Gide ou l'identité en question by Jean-Michel Wittmann (review)

The theme of this collection, derived from a conference in 2015, promises both to use contemporary issues of 'identité' to inform the study of André Gide's work, and conversely to demonstrate the continuing relevance of his work in the twenty-first century. This is an important task with regard to an author whose popularity has declined so far since his apogee as the 'contemporain capital' of French society in the 1920s. Jean-Michel Wittmann's Introduction presents 'identité' as a concept produced by the social sciences, built on the literary and psychological category of 'le moi' (a traditional focus of studies of Gide), but broader in its implications and perhaps now surpassing it. The social sciences have 'pens[é] la construction de l'identité individuelle dans son rapport avec l'appartenance à une collectivité, c'est-à-dire en prenant en compte le contexte et les mécanismes sociaux engagés par ce processus de construction' (p. 7). Wittmann does not explicitly take this discussion into the domain of 'identity politics', but his reference to a growth of communitarianism in France — more belatedly and contentiously than in the UK and US — is a step in this direction. In practice, the papers in the collection centre on Gide's formation of his own 'représentation individuelle' as an author by means of various forms of otherness, and his relationship with several specific 'collectivités'. These relationships are inevitably complex in Gide's case, owing to the high value that he places on individualism. The volume contains four parts, summarized here non-exhaustively. Part One returns to the traditional topic of 'le moi', including detailed studies of Gide's figuration of the self as fluid by David Walker, and of the deployment of Gide's Protean self across the fictional world of Les Caves du Vatican by the late Alain Goulet. Part Two focuses on Gide's construction of his own authorial image, as a translator (Patrick Pollard), a pianist (Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre), a prolific correspondent (Peter Schnyder), and in his leadership of the Nouvelle Revue française (Maaike Koffeman). Part Three is the section most clearly aligned with the collection's theme: Ryo Morii presents Gide's early works in the context of contemporary notions of 'solidarité' between individual and community; Wittmann examines the several implicated group identities in the École des femmes trilogy (Judaism, homosexuality, feminism, nationalism); and Frank Lestringant gives a long, insightful treatment of Gide's numerous encounters with Judaism (and the uncomfortable but important question of Gide's anti-Semitism). Part Four has a vague theme of 'Gide à l'étranger', and includes excellent papers by Pierre Masson on Gide's attitude towards Arab culture and peoples, by Maja Vukušić Zorica on Gide's writing on the USSR, and by Marit Karelson on the perception of Gide by the Estonian writer Johannes Semper, himself a 'contemporain capital' in his own country. The collection as a whole makes a major contribution to Gide studies, and those several papers that virtually abandon the concept of 'identité' are not necessarily any less interesting for it.