The Immoralist by André Gide
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What conjures up in the mind at the mere mention of the word ‘morality’ is a question that our evolutionary advanced mankind hasn’t been able to find an appropriate response to. For all the ethics and moral codes defining the very basis of societal structure, morality still remains a vague ideal. Vague not because there is a dearth of reasons associated with the necessity or goodness of moral values required for a harmonious existence of humans in the society but because the certainty of actions needed to achieve these morals is debatable. For action, on the part of an individual, being solely a subjective decision, results from something not instantaneous but from underlying ideals which have accumulated in the consciousness through experiences of one’s lifetime. So the defining line between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ seems blurred in the sense that what a person may hold ‘right’ another person may not.

Gide’s The Immoralist, appearing to be a simple tale distinguishing the right and wrong, is an intricate delineation of this distinction between ‘thoughts’ and ‘emotions’. Michel, who once suffered from tuberculosis, after being tended by his wife and with his strong will to attain good health, becomes healthy again. Once recovered, he realizes the importance of being alive.

There is nothing more tragic for a man who has been expecting to die than a long convalescence. After that touch from the wing of Death, what seemed important is so no longer; other things become so which had at first seemed unimportant, or which one did not even know existed. The miscellaneous mass of acquired knowledge of every kind that has overlain the mind gets peeled off in places like a mask of paint, exposing the bare skin —the very flesh of the authentic creature that had lain hidden beneath it.

Enamored with his new found love for life, Michel indulges in such pleasures deemed as wrong. His thoughts, reeking ‘immorality’, are stripped deftly before the reader by Gide. But Gide’s skill lies in the excellent rendition of such a state of mind, calling forth deliberation by reader on the blurred line subsisting between right and wrong.

For the time being, therefore, my relationship with Marceline remained the same, though it was every day getting more intense by reason of my growing love. My dissimulation (if that expression can be applied to the need I felt of protecting my thoughts from her judgment), my very dissimulation increased that love. I mean that it kept me incessantly occupied with Marceline. At first, perhaps, this necessity for falsehood cost me a little effort; but I soon came to understand that the things that are reputed worst (lying, to mention only one) are only difficult to do as long as one has never done them; but that they become—and very quickly too—easy, pleasant and agreeable to do over again, and soon even natural. So then, as is always the case when one overcomes an initial disgust, I ended by taking pleasure in my dissimulation itself, by protracting it, as if it afforded opportunity for the play of my undiscovered faculties. And every day my life grew richer and fuller, as I advanced towards a riper, more delicious happiness.

To Michel, this dissimulation is ‘right’ since it brings him happiness he was once deprived of. How can one’s happiness be termed as ‘morally wrong’ when the worse it can do is to harmlessly fake affection? Does a care shown with indifference stand the same trial as immorality?

Gide goes further and adds twists that still make it hard to confer a judgment. After the unfortunate event of abortion of Marceline, Michel takes care of her.

Then phlebitis declared itself; and when that got better, a clot of blood suddenly set her hovering between life and death. It was night time; I remember leaning over her, feeling my heart stop and go on again with hers. How many nights I watched by her bedside, my eyes obstinately fixed on her, hoping by the strength of my love to instil some of my own life into hers. I no longer thought much about happiness; my single melancholy pleasure was sometimes seeing Marceline smile.

But the recovery of Marceline again prompts Michel towards self indulgence. Even when his wife is on the verge of dying, Michel makes her travel with him. Marceline’s death is a result of long travels and insufficient care resulting from sybaritic actions on part of Michel. His demeanor goes through an alteration from the start to the end with mutation of his thoughts. Perhaps it is this instability of Michel’s thoughts, of his changed emotions as per his convenience that he is an immoralist. Perhaps he is an immoralist because he knows perfectly well that he has changed but instead of expressing regret or accepting his guilt he still prefers to follow unrestrained pleasures.

The work by Gide traverses through murky and obscure alleys of the mind, sometimes revealing those thoughts which lay concealed but which can readily surface without alarm if unrestrained, thereby posing a peril to the widely accepted or personal notions of morality.

Joan Didion quotes Lionel Trilling in her essay "On Morality":

“We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes, Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.”



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