“I hope I am not fated to live in Rochester”: America in the Work of Beauvoir

Parallel to the full but long deferred translation of the famous text that it immediately precedes (The Second Sex), Simone de Beauvoir’s America Day by Day, an account of her 1947 visit to the United States, has been “hidden from us for nearly fifty years” (A: xvi). Although a British translation did appear in 1952, the book received poor reviews and even weaker sales. Mary McCarthy’s² satiric, ultimately dismissive critique, “Mlle. Gulliver en Amérique,” relied on the immediate publication of her diaries in Les Temps Modernes, where the genre of journalistic reportage transformed the normative assessment of American democracy into anecdotal³ testimony. At the time of her review, America had on hand only excerpted passages in magazines (The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker). When an American version at last appeared in 1953, it was with key discussions on racial segregation elided. (Simons 182⁴) In 1996 the University of California Press republished the book in a new translation.

One can always give functionalist reasons for a book’s deferred publication, its less than enthusiastic reception, or its scholarly neglect. We might explain it by Beauvoir’s lack of literary weight upon her arrival in America, where she was seen as more of an exotic celebrity, a subject for Janet Flanner’s New Yorker “Talk of the Town” as the “prettiest existentialist.” (ADD: xii). The books that made her reputation, The Second Sex and her Goncourt prize winning novel The Mandarins were not yet written; her literary work (1944), L’invitée (She Came to Stay) was only translated in 1949. However, as the posthumous writings have shown, America Day by Day can be seen as an exemplary Beauvoirian work that comes directly from diary source material. For an author, where in Mary Ellman’s words, “living … is almost indistinguishable from its written record” (Ellman 100), or who could, according to Francis Jeanson, “disclose the world only by disclosing oneself in it” (Jeanson 105) this oversight is tellingly peculiar.

Worse than an error of omission (to channel Althusser), this is a theoretical mistake. For America Day by Day is one of the two best French twentieth century analyses of America (along with Jean Baudrillard’s America⁵). Both works, I will argue, are the most successful temporal translations of the Tocquevillian legacy. The reason for the success as well as the trivialization of both texts is due to their genre as travel narratives. For the genre of travel writing unlike a consecration of certain autobiographies, is rarely taken seriously as a political theoretic practice. Seen – at best – as a narrative supplement or contextualization for theoretical work done elsewhere, or – at worse – as “sociology” or an equally frivolous literary-subjectivist pursuit, the rhetorical or ideological project of travel literature is, in Barthes’ felicitous phrase, more “received” than “read.” Of course there are some noteworthy exceptions, such as Roxanne Euben’s Journeys to the Other Shore and Sheldon Wolin’s magisterial Tocqueville, which in addition to its eponymous reading offers a stunning one on other “turbaned tourists”⁶ in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters.

America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. The US is utopia achieved

(Jean Baudrillard, America, 82–3).

America is a special case … everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome …

(Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux, 19).

America Day by Day is easily situated in a European tradition of américanisme in which writers and artists such as Tocqueville, D.H. Lawrence, Sartre, Robert Frank, Le Corbusier, Fernand Léger, have “a look around the United States” and report “back on what they see” (Dyer, ix–x). André Maurois is representative of this early twentieth century viewpoint in his En Amérique (1926), when he quotes Aldous Huxley in the future perfect: “the world would be Americanized” (Bacon 6). A European avant-garde came to America to learn from its technology, institutions and culture, its city planning, buildings and architecture (as later postmodernists Venturi and Tafuri would “learn from Las Vegas.”) But their pedagogical reaction was highly ambivalent. As Le Corbusier wrote in Towards a New Architecture (Vers une architecture): “Let us listen to the counsels of American engineers. But let us beware of American architects” (Bacon 7).

The literature that resulted was selective in its objects and polemical in tone. The general evaluation of these accounts was more positive and celebratory in the early 1920s, focusing on American productivity and projective capacities. They changed dramatically after the crash of 1929 (and for some, the 1927 Sacco and Vanzetti trial) and the early 30s to an anxiety about waste, overproduction, and the attendant urban and social repercussions of the new consumerism. André Maurois’ two trips to America in both 1927 and 1931 exemplify this pattern: an initial sense of awe and profound admiration for the city’s infrastructure and the liveliness of its popular entertainments; a later pessimistic account, post-Depression, concerned with problems of overproduction and wasteful consumption.

Paul Morand’s New York (1930) was most similar to Beauvoir’s in its abundant use of literary references. It was, in part, a love poem to the city, its bridges, and public spaces such as the sub-treasury building and its statue of Washington, its topographic diversity from Wall Street to the Bowery to Harlem, its technical innovations such as the automat and the splendor of the skyscrapers, which represented “the pulse of the country” (Morand 308). Yet the cover of the Flammarion edition shows an aerial view of Times Square, which can be read as futuristic as well as menacing, a sort of architectural sublime. The skyscrapers have a “starry immensity”, their congestive grouping resembles a “perpetual thunderstorm” and their “supreme beauty” evokes “violence in its rhythms.” There is something inhuman and potentially catastrophic about this urban landscape “that’s been deserted by men and invaded by the sky” (Morand 3, 315–6, 320).

Beauvoir concurs in the strange precarity of this heroic architecture. Wanting to reproduce a view of the Battery that she has seen in the movies, Beauvoir looks out upon its towers that seem “fragile” from this perspective. The events of 9/11 give an extra frisson to her depiction: “They rest so precisely on the vertical lines that the slightest shudder would knock them down like a house of cards. When the boat draws closer, their foundations seem firmer, but the line remains indelibly traced. What a field day a bomber would have!” (ADD 9, emphasis mine). While Morand did see redemptive possibilities in white popular culture (as Le Corbusier would in its African American forms) New York ultimately embodied certain defects of capitalism. We might call these aspects of volatility and speculation, in the language of Georges Bataille, New York’s “senseless expenditure”: “The town spends its all, lives on credit…is ruined, starts again and laughs…” (Morand 307).

Georges Duhamel’s 1930 Scènes de la Vie Future (America, the Menace, 1931 translation) marked an extreme of negativity that Beauvoir’s narrative is largely written against. “America, then, represents for us the future.” (Duhamel 19) But here the future is not a utopian modernist vision, but one of materialist contagion and social destabilization in imminent threat of spreading to Europe. Duhamel presents American culture as a pathological “case study” of “speculation and greed.” Duhamel’s observations are explicitly contradicted in Beauvoir: “…N. and I say to each other that Georges Duhamel must have had very little first hand experience of America to have claimed that the countryside was hidden by advertising billboards” (ADD: 129).

Fernand Léger’s provocative New York, written in the fall of 1931, anticipated the language of Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard. New York was depicted as an “enchanted catastrophe” (une catastrophe féerique). The city has an “infernal” logic, both “elegant” and “harsh’; he wrote to his friend Le Corbusier about the “vertical thrust of this people drunk on architecture.” Le Corbusier concurred on the phallic “machismo of the American skyscraper” with a Freudian twist. Distortions in the built environment are a partial consequence (along with an imbalance within the family) of the American male’s sexual anxiety and insecurity⁷. Léger’s phantasmatic included his plan to “Destroy New York – it will be rebuilt completely … In glass, in glass! The Americans … would be the first to applaud (Bacon 141).

These early twentieth century precedents to Beauvoir’s account of her visit to America provide a framework for what Beauvoir is writing both against and a tradition that she is situated within. Beauvoir begins her account with the most telling difference of her travel narrative from those of her male compatriots: “Usually traveling is an attempt to annex a new object to my universe … But today is different: I feel I’m leaving my life behind” (ADD 3, emphasis mine). For although travel writing does allow for a possible anamorphosis, or looking awry, at one’s own cultural biases, it often can be a colonizing or otherwise imperializing project of “annexation” and cannibalization or of containment and re-territorialization. Beauvoir’s French counterparts (Morand, Duhamel, Maurois, Léger) may differ from each other in the strength of their fascination and aversions, but their preoccupation with the skyscraper, feats of engineering, the orderly grids of Manhattan redouble the omniscient viewpoint and values of “old Europe” (ADD 3; Rumsfeld was not the author of this linguistic coinage.). They quite literally “overlook” America and consequently, in Beauvoir’s words, miss out on the “extraordinary adventure of becoming a different me” (ADD 3).

Theory as radical critique and repicturization is attracted to the idea of a political journey because it provides an opportunity for the release of the theoretical imagination through an encounter with strangeness”

(Wolin, 38).

America Day by Day, along with Baudrillard’s America (and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, volume one) share a wholly different object relation to America. This is the common point that would allow for a comparison between such philosophically divergent thinkers and writers. After all, it must appear scandalous to compare a feminist thinker with a provocateur such as Baudrillard, especially with his book where he champions sacrificing a woman in the desert! (A 70) What is it about America as an object, and travel narratives as a genre, that would allow for this convergence? What subject positions or object relations do they share? For Beauvoir, Baudrillard, and Tocqueville realize grasping America means leaving Europe behind. “In Greece, in Italy, in Spain, in Africa, I still felt that Paris was the heart of the world. I’d never completely left Paris. I remained inside myself” (ADD 13). How does one “desuppose” one’s nation or its mores and resubjectivize oneself? This “loss of hegemony” is attendant upon the realization that one “has landed not only in a foreign country but in another world” (ADD 13).

What is de-familiarizing is that this “America” has no need of the traveler: it is “separate” and “autonomous.” In Baudrillard’s language, it is a “fatal object” indifferent to the critical subject: “its existence is too dazzlingly clear for me to hope to catch it in my net” (ADD 13, emphasis mine). “Dazzlingly clear” is a phrase at odds with itself: is the otherness of America less about the new technical objects of modernity, but its qualities of “transparency” that thwart usual investigation and short circuit valued modes of “insight”? Teamed with the adjective “dazzling” it suggests that this clarity is somehow “blinding”, requiring something other than revision, supervision (judgment) or omniscience. Perhaps looking away or being momentarily blinded is the optimal disposition? A most apt analogy for this visual conundrum is the astonishment of a “blind man who has just recovered his sight” (ADD 10). Yet Beauvoir reacts to her loss of control with delight: “In a flash I’m freed from that tedious enterprise that I call my life. I am just the charmed consciousness through which the sovereign Object will reveal itself” (ADD 14).

A visual repositioning and reimag(in)ing (“repicturization”) of the facts observed distinguishes the travelogue as a “literature of observation and comment” (e.g., Morand, Maurois, Duhamel) from a theoretical journey, etymologically understood.⁸ “Most theoretical journeyers attempt to convey a sense of astonishment at the remarkable arrangements they claim to have seen” (Wolin 114). The narrative strategies pursued can involve the staging of sight in tableau or spectacle, as well as the shift from vision to other senses such as taste or affects (boredom, fatigue, vertigo) that disturb reality. Critics of these accounts conflate the travelogue with the theoretical journeyer and (unconsciously) underline the key aspect of shifting visuality. The usually perspicacious Mary McCarthy writes of Beauvoir’s road trip: “In her own eyes, this trip had something fabulous about it, of a balloonist’s expedition or a descent in a diving bell.” Beauvoir is not a reliable narrator; she invents or embellishes as fabulists⁹ do. A “real” American cannot recognize herself in this distorted looking glass: “On an American leafing through the pages of an old library copy, the book has a strange effect. It is as though an inhabitant of Lilliput or Brobdingnag, coming upon a copy of Gulliver’s Travels, sat down to read, in a foreign tongue, of his own local customs codified by an observer of a different species: everything is at once familiar and distorted”¹⁰ (McCarthy 44–45). McCarthy’s analogies are exactly on point and double each other: the balloonist looks down from on high as do the giants of Brobdingnag as the diver’s descent is enmeshed with the vision from below (Lilliput).

For McCarthy, Beauvoir’s attributed viewing positions produce a “false” copy of America: “The landmarks are there, and some of the institutions and personages…here are the drugstores and the cafeterias and the busses and the traffic lights – and yet it is all wrong, schematized, rationalized like a scale model under glass” (McCarthy 45, emphasis mine). Beauvoir will also use the metaphor of glass to differentiate the “real” from the illusory when she describes her own alienation from French society: “a glass wall between things and me. All birds seemed to be in birdcages, all fish to swim in aquariums, all chimpanzees seem stuffed” (ADD 15). Glass signified things domesticated, in captivity, preserved.

What follows McCarthy’s “under glass” simile is a list of generalizations and factual errors that are consequent to an errant visual economy: American salesgirls can’t wear the same outfit two days in a row to work, professors are never writers, Americans are always in a “good mood,” Beauvoir spells James Farrell’s, James Agee’s and Mark Twain’s names wrong as well as Greeniwich (sic) Village. Beauvoir has confused the “image of a people from Oz or out of an expressionist ballet, a robot people obedient to a generalization…” with reality (McCarthy 46). These images are suggestive of the exteriorization of the will (expressionism), miniaturization (Munchkins), displaced narratives of home (Dorothy)¹¹ or, the status of Platonic illusion itself (the Wizard and the curtain). McCarthy thus misses the “ontological reversal between the ideal and the real and the real and the non-ideal” that is at the heart of a theoretical narrative: “The purpose in describing an imaginary place as though it were real is to effect a reversal between the ideal place he has visited and the real place to which he returns” (Wolin 38).

Wolin resumes what reviewers often miss when discussing travel accounts. There is a fundamental paradox in its narrative mission: it must present facts or details about what is under observation. Yet in order to distinguish itself from an almanac or Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia, it must construct a discourse to order these facts/details into a more meaningful pattern. Thus, a road trip around America, Wolin cautions us, is also a “journey towards a theory.” For the theoretical traveler recognizes “the powerful tension between the details or particular facts and the theory that is supposed, at one and the same time, to reflect/acknowledge facts and to illuminate no more than the facts will support, yet to say more than the facts themselves say.” There is always an excess of detail and explicative aporia: “There are always more details than a theory can master and always some that it cannot account for.” Theory construction is ultimately not just a paradoxical but a deconstructive process “… that has not only to go beyond where the facts are, but go against where the facts have been…” (Wolin 114, emphasis mine). The discursive solution to this predicament is the weapon of brilliance, a narrative dazzle that will, to continue the visual metaphor, “enlighten the facts so that they speak to concerns about which they themselves are mute” (Wolin 115). Thus, theoretical travelers such as Beauvoir and Baudrillard always, in Tocqueville’s phrasing, see “more in America than America;” they “have sought an image of the essence of democracy …” (Tocqueville, 23–24).

This paradox returns us to the etymological origins of theory alluded to above. Wolin’s project in his Tocqueville is to demonstrate how the traveler becomes a theoros and the travelogue a theoria (Wolin 116). He takes us back to its Greek root, theorein, “to look at, contemplate, survey.” Wlad Godzich supplements Wolin: theory, seen as speculative, is usually opposed to praxis. This is seen post Kant and earlier with Latin translations of the Greek, “after a swerve through the Arabic.” Theory was originally in an opposition, not with praxis, but with aesthetics (aesthesis). Like Wolin’s analogies with Mallarmé’s colorist, Godzich cites Ruskin on painting: “… the impressions of beauty are neither sensual nor intellectual, but moral, and for the faculty receiving them … no term can be more accurate than that employed by the Greeks, “theoria” (Godzich xiii–xiv). For Ruskin, aesthesis denotes “mere animal sensual consciousness” or “pleasantness” which can be experienced by women, children or slaves. However, the “exciting, reverent, and grateful perception of “aesthesis is theoria (xiv). If aesthesis is a “matter of fact,” facts must then be “imaged.”¹² Theoria values “the truths of imaging/imagination over the realist or mimetic truth of facts” (Wolin 141).

Caution: objects in this mirror may be closer than they appear!

(A 1)

In order for imaging to occur, there must be a concomitant visual distortion, either from “placing the eye on the end of an eyeglass which enlarges” or from some other “height” or “distance” that would suppress details, allowing for a coherent vision of the whole. This “newly visioned reader” is one who may “perceive each object less distinctly; but … comprehend with more certainty the general facts” (Wolin 137). Tocqueville’s metaphor, which occurs at the end of volume one, is of a traveler leaving a city behind and ascending the next hill; what this person will lose in visual definition of specific landmarks, he will gain in seeing the larger picture of a city’s contours and of the terrain itself: “Similarly, I seem to be viewing the whole future of the English race in the New World. The details of this huge picture (cet immense tableau) remain in shadow, but my eye can grasp the general outline (mais mon regard comprend l’ensemble) and I have a clear idea of the whole (je conçois une idée claire de tout)” (Tocqueville 479; 535).

The media and visual technology of Tocqueville’s era (painting, tableau or spectacle) can capture his view. Beauvoir and Baudrillard’s “America” is mediated by newer mechanical modes of reproduction (classic Hollywood and the silent film as well as the photograph). They also rely on senses other than the ocular. Both Beauvoir and Baudrillard encounter an America in its movie avatar; their respective road tours literalize their screen memories: “For a long time, movies represented America for me …” (ADD 22). She perceives her fellow author Calder Willingham, through this scrim; Calder had “Fred Astaire’s chin and looks typically American to me, as though I’d seen him twenty times, bits of him on film” (ADD 52). Las Vegas conjures up images of Edward G. Robinson “… drinking whiskey with his cronies” (ADD 159). Death Valley recalls Stroheim’s Greed (ADD 157).¹³ Driving from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe evokes “those landscapes seen on the screen” (ADD 144–5). Indeed, Reno is so “picturesque … that you would think they were movie actors. Yet even an ingenious film director wouldn’t have been able to invent them.” Similar to Baudrillard’s “hyperreal” the objects on the “set” of Reno – the odor of whisky, cowboy hats and dirty shirts – are “too authentic” to be real (ADD 147).

Beauvoir, like Tocqueville, does provide an analogy with painting. While Holland might be grasped through its various painters (Vermeer’s walls, Ruysdael’s trees or Hobbema’s windmills), California and the Far West are best apprehended through movie images: “Cowboys, sheriffs, herds of buffalo, wild mountain passes …” (ADD 157).

This is an extreme nature that even movies cannot quite capture: “No landscape ever seemed to me as overwhelming on screen as these plates of salty earth, cut by deep crevasses and stretching to infinity between walls of fire” (ADD 153). Beauvoir is aware of how the screen transforms its object (ADD 74). Engineering feats such as the Hoover dam recall Gauguin’s “deceptive colors,” but the exciting story is elsewhere – in the “man-made real lake that we can see with our own eyes” (ADD 163). The Painted Desert inverts this scopic process, “natural” wonders become theme parks: an ascent up a spiral staircase to an upper viewing point leads out to “a vast violet and red plateau, colors so decisive that they seem to have been painted by a megalomaniac Gauguin.” Whether Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, telescopes invite visitors to “see the world upside down” to “dizzying” effect: “your gaze is swallowed up in a vertical plunge into the sky” (ADD 179, emphasis mine). In contrast to the usual view of américanisme as a case of European projection (of its cultural presuppositions), “swallowing one’s gaze” would indicate a case of extreme introjection.

“Black and white images” were Beauvoir’s first “anchor” in America; she admitted that they remain for her America’s “real substance.” If, as we have seen with Tocqueville, the best nineteenth century theoretical traveler sees America as a panoramic (landscape or impressionist) painting, Beauvoir concurs with Baudrillard: “It is not the least of America’s charms that even outside the movie theatres, the whole country is cinematic” (A 58). Baudrillard, like Beauvoir, sees the Dutch (or Italian) city in relation to its painters: “as if the city stepped out of the painting and not the other way about. The American city has stepped out of the movies.” This insight dictates a protocol that reverses representational priority; “You should begin with the screen and move outwards to the city” (A 59). One must not move from the city to the screen.

Whenever Beauvoir went to English language movies in America, whether or not she liked the particular film (Olivier’s Henry V: thumbs up; Lady in the Lake: not bad; Sinbad the Sailor: so-so), she was disappointed. Going to the movies in N.Y. (screen to city) “makes her forget New York.” For the immanence of image to metropolis does not suffice. Beauvoir thus wished to not just “touch” but “grasp New York – with my hands, my eyes, my mouth.” Vision needs its supplementary senses; Beauvoir must “re-embody,” not just re-picture America in order to apprehend it. She uses her ears to hear sounds (jazz and the noise of city spaces), notices mouths fashioning smoke rings; she touches/is touched by (“jostles”) other pedestrians. Noticing the streetlights, she wants to incorporate them: “wear them, stroke them, eat them…” (ADD 21). New York’s neon lights are literally eye candy: “giant sweetmeats” (MDD 7). Hands and mouth take in the spectacle. The windswept choppy water of the Niagara River is “all needles and blades”; “you could cut your finger on them” (ADD 87). For Beauvoir, “eating is knowing”(Moi 24). In The Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, she expresses her desire for a totally edible world; “When I was grown up I wanted to crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the rainbow nougats of the sunset” (MDD 7).

Meals are rites of initiation: “the martini and lobster taste of the sacred” (ADD 7). Breakfast on a swiveling drugstore stool is a celebratory occasion; toast, orange juice, café au lait, a moment of civic participation (ADD18). The imbibing of martinis, tomato and orange juice are pedagogic lessons in the “taste of America.” (ADD 12) Scotch is a totem drink, a way to enter America (ADD 15). (Beauvoir’s gustatory predilections serve as fodder for McCarthy’s trivialization.) Food also allows for the taking in of screen moments; in Pecos, at the house of Judge Roy Bean, “once again we think we’re in the movies while we eat ham and pineapple” (ADD 201). America is not easily (b)eaten: “it will not let you devour it like a big piece of candy” (ADD 5). But American gleaming drugstore commodities (paperbacks and toothpaste tubes) do “leave a sweet taste in the mouth” (ADD 19).

It is fitting that an oral examination at LaGuardia airport (“as if we were horses for sale”) permitted Beauvoir passage through immigration and customs. American teeth, as metonyms of the mouth, are “dazzling.” They belong to young Vassar girls with shiny hair “like in shampoo advertisements” and to Native Americans on advertising billboards (ADD 48, 182). The American smile interpellates the consumer, suturing the brand name (Quaker Oats, Coca Cola, Lucky Strike) to an ideology of optimism and easy credit. The advertising smile “seems like tetanus. “ Smiles incessantly pursue Beauvoir wherever and however she travels – on city streets, the subway, in drugstores and on newsstands; “The constipated girl smiles a loving smile at the lemon juice that relieves her intestines” (ADD 23). Baudrillard calls this smile an “autoprophetic one … smile and others will smile back” (A 34). Behind Beauvoir’s drugstore sign: “Not to grin is a sin” (ADD 23) is a smile of “immunity,” available 24 hours a day, yet holding one “at a distance.” For Baudrillard, the massive “toothpaste effect” of Reagan’s smile binds a nation together with more efficacy than any moral value or idea. Great teeth (dents) compensate for a lack of identity (identité) or political bite (A 34). Rather than interrogating these highly cathected objects and the body parts they reference, critics¹⁴ trivialize their potential incisiveness and miss America’s challenge to theory.

It is not possible to confront things here – they exist in another dimension – they are simply here

(ADD 10).

It was Tocqueville who first realized that paradoxical fact that “the strictly empirical character of America was its uniqueness” (Wolin 117). In America, the European thinker schooled in “the uncanny realm of the déjà vu and the glaucous transcendence of history” encounters “a naïve visibility of things” (A 91). For Europeans mistakenly conflate a thing’s existence with its conceptualization or analysis. What the European has sequestered in cognition has passed directly into the objects themselves. America as the object of a theory presents challenges, not the least of these is its banality. “This is the land of ‘just as it is’” (A 28). Tocqueville was haunted by the “vast civilization of sameness,” or to return to McCarthy’s analogy, a land which was “all Lilliputians and no Gulliver” (Wolin, 119–20, 122).

Robert Frank, photographer and filmmaker, reformulated this problem in his 1955 Guggenheim application for his book, The Americans. He intended a record of “what a naturalized American¹⁵” discovers that would be emblematic of “a civilization born here and spreading elsewhere …” He offered an inventory of eminently banal American objects: “a tour at night, a parking lot, a supermarket, a highway … advertising, neon lights, the face of the leaders and the faces of the followers, gas tanks, and post offices and back yards.” What forms the common thread between these objects is that “they are there, anywhere and everywhere, easily found, not easily selected and interpreted” (Greenough 55–56). Luc Sante confirms that Frank’s banal objects were things that either one could not see in their obviousness or were attempting to repress (Sante 205). Frank’s catalogue of unremarkable everyday objects is quite similar to Beauvoir’s: faces, streets, hotel lobbies, bus stations, department stores and drugstores, bars, cinemas, billboards, alcohol and regional foods. And it also shares an affinity with Baudrillard’s astral America of hotels, motels,” mineral surfaces ... signs, images, faces, ritual acts on the road” (A 5). The real America is “the freeways, the Safeways, the skylines, speed and deserts…” (A 114).

The banality of American objects translates into an easy, “neutral humor” located in its vernacular objects that veer into the kitsch (immense billboards, giant hotdogs) and the hyperreal (Forest Lawn cemetery, colonial Williamsburg). This is not an aesthetic surreal, but the way that excess passes directly into these objects (A 95). Baudrillard and Umberto Eco are well known for their depictions of a hyperreal America. Beauvoir is rarely included in their company. One of the pleasures of America Day by Day is its mid-century tour of this “postmodern” terrain. Like Eco, Beauvoir’s America is the land of “more”: “too much finery, too many mirrors and drapes, the food has too many sauces and syrups; everywhere, there is too much heat” (ADD 15). The banal object can also be decidedly odd and (in Eco’s exuberant rendering) baroque. Beauvoir proves herself a superb reader of Baudrillard’s and Eco’s America. At a gas station outside Las Vegas, she notes a “museum of stuffed animals … bird skeletons … skulls, human remains, fetuses in jars … mummified rattlesnakes … dead things in the process of dying a second death …” (ADD 164). Hollywood director George Stevens shows Beauvoir natural landscapes which provided images of elsewheres: “false Tibets” and “illusory Switzerlands.” A tiny patch of earth “the size of a kitchen garden” is revealed as the source for a military victory scene of vast proportions (ADD 154). Beauvoir is charmed by the fake cottage or manor decors of L.A. restaurants. Of all the wonders in Forest Lawn cemetery, she is most impressed by “’the Book of David,’ a simulacrum of a book that is at least as tall as a man and open in the middle’” (ADD 114). But she finds the “conditioned past” of colonial Williamsburg “one of the sorriest shams” even if it is as “successful as Lourdes” (ADD).

America’s empirical “given-ness” displaces the usual sense of exclusion experienced by the foreign tourist. Beauvoir notes the different status of tourism in America from other countries such as Italy, Greece or Spain, where the highway is the province of guests, not the inhabitants. In contrast, highways are part of the American vernacular.¹⁶ The relatively depopulated Far West is fashioned for the traveler passing through: “The gas stations, roads, hotels, solitary inns exist only for the tourist and because of the tourist …” (ADD 165). Baudrillard contrasts the European freeway as a unidirectional system of expulsion with its American rhizomatic counterpart as a place of “integration.” Freeways, like the tourism they afford: “do not de-nature the city or the landscape; they simply pass through it …” (A 55). Utopic or privileged access to America inheres in motion, with the car as the paradigmatic vehicle. For Beauvoir, “no dream of rootedness challenges the giddy exhilaration of the car and the wind” (ADD 164). Baudrillard offers a similar challenge: “Drive ten thousand miles across America and you will know more about the country than all the institutes of sociology and political science put together” (A 57).

Americans are eminently democratic – except about Negroes

(Le Corbusier). ¹⁷

Beauvoir’s four-month stay covered a great deal of American territory: New York, Poughkeepsie, Rochester, Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Virginia, L.A., San Francisco, New Mexico, Texas, Georgia, Florida and New Orleans. Beauvoir was an exemplary American traveler in her variety of vehicles – train, car and Greyhound bus, which offered a singular opportunity to translate her extensive reading knowledge of America’s race problem into a more visceral experience of the Jim Crow south. Before Beauvoir visited America, she had started a friendship with Richard Wright. America Day by Day is dedicated to Ellen and Richard Wright and both make frequent appearances in her letters to Sartre and Algren. Wright’s short story, “Fire and Cloud,” was published in Les Temps Modernes’ first issue (1945) as lead article just after Sartre’s introductory presentation of the journal. The 1946 special issue on the U.S.A. (Les Temps Modernes, August–September) included racially pertinent texts brought to Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s attention by Wright (i.e., two excerpts from St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Clayton’s Black Metropolis – one on Bronzeville and the other on the color line¹⁸) in addition to an autobiographical essay by Wright (“Early days in Chicago”, in French: “Débuts à Chicago.”) Black Boy appeared in serialization (1947) along with Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity and Sartre’s What is Literature?

In New York, Beauvoir saw Richard Wright quite often socially. Wright brought her to the Abyssinian Baptist Church to hear the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell and experience the political aspects of his sermons as well as the more tempered response of a middle class congregation (ADD 57). She also visited a poorer, more demonstrative Harlem church during her last months (ADD 272). Wright used these visits for a pedagogy that would ground Beauvoir’s reading knowledge of Native Son in the ever present consciousness of race: “From the cradle to the grave, working, eating, loving, walking, dancing, praying, he can never forget that he is black, and that makes him conscious every minute of the whole white world from which the word ‘black’ takes its meaning” (ADD 58).

Beauvoir is quite attentive to America’s whiteness, walking in Harlem on Lenox Avenue (ADD 34–36) or lecturing at America’s “historically white” colleges and universities (in David Roediger’s felicitous phrasing): Harvard, Princeton (the most colonial campus), Yale, Macon College (Southern iterations: slavery and hunger), Oberlin¹⁹, Mills College, Vassar (one or two “black” students), Wellesley and Smith. Beauvoir notices the taxis that pass her by when she is in Wright’s company; the hostile looks that follow her when she is with Ellen Wright and Richard; she is acutely conscious of where they eat (in Chinese restaurants but not in her hotel’s) and with whom – mostly Jews and other foreigners: Japanese, French, Hindus, Chinese (ADD 276). And she is similarly observant about other racial and ethnic exclusions: signs in New Mexico bars that read “off limits to Indians” (ADD 183) as well as similar restrictions on Jews in Connecticut (where they are not permitted to swim in some lakes). Her appraisal of the different American attitudes towards Native Americans and African Americans follows Tocqueville: they are afforded paternalist protectionism while lacking the rights and status of American citizenship. Their limited responsibilities and formal authority is a semblance, more commonly associated with childhood (ADD 187–8). While the case of children and colonized peoples do serve as analogies for women’s oppression in The Second Sex, it is the comparison with the status of the American black in the Jim Crow south (the legacy of separate, but equal) that has invited scholarly attention.

For Margaret Simons, the key evidence of Wright’s influence on Beauvoir is to be found in America Day By Day where he is portrayed – as some of the above examples suggest – as “her cultural and spiritual guide” (Simons 176). Simons’ research enacts Paul Gilroy’s wished for reversal of “New Atlanticist” readings which would consider Wright’s effect on Beauvoir rather than the customary obverse: how European existentialism “influenced” Wright. Gilroy desired to read Wright intertextually, against those Parisian artists and intellectuals he was in conversation with. This echoes Wright’s preface to Black Metropolis where he ponders an analogous chiasmic reversal: “What would Chicago’s south side look like if seen through the eyes of a Freud, a Joyce, a Proust, a Pavlov, a Kierkegaard…?” (Drake and Cayton, xxxi). Thus it is Wright’s example and not that of Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew that provides the model of racial oppression; he is responsible for Beauvoir’s decisive turn away from Being and Nothingness to “situatedness;” demonstrating that it is material reality and not metaphysics nor morality that is constitutive of identity. As Wright states in his resonant concurrence with Drake and Cayton: “After studying the social processes in this book, you cannot expect Negro life to be other than what it is” (xx). Wright’s pointed descriptions of personality and its foundations, of lives of “outward submissiveness” and those “personality mechanisms that sublimate resentments,” of the role of repression and its relation to the assumption of “cultural mandates” (xxx) prefigure Beauvoir (as well as Butler) on the oppressive tenacity of norms as well as their double bind; one cannot live outside them without experiencing “radical dislocation” (Butler 41–2; Wright xxxii). It is difficult not to concur with Butler that Wright is the person who exorcizes Beauvoir’s “Cartesian ghost” (Butler 37, 39).

The Second Sex is a departure from the individual or metaphysical questions of Beauvoir’s early novels, or her “moral” essays and literary works of the Occupation period. The political portrait of women as an oppressed “caste” who “were brought up to believe in inferiority of endowment” (A. Myrdal 1077) rhetorically relies on Native Son and Black Boy for its exemplification (in both the childhood as well as the adult “independent woman” sections.) Bigger Thomas’ early ressentiment stems from a feeling of “inferiority” resulting from his partial integration in a society where he is “an inferior caste … this accursed alterity inscribed in the color of his skin: he watches planes pass and knows that because he is black the sky is out of bounds for him” (Second 321; Fr. 327–8). Beauvoir similarly sees women denied access to “a thousand adventures” because women are “born on the wrong side” of a gender line. On the other side of one’s career accomplishments, Wright is invoked as a cautionary note to those who nonetheless struggle to achieve. “Richard Wright showed in Black Boy how blocked from the start the ambitions of a young American black man are and what struggles he has to endure merely to raise himself to the level where whites begin to have problems …” (Second 753 /Fr. Vol. II: 457).

Simons credits Wright with providing a racial analogy, the framing of sex/gender in relation to caste and not biology, and also for introducing Beauvoir to both Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (its “encyclopedic scope” inspired her²⁰) and the social scientists of the Chicago school (e.g., Drake, Cayton, Parks). America Day By Day demonstrates the importance of both of these influences. Explication of Myrdal’s book takes up a relatively large section of her travel in the south (ADD 236–248) and is set up to defend against those who cautioned her on her first night in New York against writing about race. Myrdal is the “subject who is supposed to know” about race; an economic advisor to the Swedish government, he headed a research group of sociologists and economists. He offered Beauvoir a useful axiom, that the “black problem is first of all a white problem” (ADD 237). Yet this report, funded by the Carnegie Foundation during the years of build up to the Cold War, had a liberal agenda that needed supplementation by WPA Negro social scientists. Similar to a later report (by Moynihan), Myrdal’s could be accused of paternalism and a negative assessment of Black culture. In addition to moral-liberal problems with racism, Myrdal was concerned that pathologies of the racial dilemma could harm the U.S. in its ascent to global (anti-communist) hegemony. No emphasis was to be placed on Black consciousness, culture or associations as a positive transforming force. Wright’s decisive influence on Beauvoir is less his introduction to these specific books than a necessary re-framing of them. This affords a second evolution contained within the (first) movement away from metaphysics and morality. In America Day By Day, we see Beauvoir use Myrdal against Myrdal and move away from “a definition of racial difference designed to fulfill the needs of whites to a self-definition of difference by blacks on grounds for political engagement and self-realization” (Simons 181, emphasis mine).

Myrdal’s social science objectivity is countered in America Day By Day with a phenomenological approach, which is embodied and doubly conscious; she looks at herself through other’s eyes (DuBois in Simons 177). Beauvoir shares her experience of Jim Crow racism and its northern legacies not just by visual description, but also with how it feels to participate in and witness it. Her presentation of Harlem begins with a brief description of its real estate history then quickly segues into a force-field of footsteps driven by fears of others – whites and expatriate French – who will not travel freely there. Beauvoir feels a “gaiety” born of no longer feeling she is in her habitual New York, but instead in Marseilles. (Marseilles is associated with liberty as the city of her first adult teaching job.) Nothing scary occurs to her in Harlem, yet “fear is there” and as she criss-crosses between objects and associations and crosses streets, “she crosses through layers and layers of fear” (ADD 35). Her whiteness becomes a curse that weighs on her as she feels the fear of the hated against the skin color associated with the hater. The racial “wound in the present,” metonymized in the color of her skin (white) and her bluest eyes impede her movements: “I dare not smile at the children … I don’t feel I have the right to stroll in the streets where the color of my eyes signifies injustice, hatred and arrogance” (ADD 36). The incorporation/introjection of affects and objects was previously interpreted as Beauvoir’s voracious desire to know and possess New York. In Harlem, embodied racial knowledge inverts this, delimiting and constraining her. Beauvoir’s experience of “moral discomfort” takes flight into the solace that Richard Wright’s companionship will offer that evening (dancing at the Savoy.) It is a solace that contains contradictory emotions: absolution and embarrassment (ADD 37).

If there were a racial primal scene in America Day By Day, it would be the border crossing (by Greyhound Bus) from New Mexico into San Antonio, Texas. While the state line cannot be seen in the desert, the frontier is marked by the first signs of racial segregation – restrooms marked by their respective “White Ladies” and “White Gentlemen” and “Colored Women” and “Colored Men.”²¹ The “White” waiting room and lunchroom accommodations are spacious, while the “Colored” waiting area is a “miserable alcove”; its tiny eating area can only serve four people at once. Beauvoir’s ensuing description elaborates the distinction between cognition and (visceral) affect:

This is the first time we’re seeing with our own eyes the segregation we’ve heard so much about. And although we’d been warned, something fell onto our shoulders that would not lift all through the South; it was our own skin that became heavy and stifling, its color making us burn

(ADD 202–3, emphasis mine).

The unrelenting weight of whiteness and the association of fire with shame recalls Wright’s prefatory admonition in symmetrical fashion: “One cannot ignore the race consciousness which 300 years of Jim Crow living has burned into the Negro’s heart” (Drake and Cayton, xxix, emphasis mine).

The embodied racial double-consciousness is staged differently the next day – as a projected split object that induces vertigo. We witness a series of plays upon the container and the contained. Beauvoir is still in San Antonio and explores Alamo Square: a hybrid bazaar of America (skyscrapers, big stores), old Spain and Mexico, talismans of the Texas Independence period and a replica of the constitution. A description of the old Spanish Mission and site of the Alamo (whose story she summarizes) opens up to a lush nature scene with gardens, winding rivers, an open air theatre straddling the river’s bank and proceeding to an abandoned square where a gray, windowless building (the former Governor’s palace) lies beyond a gate. Once inside the gate, however, is another Eden – a sixteenth century sober Castillian monastic building (cloisters and benches, a well) and an Andulusian garden (vibrantly colored bushes, the “perfumed trees” and “climbing vines”). From this vantage point within American history – the Alamo – “America is far away.” All images of the palace are internally self-referential; no window looks out onto the street, only onto the interior garden. It is a facsimile of cloistered European sobriety, gated and literally “white washed” (ADD 204).

Yet the next paragraph begins with recognition that this is not all of America: for “America is just next door…” This America is colorized and commercial: “America is just next door, but she’s gay under the blue sky amid the laughter of a black haired brown skinned population. The curio shops break the monotony …” What appears as a non-sequitur (why talk about curio shops after the interjection of an upbeat racial image?) leads to a vertigo-inducing riff on The Shop of Ten Thousand Horns, “an extraordinary apotheosis of all the tourist shops of the Far West”:

The store’s walls, its ceiling, and its extension in the large entry hall are a forest of horns: stags, buffalo, reindeer, antelope, gazelle, fallow deer, wild goats, bulls, bison, elk, chamois – all kinds of hoofed animals have been stripped of their horns. These trophies seem both proud and humbled… In the shadow of this foliage are all the beautiful Mexican trinkets from Santa Fe, the leather boots and belts of the Far West. It’s as though a mad burglar had pillaged a museum and dumped his bag in the display window: stones and shells, scorpions, snakes, skeletons, and fetuses. Then another, more discriminating burglar must have robbed an ethnographic museum; you can buy a whole cowboy outfit, an Indian costume, an Eskimo outfit, or Mexican clothing. There’s always something else to look at, and our heads begin to swim. At the back you can drink at a little bar and eat at little tables. We order whiskey. The waitress glowers at us, “This here is Texas!” she says proudly. And she serves us beer

(ADD 204–5).

There is insufficient space to do more than note the two types of theft (the “mad burglar” opposed to the “discriminating” one), the differently inflected crime scenes (museum/ethnographic museum), and the implied association between ethnography and costume/secondary signification and museum and the forensic/”natural” object. Or one might, with Baudrillard, see the two museums as expressive of “the ideality of nature” and “the ideality of culture” (A 109). One can, however, state that Alamo Square provides an over-determined setting for Beauvoir’s viewing of Disney’s “Song of the South.” Here, she watches an American audience react to the racist depiction of an infantile Uncle Remus. Technicolor does not cover up the “hatred, injustice and fear” that is the context for the parables of Brer Rabbit, written by a “red headed white man” (ADD 207–8).

As Beauvoir travels further into the south, she notices that conditions deteriorate and become more crowded. Black accommodation areas are no longer sheltered, Blacks must stand until all whites are seated and then walk through a hostile bus. Whites prefer to stand rather than sit next to a Black person with an open seat. Between Savannah and Jacksonville, N. and Beauvoir witness a pregnant woman who faints and wish to help but postpone their intervention until the bus stop as they feel the fainting women would take the brunt of their concern: “This is only a small incident but it helps me understand why, when we are traveling through overcrowded black districts, the placid Greyhound gets such hostile looks” (ADD 233). It is fitting that her vehicle of travel is implicated in such a racially inscribed scene and described by an anthropomorphism – “the placid Greyhound. ” For Beauvoir, “three travelers brought together by chance” suffices to produce an Other (Second Sex 6).

Américanisme revisited

Tocqueville describes the beneficial effects of democracy and the American constitution with considerable enthusiasm, praising the inherent freedom of the way of life, the regularity of mores (rather than the equality of status), the supremacy of a moral (rather than political) organization of society. He then describes with equal lucidity the extermination of the Indians and the condition of the Negroes, without ever bringing these two realities together. Is it possible that one can, while keenly feeling both aspects, pass over the relation between them? As if good and evil had developed separately. Certainly it is, and the same paradox faces us today: we shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself. America is powerful and original; America is violent and abominable. We should not seek to deny either of these aspects, nor reconcile them

(Baudrillard, America, 95).

My interest in Wright’s relation to Beauvoir differs from Simons and Gilroy. For I wish to underline the profoundly Tocquevillian character of America Day by Day. We might, with Phillippe Raynaud, slightly redefine or amend américanisme to contain three aspects: modernity (the future), capitalism (money) and democracy. It is on this last issue, democracy, where Tocqueville’s equality of opportunity becomes most ambivalent. And it is the racial question that for Beauvoir, like Baudrillard above, returns us to the enigma and central paradox of the “negative foundation of America’s greatness” that Tocqueville addresses in Chapter 10 (“A Few Remarks On The Present-Day State and The Probable Future Of The Three Races Which Live In The Territory Of The United States.”) In this concluding chapter to volume one, Tocqueville queries whether it is indeed possible to speak of democracy (or equality) where there has been the extermination of one race (the cultural and physical genocide of Native Americans) and the enslavement of another (African Americans). Tocqueville takes up what he has previously put to the side to complicate a picture of an American democracy, where the general interest is always already in tension with private liberty. Beauvoir experiences this two sided nature in the rise of McCarthyism where restrictions are placed on the practice of individual freedom in order to protect society and also in legitimized private acts of discrimination on the part of citizens towards minorities. Like Tocqueville and Baudrillard, she demonstrates that banality might work in the service of democracy. However, she tempers the positive assessment that one might successfully construct a moral pact between banality and equality. For if it is true that there exists a formal equality before the consumer capitalist object or its advertisement (which would distinguish the smiling, shiny haired American waitress from Sartre’s alienated garçon), there is another side to this “cut rate paradise” of “neon lights, smiles, prosperity, ease… the truth of poverty, exhaustion, hatred, cruelty, revolt … “(ADD 80).

And, yet, for Beauvoir (and Baudrillard) the democratic ideal is neither “empty chatter” (“bavardage vide”) nor “a cynically exploited hypocritical lie. Respect for the human being and for the principles that guarantee him his rights is deeply anchored in the heart of American citizens” (ADD 293). Racism puts the idealistic American who believes in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution’s preamble (daily reiterated in churches, schools, newspapers, politician’s speeches, legal texts) in a situation of “bad faith” which is extremely uncomfortable as it is flagrantly contradicted by the experience of blacks. An elaborate defensive structure is put in place to rationalize this oppression and continue to expropriate black Americans and keep them in their place: “it’s when he leaves his station that he becomes a danger” (ADD 241). In addition a “tradition of illegality” supplements the importance of the Constitution, allowing for the persistence of social, political and economic discrimination (ADD 245). Like Tocqueville, Beauvoir gives a clear assessment of the current state of race relations, the differences between the North (where there is greater electoral participation and greater gains) and the South (where poll taxes have been declared illegal, but not the exclusion from political primaries, where “nothing is guaranteed them.”) She concludes with skepticism about the courts; a democratic judiciary might work in a homogenous society, but not in a stratified one of racial caste oppression (ADD 247). And she shares a Progressivist (Beard, Turner) suspicion that one effect of the Constitution is to render its citizens more passive (Raynaud viii).

America Day By Day deserves to be read less as a supplementary text to the Beauvoir canon than as a work of democratic theory providing a cautionary tale. For what she so eloquently and sympathetically recounts is a story of America’s shared apathy without blindness, a consciousness, however disavowed, of racial injustice, yet without any sense of direct responsibility.