Quote: In André Gide’s great Modernist novel The Counterfeiters (Les Faux-monnayeurs, 1926), the schoolboy Boris, at the age of nine, comes under the influence of a boy called Baptistin, a year or two older, with whom he enjoys certain ‘clandestine practices’ - mutual masturbation - which they both, understandably, consider to be magical. Although Boris cures himself of this ‘vice’ for a while, he later takes it up again, masturbating alone, essentially as a consequence of being bullied. His sexual pleasure (volupté) is all the more intense for the recidivism it involves (‘mais il prenait plaisir à se perdre et faisait, de cette perdition même, sa volupté’). Gide himself had been removed from school at the tender age of eight because of certain ‘bad habits’ which he made no attempt to cover up, being naïvely unaware that there was any need to do so. Prior to this, he and the son of the concierge had been in the habit of masturbating - not each other but themselves in each other’s close company - underneath his parents’ dining table.
No book so intensely redolent of the frenzy of male puberty could well avoid mention — or implication, at least — of masturbation. But there is more to the raising of this topic than the dully mirroring requirements of realist plausibility. The whole of The Counterfeiters is vibrant with onanistic promise. Its complex of intrigues and affairs between adolescent boys thrives upon the purposive conjunction of hands and penises. The motivation for this is not just Gide’s indulgence of a personal interest - although that is likely to be a part of the matter. Given that the novel is so profoundly and extensively concerned with education and socialisation, masturbation takes its place in a thematic whole as the definitive exercise in sexual self- or co-education. It constitutes the boys’ best way of establishing a firm (and pleasurable) mode of relation to the physical world. This is no incidental detail in Gide’s broader, intellectual explorations of criminality and liminality: for the perception of physical matter is, as it always has been, sited near the base of all metaphysics.