André Gide

The works of the French author André Gide (1869-1951) reveal his passionate revolt against the restraints and conventions inherited from 19th-century France. He sought to uncover the authentic self beneath its contradictory masks.

André Gide was born in Paris on Nov. 22, 1869, to Paul Gide, a professor of law at the Sorbonne, and his wife, Juliette, both of the Protestant upper middle class. After the death of his father when André was 11, the boy was dominated by his mother's love and grew up in a largely feminine environment. His fragile health and nervous temperament affected his education, which oscillated between formal schooling and a combination of travel and private tutoring. At 15 he vowed a lifelong spiritual love to his cousin, Madeleine Rondeaux.

Symbolist Period

In 1891 Gide published his first book, Les Cahiers d'André Walter (The Notebooks of André Walter), in which dream is preferred to reality, spiritual love to the physical. It did not succeed, however, in winning over the reluctant Madeleine, as Gide had intended. During this period he was introduced into the symbolist salons of Stéphane Mallarmé and José de Heredia by his friend Pierre Louÿs. In the symbolist vein Gide wrote Le Traité du Narcisse (1891; Treatise of the Narcissus) and Le Voyage d'Urien (1893).

In 1893 Gide set out for Africa with his friend Paul Laurens in the hope of harmonizing imperious sensual desires and inherited puritanical inhibitions. At Susa he had his first homosexual experience. There Gide fell ill with tuberculosis and was forced to return to France, where he was shocked to find the symbolist salons unchanged. Retiring to Neuchâtel for the winter, he wrote Paludes (Marshlands), a satire on stagnation and a break with symbolism.

In 1895 Gide returned to Africa, where he met Oscar Wilde and Lord Douglas. Wilde obliged Gide to acknowledge his pederasty, to which he now passionately acquiesced. This was indeed a pivotal year for Gide for it also brought the death of his mother and his marriage to Madeleine, who continued to symbolize for him the pull of virtue, restraint, and spirituality against his cult of freedom and physical pleasure. Gide's life was a constant effort to strike a balance between these opposite imperatives.

Middle Years

Gide articulated his doctrine of freedom in 1897 in Les Nourritures terrestres (Fruits of the Earth ), a lyrical work advocating liberation through sensuous hedonism. L'Immoraliste (1902), a novel transposing many autobiographical elements, dramatizes the dangers of Michel's selfish quest for freedom and pleasure at the ultimate cost of death to his pious wife, Marceline. In this, perhaps Gide's greatest novel, as in various other works, the portrait of the virtuous, devoted heroine was inspired by Madeleine.

Conceived at the same time as L'Immoraliste, La Porte étroite (1909; Strait Is the Gate) is a critique of the opposite tendency of excessive restraint and useless mysticism. Again patterned after Madeleine, the heroine, Alissa, renounces her love for Jérôme to devote herself entirely to God and the spiritual life. The final pages of her diary suggest the futility of her self-denials in the face of solitude without God. This was Gide's first success.

In the relatively sterile years between these two novels, Gide was a cofounder of La Nouvelle revue française. After publishing in 1911 another highly polished though less autobiographical work, Isabelle, Gide was ready to challenge the principle of order in art. This he accomplished in Les Caves du Vatican (1914; The Vatican Swindle), a humorous satire on bourgeois complacency, be it orthodox or anticlerical, and on relativism and chance. The work defies conventional psychology's insistence on motivated acts. Instead Gide carries to the extreme the idea of freedom, for the hero, Lafcadio, murders a total stranger by pushing him out of a moving train. Thus Gide evolved the notion of the "gratuitous act," an expression of absolute freedom, unpremeditated, seemingly unmotivated. He was no doubt influenced by his reading of Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

In La Symphonie pastorale (1919), a pastor's free interpretation of Christ's words to legitimize his love for the heroine is pitted against his son's orthodox adherence to the restrictions of St. Paul. This work reflects Gide's religious crises of 1905-1906, which had been precipitated by his disturbing meetings with the fervent Catholic poet, playwright, and diplomat Paul Claudel, and of 1916, after the conversion of his friend Henri Ghéon to Catholicism. The latter crisis was also caused by the beginning of Gide's love affair with Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, who later became the mother of his only child, Catherine. This religious crisis also inspired Numquid et tu … ?, which retraces Gide's effort to seek and find his own truth in the Gospels.

Gide risked his reputation by publishing Corydon (1924), an apology of homosexuality, and Si le grain ne meurt … (1926; If It Die … ), his well-known autobiography which treats the years 1869-1895, the period of his homosexual liberation.

"The Counterfeiters"

Gide's Les Faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters) appeared in 1926. It is the fruit of a 30-year meditation on a twofold esthetic freedom: freedom from subjective, autobiographical fiction and freedom from the limitations of the traditional novel. In order to convey a true impression of life, chaotic, elusive, perceived subjectively and individually, Gide devised a technique of disorder. Gide underscores this innovation by means of the character Édouard, who is also writing a book called Les Faux-monnayeurs and who fails to achieve the same goal. Les Faux-monnayeursis a landmark in the general revolt against realism, defying the reader's conventional expectations and forcing him to reflect on the technical problems which face the modern novelist.

Also in 1926 appeared Dostoevsky, a collection of lectures and articles on the Russian novelist, whom Gide greatly admired and helped bring to the attention of the French public. Like the Lettres à Angèle (1900) and Prétextes (1903), which contains an admirable study of Oscar Wilde, Dostoevsky is a book of criticism which retains its interest chiefly because it reveals Gide's own thoughts on literature and philosophy.

Later Years

In 1925-1926 Gide traveled in the Congo with his friend Marc Allégret. He was deeply distressed by the colonial exploitation of the natives that he witnessed there. Upon his return he published accounts of his trip and issued a call for action. This experience undoubtedly facilitated his conversion to communism in the 1930s. Disillusioned by a visit to the U.S.S.R. in 1936, he admitted his mistake in Retour de l'U.R.S.S. (1936; Return from the U.S.S.R.) and Retouches àmon Retour de l'U.R.S.S. (1937; Afterthoughts on the U.S.S.R.).

Gide had long since ceased to feel at ease with intellectual conformity. In 1931 he had insisted in the play Oedipe on the individual's obligation to draw his own ethical conclusions (Oedipus) rather than follow the path of blind discipleship (Eteocles and Polynices).

In 1935 Les Nouvelles nourritures (Later Fruits of the Earth) had reiterated the ideal of liberation, now tempered by consideration of others, a sense of social duty, and self-discipline. During the German Occupation, Gide was forced to flee to Tunisia. In Thésée (1946) the adventures and accomplishments of the old Theseus parallel Gide's own. The optimistic mood betrays the author's serene confidence in the path he had chosen. The following year Gide was awarded an honorary degree from Oxford and the Nobel Prize for literature.

Probably the most important publication of Gide's later years was his Journal, 1889-1939, released in 1939, one year after the death of his wife. The final volume (1950) carries the journal through 1949. Considered by some his best work, the Journal is the moving self-portrait of a man whose mind mirrored the crisis of the modern intellectual. It also contains precious information on his curious platonic marriage to Madeleine, who quietly endured her husband's homosexual adventures by taking refuge in a world of piety and domesticity. Her mute suffering was a great source of guilt and pain to Gide, who loved her deeply. Et nunc manet in te, published posthumously in 1951, is Gide's testimony to that love and a frank account of their unspoken tragedy. Gide died in Paris on Feb. 19, 1951, and was buried at Cuverville in Normandy.

Further Reading

There are two major critical biographies of Gide: Justin O'Brien, Portrait of André Gide: A Critical Biography (1953), and George D. Painter, André Gide: A Critical Biography (1968). Also useful is Harold March, Gide and the Hound of Heaven (1952). The best general studies in English of Gide's works are Albert J. Guerard, André Gide (1951; 2d ed. 1969); Germaine Brée, Gide (1953; trans. 1963); and George W. Ireland, André Gide: A Study of His Creative Writings (1970). Less ambitious but worthwhile introductions to Gide are Enid Starkie, André Gide (1953), and Wallace Fowlie, André Gide: His Life and Art (1965). Recommended for general background on the 20th-century French novel are Henri Peyre, The Contemporary French Novel (1955); Germaine Brée and Margaret Guiton, An Age of Fiction: The French Novel from Gide to Camus (1957); and Victor Brombert, The Intellectual Hero: Studies in the French Novel, 1880-1955 (1961).

Additional Sources

Cordle, Thomas, André Gide, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975 1969.

Mann, Klaus, André Gide and the crisis of modern thought, New York: Octagon Books, 1978, 1943.

O'Brien, Justin, Portrait of André Gide: a critical biography, New York: Octagon Books, 1977, 1953.

Tolton, C. D. E., André Gide and the art of autobiography: a study of Si le grain ne meurt, Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1975.

For more information on André-Paul-Guillaume Gide, visit Britannica.com.

Gide, André (André-Paul-Guillaume Gide) (1869-1951). French novelist. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947, André Gide had been a leading light on the French intellectual scene for 40 years.

His vocation as a writer was conceived at a very early age, according to his autobiography Si le grain ne meurt (1926). An only child, he was the product of a strict Protestant upbringing and an almost exclusively female environment following the death of his father when Gide was II. His mother's insecurity drove her to be excessively protective of her son, who had an unsettled childhood with little regular schooling. At the age of 13 he conceived a pious and spiritual love for his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux, which soon came into conflict with his sexual impulses. Intense religious fervour alternated with erotic obsessions throughout his adolescence: the conflict led him to write his first novel, Les Cahiers d'André Walter (1891), and offer it to Madeleine as a proposal of marriage, in the hope that his devouter aspirations, finding an ally in her, would ultimately triumph. On the advice of their families she refused, and Gide was left to resolve his dilemma alone.

He examined his predicament in the Journal he had been keeping from his early teens, and which over a lifetime would come to constitute a major landmark of French literature in its own right. He perceived himself to be a victim of the contradiction, particularly acute within Protestantism, between freedom of conscience and orthodox morality: determining on sincerity at all costs he set out on a series of trips to North Africa during the mid-1890s, in the course of which he realized his homosexuality, conceived Les Nourritures terrestres, and fought the last of his battles with maternal authority. On the sudden death of his mother in 1895, however, he felt compelled to marry Madeleine, attaching himself thereby to an anchor which would serve to check and balance his wilder inclinations.

The achievement of balance without sacrificing any of the contradictory elements in his nature became the guiding principle in Gide's life and works. The writing bears a special relationship to the biography: in his fiction Gide explores aspects of his personality to which he could not give unfettered expression in his life. Thus, although characters such as André Walter, or the Michel of L'Immoraliste (1902), are recognizably derived from Gide's own experience, and while their narratives, like that of La Porte étroite (1909), reproduce the circumstances of Gide's life, they go well beyond positions Gide was prepared to endorse. In writing such works, Gide rid himself of troublesome temptations that threatened to monopolize his energies and left himself free to envisage alternatives—often diametrically opposed ones, as in the exemplary contrast between L'Immoraliste and La Porte étroite: the former explores gratification of the instincts, while the latter examines self-denial. Ultimately, Gide was happy to remain a man divided, having, by the time of Thésée (1946), learned to nourish his contradictions and demonstrated that indecision and inner dialogue could be a source of creativity, and by extension become the mark of an authentic human being.

Gide's literary début coincided with the heyday of Symbolism, when the realist novel was widely disparaged for ignoring the subtler intuitions which it was considered the true artist's task to enshrine in his work. Aspiring none the less to be a novelist, Gide was intent on demonstrating that the novel can be a work of art with a harmonious structure and the capacity to shape and stylize reality rather than produce a slavish copy. His texts are intensely patterned, with complex formal symmetries. On the other hand, Gide casts doubt on the novel's capacity to record reality as such, suggesting, for instance, that the subject of Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926) is the conflict between the real world and the representations of it which humans attempt. He experimented with forms of lyricism, allegory, parody, and satire before fixing on a form of ironic first-person narrative which he termed récit and which he was to make his own in works such as L'Immoraliste, La Porte étroite, La Symphonie pastorale (1919), and L'École des femmes (1929). Here a character tells his (sometimes her) own story, though the account is coloured or distorted by an emotional involvement with events. Hence, the reader is obliged to adopt a critical stance, reading between the lines to reestablish the facts as far as possible, often at the expense of the credibility or moral stature of the narrator-protagonist.

These narrowly focused works failed to satisfy Gide himself, and he pursued his experiments with the novel form in search of a panoramic construction which would encompass something of the social dimension. In Les Caves du Vatican (1914) he mingled the influence of Dostoevsky with the novel of adventure, but his critical sense and propensity to irony got the better of his avowed intent, turning the work into a comic pastiche for which ex post facto he borrowed the label sotie from medieval farce. Only in Les Faux-Monnayeurs was he willing to see a genuine novel, though here too the life of the characters and the development of plot share the stage with reflections upon the novel form and with highly self-conscious devices such as the novel-within-the-novel.

Gide's literary stature also derived from his prominent role in the creation of the Nouvelle Revue Française, from his plays (Saül, 1896; Œdipe, 1930), and from his work as a distinguished essayist, critic, and translator. He further shaped the cultural climate of his time through the example of individual integrity he sought to illustrate in his life and writings. He attracted controversy by his defence of pederasty (Corydon, 1924) and his denunciations of colonialism (Voyage au Congo, 1927; Retour du Tchad, 1928). He emerged as the model of the committed intellectual in his study of the workings of the judicial system (Souvenirs de la Cour d'Assises, 1914) and his brief flirtation with Soviet Communism (Retour de l'URSS, 1937; Retouches à mon Retour de l'URSS, 1938).

[David Walker]

Bibliography

• G. Brée, André Gide (1963)
• C. Martin, André Gide par lui-même (1963)
• D. Walker, André Gide (1990)

Gide, André (äNdrā' zhēd) , 1869–1951, French writer. He established a reputation as an unconventional novelist with The Immoralist (1902, tr. 1930), a partly autobiographical work in which he portrays a young man contravening ordinary moral standards in his search for self-fulfillment. In this and other major novels, including Strait Is the Gate (1909, tr. 1924), Lafcadio's Adventures (1914, tr. 1927), and The Counterfeiters (1926, tr. 1927), Gide shows individuals seeking out their own natures, which may be at conflict with prevailing ethical concepts. Raised as a Protestant, Gide became a leader of French liberal thought and was one of the founders (1909) of the influential Nouvelle Revue française. He was controversial for his frank defense of homosexuality and for his espousal of Communism and his subsequent disavowal of it after a visit to the Soviet Union. His voluminous writings, which include plays, stories, and essays, show great diversity of subjects and literary techniques. His use of myth to embody his thought is evident in such early satirical tales as Prometheus Misbound (1899, tr. 1933). His Travels in the Congo (1927, tr. 1929) and Retour du Tchad (1928) helped bring about reform of French colonial policy in Africa. In 1947 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Bibliography

See his autobiography, If It Die (tr. 1935, repr. 1957), and his journals (1889–1949), tr. and ed. by J. O'Brien (4 vol., 1947–51); studies by J. O'Brien (1953), J. Hytier (tr., 1967), V. Rossi (1967), G. D. Painter (rev. ed. 1968), A. J. Guérard (2d ed. 1969), and K. Mann (1978).

Quotes:

"Are you then unable to recognize unless it has the same sound as yours?"

"Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you."

"A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective."

"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not."

"Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all."

"It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking to it that one overcomes it; often it is by working on the one next to it. Some things and some people have to be approached obliquely, at an angle."

See more famous quotes by Andre Gide

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