Is it the end of Eddy?

Minnes
Minnes
Aug 27, 2017 · 4 min read

Fact and fiction combine to tell a queer story.

I keep a list of books, titles I would like to read and books that I will never read. That is a fact. Maybe we are all the same. Thing is, we keep on borrowing or buying books.

One of the books on my list was The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis (2014). I don’t know how it came to be included as a must read. I think it was probably some article from The Guardian or The Independent. The genre of the book appropriates the readership of those newspapers. Myself included. So I was determind this was not going to be one that lingered. I didn’t buy it but borrowed it from my library subscription.

The End of Eddy is poignant, but a tough read. A book that begins with a physical assault on Eddy as he tries to find sanctuary in his school library and continues to take the reader through the rabbit warren of his life. Unlike the rabbit who keeps moving, Eddy is like the rabbit caught in the headlamps of his young life.

It is a fictionalised account of his childhood and youth growing up in Northern France. He is the ‘other’, his mannerisms and body movement never fit into the masculine ideal of ‘men’ in the village; the masculinity of factory work, marriage, social drinking and violent behaviour. Neither does Eddy fit into the expected masculine ‘idea’ of the women; his mother, his sisters and the women of the village. He tries the shield of a girlfriend or two to mask his sexual orientation and to fit with his surroundings. We read the awkwardness of these couplings but also the normative strong male ideal of the village. For Eddy it is the mask to his sexual orientation that makes certain his true desire of the male body that he eventually craves for intimacy.

Through the book, even though he would be considered the ‘other’, the subject more than the object, he is stronger and more independent than the other men. To have the strength to be treated with distain and disrespect from his peers instils a steely resolve to escape. Or, as a chapter example The Shed (123–134) he would be bestowed with the ring that signified that he was the subject in the sex games. Eddy enjoys the sexual contact and his strength to survive comes from the pleasure he finds in the male form.

Because the adversity of his situation can only create a strength of character even before a child or teenager knows what word to afford it. It is not an experience that I had personally but is one that many a male will resonate with. Only by creating his story in fiction can the reader see that Louis could be the child born with the refinement of the bourgeoisie but exisiting in a French working/labouring class context. Then again we reading here, between the lines, that bourgeoisie males can never be as masculine as the working/labouring class. Through the dialogue in the book Eddy’s family continually instil the values and cultural capital of their background to keep him grounded with their values but to not bring attention and shame on the family.

The working class/middle class paradigm that Édouard Louis relates is captured and informed by the work of the French sociologist and Philospher Pierre Bourdieu. Class and class culture resonates from start to finish of The End of Eddy. It is a story on the growing sexual orientation of a male and acts as a ethnographic fictional study on the lives of the working/labouring class of a Northern French town. It is interesting that Édouard Louis has studied and written about Pierre Bourdieu.

For Louis the men of his family and town don’t have to assert their strength because it is their own perception of who they are throughout the book, handed down to each generation. An interpretation of normative life and work situation.

Focus in on Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984) and the discourse on how women class conform (“Who does she think she is?’ That is not for the likes of us”) (Bourdieu 1984: 381) the same class and gender conforming is instilled into and put on Eddy by his parents (“Fancy ways; stop putting on those fancy ways” or “Why does Eddy always act like a girl?”) or by people in his school (“Look, it’s Belleguele, the homo”). Eddy is the ‘other’, by his being and by his class situation. Both hang over him like clouds.

The purpose of the book I would argue is that it is not the end of Eddy, but a rebirth of a different Eddy. He is the stronger of the male class and could justifiably write the line:

“As men we are supposed to be strong…”

He has a justifiable right to because he was strong, finding a way to survive in this situation. Louis queered what strong is thought to symbolise for masculinity. He is his own freedom and found a way to move on with his life. Can he truly escape? No, because every incident is a line of his biography and he is a storyteller who tells the truth, albeit in a fictionalised account. It didn’t just ‘get better’ for Eddy. He found a way to make it better. This makes the book and his story more powerful. Don’t leave it on your list of must reads too long!

References

Bourdieu, P. (1984/2010) Distinction, Abingdon: Routledge Classics

Innes, M. (2017) Queering the strong male, Medium, 20th July 2017, https://medium.com/@minnes1888/queering-the-strong-male-305b35f66b67

Louis, É. (2017) The End of Eddy, translated from French by Michael Lucey, London, Harvill Secker

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