Gide ou le mépris de ­l’histoire

From his literary beginnings, Gide dreamt of becoming the novelist of symbolism and of renewing the novelistic genre. In his Cahiers, he attempts to detail the ­conditions of the ­novel’s new lease of life, finally rid of the documentary ambitions of realism and naturalism. For Gide, the way of the historian –of realism, ethically speaking– ­constituted an impasse.