Paludes
Paludes ( French: Paludes [The Marshes]) is a satire by André Gide that appeared in 1895.
Paludes is the story of a sedentary bachelor who lives in a tower. The tower is surrounded by swamps. The bachelor, called Tityrus as with Virgil , cannot travel. One speaks about the normal person, more precisely - about the recumbent person Tityrus recubans [ lying backwards leaning]. Paludes is also about animals that live in the dark and have therefore usually forgotten how to see.
place
Tityrus wants to leave Paris.
content
When the narrator is asked who Tityrus is, he replies: "I". He frankly takes the reader into his poetry workshop. First, Paludes is set in verse. Then this man of letters searches for and finds epithets for an embryological term. That linguist does not seem to find an epithet for “sponginess”. Not only does the reader take part in the creative process, but also Angèle, the author's friend. A special poetic method for concentrating the monotony in the text is then made plausible. For the protagonist Tityrus, the narrator takes people from his circle of acquaintances and separates them. Truth arises only by arranging the events. If, moreover, the poet avoided judgments as much as possible and only continued to describe mere sensations, then he could not be wrong at all.
Tityrus lives in the lowlands and walks there on paths that are less "spongy" through the swamps. He doesn't want to climb hills because he knows what he'll see there. Although, a view of the day's cloudy day would have been very attractive from above.
There's nothing new downstairs. So the narrator's sentences turn out to be a repetition of yesterday. The author patiently explains the work in progress to his friend Hubert. This is guaranteed to be something round, smooth, filled, closed, into which not even a pin will fit anymore. On the other hand, the author is less lenient with his peers, the countless writers in his immediate vicinity. He communicates with them in writing. You don't talk, but exchange scribbled notes. But you don't give yourself anything. Some representatives of the rest of the intellectual elite give the author to understand that his so-called “purposeless act” can be separated, even abolished. They ridiculed Paludes , this book about mud worms. None of this concerns the author. He makes it clear - again alone in the study, addressed to the reader's address - that the statements are figuratively spoken equivalents of his thoughts. He's already unsure. Whether z. B. what has just been written is good, he does not know.
The narrator wants to be kind to his girlfriend Angèle. “Sweet Angèle!” Is the ultimate feeling. He cannot articulate or even do more. Angèle approaches him after a failed little trip, but he rejects her. Their relationship cannot be fleeting enough, he tells the woman in the face. He and she did not, in his opinion, belong to the fertile population. Angèle accuses him of cruelty. He replies desperately that he is incapable of living more intensely - something like his friend Hubert.
Hubert, who joins them, laughs at the narrator, wondering how “little impulsive power” the friend has. The answer of the narrator, who has meanwhile finished Paludes: "I am writing polder ."
Quotes
- The narrator shares from his work Paludes : "Perception begins when the impressions change, hence the need for a journey."
- "You can only be unhappy when you see each other."
Testimonials
- Gide in the preface: "Before I explain my book to others, I expect others to explain it to me."
- The role model for Angèle is Gide's wife Madeleine.
reception
- The book was initially ignored after its publication.
- The "hero of the book" is a "weak, sterile, doubting and frightened by life." Paludes is "a satire on the sedentary, fainthearted honest men."
- "Variations on nothing": Zeltner emphasizes in her epilogue that the first-person narrator writes about the swamp, the "symbol of the form and essence." However, this lack of essence becomes "something very essential: one of the most successful modern stories." The narrator mocks the writers and himself. The book is about someone who writes Paludes , who doubts himself. The narrator lets his friends talk about paludes every now and then, creating the implicit reader .
German editions
- source
- Raimund Theis (Ed.), Peter Schnyder (Ed.): André Gide: Paludes . Translated from the French by Gerda Scheffel. Pp. 245-313. The basis of the translation were two editions of the Editions Gallimard / Paris from 1920 and 1926. With an afterword by Gerda Zeltner: “To Paludes ”. Pp. 545-552. Collected works in twelve volumes. Volume VII / 1, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt Stuttgart 1991. 587 pages, ISBN 3-421-06467-9
- German-language first edition
- André Gide: Paludes (The Marshes). German edition approved and reviewed by the author. Translator: Felix Paul Greve . JCC Bruns' Verlag Minden 1905. 124 pages. linen
- 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
- Günter Krebber: Studies on the aesthetics and criticism of André Gides . Cologne Romanistic works. New episode. Issue 13. Geneva and Paris 1959. 171 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: Et nunc manet in te . Translated from the French by Maria Schäfer-Rümelin. Pp. 431-477. Collected works in twelve volumes. Volume IV / 4, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt Stuttgart 1990. 709 pages, ISBN 3-421-06464-4
Individual evidence
- ↑ Source, p. 246, 3. Zvo
- ↑ Martin, p. 157
- ↑ Source, p. 272, 18. Zvo
- ↑ Source, p. 311, 1st Zvu
- ↑ Source, p. 274, 6. Zvo
- ↑ Source, p. 275, 8th Zvu
- ↑ Source, p. 247, 1. Zvo
- ↑ Hinterhäuser, p. 443, 17. Zvo
- ↑ Krebber, p. 39, 16. Zvo
- ↑ Martin, p. 63, 22. Zvo
- ↑ Lang, p. 170, 8. Zvo
- ↑ Source, p. 550, 1. Zvo
- ↑ Source, pp. 545–552
- ↑ Source, p. 552, 10. Zvo
- ↑ Source, p. 6