Andrey Kidd and his moral trilogy

Author: Erya

2021 marks the 70th anniversary of the death of French writer and Nobel laureate Iné gide.

Gide was born on 22 November 1869 to a Protestant Christian family in Paris, the son of a law school at the University of Paris, and a mother of a prominent family. In 1891, the first work, The Notebook of André Wald, was published. In 1895, her mother died and she married her cousin Madeleine. In 1947, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died of pneumonia in Paris on 19 February 1951.

André Kidd in Paris, France, 1935

Gideqi people, whether in the content of writing, in political tendencies, or in emotional experience, have a lot of controversy throughout their lives. Puritanist family education and Nietzsche's ideas inspired him to rebel from his youth, abandoning traditional moral concepts; the criticism of the colonial system on the African trip and the extreme changes that quickly became communists and disillusioned after visiting the Soviet Union made him violently attacked by the right-wing left both front and back; despite his mother's opposition to marrying his cousin, he was defied by oscar Wilde, who he admired, and then cheated on another woman and gave birth to a child, and the chaotic emotional life added many moral stains to him.

But as Jean-Paul Sartre put it in his eulogy, The Living Kidd, "The whole idea of France over the past thirty years, whether willing or not, whatever their other coordinates, marx, Hegel, or Kierkegaard, should define itself by reference to Gide." "When it comes to French literature at this stage, Gide is always the page that cannot be bypassed. Among all the works, the "moral trilogy" composed of "The Betrayer" (1902), "Narrow Door" (1909) and "Pastoral Symphony" (1919) is the most representative.

All three novels are written from a first-person perspective. In "The Betrayer", the protagonist Michelle and his wife Maslin were on their honeymoon, and on the way, they fell seriously ill and were carefully cared for by Maslin, but after recovering, he succumbed to his own desires and lived a life of indulgence, resulting in the death of Maslin, who had accumulated illness. "Narrow Door" tells the story of the constraints of religious morality on lovers: Jerome and cousin Alyssa are in love with each other, Alyssa is worried because she witnesses her mother and people eloping, and her sister lives an unhappy married life, alienating Jerome, turning to fanatical religious beliefs, hoping that her lover can cross the "narrow door", approach God, and eventually die alone. Through the diary of a village priest, the "Pastoral Symphony" records the great tragedy of his adoption of the blind girl Getrod, but in the process of inspiration and teaching, he fell into a love network, causing great pain to his wife and children, and the blind woman deliberately fell into the water because of guilt after regaining her sight.

From the perspective of the content of the novel and the writing style, unlike the feeling of confronting the world and embracing the self in the early essay collection "Food on Earth" (1897), the "moral trilogy" goes further, using religious elements in many places, profoundly revealing the complexity and hypocrisy of human nature, and showing the moral dilemma of dilemma.

Typically, the priest in The Pastoral Symphony, who calls his act of leading a young blind girl home as "I bring back the lost lamb," is disgusted with his wife, Amelie. Later in his account, the pastor acknowledged that "trusting in God is one thing, putting the burden on others is another," and the wife took on the responsibility of caring for Hotside. Rao insisted that he spent a lot of time on enlightenment education, telling the blind girl about nature, animals and colors, and taking her to concerts. In the diary, the priest portrays his wife as nagging and jealous, and his son Jacques as alienated and cold, denying his concern for beauty, selectively reading the Bible to Godrid, and asking rhetorically, "Do you think your love is sinful?" All this exacerbated the disappointment and pain of the blind woman after her vision.

However, this cannot be reduced to just an ordinary tragedy. Whether deliberately left as a cover for evidence or as an unconscious emotional dissection, the priest's struggles are also reflected in the diary. Here, religion is a weapon to exonerate moral responsibility. The priest's description of the blind woman's emotions is very similar to "Lolita" and "Fang Siqi's First Love Paradise". Whether it is using precocious puberty as an excuse, using literature as bait, or alienating religion into a fig leaf, it exposes the natural hypocritical nature of the deceitful person who holds the right to speak.

It is also worth noting that words unconsciously project shadows of real life. The Puritan precepts of "The Narrow Door" and Jerome's love for his cousin Alyssa are highly overlapping with the writer's own life experience. The look in Michelle's eyes on the boy who stole scissors in "The Betrayer" and the patience for the gradual disappearance of the sick Maslin also implicitly correspond to Gide's famous "invisible homosexuality" in literary history. As Love in the Dark Ages: From Wilde to Almodóvar points out, "The struggle of homosexual consciousness begins with a strong sense of privacy, but if homosexuals are writers, painters, filmmakers, reformers, this struggle gradually creeps into language, imagery, politics in strange and fascinating ways." ”

Perhaps, the ending of Marceline and Alyssa represents the two possibilities that Gide imagined at the moral crossroads: selfless giving and ending up depressed by her husband's side; restraining feelings and finding a way out of God. Whatever choices are made, women of all kinds die repeatedly in literature. Equally withered, there is all the imagination of love.

The enthusiasm of struggle, honesty, chaos, and impermanence, poured out of Gide's pen, is vividly expressed in those who think that their hearts are "more desolate than the desert." From this point of view, the "Moral Trilogy" is not only a literary achievement of the heyday of Kidd's creation, but also a window to explore and observe the process of his ideological transformation. in Erya

Source: Guangming Network - Literary And Art Review Channel