André Gide was born on 22 November 1869 in Paris, the only son of Paul Gide, a professor of Law at the Sorbonne, and Juliette Rondeaux. His early life was influenced by the rigid education imposed on him by his family, and by the strong and contradictory relationship with his mother, a bond which became stronger when his father died in 1880. Henceforth the profoundly religious and strictly Calvinist attitude of Gide’s mother came to dominate his education, and strongly affected the evolution of his personality. Most of his schooling was conducted privately in the family’s house in Normandy, since Gide’s frequent illnesses and nervous problems often prevented him from attending lessons at the “École Alsacienne”, where he had been enrolled at the age of eight. Gide’s relationship with his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux, which began when the two were adolescents, mirrors both the complex nature of Gide’s relationship with his mother and the mystical attitude of his early years. Soon after the death of his mother in 1895, Gide decided to marry Madeleine despite having already acknowledged his homosexuality, thus sealing a sentimental bond which would always be based on pure and idealized feelings, rather than on passionate love.
His literary career started with the publication of a short novel, Les Cahiers d’André Walter (1891, The Notebooks of André Walter) and with two pieces of poetic prose, Le Voyage d’Urien (1893, Urien’s Voyage) and La tentative amoureuse (1893, The Attempt at Love) which, on the one hand, testify to Gide’s early investment in the form of the novel, an interest which was to culminate in 1925 with the experimental Les Faux-monnayeurs, and on the other reveal the strong influence exerted upon him by Symbolism at that time. His initiation into Parisian literary society had in fact taken place in Symbolist circles, bringing him close to Mallarmé and Valéry.
The two long journeys to North Africa which Gide undertook between 1893 and 1895 with the intention of improving his troubled health proved decisive for both his life and his writing. The liberation from the suffocating environment of his house and the contact with different civilizations (together with his friendships with Oscar Wilde and Sir Alfred Douglas, whom he had met while travelling) helped him to approach his own personality and his writing from a more honest and open point of view. In Africa he confronted his homosexuality and developed the vitalistic approach to art which he soon after expressed in Paludes (1895, Marshlands) and Les Nourritures terrestres (1897, Fruits of the Earth,), two works of poetic prose which criticize hypocritical social and literary conventions and propose instead an exaltation of life and a rejection of the idea of sin.
The works which were to follow began to show the complex and contradictory nature of Gide’s personality, prefiguring how his literary career would always be dominated by the interaction of opposing forces and ideas, a feature often taken as a sign of Gide’s inconsistency. A peculiar mechanism stands at the core of Gide’s development as a writer: on a superficial level the relation established by each work with its predecessor seems based more on the rejection of earlier positions than on a genuine evolution in Gide’s ideas. This has given rise, on the one hand, to criticism of what are perceived as ephemeral positions, and, on the other, to an emphasis on the open and dialectical nature of Gide’s works:
le refus de s’engager, le culte du doute, le soin de n’affirmer que ce qu’on a soi-même vérifié, le sentiment que tout un système est démoli par une seule expérience contraire; une sympathie presque mimétique corrigée par un esprit critique qui fait qu’on se reprend et qu’indéfiniment on recommence . . . tous ces traits de l’esprit non prévenu qu’est Gide sont les caractères mêmes du savant. (Fernandez, 43)
[The refusal to commit oneself, the cult of doubt, care to state only what one has oneself verified, the feeling that a whole system can be demolished by just one contrary experience; an almost mimetic sympathy mitigated by a critical mind, meaning that one indefinitely corrects oneself and starts again… all of these features of the unprejudiced spirit which Gide represents are the very character of the man of learning.]
In the tragedy Saul (1903), Gide presents an apparent refutation of his recently developed doctrine of vitalism, through the dramatic representation of a character dominated by desire and instinct; however, these contradictions are in fact central to the presentation of the multi-layered and contrasting personality of the author. This dynamic attitude is also evident in the eclectic nature of Gide’s literary production, which in these years comprises a wide variety of genres and themes, from Le roi candaule (1899) and Le Prométhée mal enchaîné (1899, Prometheus Illbound) to the oriental tale El Hadj (1899).
In the years following this period Gide went back to narrative fiction with two texts, L’Immoraliste (1902, The Immoralist) and La Porte étroite (1909, Strait is the Gate), which again present apparently contrasting theses. L’Immoraliste, which is built on an innovative and almost theatrical narrative structure, focuses on the character of Michel, who is dominated by his ego and committed to following his desires despite the dramatic consequences of his actions for both himself and his wife. La Porte étroite, by contrast, sees the main character, Alissa, as the embodiment of ascetic purity, which leads her to make extreme sacrifices in the pursuit of an ideal. As with most of Gide’s work, these two texts are strongly autobiographical, and in this sense their diametric opposition aptly conveys the complexity and the tension of contrasting elements at the basis of Gide’s personality and work. Furthermore, by showing the dramatic consequences of two different but equally extreme attitudes, these texts demonstrate how in Gide apparently irreconcilable views often prove to share unexpected common ground. In this period Gide also played an active role in Parisian intellectual life. He co-founded the Nouvelle Revue Française, which was to become extremely influential in the interwar literary scene, and which allowed him to make contact with several intellectuals, including Martin Roger du Gard, who became one of his closest friends.
In 1914 Gide published the novel Les Caves du Vatican (Lafcadio’s Adventures - The Vatican Cellars), which he would later define as a sotie, thus inscribing it into a tradition derived from the French comedy of the XIVth and XVIth centuries. Through the grotesque deformation of characters and events, the work presents a satirical portrayal of the Roman Catholic Church for which it was strongly criticized (in 1952, after Gide’s death, the Catholic Church would place his works on the Index), and introduces through the character of Lafcadio the idea of the acte gratuit (gratuitous act) which Gide would later develop in Les Faux-monnayeurs.
Pursuing the tendency of his work to undermine its own key positions and to replace them with an endless succession of new ideas, in 1919 Gide published La Symphonie pastorale, a more traditional novel narrating the sentimental and mystical love of a protestant pastor for a young blind girl. In the year of the publication of Les caves du Vatican Gide had also privately printed his controversial Corydon, republished in 1924, in which he employs the form of the Greek philosophical dialogue in order to present an apology for and psychological explanation of homosexuality. He also continued to produce criticism and essays, an activity which he had initiated in 1903 with the collection Prétextes (followed by the Nouveaux Prétextes in 1911). In 1923, Gide collected under the title of Dostoevsky a series of lectures he had given on the Russian author, whom he deeply admired and whose dialogic narrative structures proved very important for his own narrative experimentation.
Gide’s prolific writing career and varied narrative experiments are encapsulated in Les Faux-monnayeurs (1925, The Counterfeiters), the only one of his works that Gide retrospectively defined as a novel: in the 1930s he classified L’Immoraliste and La porte étroite as récits, for their employment of first-person narration and supposed lack of a proper narrative structure. For Les Faux-monnayeurs Gide elaborated instead a complex narrative architecture, mixing third-person narration with sections of the main character’s diary and presentation in an appendix of his own diary of the work’s composition (Le Journal des Faux-monnayeurs). A sophisticated mise en abyme (a term whose application to literary form was pioneered by Gide) involving the character of Édouard, who is portrayed in the process of creation of a novel entitled Les Faux-monnayeurs, allows Gide to de-construct traditional narration and to make the intricate plot evolve in a fragmentary manner from multiple points of view (see Dällenbach). The intent to puzzle the reader is overtly expressed by Gide in Le Journal des Faux-monnayeurs, together with the project of conveying reality as inextricably bound up with art and fiction. In this sense, the 1925 novel appears as a profoundly innovative work, which condenses many of the themes and formal experiments of modernism and also anticipates the dialectical relationship with the reader which will be typical of post-modernist novels: “Je voudrais que . . . ces événements apparaissent légèrement déformés; une sorte d’intérêt vient, pour le lecteur, de ce seul fait qu’il ait à rétablir. L’histoire requiert sa collaboration pour se bien dessiner” [“I should like the event to appear slightly warped; the reader will take a sort of interest from the mere fact of having to reconstruct. The story requires his collaboration in order to take shape properly”] (Gide 1926, 416).
After the publication of Les Faux-monnayeurs, which Gide himself considered as the culminating point of his career, the writer abandoned the hybrid forms characterizing his previous works and engaged almost exclusively with the autobiographical genre. In 1926 he re-published Si le grain ne meurt (If It Die ...), which had already appeared in 1920 and in which he narrates his childhood and youth up to his marriage with Madeleine. A more profound account of his relationship with his wife was later to be given in Et nunc manet in te, which was published posthumously. Both texts were composed by Gide with the aim of shedding light on his various experiences, and for this reason some typical Gidean “falsifications” are also present in these works. These arguably do not lessen the sincere act of self-exploration which stands at the basis of the two texts, but rather testify to Gide’s original interpretation of autobiography as a genre in which reality and fiction overlap, and subjective views inevitably convey only a personal and partial account of experience. Most of Gide’s works of fiction are characterized by overt autobiographical roots, and in this sense Gide’s engagement with “conventional” autobiography in texts such as Si le grain ne meurt re-activates and reverses the dynamic relation between fiction and reality in his work. Gide’s projection of his personality and experiences onto his characters complements his autobiographical project: protagonists are inscribed into a fictive world but overlap with autobiographical strategies, while fictive and self-distancing techniques are inserted within autobiography. In this sense, self-exploration becomes a process in which self-coincidence is perpetually negated and the subject is fragmented in a continuous interplay of subject and persona, of real and fictive elements. In both types of texts the self is portrayed as an imperfectly intelligible phenomenon, and the act of writing and language itself, with all its falsifications and communicative compromises, become central in the never-ending project of self-knowledge (see Holdheim, 108).
Madeleine, meanwhile, remained a delicate subject for Gide; in this sense some of his misinterpretations of facts can be read as attempts to lessen both his sense of guilt and his pain at her death. Gide wrote Et nunc manet in te in 1938, shortly after Madeleine had died in Cuverville, where she had retired to live alone in 1920. The relationship between husband and wife had suffered a decisive crisis after the publication of Corydon, and even if the sentimental bond between the two remained strong, Madeleine gradually distanced herself from her husband over the years. In 1916, after Gide had spent a long period in Switzerland with his lover and travel companion Marc Allégret, Madeleine destroyed all the letters that Gide had sent to her, an act which he found unbearably painful. The bond connecting the two was complex and deep and, as Gide states in Et nunc manet in te, could never be severed once for all. Nevertheless, many elements contributed to Madeleine’s disillusionment: not only did Gide’s homosexuality prevent her from feeling that their marriage was complete and fulfilling, but Gide’s unconventional ideas and egotistical personality were in marked contrast with her strong religious attitude. In the 1930s, furthermore, she probably discovered the existence of Gide’s daughter, Catherine, from his relationship with Elizabeth Van Rysselbergh.
Along with autobiographical writing, in the second half of the 1920s and in the 1930s Gide took an interest in various social issues, harnessing his famously egocentric personality to humanist causes. As a result he was active in politics as a defender of minorities, and wrote two texts devoted to the negative effects of French colonialism, Voyage au Congo (Travels in the Congo) and Le Retour du Tchad (1928). Les Nouvelles nourritures (1935) testified to his adhesion to communism, a position which he soon revised after a disappointing journey to Russia, as he explains in Retour de l’Urss (1936, Return from the U.S.S.R.).
Shortly before the beginning of the Second War World, Gide began to work towards the publication of the diary he had been keeping since 1889, which was to appear in three separate sections from 1939 to 1950 (Journal). In 1946 he published Thésée (Theseus), a series of reflections on Greek myth, and the following year he was nominated Doctor of Letters at the University of Oxford and awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Gide died on 19 February 1951, leaving behind him a last autobiographical text, Les Jeux sont faits (So Be It, or The Chips Are Down), a further meditation on his rich and contradictory life, an intense human and intellectual existence which has established itself as one of the most emblematic and meaningful of the 20th century and which, in tandem with his work, continues to arouse discussion and re-interpretation.
Works cited and references
Dällenbach, Lucien. Le récit spéculaire.
Essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris: Seuil, 1977.
Fernandez, Ramon. André Gide. Paris: Corrêa, 1931.
Gide, André. Les Cahiers d’André
Walter. Paris: Didier-Perrin, 1891; The Notebooks
of André Walter, translated by Wade Baskin. New York:
Philosophical Library, 1968.
---. Le Traité du Narcisse. Paris:
Librairie de l’Art Indépendant, 1891; The Return of the
Prodigal, translated by Dorothy Bussy. London: Secker &
Warburg, 1953.
---. Les Poésies d’André Walter.
Paris: Librairie de l’Art Indépendant, 1892.
---. La Tentative amoureuse. Paris:
Librairie de l’Art Indépendant, 1893. The Lover’s Attempt,
in The Return of the Prodigal Son, translated by Dorothy
Bussy. London: Secker & Warburg, 1953.
---. Le Voyage d’Urien. Paris: Librairie de l’Art
Indépendant, 1893; Urien’s Voyage, translated by Wade
Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library, 1964.
---. Paludes. Paris: Librairie de l’Art Indépendant, 1895;
Marshlands, translated by George D. Painter. New
York-Toronto: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1965.
---. Les Nourritures terrestres.
Paris: Mercure de France, 1897; The Fruits of the Earth,
translated by Dorothy Bussy. New York: Knopf, 1949.
---. Le Prométhée mal enchaîné.
Paris: Mercure de France, 1899; Prometheus Illbound,
translated by Lilian Rothermere. London: Chatto & Windus,
1919.
---. Le Roi Candaule. Paris: Revue
Blanche, 1901.
---. L’Immoraliste. Paris: Mercure
de France, 1902; The Immoralist. New York: Knopf,
1930.
---. Saül. Paris: Mercure de France, 1903.
---. Prétextes: réflexions sur quelques points de littérature et de
morale. Paris: Mercure de France, 1903;
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality,
translated by Angelo P. Bertocci and others; edited by Justin
O’Brien. New York: Meridian, 1959.
---. Amyntas. Paris: Mercure de France, 1906.
---. La Porte étroite. Paris:
Mercure de France, 1909; Strait Is the Gate, translated by
Dorothy Bussy. New York: Knopf, 1924.
---. Nouveaux Prétextes: réflexions sur
quelques points de Littérature et de Morale. Paris:
Mercure de France, 1911.
---. Isabelle. Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française/Marcel
Rivière, 1911.
---. Les Caves du Vatican. Paris:
Nouvelle Revue Française, 1914, 2 vol.; The Vatican
Swindle, translated by Dorothy Bussy. New York: Knopf, 1925;
republished as Lafcadio’s Adventures, 1927 and as
The Vatican Cellars, 1952.
---. La Symphonie pastorale. Paris:
Gallimard, 1919; Two Symphonies (Isabelle and
The Pastoral Symphony), translated by Dorothy Bussy. New
York: Knopf, 1931.
---. Si le grain ne meurt. Brügge:
Sainte-Catherine, 1920-21, 2 vol.; If It Die ...,
translated by Dorothy Bussy. New York: Random House, 1935.
---. Dostoïevsky, Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1923;
Dostoyevsky, translated by Arnold Bennett. London: Dent,
1925.
---. Corydon. Paris: Gallimard, 1924; Corydon, New York:
The Noonday Press, 1961.
---. Les Faux-monnayeurs, Paris:
Gallimard, 1925; The Counterfeiters, translated by Dorothy
Bussy. New York: Knopf, 1927; with Journal of the
Counterfeiters. New York: Vintage Boooks, 1973.
---. Le Journal des
Faux-monnayeurs. Paris: Eos, 1926.
---. Voyage au Congo, Paris:
Gallimard, 1927; Travels in the Congo, translated by
Dorothy Bussy. New York: Knopf, 1929.
---. Le Retour du Tchad: Carnets de
route. Paris: Gallimard, 1928.
---. Les Nouvelles Nourritures.
Paris: Gallimard, 1935.
Retour de l’U.R.S.S. Paris:
Gallimard, 1936; Return from the U.S.S.R., translated by
Dorothy Bussy. New York: Knopf, 1937.
---. Journal 1889-1939. Paris:
Gallimard, 1939; The Journals of André Gide, translated by
Justin O’Brien. New York: Knopf, 1947-1951, 4 vol.
Thésée. Paris: Gallimard, 1946;
Theseus, translated by John Russell, London: Horizon,
1948.
---. Et nunc manet in te, Neuchâtel: Richard Heyd, 1947;
Madeleine (Et nunc manet in te),
translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1952.
---. Journal, 1942-1949. Paris: Gallimard, 1950.
---. Ainsi soit-il ou les jeux sont
faits. Paris: Gallimard, 1952; So Be It, or The
Chips Are Down, translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Knopf,
1959.
---. Journal, II:
1926-1950 edited by Martine Sagaert. Paris: Gallimard,
1950.
Holdheim, Wolfgang. Theory and Practice of the Novel – A Study
on André Gide. Geneva: Droz, 1968.
Keypour, David. André Gide, écriture et
réversibilité dans Les faux-monnayeurs. Paris:
Presses de l’Université de Montréal / Didier Érudition, 1980.
Moutote, Daniel. Réflexions sur Les
Faux-Monnayeurs. Paris: Champion, 1990.
3037 words
Citation: Prudente, Teresa. "André Gide". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 July 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1734, accessed 02 April 2025.]
