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The Operative Limits of Committed Fiction

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The Operative Limits of Committed Fiction - 91 ESTHETICS IN ACTION: THE OPERATIVE LIMITS OF COMMITTED FICTION MYRNA BELL ROCHESTER PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA MARY LAWRENCE TEST LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA Peuple sous le tas de pierre du silence. ... le miracle ne viendra que de vous et personne d'autre que vous ne dira comme à Lazare en son tombeau: "Lève-toi et marche... " Edith Thomas (July 1943) Can a work of fiction change reality? Simone de Beauvoir often reaffirmed her position that the human condition must be changed, and that a writer's commitment can be an instrument of change. Was Beauvoir alone in her efforts to make fiction mattei? To compare Beauvoir and her goal with some of her contemporaries, we looked at how she proposed to translate her personal, political, and esthetic experiences and ideals into fiction to produce a littérature engagée. We also tried to define what constituted committed fiction during and just after the German Occupation of France. We read and interviewed other French women who wrote during World War II to determine whether or not they viewed fiction as a way of influencing behavior, so that their fiction could be considered politically "committed," as Beauvoir insisted hers was. However, we found no common thread in the work of these women writers, and virtually no correlation between theory and practice. Many women resisted, but never wrote. Some women writers, like Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute and Clara Malraux, committed their personal lives to the Resistance movement, but distanced their writing from their political commitment. Béatrix Beck, Clara Malraux, and Duras may have later fictionalized their wartime experiences; but these writings were self-avowedly not engagés1 Some, like Violette Le Duc, concentrated primarily on the personal. Marguerite Yourcenar spent the war years in the United States. Also, it was difficult to divorce the women from the men, in part because shared experience typified the Occupation years, and also because many of the women were inextricably linked with the men-Beauvoir with Sartre, Elsa Triolet with Aragon, and Edith Thomas with the équipe of the underground Lettres françaises. We did find that some women writers produced what we determined to be "committed" fiction—but quite different from Beauvoir's. Finally, we questioned whether Beauvoir actually had produced the most "committed" fiction of the group that also includes Edith Thomas, Elsa Triolet, Henriette Psichari, and Dominique Desanti, as well as the Russian novelist Vera Panova, known in France via Triolet. Like their male contemporaries-Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Nizan, Raymond Aron, André Malraux, Maurice Merleau-Ponty--these women were, for the most part, products of belle époque bourgeois society. The oldest (Henriette Psichari, born in 1884) and the youngest (Dominique Desanti, born in 1920) were separated by a full generation. Those born before 1900, like Henriette Psichari-granddaughter of historian Ernest Renan and sister of poet Ernest Psichari-came of age during the Dreyfus Affair. They were largely self-taught beyond their schooling at girls’ lycées. Of those born after 1900, many studied in the French university system. 3 They all emerged as leftist, anti-elitist, nonconformist, and, to a greater or lesser degree, anticlerical. Nonetheless, their outlook had a moral bent. They were intellectuals who believed that abstract ideas could overcome social conditions and effect change.3 Several were foreign - 92 born. Half were Jewish or part-Jewish. Others married or lived with Jewish men. For all their interest in humanitarian causes and social equality, none was originally working-class. Several were at one time Communists, members of the Jeunesses communistes, or had flirted with membership in the French Communist Party. The outbreak of the Phony War on September 3, 1939, found these teachers and writers preoccupied with pacifism, internationalism, and the Spanish Civil War. The August 1939 nonaggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, and the outlawing of the French Communist Party (P.C.F.) by the Daladier government in late September 1939, tempered their interest in the grand experiment of the Soviet Union. 4 In the 1930s, no one central issue riveted the intellectual community. Writers had enjoyed a certain leisure to reflect. What passed for "commitment" in fiction was often intellectualizing about the tension between individual freedom and social responsibility, with the "hero" opting for hisow/7 narcissistic freedom. André Malraux's protagonists deliberately confronted death as a means of measuring their personal freedom. Sartre's trilogy, Les Chemins de la liberté, written during the Occupation and published later, still reflects these 1930s concerns. Its central character, Mathieu, ceaselessly theorizes about involvement and action, but acts little. He so fears losing himself in the discipline and anonymity of either the Communist Party or the Loyalist cause in Spain that he never commits himself. Aragon's series of nine novels, Le Monde réel, not completed until 1951, treats neither the Occupation nor the Liberation. It stops with the fall of France in May 1940. The protagonists-middle- and upper-class intellectuals--are aware of historical change, but debate-condescendingly-the role they may decide to play in it. Edith Thomas's novel Le Champ libre, 5 set in the 1920s and 1930s, but not published until 1945, presents a typical pre-commitment theme. A young woman like Thomas--born in 1909-succeeds in emancipating herself from her family and her bourgeois background. After scuttling her parents’ marriage plans for her and completing her studies at the university, Anne (also one of Thomas's pseudonyms in the underground) works for a humanitarian organization in Paris. She has two rather meaningless affairs, becomes pregnant, and after deciding not to have an abortion, has a miscarriage. Anne then goes to Spain looking for Denis, her childhood love and soulmate. "Et voilà que Denis, comme elle, s'était jeté dans le feu de l'Europe, parce que l'homme existait, pour que l'homme existât davantage, demain." (Champ 224) She arrives too late for Denis. He has died in the service of Loyalist Spain. Nor is her intellectual search to be fulfilled: "Je cherche partout un équivalent de Dieu. Mais je suis engagée dans l'instant et dans l'histoire. Il n'y a pas d'absolu et ma faim ne sera jamais apaisée." (Champ 215) Anne learns, however, that the path to her future is open ahead of her and that "la paix... est inséparable de la liberté." (Champ2J\4) When referred to the attending physician ("le responsable") at one point in her search for Denis, Anne thinks, "Le responsable de quoi?... [E]st-ce que nous ne sommes pas tous responsables?" (Champ 226) (A male reviewer in Les Lettres françaises, a journal that Thomas all but founded, did not understand the novel: "l'héroïne du Champ libre promène son orgueilleuse solitude de femme insatisfaite."6 ) Before the war, these characters have time to examine their motives and indulge their sense of esthetics. Then, in 1940, as the Nazis march into Paris, they find themselves unwitting cogs in a large, depersonalized system. They will be forced to take sides. Like Sartre, Beauvoir's starting point is inertia, for her a moral weakness. In Pyrrhus et Cinéas she wrote: "L'artiste ne saurait se désintéresser de la situation des hommes qui l'entourent. En autrui est engagée sa propre chair. Je lutterai donc pour que des hommes libres donnent à mes actes, à mes oeuvres, leur place nécessaire." 7 The Occupation forced writers to confront social and political responsibility. A new reality was needed to defy the ludicrous disproportion between historical occurrence and the potential of the individual. Writers undertook to keep up morale and inspire unity; they pitted the French against the Germans, good against evil, unity against disunity. In La Force de l'âge, Beauvoir wrote: "Dans cette France occupée, il suffisait de respirer pour consentir à l'oppression." 8 One either resisted or collaborated-the only authentic stand was thus the negative one. .
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