MICHEL TOURNIER
37
The first know only how to speak of themselves. Under the
most various guises-whether their subject is Julius Caesar, fluctua–
tions on the Stock Exchange, rainy or fine weather- they are forever
holding forth about themselves. In my opinion, they cannot be con–
sidered real novelists because a real novel only exists if it is peopled
with a range of characters who are distinct from each other and from
the author, none of them occupying center stage to the point of eclips–
ing the others. The novels of Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, Zola and even
Marcel Proust's
Recherche
meet this criterion but Montaigne, Rous–
seau, Chateaubriand and these days
Fran~ois
Nourissier merely
create an egocentric
oeuvre,
however much they may pretend other–
Wise.
We have mentioned egotism, which naturally brings Stendhal
to mind. This is, however, a debatable case - in Gide's terms Stend–
hal would be someone with "a foot in each camp" - as debatable as
that of Flaubert, but in a different way. For if Stendhal is indeed
always at the center of his work, it is in a centrifugal rather than a
centripetal sense. This bald, red-faced, toothless, pot-bellied little
man wrote about himself only in order to escape from himself, to
project his romantic and adventurous spirit onto heroes of adoles–
cent pallor and slimness. As for Flaubert we can counter his too-oft
quoted "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" by citing the following pieces of
advice he gives to Louise Colet:
"If
banished to the horizon your
heart will illuminate you from afar rather than dazzling you with its
proximity" (March 27, 1852). "You will completely fulfil your talent
by stripping away your sexuality, which must be a source of knowl–
edge and not of dissipation" (November 2, 1852). "The artist in his
work must be like God in his Creation, invisible and all-powerful.
He must be everywhere felt, but never seen" (March 18, 1857).2
As for Andre Gide there is no doubt that all his work constitutes
an attempt to clarify and to exhaust - always in vain, of course - the
mystery of the personality of Andre Gide. It is true that an obvious
remark like this immediately calls for significant qualification. For
Gide's egotism bears no resemblance to that of the two other great
Protestants in French literature: Henri-Frederic Amiel, who was
self-centered like a man cosseting himself against the cold, or Ben–
jamin Constant, whose self-centeredness was reckless and muddle-
rrranslation
by
Francis Steegmuller from
The Letters
oj
Gustave Flaubert, 1830-1857
(Faber, London, 1981), p. 230.
