The Immoralist

In 1921, Andre Gide published “The Immoralist” in Paris (translated from French by Dorothy Bussy). Gide examines the strength of the obligations put upon us by family and society to study culture persistently, maintain a steady occupation, develop a stable marriage, and become responsible

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citizens. This process takes dedication and self-sacrifice that offers only minimal individual satisfaction.

It may take a life-threatening illness to show someone that his responsible life is an unfulfilling pose compared to his idealized life filled with unbounded and intense desires. Recovery from an illness causes a person to take a new interest in the basic sensuality of life.

If society’s moral code prevents the expression of the person’s new found life joy, then he may become an immoralist. At first, the transition is a slow struggle that can lead to agonizing self-doubt. But once the free expression of desires occurs, the person discovers, at last, his “special value.” His prior responsibility and self-sacrifice were characteristics that obscured his reason for living. The main character, Michel understands his driving force is “a kind of stubborn perseverance in evil.”

The appreciation of art once satisfied Michel’s driving force and he felt harmony with its symbolic presentations. When sensuality becomes his obsession, Michel does not know “what mysterious God” he serves. He wants personal experiences of unimagined forms of beauty, and he wants them immediately.

You can experience your own moral dilemma as your read, “The Immoralist” and gain some insight into the consequences of breaking the bonds of duty and sacrifice. One of the most poignant lines in literature is spoken by Michel’s dying wife as he leaves their hotel room in pursuit of his hedonistic desires. Close to death she speaks softly.
“Oh, you can wait a little longer, can’t you?”

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Michel travels with his new wife to the desert of Tunisia, though he falls ill with tuberculosis, and must slowly recover before he can travel home to France and continue his life as a scholar. However, during his convalescence, he discovers a new appreciation for life, and decides to restructure

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his existence to live for the present, not for the past.

Gide's novel caused an outrage when it was published in 1902; now, it is possible to read it without the sense of world-upheaval that the intelligentsia a hundred years ago might have felt, and instead appreciate it for what it is: a marvellously poetic look at the meaning of life for a man confused by his place in the world, who had never before stopped to consider what he wanted from the world.

There are clear threads of homosexuality and even what we would now consider paedophilia, but to concentrate on these two aspects would, essentially, to be missing the point. For me, the point of this novel is the examination of change in man, and how, though we are always changing unconsciously, when we try to affect a change in our lives, we meet the severest resistance, both internally and externally.

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Interesting look of total 'liberation' and its costs. Narrator varied wildly between fascinating and wholly repulsing. Back in its day, it might have been revolutionary. Now it has not aged well.

I have just finished reading Andre Gide's The Immoralist. From the get go, let me get this out of the way, it wasn't at all what I expected. I was expecting scandal, complete debauchery...that sort of thing. Oh my friends and o my foes, it ain't here. Yes,Michel, our hero, or anti-hero might be

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more to the point, eschews social convention but only to the extent that he spends his evening carousing with the poor and the labourers. Oh, and he kisses a coachman. One might infer that in these carousings, at least in the latter ones some sexual encounters occur, but, except for in one case in which he spends the night with the mistress of the young man who travels with him and his wife, there is not much even to suggest sexual corruption. I must be confusing this book with another one.

None of this is to say that I felt those things wanting in the book, but when one has heard for years about the shocking nature of a book, then one does expect to have at least a little jolt. Michel recounts to three of his closest friends his egoistic pursuit of unsavory pleasure and the deadly toll that this takes on his wife's precarious health. She suffers from tuberculosis; she had two years before nursed him through a near deadly bout with the disease. Michel is at first puzzled by his appetites for the corrupt and unsanctioned and, especially, by his attraction to the African adolescent he mets while an invalid in North Africa.
He rationalizes his passionate admiration of their beauty as a longing for their youthful health. Returning to France he encounters a friend who encourages him to live without regard to conventions, without regret nad makes him question his "hearthside happiness with his wife Marceline. Michel begins to embrace his passion for the seamy and corrupt and even, at times, criminal.

Despite his headlong run with egoism, Michel is a not unlikeable character. The fact that he is in many ways a self portrait of Gide himself probably accounts for this. Gide had among his many gifts a gift for friendship. Michel wife's eventual death weakens him and sends on some counter soul searching, the resolution, of which is not at all clear, true to Gidean form. This is Gide's usual theme played out with sensitivity, sincerity and a touch of wistful irony. Sincerity and irony? Well, yes. Gide would spend a lifetime trying to sort out his preoccupation with the need to lead an authentic, unfettered existence and the equal need to live with a sense of Christian charity. The id and super ego battle it out again, but the battle is on a battle field as lyricaly sensuous as any.

Rather famously noted for its Nietzschean and Freudian influences, it is actually more concurrent with Nietzschean
than influenced by him. Gide's journals note that it was only after being well into the book that Gide read Nietzsche
and was delighted to find the ideas he was attempting to develop elsewhere expounded. Nietzsche seems to have been more of a bolster than influence.

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A story powerful in its subversiveness, one that gets under the reader's skin, touching the reader at their most vulnerable: it is a crash course in the non-normative sexual experience that is far ahead of its time.

Read in Grenoble in 1965. One of the books which shaped my late adolescent thinking. Juar re-read: amazing "palimpsestic" experience, to allude to one famous passage. This is what I thought literature was about, was for.

A lovely book, short and easy to read.

A quick read, strange and fascinating, and built to be read in one sitting. Gide's world is both frightening and entralling, built from characters who are too easily imagined as real. Worth reading.

Apparently starring Oscar Wilde? This looks dope.

An odd book in some ways - it is almost entirely told as a first person narrative about a man Michel who almost dies and in his recovery, becomes "reborn" in a way but lost in another way. This novella doesn't feel dated (with the exception that it is now rare for people to contract tuberculosis),

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and perhaps the new translation has something to do with that...

I don't know if this is considered to be existentialist, but Michel goes from being a student of languages and history to someone primarily concerned with sensations and feelings of the present. For example, he says "I was not thinking about anything. Why bother to have thoughts? I felt extraordinarily good." and then later: "The history of the past now appeared to my eyes to be this immobile, terrifying fixity of the night shadows in the little court in Biskra. It was like the immobility of death. In the past I was pleased with this rigidity which provided precision for my mind."

For a while it seems like things will work out well, but once he and Marceline leave the farm in Normandy, things just go downhill. They lose their first baby, and then Marceline becomes ill. It seems like he becomes more and more lost as she becomes sicker and sicker. After her death, he finds "Something in my will has been broken." I see Marceline as being almost the physical manifestation of Michel's soul...

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I recently watched Anderson Cooper's segment on 60 Minutes about Mindfulness, which Wikipedia defines as "the intentional, accepting and non-judgmental focus of one's attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment." Gide, who died in 1951, had never heard of

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Mindfulness. But you would have never known it.

Gide's descriptive writing is scaled back and simple to read. I don't think he intended to craft a suspenseful plot, nor a successful love story, nor especially a sympathetic protagonist. For me more than anything The Immoralist is Gide's meditation on, and exploration of, Mindfulness. Michel, his budding, pedophiliac protagonist (a double-adjectival term I've thus far created and designated for Humbert Humbert and Michel), slowly discovers his sickening inner life. But sometime after Michel thoughtlessly bought young Arab boys' company for a few sous, and sometime before he institutionalizes his favorites as part of his personal retainer, he came to accept what we now call Mindfulness, in which "the layers of acquired knowledge peel away from the mind like a cosmetic and reveal, in patches, the naked flesh beneath, the authentic being hidden there."

I've never been one to complain about a healthy, wild, insight-ridden hedonistic romp. However, I didn't find Gide's burning introspection captivating enough to make up for his otherwise relatively sparse novel. Worthwhile to read, nonetheless.

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One of those books that I thought I had to read growing up, but was then somewhat disappointed with upon actually opening it. Perhaps because of the translation I read...

A story powerful in its subversiveness, one that gets under the reader's skin, touching the reader at their most vulnerable: it is a crash course in the non-normative sexual experience that is far ahead of its time.

A hundred and ten odd years have turned this novel limp for modern readers. The questions about personal freedom and how to pursue it best have resolved themselves.
Nonetheless, a good quick read that casts light on its time.

After a brush with death, Michel looks for purpose in a life of indulgence. Chasing meaningful experiences he uncovers his latent homosexuality and is attracted by more unsavory characters. I liked the first part of the book, where Michel under the care of his wife rediscovers his zest of life and

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is attracted by youth and health in the form of the young boys that visit their home. I had a harder time understanding his escapades in the later chapters.

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This was one of the first pieces of French literature that I read.

Gide's writing is very atmospheric and sensual (sensual as in it engages with your senses, and sensual as in sexy). The protagonist in this little book is not a very good person - newly married, he travels to Africa and, upon meeting

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some of the young men, begins to explore his sexuality.

I really liked this book. I like amoral characters, I like moral ambiguity, I like reading books about bad people doing questionable things. The only problem I believe I had with this book is that the female character in it feels a little bit arbitrary.

But the atmosphere is lovely, Gide uses metaphor really well and it makes for a hedonistic novel. c:

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Well, I liked this more than I thought I would, and more than everyone else seems to. Gide's style here is glorious. Like Larbaud, the prose is perfectly clear, a little elegiac, but also as precise as possible. Gide's tale is simple, but thought-provoking: you could read this as a celebration of

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Nietzschean uber-menschdom, but only if you're more or less an inhuman prick; you could read it as a plea for repression and moralistic priggery, but only if, again, you're an inhuman prick. On the other hand, Gide makes a strong case for both: Michel is miserable as he is (i.e., repressed and oppressed), but also miserable as a completely 'free' immoralist. There's no particularly good answer here, but the novel is extremely well put together.

Also, fun form: a letter written by one friend to another friend recounting the story told in person to the writer by a mutual friend. It works surprisingly well.

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After recovering from an illness, a man decides to live his life without being held back by society's morals or conventions.

What must have been shocking when written seemed only mildly risque to me now.

The part I found the most odd was how his wife kept hanging out with local children and then

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bringing them home to entertain them. I read her intentions as pure (she likes children and does not have any of her own yet), but kept thinking WOW that would not happen today.

I enjoyed the writing style and the philosophical debates about life and how to live it.

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Largely due to the passage of time and the evolution of public morals, this book is no longer the boundary breaking work it was on its publication in 1902. Still well written and interesting it no longer has the power to make it a memorable read.

Reason Read: Reading 1001, randomizer pick for June 2023.
Written in 1902. French author, translated by David Watson, 2000
1947 Nobel Prize in Literature.

This is a short work about a man named Michel who systematically ruins his life. A self absorbed person who is never content with life and has to

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find a way to move on. I am grateful that this is a short book. It is not my favorite. Rated it a C

I agree that the debauchery is handled tastefully which I appreciated. We the reader get the point. And it is about more than homosexuality it also includes pederasty. "As a self-professed pederast, he used his writing to explore his struggle to be fully oneself, including owning one's sexual nature, without betraying one's values." I don't fully agree that the author kept himself out of the book, but in this book he did explore what happens when one betrays his values.

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While I was initially excited by the premise of the book, it was very slow paced. It ended up being more just slow ramblings of an old man and not important life lessons he learned or the friendships he made along the way.

This story of the Immoralist is narrated to a select group of his old friends, who come at the request of the epoymous protagonist to his self appointed place of exile in North Africa. They find him dejected and really out of sorts, and he explains the story of what led him to be here, which spans

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an interval of time over which they have largely lost touch with him. In the final pages, following his tale, one of them sums up their feelings, which capture the unease that is likely to take hold of the reader: ”Our not having known at what point to condemn it in the course of his long explanation seemed almost to make us his accomplices. We felt, as it were, involved.”
The story itself, without going into any detail of the plot, centres on the Frenchman Michel. After recovering from a life threatening illness that he discovers on his honeymoon, he becomes extra alert to the pleasures of his senses, and veers off onto a path of hedonism at the expense of his new wife. While no single action here is really shocking in itself, and seems understandable based on Michel's point of view, it is the sum total that become unsettling, and perhaps more so the attitude or thoughts of Michel that drive his behaviour. He becomes detatched in some way from the world and society, but not in the sense that the existentialists do - yet it produces a similar sense of unease. The difference is perhaps that existentialist unease in some cases is due to feeling at odds with, or sick due to the senses (Satre's Nausea), of sometimes too much moral self reflection (Kierkegaard), and alienation from others (Sartre again, and Camus), while in this case Michel slips into a world subject to the senses and detatched from moral self reflection. Having said that, though much of his enjoyment revolves around others, his superficial appreciation of them more as unknowable objects in some sense, does however share some aspects with existentialism.
This is a very distinctive work, and though the story in itself is not of the kind that makes a page-turner, it leaves a lasting impression due to the reasons above, and also the atmosphere of some localations. It is also not at all difficult to read, and is somewhere between a novella and a novel in length at under 160 pages. Though it might be considered by some a classic due to there not being anything else quite like this, that I am aware of, I did not enjoy it as much as the novella length works by Camus or other French writers with whom Gide might be compared.

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One of Andre Gide's masterpieces (along with The Counterfeiters), this is a psychological portrayal of a young man who attempts to deal with his feelings and values. Michel lives life in a unique way with a measure of languorous sensuality in his attmpt to achieve happiness. Gide was influenced by

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Nietzsche and Freud which shows in the actions and thoughts of his protagonist. One of the books that I have known and returned to over the years. The last time that I read it I found that it complemented a concurrent reading of Mann's Death in Venice.

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The start of this book is somewhat absurd:
Preface: I wrote this book, and offer it for what it's worth;
Letter: Dear brother, please find attached my account of visiting Michel in Tunisia;
Account of Tunisia: I'm writing to you from Tunisia, where it's sunny. Here's what Michel said;
What Michel said:

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The actual story.

The absurd thing about this is that all this framing adds nothing. Somehow it was necessary for the author to distance himself not just once, with a narrator, or twice with a narrator writing down someone's story, but three times with a narrator recounting how he previously wrote down someone's story. And then the author sticks a preface in front of it saying that his book tries to prove nothing, just in case you weren't distanced enough.

And, this is exactly how I feel about this book - distanced. There are a few passages where the story was allowed to unfold, but mostly Michel just described how tormented he was about how he thought and felt about things - getting sick, managing a farm, Parisian society, having a sick wife. I believe the value of a novel as opposed to a work of philosophy is to allow the reader to experience or observe behaviour and emotions, rather than simply be exposed to ideas. This novel does the latter and suffers for it.

I also found that although I know it was a different time, I found many of the choices made by Michel frustrating. He seems too willing to sacrifice others for his own fulfilment, regardless of whether it might be entirely necessary. Maybe at the time it was necessary to say "I must be free regardless of who I harm in doing so" but today I'm much more interested in the question of "How can I be free and allow others to live and be free as well?" Michel certainly doesn't entertain this question.

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