John ‘s Version: On André Gide’s Paludes
Another version of this was 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, and they are sometimes perspicacious and sage, and they are sometimes petty and wicked. They are the Russian Revolution, and they are the CIA/British Secret Service Congress for Cultural Freedom, led by a vanguard of Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, and Bertrand Russell, with its fundamental mission to brainwash the entire world. They are Ezra Pound, and his radio pontifications for the Nazis. They are anti-semitism, they are knee-jerk atavism, they are racism and sexism, and they are every other nasty, trollish habituation of people-kind. But they are also courageous resistance, enormous personal loss, and a Western outlook that expanded, became more inclusive and humane—socially, sexually, racially and culturally.
Andre Gide’s early satirical work, Paludes, Morasses, can be looked at as a historical curiosity, an allegory of literary Paris—of nineteenth century salons and 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.” Just as easily, we might look to Paludes for the theme of water, to Gide and to his era, and an augury of a future, not-too-distant, when water is a life and death resource. “Oh, the wetlands,” we might croon, “our precious wetlands.” Or, we might see Paludes as a last ode to Gide’s sexual repression; Gide’s commitment to the novel was shortly preceded by a recuperative journey to North Africa, a remedy for tuberculosis infection, which evolved into an indulgence of “pagan” delights. Paludes, then, is about the Gide who stayed home, a man who suffers from an inescapable but self-imposed subjugation, as a writer and a sexual being. The novel’s biographical narrative is constructed of a willfully apparent parallel: Tityre, the protagonist of Paludes (Gide will come back to Tityre in Le Prométhée mal enchaîné), is quite content to spend his time writing descriptive passages about a nearby marsh. Why, within walking distance, Tityre is blessed with a vista of slime and rocks! Just like that suffocating, stagnant Paris of the late nineteenth century. And with the transparency of Gide’s analog, Paludes is also a pioneering metanovel—a literary undertaking that took full swings at a fourth wall still firmly in place.
Or, Paludes may be regarded as young man’s assessment of the old men his generation would become. Gide’s literary epoch is 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 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 had taken. In his later years, the World War II years, he wavered with France, wanting desperately to avoid another global bloodshedding, harboring a befudled but broadly justified 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 eschewed the covert, be-but-don’t-say homosexuality of Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust, all the while struggling against recurring spill-overs of personal revulsion; and to judge by today’s sexual values, he was a colonialist with a predilection for underage creatures. And Gide’s renowned sincerity, his incorrigible insistence on honesty, was nevertheless susceptible to the editorial strikes of what was societally viable. And yet, after his death in 1951, Gide’s falling readership had nothing to do with any of these failings; the fault was Gide’s distrust of Communism—a healthy distrust that had to be quieted in a moment when the East, yet again, offered an ersatz grail to the arty-pinkos of the West.
How does one judge the provocateur, the fearless iconoclast? We are all wrong so often, so relentlessly, and the morality of the arts is bigger, more forgiving, more endlessly human than the morality of politics, which is so hopelessly myopic, divisive and murderous. In 1934, at a meeting of the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, Gide addressed the subject of “Literature et Revolution,” by stating the “Literature has no obligation to put itself in service to the Revolution.” Gide understood the mistake, the over-and-over again error of the arts in the twentieth, and 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, our half century has done no better. The pages of Out magazine are more safe haven to the frappuccino than 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—always the Procrustean solution—has come to be regarded as par for the course, as if it is the primary purpose of art to be sacrificed at the alter 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 categories, the marketplaces of creative culture are themselves ever prone to the categories and the desires of this economic grotesque, this immersion theater, that we have all condoned. We have become patient, complacent, perhaps even entertained by the spectacle of our own self-disfigurement. The Armageddon is halfway entertaining, for a swampland.