'La Ceremonie des adieux' and 'Le Livre brise': situating Sartre in the text.(Critical Essay)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-OCT-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Modern Humanities Research Association

Soon after publication of La Ceremonie des adieux, Bertrand Poirot-Delpech wrote in a review in Le Monde that Simone de Beauvoir had refused to engage in the retelling of a love story. (1) Others launched attacks on the writer (as they had done after publication of Une mort tres douce) for having overstepped the mark in her depiction of an ageing, dying man with respect to what constitutes material acceptable for public consumption, asking whether the representation of an abject body constitutes an act of symbolic violence. (2) Informed by psychoanalysis, Alice Jardine has interpreted Beauvoir's depiction of Sartre's physical and mental degeneration over a ten-year period which culminates in his death in terms of an ultimate phallic mother whose existence menaces her own sense of identity and who has to be destroyed, a thesis explored further by Alex Hughes in her analysis of the Memoires d'une jeune fille rangee. (3) Yet Elaine Marks returns to the question of the norms which govern the choice of subject matter itself, arguing 'aging and dying, when presented referentially, are taboo topics within phallocentric discourse: it is permissible to write about the sexual practices of a famous man; it is not permissible to write about his loss of control over his excretory functions'. (4) She also focuses on the erasure of the material female body in critiques predicated on 'the death of the author, the death of the referent', arguing that critiques which downplay this aspect, 'for all their seductive subtlety [...] may also be a means of obliterating once again women, sexuality, old age, dying, and death' (ibid.; see also p. 200).

Aligning myself with Elaine Marks's emphasis on the ways in which La Ceremonie des adieux challenges norms of acceptability in terms of genre and content, I would like to re-examine depictions of Sartre to highlight the multiple and sometimes conflicting representations of him, whether as writer, as ageing body, as alter ego, or as mentor, in order to trace Beauvoir's negotiations of death and mortality via the Other. Furthermore, the focus on Sartre's portrayal and function in La Ceremonie des adieux can be made sharper if it is read in conjunction with Le Livre brise, Serge Doubrovsky's work of 'autofiction'. (5) His depiction of encounters with an ailing Sartre during the same period provides points of comparison and contrast with Beauvoir's text, one obvious difference being his overtly autofictional presentation. (6) In terms of 'ceremonies d'adieux', Le Livre brise also foregrounds death and loss: the book is ostensibly about the death of Doubrovsky's wife, Ilse. The author, in response to his wife's wish for him to write about their relationship with no holds barred (LB, p. 410), complies by recounting it in graphic detail, arguing that his role has become that of an 'executeur testamentaire', thus mirroring Beauvoir's avowed role in the preface of La Ceremonie des adieux. (7) And, like La Ceremonie des adieux, writing about the death of a loved one has elicited mixed critical responses. (8) Through Doubrovsky's characteristic 'intertextual interimplication', (9) his portrayal of his relationship with Sartre and his engagement with his works is extended to one where Sartre seems to take on the mantle of spiritual father and alter ego. It is in the background of Le Livre brise, I would argue, that Doubrovsky's ongoing engagement with Sartre and with his texts functions as an intertextual 'fil conducteur' which holds its two parts together in a work which might appear to resist such totalization. (10)

Perhaps most important of all, both write near the end of their own lives or after moments of upheaval and crisis. This 'existential' trigger provides an ideal ideological springboard to investigate how they write about death in terms of a fear of not-self, which is the position of life against death. I will argue that it is in these hybrid texts, positioned between autobiography and biography, between autobiography and autofiction, and crucially, between autobiography and autothanatography, that we can trace the in-between positionality of their authors. (11) Their writing about the death of an Other (in both cases an other of the opposite sex) reveals their relationship to alterity, in terms of both death and the other as 'unknowns', and also the different psychic writing defences they employ to deal with confrontations with their own mortality.

Does it make a difference that one writer is female and the other male? Elisabeth Bronfen's study of representations of death in art and literature provides ample evidence of the ways in which femininity and death may be 'ascribed the position of alterity', in an analysis which harks back to Beauvoir's argument in Le Deuxieme Sexe that 'Il est le Sujet, elle est l'autre' and which reminds us of Beauvoir's emphasis on the cultural construction of Woman, positioned always in opposition to the male subject. (12) In this respect Beauvoir's exploration of constructions and deconstructions of masculinity and death already diverges from the traditional model, contrasting with Doubrovsky's frequent collapsing of the female self in death: 'Inutile de lui expliquer que, justement, si j'ecris, c'est pour tuer une femme par livre' (LB, p. 60). To what extent, then, do their different texts explore, via Sartre, gendered responses to ageing and death?

In focusing here on the extent to which the depictions of Sartre in La Ceremonie des adieux and Le Livre brise inform the construction of the authors' identities and positionings, a caveat looms for analysis which encompasses references to the lived experiences of individuals and depictions of them as textual characters. (13) In an interview Serge Doubrovsky described his approach to writing using the axes of referentiality and semiosis: 'je sens que lorsque j'ecris, je louche, parce que mon oeil d'un cote regarde vers le referent--l'histoire qui m'est arrivee--et l'autre oeil, en meme temps, regarde le jeu des mots, la maniere dont ils s'accouplent, s'assemblent etc. Et c'est a l'interieur de ce jeu des mots que je glisse le referent.' (14) Without wishing to ignore Nancy K. Miller's reminder that intertextuality is in danger of effacing the woman writer by arguing for 'de-authored textuality', (15) it is the crossover between the referential and the metaphorical in these hybrid texts which, I would argue, makes their status so ambiguous, uncertain, and thought-provoking. (16) Reading the body in the two texts places the reader between the two axes mentioned by Doubrovsky. If La Ceremonie des adieux veers towards the former, Le Livre brise towards the latter, it is a 'bifocal' perspective that informs the analysis of both works. Indeed, Elaine Marks reminds us that ageing, declining, or dead bodies 'have no place in contemporary fictional and autobiographical texts read by poststructuralist, psychoanalytic critics because the apparent "story" is always secondary'. (17) Her exploration of the taboo associated with depicting the abject body forms the core of her analysis. Here, it is the relationship between the fantasized body and the materiality of the dying body which complicates readings of both texts. (18)

Beginning with La Ceremonie des adieux, the portrayal of Sartre need not be reduced to one which focuses on him either in terms of a degrading portrait whose purpose is humiliation, or in terms of the playing out of a Freudian scenario. Viewed as a taboo-breaking, but also at times empathetic, study of ageing, La Ceremonie des adieux mirrors some of the preoccupations raised in La Force des choses but which relate less specifically to a mid-life crisis than to a confrontation with mortality by an ageing and increasingly fragile self. (19) Ursula Tidd, in the chapter of her study of Simone de Beauvoir entitled 'Writing the Other', explores the nature and the function of the text in the context of her autobiographical oeuvre, arguing that 'Through the representation of the Other's decline and death, she is able both to confront certain aspects of her subjectivity which remained opaque in the memoirs and explore possibilities of reciprocity at a time when the Other is potentially most distant from the self--at the end of his/her life.' (20)...

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