Marie Gil, families!I hate you !- The rule of the game - Literature, philosophy, politics, arts

Families!I hate you !Clos households;closed doors;jealous possessions of happiness. Gide, terrestrial foods.

We are all bastards.shakespeare, Cymbeline, II, 5.

I am a bastard, too.I Love Bastards!I am bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valor, in Everything illegitimate.shakespeare, Trousus and Cressida.

If you read a quick reading of the faux-monnayers, everything seems to be built against or on the fringes of the family.The novel seems to be a remarkable illustration of the famous quotation of terrestrial foods: the family would be this false currency, deceptive, which circulates and circumscribed, encloses beings and which, far from uniting them in depth, destroys them.The romantic world is built sometimes outside, sometimes in the interstices of the family unit.It is a world of children, of children's lovers, a world that, being the one that drives the novel, seems to be the real ontological world to which the world of adults and the family unit would be subservient.In the first, everything is movement, revolt and flight;In the second: immobility, fence, silence and concealment.

We note, however, the conditional that I use here: Nathanaël's freedom and the injunction of terrestrial foods are far from imposing itself on a more advanced reading of false people.Liberty/Family dualism is tinged with ironic ambiguity, and the novel is rather the scene of a parody of the family world by a desperate, falsely free child.Has the family forever perverted childhood?Or, more simply, is not all children, in power, in their entelechy, a future family?

The family, at Gide, is not just any family; It’s the parent-child cell. Thus, the relationship of Olivier and his uncle is not a family relationship, even if they are bound by blood, and their loves are not incestuous - for the author. The Gidian family is the closure: this prison of biological and educational determinism, as well as the constraint of acts. Hence the two symbolic and romantic figures he opposes: that of the bastard (biological leak) and that of the fugue (physical leak). Thus there is, on the one hand, a continuity of terrestrial foods with false monnayeurs: the family is indeed this closed cell, characterized by its hypocrisy (its nucleus is hidden and the relations which reign there are shameful). But on the other hand, there is also a break between the two works: the false monnanayers question the status of children-and one can follow this evolution step by step through the genesis of the novel that the newspaper conceals the newspaper Faux-monnayeurs. The first ratings relating to the characters indicate the need for their total independence with regard to the Rets of the Origin; The more we advance in the newspaper, the more ambiguous the child becomes, or even a simple copy of family hypocrisy. In reality, the two romantic types are preserved, in the form of the opposition between Georges, the fallen child, and Boris, the pure angel. Nevertheless: the novel of the mise en abyme, the first "new novel" in history, destroys the Manichean opposition between negative family and free child, and, by the vrille which characterizes its composition, it includes the Childhood in the infernal spiral of the family unit. The Society of Children, which develops in Luxembourg as spiders who would weave their canvas there, that of their parallel trade in literature or counterfeit money (their two main activities), sing an existing, laborious and closed world: that of the fathers of family. They read the newspaper and write "new" novels; But they retain an excess, in purity as in evil, which is prohibited for the family.

The family's problem is also, and perhaps above all, literary: Gide cannot conceive of his heroes as "family" characters, taken in the rets of a family relationship.This psychological and ontological approach to the characters is for him aporetic: no heroic size, even that of an anti-hero (who must despite everything support the romantic frame), cannot be born from this quagmire that is the family.The Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs is on this unequivocal point:

"To make Edouard say perhaps:" Boredom, you see, is to have to condition your characters [...] as soon as you have to dress them, fix their rank in the social scale, their career, the figure of their income;As soon as you have to be around them, invent parents, a family, friends, I fold a boutique.I see each of my heroes, I would admit it, orphan, only son, single and childless. "[1]"

Several figures are then offered;The most obvious, as we have seen, will be that of the child.We also find that of the woman, who escapes the damnation of the family closure by her revolt, and even that of the "sister": as victims, they are, like children, antitheses in the family figure and canconstitute a romantic being.In the newspaper, Gide's first project is defined as "the novel of the two sisters [2]"-these two sisters that can perhaps be found in Rachel and Laura, the first of which is a figure of sacrificial purity, martyrdomof the family, and the second the mother on the run of a bastard.In the sketches, each of these two sisters had to marry a mediocre husband that they despised, in accordance with a kind of archetypal genesis of the Gidian family: the transformation of the individual grandeur of the romantic character into a negative entity.

The deconstruction and bursting of the realistic family core

The family maintains a close relationship with the narrative structure. The narration is indeed initiated into the flight of Bernard, discovering that he is bastard. In other words, the shaking of the adventure movement is done in the bastard tearing from his family (I, 1) [3], as if the romantic could only start out of the family cell. The narrative composition that follows, as we know, is anything but linear and represents the first historical occurrence of a real anti-Roman, of the first new novel. The reader's distance from the reader takes place from the incipit, which exhibits fiction as a lie: "It's time to believe that I hear steps in the corridor, says Bernard. "(I, 1) I would like to put the hypothesis that the narrative deconstruction is in the image of these isolated characters, these free electrons that are children without attachments," out of frame " - necessary and sufficient condition to be a character . Their ontological status is also presented in "The Apologists of Vincent", the brother doctor and biologist of Olivier, and in particular in his apologue "terminal buds":

"The buds that develop naturally are always the terminal buds-that is to say those who are most distant from the family trunk.»(I, 17)

Metaphorical praise of bastard, he explains that it is the only buds that are not condemned to atrophy and can develop in flowers, then in fruit.He continues with the apologue of photogenic fish, whose presence of the eyes, while he lives in the obscure underwater depths, interested the biologists, because he generates his own light.In addition to its autonomy, which again refers to the bastard, this time it is especially the beauty of the free child that is signified, the beauty of the child without family, which is light for him alone.We also think of Boris, the purest of children, and his practice of masturbation, a desire for a beauty that only flourishes for him, against bourgeois and family morality.The pure child thus joins the pure novel, defined by Édouard in his newspaper: "To strip the novel of all the elements which do not belong specifically to the novel.»(I, 8)

There is therefore a parallel between the compositional deconstruction of the realistic novel [4], and the decomposition of the family. In its structure, the novel multiplies the intrigues and the main characters, against the unity of action necessary for the identification of the reader and to the referential illusion: it contains several main intrigues, several main characters, each and each developing Regardless and in harmony with others, like the various voices of a fugue. Each intrigue corresponds to a romantic "sub-genre": training novel, realistic novel (family), love intrigue (romance), etc. It is the novel that is targeted first by this deconstruction, especially since the strings are exhibited, obvious, if only by the grossly put on the whole in the journal of Edward and its Roman Les Faux-Monnayeurs, with its main "motif": La Basterdise. The realistic novel, destroyed, is like the family: nuclear, concentric and teleological.

To this multiplication of the plot centers is added an enunciative polyphony, all the characters being households of multiple utterances: Édouard with his newspaper, the letters and the omniscient narrator constitute only the three main among many.This narrative intertwining frames a spider web, mimetic of that which weaves the trafficking of counterfeit money.His sons are so many false misleading tracks for the reader.The composition is fallacious, like the family and the psychology of the characters.The novel continues to multiply the mise en abyme - example among a hundred: the thematic paintings of Armand's room, which take up the main intrigues of the novel and the journal of Édouard (it would be long and tedious to resume here, in theirContinuity, all chapters to highlight this polyphony).There is therefore also a perpetual shift in enunciation.

The different sons are intertwined, the principal being perhaps the "learning novel" of Bernard, whose object is the rejection of families of the type of that of Nathanaël and which returns as a leitmotif throughout the narration, over the various stages of Bildungsroman, until the end and return of Bernard to his family: flight (I, 1), the experience of loneliness (I, 6), the experience of immoralism(I, 10), The experience of jealousy (I, 12), the first love - Laura - and the first profession: secretary of Édouard, life to Saas Fee (I, 14), the confession of the first love, etc.(II, 4), the first desire for rooting at the exit of the Bachot (III, 5), the Devotion, etc.(III, 9), The return to the home (III, 18).

Another main "object": the novel, all the misees of the novel and the reflections on the "pure novel": the refusal of the psychological novel (I, 1; I, 8; II, 2), the announcement of itsRoman by Édouard (II, 3) and the analysis that the narrator makes of his characters (II, 7).We could add the loves of Bernard and Olivier, who are closely linked to the writing of the newspaper and therefore of the novel in abyme of false monnanayers.

But the most important thing, in this deconstruction of the family's realistic novel, is the final opening, which destroys the "meaning" of the bastard training novel.Edward's Journal confirms it:

"I consider that life never offers us anything which, as much as a culmination, cannot be considered as a new starting point."Could be continued ...": it is on these words that I would like to finish my false monnnyrs.»(III, 12)

In its last scene, the novel thus opens up to an eternal beginning: Bernard returns to the family home, the false monnayeurs are saved by the fathers and the children have become ontologically fathers.As for Edouard, probably already tired of Olivier, he will meet other little boys.The novel ends with the expression of his desire which, like any desire, is doomed to the eternal return:

“I am very curious to know Caloub.»(III, 18)

The last word in the novel, "Caloub", first name of Bernard's brother, is the anagram of "Boucla".However, the Journal of Faux-Monnayeurs, for its part, speaks in these terms of the end of the pure novel: "He must not curl, but scatter, get rid of.The family loop is closed;That of the novel is open in a spiral, in the vrille of the eternal beginning of the same.There is no escape from the circularity of the family, but there is also no escape from the law of children's desire.Everything is just a circle, sometimes more tragic than it.Édouard expresses it in the most literal way in his newspaper:

"What I would like to do is something like the art of fugue.»(II, 3)

Deforming of the frames, cynical neutrality, fine ironic (children saved by the family) and open: if narrative deconstruction is like the need to escape the family to "create" a novel, then the only thing thatRemain is the naked character, the pure character: the bastard.

The bastard

The bastardise releases family hypocrisy and its closure (that of resemblance, heredity).The closure of the family corresponds to the experience of Gide himself who, in if the grain dies, written only after the death of his father in 1880, his mother, who became "stifling", "closed on [him] ".

Almost all children of children are bastards, literally or symbolically.Of course, Bernard is the bastard of the novel, the one who, in the traditional framework of the novel by training, is part of the family.But the "false bastards" are much more deleterious and reconnect with the freedom of terrestrial foods against any attachment.It is moreover infinitely meaning that the woman herself falls as low as the family as soon as she is a mother-like Pauline, who "gives" her son to Edouard so that he has it.

In the strict continuity of the philosophy of terrestrial foods, the bastardise symbolizes the purity of the child, the flight and freedom, with regard to the closure and the fence of the family."I will teach you the fervor, a pathetic existence, Nathanaël, rather than tranquility": this is the implicit injunction of the narrator to all the bastards of the novel."The future belongs to bastards.What meaning in this word: “A natural child”!Only the bastard is entitled to the natural.Gide uses the topoi of the common language, whose hypocrisy lies in euphemistic avoidance ("natural child"), and he updates them in a literal sense, in such a way that uniquely, he thus returns to the bastard his "purity».In doing so, taking up an old Ciceronian idea, it also means the "ontological truth of etymology", and its "invigorating force [5]".

The bastardise introduces a rupture of the parentage link, whose psychoanalysis showed the importance at the time of writing the novel.From this break with the family is born a more general break with all human ties, in particular social ties.It allows, by "leak", both liberating wandering and leakage of the pen on the white page of creation, to make a clean sweep and to escape parasitism.In the faux-monnayeurs, the bastard is erected to the rank of myth;It makes it possible to study the depth of the interiority of the pure hero released from the alienations.The bastard is therefore this unique being to conquer his own self (IPSE), as Oredipus declares to Creon declares:

"Ground of the unknown;More past, no more model, nothing about what to rely;Everything to create, homeland, ancestors ... to invent, to discover.No one to look like, that myself.[…] O Creon!If subjected, so in accordance with everything, how would you understand the beauty of this requirement?It is a call for valor, that not knowing your parents [6].»»

Lafcadio, whose novel is the origin of the false monnanayers [7], is a bastard drawing from its own resources.At the end of the life of Gide, Theseus, free conqueror, thinks to be one too:

"He is someone very good, Aegean, my father;Completely as it should be.In truth, I suspect that I am only his putative son.I was told, and that the Great Poseidon will guess me [8].»»

Let us recall that there is a barely hidden allusion to the Phèdre de Racine, in which Thésée, by jealous hatred of his son Hippolyte, has him put to death by a sea monster sent by Poseidon.Poseidon, it is the demonic god present at the bottom of any father, who represents the hatred of the son - hatred which generates in return to the writer, the hero and the bastard, the hatred of the father.This fatality, this infernal circle, which is the very circle of the deadly family, seem to be signified by the allusion to Poseidon - the god who, too, chained Ulysses to the sea.

All the children of the novel act in accordance with this movement opposed to the family fence: they keep fleeing - their husband, their father, France in SaaS Fee ... They steal suitcases in stations, place of flight;And above all, they flee into death, by suicide.

The first and main bastard of the novel is Bernard. It is a feeling of relief and freedom that seizes him when he discovers his bastardise, a freedom which, as we have said, founds the shaking of the writing of the novel, its narrative matrix: "Do not Not knowing who his father is, that's what heals the fear of resembling him. All research requires. Let us only remember the delivery. (I, 1) His letter to the father, parody of that of Kafka, swears to ridicule his name, which he denies the first opportunity. When he meets Laura, he said, "I have no last name. "(I, 14) Gide establishes an inverting parallel between Bernard, Hamlet and Telemachus: the father's quest is overturned here, it is the Father's flight which will make it possible to constitute the character's ipseity. Bernard revolts, he takes himself for "an outlaw who treads on the feet everything that hinders his desire [9]" and engages in the only God of hatred of families: chance. However, he will have tutelary daimones: Édouard and Laura. In contact, the flight moves into idealism; He becomes an altruistic and obsessed with love, self -giving, considering that the service of Edward is a granted link and the antithesis of family alienation. But Édouard and Laura should only be stages of his moult, from which he will have to detach himself as from any link. This evolution of the rebellion as a new man is symbolized in the novel by the appearance of the guardian angel: this one, doubles of Boris' psychoanalyst, but whose task-salvation-is much more difficult, dialogue and help Bernard to find your way. Their night struggle in Bernard's little room, rewriting the struggle of Jacob and the Angel, constitutes the acme of the learning novel and the symbol of the conquest of metaphysical and ontological independence. This is what Ricœur calls "the promise", rereading Kant in the light of phenomenology to show that the real self can only go through the break with the identity of the father (the idem) to reach another identity ( IPSE), buried in itself, whose condition is the openness and speech given to the other [10]. The bastardise is therefore the promise of future freedom, a transformation that the family closed cell prohibits forever. It is only to compare the outcome of the struggle with the angel and the first profession of faith of the Edward Journal:

"His struggle with the angel had matured.He no longer looked like the carefree suitcase thief who believed that in this world it is enough to dare.He was starting to understand that the happiness of others often pays the cost of audacity.»(III, 14)

"The future belongs to bastards.»(I, 12)

The bastardise is the most important motif of the novel, common to the diegesis and the journal of Édouard: it is one of the red threads of polyphony and the romantic abyme - in short, the first voice of the fugue.

Families, you are hypocrites!

The beauty of the bastard is of course opposed to the ugliness of the family. The Journal of Faux-Monnayeurs explicitly opposes the free generation of children and those of slaves who preceded it. This Manichean perspective will be partially skinned by false monnanayers. The family is at the center of the Edward Journal and his novel, of which we only know the title: "The cell diet: the family" (I, 3). In one of the relatively archaic sketches of the novel, the Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs still insists on the hatred of families, in the continuity of terrestrial foods. The bastard must represent the need to fight the indoctrination of families: "Bernard wipes the indoctrination of a traditionalist who, ignoring his bastard, wants to persuade him that wisdom consists, for everyone, to prolong the line that began to trace his father, etc. […] He comes to congratulate himself […] to seek the moral rule only in itself [11]. "Terrestrial foods shouted" Let's be widening! " ":

"Never remain, Nathanaël.As soon as approximately has taken your resemblance, or you have been similar to the approximately, it is no longer profitable for you.You have to leave it.Nothing is more dangerous for you than your family, than your room, than your past.Take from everything that the education it brings to you;and that the voluptuousness which drives its target.

Families!I hate you ![…] The father was there, near the lamp;The mother sewed;The place of an ancestor remained empty;A child, near the father, studied - and my heart swelled with the desire to take him with me on the roads [12].»»

"The place of an ancestor remained empty": the family is not only a reality, it is a structure - therefore: a structural fence.In this very primitive text that are terrestrial foods, it is theorized in a form, so that the young Gide can fight it.He will no longer be able to use this dualist structure so easily in false monnanayers.

The family is thus confined, as the famous quote says. Family names, in the work, are loaded with a prophetic value and operate as tragic fate (Fatum). Almost all the names of the novel have a hidden meaning, and only family names bear the negative dimension mentioned [13]. Faced with the first names of the sweet-"sheep" and "rachel" (which means "sheep")-, the names of the villains lend themselves to devaluing word games: Strouvilhou (c'Trou vile-hou!), Gharidanisole (name of Radiguet , the author of the Devil to the Body), Passavant ("Passe before" and "not learned" - the word also means, on a warship, the work intended to hide the movements of the besiegers, perfect representation of hypocrisy and Family nothingness housed behind his mask), Adamanti (Adam Menti), Dhurmer (the "dura-mother" is a membrane that surrounds the brain and the spinal cord). Lilian Griffith is also the anagram of Lilith Griffan, an evil character who dies in Africa and recalls Milady de Dumas. The "H", present in most of these family names, is a sign of the ambiguous and the evil [14]. Finally, Caloub, the last word in the novel, marks both the opening and the tragic fate: anagram of Boucla - I pointed out - he recalls that the whole novel unfolds between "a family pension that completed it At the end of the school every day [15] ”and the final pedophile curiosity of Édouard. Between the two, this character disappears completely, as totally determined and locked up in the potential of his surname.

The rejection of the family is an ancient reason for ontology. In the utopia of the Republic, Plato posed the injunction to tear the children from their family so that the city became their true father and their true mother, from a perspective of abolition of the private sphere (Republic, V, 462 d). Likewise, did Christ have enjoined men to leave their family to follow him, he alone representing "the way, the truth and the life" (Jn XIV, 6). Any metaphysics, in particular those of eschatological advance, is established on the rejection of the family. Is it only because the family, circular and closed, especially in its bourgeois (private) form, cannot be a life path, but signs immobility and confinement? No, the family is deadly for another reason too: their hypocrisy. The word comes from the Greek "hypocritos", which designates the actor of the ancient theater which is "under the mask" (Kritos), this mask which, in the Roman theater, becomes persona: in addition to hiding, it is -voice. In fact, the Gidian family speaks loudly and is only a sailing masking a nature which never shows itself and which, there, is perhaps only nothingness.

The hypocrisy of the family goes through the realism of adultery, as with the Enjoyendieu.Among the Molinier, the father, imbued with himself, is a pitiful and despised figure, hated by his three sons and stolen by his son Georges [16].Pauline describes her marriage as a "hell" (III, 1), then a "sacrifice" (III, 6).Among the Douviers, the worm is in the fruit from the start through Laura's loveless marriage, then its flight.The couple of the Pérouse is dramatic, they hate each other and tear themselves down in vain.In the family home of Passavant, the father died alone, without the son honored him with a visit;The very evening of the father's death, he only thinks of meeting Olivier and to hatch tricks.Passavant's speech is unequivocal:

"The old man has never earned me in life only troubles, annoyances, embarrassment.If he had a little tenderness in the heart, it was certainly not to me that he made it feel.My first impulses towards him, from the time that I did not know the restraint, only earned me rebuffs, which educated me.He always believed that everything was due to him.I think he made everyone suffer around him, his people, his dogs, his horses, his mistresses;His friends no, because he didn't have one.His death makes everyone say!»(I, 4)

The monstrosity of the Passavant son, a diabolical character of the novel, thus finds his explanation in the monstrosity of the father and in the fatality of the father-son bond.As Edouard still writes in his newspaper about his sister Pauline: "The forest shapes the tree.(I, 3) All the families of the novel are unions dedicated to the disaster;If they evolve, it is towards an enlarged fathers' evil among the threads.

The worst family of the novel is that of Pastor Vedel: the Azaïs-Vedel family, whose pension represents a sort of monstrous hyperbole of the family unit, where children pervert (trafficking of counterfeit money) and die (suicide of the little Boris ). It is the realistic counterpart of false symbolic currency. When the pastor preaches, we see his social costume overcome under his cassock, symbol of hypocrisy, as if the mask was yawning, revealing the naked reality (and his nothingness) under the religious clothes. Likewise Pauline seeks to "hide" her husband's shortcomings. In his notebooks, we learn that the man of the church masturbates. The young Armand Vedel thus makes the trial of his family (III, 16), and in particular of his father, who "contaminated" him; And he becomes a secretary of Passavant because, he says, "precisely I like what disgusts me ... starting with my own, or my dirty, individual [17]". He hates himself in his inheritance. Her sister Rachel is sacrificed to this family who exploits her, reduces her to the state of servant and asks her for recognition when she is becoming blind - in the figurative sense, she is on the contrary being in the process of becoming lucid, like Tiresias. Only Sarah escapes family hypocrisy, through her flight to England and the new morality she found there, against "all domestic virtues. Family constraint had stretched its energy, exasperated its instincts of revolt. […] She only agreed to see in Laura's marriage only a dismal and hypocrite market, leading to slavery [18]. "Sexual relations between Edouard and his nephew Olivier still exacerbate this perversion - and by this very excess, escaping hypocrisy, they buy the latter.

Fathers singing children - or the tragic bastard

Conversely of the Nathanaël of terrestrial foods and Bernard, Boris represents the stagnation and the dangers of the bastardise.Hero of a black novel, in every sense of the word, he is predestined for death, because the family's defect has not taken the form of a leak or a struggle in his home.In the last chapter of the novel, he will commit suicide by looking at his grandfather in the eyes.But in diegesis, this suicide is above all the crime of children perverted from the "brotherhood of strong men", who have reconstructed a new deadly cell.The failure of the bastard and the imitation of the fathers meet in this conclusion of the novel.Family determinism reads on an individual scale: Olivier and Vincent "let themselves be started" by the Passevant demon, figure of the substitute and bad pedophile father (False Monnayeurs Journal), and Vincent committed suicide by taking himself for Satan in person.

The failure of the flight therefore finds its representation accomplished in the false monnayeurs and their "brotherhood of strong men", which (according to the children) has as "Ciceronian" motto: "The strong man does not hold thelife.But if, in appearance, they are certainly detached from family ties, it can only be in a falsely heroic perspective - heroism having lost all meaning -: it can therefore only be in a tragic perspective.Boris, the second most important bastard in the novel, also committed suicide because of a word noted on a talisman who belonged to his father: the failure of the bastard's flight is linked to the father, and the madness of this little beingPure is a paternal heritage.

Thus, the bastards, when they do not commit suicide, end up returning to the best. At the heart of the novel, meditation on the breach of the family is attached to the born bastard of Laura, abandoned by Vincent, this bastard whose fate is commented on in the letter from Félix Douviers who proposes to adopt it - as If, for Laura, not to give a father of substitution to her child, it was to submit him to the destiny of Boris. This negative side of the bastard is accomplished in the return of Bernard to his father at the end of the novel, as if here, unlike terrestrial foods and Nathanaël, the constitutive flight of childhood had been caught up in the ironic realism of An aging author. From the moment Laura chooses the family against the flight (she had fled her husband to SaaS Fee, with Édouard, in other words: in literature), the enunciation and the philosophy of the novel change: these are now the fathers And families who have the floor. Édouard, meeting taking advantage of, relates in his newspaper the pity he feels for this false father full of love and remorse (III, 12). The radical reversal from his point of view on the couple father/bastard, he who is double of Gide, marks this polyphonic opening of the novel well: the manichaeism of terrestrial foods is dead. Is the fight against the family doomed to the vanity of an eternal repetition, from generation to generation? In any case, the flight does not constitute in the novel an end in itself. Goodbye Nathanaël's freedom! The family is recreated in other forms, and children sing fathers. They form a completely mimetic parallel world: they play, drink, make love, silver traffic. They are immersed in the world although they flee-and perhaps precisely because they flee, according to a tragic irony specific to family inheritance. The family is thus the form that tragic destiny takes in modernity. Pérouse affirms this when it is missing its suicide: "We are not free, we are linked. And what binds him is his grandson, the one who will commit suicide in his place, in a sort of inevitable family substitution.

The children themselves, initiators of counterfeit money, are therefore false.They are the false characters of a false novel, at the antipodes of utopian manichaeism of terrestrial foods.As Gide writes, which became pessimistic, at the end of the Faux-Monnayeurs Journal: "If children were left this freedom they claim, they would be the first to repent."From the start of the second part, in SaaS Fee, Bernard confesses to Laura that he became" conservative "and finds herself from his flight, at the very moment when she teaches him that she returns to her husband:" II am ashamed… I was taking myself for a rebellion."(II, 4) Gide's project is therefore misleading, and the progression of his newspaper follows this logic of a distance from Nathanaël:

"Hands of gestures of a generation find their explanation in the next generation - this is what I had offered to show.How those of a new generation, after having criticized, blamed, gestures and attitudes […] of those who preceded them, are brought little by more or less the same [19].»»

In this novel, it is through the conditions of a reconstruction of a mimetic nucleus of the family nucleus that individual ethics seems to be able to modify society.But let's not forget that everything is going there indefinitely in its opposite, in a spiral of negation.The meaning is abolished, we remain on an undecidable sharing line between terrestrial foods and their negation.The characters are only representations of representations, thus losing any possibility of positive discourse: "in a world where everyone cheats, it is the true man who is a charlatan" and "the true hypocrite is the one who does notrealizes more of the lie, the one who lies with sincerity [20] ”.It is in its structure that this novel is an "family anti-roman", not in its speech.

According to a certain reading, which has no prerogative on that of terrestrial foods, a fence of meaning, which is that of the family, reappears: in the last chapter, Bernard returns to his father, he finds Caloub and Albéric, his brothers,And invites another family, the Molinier, perhaps throwing the foundations of a new society, which would regenerate the old structure of families.But let's not forget that the word of the end, "Caloub", comes to open this last meaning by the spiral of homosexual and incestuous loves of Edward - as if Phèdre, the mother in love of Hippolyte, had despite everythingWord on Poseidon and the logic of Theseus.

Obviously, the autobiographical dimension of this bastard fable explains both irony and opening.Father take advantage is in all points the double of Gide's father, who died in 1880: judge like him, also living in rue de Tournon, is a literary spectrum from the real father - which brings us back to the way Bernard invoked himAt the beginning of the novel: “Not everyone can afford, like Hamlet, the luxury of a revealing spectrum.»(I, 6)

In the light of this in-between novel, it appears that the worst fatality would be that nothing can ward off the curse of families, not even literature.Because the only conclusion that could then emerge would be the death of literature itself.

[1] André Gide, Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, Paris, Gallimard (L’Imaginaire) [1927], 1995, p.59. Reference editions of the Faux-Monnayeurs: Gallimard, 1925 and Gallimard (Folio), 1972.

[2] Ibid., P.14.

[3] The Roman figure refers to the Arab part and figure in the chapter.

[4] It is indeed realism, as Gide confesses on the Pérouse: "I missed the portrait of the old La Perouse;I couldn't lose sight of my model." (I underline.)

[5] Cicero, of Oratore, I, 2.

[6] Gide, Oedipus, in Id., Romans and stories, lyrical and dramatic works, ed.David Walker, Paris, Gallimard (Library of the Pléiade), 2009, t.2, p.693.

[7] Originally, the false monnayeurs were to be a series of the vatican cellars.

[8] Gide, Theseus, in Ibid., P.988.

[9] Faux-monnayeurs, op.cit., p.321.

[10] See Paul Ricœur, yourself like any other, Paris, Seuil, 1990, p.57-59.The promise, from the Dardenne brothers, is an extraordinary adaptation of this theory of Ricœur, and the film represents the abjection of the father in an exemplary, particularly courageous way.

[11] Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, op.cit., p.91-92.

[12] Gide, Les nourings terrestrials [1897], in Id., Romanesque works, Paris, Gallimard (Library of the Pléiade), p.172.

[13] See Alain Goulet, "Hidden sense of some names or the art of the choice of names", in Id., Gide, Les Faux-Monnayeurs, Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Atlande, 2016, p.278.

[14] It is possible that Gide thinks there of Péguy's famous commentary on Hugo's "H" in Victor-Marie, Count Hugo.

[15] Faux-monnayeurs, op.cit., p.175.

[16] See Vincent's speech to Passavant (I, 19).

[17] Ibid., P.355.

[18] Ibid., P.281-282.

[19] Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, op.cit., p.91.

[20] Faux-monnayeurs, op.cit., respectively p.31 and p.48.

Notes

Typology of faux-monnayeurs and parental links

Édouard

Écrivain, auteur du « Journal » qui met en abyme le roman, doublant le Journal des Faux-monnayeurs rédigé parallèlement par Gide. Par l’intermédiaire de ce journal, Édouard est le narrateur de plus de la moitié du texte. Amant d’Olivier, son neveu, qu’il aime. Ami de La Perouse et ancien de la pension Azaïs, il est également le frère de Pauline Molinier et l’oncle des trois fils de Pauline :

Georges (le plus jeune) : maître de la fausse-monnaie, qu’il incarne aussi en tant qu’il passe toujours pour autre que ce qu’il est. Qualifié d’ « ange » et de poète par ses proches, il vole (des livres dans le journal d’Édouard, des lettres compromettantes pour son père). Il n’aime pas ses parents.

Olivier (amant d’Édouard)

Vincent (l’aîné, fait médecine, est biologiste) : abandonne Laura, devient fou et tue Lilian Griffith ; il est l’auteur des apologues des animaux marins (unités éclatées vs cellule familiale).

Bernard Take advantage

Beau-fils du ridicule Albéric Profitendieu, au nom de famille ironique. C’est le meilleur ami d’Olivier. Dans le premier chapitre du roman, il découvre qu’il est bâtard. Il quitte sa famille qu’il hait : il prendra un pseudonyme s’il écrit. Héros du roman d’apprentissage (une des nombreuses intrigues de l’œuvre), il retournera chez son père après avoir passé toutes les étapes traditionnelles du Bildungsroman.

Albéric Profitendieu est juge d’instruction et suit l’affaire de fausse monnaie à laquelle sont mêlés Georges et la « Confrérie des hommes forts ». À la fin, il sauve la réputation des enfants, au nom de la famille.

Robert de Passavant

A writer whose father Vincent treats, and that Edouard does not like.He trains Vincent in debauchery and ruin in the game. He presents the woman who will kill him.He tries to seduce Olivier by spending his holidays with him.He creates a review of which he temporarily appoints him editor -in -chief to buy his favors.He knows Alfred Jarry - who, during a party, "will parody" the links between all these characters and their suicides/murders.

Lady Griffith

Mistress of Passavant and then Vincent, who sacrifices Laura to him and that he will murder in a crazy crisis during a trip to Africa.

Azaïs-Tedel pension

Grand-père Azaïs (personnage très sombre), dont la fille épouse le pasteur Vedel, son beau-fils. La pension n’est pas le lieu de refuge contre la famille, mais le redoublement de la famille dans l’œuvre ; elle ne met à l’abri ni de la maltraitance ni de la mort.

Laura Vedel : fille du pasteur Vedel. Elle aimait Édouard qui, dans son journal, relate la décristallisation de leur amour. Maîtresse de Vincent, elle a un enfant de lui, mais il l’abandonne sous l’influence de Passavant. Elle épouse Félix Douvier, qu’elle commence par fuir à Saas Fee avec Édouard et Bernard, avant de revenir à lui.

Sœur : Sarah (sortira avec Bernard et échappera à la logique familiale).

Sœur : Rachel (la pureté : elle se sacrifie à sa famille – rappel de La Porte étroite –, devient aveugle – rappel de La Symphonie pastorale – et meurt martyre.)

Frère : Armand. Personnage cynique, il est le vrai critique de la cellule familiale et de l’hypocrisie de son père pasteur (III, 16) : « Tu ne sais pas ce que peut faire de nous une première éducation puritaine. Elle vous laisse au cœur un ressentiment dont on ne peut plus jamais se guérir… » « Mon père coupe dedans quand il joue au pasteur. » Toute la critique de Vedel et de la famille passe par ce fils.

La Perouse

Ancien professeur de piano d’Édouard ; surveillant à la pension Azaïs-Vedel. Il représente l’amour (d’Édouard, mais aussi celui qu’il éprouve pour Boris), puis l’échec de cet amour : « Est-il possible d’aimer un enfant qu’on n’a jamais vu ? », demande-t-il à Édouard à propos de Boris. Boris ne se laissera pas aimer et se tuera en le regardant dans les yeux, comme pour lui rappeler son statut de « père », et que c’est la famille qui est mortifère. Grand-père de Boris qui, très délicat, se suicidera, victime de la confrérie des faux-monnayeurs et de son affection pour Bronja – mais aussi d’un talisman. Il est le seul être vertueux du roman avec Rachel (et peut-être La Perouse), qui comme lui aura un destin tragique.

Strouvilhou, Gheridanisol

Of the "brotherhood of strong men".Organizers of counterfeit money.Influence on Georges.

Boris' psychoanalyst

Elle représente le parent idéal mais chimérique : « Je n’ai pas le droit d’abîmer les âmes de ces enfants » ; « ce sont des êtres qui se nourrissent de chimères » ; « ce sont des anges ». Elle révèle l’onanisme de Boris, qui est ainsi rattaché à la pureté (critique des mœurs de Gide). Elle est la mère de Bonja, l’amie de Boris.