Looking to Simone de Beauvoir’s Fiction: The Philosophical Importance of "When Things of the Spirit Come First"
Qrescent Mali Mason
Simone de Beauvoir famously made the claim that while Sartre was a great philosopher, she was not a philosopher, but, rather, a writer. While many have offered interpretations of this confession, some making the claim that Beauvoir was misguided or even misleading in making this comment, I think that, rather than interpreting this as a sign that she could not see her own philosophical importance, we might interpret this claim as Beauvoir’s imperative for us to look more deeply into all forms of her writing in order to be able to understand and fully account for her philosophical and intellectual contributions.
Elsewhere, I have argued that without taking into account Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiographical works, we cannot properly understand her philosophy. One might add to this argument that the same could be said of her fictional works. A stronger claim might even be made here: that not only should we look to Beauvoir’s autobiography and fiction in order to garner a robust account of her philosophy, but rather that her autobiographical and fictional works should themselves be treated as philosophy.
Take, for example, When Things of the Spirit Come First. When Things was one of Beauvoir’s first attempts at publishable fiction, written when she was in her late 20s and early 30s, but not officially published until 1979, after until after her most well-known novels like She Came to Stay and The Mandarins.
While Beauvoir suggests in the preface to When Things of the Spirit Come First that it was written in an attempt to account for the complex ways that young women in France navigate religion and selfhood during the early 20th century, I also see When Things as offering three very important contributions to our understanding of Beauvoir’s philosophy: 1) an illustration of how Beauvoir views the importance of erotic relationships to the development of female identity, 2) a further emphasis on the importance of both the lived experience in general and Beauvoir’s own lived experience to our understanding all of Beauvoir’s writing, and 3) a pre-figuring of fundamental concepts in Beauvoir’s ethics as offered through such works as The Ethics of Ambiguity, The Second Sex, and “Pyrrhus et Cinéas.” As such, it is clear that in order to truly understand the development of Beauvoir’s philosophy and her ethics (what I consider to be her most indelible contribution to both existentialism and philosophy at large), one must also engage with this early fictional work.
Indeed, Beauvoir writes in the preface to When Things, “When I started this book, a little before I was thirty, I already had the beginnings and the rough drafts of several novels behind me. In these I had given outward expression to phantasms; they had almost no relationship to my personal life. After thinking about the matter for a year I made up my mind to write something completely different: this time I should speak about a world I knew, and I should expose some of its defects…I decided to…deal with my own conversion to the real world.”[i]
Two things stand out here: 1) that Beauvoir very clearly lays out how fundamental the lived experience is to her writing. One might even say that this description—“speaking of the world she knows and exposing some of its defects” encapsulates what Beauvoir sees as the purpose of her writing. 2) Beauvoir also mentions here the term “conversion” when speaking of her conversion to the real world. Those familiar with Beauvoir’s ethics will note that conversion is an important concept in Beauvoir’s ethics.
“Marguerite” is one of the stories in the collection that Beauvoir explicitly describes as a reflection on the early romantic relationship and subsequent breakup between herself (her character here is named Marguerite) and her cousin Jacques (who she refers to as Denis in the story). The fictional story closely mirrors accounts of the relationship that can be found in both her Wartime Diary and her memoir Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. We can also find traces of this relationship in Beauvoir’s descriptions of “The Woman in Love” in The Second Sex.
She writes of the breakup between Marguerite and Denis:
“Slowly I walked off; the world was shining like a new penny, and although I did not yet know what I wanted to do with it everything was possible, since there in the centre of things, in the place Denis had left empty, I had found myself.
“At the time I attributed too much importance to what I may call this kind of revelation: it was not a conversion of a spiritual nature that could rid me of spirituality. In fact, my life changed from the moment I was no longer engaged in merely inward revolutions…”
“…all I have wished to do was to show how I was brought to try to look things straight in the face, without accepting oracles or ready-made values. I had to rediscover everything myself, and sometimes it was disconcerting—furthermore, not everything is clear even now. But in any case what I do know is that Marcelle and Chantal and Pascal [three female characters in the story] will die without ever having known or loved anything real and that I do not want to be like them.”[ii]
Again, we find here, in the conclusion of the story 1) the important ethical role that this kind of erotic relationship plays in the development of female identity, 2) the influence of the lived experience, and 3) the illustration of existential ethical concepts that endure throughout her writing.
Indeed, the collection is rife with such illustrations. As such, I suggest that those interested in the writing of Beauvoir return to this lesser-cited short story collection for its rich insight into the ideas Beauvoir is most well known for.
Qrescent Mali Mason, Berea College