Summary
French novelist whose L’Immoraliste (1902) opens Chapter Three, I of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, as an instance of a narrative whose structure of attitude and reference entitles the European authorial subject to hold an overseas territory, derive benefits from it, and ultimately refuse it autonomy or independence (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.218-220 / printed p.191-193).
Details
-
Michel, the novel’s philologist narrator, comes to terms with his eccentric sexuality in French Algeria, a place of deserts, languorous oases, amoral native boys and girls; his Nietzschean mentor Ménalque is straightforwardly described as a colonial official (PDF p.218-219 / printed p.191-192).
-
What first connects Michel and Ménalque is the confession of Moktir, a native boy in Biskra, who tells Ménalque how he watched Michel spying on him stealing Marceline’s scissors; what Moktir thinks or feels is far less important than what Michel and Ménalque make of the experience (PDF p.219 / printed p.192).
-
Michel’s aperçus on North Africa, as Said quotes them, hold that the land of pleasure satisfies without calming desire, and that the Arabs live their art and do not embalm it in works; Said comments that the people of Africa are just there, with no accumulating art or history sedimented into works, and that to be among them is pleasurable but risks the vermin (PDF p.219-220 / printed p.192-193).
-
Gide is a special case, treating relatively restricted material — Islamic, Arab, homosexual — but his relationship to Africa belongs to a larger formation out of which emerged Africanism, or Africanist discourse, a systematic language for dealing with and studying Africa for the West (PDF p.220 / printed p.193).
-
Since the publication of L’Immoraliste, Algeria has become independent of France, as India has since Kim was written (PDF p.188 / printed p.161).
-
Girardet remarks that Gide’s Voyage au Congo (1927) and Retour du Tchad (1928) raise doubts about French colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa, but that Gide nowhere questions the very principle of colonisation; critics of colonialism like Gide and Tocqueville attack abuses by powers that do not greatly touch them (PDF p.234 / printed p.207; French wording given in the reading notes).
-
Gide’s character Ménalque is in Said’s conviction part of the background of Malraux’s La Voie royale (1930) (PDF p.235 / printed p.208).