THE EXTREME AND THE PLAUSIBLE
THE BLOOD OF OTHERS. By Simone de BMuvoir. Knopf. $3.00.
THE PLAGUE. By Albert Comus. Knopf. $3.00.
The dramatic time of
The Blood of Others
is limited to
a single night, during which Jean Blomart is watching by the death bed
of his mistress, Helene Bertrand. Jean, as the leader of a French Resis–
tance group, had sent Helene on the mission from which she was brought
back mortally wounded. At dawn, and the end of the book, Helene dies.
Why, we might ask, has Simone de Beauvoir used this particular
device as the frame for her novel? The answer is not given by the text.
Its story is straightforward enough. Jean begins at the beginning, as the
child of a middle class family. He develops a social conscience; breaks
with his family in order to become a "working-class man" (an expression
several times repeated); joins the Communist party; breaks with the
party after his friend, Jacques, whom he has persuaded also to join, is
killed in a demonstration; becomes an a-political syndicalist; has an
affair with Helene (though he will not say, "I love you") ; is wounded
during the War; joins the Resistance; and sends Helene to her death.
Quite conceivably, these turning episodes and their anciilary events
could all have been refracted through the lens of Helene's night of dying
and Jean's death-watch. There might have been achieved an intense
concentration of the novel's energies. But there is nothing of the sort.
The device is only a trick, like the italicized passages, the shifts between
third and first person, the unparseable sentences, or the abrupt transi–
tions from scene to scene which are too obvious to have even the minor
merit of an engaging puzzle. Mlle. de Beauvoir, it would seem, is prov–
ing to her customers that she knows her twentieth century novel.
For the temporal device, however, there is no doubt a reason
be–
yond simple snobbishness. Simone de Beauvoir is the principal colleague
of Sartre. Sartrian Existentialism is preoccupied with extreme situations,
of which death is the most extreme. Man has initially no essence, but
only existence. The meaning of his existence is established in relation
to nothing, that is, to death--of each man, in relation to his own death.
I
am
nothing now; no judgment about me can be made; all of my
existence becomes defined only at the moment of my death-the same
moment, by absurd paradox, when I become eternally nothing. ("You are
there, on the bed, in the fierce light of your own death.") As an exis–
tentialist, Simone de Beauvoir has erected a plausible platform on which
to assemble her material.
The entire book is a juggle with the existentialist categories: guilt,
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