“I Who Have Never Known Men”

Existentialist literature pares down human experience to its barest existence. In my opinion, that’s exactly the effect of this novel — I Who Have Never Known Men —by author Jacqueline Harpman (1929-2012). The stark reality of a world in which only one human being remains alive and conscious is the focus of this rather short novel. The character (never named) grapples with fundamental questions that in fact don’t bother most of us who lead an ordinary social existence. She says: “I lived in a perpetual present and I was gradually forgetting my story.” (p. 5)

I admired this novel for the economy with which the author uses words and formulates ideas, getting to questions of existence without being too pretentious. I admired the way a very bleak and unfriendly landscape became a key part of the narrator’s seeking in an absurd world. It makes me think of the classic example of existential fiction, the novel Woman in the Dunes by Japanese author Kobo Abe and the French film based on it.

The existentialists had an acute sense of the absurd, and the narrator of I Who Have Never Known Men puts it thus: “Perhaps, when someone has experienced a day-to-day life that makes sense, they can never become accustomed to strangeness. That is something that I, who have only experienced absurdity, can only suppose.” (p. 55)

And near the end of the book she wonders: “What does having lived mean once you are no longer alive? (p. 159) This is a powerful book, though I think it implicitly claims to be deep and profound to a greater extent than maybe it actually accomplishes. The AI summary from google says: “The book is a modern classic of feminist speculative fiction, known for its haunting atmosphere and philosophical questions about what it means to be human. ”

Wrapping up Paris in July

What I wanted to read about Paris during the month of July

Oulipo and Georges Perec, Paris in World War II, Simone de Beauvoir, Paris mystery novels originally written in French, books by immigrants to Paris, The Anomaly, and Paris Metro Tales were all successful choices from my reading list for this month, and for my participation in the blog event Paris in July. I also added a couple of books that were not on the original list. I read a total of eleven books about Paris, and cooked one very French meal for friends.

I didn't complete my plan to explore the reason why the French love Boris Vian's L'Écume des jours and Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier. Also, there were a couple of other books from my list that I missed. But I think I did a lot, and I feel as if I do in fact have some new insights into life in the Paris of real people, both now and in the past. It's been a great month!

I'm wrapping up my participation a bit early because I have some travel plans for the rest of the month.

Paris Topics from the Other Bloggers at Paris in July 

I really enjoyed reading the blog posts of the other participants who reviewed many books and wrote about other Paris-related topics. Some of my favorites:

• I appreciated the contributions of Deb at Readerbuzz who was the co-host for this month's events. Deb made me think what to read while in Paris (or while imagining I was there), and made me think about the general topic of street art and graffiti. 

One of Deb’s great Paris street art photos.

• I enjoyed the book reviews by Emma at Words and Peace. Because she's a native speaker of French, she reads French books in the original versions, which enriches her insights.
• Jeanie at the Marmelade Gypsy summarized the generic plot of too many Paris books written by Americans. Her summary offers an insight into why I like to read fiction by French authors, who seem to have many more imaginative plots:

"Like dozens of other novels -- young woman decides to divorce her husband and move to Paris to find herself and take over the locksmith shop of her recently deceased uncle [or whatever business her relative left her]. Young woman meets interesting Parisian people, becomes enchanted with the city, deals with Parisian bureaucracy and then discovers a life-changing secret about her own past. Will she stay in Paris or return to California and her unfulfilled life? I think you know the answer."

• Another Paris in July contribution I enjoyed reading was from Marg at The Intrepid Reader, who wrote about a French Reality TV show, and linked to their YouTube channel:

"The Parisian Agency, or L'Agence as it is known in France, is a reality show which features high end property, predominantly in Paris, although they do occasionally venture further afield to the French countryside and other locations."

• Kwarkito, a blogger who lives in France, shared many images of his own Paris, which are wonderful. He actually posts pictures and thoughts about Paris every month of the year, not just in July.

All of us who participated owe our gratitude to Deb for co-hosting and especially to Tamara for once again linking all the many posts from bloggers who obviously love Paris!

Blog post © 2022 by mae sander for maefood at blogspot dot com.

Simone de Beauvoir and the Issue of Abortion

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), famous as a novelist and a philosopher, was a leader in the mid-20th century struggle for women's rights. Her book The Second Sex "can be considered the single most influential work ever to come out of the existentialist movement." (Sarah Bakewell, At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, p. 210) According to the Guardian: "Her life has inspired generations of women seeking independence, and this was largely attributed to her unconventional relationship with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, which seemed like a love that didn’t come at the cost of her freedom or professional success." (source) 

The philosophical couple -- Sartre and de Beauvoir -- lived in hotels but not together, wrote much of their famous work in Paris cafés, and agreed on freedom from ordinary commitment to one another. Their life seems like a very romantic and ideal Paris existence, and is probably more familiar to most women today than the technical details of their philosophic publications or the feminist writings of de Beauvoir. 

But there's much more to de Beauvoir's leadership of women in their struggle for autonomy and freedom. In particular, de Beauvoir wrote The Manifesto of 343 Women in 1971. The 343 signers, including the writer, all stated that they had had clandestine, illegal abortions. They asserted that they deserved complete control over their own bodies and over decisions on whether they should have children. Here are just a few words from the Manifesto:

Abortion

A word which seems to express and define the feminist fight once and for all. To be a feminist is to fight for free abortion on demand.

Abortion

It’s a women’s thing, like cooking, diapers, something dirty. The fight to obtain free abortion on demand feels somehow ridiculous or petty. It can’t shake the smell of hospitals or food, or of poo behind women’s backs. The complexity of the emotions linked to the fight for abortion precisely indicate our difficulty in being, the pain that we have in persuading ourselves that it is worth the trouble of fighting for ourselves. It goes without saying that we do not have the right to choose what we want to do with our bodies, as other human beings do. Our wombs, however, belong to us.

This is only an excerpt. For a long time, these words seemed to be just a historical detail -- nothing that concerns us any more. It's tragic that in America in 2022, this fight has to start all over again, with the coming of new laws prohibiting or regulating abortion, thanks to the reactionary Supreme Court. The Manifesto was particularly specific about regulations of abortion, as opposed to no restrictions.

From the Manifesto:

The most liberal of laws would still be regulating how our bodies can be used. And how our bodies should be used is not something which should be regulated. We do not want tolerance, scraps of what other humans are born with: the freedom to use their bodies as they wish. … we are opposed to all laws which claim to regulate any aspect of our bodies. We do not want a better law, we want it to be removed, pure and simple.

Between 1975, when the French law was changed, and February of 2022, abortion was legal in France until the 12th week of pregnancy, and covered under French national medical insurance. A revision this year extended the time frame until the 14th week, and also made medication abortions available via remote appointments rather than in person. Thus de Beauvoir's demand for no regulation has never been achieved in France. (This is a bit complicated -- see "France Expands Abortion Access in Two Key Moves" from Human Rights Watch for details.)

The words of de Beauvoir's Manifesto have just become more relevant in the USA than they have been for half a century.  Suddenly, moral questions also are being asked in what I see is a new way. In the current New Yorker, an article titled "Ethical Health Care After Roe: Can physicians meet their obligations to patients when abortion is criminalized?" reports on an interview with Louise Perkins King, a surgeon and bioethicist at Harvard, and the vice-chair of the ethics committee at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. This interview covers many of the issues of women's autonomy over their own bodies, returning to the issues that concerned de Beauvoir. The article documents some interesting conclusions about the Supreme Court decision, particularly: "we know from very clear statistics that many people will die because of this decision." 

I especially found the following statement by King to be enlightening in regard setting arbitrary time limits for the legality or illegality of abortion, an issue also of importance to the Manifesto. King stated:

..if I’m pregnant, at a certain point in time, depending on which legislation you’re looking at, you will be able to say to me, “You no longer have the right to manage the risks for your body, to manage the risks of passing a grown infant through the vaginal canal, the risks of tearing, prolapse, sexual dysfunction, hemorrhage, and death. You no longer get to control whether you’re going to take those risks or not.”

Obviously, if I’m sitting in front of somebody who is in the very early stages of pregnancy, this question is very simple for me. In the early stages of a pregnancy, if they don’t wish to take on those risks, a hundred per cent, they have an absolute right to bodily autonomy in those decisions. If we’re getting into later stages of pregnancy, it becomes quite complex, but really that’s almost a red herring, because it just doesn’t happen. Even with the incredible lack of access that we have in this country to sexual education and contraception, women are not presenting for elective termination in their third trimester. So that question doesn’t happen, and, because it doesn’t, as an ethicist, even though I find a lot of difficulty in that space, in my analysis, I don’t actually have to answer that question. It becomes a red herring, because it constantly does get brought up, even though it’s not really the true issue. It’s an interesting, difficult question to grapple with, but it just doesn’t happen.

When I think about de Beauvoir and her leadership of the struggle for women's rights, I think of Paris in an idealized time in the 1930s and 1950s. Or of Sartre and de Beauvoir's war experiences under the Nazi occupation of Paris. But now I also think about the way the advances in women's rights, that were associated with de Beauvoir's many works and actions, are once again being denied. I'm so sad! And angry!

Blog post © 2022 mae sander. Quotes as attributed.

Shared with Paris in July.

Paris, Where Intellectuals and Tourists Never Cease to Roam

You may think of Paris as a wonderful place for tourists, with its bookstalls along the Seine, with its tempting outdoor spaces in parks and cafés, with its classic restaurants and pastry shops, with its great museums and outdoor art, with its beautiful boulevards and historic buildings, and with its eternal presence in art, film, and literature.

Paris definitely offers a space where tourists flourish. Three books I've been reading recently also provide insight into the way that Paris has served as the intellectual nerve center of France, a center that influenced the intellectual life and development of the Western world for centuries. Each of these books could easily be the subject of a long review, and in fact, they've all been reviewed at length in the best publications! I'm just going to present a few ideas and quotes from each one, reflecting what I find interesting about them.

Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-1950 by Agnès Poirier, published February, 2018.

Life under the Nazi occupation of Paris was brutal. Food was scarce. Artistic freedom of speech, freedom for public performances, and freedom for publishing didn't exist. The price of even a bit of liberty in these areas was often to concede much to the occupiers of Paris. Yet many of the inhabitants of Paris managed to continue their lives in cafes, bars, and other spaces both public and private.

Poirier concentrates on the lives of some of the most famous inhabitants of Paris in the decade of the 1940s. She describes the lives of the literati like Camus, Sartre, deBeauvoir, Arthur Koestler, Samuel Beckett, and of New Yorker writers A.J. Liebling and Janet Flanner. She talks about actors and performers like Boris Vian (both a musician and a writer), Juliette Greco, Simone Signoret, François Truffaut, Marlon Brando, and at the end of the decade rising stars like Brigitte Bardot.

Poirier especially portrays the role of Jacques Jaujard, the deputy head of the French National Museums, who succeeded just before the Nazi occupation in hiding the works of art from the Louvre. I was especially interested in the Mona Lisa, which was hidden at the Château de la Treyne, in the Périgord region "where André Chamson, an archivist-paleographer by training, a novelist by métier, and an improvised keeper of France’s treasures by force of circumstance, lived with his family." (p. 47).

With the Liberation in 1944, many freedoms were restored, including free elections: "French women had cast their vote for the first time in the first national election since before the war in October 1945." (p. 136). At the same time, victims of Nazi deportations began to return from concentration camps, and the intellectuals of Paris realized the extent of the torture, the consequences that these absentees had faced, and the large number who hadn't survived. Also, as the decade progressed, Sartre and deBeauvoir became celebrities, and many of the more obscure people who appeared in Poirier's story became more successful and famous.

Besides the immediate and terrible discoveries just after the war, Poirier describes the growing number of Americans who came to Paris, especially those such as Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Norman Mailer who studied on the GI bill. As writer Art Buchwald put it: "If all the GIs in Paris who are supposed to be enrolled went to class, they would need a soccer stadium to accommodate them." (p. 231).

For the post-war survivors, food and consumer products remained scarce for several years after the war. The impact of the Marshall Plan was one of the interesting subjects of Poirier's story. Also, those like Simone deBeauvoir who were privileged to travel abroad brought all sorts of unavailable goods back. For example:

"Simone de Beauvoir, returning from her trip to Portugal and Spain... brought back in her suitcases a hundred pounds of groceries— ham, chorizo, Algarve cakes, sticky sugar, eggs, tea, real coffee, and real chocolate— and was handing them out generously to friends, lovers, and strangers. She had purchased many clothes, too, folkloric sweaters, Spanish scarves, and multicolored fishermen’s shirts from Faro in Portugal." (p. 83). 

But finally, supplies of food were restored: "Christmas 1949 in Paris had been the first in a decade without food restrictions, and Parisians spent all the extra money they had on food. Not for a quarter century had the food markets of Paris been fuller or more tempting. In the charcuteries Janet Flanner spent a long time studying “turkey pâté, truffled pigs’ trotters, chicken in half-mourning, whole goose livers, boar’s snout jelly, and fresh truffles in their fragile bronze husks.” (p. 289).

When I first read about this new book, I thought it sounded like a repeat of many other treatments of the famous intellectuals of mid-century Paris, but I loved reading it and learned all kinds of fascinating new things.

The End of the French Intellectual by Shlomo Sand, published April, 2018, translated from French by by David Fernbach. 

Author Shlomo Sand -- a native of Israel with a doctorate from a French university -- supports his belief that the French intellectual tradition is now over and past by offering an extremely detailed history of intellectual life in Paris. He points out that Paris was not just the center, but the only home of French literature, art, and learning. He writes:

"Any attempt to decipher the role of intellectuals in France must start from the following postulate: the public sphere here is more homogeneous and more centralized than in any other liberal democracy, and the origin of this cultural and linguistic homogeneity lies in the long effect of absolute monarchy." (Kindle Locations 300-302). 

Idolizing of the French intellectuals of the mid-20th century, such as Sartre and deBeauvoir, was Sand's early experience, and one of the main points of his book is to show how disillusioned he became as he learned more about their actions during the Nazi occupation of Paris and their later success at revising the way history views them. He judges them harshly.

To quote more from Sand which is relevant to the theme of Paris in July:

"The particular status of Parisian intellectuals is a phenomenon that has been repeatedly studied. In a society where the level of language itself amounts to an ideology, and cultural distinction still competes with social distinction, the ‘producers of high culture’ have always enjoyed eminent privileges.

"We might say that in the French capital, intellectuals have inherited both the role of court jester, able always to say whatever was in their minds without being punished, and that of priest, serving as intermediary between the believer and divine truth. Nor has France ever forgotten that, since the great epoch of the Enlightenment, the prestige capital built up by men of letters made Paris for many years the cultural epicentre of the Western world. It could even be maintained that in Paris today, intellectuals have long been the last aristocrats. And if the monarchist tradition has been replaced by a popular thirst for authoritarian and paternalist presidents, a deep nostalgia for knights and musketeers, seemingly foreign to bourgeois values, has also contributed to the prestige of this modern ‘nobility of mind’, who confront dangers and brandish their sharpened pens to defend truth and justice." (Kindle Locations 276-285).

"The intellectual currents that have stamped their mark on Western culture, such as symbolism, surrealism, existentialism or structuralism, were not born in France but in its capital. These artistic expressions and magnificent currents of thought, like many others, appeared in the Parisian press, in periodicals established in Paris and in books that were published there." (Kindle Locations 318-320). 

I found the book intriguing, but I felt it was too detailed about some of the political fights of late 19th and early 20th century intellectuals. At the end of the day, I'm not sure I find his depiction of betrayals and bad faith among the Existentialists to be entirely convincing. Frankly, his introduction about how he became disillusioned was the part I liked the most.

Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940-1944 by Charles Glass, published 2010.

The author's introduction summarizes this book as follows:

"Nearly 30,000 Americans lived in or near Paris before the Second World War. Those who refused to leave were, paraphrasing Dickens, the best and the worst of America. Like the French, some collaborated, others resisted. The Germans forced some into slave labour. At least one was taken back to the United States to face a trial for treason. Americans in Paris under the occupation were among the most eccentric, original and disparate collection of their countrymen anywhere – tested as few others have been before or since. This is their story." (p. 1). 

But I've said enough about these books.

Bloggers participating (as I am) in this month's "Paris in July" blog event have written about their love of long walks in Paris, their awe at monuments such as the cathedral of Notre Dame, their favorite French cookbooks, and their enjoyment of recent novels set in Paris (many of them written in English by American or British authors), as well as of their consciousness of Paris in history. Many connect with the Paris of artists like Picasso in Montmartre, writers like Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Latin Quarter, or film settings like that of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. I think I've made the point that there's always been another Paris besides the one you think you know.

The Existentialist Café

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre at various cafés, especially in Paris. Lower left: also Claude Lantzmann.

American cover.

Coffee and cigarettes played a big role at the existentialist café. That is, the literal cafe where existentialists met, as depicted in the photos above, which I shamelessly culled from around the internet. I suspect that little is known about what they ate!

Sarah Bakewell's fascinating book, At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, stresses a more symbolic version of this café, which was open mainly in the middle years of the twentieth century. As in her earlier book about Michel de Montaigne, she combines personal details from the lives of philosophers with highly approachable explanations of their work.

Perhaps the most interesting discussion in At The Existentialist Café concerns the great importance of Simone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex, which she says "had an even greater impact in Britain and America than in France. It can be considered the single most influential work ever to come out of the existentialist movement." (p. 210)

"Ideas are interesting," Bakewell writes in her final summary, "but people are vastly more so. That is why, among all the existentialist works, the one I am least likely to tire of is Beauvoir’s autobiography, with its portrait of human complexity and of the world’s ever-changing substance." (pp. 326-327)

Bakewell begins with the phenomenologists, precursors of the existentialists, but her main focus is on the Parisians: Sartre, de Beauvoir, and their constantly changing circle of colleagues and friends, including the many rifts, breaks, fights, and disillusionments that occurred between the various participants.

The Nazi era before and during World War II was central to the honesty of the philosophers -- she covers Heidigger's Nazi commitment in detail, as well as the experiences and reactions of the Paris group to the defeat of France, the occupation, and the many deportations and persecutions. For example, in the wartime life of Simone de Beauvoir:

"One necessary adjustment was learning to put up with the idiotic and moralistic homilies emanating every day from the collaborationist government — reminders to respect God, to honour the principle of the family, to follow traditional virtues. It took her back to the ‘bourgeois’ talk she had so hated in her childhood, but this time backed by a threat of violence. Ah — but perhaps such talk was always backed by hidden threats of violence? She and Sartre later made this belief central to their politics: fine-sounding bourgeois values, for them, were never to be trusted or taken at face value." (pp. 140-141).

The Existentialist Café covers philosophers' lives and thoughts, and even covers parodies of their work that appeared when they were overwhelmingly popular.

"Sartre’s friend Boris Vian spoofed the craze in his 1947 novel L’écume des jours, translated as Froth on the Daydream or Mood Indigo. This surreal and playful romance includes, as a side character, a famous philosopher called Jean-Sol Partre. When Partre gives a lecture, he arrives on an elephant and mounts a throne, accompanied by his consort the Countess de Mauvoir." (pp. 165-166)

Or about the style of the existentialists, who gave the world the black turtleneck sweater as a statement of commitment or solidarity or something:

"To go with the jazz, blues and ragtime after the war, people sought out American clothes, readily available in flea markets; there was a particular craze for plaid shirts and jackets. If your twenty-first-century time machine could take you back to a Parisian jazz club immediately after the war, you would not find yourself in a sea of existentialist black; you would be more likely to think you’d walked into a lumberjacks’ hoedown. ... The sleek black turtleneck arrived afterwards — and when Americans in turn adopted that fashion, few realised they were returning a sartorial compliment." (pp. 167-168)

UK cover.

Bakewell offers a variety of both unexpected and expected insights and observations about the existentialists and their time and influence. A few more quotes that I found interesting --

"The word phenomenon has a special meaning to phenomenologists: it denotes any ordinary thing or object or event as it presents itself to my experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality. ... Phenomenology gives a formal mode of access to human experience. It lets philosophers talk about life more or less as non-philosophers do, while still being able to tell themselves they are being methodical and rigorous." (p. 40-43)

"For Sartre, the awakened individual is ... a person who is engaged in doing something purposeful, in the full confidence that it means something. It is the person who is truly free." (p. 152)

"One sometimes has the feeling, reading Sartre, that he did indeed borrow from other people’s ideas and even steal them, but that everything becomes so mixed with his own strange personality and vision that what emerges is perfectly original." (p. 106) 

"In April 1933, all doubts about Heidegger were blown away when he accepted the post of rector of Freiburg University, a job that required him to enforce the new Nazi laws. It also required him to join the party. He did so, and then he delivered rousing pro-Nazi speeches to the students and faculty. He was reportedly seen attending the Freiburg book burning on 10 May, trooping through a drizzly evening by torchlight towards the bonfire in the square just outside the university library — almost on the steps of his own philosophy department." (pp. 79-80)  

"Heidegger set himself against the philosophy of humanism, and he himself was rarely humane in his behaviour. He set no store by the individuality and detail of anyone’s life, least of all his own."(p. 320). 

I especially enjoyed the wrap-up in At The Existentialist Café, where Bakewell describes how the existentialists' ideas of "rebellion and authenticity" reappeared in the student protests and general spirit of the 1960s and 1970s. (p. 292)

The book is wonderful to read, offering incredible clarity. As you read you feel enlightened. Could I summarize and explain what I read? I won't answer that question.