The Return of the Prodigal Son: Gide, Millet and ‘les marches du perron’

Abstract

Dawn, departure and defiance are the directives that govern the last lines of Gide's Retour de l' Enfant Prodigue (1907), diverting its sense of an ending by plans of new adventure as yet un begun and untold.¹ In his closing paragraphs Gide shocked his Catholic friends and disquieted Church authority by devising an invented younger prodigal, absent from the original gospel parable, who sets out to succeed where his elder brother, by his very return, has ‘failed’. The French writer's traité, in many ways deeply respectful, both in content and tone, of its biblical model, is thus simultaneously a pointed subversion of it - in cauda venenum. There may indeed very well be, in his actual title, a hidden hint at fictional reversibility with a play on the word retour, which, while principally signifying return, has, as one of its subsidiary meanings, the sense of shift or reversal - a slanting announcement from the outset that, in the ‘charming, pernicious and noble’ manner that Henri de Regnier recognized as peculiar to his friend Gide's art, he was about to reverse the parable, to turn sacred text inside out.²