TinHouse: On André Gide’s Paludes
As printed in TinHouse
The literary figures of the mid-twentieth century are simultaneously, paradoxically, cultural heroes and yokel blunderers, stalwart independents and villainous conformists. They are loudmouths about Communism, the greatest political experiment since democracy; they are sometimes proponents and sometimes detractors, in in their arguments they are sometimes perspicacious and sage, and they are sometimes petty and wicked. They are the Russian Revolution, and they are the CIA and the British Secret Service’s Congress for Cultural Freedom—which lent massive support to Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Ernest Hemmingway, and Bertrand Russell—with a stated mission of winning a “soft war.” They are Ezra Pound, and his radio pontifications for the Nazis. They are anti-semitism and knee-jerk atavism, they are racism and sexism, and they are every other nasty, troll-ish habituation of people-kind. They are also courageous resistance, enormous personal loss, and a Western outlook that expanded, became more inclusive and humane—socially, sexually, racially and culturally.
But in the beginning, they were children—literary children.
Andre Gide’s early satirical work, Paludes (1895, in English, Morasses) is an allegory of nineteenth-century Paris’s cultural world, a quaintly seductive, if frequently silly and petty, vision of the arts. Paul Claudel, in a 1900 letter to Gide, called Paludes, “the most complete document we have on that curious atmosphere of suffocation and stagnation we breathed from 1885 to 1890.”
One hundred years later, readers might see Paludes as an ironic treatment of Gide’s sexual repression; Gide wrote the novel following a recuperative journey to North Africa, a remedy for tuberculosis infection, which evolved into an indulgence of “pagan” delights. Paludes is about the Gide who stayed home: a man who suffers from self-imposed subjugation, as a writer and as a homosexual man. The protagonist of Paludes, Tityre, is quite content to spend his time writing descriptive passages about a nearby marsh. Titrye is arrogant, insufferable, boring, didactic, and pathetic—so pathetic that he’s almost sympathetic. That the literary world around him is even worse speaks to his plight, and thus do we see our analog: Tityre is trying, trying to love his vista of slime and rocks, which is the suffocating, stagnant Paris of the late nineteenth century. And with the transparency of this analogy, Paludes is also a pioneering metanovel—a literary undertaking that takes full swing at a fourth wall still firmly in place.
But perhaps Paludes may be regarded most as young man’s unwitting premonition of the old men of the establishment that his generation would become. Gide’s epoch was a habitat of impossible contradictions. Everyone was wrong, and everyone was right. To side with the Communists was to condone Stalin; to side with the conservative Western opposition to Communism was to endorse the most obstructive mandate of cultural controls since Rome’s annexation of Christianity. Where there was success, there was failure; Communism, as seen by the wide-eyed and optimistic, was just as doomed as Democracy, as seen by its counterpart constituency of wide-eyed optimists. Gide’s ideologies and writings epitomized the vicissitudes of popular French attitudes, so often xenophobic and self-serving; and at the same time he was staunchly, admirably independent, whatever side or nonside he took. In his later years, the World War II years, he wavered with France, wanting desperately to avoid another global bloodshedding, harboring anti-semitism, and coming to the understanding, finally, that Hitler was carrying out an unrivaled act of atrocity. In his literary stance on sex, Gide wasn’t satisfied with the be-but-don’t-say homosexuality of Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust; yet personally, Gide was beset by a recurring revulsion for gay sex.
But as much as Gide sought some alternative to the “morasses” of his time, he was uncomfortable with literature as a form of judgment. If Wilde and Proust were hypocritical in their silence, Gide was far more culpable in his vice: underage creatures. Tityre contends with Gide’s artistic muddle: while literature may be stifled, ideology is not the answer. In 1934, at a meeting of the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, Gide addressed the subject of “Literature et Revolution,” by stating that “literature has no obligation to put itself in service to the Revolution.” Gide understood the mistake, the repeated over and over again error of the arts in the twentieth—now the twenty-first— century: “An enslaved literature is a debased literature, however noble and legitimate the cause it serves.”
If Gide’s half century didn’t deliver creative or social utopia, so far, the second half of the twentieth-century, plus a few years, has done no better. The pages of Out magazine are more haven to luxury than to radical literature. If there is a single cultural truth that has gathered momentum for the last one hundred and fifty years, it is that all the advances of the arts can be gathered and deployed in the marketplace. That the creative act itself is inevitably diminished has come to be regarded as par for the course, as if it is the primary purpose of art to be sacrificed at the altar of stupidity. Politics, a willfully fatuous form of sophistry, is the overlord of the spiritual, the inexplicable, the awesome. That the polarization of political realms has become only more extreme is just another portion of what we have given up; the marketplaces of creative culture are ever prone to the categories and the desires of this economic grotesque, this immersion theater, that we have all condoned. We have become complacent, perhaps even entertained by the spectacle of our own self-disfigurement. And Paludes? It’s blockbuster, it’s cyberpunk. It’s literary Paris, nineteenth century, as an apocalyptic swampland.