Urien's Voyage by André Gide

INTRODUCTION
    Urien’s Voyage was written at a critical period in the life of André Gide and stands as a transitional but prophetic work: the past lingers still in the face of an uncertain future that is coming to birth. In later years Gide was to look back on the period of its composition as one of despair and to take a jaundiced view of the product of his desperation. Here, as elsewhere, his disclaimers bear close scrutiny, for he not infrequently stresses a point not because of its inherent truth but because of his desire for it to be true. The truth may well be that he put much more of himself than he realized in his early writings, and that readers familiar with the most intimate of his later works, especially Et nunc manet in te, will readily see that the experiences and events chronicled here bear the stamp of the irreconcilable tendencies that complicated his life from pubescence to senescence.
    Written at La Rocque during the summer of 1892, Urien’s Voyage complements three earlier works and anticipates some fifty volumes still to come from his pen. His previous works, two semi-autobiographical books and a defense of the doctrine of symbolism, had revealed the three poles which alternately attracted and repelled him: religion, sex and art. Singly and collectively his writings yield substance for a fragmentary portrait of a haunted, lonely man, never quite sure of the Idea he was to manifest and forever vacillating between being moral and being sincere.
    His early rigid Protestant and puritanical upbringing had created in him a conflict between his deeply religious yearnings and his intense sensuality. In the guise of Urien we find the mind and flesh of André. Plagued by doubts, discouraged over the prospect of having to choose between morality and sincerity, introverted and enthralled by his demon, Gide relapsed during the summer of 1892 into the solitary vice which was the bane of his existence. It was to save himself from the terror of madness and suicide that he began to compose the allegory that marks both his break with Symbolism and his gradual abandonment of the celibate life for the life of the flesh.
    Earlier, the previous Christmas season at Uzès, in the south of France, in an excess of religious fervor, he had written that “all is vanity save knowledge of the Lord.” Opposing this was the desire for self-manifestation in art, appropriately recorded on the last day of the year: “I am tormented by the fear of not being sincere.” By Easter, we learn from his Journals (1892), he had turned away from creative writing in favor of learning. In his “wild lust for learning” he read Goethe, studied philology, and reveled in the joys of the mind. His sensuality waxes and wanes from one day to the next, with the result that he can on one day write of his desire to taste “the vanity of the other things” and to “exhaust their bitter flavor” and on another of his relapse into frenzied mysticism.
    From his Journals we also learn that during the crucial summer spent at La Rocque, Gide almost lost his mind: “I was cloistered in my room … forcing myself to work; I was obsessed, haunted, hoping perhaps … through excess itself to exhaust my demon.” He was to admit years later that he had put a great deal of himself into Urien’s Voyage and that for those who could read between the lines the work was all too illuminating.
    Urien’s voyage is symbolic. Gide (Urien) and his companions set out on a voyage to find relief from their “bitter night of thought, study and theological ecstasy.” Their voyage takes them from the “pathetic ocean” of the warmer latitudes to the “frozen sea” near the pole and provides Gide with a means of illustrating both the techniques and the credo of the Symbolist movement.
    In a broad sense the Symbolist movement represents a flowering and a fulfillment of the ideals that inspired