Benjamin Huff and Dr. Scott Sprenger, Philosophy
Andre Gide’s La Symphonie Pastorale (in English, The Pastoral Symphony) portrays a pastor who mistakes the love of a woman for the love of God and believes he is serving God while he serves mostly just himself. Even his avowed love for Gertrude, a blind orphan girl he takes in, turns out to be mostly self-serving. Because the pastor’s self-love appears as love for Gertrude, some readers have compared the pastor to Narcissus and Gertrude to Narcissus’ entrancing image in the pool. Further steeping a scene already drenched in irony, I argue that while the pastor loves Gertrude as his image, she is more aptly an image of the pastor’s son, Jacques.
The pastor’s obsessive attention to Gertrude is reminiscent of Narcissus’ inattention to others who sought his love. Beginning very early in the story, the pastor neglects his own wife and children while making Gertrude his central concern from day to day. Gertrude’s beastly repugnance during the early period of her instruction shows that the pastor’s interest in her stems not from what she is but rather from what he hopes to make of her. Later she becomes more attractive in her own right, but what attracts the pastor most about her is an idealized image of her which reflects what he himself wishes to become more than what she wishes. As the pastor’s teaching stirs her, Gertrude comes initially to reflect much of what the pastor seeks in her; but as the story progresses, she deviates more and more from his vision in ways which he tries with some success to ignore.
As Gertrude differs from the pastor’s image, she comes more and more to resemble the pastor’s son Jacques, who in certain respects himself is an idealized image of his father. Both Jacques and his father first take interest in Gertrude just after an experience of iceskating on a nearby lake. Yet while in Jacques’ case the experience is lived, in the pastor’s case it is merely relived, a distant memory of skating in his youth on a lake he passes on his way to the house where he discovers Gertrude. Similarly throughout the development of their relationships with Gertrude, Jacques accomplishes in fact what the pastor imagines or wishes himself to be accomplishing. Gertrude enjoys and benefits more from Jacques’ teaching in reading, music, and the gospel than from the pastor’s parallel efforts. Learning of Jacques’ love, the pastor forbids that Jacques confess his love to or in any way associate with Gertrude, whom he would like to marry. It is ironic that the pastor condemns as sinful the love he wishes he had. For while the love Jacques develops for Gertrude is pure, the married pastor’s love is adulterous, as he and Gertrude realize on the day before she leaves to enter a clinic in another town. As Narcissus leaned to kiss his image, fell into the water and drowned, so the pastor’s and Gertrude’s kiss that night plunges them into despair.
While Gertrude is at the clinic for the medical treatment which cures her blindness, she reads with Jacques the writings of Saint Paul which the pastor had denied her and converts with Jacques to Catholicism. She realizes that Jacques bears the image that she had, while blind, imagined was the pastor’s and that it is truly Jacques, not the pastor, whom she loves. When she sees the faces of the people around her, especially the pained face of the pastor’s wife, she sees how much the pastor had hidden from her in his attempt to escape from guilt. The idealized image of their love disintegrates. Gertrude throws herself into a river and dies, as Narcissus’ image died with him. As if to join Gertrude, Jacques leaves the world to become a monk. The pastor does not die with the image he admires, for Gertrude is not his image but the image of Jacques.
The Research and Creative Activities Scholarship allowed me to research past commentary on this aspect of La Symphonie Pastorale and then expand and develop my own argument in English, building on the treatment in a brief paper I wrote in French during Spring Term 1995. I have appreciated the occasion to pursue my own scholarship rather than an assigned topic.
My research indicates that my perspective on the relationships between the pastor, his son, and Gertrude is unprecedented in the secondary literature. Though in my search I made use of published bibliographies, computer search engines, and the references of peripherally relevant books, I found very little of direct relevance to my thesis. Although the archetype of Narcissus is recognized as influential in much of Gide’s work, the peculiar pattern wherein the pastor Narcissistically admires an image he mistakes for his own apparently has not come to public attention. Indeed, even more straightforward comparison of the pastor with the figure of Narcissus seems to receive less attention than it might easily bear.
As an undergraduate I have often received assignments to research and write on topics which, generally considered important, have received much attention from scholars. Exploring the holes in a vast secondary literature is an interesting contrast to exploring the heavily sedimented areas more common in class work. Indeed, I was surprised at how little I found that would count for or against my thesis. I had expected to find some viewpoints against which I would need to formulate arguments for my interpretation of the text. Without such objection and rejoinder, my paper is shorter than I had expected it to be. A worthy project for the future might be to anticipate some responses my argument might stimulate and respond to them in advance.
Seeing how much good scholarship never appears in English translation, I gained a greater appreciation for the language training the University has required of me. Having carried out a research project for which many of the most important secondary sources were in French, I will be more aggressive in the future in supplementing English sources with those in other languages.
I read the text of La Symphonie Pastorale only in French. Yet presenting my argument in English, except for some quotations, strengthened my work. Writing in my native English as compared with French, I found not only that I could express more fully and precisely my points, but also that confronting the richer variety of available expressions forced me to think in greater detail, and with more rigor. Writing with a broad scholarly audience in mind, rather than a professor in the context of a particular class, challenged me to think through my presentation much more carefully. During a year otherwise devoted to studying philosophy, I have enjoyed the chance to explore the power of literature to comment on my favorite topic of moral values and their (mis)application to human behavior.
Having developed it to this point, I am increasingly hopeful that my work may see publication in a scholarly journal, although concrete results of the submission process will likely take several months to return. My explication of the unreflecting Narcissus illuminates elements of the pastor’s character which are crucial in the plot development of La Symphonie Pastorale. In the future, I would like to develop further arguments regarding the extent to which the image of the unreflecting Narcissus also unifies certain peripheral developments in the text.
References
- Andre Gide, La Symphonie Pastorale. Boston: Heath, 1954.