Le rasoir d'André Gide ou l'histoire d'une quête entre simplicité et simplexité

Gide’s Journal point out that simplicity represents for André Gide a moral, spiritual and aesthetic ideal which determines the subject’s relation to what is narrated as well as the form of the narration. Gide is fascinated by the "naturalness" of various authors with low school capital like Charles-Louis Philippe and Marguerite Audoux, whose books he contributes to publish. Like many other critics of the time, he recognizes in simplicity the fundamental basis of their works, and he envies the pretended ease with which they reach it. In The Simplexity (2009), Alain Berthoz has proposed an interesting reading of the approach of living beings to the complex world, which is not unrelated to Gide’s quest for simplicity. According to Berthoz, the originality of living beings is to have found solutions which are not simple, but simplex, that is to say simplified, to respond to the stimulation of a complex world, and to be able to act with efficiency and speed. Ockham's razor would therefore be a principle of simplexity, not of simplicity. André Gide does not want to surrender to "simplify his thinking"; since he can’t attain naturalness, simplexity is the only possible solution for him.