The narrow gate

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The narrow gate is a novel by André Gide , which was published in 1909 under the title “La Porte étroite” in the literary magazine Mercure de France in Paris.

Jérôme tells the story of his unhappy love for Alissa Bucolin.

time and place

Looking back, Jérôme shares events that took place in the north ( Le Havre , Fongueusemare ) and south ( Nîmes , Aigues-Vives ) of France over a period of more than ten years - reaching into the 1880s .

action

Lucile Bucolin and Pastor Vautier

Vautier had brought the foundling Lucile - a Creole - from Martinique to Le Havre. Jérôme's uncle Bucolin married Lucile when the reckless young girl turned 16 - much to the pastor's delight. Understandable - after all, Lucile's way of life did not correspond at all to the moral standards of the Christian Church. Even after their marriage, Lucile caused “a lot of mischief” in the Bucolin family. As the mother of three children - these were Jérôme's cousins ​​Alissa and Juliette and cousin Robert - she never let go of her affairs. For example, in her own house, in the presence of her children, she shared with a young, unknown lieutenant and finally ran away. The pastor preaches angrily against Lucile, condemning her sin from the pulpit : “Enter through the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is wide that leads to damnation ... And the gate is narrow and the way that leads to life is narrow, and there are few of them who find it. "

Jérôme, Alissa and Juliette

Jérôme and Alissa, the young lovers, trapped in their “ puritanical discipline”, take the preacher's sermon so seriously that they refuse any physical approach. Alissa invents a love ban for herself. The extreme, as it were the absolute climax of this pure love relationship, is a kiss from the couple. Alissa perishes from her abstinence; dies lonely in Paris.

After Alissa's death, Jérôme writes down the story of his love.

Jérôme first lost his father (who was a doctor) and then his mother. After Lucile abandons her three children, Jérôme, who loves Alissa, wants to "protect the two-year-old girl from evil". He wants to become engaged to her. Alissa refuses the engagement. The young girl sensibly notes that her sister Juliette is also interested in Jérôme. And the celibate Alissa wants to give up her lover in favor of her sister. The wine merchant Monsieur Édouard Teissières from Aigues-Vives “very persistently” freed Juliette, but was given a basket because he was not sufficiently musically educated and also not handsome. When Alissa continues to be courted by Jérôme, she devises excuses; z. B. Juliette should marry before her. Jérôme rebels after each new rejection, but in the end he gives up every time; withdraws, goes on a journey. The years go by. Jérôme has to do military service. Monsieur Teissières marries Juliette. The couple live in the south of France. Over the years, Juliette had six children from the wine merchant.

Again and again, sometimes at long intervals, Jérôme visits his Alissa. Then he rejoices - until Alissa suggests that he shouldn't come any more. When Jérôme doesn't want to know anything about it, she accuses and insults him in her distress. Immediately afterwards she confesses her love for him, but in the same breath restricts: “Believe me: we are not made for happiness.” Then Jérôme experiences “more politeness than love”. Alissa evades his desire. More years pass. In one last encounter he kisses her “almost brutally” on the lips, “permeated with golden ecstasy”. Alissa lies in his arms as if devoted, but then she says: “My friend! Oh, don't destroy our love. ”With that, everything is done and said. Alissa made the sacrifice. The couple divorced. Alissa has rejected her lover, but she is "madly" hoping for his return. A few weeks later, the mistress dies of her grief.

shape

Peter André Bloch writes in his epilogue that Gide has given up the role of “the omniscient narrator”. This means that the first-person narrator Jérôme cannot look into either Alissa or Juliette. He gropes - and with it the reader especially - completely in the dark. Just one example.

When Juliette - soon after the beginning of the novel - “should” marry, she yells at Jérôme, asking if he knows who she should marry. Of course he doesn't know and she screams: "You!" The reader is racking his brains. Who could have given the marriage order? The difficult to answer question occupies the reader throughout the novel. At the end of the novel, Jérôme submits diary sheets from Alissa's pen. These contain the answer: It must have been Alissa. But Juliette was happy even without Alissa's sacrifice.

The first-person narrator Jérôme usually reports without comment. There are sometimes considerable gaps in time between his apparently artless reports. The reader soon knows: Jérôme - by necessity - always gives in to Alissa's instructions to renounce love. Jérôme renounces out of love. It is fitting that Jérôme himself does not fall out of the role outlined above, when Alissa's diary sheds light on some of her strange behavior. The whole text is dictated by Jérôme's love for Alissa.

Quotes

  • Whoever wants to win his life will lose it.
  • ... Pascal : "Everything that is not God cannot meet my expectations."

Testimonials

Diary of

  • July 11, 1909: Gide very briefly comments on a reviewer who prefers those books to the novel that the author has previously published.
  • May 23, 1910: "If I were to die today, all my work would disappear behind La Porte étroite ."
  • March 1913: Gide praises the documentary and dialogues in the novel while rereading it, but discovers that the rest of the novel is embellished.

reception

Renée Lang writes that the novel is “a masterpiece in its beautiful moderation.” On the one hand, Alissa decides in “striving for holiness” “courageously for the narrow gate ”, but on the other hand it seems to Lang “as if she were exhilarated a unique superhuman achievement sometimes stronger than their love of God ”. By renouncing her love, the exalted Alissa, "conquered by the enormity of her sacrifice, sinks towards death". Lang calls her notes "a painful introspection with almost complete exclusion of material reality".

While Jérôme is striving for marriage, writes Claude Martin, Alissa wants to atone for the guilt that her mother, the beautiful Creole Lucile Bucolin, has incurred. Martin quotes Paul Archambault: “One fears that it is more the fear of this earth than the attraction of heaven that reveals itself in Alissa.” And Peter André Bloch thinks that the goal of Jérôme and Alissa is finally, “only to be in to be close to the distance. "

German editions

source
  • Raimund Theis (Hrsg.), Peter Schnyder (Hrsg.): André Gide: Die close Pforte . Translated from the French by Andrea Spingler. Collected works in twelve volumes. Volume VIII / 2, pp. 23-142. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt Stuttgart 1992. 511 pages, ISBN 3-421-06468-7
German-language first edition
  • André Gide: The narrow gate. Novel. With six drawings by John Jack Vrieslander. Translation: Felix Paul Graefe . Erich Reiss Verlag Berlin 1909. 240 pages. With 6 mounted black-and-white drawings, gilt head, blue linen with gold-embossed title on the spine and cover.
Secondary literature
  • Renée Lang: André Gide and the German spirit (French: André Gide et la Pensée Allemande ). Translation: Friedrich Hagen . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt Stuttgart 1953. 266 pages
  • Claude Martin: André Gide . Translated from the French by Ingeborg Esterer. Rowohlt 1963 (July 1987 edition). 176 pages, ISBN 3-499-50089-2
  • Hans Hinterhäuser (Ed.), Peter Schnyder (Ed.), Raimund Theis (Ed.): André Gide: Diary 1903 - 1922 . Translated from the French by Maria Schäfer-Rümelin. Collected works in twelve volumes. Volume II / 2. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt Stuttgart 1990. 813 pages, ISBN 3-421-06462-8

Web links

In French

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Source, p. 6
  2. ↑ Source, p. 121, 11. Zvu
  3. ↑ Source, p. 30, 14. Zvo
  4. ↑ Source, p. 34, 6. Zvo
  5. ↑ Source, p. 35, 11. Zvu
  6. ↑ Source, p. 36, 11. Zvo, see also ( Lukas 13,24  EU )
  7. ↑ Source, p. 128, 14. Zvo
  8. ↑ Source, p. 77, 4th Zvu
  9. ↑ Source, p. 102, 6. Zvo
  10. ↑ Source, p. 117, 8th Zvu
  11. ↑ Source, p. 129, 6. Zvo
  12. ↑ Source, p. 135, 4th Zvu
  13. ↑ Source, pp. 457 to 472
  14. ↑ Source, p. 471
  15. ↑ Source, p. 70
  16. ↑ Source, p. 123, 20. Zvo
  17. ↑ Source, p. 110, 1. Zvo, see also ( Matthäus 10.39  EU )
  18. ↑ Source, p. 137, 17. Zvo
  19. ↑ Hinterhäuser, p. 189, center
  20. ↑ Hinterhäuser, p. 216, 2nd Zvu
  21. ↑ Hinterhäuser, p. 317 below
  22. ↑ Lang, p. 195, 12. Zvo
  23. ↑ Lang, p. 199, 6. Zvo
  24. ^ Lang, p. 198, 19. Zvo
  25. ↑ Lang, p. 200, 12th Zvu
  26. ^ Lang, p. 198, 9. Zvu
  27. ↑ Lang, p. 199, 18. Zvo
  28. ↑ Martin, p. 87 below
  29. ↑ quoted in Martin, p. 89, 16. Zvo
  30. ↑ Peter André Bloch, quoted in the afterword of the source, p. 472, 2nd Zvu