writing
The Immoralist
. They were contemporaries – but it took Gide another thirty years to acquire Conrad’s insight.
In
The Immoralist
, the moral conflict is enacted entirely between the husband Michel and the wife Marceline. The novel trembles with her unspoken reproaches and with his pride and shame when he discovers himself. Gide sees no other conflict.
85
‘Nietzsche’s small change’ says the
Encyclopédie Universalis
contemptuously of
The Immoralist
.
Gide read Nietzsche, mad with jealousy at finding in him ‘all his most secret thoughts’. An enormous Nietzsche moustache grew on Menalces’ face, which had previously looked like Oscar Wilde’s. It becomes a ‘pirate face’ and is given the famous Nietzschean gaze: ‘a cold flame indicating more courage and determination than goodness.’
Gide, Saint-Exupéry, Vieuchange and Eberhardt – they have all looked into that gaze. All of them dive in after Nietzsche’s small change.
The contempt, however, is unwarranted. Not until the vast wealth of high-flown rhetoric has been cashed into the ordinary small change of a household do we see what it really entails – for me, for you, for all of us.
86
So what was it actually all about?
Over the moonlit terraces, Meriem comes through the tremendous silence of the night, enveloped in a torn white haik.
‘I am the “beautiful dancer” Michel lives with,’ she says. ‘Though, of course, this is a prettified circumlocution. My little brother Ali and I are prostitutes.
‘Michel asks you: “Have I done wrong? How in that case did the wrong begin?”
‘I reply: the wrong Michel does is naturally not that he wants to be healthy or strong or free. Nor is it that he is homosexual – we North Africans have always taken a more humane view of love between people of the same sex than you in Europe.
‘What is shameful isn’t there – but in the occupation, which makes love into prostitution and shrouds its crimes in myth.
‘Maupassant saw my mother dancing in the Café Joie in Bou Saada. He was one of the first in Europe to spread the rumour about the wonderful wantonness of the Ouled Nail girls: they saved up their dowries by living life’s happy days in the brothels.
‘Similar legends are spread about the prostitutes inBangkok, for the same reason. Customers are given a moral alibi. The legends give an illusion of mutual desire to the exploitation of someone else’s poverty.
‘Isabelle Eberhardt was not deceived. In fortunate Bou Saada she wrote: “Never before have I been so well aware as here of the weight that hangs over all the occupied areas.”
‘Bou Saada had quite simply had the misfortune to be the first of the Saharan oases to be conquered by the French. After the conquest, the Ouled Nail tribe continued their resistance for another twenty years. When at last it ceased, the tribe was impoverished and their social network torn apart. War and occupation had led to social anarchy. With the misery also came prostitution, first around the garrisons, then around the tourist hotels.
‘When the same thing occurred later in other oases, the legend had already made “Ouled Nail” into a brand name, used by all prostitutes regardless of which tribe they really came from. Many were children, who themselves had been led to believe the myth with which some of the greatest of Europe’s writers marketed them.
‘Michel’s liberation presumes children “far too young, don’t you think, to know anything about love?” It presumes child prostitution. That is the fundamental moral problem which is never put into words in
The Immoralist
.
‘When my income is insufficient to support the family, my little brother Ali will have to let foreign gentlemen fuck his backside for money. That’s what it is about. The rest is romanticism.’
87
‘The journey is a door through which one goes out of the known reality and steps into another, unexplored reality, resembling a dream,’ Maupassant writes
The Immoralist
. They were contemporaries – but it took Gide another thirty years to acquire Conrad’s insight.
In
The Immoralist
, the moral conflict is enacted entirely between the husband Michel and the wife Marceline. The novel trembles with her unspoken reproaches and with his pride and shame when he discovers himself. Gide sees no other conflict.
85
‘Nietzsche’s small change’ says the
Encyclopédie Universalis
contemptuously of
The Immoralist
.
Gide read Nietzsche, mad with jealousy at finding in him ‘all his most secret thoughts’. An enormous Nietzsche moustache grew on Menalces’ face, which had previously looked like Oscar Wilde’s. It becomes a ‘pirate face’ and is given the famous Nietzschean gaze: ‘a cold flame indicating more courage and determination than goodness.’
Gide, Saint-Exupéry, Vieuchange and Eberhardt – they have all looked into that gaze. All of them dive in after Nietzsche’s small change.
The contempt, however, is unwarranted. Not until the vast wealth of high-flown rhetoric has been cashed into the ordinary small change of a household do we see what it really entails – for me, for you, for all of us.
86
So what was it actually all about?
Over the moonlit terraces, Meriem comes through the tremendous silence of the night, enveloped in a torn white haik.
‘I am the “beautiful dancer” Michel lives with,’ she says. ‘Though, of course, this is a prettified circumlocution. My little brother Ali and I are prostitutes.
‘Michel asks you: “Have I done wrong? How in that case did the wrong begin?”
‘I reply: the wrong Michel does is naturally not that he wants to be healthy or strong or free. Nor is it that he is homosexual – we North Africans have always taken a more humane view of love between people of the same sex than you in Europe.
‘What is shameful isn’t there – but in the occupation, which makes love into prostitution and shrouds its crimes in myth.
‘Maupassant saw my mother dancing in the Café Joie in Bou Saada. He was one of the first in Europe to spread the rumour about the wonderful wantonness of the Ouled Nail girls: they saved up their dowries by living life’s happy days in the brothels.
‘Similar legends are spread about the prostitutes inBangkok, for the same reason. Customers are given a moral alibi. The legends give an illusion of mutual desire to the exploitation of someone else’s poverty.
‘Isabelle Eberhardt was not deceived. In fortunate Bou Saada she wrote: “Never before have I been so well aware as here of the weight that hangs over all the occupied areas.”
‘Bou Saada had quite simply had the misfortune to be the first of the Saharan oases to be conquered by the French. After the conquest, the Ouled Nail tribe continued their resistance for another twenty years. When at last it ceased, the tribe was impoverished and their social network torn apart. War and occupation had led to social anarchy. With the misery also came prostitution, first around the garrisons, then around the tourist hotels.
‘When the same thing occurred later in other oases, the legend had already made “Ouled Nail” into a brand name, used by all prostitutes regardless of which tribe they really came from. Many were children, who themselves had been led to believe the myth with which some of the greatest of Europe’s writers marketed them.
‘Michel’s liberation presumes children “far too young, don’t you think, to know anything about love?” It presumes child prostitution. That is the fundamental moral problem which is never put into words in
The Immoralist
.
‘When my income is insufficient to support the family, my little brother Ali will have to let foreign gentlemen fuck his backside for money. That’s what it is about. The rest is romanticism.’
87
‘The journey is a door through which one goes out of the known reality and steps into another, unexplored reality, resembling a dream,’ Maupassant writes
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