The Immoralist by Andre Gide

What words had I been reading that night?... Oh yes; Christ's words to Peter: "Now thou girdest thyself and goest where thou wouldst..." Where was I going now? Where did I want to go?... I didn't tell you that from Naples that last time, I had gone to Paestum one day, alone... Oh, I could have sobbed before those stones! The ancient beauty appeared: simple, perfect, smiling--abandoned. Art is leaving me, I feel it. To make room for... what? No longer, as before, a smiling harmony... I no longer know, now, the dark god I serve. O new God! Grant that I may yet know new races, unforeseen kinds of beauty.

The Immoralist... it sounds to my ear like a CBS procedural. But in fact, it's an early 20th century novel by Andre Gide about Michel, a man who struggles between his attachment to his beautiful and caring wife Marceline and his desire to shake off bourgeois moral conventions in order to live a life free of restraints. It might be best remembered today--this is certainly my greatest association with it--as a focus of Edward Said, who wrote about the way that Michel's journey in North Africa exemplifies the colonizer's narrative control over the colonized. In Tunisia and Algeria, Michel finds a landscape and culture free of European pretension, but, interestingly to me, it's not this trip exactly that causes him to seek this new life, but a long bout of tuberculosis that leaves him stranded there.

Sickness as a transformation that is physical, mental, spiritual. How does it work? Perhaps it is that, alone, Michel is cut off from the niceties of civilization and must descend alone into himself--sickness always feels a little like that, like you are inside yourself. But of course, Michel is not alone in his sickness, he has Marceline with him always; it's her tender care for him that makes him fall in love with her--previously, he had married her only to satisfy her father. But more than this, there are young boys in Africa, and Michel is drawn to their beauty and their grace. Are we meant to understand that, between the lines of the book, Michel is abusing them? Gide himself was a self-described "pederast," although The Immoralist felt much more ambivalent about such behavior than a proud pederast might project. Marceline even procures some of these boys for him; it makes one wonder how much she knew about her husband even then, and whether she, too, knows to take advantage when European civilization's back is turned. (OK, probably not.)

I found the parts of The Immoralist in North Africa engrossing, richly written. Once Michel returns to Europe, I found the novel a rather dreary affair: the settling into the grand estate, the conversations with Menalque, another "immoralist" who encourages Michel down the path of profligacy, the crush on his estate manager's son and his dalliance into poaching. (The poaching, among other things, reveals something of the pointlessness of Michel's freedom from the bourgeois--in the end, he's stealing from his own estate!) The novel picks up once again when Marceline herself takes ill and Michel ferries her back to Africa, dreaming, perhaps, that the environment there will cure her, too; and yet, once they arrive, he increasingly abandons her to pursue his own hedonistic pleasures. "The capacity to be free is nothing," he writes; "the capacity to be free, that is the task." But can one be free without being cruel? Is Michel a sick man, or an inspired one? These are the questions I think The Immoralist, in the end, is unable to asnwer.