André Gide, that sly archbishop of paradox, published The Vatican Cellars in 1914 – the very year Europe began dismantling its cathedrals with artillery fire. It’s a book that calls itself a ‘sotie’ – a medieval farce performed by jesters in cap and bells – which is Gide’s way of saying, ‘This is a joke, but one you will never quite get over.’ Oscar Wilde once remarked that ‘life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about,’ and Gide obliges, wrapping dynamite in wit and handing it out as a party favour.
What’s the novel about? In the strictest sense – nothing you could hang a crucifix on. No solemn cathedral arches of plot, no stained glass of moral certainty. Instead, it’s a scaffolding of irony erected over the sinkhole of human credulity. Gide leads us into parlours, drawing rooms, and European railway compartments, and shows us the species at its most marvellously ridiculous: believers who believe too much, sceptics who doubt even themselves, and opportunists who see the world as a cash register disguised as a chapel.
The novel’s notorious for its satire of religion – but not religion in the grand Aquinas-building-a-Summa sense, nor in the Kierkegaardian leap-into-the-absurd sense. No, Gide lampoons the religion of gossip, conspiracy, and bourgeois gullibility. It’s Chesterton’s Father Brown turned inside out: a mystery without crime, solved by a detective who has no business solving anything. In the ‘cellars’ of Gide’s Vatican, one finds less theology than cheap wine, less revelation than rumour. Yet the comedy isn’t cheap – it’s profound precisely because it shows how easily people mistake their own shadows for God.
Enter the parade of characters – not names, but masks. A freethinker who cannot think freely, a pious soul whose piety is indistinguishable from superstition, a philosopher who’s mistaken coincidence for Providence, and somewhere – always lurking – the jester who knows that to tip the scales of fate requires only the nudge of a finger. They’re Dostoevsky’s Karamazovs rewritten as boulevard comedy: all the fever of Russian guilt, but with the moustache wax of a Parisian matinée.
But the true genius of Gide isn’t in the people he invents, but in the act he imagines: the gratuitous act, the deed without cause. Imagine Hamlet without the ghost, Lear without the storm, Oedipus without the prophecy – and still they act. Pure freedom, or pure absurdity? Nietzsche declared that ‘the deed is everything, the doer a mere fiction,’ and Gide, laughing in the wings, arranges his stage accordingly. The world’s not held together by reason but by whim, and civilisation teeters on the caprice of a shrug.
Of course, Gide’s merciless to his readers as well. He interrupts himself, confides in us, and admits he has no idea what comes next. It’s the novel as practical joke, the author as conjurer revealing the trick even as he performs it. One hears the ghost of Sterne, the smirk of Voltaire, the weary sigh of Flaubert – and, yes, the Wildean grin. The effect’s maddening: we’re asked to believe in fiction that openly tells us not to believe in it. But then, isn’t that precisely how most of us conduct our lives?
So why read The Vatican Cellars? Because it’s a satire without a target, a comedy that bites its own tail, a novel that mocks the very idea of novels. It’s the literary equivalent of discovering that your parish priest’s also a skilled pickpocket – shocking, hilarious, and oddly liberating. In its pages we glimpse what happens when the pillars of faith, morality, and narrative all dissolve into air. And we laugh – not because the joke is kind, but because it’s true.
As Wilde said, ‘If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.’ Gide laughed, and got away with murder.
Wording 