Andre Gide

David H. Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315505114
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book presents a selection of some of the most significant critical work written on Andre Gide during his lifetime and since. As a major writer of the twentieth-century, his life and creative output, as well as his role as a leading intellectual, attracted comment from prominent contemporaries and continues to have relevance today. Containing a substantial introduction and overview, this compilation offers a variety of illuminating perspectives that will inform and guide the general and specialist reader.

Part Two:
Approaches to the Texts

6 Lucien Dällenbach on André Gide's shields*

In the 1960s and 1970s, as writers such as the nouveaux romanciers questioned the methods and structures of the traditional novel, the device known as mise en abyme underwent a remarkable revival. Named by Gide in a phrase he attributed to the terminology of heraldry, it denotes a technique whereby an element in the novel acts as a mirror for the text as a whole. Hence, in certain of Gide's novels, such as Les Cahiers d'André Walter, Pollutes, Les Caves du Vatican and Les Faux-Monnayeurs, the characters include a novelist writing a book very like the one in which he features. Elsewhere, a component of the text sums up in miniature its overall subject or theme: metaphorically, as in the palimpsest Michel evokes in L'Immoraliste to convey his discovery of an authentic self beneath the person he had been conditioned to become; or literally, as when in the same novel the character of Ménalque embodies and expounds the new ideals which Michel is pursuing. Gide scholars had contented themselves with the already rich stock of reflections this conception gave rise to: about the internal structure of a novel, about the relationship between the representation and the reality it purported to depict, and so on.

With the exception of the English writer Aldous Huxley in Point Counterpoint (1928), relatively few other novelists seemed to have employed the technique to any resounding effect until Robbe-Grillet, Simon, Sarraute and Butor produced texts in which the mise en abyme appeared to proliferate and take on an ever more complex set of functions and significations. This in turn led critics to explore its implications, and to follow Gide scholars in puzzling over its origins – which immediately became less than clear. Gide had only referred to the technique in one brief passage of his diary, and the more this passage was subjected to scrutiny, the less satisfactory it appeared as the founding text of a device with what some saw as profound metaphysical overtones. Lucien Dällenbach emerged as the leading expert on the subject. Having explored the workings of the mise en abyme in articles on avant-garde novels by Butor, Simon and others, he looked back to Gide and beyond and drew together his findings in his major book from whose introductory chapter the following text is taken. His work has established the importance of the device as a universal and virtually essential feature of literary production.

Dällenbach offers a careful re-reading of Gide's 'theoretical' pronouncement, clearing away certain misconceptions and illustrating thereby the avenues of reflection the device has opened up – but highlighting also a number of neglected details which prove productive when properly examined. In particular, this analysis stresses the role of the writing process in the author's construction of his own identity. Signalling the psychoanalytical dimension of Gide's writing strategy and relating it to Lacan's theories on the evolution of the subject, the critic shows how, in La Tentative Amoureuse, the author achieves the 'second degree' of reflective activity necessary to avoid the twin pitfalls of excessive narcissistic self-contemplation, and alienation of a self that dreams of autonomy.

The First Reference

In order to clarify what should be understood by mine en abyme, it is most appropriate to return quickly to the sources and to reproduce the text in which the mise en abyme is mentioned for the first time. Gide wrote in 1893:

In a work of art, I rather like to find thus transposed, at the level of the characters, the subject of the work itself. Nothing sheds more light on the work or displays the proportions of the whole work more accurately. Thus, in paintings by Memling or Quentin Metzys, a small dark convex mirror reflects, in its turn, the interior of the room in which the action of the painting takes place. Thus, in a slightly different way, in Velasquez's Las Meniñas. Finally, in literature, there is the scene in which a play is acted in Hamlet; this also happens in many other plays. In Wilhelm Meister, there are the puppet shows and festivities in the castle. In The Fall of the House of Usher, there is the piece that is read to Roderick, etc. None of these examples is absolutely accurate. What would be more accurate, and what would explain better what I'd wanted to do in my Cahiers, in Narcisse and in La Tentative, would be a comparison with the device from heraldry that involves putting a second representation of the original shield 'en abyme' within it.¹

This text, which is more often quoted than interpreted by critics inclined to think that Gide is speaking about himself,² is more complex than it appears at first sight. Although it is more correct and concise than the passage from Hugo that it is perhaps recalling,³ its apparent clarity becomes blurred if one reads it carefully; despite its straightforward appearance, it is so enigmatic that one starts to wonder whether this 'charter', which gives the mise en abyme its status in literature, is not responsible, to a certain extent, for the uncertainty surrounding it today. Before coming to a conclusion on this question, by considering at source the subtle ambiguities of the passage, let us try to note some basic points from it:

1. the mise en abyme, as a means by which the work turns back on itself, appears to be a kind of reflection;
2. its essential property is that it brings out the meaning and form of the work;
3. as demonstrated by examples taken from different fields, it is a structural device that is not the prerogative either of the literary narrative or indeed of literature itself;⁴ and
4. it gets its name from a heraldic device that Gide no doubt discovered in 1891.⁵

The last point leads to some further remarks:

• (a) The word abyme here is a technical term. I shall not therefore speculate on its many connotations⁶ or hasten to give it a metaphysical meaning: instead of invoking Pascal's 'gouffre', the abyss of the Mystics, Heidegger's 'Abgrund', Ponge's 'objeu' or Derrida's 'différance', I shall rather refer to a treatise on heraldry: '"Abyss" ("Abîme")-the heart of the shield. A figure is said to be "en abime" when it is combined with other figures in the centre of the shield, but does not touch any of these figures.'⁷
• (b) Although the word still remains allusive, we can now understand what Gide had in mind: what fascinated him must have been the image of a shield containing, in its centre, a miniature replica of itself.
• (c) Rather than worrying about whether heraldry contains such a device, or whether it is simply a product of Gide's imagination,⁸ I shall take the analogy on its own terms, in other words, as an attempt to explain a structure that could be defined as follows: a mise en abyme is any aspect enclosed within a work that shows a similarity with the work that contains it. [. . .]

The passage is truncated and the 'thus' of its first sentence refers to La Tentative Amoureuse, mentioned at the end of the text as an example of the mise en abyme. So the first important conclusion we reach is that the text has a circular structure. It starts off implicitly with the mise en abyme and ends up explicitly with it.

The second point to consider is that the ambiguity of this circular text lies in the three successive 'thus'es and in the 'finally' that follows on from these. The argument slides from La Tentative Amoureuse, which is definitely referred to, from one adverb to another ('thus ... thus ... thus ... finally') weaving the various examples interchangeably together, until the slide is halted by the unexpected phrase 'none of these examples is absolutely accurate', which puts them into perspective.

From this fact alone, one initial conclusion is clear; one cannot do justice to Gide's fundamental intentions by purely and simply assimilating the mise en abyme to the pictorial and literary examples that prefigure it. In the final analysis, the only thing the heraldic metaphor does – and it does this better than any other metaphor – is to express what Gide 'wanted to do' in some of his books. [... ] To understand what he really did want to do, we must put our text back into its context:

1 wanted to indicate, in La Tentative Amoureuse, the influence the book has on the author while he is writing it. For, as we give birth to it, it changes us and alters the course of our life; in the same way that in physics, when liquid is poured out of filled floating containers in one direction, the containers move in the opposite direction, our actions have a retroactive effect on us. 'Our actions act upon us as much as we act upon them', said George Eliot.

So I was sad because a dream of unattainable joy torments me. I tell of this dream, and, dissociating the joy from the dream, make it mine. The dream thus loses its mystique and I am joyful as a result.

A subject cannot act on an object without retroaction by the object on the subject that is acting. It is this reciprocity that I wanted to indicate — not one's relationship with other people, but with oneself. The active subject is oneself. The retroactive thing is a subject one imagines. So it's a kind of indirect action on oneself that I conveyed in La Tentative Amoureuse; it's also just a tale.

Luc and Rachel too want to achieve their desire; but whereas in writing of mine, I achieved it in an ideal way, they dream of the park of which they can only see the gates and which they want to go inside in reality: so they feel no joy. In a work of art, I rather like to find thus transposed .. . the device from heraldry that involves putting a second representation of the original shield 'en abyme' within it.

The retroaction of the subject on itself has always appealed to me. It's typical of the psychological novel. An angry man tells a story – this is the subject of the book. A man telling a story is not enough – it must be an angry man and there must always be a continuing relationship between the man's anger and the story he's telling.⁶

These comments pave the way for a productive line of enquiry. [...] I shall [...] consider the phenomenon that it is the mise en abyme's function to bring to light – the way in which the writer constructs the writing, and vice versa.

Twinning

This reciprocity, as Gide presents it in his Journal, seems to be clarified by what psychoanalysis tells us about linguistic communication (and this is perhaps not entirely coincidental): namely that the 'sender gets back from the receiver his/her own message in inverse form',⁷ and that, mediated through the desire of the other, my words construct me by anticipating the response they seek. Gide, years before Lacan, observed this on many occasions, and it would not be impossible for his whole oeuvre to be understood in terms of a methodical attempt to create according to this law. To use this law in order to give solidity to a being who was receptive, fluid and existed ad libitum,⁸ and at the same time to avoid the aspects of this law that alienate a spirit who dreams of self-sufficiency (the inevitable recourse to the other, who, by constructing me, falsifies me) – this is, at its most basic level, the unavoidable requirement of Gide's wish for sincerity. Can one ever hope to satisfy it? All of Gide's work aims to enable him to do so. The choice of the medium of writing is itself part of this strategy. By writing, Gide becomes his own interlocutor. But unless this introspection is combined with one particular condition, it still only provides a precarious solution: for although it excludes the (de-)formative personality of the other, it replaces it with the captivating and no less specious character in the novel. In order to derive a real benefit from the transaction, one has to contrive to ward off the very otherness of the fictive character, and, in order to do so, to impose sufficient constraints on oneself: in other words to create it in one's own image, or, better still, to make it engage in the very activity that one is oneself undertaking in creating it – the writing of a novel (The Notebooks of Andre Walter) or the telling of a story (La Tentative Amoureuse).

It is tempting to compare this narcissistic doubling with the creative experience, which Lacan calls the 'mirror stage' or 'mirror phase',⁹ since this strategy of auto-generation through writing reveals a perversion on the symbolic level that results in an even worse lapse into the imaginary. Thus we know, through a fortuitous note in the Journal, that Gide sometimes wrote in front of a mirror so as to get inspiration from talking and listening to his reflection:

I am writing on the small piece of furniture of Anna Shackleton's that was in my bedroom in the rue de Commailles. That's where I worked; I liked it because I could see myself writing in the double mirror of the desk above the block I was writing on. I looked at myself after each sentence; my reflection spoke and listened to me, kept me company and sustained my enthusiasm.¹¹

The reflexive language of writing, exalted by the reflected image of the writer; the mirror of his early years recalling the first...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor's Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• ASPECTS OF THE WORK
• APPROACHES TO THE TEXTS
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index