 28; F 36].) To be avoided, then, is the potential waste of precious time involved in “writingunder or about another name than my own”: writing pseudonymously, say, or penning novels in lieu of autobiography. Later, too, the cliché about the rapidity of time’s passing will recall another, “almost ritual” formulation, offered “amonth before,” about the henceforth counted time that remains to the patient. Failing treatment with AZT (“currently [ace jour, to date] the only treatment for full-blown AIDS”: another referent linking the roman to the history of theepidemic-turned-pandemic), it will be a question not of years but rather of months (as it has been throughout thenarrative to this point: “three months,” “several months,” “the months that followed,” “a month before”), in one of severalcruel revisions of his life expectancy and its most suitable unit of measure that Herve eventually confronts:

3. In December [1988], Dr. Chandi said, “At this point, it’s no longer a question of years, but of months.” In February,he’d revised his estimate sharply, saying, “If we do nothing, we’re now talking about a few short months, or somelongish weeks [c'est une affaire de grandes semaines ou de petits mois]. And he was very definite about the reprievegranted by AZT: between twelve and fifteen months”…. On February 10 I picked up my capsules of AZT…but as oftoday, March 20, as I finish getting this book into shape [mais a ce jour, 20 mars, ou j'acheve la mise en propre de celivre], I still haven’t touched a single capsule of AZT. [E 205; F 223; emphasis added]

“Short months,” “longish weeks”: these of course are fictive durations, in English as in French, figures of speech proper toliterary language and not to the time of experience, however short-lived.

FEBRUARY 26, 2010 · 12:53 PM

Numbered Days (‘To the Friend Who Did Not SaveMy Life,’ part 3)1. On this twenty-sixth day of December, 1988, as I begin this book, in Rome…several months after thosethree months when I was truly convinced I was lost, and after the months that followed when I was able to believemyself saved by the luckiest of chances [par ce hasard extraordinaire], wavering now between doubt and lucidity, havingreached the limits of both hope and despair, I don’t know what to think about any of these crucial questions, about thisalternation of certain death and sudden reprieve [cette alternative de la condemnation et de sa remission]…. [E 2; F 10;emphasis added]

Attesting to the origins of “this book” – the book we are now attempting to read, the roman or work of fiction signed byHerve Guibert – the narrative here refers the reader back to its first sentence and paragraph, specifically to “those threemonths” when “I had AIDS,” or more precisely when the first person (whom we will henceforth, following his cue, callHerve) believed that his fate, an imminent and premature death, was sealed, and to the ensuing months inaugurated bythe extraordinary chance (hasard of course also signifies risk or danger, crucial senses in this context) that brought the




promise of possible salvation. We learn that he embarks on this book in the aftermath of the three months and the severalmonths that followed, in a time of flux precipitated by his alternation between despair and hope, between the prospect ofimminent death and the promise of reprieve. Little wonder, then, that here and throughout the narrative temporalindications abound.



Despite the imprecision of “several months” and “the months that followed,” this uncertain time is given the strictdemarcation of a date that both historicizes it in the context of the unfolding of the epidemic and locates it in the narrativesequence. History and story, dovetailing in the French histoire, are intricated in a text that can be read as a partial

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historiography of AIDS, as chapters from Guibert’s autobiography, and as the work of fiction it styles itself: for examplewhen we read that Bill, the friend of the title to whom the book is addressed and dedicated, “was the first to tell me aboutthis famous disease, it must have been sometime in 1981. He’d just returned from the United States, were he’d comeacross the first clinical reports about this strange death and its specific provenance in a professional journal” –presumably the June 1, 1981 issue of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which included the first publishedclinical account of the condition known only later as AIDS [E 13; F 21]. With “it must have been,” the self-declaredliterary fiction binds itself to history, to one among several indelible events that serve here as referents. With regard to thenarrative sequence, which is irreducible to a chronology, part of the reader’s task in this instance will be to reckon in lightof what follows that “this twenty sixth day of December, 1988″ falls four days after the tests undergone on December 22 ofthat year to check for the presence in Herve’s blood of the antigen P24, sign of the active, no longer latent operation of theHIV virus. For only subsequently are the tests and their dates explicitly noted.

· 11:46 AM

Numbered Days (‘To the Friend Who Did Not SaveMy Life,’ part 2)

With the designation roman that twice punctuates the French title, Guibert’s text declares itself from the outset, beforeany further experience of reading, a work of literature, a narrative of a certain duration whose first person would not bethe author, but rather a narrator not bound by any commitment to historiographical or autobiographical veracity, freed byauthor and reader alike from responsibility to what might actually have happened. And for the most part it is indeedreadable as such a fiction, according to what the first person will belatedly term a “novelistic logic” (the logiqueromanesque evidently posed no problem for the translator). [Translation cited hereafter as E; French text cited hereafteras F.] This is the case for the provocative opening sentence as well as its qualification in those that follow,adumbrating the plot and the central predicament of the narrative:

More precisely, for three months I believed I was condemned to die of that mortal illness called AIDS…. But after threemonths, something completely unexpected [un hasard extraordinaire] happened that convinced me I could and almostcertainly would escape this disease, which everyone still claimed was always fatal…. That I was going to make it, that Iwould become, by an extraordinary stroke of luck [par ce hasard extraordinaire], one of the first people on earth tosurvive this deadly malady [cette maladie inexorable]. [E 1; F 9]

But at several telling junctures in To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, a fundamental law of the novelistic genre istransgressed when author and narrator converge to become indistinguishable. These instances, at least six in number,prove to have two traits in common: a reference to the work itself as it is being written, and an act or event of dating thatdemarcates its provenance. The unsettling experience of reading these passages leads us to ask (among other things,certainly) what the co-presence of these traits inscribes in the relations between novel and autobiography, fiction andtestimony.


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FEBRUARY 25, 2010 · 4:27 PM

Numbered Days (‘To the Friend Who Did Not SaveMy Life,’ part 1)With this post, I return to my manuscript The Brevity of Life: What AIDS Makes Legible for purposes of bringing to lighta chapter that has not yet been published in print. Entitled “Numbered Days,” it attempts a reading of Herve Guibert’s Tothe Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (A l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve la vie), which dates from the period – the early 1990s– in which Derek Jarman and Felix Gonzalez-Torres were likewise working under the cloud of HIV/AIDS. “NumberedDays” begins with an epigraph from Jacques Derrida’s Demeure: Fiction and Testimony:

Before coming to writing, literature depends on reading and the right conferred on it by an experience of reading. Onecan read the same text – which thus never exists “in itself” – as a testimony that is said to be serious and authentic, or asan archive, or as a document, or as a symptom – or as a work of literary fiction, indeed the work of a literary fictionthat simulates all of the positions that we have just enumerated. For literature can say anything, accept anything,receive anything, suffer anything, and simulate everything…. [29]

Herve Guibert

What right might an experience of reading confer on a text that, from its opening sentence (“I had AIDS for three months”["J'ai eu le sida pendant trois mois"]), renders problematic its own referential and rhetorical modes, and with them thevery experience of reading? Herve Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (A l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve lavie), published in French in 1990, is a first-person account of a young writer’s confrontation with a range of physical,psychological and social effects of HIV, dating from 1980 to 1989 and thus spanning the decade in which the first clinicalreports of what would provisionally be termed Gay-Related Immunodeficiency were made public, GRID yielded to AIDSas the rate of infection rapidly attained epidemic proportions, and the earliest generations of treatments were firstheralded and then rapidly encountered the limits of their potency. Within the narrative’s precisely delineated historicalparameters – hence, crucially, in the absence of a vaccine as well as a treatment regime sufficiently effective to counter thevirus over time – its introductory claim, uttered in the first person and the past tense, lends itself to understanding asfictive: practically no “serious and authentic” testimony of the time could truthfully, rightfully include this sentence, forbetween 1980 and 1989 most anyone who had AIDS for three months, period, would likely be writing it on the far side ofdeath. And indeed, despite numerous overtly autobiographical elements (chief among them the young writer’s recurrentself-identification as “Herve” and “Guibert,” as well as the transparent figuring of the author’s friend Michel Foucault inthe character called Muzil), the French edition declares its status on both cover and title page: roman.


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Curiously, the designation does not survive the text’s translation into English. What appears in its stead, displaced to thefine print below the copyright, is an explicit caveat to the reader in language that would appear formulaic: “This is a workof fiction. Any similarity of persons, places or events depicted herein to actual persons, places or events is entirelycoincidental.” One may wonder why Guibert’s translator rejected the obvious (and economical) option of affixing “novel”to cover and title page. But the caveat’s appeal to coincidence may help to make legible precisely what in the textguarantees its status not simply as fiction, but also, perhaps, as the fiction of a fiction. As it turns out, this is not so mucha matter of a dissimilarity or difference between the persons, places or events rendered and some putative actuality, butrather of a necessary failure of coincidence, of contemporaneity, between the times inscribed in the text and the time oflived experience.

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