Andre Gide’s The Immoralist presents us with a picture of the protagonist Michel, and his three year journey through Europe wherein, as the provocative title suggests, he experiences a dramatic change in his moral character. Whether or not the change in Michel’s moral perspective is an improvement, Gide leaves to the reader, writing The Immoralist in a manner similar to Gustave Flaubert, whose book Madame Bovary leaves out the moral commentary of a narrator, letting the actions of the characters speak for themselves.
At the beginning, Michel recounts his experience of tuberculosis which nearly kills him, but survives because of his wife’s care and his strong desire to live. Interestingly, Michel attributes the strength of his will-power more so as the cure. As the story progresses Michel becomes more enamored with this idea of the will, believing that living is for the strong and death for the weak. He then appropriates this perspective into his ideas concerning morality, anticipating a moral philosophy reminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s, whose ideas of overcoming and the will to power taught that remedying moral flaws, like a disease, is a challenge that can be fixed if an individual’s will is strong enough; physical health is symptomatic of the bodies strength to overcome it’s sicknesses; moral health reveals the strength of the will to overcome itself and its flaws. And thus, “What does not kill me, makes me stronger.” Once the body overcomes a sickness it is guarded against it, attaining the power to live; and man achieves a moral character by willing through the situations that would overcome him and render him powerless. This dramatic change in Michel’s perspective elicits a desire for Michel to rediscover himself:
“The accumulation of all acquired knowledge in our mind flakes away like a cosmetic and in places lets us see the bare flesh, the authentic being that was hidden… From then on, that was whom I strove to discover: my authentic self… the one rejected by the Gospels… From then on, I despised that secondary acquired self-superimposed by my education. I had to shake off the burdens”
Gide is concerned with our motivation for what and why we do things. As Michel would have it, it is utilizing our freedom that we become something. This sort of thinking that Michel adopts calls into questions the general motivation for our actions, namely the conventional, making him an ‘immoralist’ in this sense, because by choosing and acting in a way outside of society’s ready-made moral prescriptions, he sins against what Nietzsche often referred to as the ‘herd’s morality.’ This idea we see most clearly in Michel’s friend Melanque, who reveals how he self-consciously perceives himself and how this differs from the way in which people generally perceive themselves and others:
“They seem surprised today that a man of reproachable morals can still possess a few virtues. I can’t find in myself the good and bad points they claim to discover; I exist only as a whole. I seek only what is natural, and, for each thing I do, the pleasure it gives me tells me that I was right to do it” (62).
Gide presents us with a problem; for if we create ourselves, we create how we should live, and thus, our own morality, making the reader’s job as spectator difficult for as Melanque points out, who we are is complex; saying ‘you are bad’ or ‘you are good’ is too easy; we might act in a way that others consider ‘bad’ at one point and ‘good’ at another, but in either case the decision is up to us. So are we either? If morality is the outcome of our choice, who is to say that anything is good or bad? Considering our arbitrary choices are forced to agree with an equally arbitrary ‘code’ of morality, why shouldn’t we disagree if we feel that we must? As Melanque would have it, most are afraid of their own freedom, terrified of their ability to become something: “Laws of imitation; I call them laws of fear. People are afraid of finding themselves alone, and they don’t find themselves at all. This moral agoraphobia is hateful to me; it’s the worst kind of cowardice. And yet it is only when alone that people are inventive.” Later on, Michel conveys a similar idea, “I came near viewing decency as nothing but restriction, conventions or fear… our mode of life had turned it into the mutually binding, banal form of a contract” (86). Common morality is the outcome of a fear to authentically choose something; a code by which we can safely, without any thought, live with others and their idea of who we should and should not be.
Although these ideas that Melanque and Michel follow are appealing, and offer much wisdom concerning how we should go about making ourselves, not as blind followers but as leaders, Michel admits an important point at the beginning of the story that enlightens us as to whether his commitment to his philosophy is legitimate: “To be able to free oneself is nothing; the hard part is being able to live with one’s freedom” (9). This becomes the underlying moral question of the book that Gide forces Michel to answer. In order to understand whether Michel handled his freedom correctly, Gide parallels Michel’s rise to health with his wife’s fall into sickness. Forgetting that in the beginning it was his wife’s love and care that truly enabled him to become healthy again, Michel plunges into an intense state of self-centeredness, completely ignoring her when she acquires a fatal illness, instead of reciprocating the love that she showed him. Michel, at least in this way, carries his and Melanque’s philosophy to the wrong conclusions: “sometimes I called upon my willpower protesting against that hold over me, saying to myself: ‘Is that all you’re good for, you would-be great man!’” (88). This is what Michel fails to see: that his choice to love necessarily limits. According to Martin Buber in his famous I and Thou, “In the eyes of him who takes his stand in love, and gazes out of it, men are cut free from their entanglement in bustling activity. Good people and evil, wise and foolish, beautiful and ugly, become successively real to him… Love is responsibility of an I for a Thou” (15). Whether it is love between friends or between spouses, Buber points out that our relations to other human beings entails that we are responsible for one another, for seeing the other not as means to our own ends, but as ends in themselves. The lesson that Michel is forced to learn through the negative consequences of his actions, which is concentrated in his wife and her death, is that by disregarding others when he has chosen to love is not a legitimate choice. Thus, as Melanque reveals, “One must choose. The important thing is knowing what you want” (65). Melanque recognizes that Michel chose his wife and therefore the responsibility of loving her, separating Melanque’s adventurous lifestyle from Michel’s domestic one: “To envy the happiness of others is folly; you wouldn’t know how to make use of it. Happiness shouldn’t come ready made, but should be custom made. I’m leaving tomorrow; I know that I’ve tried to cut this happiness to my own measure. . . . Hold onto your peaceful domestic happiness. . . .” (66). Michel’s envy for Melanque’s lifestyle is not legitimate, for his situation is different; a situation that Michel chose himself.
I would argue that one of Gide’s intentions for The Immoralist is to make a case for both an immoral and moral way of living. As we saw, Gide seems to suggest that being an immoralist, in so far as it means that we approach living consciously, willing and choosing what we think is legitimate, is morally good; for adhering to mere traditions created out of habit is almost intuitively inauthentic, and even dangerous; a commitment that is in itself immoral, although some may see it as moral. It might be the case that Gide wants to revitalize those traditions that become banal through blind choice, and inspire us to choose traditions and conventional standards because they are good; a practice which also weeds out the bad. This leads us to the moral that Gide wants to communicate, namely the importance of choosing correctly, morally, with a heart for others and ourselves; using our freedom in an effective way.
A Humanities Symposium 