p. 662: The Triple Alliance was an agreement among Germany, Italy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire whereby each would come to the aid of the others if they were attacked.
p. 664: Here’s Wagner’s “Kaisermarsch”:
p. 672: “Paris in its agony in 1871”: namely, at the end of the Franco-Prussian war, when Paris was besieged. Starving Parisians dined on rat and horse; the keepers of the Paris Zoo were reduced to eating the animals they were supposed to be feeding.
p. 683: When the goddess Demeter was mourning the loss of her daughter Persephone (kidnapped by the god of the underworld), Baubo was the old woman who got Demeter to laugh by exposing her private parts.
Nietzsche: The Case of Wagner
More from Phase III.
p. 613: Nietzsche says he’s only half-joking when he speaks of preferring Bizet’s Carmen to the music of Wagner – a kind of backhanded compliment. (Last week we saw Mann quoting Nietzsche’s assurance to a correspondent that he was completely joking. But in which of these three cases was he being most ironic or most sincere?) Here’s the overture (the best part starts at 2:05):
And here’s Carmen’s most famous aria:
Here’s another good one:
And here’s a condensed version of the whole opera, with beautiful animation:
Damn, I do love Bizet; and definitely not joking. Or even half joking.
But in fairness to the other side, here’s Wagner’s overture to Tannhäuser:
I remember how the Tannhäuser overture blew me away when I first heard it as a teenager.
To the choice between Wagner and Bizet, I’ll make the same answer that Goethe made (I think it was Goethe, but can’t find the quotation just now) to Prodicus’s demand that we choose between virtue and pleasure: to grab both and run off.
p. 641: The reference is to the myth of Theseus, wherein Athens had to send periodic tributes of young men and women to Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur. But “Off to Crete!” is also the chorus from the first-act finale of Offenbach’s comic opera La Belle Hélène, wherein Helen not-yet-of-Troy tricks her husband Menelaus into sailing off to Crete so she can be alone with Paris:
p. 644: Here’s the overture to Karl Goldmark’s Queen of Sheba, which Nietzsche so detests:
Nietzsche: Ecce Homo: “Case of Wagner”
More from Phase III.
p. 780: amor fati means “love of what is fated.” We’ll encounter this concept again.
Nietzsche: “Origin of Language”
Back to Phase I. This brief piece doesn’t answer the question it raises (though it rules out some possibilities); I include it mainly because it seems linked to the next piece. Toward the end he seems to endorse Kant’s account of natural teleology, which seems rather unlike the later Nietzsche.
Nietzsche: “Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense”
Still Phase I.
p. 43: Lessing’s son Traugott lived for only a day.
p. 46: Nietzsche’s critique of abstraction here makes this brief piece one of his most significant works.
Gide: The Immoralist, Preface, Introduction, and I.1-9
A social question? Certainly. But the moral question is primary.
One man is more interesting than mankind; it is the individual,
not the race, whom God has shaped according to His image. Each man is more valuable than all men.
– André Gide (1895)
(quoted in Klaus Mann, André Gide and the Crisis of Modern Thought, p. 132)
Nietzsche is driving me mad. Why did he exist?
I would madly have wanted to be him.
I am jealously discovering my most secret thoughts, one by one.
– André Gide (1898)
(quoted in Alan Sheridan, André Gide: A Life in the Present, p. 164)
Too bad for the lazy reader: I want a different kind of reader.
My role is to disturb people. The public always prefers to be reassured.
There are those whose job it is to do just that.
There are all too many of them.
– André Gide (1925)
(quoted in Sheridan, p. 400)
The Immoralist exhibits striking parallels with Mann’s (later) Death in Venice. In both books, an initially self-disciplined intellectual begins to explore his Dionysian side, leading him toward pederastic impulses, negligence toward the physical survival of those he cares about, and ultimately a slide into passivity; in both books, this development is presented ambiguously, as neither clearly negative nor clearly positive; and in both books the protagonist’s psychic journey is expressed geographically, as a transit from the orderly north to the decadent south.
In both, likewise, there’s a focus on illness, though here we see a difference; in Mann’s book a southward journey is a journey into disease, whereas in Gide’s book the southward journey is a journey into health (physically, anyway) – at least for the protagonist, though what makes him healthier turns out to make his wife sicker.
Gide’s own geographical adventurousness definitely had a southward bias; he travelled not only to North Africa but to the Congo as well; but when Klaus Mann told Gide of his plans to join an Arctic expedition, Gide was baffled that anyone would want to go there. (Klaus Mann, p. 14) It wasn’t the desolation of the Arctic that repelled him, since he admitted a “strange love of the non-human and the arid” that made him “prefer the desert to the oasis.” (quoted in Sheridan, p. 26)
One is reminded of King Faisal’s line in Lawrence of Arabia: “The English have a great hunger for desolate places. ... I think you are another of these desert-loving English. ... No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees.”
I haven’t been able to discover whether Mann had read Gide when he wrote Death in Venice. (He certainly read him later, and his son Klaus, as you can see by my citations, wrote a book about him.)
Gide shared Mann’s passion for Nietzsche, and shared with both men a passion for Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Dostoyevsky. They differed on Wagner, however; Gide had a “horror of Wagner’s work and personality” (quoted in Klaus Mann, p. 41), and preferred Chopin – whose music he had incidentally been forbidden, as a child, to listen to, on the grounds that Chopin’s music was “morbid.”
Both authors were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature – Mann in 1929, and Gide in 1947.
Over the course of Gide’s career, his style moved from romanticism to neoclassicism – like Goethe (or Adrian Leverkühn).
Though you wouldn’t guess it from The Immoralist (or Strait Is the Gate either), Gide was the only one of our authors to regard himself as a Christian, albeit of a heterodox variety. (Gide’s version of Christianity was something like the pre-Pauline religion of Jesus as Nietzsche describes it in The Antichrist.)
Like Death in Venice for Mann, The Immoralist is based on personal experience. Michel is based on Gide, and Marceline on Gide’s wife Madeleine Rondeaux; here she is:
(For some reason, all the important characters in The Immoralist have names beginning with M: Michel, Marceline, Ménalque, Moktir ....)
Gide did have a family estate in Normandy; he and Madeleine did go to Algeria for their honeymoon (though he’d also been there before, without her); they did travel through Italy also; Gide did pursue dalliances with Arab and Berber boys on his North African trips; and the periods of illness that beset Michel and later Marceline are based on real (though less serious) bouts of illness experienced by Gide and later Madeleine. On the other hand, the respective fates of Michel and Marceline do not resemble what happened to their originals.
Typically for the era, the moral outrage against Gide focused mainly on the fact that his sexual partners were male, and scarcely at all on the fact that they were underage. Also typical for the era is the association of the Muslim world with homosexuality, and sexual license generally, and of the Western world with puritanism – rather the opposite of today’s stereotype. While Gide was (later on, anyway) a firm critic of colonialism (see his Travels in the Congo), more recent readers have sometimes seen his North African sex tourism as one more form of colonialist exploitation.
For example, Sven Lindqvist writes:
André Gide went to North Africa for the first time in 1893. Twelve years earlier, the French had occupied Tunisia. Gide travels in Tunisia without mentioning the occupation. The conquest of Algerian Sahara is at its height. Gide does not mention it. In the occupied oases, military commanders rule like absolute monarchs and the Arab population is kept down with an iron hand. Gide sees nothing. ...
For ... Gide, North Africa is primarily an erotic experience. ... There is no feeling in Gide that the conquest is an outrage. That doesn’t come until the Congo books in the late 1920s. By then Joseph Conrad had taught him to see it.
Conrad and Gide were both in Africa in the early 1890s. Conrad was writing Heart of Darkness while Gide was writing The Immoralist. They were contemporaries – but it took Gide another thirty years to acquire Conrad’s insight.
In The Immoralist, the moral conflict is enacted entirely between the husband Michel and the wife Marceline. The novel trembles with her unspoken reproaches and with his pride and shame when he discovers himself. Gide sees no other conflict. ...
[T]he wrong that Michel does is naturally not that he wants to be healthy or strong or free. Nor is it that he is homosexual .... What is shameful isn’t there – but in the occupation, which makes love into prostitution and shrouds its crime in myth. ...
[T]he ‘beautiful dancer’ Michel lives with ... is a prettified circumlocution. [She and her] little brother Ali ... are prostitutes. ...
Maupassant .... was one of the first in Europe to spread the rumour about the wonderful wantonness of the Ouled Nail girls: they save up their dowries by living life’s happy days in the brothels. ... Similar legends are spread about the prostitutes in Bangkok, for the same reason. Customers are given a moral alibi. The legends give an illusion of mutual desire to the exploitation of someone else’s poverty. ...
Michel’s liberation presumes children ‘far too young, don’t you think, to know anything about love?’ It presumes child prostitution. That is the fundamental moral problem which is never put into words in The Immoralist. ...
When [Meriem’s] income is insufficient to support the family ... little brother Ali will have to let foreign gentlemen fuck his backside for money. That’s what it is about. The rest is romanticism.
Later in life, Gide used to carry toys in his pockets in the hope of, um, enticing, youngsters that he met. All six of the figures we’re studying in this course – Nietzsche, Wagner, Mann, Gide, Lawrence, Rand – had, shall we say, some severe personal failings, but Gide’s might be the worst. Which raises the question: what attitude should we take toward great thinkers and artists who were not-so-great human beings? Particularly when their failings actually seem to be celebrated in their work, in a way that makes any attempted separation of work from life still more difficult? (And particularly when all these thinkers saw art and life as continuous anyway?) In a way this is the same problem that Nietzsche faced with Wagner, and wrestled with all his life; but we perhaps face it, in varying degrees, with all six.
Obviously I myself find worthwhile – indeed enormous – philosophical and aesthetic value in engaging with these works, or I wouldn’t be teaching them. But that engagement isn’t without discomfort; nor, I think, should it be. The pathway between the extremes of repudiating the good in these works and glossing over the bad is ... well, strait. Strait (but not necessarily straight), like this San Diego hike:
“My role is to disturb people,” said Gide, Yeah, well, mission accomplished, dude.
The blurb on the back of the Penguin edition of The Immoralist (not assigned this time around – see below) describes The Immoralist as a “frank defense of homosexuality,” and makes it sound like a cheerful tale of gay liberation. (The reference to Michel’s discovery that “freedom can be a burden” rather understates the costs that his actions incur, as well as making it sound as though he alone bore the costs of his actions.) Gide did write a defense of homosexuality, the dialogue Corydon; but it’s debatable whether The Immoralist is a “defense” of anything (Michel’s personal odyssey is surely not supposed to be unambiguously positive, any more than it’s supposed to be unambiguously negative), and it seems doubtful that homosexuality is its main focus. Reason: The Immoralist represents Gide’s attempt to work through something he’s conflicted about. But (unlike Mann) he was never conflicted about his homosexual urges per se; he consistently celebrated them. Hence what is truly problematic about Michel’s odyssey is broader than homosexuality. Still, it doesn’t seem to be the involvement of underage sex partners from subject populations that weighs on his mind, so much as the impact of his actions on his wife (as Lindqvist notes above).
The Immoralist is one of the few novels we’re reading not to have been adapted for the screen (though it was adapted for the stage in 1954, with the all-star cast of Louis Jourdan, James Dean, and Geraldine Page – a pity that wasn’t filmed!). So no movie trailer to show for this one. The closest thing we have to an Immoralist movie is The Sheltering Sky, based on Paul Bowles’s book:
I.2: Biskra is an Algerian town that Gide visited repeatedly:
I.4: Michel’s pleasure at being stolen from will recur, when he begins encouraging poachers on his own estate..
I.6: Here Michel’s attitude toward history bears comparison with that of Dr. Cornelius, in “Disorder and Early Sorrow.” Like Cornelius, Michel identifies the “fixity” and “static quality” of the past with the “immobility of death,” but he reverses the evaluation; his increased “feeling for the present” makes him unable to get the enjoyment out of historical studies that he used to get.
Ravello, “nearer to the sky than to the sea,” looks like this:
I.8: The road along the Amalfi Coast from Ravello to Sorrento is indeed one of the most beautiful sights on earth:
The carriage accident with Marceline/Madeleine did occur – but in Paris, Gide was not present to perform any heroics, and Madeleine was much more seriously injured than Marceline.
“That night, for the first time, I possessed Marceline”: In real life, Gide’s marriage, by his own report, was never consummated. He did have occasional sexual relationships with women; one of them he even had a daughter by:
André Gide and his daughter Catherine
Another one was, as his biographer charmingly puts it, “an Arab girl whom Gide had passed on to [his friend Pierre] Louÿs, after sharing her with his friend Paul Laurens for some weeks.” (Sheridan, pp. xii-xiii) Louÿs’s relationship with her subsequently became the basis for the compositions Chansons de Bilitis, with lyrics by Louÿs (who passed them off as translations from an ancient Cypriot poetess) and music by Debussy:
His wife just wasn’t one of them. Gide would later note that he was “not incapable of making love with a woman, providing nothing intellectual or emotional came into it”; it was “precisely the spiritual power” of his love for Madeleine that “inhibited any carnal desire.” (quoted in Sheridan, p. 525)
I.9: Theodoric was the Ostrogothic king of Italy in the 5th-6th centuries CE. (He passed into northern European legend as Dietrich of Bern [the Germanic version] or Thidrek of Bern [the Norse version]; the Swedish Thidrekssaga contains a version of the Sigurd/Siegfried story different from either the Völsungasaga or the Nibelungenlied. “Bern” is Verona, “where we lay our scene.”) Theodoric was succeeded by his grandson Athalaric, but as Athalaric was underage, his mother (and Theodoric’s daughter) Amalasontha, a woman famed for her wide learning, ruled as regent. Athalaric led a dissolute life and died as a teenager, leaving Amalasontha to rule as queen until she was overthrown and murdered by her cousin. Cassiodorus was the court scholar whose writings are our main source of information about Amalasontha and Athalaric.
The Collège de France is a free, open-to-the-public, non-degree-granting institution in Paris that specialises in lectures by the world’s most prominent francophone scholars. Foucault’s series of lectures for the Collège is especially famous. Gide never taught there, although his uncle did.
I’m so glad it says “Collège de France” at the bottom, because otherwise there’s nothing in the picture that would give me any clue where this is.
Nietzsche: Human, All-Too-Human I
Nietzsche starts off Phase II with a trio of books. Human, All-Too-Human is sometimes used as the title for just the first book, and sometimes used as the omnibus title for all three. Assorted (or Mixed) Opinions and Maxims and The Wanderer and His Shadow are the separate titles of the two sequels.
BW, p. 148: Nietzsche refers to the passage in Thucydides where the Athenians punish the island of Melos, in 415 BCE, for maintaining a policy of neutrality between Athens and Sparta rather than taking Athens’ side. The Athenian representatives who come demanding the Melians’ allegiance explicitly renounce appeals to morality in favour of appeals to power:
For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences – either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us ... since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Upon meeting continued refusal, the Athenians “put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves .....”
HAH, pp. 171-173 (and note that although the customary way of citing Nietzsche is by section number, I’m citing by page number just to make it easier for you to find the assigned portions): Indeed the idea of replacing the state with private contractors was in the air in Nietzsche’s day; versions of this idea were being put forward both by “capitalists” (e.g., Augustin Thierry, Gustave de Molinari, Paul-Émile de Puydt) and by “socialists” (e.g., Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Anselme Bellegarrigue, Lysander Spooner). Both sides spoke of the state’s being dissolved or absorbed into the economy. But it’s not clear which of these thinkers Nietzsche would have known much about. (He would have heard of Thierry and Proudhon, but I don’t know that he would have read them; and he might well not even have heard of any of the others.)
Magee: “Wagner’s Anti-semitism”
It’s common to interpret the dwarf characters in Wagner’s Ring (Alberich, Mime, and Hagen) as antisemitic caricatures: in appearance Wagner’s dwarves are short, dark, and ugly (by contrast with the tall blond Siegfried); in character they are whining, treacherous, lustful, and greedy; and in profession they are acquirers of and workers with gold and precious metals. All of the above are common features of antisemitic stereotypes of Jews. (Wagner does actually refer to Mime at one point as a “Jewish dwarf,” but might have been referring to the performer rather than the character.)
Alberich oppressing his fellow dwarves
But while Magee acknowledges that Wagner was personally antisemitic, he denies that antisemitism makes it into his operas.
Magee argues (p. 379) that since antisemitic stereotypes are false, the fact that a character fits them is no proof that that character is intentionally coded as Jewish. That seems right as far as it goes; but when the author himself, Wagner, is known to be an enthusiastic proponent of those same antisemitic stereotypes, the case for seeing the characterisation as deliberately antisemitic seems rather stronger. In particular, Wagner uses much of the same language (such as “vermin”) to describe both Jews and his dwarves.
Max Schlosser as Mime the dwarf at the first performance of Siegfried
It’s also noteworthy that in the original Sigurd/Siegfried legend, Fafnir/Fafner begins life as a dwarf and then later magically transforms himself into a dragon. Wagner changes the story so that Fafner starts out as a giant rather than a dwarf. Might he have been motivated by the feeling that a dragon is too cool an adversary to be a transformed Jew?
Another of Magee’s arguments (p. 375) is that Wagner is known to have held that Jews are not a fit subject for the stage, so he wouldn’t have put them in his operas. This seems an odd way of defending Wagner’s operas against the charge of antisemitism: don’t worry, the operas aren’t antisemitic, because he deliberately excluded Jews from them! But in any case, the very characteristics that purportedly render Jewish characters unfit for the stage are the characteristics displayed by Wagner’s dwarves, and yet he had no problem putting them on the stage; so Magee’s argument seems rather self-defeating here.
Magee also points to the fact that Nietzsche, while attacking Wagner for his personally antisemitic opinions, never mentions any presence of antisemitism in the operas themselves. (p. 374) But I think there is one piece of evidence that suggests, albeit somewhat tenuously, that Nietzsche might have regarded the presentation of the dwarves as antisemitic. In Birth of Tragedy § 24 (Basic Writings, p. 142), Nietzsche looks forward to the day when the German spirit will arise to “slay dragons, destroy vicious dwarfs, [and] wake Brünnhilde” – all actions taken by Siegfried in the Ring. In his section on the book in Ecce Homo (p. 727), Nietzsche says that his early line about “vicious dwarfs” was a reference to Christian priests. Kaufmann in his footnote is understandably baffled, since a reference to priests is far from obvious in the original passage. But suppose that Nietzsche took Wagner’s dwarves to be antisemitic caricatures. Then it might look as though, in calling for the German spirit to wage war on these dwarves, the young Nietzsche had been advocating some sort of antisemitic campaign. This might have given the older Nietzsche an incentive to deflect such an interpretation by claiming, after the fact, that the remark was really anti-Christian rather than anti-Jewish.
It’s been suggested that the dwarves in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth writings are also intended, in part, to symbolise Jews. The whole plot of The Hobbit is about how the dwarves are exiles from their homeland and are trying to reclaim it; and although Tolkien gave his dwarves Norse names (drawn straight from the Elder Edda) and based their alphabet on Norse runes, their private dwarvish language is based in both sound and structure, as Tolkien admitted, on semitic languages, Hebrew in particular. If Tolkien’s dwarves come across more positively than Wagner’s, that might have something to do with the fact that Tolkien hated antisemitism.
Gide: Immoralist II.1-III.1
II.1: Michel’s family estate of La Morinière is based on Gide’s real-life estate of LaRoque-Baignard, in Normandy:
II.2: The character of Ménalque (our translation calls him “Menalcas”) is based in part on Gide’s friend and mentor Oscar Wilde, with whom he’d prowled the back streets of Algiers in 1895. The “ridiculous, shameful, scandalous trial” is a reference to the trial that led to Wilde’s being imprisoned for two years for the crime of homosexuality. Upon his release, Wilde left England, never to return.
Gide’s Immoralist can be seen in many ways as inspired by Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (which in turn drew inspiration both from Jekyll and Hyde and from the Faust legend).
The reference to Ménalque’s un-Wildean “enormous, drooping mustache” confirms that the other model for the character is Nietzsche himself – although Nietzsche’s mustache did not achieve its acme of droopiness until the 1890s, after his mental collapse, when his sister was in charge of his grooming.
Gide gives his character the name “Ménalque,” which is the French version of “Menalcas,” the homoerotic shepherd of Vergil’s Eclogues. (Gide would later derive “Corydon” from the same source.) The Dover translation renders the name as “Menalcas,” which makes the classical allusion as clear in the English text as it was in the French, but at the cost of introducing a non-French-sounding name. It’s not the choice I would have made, but translation is aways a balancing act.
Ménalque (again apparently, though less obviously, representing Wilde and/or Nietzsche) had also featured in an earlier work, Fruits of the Earth (literally Terrestrial Nourishment or Earthly Food), a book-length prose poem that either was or wasn’t influenced by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Fruits of the Earth records Gide’s joyful embrace of sexuality and this-earthly delights amid the North African landscape; in effect it represents Michel’s position at the end of Part I of The Immoralist, without the darker explorations of Parts II and III. Gide would often follow up one book with another that appeared to subvert the moral of the previous book, yet without repudiating the previous book; Strait is the Gate, Gide’s next book, will subvert The Immoralist in much the same way that The Immoralist subverts Fruits of the Earth.
The last time I taught this course I assigned the Penguin translation, only to discover to my dismay that the important line “vous ne pouvez demander à chacun de différer de tous les autres,” spoken first by Marceline to Michel, and later by Michel to Ménalque, was rendered “you can’t expect them all to be different,” whereas it’s usually rendered in other translations as something like “you can’t expect each one to differ from all the others” (our Dover translation has “you can’t expect each of them to be different from all the rest” – near enough), which is more faithful to the original French, and also does a better job of trying to make individuality sound like an unreasonably demanding task (which is the point of the line). My annoyance at the Penguin translation on this point is the main reason I chose the Dover translation this time around. Hey, I wrote a paper in college comparing Gide’s Immoralist and Lawrence’s Women in Love, for which I had to read Gide in the original French, and I wrote specifically about that line; Penguin’s not going to get a crappy point-missing translaton of that line past me!
Relatedly, as a child at school Gide would come home sobbing that he was “not like the others.”
The Dover edition of The Immoralist has the same translator as our (likewise Dover) edition of Death in Venice, Stanley Appelbaum, about whom I can discover nothing except that in addition to these works in French and German, he is also credited with Dover translations from Spanish and Italian. I begin to wonder whether this versatile gentleman is a real person or just a house name like “Kenneth Robeson.” In any case, he or she or they seem to be excellent translators. (On the other hand, my copy of the Dover edition has the word “Immoralist” spelled “Immoarlist” on the book’s spine. Dover, keep your translators but fire your editors.)
II.3: Michel complains of Charles’s “absurdly pompous figure in a bowler hat”; yet back in II.1, Charles’s “dreadful city clothes ... didn’t make him look too ridiculous.” The implication is that it is Michel, not Charles, who has changed.
III.1 : This is Engadine, Switzerland, where Michel initially takes Marceline:
Although the doctor has recommended for Marceline “the climate of the high Alps,” and she does indeed begin to get better in Switzerland, Michel nevertheless drags her back through Italy to North Africa – which might seem to make sense, since that’s where he was healed before, but Michel’s and Marceline’s temperaments are opposite enough that what is curing for him is debilitating for her.
Michel writes: “Oh, those honest Swiss. Where do their good manners get them? ... They have no crime, no history, no literature, no art.” These lines are reminiscent of Orson Welles’s speech in The Third Man:
(I’ve been on that Viennese ferris wheel, by the way! Also: on the origins of this speech, see here.) Thomas Mann, by contrast, writes: “It was [Nietzsche’s mentor] Jacob Burckhardt who said of Voltaire: ‘In him rationalism becomes poetic, even mythic.’ I should like to see the German writer who could produce such a sentence! Switzerland is the country in which the most gloriously un-German things are said in German. That is why I love it.” (Story of a Novel, p. 85)
Welles mentions Italy under the Borgias. Nietzsche occasionally expressed an admiration for Cesare Borgia; and here’s Welles again, this time playing Borgia, in The Prince of Foxes:
In the words of Ogden Nash:
What would you do if you were up a dark alley with Cesare Borgia
and he was coming torgia?
Taormina, “perched high on a mountainside”:
The Penguin edition offered no translation of Michel’s conversation with the Sicilian boy; another mark in favour of the Dover.
Touggourt is a city in the Sahara, 140 miles south of Biskra, and 350 miles from the coast:
When Marceline complains that Michel’s doctrine “leaves out the weak,” we’re initially invited to think of Marceline as one of the weak and Michel as one of the strong; but given the way Michel ends up, feeling no more reason to live, it can be argued that he too is one of the weak, and that his failure is the result of trying to live a philosophy intended for a stronger nature than his own (which, remember, is essentially what Mann claimed abouit Nietzsche in his Library of Congress lectures). Certainly one feature of his development – his trying to lower himself socially, to erase the class distinctions between himself and the poachers on his land – might look rather un-Nietzschean.
The Immoralist ends with the main character reciting to his friends an account of his choices and their cost, just as Doktor Faustus does – though Michel’s final slide into passivity is not as extreme as Adrian’s.
In real life, Gide did not slide into passivity; quite the contrary. Nor did he end up causing the death of his wife; instead she lived on, through another 43 years of increasingly miserable marriage. Gide’s writings shocked and embarrassed the conventional and conservative Madeleine (she eventually refused to read him any more); his homosexual flings left her feeling hurt and rejected; and his public acknowledgment of those flings made her feel publicly humiliated. Gide recognised that his treatment of his wife was symbolically, albeit not literally, like Michel’s; over three decades after The Immoralist, Gide would write:
Each time I see her again I realize anew that she is the only being I have ever really loved; in fact, it seems to me that I love her now more passionately and deeply than I ever did before. That is why every step forward causes me so much pain: it widens the gap between us. I cannot think without being cruel to her. (quoted in Klaus Mann, p. 173)
And after her death, he would write: “how cruelly I must have hurt the woman for whom I was ready to give my life .... In fact, I could only develop, as an individual, by hurting her.” (quoted in Sheridan, p. 525)
Gide: Strait Is the Gate
The French title La porte étroite would be more accurately rendered as “The Narrow Gate” or “The Strait Gate” – the latter a reference to the Biblical line “strive to enter in at the strait gate.” (Luke 13:24 – in the KJV). The standard English translation, “Strait Is the Gate,” draws instead from a different Biblical passage, “strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life.” (Matthew 7:14) Though Gide actually quotes both versions. “Strait” in both cases meaning, of course, NOT “straight,” but rather narrow, constrained, confining, as in “strait-laced,” “dire straits,” “straitened circumstances,” “Strait of Gibraltar,” “straitjacket,” “strait and narrow,” etc. (And if you’ve been spelling any of those with “straight” rather than “strait,” then repent! The two words don’t even have the same etymologies – more like opposite etymologies, with “straight” deriving from a word meaning “to stretch,” and “strait” coming from a word meaning “to compress.” Although admittedly the word “straight” has latterly come to be flavoured with the meaning of “strait,” a development facilitated by contrast with the multiple meanings of “crooked.”)
The Strait of Gibraltar between Europe and North Africa: – see? narrow!
No movie version of this one either. So no trailer. It would be interesting to see a double feature of The Immoralist and Strait Is the Gate with the same actors playing the main couple.
Just as The Immoralist subverts the cheerful hedonism of his earlier Fruits of the Earth, so Gide’s next novel, Strait Is the Gate, offers a kind of subversion of The Immoralist. The two protagonists, Jérôme and Alissa, are recognisably Gide and Madeleine again; but their situation is inverted. Alissa desperately loves Jérôme (as he too loves her); but she renounces him, initially because she discovers that her sister is also in love with him, and so she seeks to sacrifice herself for her sister (despite the fact that Jérôme has no interest in the sister). Later on, when the sister appears to find happiness with someone else (though in fact she is merely sacrificing herself for Alissa and Jérôme), Alissa nevertheless continues to renounce Jérôme, this time because she is convinced that Jérôme’s love for her is interfering with his love for God. Alissa slowly, sadly wastes away and finally dies, leaving Jérôme desolated. In short, where The Immoralist explores the seductive/destructive power of immoralist self-indulgence, so Strait Is the Gate explores the seductive/destructive power of pious self-denial.
Both Michel and Alissa embark on spiritual journeys where their romantic partners cannot follow; Jérôme initially finds Alissa’s devotion to virtue admirable, and seeks to emulate her nobility: “I strove after more virtue only for her sake. ... Any path, provided it climbed upwards, would lead me to her .... I did not suspect ... that it would be ... a height where there was room for only one.” (Hence the “strait gate” of the title.) It’s as though Gide were saying: you think the moral of Michel’s story is the alienating power of selfishness? okay, then I’ll show you what the alienating power of selflessness looks like!
Gide in his journals called Strait is the Gate “the twin of The Immoralist,” saying that “the two subjects grew up together in my mind, the excess of the one finding a secret permission in the excess of the other, so that the two together form an equipoise.” He seems to have seen them as something close to two halves of a single novel.
Geographically, Strait Is the Gate is set primarily in the northern France of Gide’s unhappy childhood (specifically Normandy), which he associated with piety and repression, by contrast with the North Africa of his liberated adulthood, which Gide associated with freedom from moral restraint.
Not to rag on Penguin again (they’re usually quite good), but the blurb on the back of the Penguin edition of Strait Is the Gate reads: “A devastating exporation of aestheticism taken to extremes.” That might describe The Immoralist, but I have a hard time seeing how it describes Strait Is the Gate. I suspect the blurb writer has confused “aestheticism” with “asceticism.” Oh well, po-tay-to, to-mah-to.
Oh, here’s a sample of Gide’s handwriting. Having started with Mann, Nietzsche, and Wagner, I might as well continue. He seems to have some ... right-wing leanings:
Ch. 1: The Bucolin residence at Fongueusemare is closely based on Gide’s own residence in neighbouring Cuverville (see the cozy cottage below); he may have transferred the location to Fongueusemare because the name suggests something like “fungus-infested marsh” – the opposite of his beloved dry hot desert:
Ch. 2: Our translator, Dorothy Bussy, makes the odd choice not to translate any of the poetry quoted in this book. This seems to me to be a dereliction of duty on a translator’s part. Well, let us remedy.
“Bientôt nous plongerons dans les froides ténèbres; / Adieu, vive clarté de nos étés trop courts!” is from Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and means “Soon we shall plunge into the cold darkness; / Farewell, vivid brightness of our too-short summers!” The poem gets still gloomier from there. You can read the whole thing, in both French and English, here.
Ch. 3: The line “j’aime, que dis-je aimer – j’idolâtre Juliette” is adapted from Racine’s Britannicus (where the line is about a Junie, not a Juliette; there is a play on the names of successive months here): “I love, why do I say [merely] love? – I idolise [adore, worship] Juliette!”
The line “Le meilleur moment des amours n’est pas quand on a dit: je t’aime” is from René-François Sully Prudhomme, and means “The finest moment of love is not when one has said: I love you.” Read the full poem in French here and a rather free English translation here.
The line from Dante, “Amor che nella mente mi ragiona,” means “Love, who speaks/discourses/reasons in my mind.” Original Italian plus a translation here.
Ch. 5: The lines “Quel charme vainqueur du monde / vers Dieu m’élève aujourd’hui? / Malheureux l’homme qui fonde / sur les hommes son appui,” quoted as being from Corneille, are actually from Racine, and mean: “What world-conquering charm lifts me up toward God today? Unhappy the man who bases his support on men.” Whole poem, in both French and English. The subsequent lengthy section a few pages later, beginning “De la sagesse immortelle,” is from the same poem and can be read, in both French and English, via the same link. It’s worth a look, as it ties in thematically with the storyline rather tightly.
A little later, e non altro is, as the context implies, Italian for “and nothing else.”
Ch. 7: The lines from Shakespeare beginning “That strain again – it had a dying fall” are from Twelfth Night; read them in context here.
Hic incipit amor Dei is Latin for “Here begins the love of God.”
Nietzschean Tune of the Week
This is probably about as far as one can get from what people ordinarily expect of Nietzsche’s music:
The Immoralist exhibits striking parallels with Mann’s (later) Death in Venice. In both books, an initially self-disciplined intellectual begins to explore his Dionysian side, leading him toward pederastic impulses, negligence toward the physical survival of those he cares about, and ultimately a slide into passivity; in both books, this development is presented ambiguously, as neither clearly negative nor clearly positive; and in both books the protagonist’s psychic journey is expressed geographically, as a transit from the orderly north to the decadent south.
André Gide went to North Africa for the first time in 1893. Twelve years earlier, the French had occupied Tunisia. Gide travels in Tunisia without mentioning the occupation. The conquest of Algerian Sahara is at its height. Gide does not mention it. In the occupied oases, military commanders rule like absolute monarchs and the Arab population is kept down with an iron hand. Gide sees nothing. ...
