Simone de Beauvoir Studies Volume 29 2013-2014 20

BEAUVOIR’S LECTURE ON THE METAPHYSICAL NOVEL AND ITS CONTEMPORARY CRITIQUES

JO BOGAERTS

It has been suggested that Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of the metaphysical novel was developed as a response to criticism of “philosophical literature.” The intersection of literature and philosophy, which was not only evident in the writings of fellow existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, but also in the works of Georges Bataille, Jean Grenier, Gabriel Marcel, Brice Parain and Jean Wahl, was often rejected as being “merely” allegorical. As a form of allegorical writing, existentialist literature would once again have served as philosophy’s handmaiden by expounding the tenets of a philosophical system. Beauvoir scholars have recently set out to prove both the literary and the philosophical value of Beauvoir’s work, as well as her intellectual autonomy vis-à-vis Sartre. The concept of the metaphysical novel has proven indispensable for this task, as it often furnished the very basis on which Beauvoir’s literary work was reread and reevaluated. However, in doing so, scholars have failed to investigate the contemporary reception of Beauvoir’s lecture and turned a blind eye to possible criticisms that could be made of her concept. While maintaining a firm belief in literature’s ability to. unveil metaphysical aspects of human existence, Beauvoir abandoned the critical use of this concept in the 1950s. Careful scrutiny suggests that she had formed the concept on the basis of ethical categories, thereby obscuring a literary-theoretical reflection and evoking questions about the relevance, viability, and technicality of the concept that are surprisingly absent from the secondary literature.

Beauvoir’s Concept of the Metaphysical Novel On December 11, 1945, Simone de Beauvoir gave a talk entitled “Roman et métaphysique” as part of a series of lectures delivered at the Club Maintenant in Paris, a presentation which she subsequently revised and published in Les Temps Modernes in April 1946. Noting the pejorative associations with manifestations of “philosophical literature” such as the theatre of ideas, roman à these and roman métaphysique, Beauvoir argued in favor of a reconciliation of the two in a form of literary writing that is faithful to her philosophical convictions, all the while retaining its literary value. Taking up the idea that philosophical thought must not be regarded as something solely expressed from an Archimedean point of view, Beauvoir approaches the issue at hand from an experiential perspective as she describes her own feeling of being torn between the “seductions of fiction and [...] the rigor of philosophical thought” (TM 46: 269). Her personal belief that, in order to express the Simone de Beauvoir Studies Volume 29 2013-2014 21 totality of the world, we must rely both on literature and philosophy is nonetheless quickly recognized as following from “a long tradition” and answering to “a profound demand of the mind” (TM 46: 270). She does not explore that historical tradition in great detail, or in a systematic manner, and does not even mention the enormous influence of phenomenology, but remarks that “one renounces the philosophical novel if one defines philosophy as a fully constituted, self-sufficient system” (TM 46: 272). She goes on to show that even philosophers such as Plato and Hegel have had recourse to literary discourse whenever they wanted to convey “the subjective, singular, and dramatic aspect of experience” (TM 46: 274). Evoking Kierkegaard and Kafka as precursors of a movement to which the subjective dimension of existential experience had become central, she argues that it is no wonder that French existentialism evinced major interest in literary manifestations of philosophical truth. A few months earlier, Merleau-Ponty had similarly argued that French existentialism was “the coming to consciousness of a movement older than itself, whose meaning it reveals and whose rhythm it accelerates” (MP 27). He argued that the rapprochement of literature and philosophy became particularly strong at the end of the 19th century, when an investigation was opened up through which literature became increasingly philosophical and philosophy assumed the characteristics of literature. “Only now,” he contended, “had this concern [for an implicit attitude toward the world, in literature and in philosophy] become explicit. One did not wait for the introduction of existential philosophy in France to define all life as latent metaphysics and all metaphysics as an ‘explicitation’ of human life” (MP 27). In traditional philosophy, metaphysics, or the understanding of one’s relation to the self, to others, and to the universe, had been a matter of knowledge, as it sought to imagine man as a monad, to analyze him against a “transcendental theatre,” to establish Kantian “conditions of possibility,” or to envisage him as a fleeting moment in a universal dialectic. However, “[everything changes when a phenomenological or existential philosophy assigns itself the task, not of explaining the world [...] but rather of formulating an experience of the world, a contact with the world which precedes all thought about the world. After this, whatever is metaphysical in man cannot be credited to something outside his empirical being - to God, to Consciousness. Man is metaphysical in his very being [...] [a]nd metaphysics is no longer the occupation of a few hours per month, as Descartes said; it is present, as Pascal thought, in the heart's slightest movement” (MP 28). While Beauvoir is not primarily concerned with a historical understanding of the metaphysical novel, and only summarily addresses this issue at the end of her article, her lecture did contain a more precise historical emphasis. She argued that the manifestation of a metaphysical attitude must be related to the death of God and the development of a literature that specifically addresses the author’s existential experience in a secular world. That a story should bear the signature of the author’s universe is a necessity that only manifested itself when the relation between consciousness and the world was no longer caught in a fixed understanding of religious thought: