***"Man and Superman"-The Immoralist, Andre Gide

 

BOOK REVIEW

The Immoralist, Andre Gide, Penguin Classics, New York, 2001

Andre Gide was always justly famous for writing tight little novels that presented unusual moral dilemmas that did not, as in real life, necessarily get resolved or resolved in a way that one would think. Reflecting at bottom a certain historically pessimistic understanding of the world, and the capacity of its denizens to finally act as a conscious collective mass. That stance also reflected a very real reaction, not all of it mere show, mere café chatter about the solitary nature of modern humankind’s ability to cope with a system that it build and for which some of its member felt an urge to flee. To seek one’s own good in the world and not be troubled by larger perspectives if they entered into the equation at all.

That is the case here with one of his early and perhaps most famous offerings, The Immoralist, a very good title to describe the dilemma to be related. The story line centers on the bedraggled life of a consummate French bourgeois scholar who went through a personal crisis after the death of his father and his unsought `shot gun' marriage in the early part of the 20th century. Already, at that early date, that the explosions to come , wars and revolutions, would not find everybody up to the task of bringing out of the small confines of their singular existence.  The newlyweds travelled to various exotic outposts of French imperialism, including the hot and dry Northern African coast.

Along the way while staying that exotic North African locale our protagonist became sick with a life-threatening illness but by an act of will, and the extraordinary care of his new wife, overcame that crisis. That event and his reaction to the closeness of death, or maybe just another in a line of hubristic acts drives the rest of the action. As a result of her loving efforts his wife in turn got sick (moreover during her pregnancy). He is decidedly inattentive to her illness, to the extent of it, to the lie-threatening nature of it. The scholar, in the final analysis, permits her to die by his self-centered actions.  

After his own illness, and as a result of overcoming that close experience the scholar began, little by little, to believe, to sense  that he is `superman' a la Nietzsche, that he is a chosen one,  and therefore consciously or unconsciously becomes the agent of his wife's descend into greater illness and eventually death. Quite a dilemma, to be sure, but he shed no tears over it. The real question here is whether, in a hard and unforgiving world where each person is his or her own agent, that it was his duty to thoughtfully care for his wife or whether his need to take actions to `understand' himself was paramount.

Some other moral questions concerning his role as landlord in his inherited rural estate pop up along the way, as well. Also, just a hint of homosexual tension in his dealings with the young Arab boys in the neighborhood hovers in the background. This is a subject that then was almost always covered in discreet language so it is hard to tell the full extent of the attraction, the physical consummation part. And whether he did anything about it. This is a question that concerned Gide personally, as well so he may have been working through some of his own concerns in novel form.

 

This theme of one’s responsibility in the world (and the sub-theme of homosexuality) and the book itself at the start of the 20th century may have been somewhat scandalous but reading it after some of the harrowing events done by humankind in the last century has cut deeply into the impact that it was intended to have. Still it is a great book and a quick read. Any lessons to be drawn about the dark side of human nature, as it has evolved thus far, take a lot longer to fathom.