.J.NDRE
GIDE AND COMMUNISM
31
surface which creates the first impression . . . but upon close inspection,
we find that if the author is interested in ideas, he is concerned with
them in so far as they reflect the sensitive apparatus of man; it is the
movements of the
moi
that hold him fascinated . . . . Proust is looking
always at life, Gide at the human soul within. The former proceeds,
or likes tQ proceed, from the particular sensation to the intellectual and
universal law. Proust is an observer, whose characters seek reality within
themselves, whereas G ide is attracted by the gesture, and from the gesture
goes inward and downward.... Gide probably comes the closer to life,
for the reason that his tendency is affective, while the Proust tendency
may be taken as standing for art and order in the expressive formulation
of the real."
The formula which each gives us for his art is indicative. Proust's
is:
"L'art recompose exactement la vie"
(art exactly reproduces life).
Gide's:
"Le genie du roman fait vivre le possible, non pas le reel"
(the
function of the novel is to make the possible, not the real, come alive).
In other words: to reconstruct
~ith
exactitude the panorama of life,
through a
rechehche du temps perdu,·
or, to make the possible live, which
is Gide's attempt in such works as
Les Faux-monnayeurs
and
Les Caves
du Vatican.
Gide's approach to art and life, then, as over against Proust's basically
intellectualistic attitude, is
affective,
or emotional. And it is undoubtedly
Gide's affections, rather than his intellect, which have brought him
to
Communism. His "conversion" (a word which I, with him, would
curse) has been due to his sensitivity. Upon reading the recent letter
of Ramon Fernandez to Gide, one feels that the humanist critic is aware
of this, as how could he help being? Fernandez rightly considers himself
the better Marxist scholar of the two. Indeed, he previously had expressed
a doubt as to whether Gide understood Marx at all, and was irritated
by the amateur's rushing in where a specialist feared to tread. But M.
Fernandez himself, as his letter shows, has learned something outside the
philosophy texts since the shameful Sixth of February last, in the face
of a rising Fascistic tide in France.
With Gide, as has been said, the gesture is the thing. And for
"gesture," we might almost substitute "action," comparing the while that
"humanism of action" of which Fernandez has spoken, action being re–
garded as a means of knowing, a mode of knowing, oneself and the world
(reality), either from the point of view of humanism, which is Fernandez',
or from that of the human sensitivity, which is Gide's. Gide in the past
has been regarded as an apostle of the
"acte gratuit."
Now, the
acte
