Laying a Paraboloid
AI and the Future of the Novel
Just wanted to give a bit more context for André Gide’s novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), first published a century ago today. I wrote about this in relation to AI and novel for the Royal Literary Fund here.
The first part of André Gide’s novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters) appeared 100 years ago, on 1 March 1925, in the literary magazine La Nouvelle Revue Française. Revolving around the theme of originals and copies, the centrepiece of the novel is an exploration of the art of the novel itself, and the relationship between the worlds of fiction and ‘real’ life. Gide’s alter-ego within the novel, Édouard, is also writing a novel called Les Faux-Monnayeurs; he, like Gide, keeps a journal commenting on his own compositional process, with this journal published within (and, in Gide’s case, alongside) the novel. Asked by his friend Sophroniska what the subject of the novel is, Édouard replies ‘There is none…My novel has no subject.’ His aspiration instead is to write a novel that contains everything, that excludes none of his material: ‘I have been working for a year, and there is nothing I haven’t put in: all I see, all I know, all I can learn from other people’s lives and my own.’
Speaking about it two years after its publication as part of a Cambridge lecture-series (eventually published as Aspects of the Novel), E. M. Forster described the novel as being both a ‘curious’ specimen – as though, instead of laying an egg, Gide had set out ‘to lay a paraboloid’ – and as being ‘among the most interesting of recent works’. What was new in the novel, for Forster, was Gide’s attempt to break free from the ‘tyranny’ of novelistic plot ‘and its alternative, tyranny by characters’. The alternative proposal, here, for Forster, was that writers should fully immerse themselves in their material: they should be subdued, carried away, and ‘rolled over and over by it’, rather than trying to control it or use it as a basis to plan or structure the work. Ideas about forgery, inflation and depreciation had, after all, ‘gradually invaded’ Édouard’s book (in Gide’s words) just as theories of clothing invade Thomas Carlyle’s novel Sartor Resartus to the point of assuming ‘the functions of characters’. The novel is also notable, for Forster, in its attempt to combine ‘the two truths’ – truth in life and truth in art – in a sub-genre that we might now categorise as autofiction.
One of the incidents that inspired the novel was Gide seeing a schoolboy stealing from a second-hand bookstall in Paris. It was only after cramming the book in his pocket that the schoolboy realized Gide had seen him, shortly and hesitantly withdrawing his wallet and pretending to search for the money that he already knew he did not have. Georges, the schoolboy in the novel involved in a similar incident of theft is also involved in passing the false currency of the novel’s title, with the real counterfeiters being a gang captured in Rouen in the years before Gide began writing the novel. Newspaper clippings appended to Gide’s compositional journal (from Figaro, 16 September 1906) describe the counterfeit coins as being manufactured in Spain, introduced into France, brought by three professional criminals before being passed by middlemen to ‘bohemians, second-year students, unemployed journalists, artists, novelists, etc.’ for circulation to the public. For some, this illegal trade was ‘humanitarian work: “Once in a while I would give a few to poor devils with money troubles who could use them to keep their families alive. …And nobody was harmed, because we were stealing from nobody but the State.”’