Andy Evans wrote:
Lafcadio the existential escapist
Lafcadio, one of the key characters in Les Caves du Vatican by Andre
Gide, is an interesting example of the escapist, since he personifies
the dilemma of how the individual is to achieve mastery over his
actions inside a society for which that individual has no respect.
Part escapist, part motivated by transcendence, he seeks some
resolution. The same theme of arbitrary murder as an intellectual act
features in Hitchcocks film Rope (1948).

Gide, in Promthe mal enchan says that which distinguishes man
from animals is the acte gratuite a gratuitous action which is
motivated by nothing not any interests, passions, nothing an action
without vested interest which simply occurs. It is an act with no
goal, no master, a free act. The person who thus acts without
reasoning can be called free. Such a person can accomplish anything,
even an action which is completely absurd.

In Les Caves du Vatican Gide makes one of his characters carry out
such an act. The young Lafcadio is travelling to Rome by train and
finds himself in the same compartment as an old man called
Fleurissoire. Suddenly, as the old man is standing by the train door
the idea occurs to Lafcadio to push his travelling companion out. He
decides that if he can count up to 12 before the train passes a set of
lights on the track, he will take no action. But on the count of 10
they pass a light and he carries out his act. The action is one
accomplished without any foundation to it, as a result of an arbitrary
decision which emerges by accident out of a pure mental caprice.
The underlying philosophy of the existential movement was a lot more
profound than the tawdry and emotionally bankrupt act of Lafcadio who
is as much an ante hero as a hero in a French intellectual game which
loves nothing better in life than a double paradox. Gide, the sombre
casuist had long been accused of labyrinthine thought and while his
vision of the society that had condoned the awfulness of the First
World War was as bleak as that of the other existentialists, the acte
gratuite was more a piece of escapism than a moral solution more a
grudge reaction that if society can be so absurd, how can its
inhabitants not be equally absurd.

Gides belief was that the individuality of Man was the only thing of
intrinsic worth in the universe, and that apart from Man and his works
everything was absurd, chaotic and meaningless. Mans destiny,
therefore, was to revolt against the outside world, to develop to the
full his latent powers and so contribute to the uniqueness of the
human race. Mans function is self-creation, his aim is to release
through authentic living the God that is within him (F.J. Jones). Like
Nietzsche, Gide sees Man as his hero, his God a force of nature
different in kind to animals and the rest of life. But in attempting
to deify man he runs across the familiar problem that the history of
mankind is stained through and through with absurdity, cruelty and
animal behaviour not so much of an intellectual riddle to a
Darwinist, of course. Unlike Max Jacob, who postulated that man was
fundamentally absurd (une personalite nest quune erreur
persistante) or Rimbaud who chose to live a life of absurdity a
dereglement de tous les sens - Gide was left with the attitude that
since man had to be god like, the absurdity had to come from somewhere
outside of him maybe in society, or something else about the human
condition.
In the majority of escapist literature, everyday life is humdrum but
not weird, and the escapist escapes through imagination and dreams of
adventure. For Gide wrapped up in his labyrinthine intellectual knots
- everyday life, though equally empty, has a more profound absurdity,
and his attempt to escape from it is a perpetual attempt to return to
some kind of authenticity. Lafcadio tries to escape, however, only to
enter a world even more disturbing and chaotic than the one he is
attempting to transcend something close to the world not of the
freethinker but of the criminally insane. By this period of French
literature and the arts one thing was for sure the rigidly scientific
deterministic reality proposed by Descartes, where there was no room
for absurdity was as warped and out of shape as the clocks of Dali.
(Evans A "This Virtual Life" 2003)



So that's why valve's sound better ;-)


Dave
www.davewhitter.myby.co.uk

Music is Art - Audio is Engineering
Steam is Fun