The degree of formative philosophical influence that Simone de Beauvoir had on Jean-Paul Sartre and vice versa has long been a subject of scholarly inquiry and debate.1 This open question is important in terms of the history of twentieth-century philosophy and of women’s part therein. In the 1990s this particular inquiry became centered on the relation between two texts, Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.2 The investigation revolves around two questions: Which book was conceived and written first? and Is Beauvoir’s novel a philosophical text in the sense that it intentionally expounds, develops, and tests philosophical ideas?3 Beginning in the mid-1980s, researchers gained access to Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s letters and journals, and these showed beyond doubt that She Came to Stay was conceived and written first. But for some scholars the second question remains open to contention. The text that this essay introduces is highly relevant for resolving, once and for all, this lingering dispute. “Two Unpublished Chapters” was Beauvoir’s original beginning to She Came to Stay. Although the two beginnings to her novel are totally distinct in terms of the places and events described, close reading reveals a startling similarity. This introduction will explain how and why this is so.
The ambiguity of language permits the construction of texts that are readable at more than one level of meaning. Showing people how to access different levels of meaning of sophisticated texts is the daily business of literature teachers. But willingness to acknowledge such sophistication in a particular text often depends on the social category to which its author belongs. This is so because social prejudices do not magically vanish when reading, teaching, or writing about books. When a society withholds recognition of an existing level of meaning in a text, it imposes on that text a form of censorship.
Until quite recently, getting anyone to read a Beauvoir text for its philosophical content was nearly impossible. And reading one with a view to finding in it philosophical originality was deemed laughable.4 Beauvoir the philosopher had been erased from existence.
“Two Chapters” is easily censored contextually. These, remember, were the original first two chapters of She Came to Stay, and this book, Beauvoir’s first novel, has become the most contextually censored of all of her works. I say “has become” because in the beginning She Came to Stay was not censored. Initially it was reviewed as a philosophical text by her good friend and fellow philosopher Merleau-Ponty. Also, in 1959 Hazel Barnes, the English translator of Being and Nothingness and a Sartrean, not only saw fit to introduce Beauvoir’s novel to English audiences as a philosophical work, but also demonstrated that some of its philosophical content was identical to that found in key parts of Being and Nothingness.5 But willingness to acknowledge the philosophical dimension of She Came to Stay remained the exception, even after a momentous interview with Beauvoir in 1979.6 Responding to penetrating questions from Margaret A. Simons and Jessica Benjamin, Beauvoir denied categorically that Sartre had any input into She Came to Stay. If Beauvoir was not lying—and there was no prima facie evidence that she was—then it followed that it was her book that was the primary text and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, at least in significant part, the secondary one.7
Censoring contextually She Came to Stay, however, was made easy by two cultural differences between analytical and continental philosophy. The first concerns the unit of work. The most famous “continental” philosophers have constructed “systems” designed to encompass solutions to many of philosophy’s perennial problems. Kant, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and Sartre are examples. These system builders took other philosophers’ solutions along with some of their own and combined them in novel ways. But system builders in the analytical tradition are virtually unknown. Here the focus of work and the basis of reputation is almost exclusively problem-solution.
In the English-speaking world the continental philosopher has been cruelly and crudely stereotyped as someone unconcerned with philosophical problems, so much so that, as Simon Critchley has observed, “Continental philosophy has been reduced to a list of proper names.”8 This prejudice works very strongly against the recognition of Beauvoir, who was a problem-oriented philosopher, and in favor of Sartre, who was a system-oriented philosopher. As evidenced in her student diaries,9 Beauvoir was from the beginning self-consciously problem oriented in her approach to philosophy, and she remained so. But Beauvoir and Sartre scholars who have been infected with the prejudice described above do not look for solutions to philosophical problems in Beauvoir’s work and, if called to their attention, dismiss them as unimportant because she has not made them part of a philosophical system.
The second cultural difference facilitating the contextual censorship of She Came to Stay concerns phenomenological and existential philosophy in particular. Whereas rationalist philosophers begin with supposed universal truths and analytical philosophers with the presumed universal subject and then proceed to truths of diminishing generality, philosophers in the phenomenological-existential tradition begin with concrete individual experiences and then, if possible, proceed to generalizations. This diametrical opposition of perspectives makes it easy to sabotage understanding between the two traditions. But some philosophers in the analytical tradition have worked hard to break down these barriers to cross-cultural understanding.
One of these is the Cambridge philosopher Mary Warnock. “The methodology of Existentialism,” she says, “consists in a perfectly deliberate and intentional use of the concrete as a way of approaching the abstract, the particular as a way of approaching the general.” She adds: “The existential philosopher, then, must above all describe the world in such a way that its meanings emerge. He cannot, obviously, describe the world as a whole. He must take examples in as much detail as he can, and from these examples his intuition of significance will become clear. It is plain how close such a method is to the methods of the novelist, the short-story writer.”10
Close, indeed: Sartre’s novel Nausea has long occupied a central place in the phenomenological-existentialist canon.11 The eminent American philosopher Arthur Danto begins his book on Sartre’s philosophy as follows: “Sartre’s great philosophical novel, Nausea, is a sustained reflection on the relationships and ultimately the discrepancies between the world and our ways of representing it.”12 Like Warnock, Danto is an analytical philosopher, and yet he treats Nausea as Sartre’s second-most important philosophical work and devotes a fifth of his book to explicating Nausea’s philosophical content.
Following Beauvoir’s death, her and Sartre’s letters and diaries gradually became available to researchers. These documents showed beyond all doubt that not only was She Came to Stay written before Being and Nothingness but also that Sartre first began to compile notes for his philosophical masterpiece in the days immediately following his reading of the second draft of She Came to Stay. These documents, once in the public domain, redefined, as had the Simons-Benjamin interview earlier, the possible terms of the debate. This time the redefinition was definitive: to save the traditional narrative regarding the development of French existentialism, and to preserve Sartre’s status as the sole provider of the philosophical ideas that he and Beauvoir shared, it now was imperative not to read She Came to Stay as a philosophical text. Obviously, given the phenomenological-existentialist philosophical tradition and Nausea’s status as part of its canon, this censorship appeared problematic. Either henceforth Nausea should no longer be read as a philosophical text, or the ancient principle of a male-female double standard should be allowed to prevail once again.
“Two Unpublished Chapters” poses still a further threat to the traditional patriarchal exclusion of She Came to Stay (SCS) from the phenomenological-existentialist philosophical canon. As suggested earlier, even the best teacher cannot force a reader to engage with a textual level or even to acknowledge its existence, especially when a cultural gestalt obscures a level of meaning or when self-interest would be ill-served by acknowledgement of its existence. This is so because the very nature of multiple levels of meaning is that they are not all easily discernible for all readers. And such circumstances create pedagogical impasses. But for the reading of She Came to Stay, “Two Unpublished Chapters” comes to the rescue. It is hard to imagine how anyone who compares these two texts could thereafter in good faith deny that both works, no less than Sartre’s Nausea, are philosophical texts. Let me explain.
“Two Unpublished Chapters” (TUC) traces the childhood and adolescence of Françoise, the novel’s central character. In 1938 Beauvoir abandoned these chapters, begun in 1937, after showing them to Sartre and to Brice Parain, the editor at Gallimard. Instead of beginning with an account of Françoise’s childhood, Beauvoir now began her novel with Françoise as a young woman. Whereas most of the first chapter of TUC takes place in and around a country house, the entire first chapter of SCS takes place in a Paris theater and its courtyard. Thus on the level of simple storytelling the two beginnings to Beauvoir’s novel are totally dissimilar. Nevertheless when one compares the two texts one is struck by the fact that large parts of both are centered on very similar, but otherwise highly idiosyncratic, descriptions. Some examples, all drawn from the opening pages of the two beginnings to the novel, will show what I mean.
TUC: There was a scent of scrub, there were pine needles, a taste of apple . . . and Françoise no longer existed anywhere. . . . She spent a long time lying there, her mind blank. She no longer even felt her body: she could feel the warm air, she could smell the scent of the grass; in the valley wrapped in mist, two red spots shone. Suddenly, Françoise was no more than this mist, these bright spots, and there was nothing else left in the world.
SCS: She leaned back against the hard wood of the bench. A quick step echoed on the asphalt of the pavement; a motor lorry rumbled along the avenue. There was nothing but this passing sound, the sky, the quivering foliage of the trees, and the one rose-colored window in a black façade. There was no Françoise any longer, no one existed any longer, anywhere.13
TUC: She . . . had the mission to make as many, as beautiful and varied things as possible come into existence.
SCS: It was as if she had been entrusted with a mission: she had to bring life to this forsaken theatre (2). . . . but for me this square exists and that moving train . . . all Paris, and all the world (4).
TUC: If she looked away, it had no more existence for anyone.
SCS: When she was not there, . . . [they] did not exist for anyone; they did not exist at all (1).
TUC: Until today, nobody smelt the scent of charcoal and scrub; nobody knew that these white rocks and the black bare remains of the trees existed; they did not know it themselves; it was as if they had not existed at all. But now, I am here.
SCS: When she was not there [in “the dark corridors”], the smell of dust, the half-light, and their forlorn solitude did not exist for anyone; they did not exist at all. And now she was there (1).
TUC: In her absence, the scents, the light were plunged in a torpor that could not be conceived of; one might as well try and imagine oneself dead.
SCS: She exercised that power: her presence snatched things from their unconsciousness; she gave them their color, their smell (1–2).
TUC: Françoise’s heart swelled: the people on the street, the people in the houses, all the people needed her; when she abandoned them, their movements and their faces disintegrated like a deserted landscape.
SCS: I feel that things that don’t exist for me simply do not exist at all (6).
TUC: When she stood up to leave, she felt as if she was committing a betrayal. . . . From the moment she pushed open the stained-glass door, the shadows and the scents were swallowed in impassive night.
SCS: She put her hand on the door-knob, then turned back with a qualm of conscience. This was desertion, an act of treason. The night would once more swallow the small provincial square (3).
TUC: She felt she was the center of the world.
SCS: Wherever I may go, the rest of the world will move with me (5).
TUC: A brief anguish wrenched her heart; she could not be everywhere at once.
SCS: She would have had to be everywhere at the same time (2).
TUC: Françoise knew perfectly well who she was; sometimes at night, she could hear her parents talk about her when they thought that she was asleep.
SCS: We get the impression of no longer being anything but a figment of someone else’s mind (7).
Clearly then—and this is not a difficult matter to see—in these two beginnings to her novel, Beauvoir is telling us more than just, in the one, about a child’s mundane experiences in the woods and, in the other, about a thirty-year-old woman’s mundane experiences in a theater. It also is abundantly clear that this something extra, this other stream of meaning that Beauvoir delivers to us, is approximately the same in both texts. She has constructed these otherwise dissimilar narratives as vehicles for introducing the same or similar sets of philosophical ideas. Both narratives serve Beauvoir the philosopher as means to an end. The philosophical and argumentative shape of the novel as a whole required her to introduce certain ideas and positions at or near the beginning. She especially wants to settle at the outset some basic ontological questions, that is, what kinds of being exist and the broad nature of the relations between them. Being a phenomenologist, she can do this through her characters’ perceptions. Indeed, for Beauvoir only phenomenological evidence, not abstract reason, is admissible.
A distinctive thesis of Beauvoir is that consciousness is not just the desire to be but also the desire to reveal being, of taking delight in the pure witnessing of the world around oneself, of confronting the mere existence of the world in pure and selfless and, sometimes, joyous wonderment. The first seven groups of quotations above catch Françoise in this mode of intentionality. The eighth relates to Beauvoir’s concept of embodiment (that one’s experiential world is centered on one’s body moving in physical space), the ninth to her theory of appearances by which she demonstrates phenomenologically the existence of a world independent of consciousness, and the tenth to her theory of the Other.
But the important thing for us here is not so much the ideas themselves but rather that the two texts, despite their dissimilarity on the level of simple storytelling, convey similar content on another level of meaning, namely, that of phenomenological philosophy. The only rational explanation for this similarity is that Beauvoir’s “Two Unpublished Chapters” and She Came to Stay, no less than Sartre’s Nausea and Being and Nothingness, are philosophical texts.
1. See Margaret A. Simons, “Beauvoir and Sartre: The Question of Influence,” Eros 8, no. 1 (1981): 25–42.
2. See Simone de Beauvoir, She Came to Stay (London: Flamingo, 1984), and Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956).
3. These and other questions are taken up at greater length in Kate Fullbrook and Edward Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend (London: Harvester, 1993).
4. The Ethics of Ambiguity might appear as an exception, but in fact it was generally read as the ethics that Sartre had promised at the end of Being and Nothingness, with Beauvoir acting as his intermediary.
5. See Hazel Barnes, The Literature of Possibility: A Study in Humanistic Existentialism (London: Tavistock, 1961).
6. See Margaret A. Simons and Jessica Benjamin, “Simone de Beauvoir: An Interview,” Feminist Studies 5 (Summer 1979, part 2): 330–45.
7. See the discussion in Edward Fullbrook, “She Came to Stay and Being and Nothingness,” Hypatia 14, no. 4 (1999): 50–69.
8. Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 125.
9. For discussion of these diaries, see Margaret A. Simons, “Beauvoir’s Early Philosophy: The 1927 Diary,” in Beauvoir and “The Second Sex”: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 185–243.
10. Mary Warnock, Existentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 133, 136.
11. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1965).
12. Arthur Danto, Sartre (London: Fontana, 1991), 5.
13. Beauvoir, She Came to Stay, 2. Subsequent page references to this work in this introduction are cited parenthetically in the text.