Privilege and "The Blood of Others"
Verónica Zebadúa Yáñez
Beauvoir wrote in her autobiography that her essays and her novels corresponded to “two orders of experience that cannot be communicated in the same manner. Both sorts of experience,” she continued, “are to me equal in importance and authenticity. […] If I have used two different modes of self-expression, it was because such diversity was for me a necessity” (41). If both genres—and I would add her autobiographical writings too—were for Beauvoir essential means of communicating experience, does it matter whether we focus on her non-fiction, fiction, or autobiography as grounds for our scholarship? I believe not. This rich variety of sources renders research more complex and truly interdisciplinary. This does not mean, of course, that we can conflate her chosen genres as if they rehashed the same arguments. But it does mean that we can search for deeper insights on her ethics and politics, and the reasons why she developed her specific literary and philosophical vocabulary, in the totality of her work, using a diversity of methods. Indeed, the fact that we can do this is a testament to her deep originality.
Beauvoir repeatedly stated that there is no difference between literature and life. Margaret Simons suggests that Beauvoir’s stubborn self-identification as a literary writer, and not a philosopher, might be understood as a philosophical stance in itself, one that underscores the priority of the concrete and experiential over the abstract.
While I largely agree with Simons, I’d argue that some of Beauvoir’s literary writings suggest rather the opposite, namely, a priority of the abstract over the experiential, or maybe abstracting from the experiential. In other words, in her very literature there is a tension between the literary and the philosophical.
One example is The Blood of Others, published in 1945. She wrote that her intention in this novel was “to define our true relationship with other people.” The novel is of course written in French, but in reality, its characters talk, think, and desire in “Existentialist.” On this point, Beauvoir herself responded to an interviewer, a propos The Blood of Others, that a risk of the metaphysical novel is rendering characters embodiments of ideas.
On the face of it, this is a “thesis novel,” which posits freedom as an absolute given that can be either willed or denied. There is, however, a more subtle thread that runs through it, addressing the existential meaning of privilege, which handles the matter on affective and experiential, indeed literary, terms rather than abstraction. The awareness of privilege is unveiled through the experience of the other: the death of a maid’s baby (suggestive of the evils of poverty), and the probable death of a Jewish girl (suggestive of the evils of totalitarianism), result in an ethical conversion of two of the novel’s protagonists, Jean Blomart and Helene.
So, The Blood of Others represents an answer to a question Beauvoir would pose some ten years later: Is it possible for the privileged to think their situation of privilege? Well, is it? The answer is yes and no. For Beauvoir, privilege is ethically blinding. Privilege is a lack of reality: as she wrote in her autobiography, one is “sheltered from want, [and] insecurity, [enjoys] good health, idealism, happiness, [and is] blinded to political realities” (PL, 288). Even if we think through this condition and face it squarely, we cannot escape it. As she also wrote in her autobiography, her privilege represented a mutilation of her life (FCII, 375).
As we know, the narrative of The Blood of Others takes place during the Second World War, and revolves around Blomart, a young bourgeois who is accosted from childhood by guilt at the “sin” of his privilege. The novel unfolds the events of a single night, while Blomart waits for his lover Helene—once a careless young woman—to die. He feels responsible: as the leader of a resistance cell, he had sent her to a rescue mission where she was wounded. Now, he faces another agonizing moral choice: he must decide whether to send other fighters to a mission, and risk “paying with the blood of others” yet again.
In a series of flashbacks, we find that a young Blomart had chosen—or rather, willed—to detach himself from his class and pursue something meaningful. He naively believed that he in this way he would shun his guilt and privilege. He says, “I’ve lived for a few months like a real working-class man.” His friend Marcel replies, “There’ll always be a gulf between you and a working-class man, you choose freely a condition to which he submits” (27).
Helene, for her part, trying to save her Jewish friend Yvonne from deportation, witnessed a horrific incident: boys and girls separated from their mothers, loaded onto trucks like cargo; a woman and a girl crying, a mother begging for her daughter. At this sight, tears rose to her eyes. “Can we do nothing? […] She was weeping but remained motionless like the others and she was watching. She was there and her presence made no difference” (230).
In one of her essays, Beauvoir wrote that every silence has a voice. Helene’s silence there—voice of privilege—is what eventually ‘woke her up’ and led her to the resistance. On her dying bed she would utter the name of the girl she had seen. Awaking to privilege, then, necessitates a mode of relation to oneself that is not dealt though abstractions but through concrete relations to the other, by witnessing. The title recalls this: the blood of others, the injustice suffered by the other.
Even if the novel ends with Helene’s death, Beauvoir’s story signals towards an idealism that she would lose years later. Privilege, she would say then, is inescapable. It’s an indelible mark. On the Algerian war, she wrote “[…]. When one lives in an unjust world there is no use hoping by some means to purify oneself of that injustice; the only solution would be to change the whole world, and I don’t have that power. To suffer from these contradictions serves no good purpose; to blind oneself to them is mere self-deception.”
Verónica Zebadúa Yáñez
Visiting Lecturer in Gender Studies, Mount Holyoke College