Quite unlike Jean Cocteau in Le
Livre Blanc, André Gide in
L'Immoraliste (1902) refuses to
take defeat for granted. Neither does he take triumph for granted, but
the total impact of the novel has more in it of salvation than of
despair. Cocteau and Gide of course deal with substantively different
issues, the former with the problem of how an overt homosexual suffers
from the oppression of homophobic culture, the latter with the drama of
how a latent homosexual rediscovers his suppressed self.
Neither author had much hope that their works would be understood by,
or be of benefit to, the general reading public. Cocteau vainly wishes
that society will understand that the homosexual "is not a
monster," but that it is the homophobic "vice of
society" that is monstrous — but he recognizes that society
will tolerate "dangerous experiments" in art while it
continues to condemn them in real life. Similarly Gide, in the notes
with which he prefaced later editions of the work, admits that he
failed as an author in so far as few readers understood the work.
Although "I intended to make this book as little an indictment as
an apology," most of the readers regarded it as an indictment,
while "the few readers who were disposed to interest themselves in
Michel's adventure did so only to reprobate him with all the
superiority of their kind hearts" — the typical stance of
liberal tolerance, the kind of tolerance that similarly angered and
wounded Cocteau in the last lines of his own novel.
Gide took offence both at the general reading public who regarded
his novel as an exposition of a "problem" — which
prompts him to criticize "the ephemeral public" for being
"greedy only for sweets and trifles" — and the critical
establishment, those "certain distinguished minds" who
regarded the novel merely as a case study of "a sufferer from
disease." Pseudo-Freudian analysis of both works is still the rule
today, and readers and critics still fail to appreciate either works as
detailed studies of the homophobic context in which the homosexual
finds himself.
Although Michel's homosexuality may remain "latent"
throughout the novel — no specific homosexual acts are explicitly
delineated in the text — The Immoralist
remains a drama of the return of the repressed, and by the end of the
novel we are left with the distinct impression that Michel has
succeeded at last in recovering his authentic self and is living as an
overt homosexual. Gide was no doubt restricted by what was allowable
according to the expectations of his prudish and homophobic audience,
for although the novel is clearly autobiographical Gide felt it
necessary to suppress all of the explicit and overt homosexual content
of his own North African adventures that he was recounting.
Occasionally there are ellipses in the narrative which indicate that
the autobiographical and fictional motives have not been successfully
harmonized by the author. But for the most part this suppression has
benefited the artist's creative techniques by allowing him — or,
rather, requiring him — to exploit the
potentials of symbolic allusion.
The common factor of all the elements in this symbolic — and
sometimes allegoric — fabric is the psychosexual theme of
discovering, uncovering, recovering the old Adam. In Cocteau's novel
the homosexual nature of the narrator's personality is a given, and the
novel progresses according to the degrees to which he affirms,
suppresses, and re-affirms this component when confronting society. In
Gide's novel the hero's homosexuality is only gradually discovered, and
the drama progresses according to the degrees to which this approaches
the surface, and relapses, before complete self-recognition.
Marceline becomes more of a mother than a wife as she nurses this
helpless infant back to life. It would be unfair to find herein the
close-binding-intimate mother of the Freudian homosexual paradigm, for
Michel's actual childhood was dominated by his father. In so far as he
and Marceline were betrothed at his father's deathbed, it would be more
plausible to regard Marceline as an extension of the father-figure. It
is equally possible that Marceline is the Cybele to Michel's Attis.
After Attis encounters Cybele, he castrates himself, and as Cybele
weeps over his body, violets begin to sprout from the blood spilled
upon the ground, just as Michel begins to recover a new health under
the careful eye of Marceline. This very tangential symbolism is
supported by reference in this chapter (1.1) to Michel's
Essay on Phrygian Cults, of which the cult
of
Attis/Cybele was the primogeniture.
Be this as it may, while in Biskra recuperating, Michel comes to
the realization that he has come very close to physical death, and that
this experience has prompted the psychological rebirth of a new self.
The first symbolic correlative of this rebirth is the appearance of the
young Arab boy Bachir, whom Marceline, ironically, has brought to the
sick-chamber for Michel's amusement. Michel glimpses Bachir's
nakedness
and animal grace under his skimpy clothing — this is the first in
a pattern of the "uncover they nakedness" leitmotif —
and is fascinated, almost hypnotized, as he watches Bachir use his
phallic knife to whittle an equally phallic whistle. Michel reaches
down to touch Bachir's delicate shoulder (also phallic, as in the myth
of Pelops), and Bachir gives him the completed whistle — this
signifies a transfer of virility that will aid in Michel's recovery.
Two days later Bachir returns, and again while whittling he
accidentally cuts his thumb, and laughingly sucks the blood from the
wound. This symbolic self-castration — as in
all castration rituals — signifies
rebirth rather than death (as evidenced by "his tongue as pink as
a cat's"), and as Bachir sucks his own blood he is engaging in a
ceremonial act of regaining health. The next
day Bachir brings some marbles, and Michel is strong enough to play a
game with him, ending with him breaking out in a "profuse
perspiration." This is the sweat following orgasm, however
metaphoric. A few hours later he has a haemorrhage. As he spits up
clots of blood he thinks of Bachir's "beautiful, brilliant flow of
blood. ... And suddenly I was seized with a desire, a craving,
something more furious and more imperious than I had ever felt before
— to live!" The tubercular blood, like Bachir's blood, is not
really a symptom of disease after all, but an omen of the buried self
which is rising to the surface, refusing to be ignored, and demanding
to be incorporated into the whole personality. The tubercular patient,
like the latent homosexual, suffers more from a denial than an
acceptance of the facts, and Michel resolves upon a regimen of health
to recover — to uncover and discover — complete life.
The homosexual — latent or overt — regularly suffers
from a sense of split identity until he integrates his sexuality into
the whole fabric of his social life — which necessitates not only
self-acceptance, but coming out so as to harmonize the private with the
public self. This is the fundamental message not only of modern
psychological theories about the fully integrated personality as the
key to mental well-being, but of the mythic imagination's insistence
that the Apollonian and the Dionysian must be reunited in primordial
Eros. Usually the road to this unity lies through a near-abandonment of
oneself to that half of the personality which has been suppressed for
far too long, as though the scales can achieve equilibrium only by
overweighing the lighter side. Michel has been almost entirely a man of
the intellect, resulting in a split wherein soul and body no longer
recognize one another.
His repressed homosexuality finally rebels and manifests itself as
tuberculosis. Weakened by the battle, Michel is no longer able "to
keep up a double life," so he resolves to concentrate upon the
needs of his body. As Norman O. Brown might say, he enters
the body, which in chapter 1.3 is symbolized
by a public park filled with plants, trees, a deep stream, and Arab
children. This signifies the lost garden of Eden, the pool of Hylas,
the Sacred Precinct that figures so prominently in the bulk of
homosexual literature: "A curious shudder ran through me when I
entered the strange shade."
The "old Adam" is the Adam who lived alone in the
garden before the creation of Eve. Michel is disturbed by the presence
of Marceline: "however slightly, she was in my way." Like
Adam reclaiming his rib in order to become the primordial androgyne
before the creation of Eve, Michel the next day leaves Marceline at
home, but takes her shawl with him, and gives it to Bachir to carry.
Bachir and the shawl could be regarded as the projections of the male
and female halves of Michel, but in any case Bachir is clearly
substituting for Marceline during Michel's first break away from her.
In the garden Michel meets Bachir's sister, who, like all the other
children in the novel, is almost purely symbolic. Her name Rhadra
"means `green' in Arabic" — she is the androgynous
personification of growth, just as the colour green is the center and
turning point in the spectrum of advancing and retreating colours, the
most neutral of colours, the colour of growing health almost
universally used to paint the walls of hospital rooms. She is a
personification of nature, but to view her in sexual terms as Mother
Nature would misleadingly succumb to the relatively modern view that
nature is predominantly "feminine" rather than androgynous.
Michel also meets their mother, a heavy washerwoman with tattoos on her
forehead and a basket of linen on her head "like a Greek
caryatid," representative of the archaic and the primordial in
this pagan temenos. She requires Bachir's help for the rest of the day,
but soon the shawl is transferred to a sturdy fourteen-year-old boy
named Ashour, who is blind in one eye, symbolic of the one-eyed penis.
Ashour serves the archetypal function of the friendly guide in the
initiation ritual of descent, and he explains where The Source of the
stream is and how it eventually ends in an oasis, the stream obviously
signifying The River of Life for whose source Michel is questing.
When Michel returns home he discovers that Marceline has
transferred her maternal tenderness to a sickly child, an indication
that Michel has been replaced now that he has progressed beyond the
limits of Marceline's role in helping him achieve health. The garden
now fulfils that function more effectively, and becomes the womb which
will give birth to the old Adam: "It was with rapture I passed
into its shade. The air was luminous. ... I was excited — dazzled
... Light! Oh, light!" In this orgasmic dawn of a new day he
approaches a variation of the burning bush, "whose bark looked of
such a curious texture that I felt obliged to go and feel it. My touch
was a caress; it gave me rapture. ... Was that the morning that was at
last to give me birth?" He is simultaneously mother and father to
his new self. What is born within him, through seminal contact with
this phallic bush, is partly a rediscovery of his own past childhood,
partly a recovery of human innocence in the beginning:
Marceline's own perceptions of this mythical realm are delimited
by her conventional tourist response: "It's no use going any
further; these orchards are all alike." The next evening Michel
returns — alone — to the same orchard. He converses with the
handsome twelve-year-old goatherd, Lassif, and learns about the
ingenious system of canals which provides just enough water for the
palms without wasting any, an image perhaps of the careful
resourcefulness which may contribute to health as well as growth.
Soon he meets Lassif's older and slightly less handsome brother Lachmi
(a more "pure" symbolic pair of siblings than Bachir and
Rhodra, a coming-closer to the homosexual Dioscuri). As Lachmi climbs
a palm, Michel sees "a glowing nudity beneath his floating
garment" — another coming-closer, this time to a less
obstructed view of the naked body paralleling the increasingly less
obstructed view of his own nature. Lachmi brings down a gourd
containing sap collected from the severed head of the palm. This
parallels Bachir's cutting his thumb, the sap being more clearly an
equivalent to semen — only this time Michel tastes the sap,
whereas he did not taste Bachir's blood. He does not like its taste,
and it will still be a long time before he can acknowledge the taste of
his own nature and become an integrated personality.
The children, particularly the boys, with whom Michel becomes
intimate on his ever more extensive visits to the orchards, sometimes
visit his home, where they meet "the good little boys, the quiet
little boys" whom Marceline is bringing home for games and
sweetmeats. These distinctly different breeds of boys — the former
representing primordial origins, the latter representing conventional
childhood — personify the opposite concerns of Michel and
Marceline, the former the pursuit of health, and the latter the pursuit
of sickness. Michel's boys are robust and free while Marceline's boys
are "weakly sickly, and too well behaved." Marceline is the
maternal/protective type whose subconscious desire is not so much to
aid sickness as to abet it: had Michel remained solely under her care
his sickness, like his conventionality, would have been prolonged until
his death or total conformity. He wisely sends her boys away, thus
achieving a further break away from her. Moktir, the only one of her
boys whom Michel likes because he is handsome and different from the
others, steals Marceline's scissors. This symbolic act of removing the
knife with which she would emasculate Michel endears him to Michel's
heart, and soon Moktir is his favorite.
Ashour and Moktir and the rest in due course have nothing more to
contribute to Michel's health; he has absorbed the pastoral stage of
the quest that they so admirably provided, but this is only the
beginning of the journey inward, a stage of gestation (in spite of the
birth metaphors previously used). The spring rains come and the oasis
is "bursting with the fresh rise of sap [a pleasing
contrast to the rise of tubercular blood, but nevertheless parallel to
it]; throughout it rang the wild laughter of an exultant spring
which found an echo, a double, as it were, in my own heart."
Needing a more substantial food than that offered by the children, he
turns again to Marceline, feeling that he had unjustly ignored her. He
persuades himself that his love for her will grow, but he still does
not physically desire her. He rises from their still-chaste bed one
night, goes out beneath the silent moon, and wildly protests his desire
for life in this courtyard where all is pale and deathly silent. In
order to engrave upon his memory this realization of his thirst for
something not yet recognized, he picks up a Bible (which for some
reason is convenient to hand) and reads "thou shalt stretch forth
thy hands." A more appropriate message — though the quest
metaphor remains the same — would have been "cast away thy
garments," for Michel is seeking that which lay within rather than
that which is outside of himself.
He more fully realizes this when he and Marceline arrive in
Syracuse, where he reads Theocritus and recognizes that his own
shepherds in Biskra were those very same semi-mythic beings. All of his
previous sensations and experiences now accumulate, or are re-
collected, to the consciousness that he "had only just been
born," but that he "could not as yet know
what I had been born." He abandons
his
conventionally erudite interest in temporal history and becomes an
archaeologist of the self:
The moment that he jumped into the pool, he suddenly realizes
that his beard (and moustache) is a mask — "it was like a
last piece of clothing I could not get rid of." At Amalfi he
shaves it off, and lets his hair grow freely instead of cropping it
short. Beard and hair are both phallic symbols: his actions symbolize
the castration of the false man and the re-erection of the true man.
This causes a minor trauma, the sudden fear of being "stripped of
all disguises." But though he feels thrust out naked into the
world, Marceline "loved me too much to see me as I was," and
she notices nothing new about his appearance. Although Michel
explicitly acknowledges that Marceline is a creature blinded by
convention and incapable of appreciating or even noticing the
unconventional, Michel always absorbs some of the conventional when in
contact with her. He falsely persuades himself that it is necessary to
actively hide his new self from her. His specific rationalization is
that by maintaining his old face towards her he is left free to devote
his energies to tending to his new self, though such a
"double" life increases his sense of the falseness of his
past self. Just as various lovers are "strengthened by
deceit" in Cocteau's Le Livre Blanc, so
Michel persuades himself that "my very dissimulation increased my
love" for Marceline in so far as it kept him "incessantly
occupied" with her. This is not an entirely correct self-appraisal
of the situation, for he is more occupied with the dissimulation itself
than with Marceline, and even comes to love that dissimulation for its
own sake. What has happened is that the mask no longer
controls him, but he controls the mask — and delights therein.
Michel never attains an entirely objective and complete self-
realization in the novel — although he steadily moves towards this
realization — and his failure to understand his precise
relationship to Marceline is well illustrated by Gide's description of
the event immediately preceding the first night that Michel copulates
with Marceline. On the road from Ravello to Sorrento, the driver of
Marceline's carriage viciously whips the horse; the carriage is nearly
overturned during the frantic pace; the horse falls down and Marceline
escapes unharmed; Michel goes mad with anger and brutally attacks the
driver and ties him up. Michel's ability to demonstrate his strength in
the protection of his wife leads directly to
their wedding night in Sorrento. It is obvious that the desire, though
consummated with a woman, was aroused by Michel's physical contact
with
a man. This event is the situationally homosexual wrestling match, one
of the central archetypes in homosexual ritual and experience. The
driver of the carriage — a "madman," a
"brute," a "horrible creature" — is the
Minotaur of the labyrinth, the irrational and Dionysian half that
Michel has yet to incorporate into his new self. As the driver
"spat, foamed, bled" under Michel's fists, he is the
veritable source of his own tubercular blood.
Gide may well have had in mind Plato's myth of the charioteer. Plato's
point was that the chariot (in this case carriage) which represents the
ego of the integrated personality can only move ahead if the white
horse of the Apollonian intellect (superego) can restrain the dark
horse of Dionysian passion (id). But the theme of
L'Immoraliste is the return of the repressed
rather than its re-repression, and the driver (the dark horse) is not
so much subdued by Michel (the white horse) as incorporated into Michel
as he himself becomes "brutal" during their wrestling. Had
this been a novel of sudden discovery rather than gradual recovery, the
wrestling match would have concluded with Michel mating with the driver
rather than a displacement of his erotic drive towards Marceline that
night, just as the wrestling match of primitive initiation rituals
typically ends by the victor raping the vanquished. The conventions of
heterosexual culture prevent that outcome just as effectively as
"the thought of a policeman" prevents Michel from killing the
driver. Like Walt Whitman celebrating the body electric, Michel
immediately preceding the runaway carriage had been exulting in the
"unerring rhythm of the muscles": the erotic rhythm of the
muscles begun with the wrestling does not itself err, but is wrongly
re-directed toward the socially-approved receptacle, for Michel has not
yet attained that unlicensed freedom represented by the driver.
Psychologists and sociologists are probably correct that full
mental health (and "happiness") can be achieved only through
the integration of the different aspects of one's personality rather
than by the dominance of one and the suppression of others, but
complete psychic unity becomes largely theoretical when we consider the
extreme diametrical opposites along which the personality is polarized,
and in particular it is difficult to mount an effective strategy for
their reunification.
In order to incorporate the passional aspect of his new self —
such as that represented by the insane carriage driver — Michel
reactivates his earlier intellectual mode of scholarly research. It is
no accident of circumstance that the subject that now interests him in
this research — research designed to aid in the return of the
repressed — is an ever more extreme manifestation of the force
represented by the carriage driver: Athalaric, fifteen-year-old king of
the Goths, dying at the age of eighteen after a few years of
"violent and unbridled pleasures." Virtually every male
character in the novel is introduced as a slightly freer and fuller
enlargement of the immediately preceding character, for all the male
characters are stages along the continuum reaching back to the old
Adam. Athalaric, "as a restive horse shakes off a troublesome
harness," and "unbridled," resembles the carriage
driver
whipping on his horse, and his "violent death" is an
extension of what Michel could have done to the carriage driver.
Athalaric, again like virtually every male character in the book,
represents a deeper part of Michel's new self: "in revolt against
his mother" just as Michel is subconsciously in revolt against
Marceline; "rebelling against his Latin education" just as
Michel has abandoned most of his scholarly endeavours; "flinging
aside his culture" as is Michel; "preferring the society of
the untutored Goths" just as Michel preferred his ruder boys to
Marceline's well-mannered boys. Michel "recognized in this tragic
impulse towards a wilder, more natural state, something of what
Marceline used to call my "crisis" — though we never
know quite for sure whether or not Michel will ever reach Athalaric's
end in "rotten and sodden debauchery."
Michel's journey toward primordial childhood — represented
by the myth-like Arab children of North Africa and by King Athalaric
— is now supplemented by an attempt to recapture his personal lost
childhood. He returns with Marceline to his
maternal home, La Morinière,
between
Lisieux and Pont-L'Evéque, which used to belong to his mother,
and where "I had passed several summers with her in my
childhood." La Morinière is another of the garden/womb
precincts: situated "in the greenest of green Normandy,"
"in the shadiest, wettest country I know." It has the same
"mysterious shade" of the earlier gardens, and is in effect
the oasis gone lush: "in every hollow there is water — pond
or pool or river; from every side comes the continual murmur of
streams." When he arrives at this sacred precinct, "the whole
past suddenly rose up, as though it had been lying in wait for my
approach to close over and submerge me." Marceline clearly
becomes
the mother-figure as she sits beside him on the bench where he used to
sit with his mother.
This section of the narrative, however, illustrates Michel's
first major relapse toward the conventional
self (of personal childhood) rather than the authentic self (of
primordial childhood). The garden is not a place of free growth as were
the others, but an enclosed garden similar
to
the enclosed garden set-pieces of early seventeenth-century semi-
pastoral poetry. It is "raked and weeded," the meadows are
mown twice a year, it exhibits throughout an "ordered
abundance," a "joyous acceptance of service imposed,"
a
"smiling cultivation," not the unbridled freedom of Athalaric
or the inherently unerring rhythm of the muscles, but "a rhythm
at
once human and natural, in which the teeming fecundity of nature and
the wise effort of man to regulate it were combined in such perfect
agreement that one no longer knew which was more admirable."
Michel persuades himself to adopt a philosophy of the golden
mean, that both "the savagery of these upwelling forces" and
"the intelligent effort to bank it, curb it" are worth little
individually unless they are brought into harmony. His earlier
"rebelliousness vanished" — but his succumbing to the
conventional does not last for long. His complacent acceptance of this
stagnant phase in his growth is upset by the personification of
"man's effort" to control nature, old Bocarge, the archetypal
Keeper or figure of Authority and Regulation, who bores and exasperates
Michel with his "sententious truisms," his tedious moralisms,
his tiresome interferences as the superintendent of the farm, until he
desperately feels the old need to
"recover my liberty."
The symbol of this liberty — as in all previous cases —
is a beautiful boy, Bocarge's seventeen-year-old son Charles: "a
fine strong young fellow, so exuberantly healthy, so lissome, so well-
made, that not even the frightful town clothes he had put on in our
honour could make him look ridiculous." The clothes, ostensibly
designed to conceal his nakedness, rather call attention to his rustic
youthfulness. Michel and Charles symbolically mate in a variation of
the archetypal Wrestling Match, this time combined with the sacred
pool: they both remove most of their clothing to enter a pool in order
to capture eels, an appropriate enough phallic symbol. They join hands
to grip a particularly large eel, and "in the ardour of our
sport" Michel soon finds himself addressing Charles as
"thou" and "ceased to regret [Marceline's] absence; I
felt as though she would have a little spoiled our pleasure."
Unfortunately Charles is in the same mould as his father: when
compared side by side with Bocarge, Charles does indeed represent a
greater degree of liberty, but he signifies constraint in pleasing
guise. He is even more concerned than his father that all the lands be
efficiently tilled, and his two basic symbolic actions are to
capture eels, and to break
in a colt. Under Charles's thoroughly conventional
influence, Michel sets about reforming the ways of the estate, thereby
increasing the split in his personality instead of recovering the
suppressed half:
Partly because of the sense of artificiality caused by the self-
enforced pretence of being like the others, during this period Michel
experiences the typical homosexual's sense of being an outsider. He
reflects upon this feeling of "being different," and is
unable to ascribe its cause simply to his desire for a wider range of
experience or to his having come close to death. What "separates
— distinguishes" him from others is an ambiguous
"secret" or "mystery" which he cannot yet
comprehend. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say: which Gide declines
to name. Gide's beating around the bush, using euphemisms such as
"vagabond inclination" when what he really means is
"homosexuality," is exasperating for today's reader.
It is significant that Menalque appears at this point in the narrative,
an incarnation of the outsider, even more specifically the outcast in
so far as he is the victim of a "shameful" and
"scandalous" lawsuit that makes respectable society
indignant. It is not surprising that Michel feels "attracted by a
secret influence" between himself and Menalque and therefore
rushes forward to embrace him in spite of the disapproval with which
the onlookers view this indiscretion — and upon which they leave
the room.
Menalque is a fictional portrait of Oscar Wilde, and Gide's reticence
to reveal the facts behind it raises a number of difficulties within
the narrative: the homosexual data has been deliberately suppressed and
merely hinted at. On the fictional level Menalque symbolizes the Wise
Man (albeit his wisdom is "demonic" by conventional
standards) who appears as an oracle to save Michel from stifling in the
conventional world. Having just come from Biskra, he is the voice of
the past, the voice of Michel's authentic self, and he is even a
reincarnation of Moktir in so far as he is now in possession of the
scissors that Moktir had stolen from Marceline under Michel's
comprehending eyes. His philosophy is quite simple, amounting to a
single moral imperative: THOU SHALT NOT SUPPRESS. He
attempts to lead Michel to a greater awareness of his real — his
de-suppressed — nature, and rather openly hints that Michel is
homosexual, first when he says "I know now that you are ..."
— though unfortunately the words "a pederast" are
hidden
by an ellipsis — and secondly when he says "you preferred the
company of children to that of your wife. ... Don't blush like
that." Michel spends "one night" alone with Menalque,
virtually a night of vigil, during which they significantly drink the
wine of Hafiz, poet of boy-love. We are not told what they talked about
during this "night of watching," except that Menalque's words
not only "taught me much that was new," but "suddenly
laid bare my thoughts — thoughts I had shrouded in so many
coverings that I had almost hoped to smother them." And during
that very same night while Michel is alone with Menalque, Marceline
miscarries and their child dies — a rather blatant symbolic
indication that Michel's heterosexual consummation with Marceline was
artificial and even sterile, part of his superficial self that is
destined to be destroyed by his encounter with Menalque.
The historical reality behind these fictions is that Menalque is
Oscar Wilde, that the "shameful lawsuit" was the series of
trials following the Marquess of Queensbury calling him a sodomite, and
that the night of the "vigil" took place in 1895 in Algiers,
when Wilde provided him with a fourteen-year-old Arab flute player with
whom he had sex and he came to the complete realization that he was a
"paiderast." Such historical facts can certainly enlighten us
as to the meaning of the fictional narrative — but it is not
absolutely necessary to know these facts to nevertheless understand
that Michel's encounter with Menalque indicates beyond doubt that
Michel is not a family man!
Marceline of course immediately takes a dislike to Menalque, for
he represents all that is foreign to her conventional and heterosexual
and feminine nature. As Michel comes into more intimate contact with
Menalque, it is symbolically inevitable that the illusion of his love
for Marceline, represented by the child conceived after his wrestling
with the carriage driver, should be destroyed. Disease now gets a firm
grip upon Marceline, and she produces a clot of blood: "it had
marked her, stained her. Henceforth she was a thing that had been
spoiled."
It is as if no amount of apostasy can effect a rebirth of the
unauthentic self, and the death of the
stillborn child is the definitive break of Michel's link to the world
of conventional heterosexual society. The remainder of the narrative is
an inverted retracing of his steps back to Biskra. Each stage of the
"return," i.e. the return of the repressed, is marked by the
appearance of a young man.
First, Michel and Marceline return to La Morinière in
Normandy, where he is fascinated by "the mystery about the
existence" of each peasant, and attempts to discover the part of
their lives that he believes they "conceal." The
"secrets" which he "pertinaciously tried to
discover" are significantly contained in "the rudest and
roughest among them." Pierre the young farmer who attracts him
the
most upon their arrival, is of course "fairly good looking"
and "wholly guided by instinct." The attraction is almost
certainly erotic, though again Gide inserts an annoying ellipsis:
"One night I crept furtively down to the barn to see him; he lay
sprawling in a heavy, drunken sleep. I stayed looking at him a long
time ...." Pierre is correctly described by Bocarge as a
"drunkard," a "regular waster," and
almost-but-not-
quite recognized by Michel as the symbol of his own "vagabond
impulses" (another euphemism for homosexual desires).
"Blown
hither and thither by every passing impulse," Pierre merely
disappears one day, partly because he symbolizes the Dionysian
wanderer, partly because he is dismissed by Bocarge, partly because he
has fulfilled his symbolic function of announcing the re-emergence of
Michel's wanderlust.
Bocarge's son Charles no longer interests Michel, partly because
Gide is taking too many pains to force upon the story the essentially
superficial thematic assertion that Michel continually absorbs
experiences and then passes beyond them. But the real reason why
Charles no longer interests Michel is that Charles is no longer the boy
whose clothing cannot restrict his authenticity, but the young man in
his father's image who has succumbed to the ways of the world: he is
now "an absurd individual with a bowler hat" and wearing the
"whiskers" that Michel had earlier recognized as a mask of
the self. On the path toward Paris and socialization, Michel had viewed
La Morinière as a garden where energy was controlled by order,
symbolized by Bocarge and his sons. On the return toward Biskra and
what might be termed his de-socialization, Michel views La
Morinière as a garden where order is subverted by disorder.
This theme is symbolized by the woodcutter Heurtevent and his sons.
Whereas Bocarge and Charles ruled over well-cultivated meadows,
Heurtevent and his sons rule over a wild copse of woods filled with
fallen trunks similar to the oasis in the desert. Whereas Bocarge and
Charles are of good French stock and belong to the place, Heurtevent
and his sons have mixed Spanish blood and are "foreign
looking," i.e. they are outcasts as much as is Menalque:
"rather looked askance at in the neighbourhood." The fifteen-
year-old son — "long-limbed, wiry, hard-featured" —
sings an "extraordinary song" which resembles the
mysterious
song Michel had heard the boy with the flute playing in Africa. This
ancient call to the true homosexual self is common in gay literature,
as in Richard Amory's Listen, the Loon
Sings
(1968).
The other son, twenty-year-old Bute, equally handsome in ruggedness,
is
an incarnation of Altharic: "I lapped up his mysterious secrets
with avidity. ... I questioned Bute as I had questioned the uncouth
chronicles of the Goths. Fumes of the abyss rose darkly from his
stories." Bocarge's third, and even more mysterious son, Alcide,
symbolizes the creature completely dominated by the instincts. He is a
veritable animal whom Michel can meet only after capturing him in a
snare:
We need not retrace all the steps by which Michel rejects both society
and his wife. Marceline is partly a symbol of society-at-large, and
partly the tragic figure of the woman who marries a homosexual man.
Readers tend to sympathize with her and to condemn Michel. This may be
largely because in the novel as it stands, there are no mitigating
circumstances to account for Michel's treatment of Marceline. He simply
rejects her; because Gide has omitted all homosexual facts from the
narrative, we do not see that Michel rejects her in favor of something
or someone else. Ultimately his abandonment of her is reduced to the
level of his abandonment of Charles — and there is no emphasis
upon a corollary acquisition such as the Arab boy. If a homosexual
triangle had been introduced, conventional readers would be even more
condemnatory of Michel, and perhaps this is one of the considerations
that led to its omission. Sensible readers would react as they react to
any triangle: an unfortunate situation engaging our sympathy for all
parties.
André Gide's motto was BE
SINCERE. This became his veritable philosopher's
stone, however naively it may have been pursued by the young writer
in
the early pages of the Journals. Certainly
we
are justified in taking up the challenge that Gide lays himself open to
when Michel queries in L'Immoraliste,
"what can this story be to me, if it ceases to be truthful?"
The fact is that much of L'Immoraliste is
quite simply untrue. At its core is a very large lie as a result of the
surplus suppression with which Gide has burdened Michel and his story.
The historical incidents which suggested the fictional narrative
tell a story far different from the one we hear in
L'Immoraliste. Gide, like Michel, visited
North Africa, in 1893— not in the company of a "wife"
but with Paul Laurens, one year his junior. Laurens, son of the painter
Jean-Paul Laurens, was graced with exquisitely handsome features, and
Gide played the dandy with him. They left for Africa on October 18,
1893, arrived in Tunis, then spent six days in Sousse (or Susa) while
Gide recovered from a severe cold, diagnosed as tuberculosis. While in
Sousse, on the edge of the desert, Gide had his first sexual experience
after twenty-three years of virginity — with the young Arab boy
who carried his shawl, named Athman (whose name and porter-duties
remain unchanged in the novel). Gide and Laurens subsequently took up
lodgings in Biskra, where they shared a mistress named Merièm,
though Gide remembered primarily the Arab boy, and Laurens
apparently
remained unaware of Gide's homosexual activities. Laurens sent for
Gide's mother when Gide had a haemorrhage, and when she arrived she
dismissed Merièm.
Gide and Laurens left together for Italy in April, settling for
a time in Rome, and in May Gide went on alone to Florence, where he met
Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, the former in exile after his
imprisonment. In June Laurens returned to Paris, and Gide went on to
Champel, Switzerland. In August he returned to his mother's estate in
Normandy, le chateau de la Roque, the model for La Morinière.
After learning from a physician in Geneva that his illness was not
serious, he returned to Algiers in January 1895, then to Blidah —
where he again met Wilde and Douglas, and Wilde brought him to a
brothel where he had a beautiful homosexual experience and felt
completely at ease with himself. By February 1895 he was back in
Biskra, living with Athman. He wished to bring Athman back to France
with him, but forbore to do so after a series of epistolary protests
from both his mother and his cousin Madeline Rondeaux. In other words,
Gide discovered himself far more quickly and easily than did Michel in
the novel.
In October 1895 Gide nevertheless married Madeline, partly at the
instigation of a kindly but misguided doctor who urged marriage as a
"cure" for his homosexuality. Gide was impotent with
Madeline, who for her part had been terrified of sex ever since she had
discovered that her mother had been "unfaithful," and their
marriage — which lasted more than twenty years — was never
consummated. Their honeymoon was spent in North Africa and Biskra
— where Gide slept with various Arab boys, without any of the
soul-searching implied in the novel.
We need not pursue Gide's biography any further as regards
L'Immoralist, but we already have sufficient
indication of the various deceits foisted upon the reader of the novel.
Although Gide does not conceal the physical attraction that the young
Arab boys hold out for Michel — an attraction that is sufficiently
homoerotic even without any knowledge of Gide's personal life —
the numerous ellipses that Gide inserts into the narrative in the
passages where we not unreasonably expect some description of what
Michel does when he slips out of the window at night, amount to a lack
of artistic sincerity, a stylistic evasion of the writer's
responsibility.
For all its beauty, skill, profundity, and relevance to the theme
of self-discovery in general and homosexual self-acceptance in
particular, L'Immoralist is constructed
around three lies.
To a great extent Gide knew very well that she was absolutely right,
and he betrays his readers by not allowing us to see the full view by
which we would have arrived at the same understanding. The problem,
however, may be that Gide never admitted to himself that he
loved boys as well as desired them. He
maintained the illusion that his authentic love was somehow reserved
for Madeline. For all the honesty with which Gide treated his
homosexuality in later life, he committed the most grievous of insults
to homosexuals by justifying his pederastic amours by his undying
devotion to a woman. He followed the dictates of society by assigning
love solely to the spiritual and heterosexual dimension of his life
while attempting to relegate the homosexual dimension solely to the
level of lust. He may never have realized that the intensity and
supposed sincerity of his love for Madeline was due to his overriding
need for an excuse and palliative for his homosexual behavior.
Madeline, however, recognized the truth that Michel failed to
comprehend, that he in fact loved, as well as lusted after, boys.
Gide's cult of sincerity derives from only one facet of the homosexual
personality, the revulsion towards the false self imposed upon us by
heterosexual convention, i.e. the rejection of heterosexual values and
culture. But he failed to develop the corollary facet: the affirmation
of homosexual values and culture. This conflict of rejection and
affirmation is a theme that runs throughout his novel and his life.
When Michel marries Marceline at the age of twenty-five, it is
simply at the request of his dying father. The courtship begins
lovelessly, compounded largely by ignorance, particularly Michel's lack
of self-awareness. While on their dutiful honeymoon trip, at Tunis he
discovered "dormant facilities" full of "mysterious
youth." He attributes this awakening of erotic capacities to his
wife, and is therefore delighted with Marceline, little realizing at
this stage the large homosexual component in this eroticism. With this
awakening to life, he simultaneously falls ill with tuberculosis, and
here begin the many equations of repressed homosexuality with disease,
blood, original-sin-as-original-grace, the secret instinct, the
authentic self. He attempts to hide his sexuality both from himself and
from Marceline just as he attempts to hide his bloodied handkerchiefs.
The spitting of blood significantly "grew in me like an
instinct."
My reawakened senses now remembered a whole ancient history of their
own — recomposed for themselves a vanished past. They were alive!
Alive! They had never ceased to live; they discovered that even during
those early studious years they had been living their own latent,
cunning life.
Marceline is not entirely excluded from Michel's quest, but her
role in introducing Michel to the garden is not so clearly symbolic as
that of Ariadne leading Theseus through the Labyrinth. She is more of
a companion than a guide, the useful security-figure who helps Michel
first enter the garden — and later to first enter the oasis. But
in each case the more significant revelations occur when Michel returns
alone, without her. As he recovers health and becomes able to enjoy
long walks, he rejoins Marceline and she introduces him to "a
marvellous orchard of the oasis" that is clearly a symbol of the
archetypal labyrinth: the path which runs along the river "is odd.
... sometimes it winds; sometimes it is broken; a sudden turning as you
enter it and you lose your bearings." He walks along this path of
inversion "in a sort of ecstasy" until they enter "a
breach in the wall" and come upon what amounts to the holy of
holies, the centre of the sacred precinct, "a place full of light
and shade; tranquil; it seemed beyond the touch of time." But the
centre of this labyrinth is occupied by the god Eros rather than the
Minotaur: a nearly-naked boy playing a flute, sitting upon the trunk of
a fallen palm tree, obvious symbols of phallic creativity.
The miscellaneous mass of acquired knowledge of every kind
that has overlain the mind gets peeled off in places like
a mask of paint, exposing the bare skin — the very
flesh of the authentic creature that had lain hidden
beneath it. He it was whom I thenceforward set out to
discover — that authentic creature, "the old
Adam," whom the Gospel had repudiated, whom everything
about me — books, masters, parents, and I myself had
begun by attempting to suppress. And he was already coming
into view, still in the rough and difficult of discovery,
thanks to all that overlay him, but so much the more worthy
to be discovered, so much the more valorous. Thenceforward
I despised the secondary creature, the creature who was due
to teaching, whom education had painted on the surface.
These overlays had to be shaken off. And I compared myself
to a palimpsest; I tasted the scholar's joy when he
discovers under more recent writing, and on the same paper,
a very ancient and infinitely more precious text.
Michel is glimpsing himself just as he had glimpsed Ashour's golden
nudity. When he sees "the beautiful, brown, sun-burned skins
which
some of the carelessly clad peasants at work in the fields showed
beneath their open shirts," later in Ravello he "longs to be
like them," strips himself naked in the garden, and bares his body
to the flame of the burning sun — in the same way that the
narrator of Cocteau's Le Livre Blanc
submits
to "an old lover, the sun." As his skin acquires a tan
through repetitions of this "treatment," he begins to feel
that he is "wearing a troublesome and unnecessary amount of
clothing." The real self is coming forward and displacing the
suppressive garments of convention. He is being transformed into an
older version of Ashour, skimpily-clad keeper of the archetypal garden.
As in the oasis, the water in the garden of Ravello is "not very
abundant," and like the basins hollowed out at the base of each
palm tree in the former, in the latter there is "a deeper
basin" at the foot of the rocks, which for three days Michel gazes
into as did Narcissus, and on the fourth day "plunges straight
in." His physical transformation is nearly complete, both in the
sense that his body has attained the animal health of Bachir and the
Arab boys, and in the sense that he is no longer ashamed of his true
self, and can look upon his own —
rather
than others' — naked limbs with an appreciation for his own
sensuousness and beauty.
the more pleasure I took in establishing order about me — the more
attracted I felt by the rude ethics of the Goths. With a boldness for
which I was afterwards blamed, I took the line throughout my lectures
of making the apology and eulogy of nonculture; but, at the same time,
in my private life, I was laboriously doing all I could to control
— if not to suppress, everything about me and within me that in
any way suggested it.
Marceline's health steadily declines as Michel's health
increases, partly because the conventional self (Marceline) must
decline before the advent of the authentic self (Michel), partly
because her conventional self is making a last desperate attempt to
maintain a hold over Michel's emerging new personality. Marceline's
fragility forces them to move to Paris for the winter, where Michel
continues his apostasy by tying himself to "the world"
through their expensive apartment, "thinking that by these means
I should suppress every vagabond inclination I felt — or feared I
might feel — within me." Fortunately his real self has
advanced too far for him to become completely apostate: he recognizes
that the good people of society "have never managed to be
ill" — i.e. to thereby discover their real selves — and
he is strained by being "forced to impersonate a false character,
by pretending to have the thoughts and tastes with which they credited
me." He is unable to renew his friendships with his former
acquaintances, for he realizes that "they did not really live, but
contented themselves with appearing to live." These are the
tedious people who regularly assemble in Marceline's drawing-room,
though there is no indication that she herself takes any real delight
in them, either.
I saw him suddenly fall flat, with his ankle caught in the wire. He
tried to save himself, fell down again, and began struggling like a
trapped rabbit. But I had hold of him in an instant. He was a wicked
looking youngster, with green eyes, tow-coloured hair and a ferrety
expression. He started kicking; then, as I held him so tight that he
was unable to move, he tried to bite.
This is another variation upon the Wrestling Match, its erotic meaning
not entirely obscured when he slips his stocking over his boot to show
Michel the "slight pink mark" on his ankle — perhaps an
echo also of Moktir's cat-like pink tongue.
The tragedy — and creative failure — of
L'Immoralist lay in Gide's inability to make
the homosexual theme explicit, with the result that there remain two
conflicting themes which are never artistically or humanely integrated.
On the one hand Gide is demanding the right to be free from culture in
order to reclaim the authentic self. On the other hand he is demanding
freedom from all restrictions simply for the sake of freedom itself.
The former theme has an object of liberty, a freedom
for; the latter is objectless, a freedom
from. In the former theme the movement is
toward something; in the latter the
movement
is away from something. The result is a
disjunction. Michel is forever afflicted with a "confused
consciousness" regarding the nature of his liberty. The most he
can say, in the last line of the narrative, in response to Marceline's
observation that he remains in Biskra for the sake of a boy, is
"Perhaps she's right."
CITATION: If you cite this Web page, please use the following form of citation:
Rictor Norton, "André Gide's Recovery of the Old Adam",
Gay History and Literature, updated 9 Jan 2000 <http://rictornorton.co.uk/gide.htm>.
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