Pretexts;: Reflections on literature and morality

by André Gide

English, French (translation)

Paperback

First published August 31, 2010

About the author

Diaries and novels, such as The Immoralist (1902) and Lafcadio's Adventures (1914), of noted French writer André Gide examine alienation and the drive for individuality in an often disapproving society; he won the Nobel Prize of 1947 for literature.

André Paul Guillaume Gide authored books. From beginnings in the symbolist movement, career of Gide ranged to anticolonialism between the two World Wars.

Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposes the conflict and eventual reconciliation to public view between the two sides of his personality; a straight-laced education and a narrow social moralism split apart these sides. One can see work of Gide as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritan constraints, and it gravitates around his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of full self, even to the point of owning sexual nature without betraying values at the same time. After his voyage of 1936 to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the same ethos informs his political activity, as his repudiation of Communism suggests.

Chinese 安德烈·纪德

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's difficult to get at what bothers me in Gide. He is almost always right. My first impulse is to say that he is *too* right, but those words mean nothing and drive me crazy when other commentators use them. No, what bothers me about Gide is what alarms me about my own thought, which is that his brilliance is neither systematic nor obsessional. His brilliance is reasonable. His brilliance is so reasonable, in fact, that it has the capacity to partially leave behind reason for irrationality when the situation calls for it. He was the very picture of a mature thinker. I should love to have known him. Gide is a man of letters, one of the ultimate men of letters. What does this cost him? In a volume such as Pretexts, it means that his very absence of obsession and turgidity keeps us viewing the same brilliant varnish at all times. His insights into Theseus and Hercules are breathtaking, visionary. Read them, and these figures will be forever changed. Why then has he nothing to say on the rest of the Greeks? Why does he repeat his insight of each hero in multiple essays? He never wrote a book on the Greeks; his astounding aphorisms were enough, except they aren't. Their very excellence makes clear the failure to advance upon them. Obviously, obsession provides its own limits, is by definition narrow. But the best systems and the most overpowering obsessions have an advantage over the most brilliant dilletantism: they overcome complacence. Not to say Gide was by temperament complacent. By all available evidence, he was a questing intelligence and one that fretted as he aged over how to maintain his catholicism to new, younger art. He worked hard. But Borges also worked hard, and it remains an uncomfortable truth that I wish Borges had written a few of those novels he "reviewed." There is value in being exhaustive.