Andre Gide

André Gide in 1893

Template:French literature (small)

André Paul Guillaume Gide (November 22, 1869 – February 19, 1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career spanned from the symbolist movement to the advent of anticolonialism in-between World WarI and II.

Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritan constraints, and gravitates around his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, even to the point of owning one's sexual nature, without at the same time betraying one's values. His political activity is informed by the same ethos, as suggested by his repudiation of communism after his 1936 voyage to the Soviet Union.

Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation between the two sides of his personality, split apart by a straight-laced education and a narrow social moralism - as he perceives himself: the austere and refined Protestant, and the divinely inspired - and no longer blushing - pederast.

Early life

Gide was born in Paris, France on November 22, 1869. His father was a Paris University professor of law who died in 1880. His uncle was the political economist Charles Gide.

Gide was brought up in isolated conditions in Normandy, becoming a prolific writer at an early age, publishing his first novel in 1891, The Notebooks of Andre Walter (French: Les Cahiers d'André Walter).

In 1893 and 1894 Gide traveled in northern Africa. He befriended Oscar Wilde in Algiers and there clearly recognized his own pederasty.

The middle years

In 1895, after his mother's death, he married his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux but the marriage remained unconsummated. In 1896 he was mayor of La Roque-Baignard, a commune in Normandy.

In 1908 Gide helped found the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue française (The New French Review). In 1916 Marc Allégret, 16, became his lover. He was the son of Elie Allegret, best man at Gide's wedding. Of Allegret's five children, Andre Gide adopted Marc. The two eloped to London, in retribution for which his wife burned all his correspondence, "the best part of myself," as he was later to comment. In 1918 he met Dorothy Bussy, who was his friend for over thirty years and who would translate all his works into English.

In the 1920s Gide became an inspiration for writers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1923 he published a book on Fyodor Dostoevsky; however, when he defended homosexuality in the public edition of Corydon (1924) he received widespread condemnation. He later considered this his most important work.

In 1923 he conceived a daughter named Catherine with another woman, Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, daughter of his friend, the Belgian neo-impressionist painter Théo van Rysselberghe. His wife Madeleine died in 1938. Later he used the background of his unconsummated marriage in his novel Et Nunc Manet in Te. The novel included passages about ponies and bananas. These works were unconventional at the time, and became instant classics (1951).

After 1925 he began to demand more humane conditions for criminals. In 1926 he published an autobiography, If it die (French: Si le grain ne meurt).

Africa

From July 1926 to May 1927, he travelled through the French Equatorial Africa colony with his lover Marc Allégret. He went successively in Middle Congo (now the Republic of the Congo), in Oubangui-Chari (now the Central African Republic), briefly in Chad and then in Cameroun before returning to France. He related his peregrinations in a journal called Travels in the Congo (French: Voyage au Congo) and Return from Chad (French: Retour du Tchad). In this published journal, he criticized the behavior of French business interests in the Congo, inspiring reform. In particular, he strongly criticized the Large Concessions regime (French: régime des Grandes Concessions), i.e. a regime according to which part of the colony was conceded to French companies so that these companies could exploit all the area's natural resources, in particular rubber. He related for instance how natives were forced to leave their village during several weeks to collect rubber in the forest, and went as far as comparing their exploitation to slavery.

Russia

During the 1930s he briefly became a communist, but became disillusioned after his visit to Soviet Union. His criticism of communism caused him to lose many of his socialist friends, especially after the publication of Retour de L'U.R.S.S. in 1936. He was also a contributor to book, The God That Failed, which was composed of a collection of essays by former socialists and communists.

The 1940s

Gide left France for Africa in 1942, living in Tunis until the end of World War II. In 1947, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Gide died on February 19, 1951.

The Counterfeiters

The Counterfeiters

Author	André Gide
Original title	Les faux-monnayeurs
Country	France
Language	French
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Nouvelle Revue Française
Released	1925
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	NA

The Counterfeiters (Les faux-monnayeurs) is a 1925 novel first published in Nouvelle Revue Française. It is written in a slice-of-life form with many characters and crisscrossing plotlines. Its main theme is that of the original and the copy, and what differentiates them — both in the external plot of the counterfeit gold coins and in the portrayal of the characters' feelings and their relationships.

The Counterfeiters is a novel-within-a-novel, with Edouard (the alter ego of Gide) intending to write a book of the same title. Other stylistic devices are also used, such as an omniscient narrator that sometimes addresses the reader directly, weighs in on the characters' motivations or discusses alternate realities. Therefore, the book has been seen as a precursor of the nouveau roman.

The novel features a considerable number of bisexual or gay male characters — the adolescent Olivier and at least to a certain unacknowledged degree his friend Bernard, in all likeliness their schoolfellows Gontran and Philippe, and finally the adult writers Comte de Passavant (who represents an evil and corrupting force) and the benevolent Edouard. An important part of the plot is its depiction of various possibilities of positive and negative homoerotic or homosexual relationships.

Initially received coldly on its appearance, perhaps because of its homosexual themes and its unusual composition, The Counterfeiters has gained reputation in the intervening years and is now generally considered one of Gide's most important novels and counted among the Western Canon of literature.

The making of the novel, with letters, newspaper clippings and other supporting material, was documented by Gide in his 1926 Journal of The Counterfeiters.

Plot summary

The plot revolves around Bernard — a schoolfriend of Olivier's who is preparing for his Baccalauréat exam. He discovers that he is a bastard. taking this as a welcome pretext, he runs away from home. After a night in Olivier's bed (where they discuss sexuality with Olivier recounting a recent visit to a prostitute and how he did not find the experience very enjoyable), Bernard is finally, after having stolen Edouard's suitcase and the ensuing complications, made Edouard's secretary. Olivier is jeaulous and ends up in the hands of the cynical and downright diabolical Comte de Passavant, who travels with him to the Mediterranean.

Eventually, Bernard and Edouard decide they do not fit as well together as anticipated, and Bernard leaves to take a job at a newspaper, and at the end decided to return to his father's. Olivier is now made Edouard's secretary, and after an eventful evening on which he embarrasses himself grossly, Olivier ends up in bed together with Edouard, finally fulfilling the attraction they have felt for each other all along but were unable to express.

Other plotlines are woven around these elements, such as Olivier's younger brother Georges and his involvement with a ring of counterfeiters, or his older brother Vincent and his relationship with Laura, a married woman, with whom he has a child. Perhaps the most suspenseful scene in the book revolved around Boris, another illegitimate child, grandson of La Pérouse, who is led to commit suicide in front of the assembled class by Ghéridanisol, another of Passavant's cohorts.

The characters and their relationships

As the novel unfolds, many different characters and plotlines intertwine. This social network graph shows how the most important characters in The Counterfeiters are related to each other:

Main characters in The Counterfeiters

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Further reading

• André Gide: The Counterfeiters. ISBN 0394718429
• André Gide: Journal of The Counterfeiters.

Partial list of works

• Les cahiers d'André Walter - 1891
• Le traité du Narcisse - 1891
• Les poésies d'André Walter - 1892
• Le voyage d'Urien - 1893
• La tentative amoureuse - 1893
• Paludes - 1895
• Réflexions sur quelques points de littérature - 1897
• Les nourritures terrestres - 1897
• Feuilles de route 1895-1896 - 1897
• El Hadj
• Le Prométhée mal enchaîné - 1899
• Philoctète - 1899
• Lettres à Angèle - 1900
• De l'influence en littérature - 1900
• Le roi Candaule - 1901
• Les limites de l'art - 1901
• L'immoraliste - 1902 (translated by Richard Howard as The Immoralist)
• Saül - 1903
• De l'importance du public - 1903
• Prétextes - 1903
• Amyntas - 1906
• Le retour de l'enfant prodigue - 1907
• Dostoïevsky d'après sa correspondance - 1908
• La porte étroite - 1909 (translated as Strait Is the Gate)
• Oscar Wilde - 1910
• Nouveaux prétextes - 1911
• Charles-Louis-Philippe - 1911
• C. R. D. N. - 1911
• Isabelle - 1911
• Bethsabé - 1912
• Souvenirs de la Cour d'Assises - 1914
• Les caves du Vatican - 1914 (translated as Lafcadio's Adventures)
• La symphonie pastorale - 1919
• Corydon - 1920
• Numquid et tu . . .? - 1922
• Dostoïevsky - 1923
• Incidences - 1924
• Caractères - 1925
• Les faux-monnayeurs - 1925 (translated as The Counterfeiters - 1927)
• Si le grain ne meurt - 1926
• Le journal des faux-monnayeurs - 1926
• Dindiki - 1927
• Voyage au Congo - 1927
• Le retour de Tchad - 1928
• L'école des femmes - 1929
• Essai sur Montaigne - 1929
• Un esprit non prévenu - 1929
• Robert - 1930
• La séquestrée de Poitiers - 1930
• L'affaire Redureau - 1930
• Œdipe - 1931
• Perséphone - 1934
• Les nouvelles nourritures - 1935
• Geneviève - 1936
• Retour de l'U. R. S. S. - 1936
• Retouches â mon retour de l'U. R. S. S. - 1937
• Notes sur Chopin - 1938
• Journal 1889-1939 - 1939
• Découvrons Henri Michaux - 1941
• Thésée - 1946
• Le retour - 1946
• Paul Valéry - 1947
• Le procès - 1947
• L'arbitraire - 1947
• Eloges - 1948
• Littérature engagée - 1950

The Catholic Church placed his works on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1952.

External links

• Works by André Gide. Project Gutenberg
• Center for Gidian Studies
• Amis d'André Gide In French
• Alphabet Soup
• "Gide's Rhetoric of Acceptance in Les Faux-monnayeurs" by Eric Mader
• "Gide's Fictional Technique" by Justin O'Brien

Nobel Prize in Literature: Laureates (1926-1950)

Credits

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