ABSTRACT
This study of Beauvoir’s fiction focuses on her writing practice, on her textual strategies. I examine how she tells the stories she tells and intend to demonstrate that madness is an intrinsic quality of the text, of the very telling of the stories. I use the term madness metaphorically to designate those qualities that unsettle meaning. Madness is a useful conceit that encompasses interalia excess, transgression, instability, disruption, and incoherence.1 My centre of interest is not the theme of madness in the fiction. What interests me is the way textual strategies duplicate madness in the text, the way the text structures an experience of madness (for readers) that is not locatable in any one character but is an effect of the text as a whole. I read madness metaphorically as an intrinsic quality of the texts. This is not to say that the texts per se are ‘mad.’2
