Alexis Reading Order

What did Yourcenar say about Alexis later in her life?

Yourcenar returned to Alexis several times over her career, both in interviews and in a revised edition (1963) with a new preface. She was characteristically precise about its influences and limitations: she acknowledged the debt to Rilke's style and to Gide's subject, but she also noted that Alexis differs from L'Immoraliste in a crucial respect — Michel in Gide's novel is unable to be honest about himself even at the end, while Alexis's entire project is an attempt at total honesty, however difficult. Yourcenar also noted that Alexis is more concerned with what cannot be said than with what is said: the letter is full of hesitations, circumlocutions, and withdrawn statements that indicate the gap between what Alexis knows about himself and what he can bring himself to articulate. In this sense Alexis belongs with the tradition of French psychological writing (Constant's Adolphe, Fromentin's Dominique) that explores consciousness through the letter's or memoir's incomplete self-knowledge, rather than with the confessional tradition that claims full transparency. Yourcenar's decision to add a preface in 1963 was also an opportunity to place Alexis in its historical context: the 1929 date is important, she said, because what seems relatively frank in 1963 was much more daring in a world that did not yet have the vocabulary for what Alexis is describing.