Stephen B. Vaisey and Dr. Scott M. Sprenger, French and Italian
The goal of my research was to identify the origin of a deviation from the classic Ovidian myth of Narcissus that Professor Sprenger noticed in the Traité du Narcisse of Andre Gide. Gide’s Narcissus dies by drowning while trying to embrace his own image in the river, while Ovid’s traditional account has Narcissus die by the side of water and turn into a flower. In addition to searching out the origins of this variant, I also made it my goal to discover the reasons for its appearance or reappearance in Gide’s work.
My first step was to try and isolate other renditions of the myth in the work of Gide’s turn-of-the-century French contemporaries. The University of Chicago maintains a searchable database on the Internet called ARTFL, which contains a large body of French literature in its complete form. As useful as this sounded at first, I hit an obstacle that impeded much of my research into the Narcissus writings of Gide’s contemporaries. I discovered that since most of these writings were copyrighted, I was only able to view one or two lines of text at a time that contained the key words I was looking for. This substantially slowed my inquiries in this area and required me to “go fishing,” so to speak, in their writings. Although Narcissus was a popular subject among the Symbolists, it is difficult to determine if the Gide variation was standard at the time or not.
As for locating the ancient origins of the variation, I looked for Narcissus references in the texts that I speculated may have influenced Gide. This angle bore some fruit. In his Enneads, Plotinus mentions the myth of Narcissus “who was carried away by the current.” Plotinus gives no further commentary on the subject, implying that this was an accepted version at this point in history.
Another ancient writer, Callistratus, has Narcissus dying by drowning while trying to embrace his own reflection. Callistratus produced his work at approximately the same time as Ovid, and I was unable to trace this version of the myth any further back.
I decided at this point to explore Gide’s Traité from a slightly different angle. This approach did not help advance the objective of discovering the initial origin of the myth’s variation, but raised some extremely compelling questions. In Traité du Narcisse, Gide seems to equate Narcissus and the Biblical Adam. This, coupled with the plausible mythological link between Gide and Plotinus, led me to the Nag Hammadi, the scripture of the Gnostics, an early Christian sect deemed heretical by the Roman Church. The Nag Hammadi equates Narcissus and Adam in a fascinating way. According to these writings, Adam was cast out of Paradise for falling in love with his own image. This idea is clearly influenced by the myth of Narcissus, and is obviously an until now unaccounted for influence on Gide and perhaps his contemporaries as well.
Heartened by the gratifying results of this line of inquiry, I decided to explore another obscure reference from the Traité du Narcisse. Ygdrasil, the name Gide gives to the tree standing next to the river in which Narcissus perceives his own reflection, did not appear to be of French or Greek origin. Some searching led to the source of this name. It is the name of the World Tree in Norse mythology, which stands next to a spring in which one can see past and future events. This was quite an interesting discovery because the river in Gide’s Traité serves the same revelatory purpose. From these findings, it seems likely that Gide was influenced by Norse mythology in writing Traité du Narcisse. Neither Professor Sprenger nor I had previously read of any such influence on Gide or his contemporaries.
Although my research did not attain its original goal, I am extremely pleased with the results. I managed to uncover two previously unknown influences on a significant French author about whom scholars have written volumes. Professor Sprenger and I have decided to work on an article about the Gnostic influence on Gide which we will submit for general publication. I am also pleased to have worked on a project that required me to work so much with original sources rather than existing commentary. My skills as a researcher have improved immeasurably as a result of this project.