Resistance and rescue in Beauvoir's The Blood of Others and The Mandarins: A semiotic contribution to the thinking of the ‘being-for-other’ existential category

Abstract

In The Blood of Others and The Mandarins , Simone de Beauvoir encodes the experience of a resister in World War II. The objectivization of her particular vision is developed by the use of an idiosyncratic language through quotations and the coining of semiotic equivalents. She first defines her paradigms in The Blood of Others , where the theme of resistance against the Nazis is explicitly dramatized. In The Mandarins , she puts her semiotics to the test through phenomenological descriptions. Rich food along with the military authority to make the rules indicated by formal clothes point to abuse. Homologies are made with the abusive military authority and its substitutes, and the oppressed individual identified as the ‘other.’ Scenarios where the characters switch identities in resistance and rescue point to an underlying philosophy of the human being as a ‘being-for-other.’ Examples of transformations and substitutions are the characters Ruth, Yvonne, and Hélène in The Blood of Others , and Diego and ‘the first’ Lewis in The Mandarins . The compassion of Hélène for Ruth at her arrest by the Gestapo is a heroic response whereas in The Mandarins , Lewis's unexpected transformation from a husband into an enemy is the echo of the abandonments of World War II.