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 the earlier Romantic generations. Philosophically and esthetically viewed, it is a modern means of giving expression to a fundamental arrangement of the human mind; it puts stress on the intuitive rather than the rational, on the subjective rather than the objective, on freedom rather than restraint.

As formulated by Jean Moréas in an article published in Figaro in 1886, the doctrine of Symbolism was predicated on lofty aims and ambitions. Symbolist poets, whom others accused of being morbid and neurotic, were actually trying to create beauty, said Moréas. Beauty, according to the author of the abstract and verbose article later accepted as the manifesto of the Symbolists, was to be sought in “pure concepts” and “eternal symbols.”

Five years later Gide defended the tenets of Symbolism in Narcissus. The views expressed in his treatise on Narcissus and illustrated in the allegory narrated by Urien may be summarized in these words: Visible forms are but the transient external symbols of eternal truths; the true poet sees beyond mere appearances (phenomena), grasps the Ideas (noumena) which they represent, and uses the former to suggest the latter; each man is born to make manifest an Idea—the truth, whether good or bad, which is his inmost self. Gide’s problem was to conciliate sincerity to the Idea that he was to represent with morality.

The temptations, suffering, and surroundings of Urien and his companions are described with such profusion of detail that the reader can recreate them in their entirety, yet the pilgrims are never certain of the reality of either their experiences or their surroundings. The chimerical shores and crags that drift by their ship in the pathetic ocean are scarcely more chimerical than the “real” world was to Gide when he remarked in his Journal (in June, 1891) that things seemed to cease to exist for him when he “stopped thinking about them.”

We note too that the crewmen made the mistake of confusing “passing things” with “eternal isles” while Urien and his companions, bending over the water like Narcissus (who saw both his own reflection and the moving panorama of life, realize that things reveal themselves through their changing aspects.

Various temptations which Urien resists, the stagnation of the Sargasso Sea, the voyage through the frozen sea, and the agony of despair after a futile search—all this is easy to interpret. Urien’s resistance in the face of diverse temptations is the repressed side of Gide’s own nature while the sensuous details with which he embellishes the most trivial item betray his recognition of physical desire as the ridiculous counterpart of piety. The stagnation of the Sargasso Sea has as its counterpart the physical excesses that brought Gide to the verge of madness during the summer of 1892. The passage through the frozen sea and the march to the polar regions are his quest for conquest of the world of the senses and attainment of the realm of the spirit.

Urien’s Voyage is perhaps more important because of what it suggests than what it says. Readers familiar with Gide’s later writings—especially his Journals and Et nunc manet in te—will find in this early allegory the elements that were to motivate the works of his maturity. “Without sensuality, sexuality and pride there could be no work of art,” he later wrote. It is somewhat ironic that he made his supreme effort to dominate or sublimate his passions through art—and of course failed—when these very passions were at their peak. For though later when tortured by desire he prayed that he might no longer be enslaved by his flesh, even in old age he longed to remain “carnal and desirous until death.”

Viewed against the background of his other works, the unpolished declamations of his youth may be more revealing than the carefully wrought images of his maturity. We might not be far from the mark if we concluded that during the last years of his life he achieved the ideals formulated during the first, realizing thereby the perfect life defined by Valéry, whom he was fond of quoting: “a dream of youth brought to fruition in maturity.”

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I have tried through occasional notes to call attention to relevant biographical details or statements from Gide’s other writings. A more ambitious undertaking would probably illuminate the substratum of superstitions, myths and legends on which Gide erected his art. Names, numbers, episodes, events and a host of striking metaphors suggest a skillful blend of ingredients drawn from diverse cultures—Hellenic, Roman, Celtic, Germanic, Christian and Moslem, to name only the most obvious. It is my hope that the suggestions made here and in the notes that follow will stimulate further interest in this work and in its place in Gide’s art.

In more than a few instances I have borrowed freely from Harold March’s exemplary work, Gide and the Hound of Heaven (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1952). I wish also to acknowledge my indebtedness to my colleagues whose efforts are reflected in the foregoing remarks and in the translation of Gide’s allegory: Dr. Margaret C. O’Riley, Professor Mildred Riling, and Mrs. Helen Scroggins.

WADE BASKIN

Southeastern State College