Scan barcode
A review by savaging
The Counterfeiters by André Gide
4.0
"But the reader must leave me as a stone leaves the slingshot. I am even willing that, like a boomerang, he should come back and strike me." -- Gide's journal of The Counterfeiters
In the thick of this book I thought I didn't like it. I thought the navel-gazing Novel of Ideas had been spoiled for me by reading [b:Point Counter Point|5135|Point Counter Point|Aldous Huxley|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1386925117s/5135.jpg|954202]. Both are novels of a novelist writing a novel about a novelist, etc. (and Gide's book has the gumption to -- apparently without irony -- condemn "onanism"!). Both are stuffed with "conversations" that should have been essays.
But Gide moves past Huxley. His characters aren't out of Pilgrim's Progress. They aren't the incarnation of Ideas. They move, they are inconsistent, they are ruined and redeemed -- or not. As Gide himself writes in the journal he kept while writing this novel: The problem for me is not how to succeed -- but rather how to survive. For some time now I have aimed to win my case only on appeal. I write only to be reread."
The characters go further than anything in Huxley to feel out the question of how to live rightly. They would like to sacrifice their wills to something higher that will make this decision for them, and yet they can't give themselves up to the Authorities. Most of them have to conclude that religion is self-delusion and a disavowal of the real world, politics is mostly lies, and the Arts are where petty and cruel people try to make a name for themselves by being increasingly bombastic to hide their small and sterile hearts.
As one character puts it, after experiencing political group-think: "It seemed to me all the young men I saw there were animated by the best of sentiments, and that they were doing quite right to abdicate their initiative (for it wouldn’t have led them far) and their judgment (for it was inadequate) and their independence of mind (for it was still-born). I said to myself too, that it was a good thing for the country to count among its citizens a large number of these well-intentioned individuals with subservient wills, but that my will would never be of that kind. It was then that I began to ask myself how to establish a rule, since I did not accept life without a rule and yet would not accept a rule from anyone else."
When I write this, it sounds simplistic. But surely someone has concluded just the opposite from this book. After all, the characters who set out to make their own rules also make a mess of it. There isn't a moral here: the book's a Rorschach test.
The best characters in the book are largely in the wings (my personal favorites are old La Perouse and young Armand Vedel. Armand, the pastor's son, always ironic and attempting wickedness in his hatred of a hypocritical virtue, feeling only hypocritically vicious. He's a hipster with a heart, probably, down there at the bottom. La Perouse is a despairing maltheist: "the devil and God are one and the same; they work together. We try to believe that everything bad on earth comes from the devil, but it’s because, if we didn’t, we should never find strength to forgive God. He plays with us like a cat, tormenting a mouse. . . . And then afterwards he wants us to be grateful to him as well. Grateful for what? for what? . . . ")
In the thick of this book I thought I didn't like it. I thought the navel-gazing Novel of Ideas had been spoiled for me by reading [b:Point Counter Point|5135|Point Counter Point|Aldous Huxley|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1386925117s/5135.jpg|954202]. Both are novels of a novelist writing a novel about a novelist, etc. (and Gide's book has the gumption to -- apparently without irony -- condemn "onanism"!). Both are stuffed with "conversations" that should have been essays.
But Gide moves past Huxley. His characters aren't out of Pilgrim's Progress. They aren't the incarnation of Ideas. They move, they are inconsistent, they are ruined and redeemed -- or not. As Gide himself writes in the journal he kept while writing this novel: The problem for me is not how to succeed -- but rather how to survive. For some time now I have aimed to win my case only on appeal. I write only to be reread."
The characters go further than anything in Huxley to feel out the question of how to live rightly. They would like to sacrifice their wills to something higher that will make this decision for them, and yet they can't give themselves up to the Authorities. Most of them have to conclude that religion is self-delusion and a disavowal of the real world, politics is mostly lies, and the Arts are where petty and cruel people try to make a name for themselves by being increasingly bombastic to hide their small and sterile hearts.
As one character puts it, after experiencing political group-think: "It seemed to me all the young men I saw there were animated by the best of sentiments, and that they were doing quite right to abdicate their initiative (for it wouldn’t have led them far) and their judgment (for it was inadequate) and their independence of mind (for it was still-born). I said to myself too, that it was a good thing for the country to count among its citizens a large number of these well-intentioned individuals with subservient wills, but that my will would never be of that kind. It was then that I began to ask myself how to establish a rule, since I did not accept life without a rule and yet would not accept a rule from anyone else."
When I write this, it sounds simplistic. But surely someone has concluded just the opposite from this book. After all, the characters who set out to make their own rules also make a mess of it. There isn't a moral here: the book's a Rorschach test.
The best characters in the book are largely in the wings (my personal favorites are old La Perouse and young Armand Vedel. Armand, the pastor's son, always ironic and attempting wickedness in his hatred of a hypocritical virtue, feeling only hypocritically vicious. He's a hipster with a heart, probably, down there at the bottom. La Perouse is a despairing maltheist: "the devil and God are one and the same; they work together. We try to believe that everything bad on earth comes from the devil, but it’s because, if we didn’t, we should never find strength to forgive God. He plays with us like a cat, tormenting a mouse. . . . And then afterwards he wants us to be grateful to him as well. Grateful for what? for what? . . . ")