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PARTISAN REVIEW
cover some new form of unhappiness to astonish the gods, and who
takes pride in not knowing his parents. When he finds out that his two
sons wish to make love to their sisters, he reproaches them not as im–
moral, but as lacking in noble ambition, a view of incest which is not
meant to shock the reader but to illustrate the exalted and discriminat–
ing nature of Gide's gospel of self-realization. In the same way, Gide's
Oedipus is not horrified to learn that he has committed parricide
and incest, for the gods have tricked him into committing these crimes.
What does horrify him, appall him, and make him say that he must
"awake from happiness" is the discovery of the abyss of his ignorance.
This is an unbearable humiliation because he is a man who has taken
great pride in his knowledge, his self-knowledge above all. He has de–
lighted in himself as a self-made, self-reliant being who conquered the
Sphinx by knowing that Man, human nature, and one's self were the
passwords, the key and the answer to all dangers and enigmas. Hence
his tragedy is the recognition that his happiness and success have been
based on ignorance and self-deception, and not, as he had supposed, on
knowledge and independence. There is every reason to suppose that this
interpretation of Oedipus is Gide's effort in old age to criticize the
doctrines of self-fulfillment on which his career had been based.
The weakness of the play, considered solely as a play, is that the
characters tend to talk about moral principles and ideas instead of drama–
tizing them, a temptation to which most authors who are interested in
ideas succumb. Both Broadway and Henry James warn of the danger, the
former with the iron rule, "Don't tell 'em, show 'em," and the latter by
speaking of "the platitude of mere statement." In Gide's case, as in
Shaw's, however, the dramatic poverty does not matter too much because
he knows how to make his ideas intensely interesting in themselves.
Gide's Theseus tells the story of his life in the first person, after his
exploits have been accomplished. But the deeds which in the classic
authors had been represented as heroic or noble now appear as the
underhand tricks of a benign Machiavellian who takes nothing, not even
himself, seriously, and who is cunning, cocky, sophisticated, and quite
smug. He thinks everyone else is slightly ridiculous, particularly Daedalus
and Icarus, who, it now turns out, wanted to have wings not to fly but
to solve philosophical problems. And the labyrinth in which Theseus
conquers the Minotaur is transformed by Gide into a charming garden:
Theseus' heroism consists in refusing to permit pleasure itself, how–
ever enchanting, to distract him from what he regards as success. So
too when an old friend argues with him about the founding of Athens
and says: "Mankind isn't worth all this trouble," his characteristic reply
