Big Ironies with Musil, Roth, Mann, Tanizaki, and Gide - he says nothing but stupidities, speaking loudly, wrongly, and incessantly, all day long

Lately I have read a number of novels that depend on Big Historical Ironies.  The Big Irony is a big part of the point of the novel.  I mean “irony” in a simple sense – “I know, you know, the author knows, the characters do not know.”  As for “big,” I mean something like the line at the end of the last paragraph of The Man Without Qualities, the first volume published in 1930: “It was a fine day in August 1913” (tr. Sophie Wilkins).

The reader of September 1913, encountering that line in some other story, would not think much of it, but the reader of 1930, the Austrian reader, is immediately engulfed in a shadow that never lifts.  And Musil rubs it in, puffs it up.  Much of the action of the book takes place in a committee that is planning a jubilee celebration for the 75th year of the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph, in 1918.  The themes they pick are “Emperor of Peace” and the “Global Idea of Austria.”  Musil is not being subtle.  He wants Huge Irony.  The Biggest Irony.  He seems to want his reader to wince frequently.

Franz Joseph died in 1916, while the whole notion of an Emperor died in 1918.  There was also a major war.  The non-Austrian reader of 2020 may have to look up the former, but surely few readers pick up The Man Without Qualities who do not read “a fine day in August 1913” and think “Oh no.”

In The Radetzsky March (1932), Joseph Roth moves his cavalry officer protagonist to the frontier, right in the middle of the bloodlands, just in time for the war.  Occasionally, in a barracks scene, Roth notes that everyone in the room will be dead in a few months.  When war is declared, a bolt of lightning strikes the house where the officers are having a party.  Big, big, big irony, and no hiding it.

Thomas Mann began The Magic Mountain (1924) before the war.  The joke was on him, this time.  He did not know, and then he knew, and once he knew, there was really only one way for the novel to end.

I will save Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters (1946-8) for the next couple of days, but I am pretty sure that the same kind of Big Irony is at the center of that novel.  Look at those publication dates, then guess when it is set.

André Gide creates the same kind of effect in what passes for real life, in his Journal for summer 1914.  For context, first, The Vatican Basements has just been published, and Gide’s journals often take an odd turn post-book publication; second, Gide is realizing that his recent trip to Turkey was mere tourism and thus not going to give him anything to publish; and third, it is June 1914 and he reads the newspapers.  However, in the Journal he utterly suppresses #3 and writes extensively about his attempt to turn a foundling starling into a pet.

I had tried to put him in a cage, but he would die there; letting him have the freedom of the room, he dirties everything; within ten minutes, he leaves it does not matter where little liquid and corrosive droppings.  I give him bread crumbled in milk mixed with the yolk of a hard-boiled egg to eat, or some little earthworms, of which he is fond.  He flies form the table to my shoulder as soon as he sees me return.  (June 22, tr. mine, is it ever)

The experiment of keeping the starling in the house only lasts a couple of days.  On July 3, Jean T. arrives for a long visit.  He is a little boy who is related to Gide somehow.  Journal entries now alternate between the sparrow and the boy, who drives Uncle André insane.

I believe him to be intelligent; very intelligent even; but he says nothing but stupidities, speaking loudly, wrongly, and incessantly, all day long… (July 5)

All of this culminates in the amazing sitcom-like episode where little Jean the Menace locks Gide in the little aviary (July 8, a comic highlight).  I don’t know when Jean goes home.  The poor starling is finally “torn apart by the cats” on July 19.  Austria and Serbia mobilize for war on July 26, and the Journal shifts to a wartime footing, relieving my tension.  What was Gide supposed to do about the imminent war?  So he writes about his tame bird.  The war comes soon enough.

The octopus attacks - Hugo's uninterrupted mobilization of all the possible resources

Among the fine features of the recent Modern Library paperback of The Toilers of the Sea, the edition I read, are a selection of Victor Hugo’s watercolors, the ones which were illustrations not for the published book but for Hugo’s manuscript.  He pasted them in himself.  The friendly fellow on the left is acknowledging his creator with the V and H he is creating with his tentacles.  If that is hard to see, please visit the much larger version at 50 Watts, from whom I borrowed the picture.

  When God so wills it, He excels in the creation of the execrable.  Why He should have such a will is a question that troubles religious thinkers.  (II.4.ii, 349)

The chapter title is “The Monster,” the subject of which is described at length, and width and depth, too.  As impressive as the description is (“It looks like a rag of cloth, like a rolled-up umbrella without a handle”) Hugo has not convinced me that religious thinkers, pondering the existence of evil, have actually given all that much thought to the jolly, squashy octopus.  But in Toilers it is a physical embodiment of the evil of nature.  What an odd idea.

These creatures almost cause her [Philosophy] concern about the Creator.  They are hideous surprises.  They are the killjoys of the contemplator:  he observes them in dismay.  They are deliberately created forms of evil.  In face of these blasphemies of creation against itself what can be done?  Who can be blamed for them?  (354)

This is hardly Hugo’s only idea about the force or purposefulness of nature, though.  He has plenty of  ideas.  The novel’s hero, Gilliatt, once he has survived, through heroic effort, the great storm I mentioned a couple of days ago, insults nature:

Then, taking up in the hollow of his hand a little water from a pool of rainwater, he drank it and cried to the clouds: “Fooled you!”

… Gilliatt felt the immemorial need to insult an enemy that goes back to the heroes of Homer.  (343)

Hugo is clear enough about the tradition he wants to join.  Achilles merely battles and defeats a river in the Iliad; Hugo’s champion defeats the sea.

Hugo’s profligacy, of ideas, of images, and of himself, of his own massive personality, is fascinating but also maddening.  André Gide writes in his journal, developing a complaint about my nemesis Richard Strauss:

And same causes of shortcomings: lack of discretion of the means and monotony of the effects, annoying insistency, flagrant insincerity; uninterrupted mobilization of all the possible resources.  Likewise Hugo, likewise Wagner, when metaphors come to mind to express an idea, does not choose, does not spare us a single one.  Fundamental lack of artistry in all this.  (Journals, Volume I: 1889-1913, tr. Justin O’Brien, May 22, 1907, p. 213)

The octopus is a rag and an umbrella, a wheel and a harpoon, “spiderlike” and “chameleon-like,” a disease.  In a passage that approaches self-parody, Hugo lists every animal the octopus is not like:  “The whale is enormous, the devilfish is small; the hippopotamus is armor-plated, the devilfish is naked,” and on to the howler monkey, the vampire bat, the lammergeyer, and many more.  Inartistic, sometimes, yes, but it is still thrilling to watch Hugo perform his feats of superhuman literary endurance and strength, however preposterous.  Who else could have done them?

The Immoralist as spy novel – a misreading

Others criticized my method; those who complimented me were those who had understood me least. (The Immoralist, tr. R. Howard, 93)

The Immoralist is a tricky novel, easy to misread.  Minds greater than mine have mangled it every which way.  Whatever Sartre and Camus found in Gide’s novel is their business.  Their use of Gide may not tell us so much about the book Gide actually wrote, but they are artists, not critics.  Misreading, like reading, can be done well or badly.

I want to do some misreading myself.  From the first page on, I found hints of a sub-story in The Immoralist that I do not know how to fit into the rest of the book, that seems incidental, at best, to what the novel is really about.  But the theme kept popping up.

On the first page, the “written” narrator, the friend of Michel’s who takes down his story, is writing to his brother, a state official.  He is worried about Michel’s psychological crisis – the first-time reader, of course, knows nothing about the nature of the crisis.  The writer asks “How can a man like Michel serve the state?”  Sort of an odd question to ask about a close friend having a nervous breakdown, odder when we learn that, before and after his illness he was a classical scholar with an independent income.

In Paris, halfway through the book, Michel encounters another old friend, Ménalque, who works for the Colonial Ministry and disappears “for over a year at a time” on foreign expeditions.  He is also, and I will admit that the combination is perplexing, Oscar Wilde, the subject of “an absurd, a shameful, lawsuit with scandalous repercussions,” and a man who speaks only in irritating, “witty” aphorisms.  E.g., “You have to let other people be right.  It consoles them for not being anything else.”

Ménalque appears to understand Michel’s crisis and offers him, if not advice, then an example, although an example of what, I am unsure.  My greatest failure, I fear, reading The Immoralist, is integrating this character into my understanding of the novel.  I am brought up short by passages like this:

“Listen, I’m leaving Paris soon, but I’d like to see you again.  This time my trip will be longer and more dangerous than the others; I don’t know when I’ll be coming back.  I’m planning to start in two weeks; no one knows I’m leaving so soon – I’m telling you in confidence.”

(106)

His trip will take him, first, to Budapest, Rome, and Madrid, and then, who knows where; at least one previous trip was to Nepal, and he learned about Michel’s illness by chance while in Tunisia.

Ménalque – now the misreading really begins – Ménalque is a spy, a secret agent in the service of France.  Michel’s other college (or earlier?) friends, the ones who listen to his story, are also spies or foreign agents of some sort (page 4 - “Denis was in Greece, Daniel in Russia”)

The narrator asks his brother if, hearing the story, hearing about Michel’s cruelty, they have to reject his "capacities" as "useless."  Implicitly, one answer is “No,” his “capacities” are still “useful.”  Michel’s friends have actually gathered to survey the extent of the damage, and, if he is capable, to recruit him as a spy. 

What does all of this mean?  Why did Gide put it in his novel?  “How can a man like Michel serve the state?”  What am I supposed to do with that question?

More Gide – someday.  Tomorrow, on to other things, or the same thing, with a different book.

All of which was ridiculous, ridiculous - the trangressive Immoralist

The Immoralist’s life-threatening illness causes him to embrace the physical, sensual side of life.  A different character, in a different book, might engage in a series of sexual adventures, or experiment with narcotics, or, I don’t know, skydive or bungee jump or something.  By 1902, French literature was not exactly lacking transgressive models.  Michel seems to be unaware of them.

If only he had read Gautier or Baudelaire.  Michel’s new found sensuality does lead him to consummate his marriage with his wife – “It was on that night that I possessed Marceline.”  Not all that daring but a start, I guess.  He also shaves his beard, and “[i]n compensation, I let my hair grow.”  I am looking at page 59, irritated that it took me so long to pick up the clues.  Ah, the power of a narrator’s voice.  Michel, as a transgressor, as a wild man, is incompetent.

I can point to the exact moment, the page at least, where my irritation with The Immoralist dissipated, where my idea of the novel Gide was writing flipped.  Michel has returned to his Normandy farm, where he moons about the attractive peasant boys.  He begins to poach game with one of them.  Finally, a crime, something truly transgressive!

With what passion I continued poaching!

The only attention of which I was capable was that of my five senses.

But once night fell – and night, even at this season, fell quickly – that was our time, whose beauty I had never suspected until then; and I stole out of the house the way thieves steal in.

It was the truth: I despised my bed, and would have preferred the barn.  (scraps from 131-133)

The joke, though, and it’s an outstanding one, is that Michel is poaching his own game on his own land!  He’s not committing any sort of crime at all, but is rather playing at crime.  He even, in some sense, legitimizes the poachers.  Perhaps Gide is tweaking a metaphor – is property still theft when you give your property to thieves?

The consequences of mucking around in the business of the petty criminals has a whole series of consequences, each funnier than the next, “[a]ll of which was ridiculous, ridiculous.”  Michel and I agree on that point.

The entire episode is the comic high point of The Immoralist.  When Michel leaves his farm, the novel shifts into another mode, moving towards a climax that is not funny at all.  The ridiculous shifts to the tragic.  Michel finds something genuinely immoral that he can do.

The Immoralist is built out of a series of snares, each trapping the reader in a different but incomplete, even incorrect, interpretation of the novel.  Any reader is free to cheer on Michel’s immoralism.  “Go! Go!” cheers Dean Moriarty, waving his filthy bandaged thumb while listening to bebop.*  That reader is ignoring substantial parts of the novel in his hands, the novel Gide actually wrote.

* I’m referring to On the Road.  I may well completely misremember the scene.

The French are all lovers (the French are all crazy) - the carefully hidden homosexual subtext of The Immoralist

A young classics scholar, on his Tunisian honeymoon, is nearly killed by an attack of tuberculosis.  The illness leads him to rethink the meaning of life.  He concludes that the authentic life is the life of the body, not the mind; conventional society represses or destroys sensual life, or if it does not, is insufferably dull; and teenage Tunisian boys are highly attractive, as are certain strapping young Norman peasant lads.

Michel may or may not actually “conclude” that last item, although the reader of The Immoralist is left with no doubts.  The novel is a classic in the literature of homosexuality – this is virtually the only thing I knew about it before I read it – although the only homosexual act is here:

I stood up in the carriage to talk to the driver, a boy from Catania, lovely as a line of Theocritus, vivid, scented, savory as a fruit.

“Com’è bella la signora!” he said in a charming voice, watching Marcelline walk away.

“Anche tu sei bello, ragazzo,” I answered; and as I was leaning toward him, I couldn’t resist my impulse, and abruptly drawing him against me, kissed him.  He yielded with a laugh.  “I Francesi sono tutti amanti,” he said. (Howard trans., Modern Library, 154)

Michel and his wife are now near the end of the novel, back in Sicily, retracing their steps.  Sicily embodies classical ideals, including sexual freedom.  This one passage has enough ironies for today, doesn’t it?  Beginning with the sexual freedom of the Sicilian boy – the freedom to openly admire other men’s wives, and the freedom to mock amorous Frenchmen.

As blatant as this episode appears, it is possible that Michel is unaware of his homosexuality, that he is repressing it.  It is possible that he is perfectly aware of it.  Many possibilities exist:

• Despite his newfound impulse to the sensual life, Michel is repressing his true sexual desires, but inadvertently reveals them in his narration.  Typical unreliable narration.

• Michel means to hide his sexual inclinations, of which he is perfectly aware, from his friends, from the reader, but can’t help himself.  He is not repressed – he fails at repression.  He is exuberant.

• Michel is pretending to repress his homosexuality, and cannily reveals it to the friends listening to his story.

Gide’s frame, the fact that we are not reading Michel’s narration, but a later account of his narration, written by someone else, multiplies the interpretations: 

• Michel is cagey about his homosexuality, for whatever reason, repression or fear.  The writer detects Michel’s evasions and highlights them, or even exaggerates them, in the written text. 

• Michel is actually more explicit in his spoken account than in the text.  Perhaps that Sicilian kiss was not the end of the story.  The writer conceals Michel’s homosexuality, to protect him, or because the writer is himself sexually repressed.  He conceals Michel's inclinations poorly - on purpose, or not?

Straining the point, I could come up with a few more of these.  The frame is not incidental in The Immoralist.  It is an enormous complication.  Ignoring it is an error.

A final irony is that Michel’s homosexuality is not, within the ethics of the novel, very closely related to the “immoralism,” whatever that is, in the title.  Another little trick of Gide’s.

they are sweet, harsh; they quench your thirst - the prose of The Immoralist

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. – Humbert Humbert

HH is, as usual, incorrect.  Michel, the narrator of André Gide’s The Immoralist (1902), has a disappointingly plain style.  Or perhaps it is the style of his amanuensis that is so ordinary.  Regardless.  At the sentence level, The Immoralist is rarely too interesting.  I was hoping for - am always hoping for - something more like Flaubert or Proust.  Oh well.

Gide is working in his character’s voice, so he is working under a conceptual constraint.  The result is passages like this (which I am not saying is bad writing, not at all, but merely ordinarily good writing):

Numb with cold, I came out almost at once, stretched my body on the grass, in the sunlight.  There was a clump of mint growing nearby, the perfume overpowering.  I picked a stalk, crushed its leaves and rubbed them all over my body, damp but now incandescent with the sun’s heat.  I looked at myself a long time, without any more shame, with joy.  I judged myself not yet strong, but capable of strength, harmonious, sensual, almost beautiful.  (57)

Michel is recovering from a life-threatening illness, and has discovered his own physicality.  He decides to live, to really live!  One aspect of really living is to swim and sunbathe in the nude.  Not my point.  My point – the incident, the sensual mint-crushing, the sun worship, has its own interest, but the prose is nothing special – functional, unsurprising, only barely metaphorical.

It is also clear and light, which are virtues, but common ones.  Gide needs these qualities, though, to put some distance between the narrator and his story.  As I mentioned yesterday, Michel’s own telling is described as dispassionate.  I can imagine an ecstatic reading of the sun worship passage, like something out of D. H. Lawrence, but the straightforward language restrains the reader. Or restrained me, at least.

I would describe some dialogue-heavy sections of the novel as genuinely bad, but I’ll skip to a favorite paragraph, an exception, and one which, weirdly was quoted by Whispering Gums earlier today:

Olive groves, enormous carobs; in their shade, cyclamens; higher still, chestnut groves, cool air, alpine plants; lower down, lemon trees beside the sea.  They are set out in tiny, almost identical terraced gardens, shaped so by the slope of the terrain; a narrow path runs through the center from the highest point, all the way down; noiselessly you enter, like a thief.  You dream, under this green shade; the foliage is dense, heavy; not a single sunbeam penetrates unfiltered; like drops of thick wax, the lemons hang scented; in the shade they are white and greenish, they are within reach of the hand, of your thirst; they are sweet, harsh; they quench your thirst. (54)

The beginning is dry, an arborial topography, but then metaphors begin to intrude with the thief.  That fine last sentence, those drops of wax, is very much not the normal mode of The Immoralist.  Michel is in Sicily at this point, so the passage is suddenly loaded with associations, going back to the idyllic shepherds of Theocritus, and continuing through Goethe’s “Mignon” (“Knowst thou the land of flowering lemon trees?”) and Nerval’s “Delphica” ("Et les citrons amers où s'imprimaient tes dents?").  Gide crams the passage not just with imagery, but with literature.  Elsewhere in the novel, I find clear references to St. Augustine and W. G. Sebald.  I cannot be sure if the allusions are Michel’s or Gide’s.  This murderer’s style has its curlicues.

Next week I will make some attempt to describe what The Immoralist is about.  It is about more than one thing.

When it was night, Michel said - puzzling over The Immoralist

Now here’s something unusual for this Appreciationist, a novel I disliked from the first page and grew to despise as I read on.  It’s The Immoralist (1902), by André Gide, a great classic of something or another.  I could bury my hatchet in the book’s head, which would be good fun, but I want to spend more time with it, this week, and maybe part of next week – my vacation has kerfuddled the Wuthering Expectations schedule.

After giving the book some of that ol’ whaddayacallit – time, reflection, some simulation of thought – I discovered that Gide had bamboozled me.  I fell into every trap, into one copper-wire rabbit snare after another (that’s an actual detail from the novel, right there).  Well, I’m out now, I hope.

The novel begins with a letter to a “Président du Conseil” from his brother.  He is describing an encounter he and two friends had with the immmoralist of the title, Michel, an old school chum who has been ill and gone through a damaging philosophical transformation.  Michel has called his friends to Tunisia to make his confession, which makes up the rest of the short novel, a first person account that is, oddly, not written but spoken.  “When it was night, Michel said:” followed by 165 pages of uninterrupted story.  No digressions, no chronological missteps, no corrections.  Virtually no reference to the three auditors, his best friends.  Preposterous.

The narrator is a classics scholar of genius, we are told, the author, at the age of twenty, of a book titled Essay on Phrygian Religious Customs.  So perhaps I can just barely swallow his unlikely control over his own material, over the course of the hours of his monologue, told “without an inflection or a gesture to reveal that any emotion whatever disturbed him” (169).  But what, then, of the recounting of conversations, typically novelistic stuff like:

“But we’ll see each other again before that,” I said, rather surprised. (106)

or, for that matter, the chapter breaks?

I was reading a written text that sounded like one, not like speech, however rarefied.  But in the world of the novel, it is, in fact, also a piece of writing, written by the author of the letter that begins the novel.

I send you this account, then, as Denis, Daniel and I heard it.  Michel delivered it on his terrace, where we were stretched out near him in darkness, under the bright stars.  By the time he had finished, day had broken over the plain.

This is on page 5, and contains a lot of information for the reader alert enough to notice it.  The text of The Immoralist is not the spoken confession of a disturbed genius, but a later transcription by someone else entirely, written to be sent to a Président du Conseil.

This is all awfully complicated, isn’t it?  Changing almost nothing, Gide could have simply made the novel a fictional memoir, written by Michel, to be published or perhaps written for private purposes, to justify his actions to himself.  What is all of this clumsy framing for?  One possibility is that Gide is incompetent, technically inept.  If not, we have a puzzle to solve.  (Preview:  not incompetent).

One might argue that, resistant to Novels of Ideas, I respond by turning them into aestheticized puzzle books, regardless of what they actually are.  One might be right.  But The Immoralist is a tricky puzzle book, a parody of a Novel of Ideas, a snare.

Page numbers refer to the admirable Modern Library edition, which contains the admirable Richard Howard translation.