Rites of Passage, Revelation and Release: Drink in the Fiction of Simone de Beauvoir

Abstract

There are certain obvious difficulties in discussing the significance of alcohol in the context of either French existentialism as such or the biographies of its major proponents, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In spite of or perhaps because of their general emphasis on consciousness and lucidity, it is doubtful whether they had a clear or important theoretical position on, say, drunkenness. Even Sartre's well-known conclusion in L' Etre et Ie Neant, 'Ainsi revient-il au meme de s' enivrer solitairement ou de conduire les peuples', I is evidently double-edged. At the same time, while alcohol was manifestly a factor of great importance in the lives of Sartre and Beauvoir, there is much to be said for leaving the delicacy, even intrusiveness, involved in examining this to professional biographers. The role of drink and drinking in their works of fiction, however, is more than a legitimate target for literary critics. It is a topic which offers a rich source of varied material, particularly. in the case of Beauvoir, who went on writing and publishing stories some twenty years after Sartre, and whose fictional perspective on alcohol is wider, both chronologically and in relation to the two sexes.