The Lexicon of Les Caves du Vatican

Abstract

Numerous entries in Gide's Journal attest that for him Les Caves du Vatican was to represent a break with the tradition of La Porte étroite. He is especially concerned that the novel's language be liberated from the orthodoxy imposed by current usage. Hence, in Les Caves there is what appears to be an unusually high incidence of extravagant names, exotic nouns, foreign words and phrases, argot, rare words, and lexical and semantic neologisms. This phenomenon has been either neglected or misunderstood, and can be explained only in correlation with Gide's systematic overturning in Les Caves of the standard narrative conventions of the Realist-Naturalist tradition. Gide realized that the revolution in thinking about language which was occurring around him could play a role in freeing the novel from the existing restrictions of the public's expectations. By his esoteric vocabulary he forces the reader to remember that the novel's “story” is the author's invention and the characters his playthings. That fact, forgotten since Balzac but now reestablished, restores to the novelist the creative freedom he needs. It is on that level that the significance of Les Caves du Vatican is to be found.