Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Here is a short piece from a post I did at The Excerpt Mill on  Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) in where I quote Barbara S. Andrew:

One of the most significant aspects of The Second Sex is its encyclopedic indexing of women’s lived experience: biology, psychology, the experience of living in a female body and developing and living with a feminine mind-set. Many contemporary women’s first reaction to reading it is that they do not experience themselves in the way Beauvior describes. But this is to miss the point. Most of The Second Sex is a phenomenological, descriptive analysis. Beauvoir is not claiming that there is one way that we who are women experience ourselves, our bodies or our minds. Instead, she describes, and argues against taking as perspective, literary representations of femininity, biological sciences’ accounts of femininity, psychoanalytic theories about femininity, and so on. It is easy, initially, to confuse her work as participating in negative stereotypes of femininity, rather than cataloging them and analyzing their effect. Although Beauvoir’s descriptions of women’s bodies may seem negative, Arp argues that she is describing women’s experience of bodily alienation in understanding their social bodies, that is, the body as known through the experience of a sexist world.

Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Barbara S. Andrew writes about Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) and her phenomenology and views of what it is to be a woman in a male-supremacist society:

For phenomenologists, “the world” usually denotes a combination of the natural world and human relationships.  A key aspect of phenomenology is the interaction between self and world, and The Second Sex may be best understood as a work of phenomenlogy in which Beauvior examines the interaction between the gendered self and the gendered world.  The Second Sex looks at how social ideas of femininity shape women’s experiences of self.  One of the most significant aspects of The Second Sex is its encyclopedic indexing of women’s lived experience: biology, psychology, the experience of living in a female body and developing and living with a feminine mind-set.  Many contemporary women’s first reaction to reading it is that they do not experience themselves in the way Beauvior describes.  But this is to miss the point.  Most of The Second Sex is a phenomenological, descriptive analysis.  Beauvoir is not claiming that there is one way that we who are women experience ourselves, our bodies or our minds.  Instead, she describes, and argues against taking as perspective, literary representations of femininity, biological sciences’ accounts of femininity, psychoanalytic theories about femininity, and so on.  It is easy, initially, to confuse her work as participating in negative stereotypes of femininity, rather than cataloging them and analyzing their effect.  Although Beauvoir’s descriptions of women’s bodies may seem negative, Arp argues that she is describing women’s experience of bodily alienation in understanding their social bodies, that is, the body as known through the experience of a sexist world. (Andrew, 30)

Source

Barbara S. Andrew.  ”Beauvior’s place in philosophical thought.”  In The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir edited by Claudia Card, 24-44.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

“Falo do amor de forma mística, sei o preço. (…) Sou muito inteligente, muito exigente e muito engenhosa para alguém ser capaz de se encarregar completamente de mim. Ninguém me conhece nem me ama completamente. Só tenho a mim” (S. de Beauvoir).

“Isso responde à pergunta que a atormentava: meu amor, você não é ‘uma coisa em minha vida’ – nem mesmo a mais importante -, porque minha vida já não me pertence, porque (…) você é sempre eu” (Sartre).

Em meio a processos, recursos e exames finais eu tento levar adiante esse meu (pequeno) projeto literário, pelo qual eu sinto muito carinho e levo comigo uma grande culpa pela falta de tempo de concluir as minhas leituras e rechear este blog mais rapidamente.

Hoje eu finalizei a leitura de “Tête-à-tête”, livro que mostra, com intimidade, a relação que existiu entre Simone de Beauvoir e Jean-Paul Sartre. Já tinha dito aqui que eu gosto muito de biografias, mas devo dizer que esta foi a que eu mais gostei de ler. Sentia muito por não estar lendo o livro quando estava ocupada com outras questões, até mesmo quando estava dirigindo! rs.

Hazel Rowley demonstrou muito cuidado na sua pesquisa para a confecção do livro: apesar de não ter sido uma das testemunhas oculares da relação Beauvoir-Sartre, ela conseguiu obter todas as informações necessárias para encantar o leitor com o seu livro (apesar de ter ouvido que o texto parecia uma tese de mestrado, eu adorei a forma de escrita dela…).

No livro nós podemos perceber a beleza e a lealdade da relação dos dois escritores, tanto entre si como com os outros amores de sua vida, os seus filhos adotivos, as causas que abraçaram – e ainda ficamos com muita vontade de devorar os livros deles, no meu caso, especialmente, os de Beauvoir.

Apesar de algumas desavenças e outros atritos do chamado “Grupo Sartreano” não são páreo para destruir a imagem que eu tinha deles; muito pelo contrário, se solidificou em mim uma representação linda deles dois, da França, dos livros, dos intelectuais, dos movimentos socias que antigamente davam sentido à sociedade.

Bom demais, lindo demais, ótimo!

O livro é encontrado nas livrarias pelo preço médio de R$ 70.

If Americans have so little sense of nuances, it isn’t that they’re incapable of grasping them– after all, American reality itself is sufficiently nuanced– but that they would be troubled by them.  To accept nuance is to accept ambiguity of judgment, argument, and hesitation; such complex situations force you to think.  They want to lead their lives by geometry, not by wisdom.  Geometry is taught, whereas wisdom is discovered, and only the first offers the refreshing certainties that a conscientious person needs.  So they choose to believe in a geometric world where every right angle is set against another, like their buildings and their streets.

– Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day, translated by Carol Cosman, Phoenix, 1998 (originally published 1954)

Lest you assume Ms de Beauvoir turns her nose up at us all, much of her book about her travels in America describes her delight in exploring our country.  If we can still refer to it as “our” country.  The America of just after World  War II was a conservative, awkward place, still wearing its braces and still broken out with the blemishes of a somewhat wild West.  You couldn’t drink much, or late, in Los Angeles.  People didn’t want to talk too much politics with her, although they felt they understood exactly what Europe needed.  Ah, how could they not show some bravado, having just inherited a burden of power they weren’t sure they asked for?

But I digress.  Americans still do tremble at nuance.  Our pound-the- drums two-party system insists we color within the lines.  Of course, I like that about us.  We are bold.  And it kind of makes me nuts, like when we can’t set up a reasonable national health care system because we have to pretend there are only two choices: socialized medicine and slightly tweaking our slightly imperfect current system.  Yes, let’s move on to Art.

Yet at the same time his heart swelled with delight over the adventure the outside world was about to embark upon.  For passion, like crime, is antithetical to the smooth operation and prosperity of day-to-day existence, and can only welcome every loosening of the fabric of society, every upheaval and disaster in the world, since it can vaguely hope to profit thereby.  And so Aschenbach felt a morose satisfaction at the officially concealed goings-on in the dirty alleyways of Venice, that nasty secret which had merged with his own innermost secret and which he, too, was so intent on keeping: he was in love and concerned only that Tadzio might leave, and he realized not without horror that in that event he would not know what to make of his life.

–Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, translated by Michael Henry Heim, Ecco, 2005.

I think this novel (barely a novel) might be one of the most beautiful things I have ever read.  I was so enchanted by it that I read it in one day, in a handful of sittings.  Even odder, I actually underlined and later looked up the words I wasn’t sure about, so I would know exactly what Mann meant (or what Heim thought he meant).  Sirocco.  Eflluvia. Matitudinal.  Apotheosis.  I never do that.  I have a vague idea, enough to keep going, and I keep going.  For this book, my blundering wasn’t good enough.

Crime and passion wait for ice storms and snow days, that is for sure.

I sat at a bar and ate dinner on my white cloth napkin and had one glass of wine, and I thought when the book was over, my face would hold its expressions, and I would not know what to make of my life.  That last part was killer, but this is even worse (in a Michael Jackson sense of bad):

There is nothing more curious or delicate than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who encounter and observe each other daily– nay, hourly– yet are constrained by convention or personal caprice to keep up the pretense of being strangers, indifferent, avoiding a nod or a word.  There is a feeling of malaise and overwrought curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally stifled need for mutual acknowledgment and communication, and above all a sort of strained esteem.  For a man loves and respects his fellow man only insofar as he is unable to assess him, and longing is a product of insufficient knowledge.

That just makes me want to hide under the bed.  Okay, one more:

The gods have many shapes.

The gods bring many things

to their accomplishment.

And what was most expected

has not been accomplished.

But god has found his way

for what no man expected.

So ends the play.

–The Bacchae by Euripides, translated by William Arrowsmith, University of Chicago Press, 1959

Like most regular people, I haven’t sat and read a lot of ancient Greek plays since college.  I did thoroughly enjoy reading all those plays in college, though.  The coolness and boldness of the language contrasts so sharply with the slung-around slyness of so much clever clever modern dialogue.  It’s pert without being snotty.  They did have the advantage of writing some of our first plays.  They weren’t so worried about sounding stale, I’m sure.

The other advantage they had was  a declining language, which freed them from having to string their sentences like a set of graduated pearls.  Ancient Greek words are hippie multicolored beads you can string to any length, shape, or pattern.  Which makes me slightly jealous, until I remember that we have more words.  So there, Euripedes.

[Roth’s novels] were also paeans to masculine sexuality, which remains potent long after the ravages of the body have removed the ability to do anything about it.

That Shakespearean Rag’s review of Philip Roth’s The Humbling made me think of the notable old white guys whose work addresses the perceived injustice of the failing body with the active sex drive, whether through wish-fulfilling narrative fantasy or cruel mockery, and contrast them with the fewer instances of older female writers exploring the same situation.

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins looks at (among many other things) the fading sexuality of an older women who cannot enjoy the present without a painful awareness of her own age and future asexuality. Diana Athill’s latest biography, Somewhere Towards the End, deliberately takes a rather sensible and unapologetic view about her own independent sexuality, its final flowering (if you will pardon the phrase) and its ultimate and total disappearance.

Which is crueler? The male body that, once developed (over, on average, eight gawky and masturbation-filled years), never loses its sexuality and urges, only weakens their potency and lessens their frequency, or the female body, that enters fecundity in a maelstrom of hormones (the rapid four years of sudden breasts and awareness of the lunar calendar), whose development is quicker but whose peak is later, and who later returns to the asexuality of youth, but for the memory of experience, after another short and unpleasant hormonal battle?

Ultimately, the desire is for the same thing – the possession of the young body. I was going to say the young female body, but one must except the homosexual men in this case. However old the male body becomes, it is still capable of arousal, still, then, susceptible to the attractions of the young and nubile. The female body, on the other hand, has a greater disconnection between the mind and body. While the mind may crave or pine or what have you, the body cannot respond.

One sex has an ever-responsive libido (however incapable of action the rest of the corpus might be), and the other with a body that returns to the disinterest of childhood, without the curiosity.

Of course, the medical community has found ways to work around this – with the male, rendering him capable of performance, and with the female, producing a steady dose of hormones that stave off the rapid aging that comes with the stoppage of natural hormone production.

One could ask why aren’t we all on the same timeline, and be met with the biological determinists who would point out that the male body producing viable sperm until death is more likely to succeed genetically, whereas the female body, who, with age, is less and less capable of enduring pregnancy and childbirth, is better off without the strain after a certain point.

But I want to know which is better or worse – or if we must simply shrug our shoulders and label it different. On the one hand, one always has hope, and on the other, one has a kind of freedom, but a freedom that entails exclusion.

With the literary evidence mentioned, I have to say it is the women who seem the most calm and accepting, whereas the men seem to be in the grip of an epic tragedy which involves a significant amount of embarrassment. And yet, what is there but acceptance when hope is gone?

Jessica is a tourist in Paris and in life.

(THINKfilm) Cecilie de France, Valerie Lemercier, Albert Dupontel, Sydney Pollack, Claude Brasseur, Christopher Thompson, Dani, Laura Morante, Suzanne Flon. Directed by Danielle Thompson

Life imitates art, it is often said but the reverse isn’t always true. From time to time, art – and the artists who make it – is completely at odds with reality.

Jessica (de France) is a wide-eyed innocent who was orphaned at age four and was raised by her delightful grandmother (Flon), who had a taste for luxury but unfortunately not the pocketbook for it. She contented herself by being a ladies room attendant at the Ritz Hotel, able to rub elbows with the very rich at least indirectly.

Now on her own, Jessica comes to Paris looking for a job but without much experience. She talks her way into a job as a waitress at a café on the Avenue Montaigne, a center of the arts in Paris. At the Bistro, the famous and the lowly come to eat from the stagehands and ushers to the stars of the theater and the concert hall across the street.

Three events are taking place three days from her first day; a recital by Jean-Francois Lefort, a world-famous classical pianist (Dupontel) who has grown weary of his lifestyle and yearns to play for a less discerning audience, despite the fact that his adoring wife and agent (Morante) has him booked for the next six years. There is also an art auction as a businessman and connoisseur named Jacques Grunberg (Brasseur) is selling off the contents of his former life, which irritates his estranged son Frederic (Thompson, the son of the director) who sees his father dating a much younger woman he once had an affair with (unbeknownst to the father) and leaving the legacy of his mother behind.

Finally, there is the performance of a farce at the theater starring Catherine (Lemercier), a star on a wildly popular soap who yearns for more substantial roles. She hopes she might get one in a biography of Simone de Beauvoir that an American director (Pollack) is putting together. Although the casting director for the film hates her, she still hopes she can win the director over.

Jessica moves in an out of their lives like a sprite, befriending the elderly concierge (Dani) who is retiring after the performances. With no place to live and knowing nobody, Jessica sleeps in the dressing room of the concert hall and befriends the performances so guilelessly that they can’t help but feel comfortable with her. But as things move towards the night of the performances, each performer feels the weight of their demons moving in. Can the show go on when the showman doesn’t have the will to perform any longer?

Director Thompson (Jet Lag) has crafted a typically charming slice of life in the French capital as it relates to the arts on the Avenue. This is not a love letter to Paris – although the beauty of the city is well on display, the movie takes it more as a matter of fact that you love Paris. And who wouldn’t? Even the neuroses are charming.

De France carries the movie effortlessly, a pixie in a sidewalk café who flits from situation to situation with enough pluck to make her adorable. Lemercier also captures the neurotic television star with the right mix of frenetic kinesis, nervous tics, self-loathing and blind ambition to make her believable, but with enough heart to make her worth caring about. Dupontel is also solid as a pianist who is a prisoner of his own talent and fame.

The one drawback is that it is hard to feel much sympathy for people who are so successful, so famous, so wealthy. Not that people with success, fame and wealth are without problems, but one must take them with a grain of salt.

There is also a subtext about the relationship between the young and the elderly, starting with Jessica and her grandmother but also including Jacques and his son and Jessica and the concierge. I actually kind of liked it; too often we dismiss the wisdom of our elders because of our own arrogance. The fact is we don’t freakin’ know it all.

Any movie that takes place in a French café had better be prepared to charm the pants off of you, and Avenue Montaigne accomplishes that. This isn’t something that is going to give you remarkable insight; rather it is a fluffy entertainment, a meringue if you will. Nothing wrong with that, so if you like your movies light and charming this just might be your ticket.

 WHY RENT THIS: A delightful slice of Parisian life in the arts as seen by a wide-eyed innocent from the provinces. Some timely themes about ageism and class distinctions.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: It is occasionally hard to feel sympathy for people who are successful and adored but are miserable.

FAMILY VALUES: There is some brief sexuality and some salty language but otherwise fine for all audiences.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Actress Suzanne Flon passed away shortly after filming was completed. As the end credits begin, we see a tribute page to her with the actress, offscreen, repeating a line from earlier in the film stating that she had a good life.

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: None listed.

FINAL RATING: 7/10

TOMORROW: Frozen River

The Left Bank is synonymous with literary cafes, the Existential philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, bourgeois art galleries and gauche chic designers like Yves Saint Laurent and Sonia Rykiel.  Nowadays, the philosophers may have decamped from the Café de Flore, but there are still plenty of students from the Sorbonne university and academic bookshops to keep up its ‘intellectual’ atmosphere.

On one of our many Paris visits last year, Steven and I stayed at the Hotel Design Sorbonne, which is just a few steps away from the Boulevard Saint Germain, the Pantheon, Luxembourg Gardens, the Seine and of course, the Sorbonne.

The hotel is tucked away on a peaceful side street and is accessed by a quaint courtyard. The reception/lounge area is a mix of a typical French salon interior and bold, contemporary colours, flock wallpaper and striped velvet seating.  There are a number of coffee table books, magazines and Paris attraction maps, as well as an iMac for web browsing. 

The corridor looks like something surreal from a Jeunet and Caro film, with custers of quirky photographs and lines of poetry emblazoned on the carpet. 

Our room had a dark, romantic atmosphere due to colour scheme of chartreuse, silver and black – even curtains and doors were black!  The bed was extremely comfy, with fluffy pillows, crisp cotton linen and a throw in complementing colours.

The bathroom had beautiful dusky brown and gold flock tiles but was pretty tiny, although I’ve heard that they have rooms with larger ones if you’re staying for longer and need more space.

Like most forward-thinking hotel, they have installed an Apple iMac in each room, so you can access the web and watch TV and DVDs without hassle.  It seems that hotels now want to give guests a more homely experience, rather than leaving us detached from the world, charging guests 10 Euros a day for using wifi. It also eases them off unnecessary concierge duties!

We ate breakfast outside and tried out the bakeries around the rue de Buci for a croissant and café crème, although the breakfast room at the hotel looked delicious.  

One thing that impressed me most about the hotel is that they have since kept in touch by email and regularly report on their fabulous meanderings around the city on their Paris newsblog.  I had serious food envy over their tasting session of mille-feuilles by legendary Paris pâtissier, Pierre Hermé and am planning to eat at La Bouche, a laid-back restaurant with innovative cuisine in Ménilmontant, which they visited and recommended.

Hotel Design Sorbonne is part of the Hôtels de Paris Rive Gauche group, that runs three other boutique hotels on the Left Bank, with the hotly anticipated BJ luxury design hotel (formerly the Hotel Ferrandi) opening next Autumn.  If you want a ‘home away from home’ or a more private stay, they also have a designer studio in the Marais, a bijou apartment by the Canal Saint Martin for up to four people and a luxury apartment in the Mouffetard area.

Hotel Design Sorbonne is the perfect base for Paris newbies, as it is within walking distance of the chic designer shops on the Boulvard Saint Germain, the buzzy Latin Quarter, the markets on Rue Mouffetard and of course, the Seine.  The hotel is quiet at night due to its side street position, so if it’s all about getting up and out  in the morning, you’re pretty much guaranteed a good night’s sleep.

Photo Credit

Rates range from 100 – 350 Euros per night and a continental buffet breakfast is 12 Euros.

Hotel Design Sorbonne, 6,  rue Victor Cousin, 75005 Paris. £

Metro: Line 10 : Cardinal Lemoine, Cluny Sorbonne. RER B : Luxembourg.

I want to talk about two poems today, one by Frost and a second by Andrew Marvell. But before getting round to them I must revisit the business of the “gender/sex system” (as Gayle Rubin put it her 1975 essay “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”). To do that, I’ll take a short tour back through Simone de Beauvoir’s great book The Second Sex—the book which put into play so much of what has followed in the English Department.

Beauvoir shows us how it was “no accident” (as the saying goes) that imperatives of “order,” “reason,” “logic,” “structure,” and “form,” became associated with “masculinity.” She regards this association as a consequence of an effort on our part—on our species’s part—to slip the bonds of earth; on our effort to establish some manner of control over the “natural” fates that had always determined us, and from which we had “mysteriously” sprung. The onset of patriarchy, on her account, coincides with the development of agriculture, which for the first time made the

Simone de Beauvoir (photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson)

natural world subordinate to our purposes: no more catch-as-catch-can, no more gathering. (Cf. chapter five of The Second Sex: “Early Tillers of the Soil.”) We sought above all things to transcend mere “repetition,” mere “animal” life, and to realize ourselves as self-determining “existents” (to borrow a term from Beauvoir’s existentialist vocabulary). But in so doing, we—at this point the “we” begins to become gender exclusive—came to see in “woman” a creature more intimately bound up with “Nature” than “man.” Why? Because of the asymmetry in the relations men and women separately have to the “natural” reproductive process, which much more intimately conscripts the bodies of women than the bodies of men, from the onset of menstruation, on through pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, and so on. (Here, cf. chapter one of The Second Sex: “The Data of Biology.”) The body of woman came to seem as if it were the very site at which the “natural” realm laid hold on “us”—again, the pronoun becomes invidiously gender-exclusive—and it was from that realm that we sought our emancipation. In woman (Beauvoir tells us) men behold their point of origin, as well as a token of the fact that they were once utterly dependent on another (female) creature for survival. Men hate this fact, Beauvoir suggests, because they wish to be “autonomous” and “free.” Men’s devotion to Order, Logic and Reason is a part of a larger project to master their contingency, their limitation (both of which, again, man associates with woman, who appears to him irrecoverably bound up in the “animal” processes of nature). All of this, Beauvoir suggests, explains the origins of the “binary oppositions” that so govern our thinking, and which are essentially “patriarchal” in character.

Let’s rehearse a few such familiar oppositions, to the analysis of which so much effort in the English Department was devoted back in the 1980s and 1990s. All of them are ranged under what we might call the master opposition of “Feminine” to “Masculine”:

Mere life/Authentic Existence
Animality/Humanity
Immanence/Transcendence
Fate/Power
Species/Individual
Body/Mind
Other/Same
Passion/Reason
Passivity/Activity
Disorder/Order
Darkness/Light
Matter/Form
Earth/Sky

Needless to say, Beauvoir argues that these binary oppositions damn the feminine and exalt the masculine. That is why we speak of them as “patriarchal.” They so thoroughly permeate our discourse (philosophical, theological,aesthetic, political, medical) that it may reasonably be said that our language is itself “patriarchal” in “structure”—that is to say, in the “structures” through which it organizes the world.

Cover, Vintage Paperback Edition. Click on the image for (partial) access to the text at Amamzon.

We must emphasize the point: The animosity that often colors this subordination of one value to another in the pairs of terms listed above is ultimately a function of “male” contempt for our “natural” origins. It is very deeply seated, and very ancient. Beauvoir says: “Woman inspires man with horror: it is the horror of his own carnal contingence.” This “horror” is expressed most starkly in the many strictures and taboos that ancient peoples (and some modern peoples) establish around menstruation and childbirth. (Cf. chapter nine of The Second Sex: “Dreams, Fears, Idols.” Cf. also chapter 12 of the book of Leviticus: “ If a woman have conceived seed, and born a man child: then she shall be unclean seven days; according to the days of the separation for her infirmity shall she be unclean. And in the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised. And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days; she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purifying be fulfilled. But if she bear a maid child, then she shall be unclean two weeks, as in her separation: and she shall continue in the blood of her purifying threescore and six days.”)

“The female,” then, “is the victim of the species,” as Beauvoir succinctly puts it. This idea arises, as might be expected, from consideration of the mechanism of reproduction: “Even when she is willing or provocative, it is unquestionably the male who takes the female,” Beauvoir explains. “Often the word applies literally, for whether by means of special organs or through superior strength, the male seizes her and holds her in place . . . In this penetration her inwardness is violated, she is like an enclosure that is broken into. The male is not doing violence to the species, for the species survives only in being constantly renewed and would come to an end if eggs and sperms did not come together; but the female, entrusted with the protection of the egg, locks it away inside herself, and her body, in sheltering the egg, shields it from the fecundating action of the male. Her body becomes, therefore, a resistance to be broken through, whereas in pentrating it the male finds self-fulfillment in activity.” (Again, cf. chapter one, “The Data of Biology.”)

Cover, Oxford UP 30th Anniversary Edition. Click on the image for (partial) access to the book at Amazon.

The point to bear in mind is that the “interests” of the “individual” woman and the interests of the “species” are not (necessarily) in harmony. If we consider the “interests” of what Richard Dawkins calls the “selfish gene,” it is easy to see how any one individual woman may become “the victim of the species.” It is as if the “species” realizes itself by hijacking the bodies of particular women, whose “private” aspirations, insofar as these conflict with the demands of the species, aren’t allowed to develop. The problem for us is that “morality” and “ethics” have precisely to do with individual men and women, and not with “genes” or with “the species.” In us, “Nature” happened upon a species whose individuals may regard themselves as characteristically in conflict with Nature, as set apart from it. From the point of view of Nature—if I can indulge the fancy of giving it a point of view—we may be a terrible mistake. We’ve come to realize that our interests need not be the interests of Nature at all—that Nature’s interests, which certainly have to do with what Beauvoir calls “mere life,” are not necessarily ours. Where these interests conflict, we have to “take sides.” This feminism has done through advocacy of contraception, abortion rights, and so on, to speak only of political and medical matters.

Click on the image for (partial) access to the book at Amamzon.

But the point Beauvoir would make is very simple: there’s no reason whatever that the category “Nature” ought to play a determining role in our lives. The final conquest of Nature by Culture, its final subordination to “human” purposes, means that the ancient “asymmetry” I spoke of above can be redressed. Woman will no longer be “the victim of the species.” (This dream accounts for the utopian investment that radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone—author of the now-neglected The Dialectic of Sex (1970)—once placed in advanced reproductive technology, envisioning, ultimately, gestation outside the womb.) At the end of the day, as Beauvoir tells us, “it is only in a human perspective [as opposed to a “natural” or “biological” one] that we can compare the female and the male of the human species. But man is defined as a being who is not fixed, who makes himself what he is.” And with this, Beauvoir anticipates a major insight of what we now call, speaking very generally, post-structuralist theory: “Man is not a natural species: he is a historical idea.” In certain respects, Darwin laid the basis for this recognition, and as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett make clear, it is a perversion of his thinking to argue from supposedly “Darwinian” grounds that “morality” either inevitably has, let alone must have, a basis worth calling “Natural” in any strong sense (as popular writers on evolutionary psychology sometimes wrongly assume it does). To put it in a contrarian sort of way Dawkins might well approve of: The more “un-Natural” we are, the better and more “human” we become. “Society is not a species,” says Beauvoir, and it should not, therefore, be considered in a “biological” or “Natural” light. But do these ideas help us read poetry?

Consider “The White-Tailed Hornet,” a poem by Robert Frost first collected in his 1936 volume A Further Range. “The White-Tailed Hornet” begins with an anecdote, related in Frost’s ingratiating and self-impeaching way, about a hornet who strikes not unerringly, as one might expect an “instinctual” creature to do, but in an all-too-human, fallible sort of way. This hornet mistakes nailheads and huckleberries for flies, and when he finally does strike a fly, he misses.

The white-tailed hornet lives in a balloon
That floats against the ceiling of the woodshed.
The exit he comes out at like a bullet
Is like the pupil of a pointed gun.
And having power to change his aim in flight,
He comes out more unerring than a bullet.
Verse could be written on the certainty
With which he penetrates my best defense
Of whirling hands and arms about the head
To stab me in the sneeze-nerve of a nostril.
Such is the instinct of it I allow.
Yet how about the insect certainty
That in the neighborhood of home and children
!s such an execrable judge of motives
As not to recognize in me the exception
I like to think I am in everything—
One who would never hang above a bookcase
His Japanese crepe-paper globe for trophy?
He stung me first and stung me afterward.
He rolled me off the field head over heels,
And would not listen to my explanations.
That’s when I went as visitor to his house.
As visitor at my house he is better.
Hawking for flies about the kitchen door,
In at one door perhaps and out another,
Trust him then not to put you in the wrong.
He won’t misunderstand your freest movements.
Let him light on your skin unless you mind
So many prickly grappling feet at once.
He’s after the domesticated fly
To feed his thumping grubs as big as he is.
Here he is at his best, but even here—
I watched him where he swooped, he pounced, he struck;
But what he found he had was just a nailhead.
He struck a second time. Another nailhead.
“Those are just nailheads. Those are fastened down.”
Then disconcerted and not unannoyed,
He stooped and struck a little huckleberry
The way a player curls around a football.
“Wrong shape, wrong color, and wrong scent,” I said.
The huckleberry rolled him on his head.
At last it was a fly. He shot and missed;
And the fly circled round him in derision.
But for the fly he might have made me think
He had been at his poetry, comparing
Nailhead with fly and fly with huckleberry:
How like a fly, how very like a fly.
But the real fly he missed would never do;
The missed fly made me dangerously skeptic.
Won’t this whole instinct matter bear revision?
Won’t almost any theory bear revision?

So much for “instinct,” then, and for “theories,” too. And Frost continues:

To err is human, not to, animal.
Or so we pay the compliment to instinct,
Only too liberal of our compliment
That really takes away instead of gives.
Our worship, humor, conscientiousness
Went long since to the dogs under the table.
And served us right for having instituted
Downward comparisons. As long on earth
As our comparisons were stoutly upward
With gods and angels, we were men at least,
But little lower than the gods and angels.
But once comparisons were yielded downward,
Once we began to see our images
Reflected in the mud and even dust,
‘Twas disillusion upon disillusion.
We were lost piecemeal to the animals,
Like people thrown out to delay the wolves.
Nothing but fallibility was left us,
And this day’s work made even that seem doubtful.

Frost obviously has Darwin in mind, here—the thinker whose “downward comparisons” forever detached us from the angels and cast us down with “the dogs under the table.” Though he certainly doesn’t say evolutionary theory’s “downward comparisons” are “untrue,” Frost does imply that they are somehow not “beneficial” for us, that they have, in certain cases, bad “human” consequences. He is giving us, in a delightfully playful sort of way, a “pragmatic” reason for quarantining Darwin, at least in certain arenas of human endeavor. (This is precisely what Richard Dawkins does in The Selfish Gene, in his own rather different way, and to his own rather different purposes: “We [homo sapiens sapiens] at least have the mental equipment to foster our long-term selfish interests rather than merely our short-term selfish interests. We can see the long-term benefits of participating in a ‘conspiracy of doves,’ and we can sit down together to discuss ways of making the conspiracy work. We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination [e.g., into institutions like patriarchy and white-supremacy]. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism—something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone upon earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” [pages 200-201 of the 1989 edition].)

Cover, 1st Edition, 1936

“The White-Tailed Hornet” advocates something like a principled turning away from our knowledge of, and from the imperatives of, biology. But what accounts for this turn away from “the natural” and back toward “the super-natural,” if that is in fact what the poem involves (i.e., “upward comparisons”)? Why should a discovery that we have feet of clay—that our image is reflected in the mud and dust—be so dispiriting? Does Frost wish us to enter into a Dawkinsian “conspiracy of doves”? Perhaps. But there’s more to it than that. For one thing Frost—or rather the persona he adopts for the purposes of “arguing” this whimsical poem—is “denied his transcendence,” as the existentialists (and Beauvoir) say. No more of those “stout” “upward comparisons” whereby we once identified ourselves not with the “body” but with the “soul.” (Goodbye St. Paul, and may God be with ye!) Now, nothing but our cherished all-too-human “fallibility” is left us, and even that seems “doubtful,” the poem tells us, as an index by which we might finally distinguish the “human” from the “animal” (because “animal instinct,” too, can “err”). We “lose ourselves piecemeal,” in a hard Darwinian turn, “to the animals.” Which is to say: Nothing but “the body” is left us. Literary critics indebted to Beauvoir might argue along the following lines: The “chastened” air of the last section of “The White-Tailed Hornet” is really a function of a particular man’s contempt for his own “contingent” and “carnal” origins. He looks down at the dust out of which he arose, which is also the place where he is destined again to lie (the womb and the tomb of earth). He loses himself to brute Nature, and he doesn’t like it. Man’s curse, says Beauvoir in “Dreams, Fears, Idols,” is to have “fallen from a bright and ordered heaven into the chaotic shadows of his mother’s womb. This fire, this pure and active exhalation in which he likes to recognize himself, is imprisoned by woman in the mud of earth.”

Frost, arriving in London, 1957

It is not at all gratifying—or so poems like “The White-Tailed Hornet” imply—to find your “image” “reflected” in the “mud” and “dust.” Much better to bear with those old “upward comparisons,” which promise otherworldly origins and ends, and a “bright and ordered heaven.” It is possible to discern, here, a “patriarchal” habit of thought, even though the question of “woman” never once arises in the poem. Literary critics of the Roundhead stamp (so to speak) simply ask that we weigh the importance of this habit of thought in the total context of the poem. How much sin is here, and how much sincerity? Is there something more, here, than a mischievous response to Darwin—something from which all the charming wit and play might well distract us? I think there is. “The White-Tailed Hornet” is complicated by a knowing irony, which says, on my reading: “It is foolish to resist these ‘downward comparisons.’ The ‘upward comparisons’ of the Christian epoch were just a splendid fiction, worth indulging in now only in a qualified, winking sort of way, or worth relying on only insofar as they insulate us from overdrawn ‘naturalist’ reductions of human motives, experiences and possibilities.” No one seriously attached to those “upward comparisons”—and untold millions still are attached to them—could tolerate Frost’s general pragmatism, which is, at the end of the day, anti-foundationalist. He would deny any account of our “human” nature a secure purchase on the way things “really are.” His criterion for “choosing” between such rival accounts as Darwinism and (say) Christianity, in this very playful poem, has nothing whatsoever to do with whether one or the other more “truly corresponds” to the world. The question is simply which one best helps us make our (contingent) way in the world.

But what are we to say to the Andrew Marvell of “The Garden,” a poem in which we find the “patriarchal” habit of thought just traced out in “The White-Tailed Hornet” untempered and pure? I ask the question because that poem, to this day, enjoys a place of real prestige in all the teaching anthologies, and so lies precisely at the heart of the canon. I regularly teach it myself. Indeed, I rather like it (for reasons I will explain in due course).

How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the Palm, the Oak, or Bays;
And their uncessant Labours see
Crowned from some single Herb or Tree,
Whose short and narrow verged Shade
Does prudently their Toils upbraid;
While all Flow’rs and all Trees do close
To weave the Garlands of repose.

Fair quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence thy Sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy Companies of Men.
Your sacred Plants, if here below,
Only among the Plants will grow.
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious Solitude.

No white nor red was ever seen
So am’rous as this lovely green.
Fond Lovers, cruel as their Flame,
Cut in these Trees their Mistress name.
Little, Alas, they know, or heed,
How far these Beauties Hers exceed!
Fair Trees! where s’eer you barks I wound,
No Name shall but your own be found.

When we have run our Passions heat,
Love hither makes his best retreat.
The Gods, that mortal Beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race.
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that She might Laurel grow.
And Pan did after Syrinx speed,
Not as a Nymph, but for a Reed.

What wond’rous Life is this I lead!
Ripe Apples drop about my head;
The Luscious Clusters of the Vine
Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine;
The Nectaren, and curious Peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on Melons, as I pass,
Ensnared with Flow’rs, I fall on Grass.

Mean while the Mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green Thought in a green Shade.

This is a poem of “retreat,” of which there are many in the 17th century—retreat from the city, from the court, from the field of battle, and, indeed, from the world. Men “vainly amaze” themselves—confuse themselves—by pursuing military, political, and literary glory (of which, respectively, the palm, the oak, and the bays are emblematic). Better to retreat to the “garden,” where “all trees do close” to “weave the garland of repose” (i.e., we need satisfy ourselves with no “single herb or tree,” as men often do with the “palm,” or the “oak,” etc.)

Andrew Marvell (portait, ca. 1655-60, artist unknown)

By contrast to the city, where “busy companies of men” abound, Marvell’s garden is an orderly, hermetic place (as are also Marvell’s stanzas: eight lines of eight syllables each). This is all well and good. But Marvell is in retreat not simply, not even chiefly, from “busy companies of men,” with their emblematic palms and oaks and bays. He is in retreat from the “white” and “red” that were emblematic of feminine beauty: “No white nor read was ever seen / So am’rous as this lovely green,” he says, speaking of the trees that weave the garlands of a repose that women could only perturb. “Cruel lovers” carve their mistresses’ names in the bark of trees. Marvell, if he “wounds” the trees at all, carves only the names of the trees themselves, writing “Birch” on the birches, “Oak” on the oaks. He is a dendrophiliac. After all, the trees “far exceed” in “beauty” any woman of whom he might once have been enamored. This poem of seclusion is a poem of chastity; Marvell writes with an almost Buddhist aspiration to abolish sensual desire. “When we have run our passions’ heat / Love hither makes his best retreat.” Love ought not be “passionate,” ought not be fleshly, ought not be “of the body” at all. This lesson we know even from the old myths: All the gods who chased “mortal beauty”—that is to say, beauty of an “embodied” sort—wound up in the trees. Apollo pursued Daphne, only to find her transformed into a laurel. So why not follow the example of the gods? Why not “withdraw” from the “lesser” “pleasures” of the body into the higher pleasures of the mind, wherewith we might “annhilate” the merely physical world (“all that’s made”) into “a green thought in a green shade”? Whereupon Marvell drives home the point:

Here at the Fountains sliding foot,
Or at some Fruit-tree’s mossy root,
Casting the Bodies Vest aside,
My Soul into the boughs does glide:
There like a Bird it sits, and sings,
Then whets, and combs its silver Wings;
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its Plumes the various Light.

Such was that happy Garden-state,
While Man there walked without a Mate:
After a Place so pure, and sweet,
What other Help could yet be meet!
But ’twas beyond a Mortal’s share
To wander solitary there:
Two Paradises ’twere in one
To live in Paradise alone.

The logic goes as follows: 1) When we make our “best retreat,” Soul is released from Body (it “casts the body’s vest aside,” the body being but a kind of inessential “garment” for the soul); 2) Reason is released from Passion (“passion’s heat” no longer unsettles the temperate movements of the mind); and 3) Man is released from Woman (“Such was that happy Garden-state, / While Man there walked without a Mate”). The “binary oppositions” of which I spoke above, in summarizing Beauvoir’s arguments, do all the thinking here: Man is to Woman as Soul is to Body (to turn away from the one is to turn away from the other); or Man is to Woman as Reason is to Passion; or as Heaven is to Earth (the soul, redeemed from the body, “whets and combs its silver wings,” readying itself for upward flight).

Diorama, "Adam and Eve," in the Creation Museum, Louisville, Kentucky. The astute eye will notice how the curators avoid the age-old theological question as to whether Adam had a navel.

Marvell withdraws into his “bright and ordered heaven,” as Beauvoir would say, the better to escape the chaotic (and chthonic) shadows of the womb, and of the earth. It may be precisely as Beauvoir says: “Woman inspires” Marvell, as she does all men, “with horror.” After all, she is the Devil’s doorway. Tertullian said so—and he, too, was thinking of Adam’s mate. In laying bare the structure of “binary oppositions” that organize the thinking done in this poem we are simply giving sense to the idea that it is “patriarchal” in disposition. We are suggesting that what Gayle Rubin calls the “gender/sex system” had consolidated in Andrew Marvell a “subjectivity”—a way of being in the world, a way of “seeing” and “feeling”—that could contemplate woman only with a kind of anxious contempt. (For what it’s worth—perhaps nothing—Marvell never married, though after his death Mary Palmer, his housekeeper, claimed that he had secretly married her, a claim that was never verified, and much disputed.)

Now, here is the argument made by (some) literary critics affiliated, in the old days, with “post-structuralism”: to the extent that we associate ourselves with the views taken in “The Garden”—to the extent that we take real “pleasure” in reading it, let alone in teaching it—we somehow involve ourselves inevitably in the “logic” and the language of patriarchy, and for that matter also in the “institution” of patriarchy. We become a “vector” through which the “infection” of patriarchy is transmitted. Should we purge the canon of “The Garden”? Should we deal with it by, say, “teaching the conflicts” through it? Or—to shift coordinates a bit—should we point out that Marvell’s thinking is continuous with that of the Church in the 17th century, and so may be said to further the imperatives of it as an “ideological state apparatus” (to borrow Louis Althusser’s useful phrase)? Will doing these things in the English Department help, in any way, to bring into being “a community or culture made up of numerous anti-systematic hints and practices for collective human experiences that is not based on coercion or domination,” as Edward Said once phrased his hopes? And if it will help us to do this, are we being irresponsible, or even “immoral,” when we attend to what might be called the “beauty” of “The Garden,” as I am about to do? In reading “The Garden,” let us attend to what Annette Kolodny calls “aesthetic pleasures,” and also to the “perfection” (or anyway to the “grace”) of Marvell’s figurative language. And let us ask ourselves whether “ethical and moral concerns” (as Kolodny puts it “Dancing Through the Minefield“) might require of us a “denial,” or at least a serious qualification, of those pleasures.

For example, we might speak of the “balance” and “proportion” of its eight-line stanzas, each composed of eight-syllable iambic tetrameter lines whose tempered regularity of movement registers a poise already-achieved—a poise that seems, for all the world, to arise out of precisely the setting that “The Garden” describes. To put the matter another way: “The Garden” effectively (and affectingly) creates the condition of mind to which it aspires. We are reading a poem already “chaste,” a poem already well rid of “passion’s heat.” There is nothing whatsoever intemperate about it. What’s more, this poem may be said to mark the “sublimation,” the elevation and redirection, of a “passionate” eroticism. The desire that might once have been directed toward the “red” and “white” of a (female) lover finds its redistributed objects instead in the things of this passing strange garden of his, which are described with a sensuality at once unmistakable and, somehow, utterly purged of “heat”: the “delicious” solitude, the “luscious” grapes, and so on. It would be no surprise to find in “The Garden” a merger of “redemptive” and “erotic” experiences. This sort of thing is everywhere to be encountered in 17th century poetry. There is paradox here, just as there is in the Donne’s sonnet “Batter my heart, Three-Personed God.” This garden both “ravishes” and “chastens” Marvell. In fact, it chastens him by ravishing him: he is “ensnared,” “fallen,” enraptured—but all the while finds his soul the more redeemed from bondage to the body and to worldly affairs. Of course, we must qualify any analogy to Donne as soon as we make it: “Batter my heart” is as intemperate and unbalanced in its movements as “The Garden” is poised in its movements. In reading Donne, I always suspect that it is only with great difficulty that he achieves any “retreat” at all from “passion’s heat.” Marvell makes the thing look easy.

But when we speak of such matters, are we at all derelict in our duty (as Annette Kolodny claims), lapsed in our commitments to the common good? Is it an evasion (let us say) of the “real work”—is it a “mystification” of the poem—to suggest that “The Garden” is not so much an instance of “patriarchy” as an instance of a more “general” will to detach the self from the body, the better to achieve some redemption from the “passionate” claims on us of what Beauvoir herself calls “the species”? And to suggest, further, that in its artful poise and temperate wit the poem already vouchsafes us an experience, or foretaste, of that “redemption”? Must we think of “passion’s heat” as a positive good, in the way we emancipated Westerners often do? (I have in mind, here, our general tendency to “celebrate” the body and its desires, our tendency to say “Yes!” to life, rather than to treat it, the body, and bodily desires with a certain, well, wariness. Consider, for example, how, in “The Traffic in Women,” Gayle Rubin speaks, with nostalgic sympathy, of “the wild profusion of infantile sexuality.” Is that what we really want?) If we abstract from “The Garden” not merely those “memes” peculiar to patriarchy (to borrow a useful term from Richard Dawkins), but also those peculiar to the Christian Church, we may find in it merely an aspiration toward what the Buddhists might call perfect “detachment.” After all, “The Garden” is really a sort of “fire sermon.” Maybe we should, rather liberally—and cutting the poem a little slack—take from it the following  monkish admonition: It simply must be possible to turn away from “the body” and the “world” (albeit, for my purposes anyway, without believing in “the soul”).

But however that may be, one thing we certainly can say: In the English Department we are no longer able to read “The Garden”—let alone to teach it—with a kind of unruffled confidence in its integrity. Poetry no longer awes us in the classroom, not usually. Our otherworldly gig, it would seem, is done with.

Sbirciamo tra le letture di Anne-Laure.  Oggi ci propone Memorie di una ragazza per bene di Simone de Beauvoir.

Questa estate, nella biblioteca di una casa di campagna, ho trovato per caso Una morte dolcissima e questa lettura mi ha toccata ed intrigata. Vi si prevedevano le relazioni complesse dell’autore con la propria madre, un passato pesante di silenzio e di incomprensione. Ho dunque ripreso il filo al suo inizio. La scrittura di Simone de Beauvoir è così precisa, così intelligente da rendervi a sua volta intelligenti. Sono rimasta affascinata lungo tutte le sue memorie dal percorso di questa bambina che diventa adolescente e donna, dalla sua forza, in un universo sociale così tanto soffocante e costrittivo. È il resoconto di una nascita, di una liberazione, di una rinascita al mondo, alla vita, alla filosofia, la costruzione di un individuo analizzata passo per passo e resa in maniera notevole. Ignoro se questa lettura mi avrebbe così tanto colpito nell’adolescenza, ma forse sì, per via dei picchi di dolore e d’esaltazione, di questa oscillazione permanente tra scoraggiamento e avidità di futuro, che sono certamente molto universali. Ho avuto voglia di annotare alcune frasi, colpita dalla loro precisione. Ecco a caso: “Il mondo attorno a me era una presenza enorme, confusa. Andavo a grande passo, sfiorata dal suo alito spesso. Mi dicevo che tutto sommato era interessante vivere”, questo libro è un incontro importante.

“We regarded any situation as raw material for our joint efforts and not as a factor conditioning them: we imagined ourselves to be wholly independent agents. … We had no external limitations, no overriding authority, no imposed pattern of existence, We created our own links with the world, and freedom was the very essence of our existence. “

Previous winners have been Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir.

French-born writer Marie NDiaye won France’s top literary prize Monday for “Three Strong Women,” her moving tale of the struggles of woman in Europe and Africa.

NDiaye has written a dozen books, from novels to short story collections and plays, and in 2001 she won the Femina award. She was born in 1967 in Pithiviers, south of Paris, to a French mother and a Senegalese father.

Her latest novel, “Trois femmes puissantes,” is the story of characters Norah, Fanta and Khadi’s fight to “preserve their dignity in the face of humiliations that life has inflicted,” according to her publisher Gallimard.

Novelist NDiaye Wins France’s Top Literary Prize – NYTimes.com

Excerpt From Three Strong Women

Simone de Beauvoir témoigne d’un processus psychique qui chancelle entre le destin de devenir femme et rester femme. Lorsque Freud souligne que l’anatomie est le destin, on entend dire Simone de Beauvoir « On ne naît pas femme, on le devient »[i]. La position existentialiste de la condition féminine de Beauvoir va de pair, à notre avis, avec ses tendances homosexuelles et ses rapports au lesbianisme.

© U. Amarasekara, Hétérosexualité, Tarascon-sur-Ariège, France, 2006.

Freud remarque que l’homme est un animal de disposition incontestablement bisexuel[ii]. Cependant, il souligne, à partir de sa clinique du féminin, que la « bisexualité est bien plus accentuée chez la femme que chez l’homme »[iii]. La fille au moment de l’Œdipe se trouve dans un moment critique entre le désir du père et son choix d’objet hétérosexuel. La femme, désirée par le père, est en effet au centre de la question de la fille oedipienne. Elle cherche cette énigme qui est la cause du désir de son père. A ce moment précis, elle est censée choisir cet objet substitut homme. Néanmoins, entre en jeu, l’énigme de la séduction de la femme qui est désirée du père. Simone de Beauvoir témoigne d’une figure de la fille qui développe une jalousie et une envie envers l’autre femme. A la place de choisir l’homme substitut, elle choisira cette femme aimée par le père. Comme si elle voulait se venger du père. Comme dit Lacan dans le cas de l’homosexualité, La fille est nettement agressive à l’endroit du père[iv]. Il s’agit d’un phénomène réactionnel. Pour agacer son père, Simone de Beauvoir fait la noce à Paris. Elle continue à agresser son père. On observe le même scénario auprès de Sartre. Peut-on dire que Sartre ne devient pas un substitut du père mais le personnage de père lui-même ? Simone de Beauvoir veut-elle importuner Sartre par ses scènes d’homosexualité ?

« Olga fut la première femme avec qui Beauvoir eut cette relation physique chaleureuse, et celle dont Sartre fut le plus jaloux. Olga et toutes les jeunes étudiantes aimaient profondément Beauvoir, bien plus qu’elles n’aimaient « ou seulement appréciaient » Sartre, et cela, il ne le supportait pas. Il avait besoin de les obliger à l’aimer, comme le disait Beauvoir, pour passer en premier dans leur préoccupation, pour devenir le centre de leur vie. Il créait ainsi une situation de rivalité avec Beauvoir, où il avait besoin de l’emporter et où elle devait non seulement le laisser gagner mais de plus l’aider. Sartre devenait fou furieux lorsque Olga embrassait longuement Beauvoir sur la bouche, alors qu’elle se contentait de lui tendre la joue pour un petit baiser hâtif. Beauvoir se sentait obligée d’en joindre à Olga d’être un peu plus gentille, ce qui avait le plus souvent pour résultat d’irriter cette dernière ; elle disparaissait sur un mouvement d’humeur avec Bost, et revenait seulement lorsque Sartre, souffrant mille morts à cause d’une passion non payée de retour »[v] .

Nous avons pris avec prudence les incidents et les histoires des relations homosexuelles de Simone de Beauvoir. La forte amitié qu’elle avait avec Elisabeth Lacoin dite Zaza, son amie et amour[vi] d’enfance pour laquelle elle a éprouvé des « émotions non codifiées » est relatée comme ceci : « Zaza, qu’elle me semblait plus réelle que moi-même ; j’étais son négatif : au lieu de revendiquer mes propres particularités je les subis avec dépit »[vii] Elle a été une fois suspendue de l’Education Nationale à la suite d’une plainte portée par la mère d’une de ses élèves, pour un détournement de mineure, le procès déboucha pourtant sur un non-lieu[viii].  Elle écrit à Sartre avec des « métaphores alimentaires » la nature de la relation qu’elle avait avec une de ses amantes : nuit pathétique-passionnée, écœurante  comme du foie gras[ix]. Cette phrase dépeint-elle une « jouissance » qui débouche vers un dégoût et une culpabilité d’avoir trop joui ?

En effet, elle se montre comme la fille attirée par l’autre femme, mais reste très timide dans ses déclarations. L’homosexualité est omniprésente dans ses écrits. Mais elle n’ose pas dire qu’elle est dans la catégorie des lesbiennes. Elle cherche en effet, la limite pour ne pas complètement détruire sa vie avec l’objet hétérosexuel.

Elle disait : « J’embrasse les femmes sur la bouche. Je les serre contre moi et parfois nous nous caressons les seins mais il ne se passe jamais rien de plus bas »[x]. La relation ambivalente, comme « amie » « amante » « fille adoptive », qu’elle avait avec Sylvie le Bon et les relations avec de nombreuses autres femmes témoignent de sa bisexualité. Elle relate qu’avec une certaine Gérassi, elle avait une vague tendresse d’ivrogne, puis c’était du « vrai trouble psychique » et non comme avec une certaine Védrine qui ressemblait à un trouble consenti avec la perversité.[xi] Elle-même n’arrive pas à distinguer le trouble psychique et cette perversité qu’elle a ressentie au moment de la consommation de l’homosexualité. Elle semble masquer son objet de fantasme homosexuel.

Sous la plume de D. Bair, nous regardons les couleurs de la fresque jouissive de la « horde factice » à laquelle Beauvoir fait partie intégrante. Olga certifie, avec une métaphore animalière, la véritable nature de ce jeu perverti, les allers-retours à la « horde nostalgique »,  en plein milieu de la civilisation moderne du 20^ème siècle. «Nous étions tous des serpents, hypnotisés. Nous faisions ce qu’ils voulaient parce que cela nous excitait qu’ils s’intéressent à nous, nous nous sentions privilégiés qu’ils nous accordent leur attention »[xii] Simone de Beauvoir témoigne de cette passion amoureuse qui veut représenter un « amour parfait » qu’elle n’a pas vu au sujet du couple parental.  Citons Assoun :  « L’amour pour l’autre femme serait à situer du côté d’une certaine « vengeance » contre le père, en même temps que d’une revanche contre la mère »[xiii].Dans le cas de Beauvoir, il y a un défaut du père. Il veut garder sa fille sans qu’elle soit échangée. La fille semble emprisonnée dans cette logique. Que peut-elle choisir ? Comme elle n’est pas échangée, elle trouve cette autre femme dans une position de séductrice. Elle se met ainsi dans une position masculine, comme complice de la demande « ratée » du père.

Nous mettons au jour, dans ces relations, une tendance à réclamer la femme sans complètement rejeter l’homme substitut, dans la position du « côté du père ». La fille a « une relation d’opposition entre la liaison au père et le complexe de masculinité, expression de l’opposition générale entre activité et passivité, masculinité et féminité »[xiv]. Au lieu d’agir activement, comme l’objet cause de désir, c’est-à-dire vers le plaisir gagné par le sens passif, elle cherche activement le plaisir dans l’actif. Elle agit en « homme » face à cette femme séduisante. La « jouissance » qu’elle éprouve reste plutôt dans une version autre du père. Elle ressent qu’elle n’est pas en effet dans les normes. Mais elle cherche plutôt à déclarer qu’elle n’a pas transgressé complètement la loi du père. Les relations qu’elle entretient avec les femmes ne sont pas comparables aux relations qu’elle a avec les hommes. Pour elle, l’orgie et l’exaltation de la jouissance ont souvent un rapport avec les femmes. Pourquoi ne pas dire que cette jouissance vient du maternel, d’une loi arbitraire de la Chose ? : « Jazz, femmes, danses, paroles impures, alcools, frôlements … ; comment puis j’aimer ces choses avec cette passion qui me vient de si loin, qui me tient si fort ? Qu’est ce que je vais chercher dans ces endroits aux charmes troubles »[xv].

Elle incarne la figure clinique d’une femme qui se positionne comme hyperactive ou «garçon manqué», malgré toutes ses conditions existentielles d’une bourgeoise. Il s’agit d’une femme qui se révèle, parfois, homme au miroir. Dans cette histoire de femme qui investit d’autres femmes, le sexe réel est en contradiction avec le sexe qu’elle assume. Tantôt elle est dans une logique d’identité usurpée, tantôt dans une logique d’identité assumée. On peut dire qu’elle porte le phallus (de la mère), et qu’elle est  insoumise à la loi de la castration. Par ailleurs, elle conteste vivement la théorie de la castration de la fille. Selon elle, Freud « suppose que la femme se sent un homme mutilé »[xvi].

Simone de Beauvoir est dans la continuité de ce phénomène de l’ambivalence qui se situe avant l’Œdipe, les deux positions étant de devenir femme, ou de rester comme porteur du phallus. A l’Œdipe, l’enfant fille s’engage dans la dialectique intersubjective d’une illusion que la mère porte le phallus. Pour satisfaire ce désir (de la mère) la fille essaie de devenir «cet objet trompeur». Le moi se stabilise ainsi au niveau de l’identification à une image phallique. De cette manière, la femme crée une situation de «parade». Simone de Beauvoir est paradigmatique de cette femme qui n’a pas encore constaté son incapacité à devenir «porteur de phallus de la mère». Elle s’éloigne donc de son versant féminin. Nous en déduisons qu’elle vit une chronicisation du symptôme du «garçon manqué». La jeune fille « active » prouve, en général, la chronicisation d’une caractéristique de la fillette dans l’ambition d’être un autre homme plus qu’un homme.

La relation qu’elle entretient avec une femme désirée par Sartre est la source principale de son roman intitulé L’invitée. Cette relation trio nous rappelle le cas Dora de Freud. Ce cas peut être considéré comme l’exemple par excellence de la fille hystérique qui peut basculer vers la perversion. Dora était dans ce trio, avec la femme désirée par son père. Elle a été également convoitée par l’homme de cette femme. Sans rester dans la logique du fantasme, Sartre et Beauvoir ont mis en pratique ce trio. Ce qui nous incite à penser que Beauvoir se contentait de vivre une « relation » fantasmée qui basculait sans arrêt vers la perversion. La relation avec Sartre demeure très ambiguë et fantasmatique. De plus, les relations avec ses amantes représentent une « jouissance » puisée dans une logique perverse. Elle cherche en fait, « un trio bien équilibré »[xvii]. Elle a ce problème du moi qui souffre du vertige permanent. Pour qu’elle se positionne sur un terrain bien stable, il lui faut « construire » ce trio. Elle semble chercher le triangle, mais sans le quatrième élément l’objet a, comme si le trio seul pouvait compléter la Chose. Il lui faut chercher, encore et encore les objets sans interruption, pour que l’objet a soit effacé de son chemin. L’informe qu’elle gagne procure ainsi cette jouissance de la Chose : « Je n’apercevais nulle trace de ma subjectivité. Je m’étais voulu sans bornes. J’étais informe comme infini ».[xviii]

Bibliographie

1. Assoun  P.-L., masculin Féminin, Paris, Anthropos, 2005.
2. Assoun P.-L., Freud et la femme, Paris, PBP,1993.
3. AUDET J.-R., Simone de Beauvoir face à la mort, Paris, L’âge de l’homme, 1979.
4. Bair D., Simone de Beauvoir, Paris, fayard, 1990.
5. Beauvoir S. de, Deuxième sexe I(1949), Paris, Gallimard folio essais, 1976.
6. Beauvoir S. de, Journal de guerre, Paris, Gallimard, nrf, 1990.
7. Beauvoir S. de, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, Paris Gallimard folio, 1958.
8. Freud S, La vie sexuelle, Paris, PUF, 2002.
9. Freud S, Le malaise dans la culture(1930), Paris, PUF, Quadrige, 2000.
10. JEANSON F., Simone de Beauvoir ou l’entreprise de vivre, Paris, Seuil, 1966.
11. LACAN J., Le Séminaire livre IV, La relation d’objet, Paris, Seuil, 1994.

[i] Simone de Beauvoir, Deuxième sexe I, Paris Gallimard, p. 285.

[ii] Sigmund Freud, Malaise dans la culture, Paris PUF Quadrige, p. 48.

[iii] Sigmund Freud, Sur la sexualité féminine in la vie sexuelle, Paris PUF, 2002, p. 141. voir aussi, P-L. Assoun, Masculin Féminin, Paris Anthropos, p. 27.

[iv] Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire livre IV, La relation d’objet, Paris Seuil, p.106.

[v] Deirdre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, Paris, fayard, 1990, p. 230.

[vi] Francis Jeanson, simone de Beauvoir ou l’entreprise de vivre, Paris, Seuil, 1966, p.147.

[vii] Simone de Beauvoir, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, Paris Gallimard folio, 1958, p.157.

[viii] Deidre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, op.cit., p. 319-321.

[ix] Simone de Beauvoir, Journal de guerre, Paris, Gallimard, 1990, p .143, voir aussi la lettre du 12 novembre 1939 in Lettres à Sartre tome 1,  (1930-1939), Paris, Gallimard, 1990, p. 255.

[x] Deidre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, op. cit., p.802.

[xi] Simone de Beauvoir, Journal de la guerre, Paris Gallimard, nrf, 1990, p.139.

[xii] Deirdre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, op.cit., p. 230.

[xiii] Paul Laurent Assoun, Freud et la femme, Paris PBP, 1993, p. 32.

[xiv] Paul Laurent Assoun, Masculin Féminin, op. cit., p. 43.

[xv] Francis Jeanson, Simone de Beauvoir ou l’entreprise de vivre, op. cit., p.183.

[xvi] Simone de Beauvoir, Deuxième sexe I, Paris Gallimard Folio essais 1976, p. 84.

[xvii] Jean-Raymond Audet, Simone de Beauvoir face à la mort, Paris, L’âge de l’homme, 1979, p. 28.

[xviii] Simone de Beauvoir, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, op. cit., p.157.

En la edición de hoy publicamos la última parte de Los Cuadernos. Al culminar las tres entregas consecutivas, queremos destacar que para Palabra de Mujer constituye un gran honor, ser la fuente original y el medio a través del cual   fragmentos de esta importante  obra, traducidos por primera vez del francés al español  por nuestra querida compañera del equipo editorial, Gloria Comesaña Santalices,  seleccionados, analizados y comentados por ella, para su publicación en este espacio, están siendo leídos y conocidos por un muy amplio conglomerado de lectoras y lectores en nuestro país y en otras latitudes (la Editora).

————————————————————————————————-

Por: Gloria Comesaña Santalices

En Julio de 1929 aparece Sartre en su vida, presentado por Maheu, quien pese a estar casado y rechazar la infidelidad, tanto por respeto a su esposa, como a Beauvoir, no deja de expresarle sus sentimientos.

Finalmente ella decide que quien de verdad le interesa y colma todas sus expectativas es Sartre:

Mi admiración por los otros es más o menos  cosa decidida, poesía; sólo Sartre me ha dado la libertad de una sinceridad absolutamente entera, de una simplicidad que no trata de construir nada. Ahora, gracias a ello, he comprendido a mi príncipe de los Lamas. ¡Y bien!, no, no lo estimo mucho, y conservo la impresión penosa que me había dado hablando de su mujer, del mundo, de la sociedad- sensualidad, arribismo, un poco de vanidad, puerilidad- y falta de generosidad. Moralmente no lo aprecio. Intelectualmente, no me basta: no se interesa a suficientes cosas, no comprende suficientemente rápido,  no domina todas las cuestiones. (…) y esta clara y pura sequedad de su espíritu es para mí un poco asfixiante. Viendo todo eso, pensaba en Sartre,  a la forma tan parecida a la mía en que las cosas existen o no existen para él, sus relaciones con las mujeres, con el mundo, su cultura, su pasión por las ideas, todo eso por el contrario lo admiro, lo estimo sin reserva, lo veo netamente, lo coloco a una altura extraordinario.

Y haciendo, como acostumbra el balance del año transcurrido, escribe en Septiembre de 1929:

Julio- agosto-septiembre. Sartre. El mundo acaba de abrirse. Aprendo lo que es un destino de mujer y que es éste el que yo quiero. Aprendo lo que es pensar, lo que es un gran hombre, lo que es el universo. Me libero de todos los viejos prejuicios religiosos, morales, y falsos instintos. Aprendo la sinceridad entera, la libertad de pensar y de vivir su pensamiento con su espíritu, su corazón, su cuerpo. Inmensas revelaciones- sin trastornar, porque todo estaba preparado. Consumación del pasado, apertura a un porvenir diferente a estos cuatro últimos años. (…) y diez días en La Grillère  donde acabo de conocerlo y amarlo. Y la promesa de un fuerte amor, de una amistad de siempre.

En todos estos análisis sobre sí misma, sus aspiraciones y sentimientos  (sorprendentes en su detalle, finura y acuidad) y particularmente en los que se va revelando cómo surge su amor por Sartre, nos atrevemos a decir que se encuentra la clave de su permanencia al lado de este hombre, que por otra parte la hizo sufrir bastante al negarse a cualquier compromiso que no fuese su amor necesario, al lado de los otros que ambos tendrían, que fueron siempre, aunque no sin dificultad, a veces, llamados por él, contingentes.

Y aquí coincidimos con los análisis que al respecto hace Sylvie Le Bon. Para ella está claro que, si bien ambos están de acuerdo en lanzarse a esta aventura, no parten en igualdad de condiciones: Porque ella es mujer, el coeficiente de adversidad de las cosas, está multiplicado por su lado, y lo excepcional comporta un peso de riesgos que Sartre ni siquiera sospecha.

Y por el hecho de que Beauvoir es amante de correr riesgos, dado su valor y su orgullo, no debe minimizarse la importancia de estos riesgos, ya que en aquella época, al rechazar el matrimonio, ella se expone de una manera enorme. Pero además, dadas las condiciones  del pacto que le propone Sartre, ella acepta, en palabras de  Le Bon: en el seno de la dicha la precariedad, la inseguridad, un porvenir quizás de nuevo solitario.

Ella no puede saber, en ese momento en que lo arriesga todo, que esos dos años se convertirán en una relación de cincuenta años, de toda una vida. Sin la lectura de estos Cuadernos, no podríamos comprender por qué ella estaba preparada para vivir esta aventura. Sartre, en cambio, no corría prácticamente ningún riesgo, dado su estatus como varón y la cantidad de roles sociales aceptables para él.

No es él, sino ella la que apuesta fuerte en este juego. Además, Sartre,  es según Le Bon: una especie de: pez frío al cual una distancia interior infranqueable separa de él sus sentimientos. Si bien es sensible, no puede apasionarse, afligido de una especie de mutilación afectiva, de frigidez pasional, por la cual es más digno de compasión que de censura, pero que de hecho le facilita las cosas.

Simone de Beauvoir, en cambio, es totalmente diferente en este sentido, lejos de tal ataraxia. Ella es, como hemos visto, emotiva, apasionada, vulnerable y excesiva, dice Le Bon: Desde el comienzo de su relación ella analiza lúcidamente la diferencia que, en el seno de su gemelaridad la opone a Sartre.  Diferencia que no pone en cuestión su proximidad. Pero que hay que admitir y afrontar – el esfuerzo sobre sí misma no puede sino asignársele a ella, sostenido, ciertamente, por la inmensa confianza que tiene en Sartre.

Y con respecto a todo esto, la joven Simone, cuando decide unirse a Sartre, está muy clara en cuanto a los riesgos que corre, jugándose su autonomía, que ha conquistado a lo largo de los cuatro años que dura la escritura de los Cuadernos.

Y así escribe en Septiembre de 1929:

No tengo miedo del porvenir, tengo una confianza total en Sartre; él jamás me hará daño, más allá de lo que será absolutamente necesario, y yo me las arreglaré también. No lamento nada de lo que dejo detrás de mí, de esta adolescencia, de esta querida Casa; creo por el contrario que este bello sueño en el que he vivido durante tres años no puede conservar su pureza sino de esta forma. Cielo azul. Biblioteca Nacional, Stendhal, café helado, Tullerías. Atardecer placentero y tierno. Amor inmenso por Sartre.

Ella elige pues a Sartre, como lo hará siempre a lo largo de su vida, aunque haya otros amores apasionados, y más arrolladores que lo que en esas etapas más maduras de su vida representa la relación con Sartre, como es el caso de su relación con Nelson Algren, que le propone matrimonio, y cuyo anillo ella portará hasta su muerte.

Pero ningún otro hombre le proporciona lo que ella encuentra en Sartre: ciertamente, ella lo admira, pero además él la comprende, la apoya, y estimula en el camino de la escritura que ella ha elegido desde muy joven, como prueban los Cuadernos, donde casi desde las primeras páginas,  esboza argumentos para las obras que se propone escribir.

Y es esta fe en su vocación de escritora lo que la une más fuertemente a Sartre. Con una diferencia entre ambos, que señala muy acertadamente Sylvie Le Bon:

La singularidad de Simone de Beauvoir, sin embargo, con relación a Sartre, es que, dividida entre dos postulaciones contrarias, escribir y existir, ella no quiso sacrificar ni la una ni la otra. Las dos valen para ella absolutamente: la dicha de existir, y la necesidad de escribir, por una parte el esplendor contingente, por la otra, el rigor salvador. Hacer de su existencia el objeto de su escritura, le permitirá en parte, salir del dilema (…) apuntando a lo universal la novelista se transforma en ensayista, en filósofa, y para Simone de Beauvoir no hay por qué elegir entre estos dos modos de expresión, ni preferir el uno al otro. Literatura y filosofía no se oponen, se completan, y tan pronto ella sentirá la necesidad de la una como de la otra.

Lúcidos autoanálisis

No puede decirse que la relación con Sartre, que va a durar toda la vida, con su estatuto tan diferente de una relación tradicional, no haya sido sopesada y definitivamente elegida con conocimiento de causa. Así, el 3 de Noviembre de 1929, escribe:

Estoy feliz. Siento más claramente que nunca toda la fuerza que exige un amor tal, la falta de seguridad, las amenazas. Siento cómo una promesa definitiva, cómo el  matrimonio comportan un reposo, una dulzura, un gozo sin temor, pero siento que esto es mucho más bello, y que no tiene ninguna importancia sufrir las noches en que uno es débil, que no dejaría mi lugar por todo el oro del mundo. Estoy satisfecha de mí, y lo amo.

No dudo entre dos amores. Dudo ante el amor. Tengo miedo. Siempre he tenido miedo. (…) Hay en mí un deseo desenfrenado de libertad, de aventura, de historias, de viajes, de otras almas; un deseo de mantener todas las puertas abiertas, de darme a todo, un rechazo de todo lazo, un temor al matrimonio, que siento lo más alejado de mí.

Pasarela Simone de Beauvoir, París.

Editó las tres entregas: Teresa Sosa

Antes de tudo é preciso diferenciar feminino de feminismo.

Feminino são os trejeitos, características que criam para diferençar o que é da mulher, a chamada sutileza ou o que seja semelhante a isso.

Feminismo é posicionamento político, é ser contra a cultura machista que nos deixaram como herança, é entender que a mulher é colocada em posição inferior em todas as esferas sociais, seja no âmbito do lar, seja no âmbito do mercado de trabalho, seja nos olhares que recebem na rua.

Por isso não pode existir feminismo velado, pseudo revolta com uma situação, mas ao mesmo tempo falta de coragem de levantar a bandeira e denunciar que a subjulgação ainda é fato. Quando não damos a cara para bater estamos reproduzindo conhecimento, reafirmando o status-quo.

Em uma entrevista para o jornalista John Gerassi, em 1976, época que “O Segundo Sexo” compeltou 25 anos, Simone de Beauvoir deu a melhor definição de feminismo que eu já vi. Depois disso não é preciso falar mais nada. 

“Uma feminista, quer ela se autodenomine esquerdista ou não, é uma esquerdista por definição. Ela está lutando por uma igualdade plena, pelo direito de ser tão importante, tão relevante, quanto qualquer homem. Por isso, incorporada em sua revolta pela igualdade de gêneros está a reivindicação pela igualdade de classes. Numa sociedade em que o homem pode ser a mãe, em que, vamos dizer, para colocar o argumento em termos de valores para que fique claro, a assim chamada “intuição feminina” é tão importante quanto o “conhecimento masculino” — para usar a linguagem corrente, apesar de absurda — em que ser gentil ou delicado é melhor do que ser durão; em outras palavras, em uma sociedade na qual a experiência de cada pessoa é equivalente a qualquer outra, você já estabeleceu automaticamente a igualdade, o que significa igualdade econômica e política e muito mais. Dessa forma, a luta de sexos inclui a luta de classes, mas a luta de classes não inclui a luta de sexos. As feministas são, portanto, esquerdistas genuínas. De fato, elas estão à esquerda do que nós chamamos tradicionalmente de esquerda política”

Por: Gloria Comesaña Santalices*

En el mes de Marzo de 2008 se publicaron en Francia, Cahiers de Jeunesse (1926-1930) o Cuadernos de Juventud, de Simone de Beauvoir, diarios íntimos escritos entre los 18 y los 22 años de edad. La edición así como el Prólogo se deben a su hija adoptiva: Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir. Los Cuadernos nacen de la necesidad que siente la joven Simone  de encerrarse en su interior y reflexionar cada vez que un dolor, una ruptura, se presentan en su vida, pero también cuando se siente “en exilio”, alejada de las opiniones y las acciones de los demás. A medida que vamos leyendo las páginas, asistimos al surgimiento de aquella que está en proceso de convertirse en Simone de Beauvoir, según los documentos oficiales, Simonne Bertrand de Beauvoir.

Encontramos frecuentemente en estos textos, afirmaciones de un existencialismo anterior a su conocimiento de Sartre, y sin conceptualizar aún. Como este fragmento:

Pero yo, ¿quién soy? Mi unidad no viene de ningún principio, de ningún sentimiento al cual yo subordinaría todo: ella no se hace sino en mí misma. No puedo definirme ni clasificarme: mi gusto por la nitidez se acomoda poco de ello, sin embargo, detesto las etiquetas. No, verdaderamente; lo que amo por encima de todo, no es la fe ardiente y el gran acto simple que me conmueven sin embargo, con un respeto admirativo; son los impulsos rotos, las búsquedas, los deseos; son las ideas sobre todo, es la inteligencia y la crítica, los cansancios, las derrotas. Son los seres que no pueden dejarse engañar y que se debaten para vivir a pesar de su lucidez.

Ella lee toda clase de autores, sobre todo literatura y filosofía, y considera que lo que lee la transforma. Pero no es una intelectual fría. Su inteligencia va unida a una gran sensibilidad, incluso apasionamiento y emotividad, que funcionan como un todo orgánico unidos a su razón.

Para ella vivir y pensar son la misma cosa. Pero esta joven devoradora de libros y que puede pasarse un día entero leyendo y escribiendo, es además una muchacha muy sociable, que cultiva sus amistades.

Entre esas amistades de los primeros tiempos, cuatro permanecerán a lo largo de su existencia, aunque a algunos, como a su amiga Zaza la muerte se la haya arrebatado muy tempranamente. Los otros son Stépha Avdivovitch, René Maheu, que llegó a ser director de la UNESCO, y Maurice Merleau Ponty.

Con Stepha vive una amistad muy sensual, tratando de conocer un mundo muy distinto al de la joven formal que siempre había sido. Maheu, con quien vive una amistad amorosa sin ir más allá, por razones que ambos respetan, es quien la da el sobrenombre que permanecerá, Castor, porque Beauvoir se la parece al inglés beaver, castor, y porque los castores andan siempre en bandas y trabajan muchísimo, tal como ella hace.

Años después, sus más íntimos, comenzando con Sartre, seguirán llamándola Castor, el Castor, en una curiosa masculinización del sobrenombre. A Zaza, Elisabeth Lacoin, la conoció  en el curso Desir, cuando ambas tenían diez años.

Desde entonces, si no estaban juntas en vacaciones, se escribían constantemente. Zaza deviene novia de Merleau Ponty, a quien su familia rechaza, por ser de familia poco notable. Zaza, llena de terribles contradicciones e incapaz de desobedecer a su familia, sucumbe a una enfermedad fulminante. Esta pérdida afectará muchísimo a la joven Beauvoir, que deja constancia de ello en las últimas páginas de su último cuaderno:

Zaza. No puedo soportar que estés muerta (…) sería preciso que estuvieras aquí, amiga mía. Podías hacer tanto por mí. ¡Oh! Devuélvanme mi pasado. ¿Es que se ha acabado todo, Zaza, es que sólo quedan estas cartas? (…) Esta tumba con esas flores, esas fotos, y este horrible recuerdo. Y yo, yo vivo. Mañana tendré un vestido malva y estaré con Sartre. Cuánto hemos detestado esta vida, esta vida de  las personas mayores que han abdicado. Pero estoy sola sin ti y ni siquiera se lo que quiero. Quisiera partir; quisiera dejar a Sartre y partir a pasearme contigo, sola contigo, para hablar, y amarte, y pasearnos, lejos de aquí, lejos. ¿Caricias, trabajo, placeres, es eso todo? Oh mi amiga. ¿Era de tal manera otra cosa, te acuerdas? No tengo la fuerza de recordarlo sola. Se ha acabado.

El tiempo y la muerte

Estos dos temas, presentes en toda la obra de Beauvoir, aparecen ya claramente expresados en los Cuadernos. Ella experimenta con mucha fuerza el fluir del tiempo. Cada instante es único, pero se va para siempre y no podemos retenerlo. Y junto con esa sensación viene la de la vejez, la idea de que el paso del tiempo implica envejecer constantemente y acercarse a la muerte. A Sylvie Le Bon, que le preguntaba cuándo se había sentido vieja por primera vez, ella le contesta que a los doce o trece años. Estas angustias, que le provocaban cuando la asaltaban, crisis de lágrimas, la persiguieron toda su vida. Así, en el segundo Cuaderno, escribe:

No puedo creer que eso no será más. (…) Hay tantas otras cosas que habría querido prolongar. En mis notas del año (se refiere a lo escrito en el primer Cuaderno, que se perdió), hay sobre todo esta angustia de saber que el minuto vivido iba a desaparecer para siempre. Tengo una especie de remordimiento de ya no llorar por su desaparición; y sin embargo, es al saber que ya no lloraría hoy, por lo que lloraba entonces. La vida es una perpetua renovación, he aquí a lo que no podré habituarme.

Sin embargo, tal como lo señala Sylvie Le Bon en su Prólogo, frente a esa angustia que le causa la temporalidad, ella responde mediante la intensidad, la fidelidad, y la totalización.  El transcurrir indetenible del tiempo, hace que cada momento sea precioso, lleno de riquezas que hay que vivir en profundidad, que hay que devorar:

He tomado entre mis manos el día de hoy y el futuro y de ello he hecho una embriaguez; y de esta embriaguez la gran felicidad ha surgido. Y si es esto lo que llaman felicidad, no  hay nada mejor que hacer con la propia vida que el hacerla dichosa. He hecho entrar el cielo rojo, y la atmósfera amarilla translúcida en mi sueño resucitado más bello; y Notre Dame estaba allí toda entera, mi bella hija esculpida que había sido hecha para mí. Esta hora de mi vida, ya no la viviré jamás, me decía; y qué embriaguez  tenerla así, única, entre mis dedos. La catedral estaba tan negra, que uno no veía las lágrimas sobre los rostros; los vitrales violetas, el sonido del reloj eran un decorado lejano y encantado: maravilla de encontrarme allí, yo. ¿Quién, yo? ¿Dónde, allí? ¿En qué mágico país, a qué hora irreal que ningún reloj podría marcar?

Esta fidelidad salvadora, implica que en la mujer que será perviva la adolescente que fue, y en ésta la niña. Ella pacta consigo misma esa fidelidad y confía en sí misma:

Mi propia fuerza: yo se que, durante toda mi existencia, podré contar conmigo misma; que no necesitaré consejos ni energía, sino siempre ese gran poder de retomarme. Este amor y este ardiente interés, este deseo de perfección para mí misma. Se que me seré fiel, que sabré siempre reencontrarme en toda mi integridad en medio de las banalidades necesarias. Camino con confianza hacia ese yo del futuro, que no me traicionará.

Finalmente, su lucha contra el devenir que nunca se detiene, culmina con el esfuerzo de totalización. Ella quiere vivir el presente, a la vez que mantiene vivo el pasado y se avanza hacia el porvenir:

La clarividencia ha venido a mí, y el gusto de los análisis minuciosos, al mismo tiempo que disminuía mi poder de salir fuera de mí. La acción me atraía menos; en los libros, me buscaba más, pero lo que era esencialmente lo mismo, creía en el valor místico de todos los momentos del yo. (…) Yo no me abandonaba: dominaba los instantes, exprimía cada acontecimiento para hacer salir de allí una pieza de oro con la que me enriquecería.

Ahora bien, la verdadera solución a este problema del tiempo y de la muerte, es su voluntad de hacer una obra, de ser una escritora.

*Filósofa feminista. Tradujo del francés al español los textos de su artículo. Es miembra  del equipo editorial de Palabra de Mujer.

L’Etranger d’Albert Camus est publié en 1942.

Ouvrage littéraire que son auteur attribue au “cycle de l’absurde” aux côtés de l’essai Le Mythe de Sisyphe et des pièces de théâtre Caligula et Le Malentendu, L’Etranger est l’une des oeuvres fondamentales de la bibliographie d’Albert Camus.

Toute l’histoire du roman se fonde sur deux évènements venant bouleverser la vie du principal protagoniste, Mersault : la mort de sa mère et le meutre qu’il commet le menant à la peine capitale en clôture de l’ouvrage. Ce sont ces themes que vous aborderez dans vos 2 principales parties de dissertation.

“Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.” Avec cette première phrase restant comme l’une des plus belles et des plus fortes de la littérature française, Albert Camus écrit un court roman entre absurde et existentialisme. Car l’Etranger pose aussi la reflexion philosophique via la narration. Mersault est un homme ne se conformant à la norme définie par la société dans laquelle il évolue. Il ne trouve pas sa place et devient étranger au monde comme à lui-même. A ce titre, il vous sera intéressant de faire le parallèle avec le personnage principal de La Nausée de Jean-Paul Sartre. Cette différence, cette distance face au monde lui vaudra d’ailleurs sa condamnation à la guillotine: l’homme qui ne pleure le décès de sa mère et ne trouve comme excuse du meurtre que le soleil aveuglant ne peut être qu’un étranger, qu’un danger pour la société qui l’entoure. Pourtant, Mersault n’est ni mauvais, ni bon, il subit l’existence et l’achaînement des rencontres, des évènements sans interférer, sans manifester de colère ou de passion à l’image de la pensée existentialiste.

the love

http://www.simonebeauvoir.kit.net/imagens.htm

I was going to FINALLY read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as par of Twitter’s readathon (the purpose of which is to read those books you’ve had sitting on the shelf and thought ‘hmm, should really get round to those), but the lure of Harold Evan’s new biography, My Paper Chase, has proved too strong.

So, by tonight, I aim to have kicked its butt by about 200 pages, not Harold himself though, as a former journalist it would be like killing a God, which is far too Nietzchean for a Saturday morning.

And so, led the reading begin! And tell me what you’re planning to plough through!