ABSTRACT
If anything has catapulted Sartre and Beauvoir into History, and incidentally proved their contention that historicity entails changing frames of reference, it is the revolutions in Eastern Europe, and the bringing down of the Berlin wall. So much of their political lives was shaped within and by the context of the Cold War; they are no longer here to reinterpret and reorientate the meaning of their endeavours in the light of the present changes, nor can implicit or embryonic responses be extrapolated from their works. Beauvoir’s views on politics and history will be judged, necessarily, by criteria she could not have foreseen, although she does not seem to have shared Sartre’s sense of oppression and trauma at the prospect. In terms of more personal revaluations, the publication of her letters to Sartre in 1989, and particularly the revelation, for most readers at least, of her bisexuality, will have its impact on criticism of her work. Fallaize’s study indirectly re-poses questions around the weight and relevance to be accorded to authorship, first in her discussions of Beauvoir’s intentions to use realism to political ends, and second in the interplay between narrative theory and biography. Perhaps it is inescapable with an author who has written such important autobiographies, and whose life was in so many respects in the public domain, that structural readings are still combined with biography. There is no sense of reluctance or unease on Fallaize’s part here, nor should there be. But in literary criticism which is placing its explanatory principles elsewhere, the rejection of the model which ultimately traced its authority back to the conscious or unconscious intention of the author leaves the question of what value to place on an author’s aims and intentions unresolved. Pragmatically (and even theoretically), however, the question of agency can be put on one side in favour of the recognition of biography’s status as discourse and thus an inevitable part of the process of reading and rereading. For example, whether one viewed Beauvoir’s account of her life with Sartre sympathetically or not, the conclusion that it placed a special value on the heterosexual couple was widely drawn, and necessarily influenced the readings of heterosexual couples in her fiction. The knowledge of her bisexuality must change that.
