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  • Existential Realism: Reading American Novels the French Way
  • Kevin Spencer (bio)

In her travelogue America Day by Day (1947), Simone de Beau-voir recounts an argument over literature she had with Dwight MacDonald, Lionel Abel, William Phillips, and possibly Philip Rahv, key members of the New York Intellectuals. Since the mid-1930s, a handful of American novelists had been in vogue in France, prominent among them William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, Dashiell Hammett, and Richard Wright. Rahv had already complained in 1940 that “[t]he intellectual is the only character missing in the American novel, which contains everything except ideas” (414), and this seems to have been the central complaint as Beauvoir tells it. They scorned recent American fiction for its “unaesthetic and superficial realism. Description of behavior has replaced a deeper psychology, and documentary precision has replaced invention and poetry” (Beauvoir, America 54). Beauvoir agreed with their characterization, but for her, these features were strengths, not flaws. The existentialists believed that French literature had grown stale and that American fiction offered “lessons in a renewal of the art of writing” that could teach French authors how to “give philosophy itself a novelistic form” (Sartre, “American Novelists” 118; Beauvoir, “American Renaissance” 110). They appreciated the emphasis on unconceptualized experience in American fiction, the same feature Rahv lamented. [End Page 501]

The disagreement hinges on the value and meaning of novelistic realism. “In a sense,” Beauvoir wrote elsewhere, “one can call Steinbeck and Richard Wright ‘realists’” (“American Renaissance” 110). Her tentativeness shows that she was not entirely comfortable with the idea that there might be a correspondence between American fiction of the interwar period and the novels of Balzac and Stendhal, but clearly she detected enough of a similarity to use the word. While the Partisan Review crowd faulted the same fiction for this quality, Beauvoir thought their “indictment of realism has no clear meaning.” The problem with nineteenth-century French realism, she wrote, was that it was an alibi for conservatism (“rank prejudice masquerading as impartiality in the face of reality”), but she was not against realism as such. The American novels the French loved were not politically reactionary, nor did they aspire to represent society impartially. Rather, in them “[l]ife is revealed in its truth, through the hero’s consciousness. What, then, does the word ‘realism’ mean?” (Beauvoir, America 55). In various writings and remarks, Sartre and Beauvoir provided an answer to this question, and in this essay, I reconstruct the existentialist account of novelistic realism and argue for its relevance to contemporary scholarly efforts to salvage realism.

What I call “existential realism” is rooted in the reader experience of getting immersed in a novel such that readers forget about themselves and get wrapped up in characters’ struggles and triumphs as though they were their own. I will show that Beauvoir and Sartre were dissatisfied with what they saw as politically quietist trends in French literature that we now call modernist. While recognizing the limits of nineteenth-century realism, they welcomed a strain of twentieth-century American literature because in their eyes, it invited an immersive reading experience that was politically committed (engagée) and philosophically sophisticated. Existential realism is based on the idea that we relate to reality not by representing it but by disclosing it, a process in which mind and world are mutually revealing through human action and perception. This vision of realism transforms our notion of character, steering a path between a Jamesian vision that prioritizes self-enclosed subjectivity with private thoughts and memories and a narratological view that reduces character to nothing more than a function of plot. [End Page 502]

While a strand of American fiction provided its literary exemplar, existential realism’s philosophical foundations lie in the French existentialist uptake of the phenomenology of Husserl and, to a greater extent, Heidegger.1 In a short essay called “A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Intentionality,” Sartre explains that intentionality entails that consciousness is always consciousness of something: We don’t just see, we see a parking lot; we don’t just fear, we fear the prospect of falling down an icy staircase. In teasing...

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