“The Mandarins” by Simone de Beauvoir (post 1): Four quotes from first half of novel

Wikipedia Synopsis

“The Mandarins is a 1954 roman à clef by Simone de Beauvoir, for which she won the Prix Goncourt, awarded to the best and most imaginative prose work of the year. The book follows the personal lives of a close-knit group of French intellectuals from the end of World War II to the mid-1950s. The title refers to the scholar-bureaucrats of imperial China. The characters at times see themselves as ineffectual ‘mandarins’ as they attempt to discern what role, if any, intellectuals will have in influencing the political landscape of the world after World War II. As in Beauvoir's other works, themes of feminism, existentialism, and personal morality are explored as the characters navigate not only the intellectual and political landscape but also their shifting relationships with each other…In her autobiography de Beauvoir denies that The Mandarins is a roman à clef” and says that the characters are are not exactly like herself, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus (1).

Four Quotes

“It’s preposterous, the liberties one takes with the characters in a novel…If you look closely enough, every character in a novel is a monster, and all art consists in preventing the reader from looking too closely” (2, p. 156).

“…a gentle ecstatic voice inside him would whisper that the book he was writing would be good and that nothing in the world was more important” (2, p. 21).

“But a voice settled in Henri’s breast and kept repeating, ‘The daughter did, too.’ And all through the afternoon, it kept repeating that refrain” (2, p. 372).

“It’s true that Dubreuilh is a split personality. But I’m surprised to see you criticizing him for that; I am like him, you know” (2, p. 337).

Comment

In nonpsychotic persons, voices may be from alternate personalities. When the Sartre and Camus characters are explicitly said to have a “split personality” (an informal term for multiple personality), it may be meant either as a joke or as a matter-of-fact observation.

1. Wikipedia. “The Mandarins.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mandarins

2. Simone de Beauvoir. The Mandarins [1954]. Translated by Leonard M. Friedman. Introduction by Doris Lessing [1993]. London, Harper Perennial, 2005.