Gide, Wilde, and the Death of the Novel

Gide’s only novel, Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925), ends with a bang—almost: little Boris, the troubled illegitimate grandson of the piano teacher La Pérouse, shoots himself in the head in front of the classroom in an initiation ritual forced upon him by a group of his pernicious classmates.¹ Though Boris dies, the tragedy itself echoes for a few more pages. As with every event in Gide’s novel, the question of how to represent it—or whether such an inexplicable event can even be represented—subsumes the act itself. Édouard, the author in Les Faux-Monnayeurs writing his own novel, Les Faux-Monnayeurs, decides to exclude Boris’s death from his version:

Without exactly pretending to explain anything, I should not like to put forward any fact which was not accounted for by a sufficiency of motive. And for that reason I shall not make use of little Boris’s suicide for my Counterfeiters; I have too much difficulty in understanding it. And then, I dislike “faits divers.” There is something peremptory, irrefutable, brutal, outrageously real about them. . . . I accept reality coming as a proof in support of my thought, but not as preceding it.

(394 trans. modified)

Édouard’s hesitation centers on the difficulty in “understanding” or “explaining” this act without apparent “motive.” But for Gide the motiveless act—or acte gratuit—signifies the ultimate pleasure fiction offers, since it couples the desire for representation with the resistance to explanation, the very limits of the literary. The ambivalence resides in the act itself, a forced suicide, which Gide registers doubly by countering his narration of Boris’s death with Édouard’s theoretical refusal.

By placing this “outrageously real” event in his own novel, Gide tries to have it both ways: he simultaneously represents and refuses to represent reality in the form of Boris’s death. This paradox provides the theme as well as the structure of both authors’ Faux-Monnayeurs: to paraphrase Édouard, the opposition of reality and the representation we make of it. Gide develops this paradox from the outrageous claim made by his old friend, Oscar Wilde, “life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” In the Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs (1926), Gide writes: “I stick to Wilde’s paradox: nature imitates art. The artist’s rule should be never to restrict himself to what nature proposes, but to propose nothing to nature but what nature can and should shortly imitate” (416, trans. modified).

The form of Les Faux-Monnayeurs and the accompanying Journal pay tribute to Wilde’s blurring of the boundaries of art and life. In the novel, Gide follows the struggle of an author named Édouard as he tries to write a novel called Les Faux-Monnayeurs based on the events happening in his life. Excerpts from Édouard’s journal, commenting on his writing process, are interspersed throughout the novel. Gide’s publication a year later of his own journal, which contains many similar remarks and ideas to what we find in Édouard’s novelized journal, heightens the ambiguity between novelist and character; it becomes impossible to distinguish Gide’s and Édouard’s aesthetics, though Gide can remain always one step ahead of any criticism due to the subtle differences between the two authors. The Journal might be Gide’s cleverest homage to Wilde since Gide continually marks the differences between his novel and his life in the entries, as if to assure himself which author is indeed himself.

Édouard’s ambivalence (and Gide’s ambiguity) at the end of Les Faux-Monnayeurs is not a literary impasse, but rather an entry point through which we can understand his dismantling of the form of the novel. To appreciate fully the critical importance of this moment of indecision, we must read Gide’s experimental novel as a working-through of the personal and aesthetic impact Oscar Wilde had on Gide. I propose to follow the circuitous paths, both biographical and literary—where life imitates art—to show how Gide tries to surpass Wilde’s already outrageous aesthetics. Boris’s death comes to figure the complication of Wilde’s...