Missing Modernism (Gide)

Abstract

Through an examination of the paradoxical case of André Gide—who is at once a towering intellectual figure and, for scholars ranging from Paul de Man and Roland Barthes to Emily Apter and Michael Lucey, a “missing” writer—this article proposes a broad reflection on French modernism as a “missing” aesthetic-political concept. Specifically, it shows how different conceptions of Gide’s relation to modernism and postmodernism inform subsequent and competing definitions of the French literary contemporary. Gide thus comes to represent less an exemplary writer of the modernist literary aesthetic than an exemplary figure for how we now miss modernism, not only in the forms it took in Gide’s work but also more broadly as an idea of a vital cultural politics, of a negativity or an authentic resistant space. Thinking about how that kind of modernism is missing or missed offers another way of thinking about our current relationship to French literary history.

Keywords:

• Gide
• Proust
• modernism
• postmodernism
• contemporary
• novel

Notes

Notes

1 André Gide, Paludes, Paris, Librairie de l’art indépendant, 1895.

2 Nathalie Sarraute, Tropismes, Paris, Denoël, 1939.

3 Barthes has curiously little to say about Sarraute, and his references to her generally occur in lists of New Novelists.

4 Nathalie Sarraute, L’Ère du soupçon, Paris, Gallimard, 1956; Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu I à IV [1913–1927], Paris, Collection Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 2019; Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit, Paris, Denoël et Steele, 1932; Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée, Paris, Gallimard, 1938; Jean Genet, Miracle de la rose, Paris, L’Arbalète, 1946.

5 Annabel L. Kim, Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions. The Ohio State UP, 2018.

6 If I mention Gide’s sexuality here it is because, as Michael Lucey reminds us, “the uneasiness with which [writers like Gide, Proust, and Colette] inhabit the structures of the literary field has to do with the fact that as they write they also draw on the resources of various misfit sexual cultures” (Someone, 49).

7 See Emily S Apter, André Gide and the Codes of Homotextuality, Anma Libri, 1987, p. v.

8 See Paul De Man, “Whatever Happened to André Gide?” The New York Review of Books. May 6, 1965. Internet. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1965/05/06/whatever-happened-to-andre-gide/. The repeated critical affirmation of Gide’s diminished status flirts with performative contradiction. Gide’s marginality is no doubt relative, and should not obscure significant recent studies of Gide by established scholars like Pamela Genova, Alison James, Pierre Masson, Lucey; and by early-career scholars like Sam Ferguson and Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche.

9 On the shortcomings of de Man’s essay, see Lucey, Gide’s Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing. Oxford UP, 1995, pp.183–187.

10 See for example the comments by John Weightman quoted in Lucey, Gide’s Bent, 73.

11 See Sam Ferguson, “Forgetting Gide: A Study of Barthes’s ‘Ursuppe’.” Barthes Studies, 1 (2015), p. 23.

12 Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes, Paris, Émile-Paul Frères, 1913.

13 André Gide, Les Caves du Vatican, Paris, Gallimard, 1914.

14 André Gide, Les Faux-Monnayeurs, Paris, Gallimard, 1925.

15 There are, for example, nine references to Proust in the Cambridge Companion to Modernism (edited by Michael Levenson, Cambridge UP, 1999), and none to Gide.

16 See Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford UP, 2002, p. 5.

17 On the construction of the category of the contemporary in relation to the categories of the modern and postmodern, see Lucas Hollister, Beyond Return: Genre and Cultural Politics in Contemporary French Fiction, Liverpool, 2019, pp. 1–15.

18 See Michel Murat, Le Romanesque des lettres, Paris, Corti, 2017, pp. 173–179.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lucas Hollister

Lucas Hollister is Associate Professor of French and Italian Languages and Literatures at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Beyond Return: Genre and Cultural Politics in Contemporary French Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2019) and of a number of articles on modern and contemporary French literature. His current research focuses primarily on ecocriticism and genre fiction in France and the United States.