The existentialist novel had a brilliant albeit somewhat ephemeral life. It was born in 1938 with Sartre’s Nausea and was for fifteen years the dominant tendency in French narrative. The date of its death can be put at roughly 1954, the year of the publication of the movement’s best novel and also its swansong: The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir. This admirably describes the failure of a generation of lucid and honest intellectuals who believed in ‘committed’ literature which could have an immediate social function, and who were brutally disillusioned by the Cold War, McCarthyism, Korea, the colonial wars and the impotence of the left in the face of the conservative forces that have taken power in almost all of Europe. For fifteen years, the most gifted and serious French writers brought out plays and published novels, articles and essays trying to form a progressive consciousness, defending the generous ideals of the Resistance. This fine effort would come to very little and would be partially destroyed by the imperialist adventure of Suez and the barely disguised barrack room uprising that brought down the Fourth Republic. This generation was not only disillusioned but also divided by the time The Mandarins appeared: first the break between Sartre and Camus and then between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty weakened the formidable initial group of Les Temps Modernes. The novel was no longer the preferred genre of the existentialists: Sartre interrupted Roads to Freedom and the final volume would never appear; the narrative vein of Camus weakened pitifully after The Outsider and The Plague (his later stories and his third novel are exercises of style which do not reach any great heights); even Genet, who can just about be included within the ranks of the existentialist novelists, abandoned the genre after writing Diary of a Thief. Within a short period of time, a handful of apolitical and formalist novelists replaced the Liberation writers in the front rank of contemporary French literature. For ten years, nobody in France has contested the vanguard position of this disparate group which comprises, among others, Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Butor and Beckett, despite the fact that their artful experiments show increasing signs of weakness.
The deaths of Camus and Merleau-Ponty reduce the leaders of French literary existentialism to two names (Gabriel Marcel, despite his attempts at drama, was never really a creator): Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre is writing some plays but his main work in the future will be philosophical and political. Simone de Beauvoir wrote of her travels in China and the United States in books that are halfway between reportage and essays; then she brought out her memoirs: three solidly constructed volumes that describe intelligently and in depth the emancipation of a young woman from the bourgeois world that she was born into, her struggle to overcome the taboos and prejudices that a class stills holds over the ‘second sex’. Un Mort si douce, a short account of the agony and death of Simone de Beauvoir’s mother, is a type of appendix to these memoirs.
Thirteen years after The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir has now published a new novel (her fifth): Les Belles images. It is an excellent, tightly written text that dispels in its first pages the fears – set out by someone before the book appeared – that this novel, in the wake of the frantic desire for new forms and stylistic experimentation put in vogue by the authors of the ‘nouveau roman’, would damage the narrative prestige acquired by The Mandarins and would reveal Simone de Beauvoir as an old-fashioned novelist. Quite wrong. Les Belles images, although faithful in its contents to the existential postulates of ‘commitment’, is not traditional in its techniques, but is similar, in its writing and structure, to an experimental novel. This is perhaps its greatest merit: to have made use, in order to enhance an important narrative, of certain forms and expressive modes which seem artificial and irritating in other authors due to the poverty of the issues that they are dealing with.
Les Belles images is written in the present indicative, like a novel by Robbe-Grillet; it has the descriptive austerity – very short sentences, minimum allusion sufficient to present a landscape or a character – of a story by Marguerite Duras, and uses imagined dialogues, like Nathalie Sarraute, to reveal the subjectivity of its heroes (let’s call them that). But although it is clear that Simone de Beauvoir has carefully read these authors and has used their techniques, it would be wrong to say that she imitates them. Her intentions are very different from, and even opposed to, these other writers. The main objective of Les Belles images is to show, through a fiction, the alienation of women in a large, modern, consumerist society; to describe the depersonalization of human beings, their subtle transformation into robots in the heart of a
society in which what Marx called ‘fetishes’ – money, advertising and the like – have been transformed from instruments at the service of man into instruments that enslave man. Of course, Simone de Beauvoir is not the first person to deal with the theme of ‘alienation’ in industrial countries: literature and cinema are greatly concerned with this problem (which, for example, appears time and again in the films of Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard). The difference is rather that while so many authors are content just to describe the symptoms or manifestations of this alienation and even jubilantly contribute to it with their own work, Simone de Beauvoir keeps her distance from the topic, is critical towards it and tries to fight it.
This danger, although real, is difficult to detect because of the pleasing forms that it adopts. The central character of Les Belles images, Laurence, is a young woman, married to an architect, who works in an advertising agency. She has a vague premonition of this danger, intuits that it is rooted in her life, but cannot identify it or rid herself of it. She feels that something, she does not know what, is every second gnawing away at her life which is apparently being led, without any major upheavals, in a comfortable environment made up of ‘beautiful images’ – an elegant apartment, social functions, travel – similar to those that she has to fabricate each day in order to win clients for her products. Her husband loves and respects her; she likes her work; her children are clever and entertaining; the family income allows her to live well. Why, then, is she not happy? To bring a bit of excitement and adventure to this very settled life, she has an affair; but she soon discovers that her relationship with Lucien, a colleague at work who is as well-mannered, affectionate and intelligent as Jean Charles, her husband, does not liberate her from tame matrimonial monotony but rather prolongs and duplicates it. Frustrated, Laurence breaks up with Lucien. She then seeks refuge in her father, who has a modest job in the Congress. His wife, Dominique, who has a good job in television, had left him years previously because of his lack of ambition. Laurence sees in her father, who lives shut away among his books and records, an example, something different from her conventional and empty world and is prepared to believe that her father is right when he accuses ‘civilization’ of having made men unhappy, of having snatched them from the simple happiness of primitive life.
But on a trip to Greece with her father, Laurence discovers that there is nothing healthy and pleasant about poverty, it is simply
terrible. Furthermore, it is not true that literature and art are sufficient for happiness; the reconciliation between her father and Dominique, when she is abandoned by her lover, shows Laurence that he was tired of solitude and prepared to do anything – even accept a frivolous life – to escape from it.
‘Why am I not like everyone else?’ Laurence asks herself continually. Because she finds herself all the time saying things that she does not believe, acting without conviction, pretending to feel what she does not feel, showing to the world a personality that is not hers. When did this incomprehensible duplicity begin to appear in her life? Why was she not the woman she should have been and is now this being who is a stranger to herself? She tries to rebel but only very vaguely, because she does not clearly know how and against whom she should be rebelling: her blind swipes in the void only serve, in the long run, to aggravate her malaise. She would like ‘to be a friendly presence for herself, a hearth radiating warmth’, and instead she has the feeling that she is a sleepwalker moving in a ‘smooth, hygienic and routine’ world. At the end of the book, Laurence decides to educate her children in a way different from that demanded by the conventions of her world, to give them a chance to save themselves. ‘What hope? She does not even know.’
Simone de Beauvoir ends the tragedy of Laurence with this gloomy sentence, the tragedy of a paradoxical world in which the greatest development of science and technology, the proliferation and abundance of goods, does not diminish but instead increases human unhappiness. Of course, the book is not an argument against progress, an obscurantist manifesto against machines. It is a plea in favour of man, who must always be the main object of progress, the master and beneficiary of these prodigious modern machines and not their victim.
For Latin American readers, the problem that Simone de Beauvoir describes in her novel is still somewhat indistinct, since the dangers that threaten a society which has achieved material well-being through technology do not yet hang over our countries, which are beset by more primary ills. But it is useful to keep in mind how deceitful these beautiful images are and to be aware of how derisory is progress which satisfies certain needs and forgets others. The progress of man, Simone de Beauvoir seems to tell us, must be at once material, intellectual and moral, or it will simply not be progress at all.
London, February 1967