René Maran - André Gide : un soupçon de proximité

Abstract

René Maran admired André Gide unconditionnally until the publication of Gide’s travel narratives, Voyage au Congo (1927) and Le Retour du Tchad (1928), at which point he grew equally distrustful. René Maran then attacked André Gide’s posture as écrivain engagé and launched a controversy that has largely remained unnoticed inspite of the research devoted to it by Netherlands academic Ieme Van der Poel. The latter’s publication, Congo-Océan, un chemin de fer controversé (L’Harmattan, 2016), confronts us with what I call « the conspiracy of silence », for Gide makes no mention of René Maran in his Journal, and the specialists are equally silent. Yet, from November 1925 to July 1934, the winner of the Goncourt 1921 devoted many an article to Gide’s trip in French Equatorial Africa (AEF) in Le Journal du peuple. I analyze this strange silence in an attempt to unearth its links with political, literary or moral interests of the times, while underlining the egotism of both figures, their competing with each other, their media strategies and, of course, the limits derived from those aspects.

Keywords

• negritude
• conspiracy of silence
• moral posture
• cultural alienation
• Pierre Herbart
• Marcel de Coppet