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SIX MONTHS AFTER announcing his break with the N.R.F. in the pages of Le Figaro, Gide began writing a column entitled “Interviews imaginaires” for that mainstream newspaper’s literary supplement.1 Running from November 1941 through June 1942, this series of conversations between Gide and a fictitious interlocutor ostensibly deals only with linguistic and literary issues.2 Beneath the surface, however, these essays convey a message of political opposition : “cutting the most mockingly habile arabesques on the thinnest of political ice,” says George Painter, the “Interviews” “sustain a brilliantly ramified and prolonged double entendre on the opposition between the French spirit and the banal infamy of Pétainism” (126). Relying on a system of cross-references like that of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, Gide criticizes the occupier and Vichy government and offers tacit encouragement to resist. Arguing in favor of individualism , discipline, and prudence, and against the passive acceptance of totalitarianism , Gide seeks primarily to foster intellectual opposition. Nevertheless, he leaves open the possibility of interpreting his essays as a call for more active forms of resistance. With these quietly patriotic essays, Gide attempts to distance himself from his earlier expressions of ambivalence and continues the political repositioning that began with his attack on Chardonne. This chapter begins by examining Gide’s strategies for outwitting Vichy censors, then explores the political connotations with which Gide invested his remarks on grammar, vocabulary, and literary genre. An analysis of the essays’ intertextual code focuses on Gide’s use of literary quotes and allusions to criticize Vichy and praise resistance efforts; it then examines the ways in which these same literary allusions allowed Gide to revise his earlier positions and distance himself from the Journal excerpts he had published in Drieu La Rochelle’s Nouvelle Revue Française. 61 THREE Coded Messages The “Interviews imaginaires” WRITING BETWEEN THE LINES Calling attention to the limitations on free expression in Vichy France, the foreword to Attendu que . . . , the 1943 compilation of “Interviews imaginaires ” published in liberated Algiers, explains that the volume reinstates certain censored phrases, especially the names of Jewish thinkers Heinrich Heine and Albert Einstein (AQ 9).3 While some overtly political passages were indeed stricken by the censor, the number of cuts is in fact surprisingly small. Gide’s extensive self-censorship—often guided by the advice of friends like Roger Martin du Gard—accounts in part for the relative absence of censor ’s cuts. Gide also enjoyed the active support of Le Figaro’s editor Pierre Brisson, who went to considerable lengths to publish Gide’s articles intact (CAG 6: 291).4 Furthermore, though Vichy censorship was often more stringent than that in German-occupied Paris, the censors in Lyon, Le Figaro’s wartime headquarters, were perhaps less rigorous than those in other parts of the unoccupied zone; in fact, Gide may even have benefited from the complicity of sympathetic censors (Lottman, Left 154; Beauce; Patri 1). At times, however, Gide expressed himself too bluntly for any censor— hostile or friendly—to pass his remarks. In January 1942, when Le Figaro began serializing Gide’s introduction to the 1942 Pléiade volume of Goethe’s dramatic works, Maria Van Rysselberghe reported that the censor had stricken two passages whose reference to current events was “highly transparent and unorthodox.”5 The censored passages concern Goethe’s attitude toward the Napoleonic conquests; their evocation of the “unified Europe” that “Napoleon was creating [. . .] by force of arms” quietly invites comparison with Hitler’s Europe (I.I. 99).6 Had the text passed the censor unscathed, this parallel would have been explicit: Gide pictures an accomodationist Goethe “accepting and celebrating a tyrannical power which left him full license to be a public figure and even enjoy certain prerogatives,” satisfied so long as his “freedom of thought and of expression of that thought” remained intact. Such acceptance was possible, Gide adds, because “[n]ot once was Goethe touched, as we are today, or at least as we were yesterday, by the shadow of fear that the very soil from which he sprang and on which his genius rested might tremble and disappear beneath him” (adapted from I.I. 99, italicized passages deleted).7 Elsewhere in the “Interviews,” Gide risked similarly overt allusions to wartime France; predictably, these comments also failed to pass the censor. In December 1941, the fictitious interviewer offers hope for the coming year, suggesting that reassuring gleams of light have begun to appear. Gide replies: “Are you thinking of those of Vichy...

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