LA CEREMONIE DES ADIEUX AND LE LIVRE BRISE: SITUATING SARTRE IN THE TEXT Soon after publication of La Ceremonie des adieux y 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? 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 I am grateful to ProfessorMary Orrforherhelpfulcommentson an earlierdraftofthisarticle. 1 'Elle s'interditde raconterl'amour Sartre-Beauvoir': 'La Ceremonie des adieux, de Simone de Beauvoir', Le Monde, 25 November 1981, pp. 1 and 11 (p. 11). Referencesto La Ceremonie desadieux,Folio edn (Paris: Gallimard,1981) and to Le Livre brise(Paris: Grasset,1989; edn de Poche, 1991) willbe abbreviatedto CA and LB respectively. All quotationsare takenfromthese editions. 2 Elaine Marksexploresreceptionofthetextin termsoftrangressing taboos in 'Transgressing the(In)cont(in)entBoundaries:The Body in Decline', Yale FrenchStudies,72 (1986), 181-200, as does Genevieve Idt in 'La Ceremonie desadieuxde Simone de Beauvoir:Rite funeraire et defi litteraire', Revuedessciences humaines, 192(1983), 15-33. See alsoAlexHughes'sdiscussionofC/w^ mort tresdouceinHeterographies: Sexual Difference inFrenchAutobiography (Oxford:Berg,1999), pp. 119-27, and Ursula Tidd's analysisofreceptionof Une morttresdouceand La Ceremonie des adieux,in Simonede Beauvoir: Genderand Testimony (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversityPress, 1999),PP-158-63. 3 Alice Jardine,'Death Sentences: WritingCouples and Ideology', Poetics Today, 6 (1985), 119?31; Alex Hughes, 'MurderingtheMother:Simone de Beauvoir,Memoiresd'unefillerangee\ FrenchStudies,58.2 (April 1994), 174-83. 4 'Transgressingthe(In)cont(in)entBoundaries',p. 187. 836 Sartre's (La Ceremonie des adieux' and 'Le Livre brise' 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...