Autobiography and the Existential Self: Studies in Modern French Writing (review)

Abstract

214 Biography 20.2 (Spring 1997) more a study of individual fixation, of the compulsive drives that enflamed and consumed Meyer Levin, than one of significantly larger biographical and cultural dimension. AMn H. Rosenfeld Terry Keefe and Edmund Smyth, Autobiography and the Existential Self: Studies in Modern French Writing. New York: St. Martin's, 1995. 206 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-312-12593-3. We are drawn to autobiographical and intimate writings (for example, letters and diaries) in the hope of catching their authors in the act of revealing their real/existential selves. After reading Autobiography and the Existential Self, we realize that this hope is rarely, if ever, met. The self portrayed in autobiographical and intimate writings is as constructed as the self of the public persona. Though this point is made throughout this anthology, neither the authors nor the editors allow it to challenge their basic assumption—an existential self, a self that is spontaneous rather than constructed, fragmented rather than singular, and multiple rather than unified, exists and can be used to discern the degree to which the self given to us by an author is existentially lived or artfully constructed. This commitment to the idea of an existential self, and to the distinction between an existential and an essential self, is not, however, supported by an analysis of arguments or texts. Neither is it required by the project of the anthology, for though Edmund Smyth's Introduction tells us that the volume is centered on the writings of Sartre and Beauvoir, Terry Keefe's Conclusion claims that the essays in the collection are only loosely linked with the French existentialist thought of the 40s. Given the divergent claims of the Introduction and the Conclusion, the point of bringing these particular essays together is unclear. Further, the effect of uncritically adopting the dualist paradigm of an existential versus a constructed self is to position existentialism as the mean between the extremes of ontological essentialism and Postmodern constructivism. Existentialism thus emerges as the philosophy of common sense. Whether this taming of existentialism's challenge to the familiar categories of the bourgeois world is an example of the processes Marcuse described in One Dimensional Man, or a consequence of uncritically adopting the early Sartrean concept of the self, the effect is the same: a thinking that was once (and still has the potential to be) provocative is rendered banal. Whatever the claims and counterclaims of the introduction and the conclusion, the organization of the anthology into a Part I that Reviews 215 deals with Sartre and Beauvoir, and a Part II that deals with those who at one time or another were a part of their circle, invites us to read the collection as centered on Sartre and Beauvoir. The essays in Part I raise several interesting questions regarding the relationship between author and text, text and audience, and the writing, written, and lived self. In "The War Diary as Autobiography: Sartre 1939-40," Michael Scriven introduces us to the distinction between the existential self and the constructed ego by analyzing the differences between the existential self's spontaneous deconstructive writing (Les Carnets) and the ego's totalized and stabilizing writing (Les Mots). Scriven attributes these differences to questions of audience and age. Les Carnets, he tells us, is the work of a younger man in transition who is writing for himself, in order to catch himself in the act of transformation. Les Mots, Scriven says, is the work of an older man writing for an audience and concerned to preserve a specific representation of himself for posterity. Edmund Smyth reads Les Mots differently. He claims that it disrupts the teleology of the narrative and reveals Sartre's existential self as a composite of texts, voices, and words. For Smyth, writing for the other does not lure an aging Sartre to bad faith. Whatever their differences, however, Scriven and Keefe agree, the existential self can be written. Other contributors to the volume are not so sure. Terry Keefe's and Emma Wilson's essays, for example, claim that Beauvoir always wrote with Sartre in mind and that as the object of the gaze, she never reveals her existential self...