Play and crime in L'Immoraliste and Les Caves du Vatican by André Gide

• Main Author: Rowswell, Kathryn Joan
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2011
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/36920

For this Master’s thesis, the initial problematic asks how André Gide reconciles the concepts of ethics and authenticity in two of his early twentieth century works: L’Immoraliste (1902) and Les Caves du Vatican (1914). In a letter dated the 6th of June 1911, Gide wrote to his friend Jean Schlumberger “Si quelque jour je peux raconter ce passage quasi insensible du jeu au crime, ce sera mon plus beau livre.” Play and crime are recurring themes in Gide’s works and serve a role that on a thematic and structural plane are both ethical and aesthetic. In addition to this ethico-aesthetic interaction, the idea of a passage quasi insensible constitutes an important aspect of my argument. This passage between game and crime represents an act of ethical transgression implicit in the aesthetic construction of the work of art. Returning to my initial problematic, Michel (L’Immoraliste) and Lafcadio (Les Caves du Vatican) attempt to cultivate a play-mood representative of the endeavor to cultivate one’s être authentique in the face of the dominating social ethic. In short, Lafcadio and Michel believe themselves capable of affirming their true selves simply by transgressing this socio-ethic. This desire to transgress the collective ethic results in a state of impasse experienced by the protagonists at the end of each text. There is a discursive structure implicit in the two texts: the ethical space regulated by what Michel Foucault terms the “juridico-discursive” model of power and the ludic space governed by the desire to affirm one’s authentic self. These two spheres overlap to create a third space – that of transgression or crime. It is precisely this trangressive passage from the play sphere towards that of collective ethics that constitutes this passage quasi insensible that Gide mentions in his correspondence and what in this thesis is termed a poetics of transgression.