When Things of the Spirit Come First: Five Early Tales

"This is a slightly odd book because it’s not quite a novel and not quite a collection of short stories either. They’re five stories of varying lengths that centre around the same cluster of characters, but the narratives of those stories don’t necessarily fit together to create a single overarching novel. If you read it that way you encounter a lot of loose ends. She wrote it in the late 1930s and tried to get it published, but it was turned down by the publishers she sent it to and she gave up on it. She then found it forty years later in the late 1970s and thought it was worthy of publication, and so published it as it was. So it was certainly underrated by the publishers at the time it was written. Good question. Well yes, I think it is. You can see in that work the important features of Beauvoir’s own philosophy that she develops in much more detail in the 1940s. Take the idea of sedimentation that I’ve already mentioned. These characters are all emerging from a very conservative, closed upbringing, which is also very spiritual in a Roman Catholic way, and they’re all dealing with the effects of that on their outlook of the world. Some characters still very much have those ideas, while others are trying to break away from it and develop their own perspective, but are finding that these elements of themselves are so sedimented that they are surprisingly difficult to budge and that this makes it harder for them to be the people they want to be. Most of these key characters are women as well, so the fact that their upbringing is the kind of upbringing that sediments them with a particular notion of femininity, but also a particular kind of spirituality, is important. Beauvoir later explains this at great length in The Second Sex . It’s an interesting work of fiction in its own right. It gives us a really interesting insight into life growing up as a woman, or a man, in early twentieth-century France, a taste of French culture at that time. It gives you an insight into the way in which the roots of French existentialism grow out of, in part, this widespread theologically-orientated upbringing, a very spiritual kind of upbringing. That’s right. But I think what comes out in this novel, at least with these characters, is that the moral expectations themselves have a spiritual sheen: they are at least presented as being led by spirituality – an idea I don’t think she’s very sympathetic to. I think she sees it as very constraining and problematic. Most of Beauvoir’s fiction, particularly from that era, consists of huge novels, and these can be quite a slow and difficult read; whereas this book is a great place to get a shorter introduction to her work."