Hospitality Gone Awry in Gide's La Symphonie Pastorale

Critics of André Gide's La Symphonie pastorale (1919) have grappled with the Pastor's ostensibly benevolent but immoral conduct. More than his ambiguous conduct, what makes this short novel interesting is how it is mediated in the narrative. Questioning the Pastor's belated prise de conscience, Brée writes that "Un être humain ne peut pousser l'inconscience au delà d'un certain point, et l'intention de l'auteur [. . .] amincit le personnage et pousse le récit vers l'invraisemblance" (249-50). Other critics have examined the Pastor's unreliability as narrator. According to Babcock, the novel is a self-conscious fiction, and the Pastor "a creator of fictions" (65). Further, the Pastor "[is] not [. . .] completely accurate about his comprehension of events: he understands more than he says as he writes the first book" (68). On the other hand, based on the complex chronology of the narrative, Booker draws a fine distinction between the Pastor's conscious and subconscious awareness of the events he describes (164).

While these studies focus largely on the Pastor, in this essay, I propose to examine the notion of hospitality, an important aspect that involves all the main characters, but has eluded critical attention. After preliminary observations on the Pastor's portrayal of himself as compassionate as opposed to others, particularly his wife, Amélie, I will discuss the dialectic of light and darkness, and sight and blindness, the centerpiece of the relationship between the host and the guest in the novel. The essay will show that the Pastor's exclusive control of vision and the power associated with it result in the perversion of hospitality. In the concluding section, I discuss the diary as a medium of self-hosting that leads to the Pastor's self-awareness.

From the adoption and education of a blind girl by the Pastor to her seduction and death, the notion of hospitality and its perversion pervade La Symphonie.¹ The Pastor's hospitality goes awry as compassion turns into passion. Hospitality, which necessarily involves an intersubjective relationship, is founded on equality and reciprocity between the host and the guest as the word hôte, used for both, suggests.

In La Symphonie, the Pastor comes across as compassionate toward and respectful of Gertrude when he portrays others, Amélie in particular, as insensitive toward her. When Gertrude's neighbor suggests that she be placed in a hospice, the Pastor says he is shocked, "soucieux du chagrin que ces brutales paroles pourrait lui causer [à Gertrude]" (15). When Amélie objects to his decision to bring Gertrude home unmindful of the family's circumstances (they have five children including an infant), he justifies his action alluding to the parable of the Lost Sheep (22, 40-41), which, in essence, is about giving hospitality to the one who is estranged, the Other. Likewise, when Amélie is critical of the Pastor taking Gertrude to the concert in Neuchâtel, and for not doing as much for his children as for Gertrude, he cites the parable of the Prodigal Son to defend himself: "l'on fête l'enfant qui revient, mais non point ceux qui sont demeurés" (61).² Throughout the narrative, the Pastor's rhetorical strategy is to show that, whereas Amélie's arguments are mundane, he "obéit à une éthique supérieure" (Goulet 47-48). Goulet writes that the Pastor, recognizing Amélie as his strongest opponent, "tente de se débarrasser du point de vue d'Amélie en s'affirmant serviteur de Dieu" (46). He thus portrays Amélie as inhospitable and himself as empathetic toward Gertrude.

In La Symphonie, respecting the guest's identity and selfhood acquires greater importance because of her blindness. In Totalité et infini, Levinas writes that hospitality begins with welcoming the Other, and the Other's face is the primary locus of the act of welcoming (334). For Levinas, "Le visage parle. La manifestaion du visage est déjà discours" (61). The word visage is derived from the Latin visus which means "action de voir, sens de vue, vue, vision" (Baumgartner and Ménard...