First-Person Narratives

Abstract

Symbolism’s attacks on the novel did not actually discourage writers from turning their hand to the genre; but the effect of their profound dissatisfaction with the form was to generate a great multiplicity of mutually contradictory experiments amongst aspiring novelists during the 1890s.³⁸ Gide himself would soon declare: ‘The novel as a literary genre lacks clear outline and is multiform and omnivorous.’³⁹ His aesthetic instincts, as we have seen, could hardly be satisfied with such a state of affairs; and his notion of the a priori novel was one solution to the problem. It could be viewed, in fact, as the culmination of André Walter’s assertion that ‘a novel is a theorem’ (W, 92; 79). In this perspective, the inner logic of the narrative, the principle which gives the novel its formal coherence, depends upon a deductive process whereby from an initial premiss the story develops logically a certain set of consequences. It could be argued that the ‘experimental’ fiction of Zola and the naturalists claimed to do much the same thing; but they were concerned above all with the inductive laws of science which draw their conclusions from empirical observation. Whereas their experiments set out to illustrate theories of scientific determinism — in other words, to confirm the inevitability of what scientists had already asserted was the case — Gide’s theory of narrative was aimed at exploring possibilities as yet uncharted. His fictions were to be governed by the logic of ideas, rather than by enslavement to contingent fact which was inherent in the naturalists’ empirical methods of documentation.