France at War in Simone De Beauvoir - Essay Example

Name of writer appears here] [Course name appears here] [Professor’s name appears here] [Date appears here] Simone De Beauvoir’s Le Sang Des Autres In France, the first post-war year was marked by a succession of nationalizations that introduced far-reaching state intervention into several sectors of the economy, including key parts of the finance, raw materials, manufacturing, and transport industries. Less remarked was the sharp increase in state investment and regulation in the cultural field, which was accompanied by a massive mobilization of cultural producers in the work of national reconstruction. In substance, culture was also nationalized. The process of nationalization took different forms in different parts of the cultural sector, and the purpose of this paper is to show how it took place in the intellectual field. It will show how leading writers accepted their national mission, and in so doing became conscious of their status as intellectuals, perhaps for the first time. In this sense it will argue that intellectuals were both nationalized and constituted as intellectuals in 1945. In the aftermath of 1944, and the heady summer of Liberation, France faced the urgent and difficult task of reconstruction. The appalling material circumstances were compounded by a series of political and ideological conflicts, which left the country on the brink of civil war. (Jean-Pierre Rioux, 20) The Allies only shelved plans for a military administration of France (AMGOT, Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories) on the eve of the Normandy landings, and only finally recognized de Gaulle's provisional government somewhat belatedly in the autumn. The country faced the post- war, in Pierre Nora's phrase, "half victor, half vanquished.” (Pierre Nora, 27-31) The chief precondition of national reconstruction was that the internal conflicts of the past four years should not be allowed to deteriorate into civil war. National unity therefore became an overriding priority. It was largely achieved thanks to the overwhelming desire of the population to secure an independent French government. And it was facilitated by their willingness to subscribe to the founding myth that the French had massively supported the Resistance and the external Free French movement, and that the collaborators in Vichy and Paris were no more than a tiny band of traitors. In the sequence of real and fictional deaths that Beauvoir's writing describes, her second novel, Le Sang des autres holds an important place. It was written during the Second World War, in the itinerary of what Beauvoir called the 'pCriode morale' of her literary career. It attempts to place the struggle of antagonistic consciousnesses dramatized in L'Inuitie within a framework that is more concretely historical and more tangibly ethical. Murder, in this work, is to cease being the petulant lashing out of a wounded ego, enraged on discovering that others do not respect the sovereignty of its desire; instead, violence appears as a calculated political act, undertaken in full lucidity and justified, perhaps, in the context of the fight against the occupying German forces. Written during the Second World War and firmly rooted in the political struggles of the 1930 and 1g4os, Le Sang des autres has commonly been read as a Resistance novel with didactic intent. Blanchot described the novel as a roman a these in the 1940s and Beauvoir readily accepted his judgement. Subsequent critics have followed this line of reading. Terry Keefe, for example, refers to the “over-schematized or didactic treatment of certain themes”, (Keefe, 69) and asserts that “criticisms that the ending itself is contrived and "closed" are difficult to dirniss” (Keefe, 167) and Alex Hughes refers to the excessively ethico-didactic character (Hughes, 57) of the novel. Neither of these critics believes that Le Sang des autres is a text without ambiguity; nevertheless, they seem to share the assumption that any residual ambiguities or dissent from fore-grounded points of view are somehow inessential to the didactic message of the novel. At least one critic, however, seems positively to regret that the novel is not more didactic. Having set out to examine how Beauvoir 'manipulates her characters in order to present her particular moral thesis, Margaret Burrell finds that such a thesis is obscured by the constant twists and turns of the characters. “The issues of individual and collective responsibility, and the exercise of free will, remain unresolved in the exposition of their vacillating moral stances.” (Burrell, 36) If Sartre failed to establish an Existentialist ethics, Beauvoir radicalizes his non-completion of the Cahzers pour une morale by making failure itself the unsurpassable horizon of moral action. The word ichec recurs in numerous key passages of Pyrrhus et Czne'as and Pour une morale de l'ambiguzte'. The error of Kant and Hegel, according to Beauvoir, lies in their desire to remove failure from ethics, either through the search for infallible maxims, or by denying the irreducible singularity of individual subjects. Beauvoir, on the other hand, focuses on the risk or wager involved in all choice for her, any ethical project inevitably involves an element of failure. (Simons, 165-167) Existentialism, according to Beauvoir, requires a permanent, exhausting tension. Violence is authorized, but never definitively justified; it is permissible in circumstances that cannot be described in advance, and it always entails an element of defeat. Ends are corrupted by means, means are always impure, and failure inhabits all success. The ethical turn of existentialism does not then overcome or resolve the antagonism between self and other on the contrary it must contend with the complex interaction of competing subjects, incompatible goals, and unacceptable means. Beauvoir's ethics require that the moral subject is never moral enough, that it lives and acts with a perpetual unease: [L'homme] agit dans le risque, dans l'kchec. I1 doit assumer le risque [. . .]. Mais 1'Cchec ne peut s'assumer'. There is no Sartrean qui perd gagne here whereby ethical failure is transformed into success. Failure is failure, and as such it is the necessary condition of moral action, or, as Beauvoir bluntly puts it, sans kchec, pas de morale. If, then, Pyrrhus et Cine'as is a defence of violence, it is at best a hesitant one. Violence may turn out retrospectively to have been justified, but by definition its perpetrators cannot know what a retrospective judgement would be at the moment of action. Existentialist morality entails risk and the real possibility of being disastrously wrong. In a passage from Pour une morale de l'ambigui'te' Beauvoir discusses the question of Resistance violence during the Occupation. The aim of Resistance actions was not, she suggests, weakening the German forces materially, but to produce un etat de violence that would make collaboration impossible; the justification of this entails a difficult and shaky calculation involving ends and means: En un sens, c'ktait payer trop cher la suppression de trois officiers ennemis que de la payer par l'incendie de tout un village franqais; mais ces incendies, les massacres d'otages, faisaient eux-m2mes partie du plan, ils crkaient un abime entre occupants et occupes. Precisely the same calculation is made in Le Sang des autres by Jean Blomart as he takes steps to establish a Resistance group. Warned by Parmentier that Resistance actions will result in reprisals, Blomart responds that this is precisely what he wants. The dialogic nature of Le Sang des autres emerges very clearly on this occasion, as the text provides ample grounds for rejecting Blomart's plans: innocent people will be murdered, Blomart cannot be certain that his strategy will work, and if it does not, the crimes of the Resistants will turn out to have been pointless, Mais si notre effort avorte, dit Parmentier, nous nous retrouverons charges de crimes inutiles. In the course of the novel Blomart learns that there can be no guarantees in the domain of morality, and that action depends upon the ability to discard the desire for secure moral equations. At the end of Le Sang des autres a number of disparate characters have joined or support the Resistance group: Blomart, who earlier in the novel had rejected all political violence; the previously apolitical Helene; the communist Paul; the troubled artist Marcel and his unhappy wife Denise; even Blomart's father, the representative of bourgeois capitalist conservatism, lends support. This movement towards unification has been taken as a sign at the level of structure of the didactic intent of the novel, and moreover as an inscription in the text of the dominant Gaullist myth of Resistance as commanding broad public support. In effect, such readings imply that the dialogic element of the novel is suppressed in favor of an unequivocal commitment to Resistance violence. I would suggest, however, that part of the power of the conclusion of the novel, and of the unease to which it gives rise, derives from the fact that resolution or moral serenity have not (yet) been achieved. The title ofAndrt Malraux's L'Espozr written and published before the end of the Spanish Civil War, turned out to be cruelly ironic, as the hope that it expresses for a Republican victory proved to be unjustified. Similarly, Le Sang des autres ends with the war still being fought, and thus with its conclusion still uncertain. Helene is dead, and after a night's agonizing Blomart authorizes another mission that may cause more blood to be shed pointlessly. The moral risks taken by Blomart and his companions may yet turn out to serve no positive purpose. The authorization of violence in Le Sang des autres is further brought into question by another, perhaps more damaging factor. Beauvoir's second novel attempts to place violence within a moral framework that had been absent from the depiction of murder in L'lnvite'e, but Elizabeth Fallaize implies that the second novel may not be fundamentally different from the first. The sacrifice of the main female character on the altar of the political and moral education of the male hero means that the woman, the "Other", is again destroyed in this text, as Xaviere is destroyed in L'lnuzte'e, this time in the interests of commitment. Different interests, same result, and this raises the question of whether Blomart's altericidal instincts are ultimately any more 'moral' than those of Franyoise in L'lnczte'e. The recourse to violence, here only imaginary becomes real when Blomart forms a Resistance group. The parallel between the public and the private is instructive: the Occupation is another context in which Blomart loses control and resorts to violence in order to reassert his mastery of the situation. This is one example of the important emphasis throughout Le Sang des autres on the direct connections between public and private domains, and on the way the same nexus of choice and consequence operates in both. Blomart discovers that his initial refusal to get involved in the life of Helene is itself a form of involvement; inaction is a choice with real consequences. Precisely the same principle is illustrated at a political level later in the novel when Blomart and his companions choose not to intervene in the Spanish Civil War or in the German Anschluss with Austria; their failure to act, while maintaining their illusion of control, positively contributes to events they had wanted to avoid. This consistent parallelism between public and private is illustrated in the language of enmity and struggle. As the war approaches and Blomart prepares to fight the enemies of France, he discovers that Helene has also become presque une ennemie. Later, as she attempts to persuade Blomart to accept a posting away from the front line, she refuses to see the war in terms of altruistic struggle, insisting instead that 'C'est toujours pour soi qu'on lutte. Blomart responds angrily ‘Helene! il ne devrait pas &tre question de lutte entre nous. Xloi, je fexais n'importe quoi pour toi, dit-elle avec haine. Je volerais, j'assassinerais, je trahirais . . .Mais tu n'est pas capable d'accepter le risque de ma mort! Non, dit Helene. Non. Tu n'obtiendras pas Fa de moi. Tu vois bien que nous sommes en lutte.’ (Beauvoir, 227-28) Later, Blomart tells Helene, 'Tu m'as trait6 en ennemi.' (Beauvoir, 237) Against the background of the onset of the Second LVorld Lt'ar, this language acquires added significance. Shortly after the encounter between Blomart and Helene when they realize that 'nous sommes en lutte', the word lutte takes its place as a positive term in an ethic of humanist resistance: hlais il savait que tout arrive par les hommes et que chacun est tout un homme. L'un apres l'autre, il alla trouver ses camarades. Nous ne sommes pas seuls si nous nous unissons, disait- il. Nous ne sommes pas vaincus si nous luttons. Tant que nous serons la il y aura des hommes. Il yarlait, et ses camarades allaient trouver d'autres camarades et parlaient. Et dkja parce qu 11s parlaient, ils Ctaient unis, ils etaient en lutte, les hommes n'etaient pas vaincus. (Beauvoir, 246) Helene and Blomart are en lutte with one another just as the Resistant and the Germans are. The political mirrors the private, and this mirroring may weaken any attempt to establish a reliable moral distinction between the struggles of individuals and those between political or national groups. The war appears as a larger version of the battle for dominance between subjects; the rivalry of nations may only extend the rivalry of consciousnesses onto a different scale, and if this is the case, the shadow that accompanies the ethical 'didacticism' of Le Sang des autres, the risk that must be taken as the price of effective action, is that the Resistance activity of Blomart and his companions may be no more moral or justified than the murder of Xaviere in L'lnvitie. The novel's most dominant and apparently self-assured character, Blomart, is insistently divested of his authority by his inconsistencies, his pathological terror of alterity, his disabling sense of guilt, and his infantile desire for moral purity. Moreover, to see the novel as leading to the resolution of conflicts through an unambiguous embracing of Resistance violence entails a fundamental misunderstanding of the ethics of Beauvoir's fiction. To ascribe certainty or lack of ambiguity to Blomart's final decision to continue the path of violence misses the point: that ethics is the domain of risk not knowledge. Therefore, the possibility of interpreting his decision as wrong (as his mother does), or of finding it historically futile (as might have been the case if the war had ended differently), is essential to the tension of the final pages of the novel. If there is didacticism in LPS Sang des autrps, it is tense, anguished, and constitutively unsure about its own message. Beauvoir's novel has been portrayed as having a moral and philosophical message to impart, but failing to be persuasive because that message is not imparted with sufficient clarity; it subscribes to the Gaullist version of Resistance activity, though it may also subvert it its main intentions are ethical and philosophical, yet it fails to fulfill those intentions in a persuasive or unambiguous manner; it is unsettling in its complexity, yet also excessively didactic; its philosophical aspects have the potential 'to alienate and irritate the reader' (Hughes, pp. 3, 60) , whilst (or perhaps because) its ideas turn out to be strangely elusive' (Low, p. 31). The novel seems to arouse hostility amongst its readers both for being didactic and for not being didactic enough. (2507 words) Read More