Jonathan Webber's Reading List

"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."

"Pyrrhus is a king and Cinéas is his adviser. The book opens with a conversation between the two of them. Pyrrhus declares that he is going to conquer Greece, and Cinéas asks him, ‘Why? What are you going to do after that?’. To which Pyrrhus replies, ‘Well then I’ll conquer Africa.’ Cinéas asks again, ‘Well what are you going to do once you’ve done that?’ ‘Then I’m going to conquer Asia’, Pyrrhus replies. Cinéas keeps asking this same question until Pyrrhus runs out of lands to conquer, at which point he says, ‘After all this I will rest.’ Cinéas replies: ‘Well why not just rest now?’ Indeed. Why bother doing all those other things first? “Cinéas replies, ‘Well why not just rest now?’ Indeed.” There’s a lot going on in that conversation, but what Cinéas seems to be suggesting is that there’s something absurd about these projects, about all projects. You value the goal you’re trying to achieve while you’re trying to achieve it. But then once it’s been achieved you just move on to something else. So, that’s one of the problems Beauvoir wants to raise in the book: the problem of absurdity. Exactly. But what Cinéas is wrong about, she thinks, is the suggestion that you could just give up committing to these projects, because on Beauvoir’s view you can’t. What it is to be human is to pursue projects. So that’s the problem of absurdity, as she sees it: we are stuck, we have projects and must value our goals, and yet are aware from some perspectives that these goals seem valueless. No, it’s a philosophical essay in the style of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais . It was originally published as a short book in 1944, but only translated into English in 2004. It is fascinating. It strikes me as a much more insightful and interesting analysis of the problem of absurdity than Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus which is the go-to text for that topic. It’s also an important moral argument: her analysis of absurdity produces an argument for Kantian morality, the idea that it’s imperative that you respect and promote human freedom. Her other moral and political writings of the 1940s, including The Second Sex , all are built on that claim. She’s often accused of simply assuming it without any argument, but she hasn’t assumed it, she’s published her argument in this book that was very well received in 1944 in Paris. I don’t know whether it then disappeared in French culture or just never got translated into English. I think the reception of all her moral and political work, certainly in the English language, has been distorted by that crucial missing piece of the jigsaw. I think that’s right. But the contrast between them has even got to the point where some people think that, because of exactly the contrast you’ve described, and because people think existentialism has to be defined in terms of Sartre’s philosophy, that it somehow shows that Beauvoir was not fully an existentialist. But I think it’s exactly the other way around. If you define existentialism as what they were both saying in 1945, then you see this as a tension within existentialism, one that got resolved in Beauvoir’s favour across the 1940s. I’m not sure that is what neuroscience is necessarily telling us, and a certain take on it often overlooks this. The neuroscience story isn’t that what appear to be our decisions are completely epiphenomenal, it’s not that they have no effect, it’s that their effect isn’t directly on our immediate behaviour but rather it’s on training and programming the system that produces our behaviour. I think this is exactly what you find in Beauvoir’s style of existentialism based on her notion of sedimentation. Sartre’s whole model doesn’t make sense without a notion of sedimentation. Why might ‘slimy’ things be disgusting because they conflict with your projects, unless it’s because your projects have become so engrained in your cognitive system that they are even shaping your perception. It looks like sedimentation is required for a lot of Sartre’s existentialism. That’s why I think it’s a mistake to think that existentialism is just the theory of radical freedom and that Beauvoir’s theory is not really existentialist. The radical freedom version of Sartre in 1943 was not even internally coherent for that reason, and that’s ultimately what he came to realise over the 1940s."

"It is a reference to the third-century martyr Saint Genestus, the patron saint of actors, who is known in French as Genêt. He was supposedly an actor who converted to Christianity on stage during a play that mocked Christian rituals. Sartre is drawing parallels between the life of Genet and the mythology surrounding this saint. He’s not necessarily holding Genet up as a hero. I have to admit this is one of the strangest books I’ve ever read. It’s a biography, as you say, of Genet, who was quite famous at the time as a novelist, a playwright, and a poet. But he wasn’t hugely famous. Sartre had been asked to write a preface to a collected works of Genet, and what he ended up writing was a 700-page psychoanalytic tome. He didn’t believe in the particular Freudian structure of the mind, but he did think that a lot of what Freud described about patterns of behaviour was correct. He just thought Freud had developed the wrong theory of the mind to account for it. In fact, he thought Freud’s theory of mind failed to explain it. That’s right. He was trying to present an analysis of Genet’s life and all the details of it as if in the first person. But on the other hand, he does sometimes describe the book as a true novel. There are various places in it where he describes some event, and you’re reading it thinking, ‘how could you possibly know this event took place like this when Genet was ten years old?’ And then Sartre quite disarmingly writes ‘oh, well maybe it didn’t happen exactly like that, but something like this happened.’ He did talk to Genet and studied his writings, which were strongly autobiographical. But to some extent what he was doing with Saint Genet was not just presenting a biography of a particular person, but rather showing how a whole person, with all of their tastes and mannerisms and works, can actually be a manifestation of a single underlying project. In a way, it’s a description of a possible person, a description of how the theory can be coherent and give a story about a person. In that way it doesn’t matter whether it’s actually true about Genet; that’s what I think he means when he deflects with those disarming comments. That’s certainly right. It’s a much more lucid piece of writing. Some passages in Being and Nothingness are great, but some of them are absolutely tortuous. In many respects, what he’s doing in Saint Genet is rethinking the existentialism of Being and Nothingness because he has abandoned the idea of radical freedom because he’s been persuaded finally that Beauvoir is right about sedimentation. That’s why he cites The Second Sex a few times in Saint Genet . It’s also the first time really that he’s paid much attention to childhood: there is a lot about Genet’s formation throughout his childhood; whereas in Being and Nothingness it’s as though we simply appear out of nowhere as fully formed adults. Obviously later he wrote The Words which is a short autobiography. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature for that, but went on to reject the prize. So, he did later devote time to thinking about childhood and in particular his own childhood… It’s probably the definitive statement of Sartre’s existentialism. His existentialism developed until this point, because of the tensions between radical freedom and sedimentation that we’ve discussed. Once he had finally accepted the theory of sedimentation, he didn’t want to throw out his existing existentialism, but could see that this alteration in the metaphysical theory had far-reaching ramifications. So, this is all thoroughly rethought throughout Saint Genet . The book also weaves together various threads he’d been working on in the previous decade. The work on imagination in particular, and the way it developed in Genet’s own aesthetic sensibilities, the way it came out in his poetry and prose – these were all things Sartre had talked about in different ways, but he had never tried to coalesce them all into a single picture before. That may well be true, although to be honest there might be other reasons why it wasn’t mainstream. It is just such an odd book. You wouldn’t necessarily intuitively think that some great philosopher’s definitive work might be found in the biography of a playwright and poet. Admittedly Being and Nothingness is a strange book too, although that’s strange in a way that’s fairly familiar from the history of philosophy."

"Fanon was a psychiatrist by training. In fact, he originally wrote Black Skin, White Masks as his final-year dissertation for his medical degree, but was promptly told by his supervisor that there was no way he would pass with a paper like that. So he wrote something different on neuropharmacology for that instead. He was black, and was born and raised in Martinique, which was a French colony that then became a département of France. He fought for the French forces in the Second World War and in recognition of his service in the war he was awarded a scholarship to the University of Lyon where he trained to be a psychiatrist. He’s especially well known for his second book, The Wretched of the Earth , which came out in 1961 and is a central text in anti-colonial political thought. But his first book doesn’t take the same kind of political perspective. Rather it focuses on the individual person. It was very much influenced by existentialism as a movement, and was published in the same year as Saint Genet . Fanon was particularly interested in the psychiatric problems you could face if you were a victim of racism , particularly of anti-black racism in France. This book is often misunderstood, I think, and its existentialism is usually completely overlooked. Both of those things are important features of its existentialism. What he develops is an existentialist view, that existence precedes essence, that people don’t have fixed personalities. It follows that there are no ethnic natures, or essences of particular groups of people, and that anything that might appear to be this way is therefore the result of social construction. That operates, in his view, through a kind of sedimentation of the idea that there are different races of people with different fixed natures. Fanon places a lot of emphasis on childhood and upbringing here, so there’s a strong similarity between Black Skin, White Masks and The Second Sex in that regard. The underlying theory of the whole book does seem to be that same kind of existentialism you get in Beauvoir’s work from the late 1930s onwards and in Sartre’s work from Saint Genet onwards. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Each chapter in the book develops work of a different kind of analysis: he has some literary criticism, some historical analysis, some psychoanalytic and political theory, followed by short chapters on Hegel and Adler. So, it’s often been seen as quite an eclectic work that’s trying to address racism in a number of ways but doesn’t really have any theoretical unity to it. Some people think that’s the point of the book, that there is no correct single way to address these problems; but I think that’s mistaken, that what he’s doing consistently throughout the book is developing this existentialist viewpoint of the sedimentation of a social racism into the outlook of the individual. Again, it’s quite an odd book. He changes literary register all the time, and he’s drawing on a wide range of intellectual sources, both academic ones in psychology, history and anthropology, and literary sources, novelists, poets and musicians. And he’s not only drawing on those influences, but also switching between those literary registers himself. So, some of it is quite autobiographical and confessional, almost meditative. Much of it is objective and forensic. So it can be a challenging read, trying to keep up with him as he keeps shifting gears. I think that’s definitely what’s going on with Black Skin, White Masks . The actual writing of the text is a kind of performance of the theory itself. So, who is Frantz Fanon, the author? Well, he’s the person who has all these influences and whose outlook is developed through all this sedimentation, and when he expresses himself authentically, as the person that he is, he must express himself in these different registers and draw on all these influences, because otherwise it’s only a partial presentation of his thought and his voice."

"She’s written a number of novels, mostly children’s novels, but this is the one that she’s best known for. This is partly because it is the title of The Cure’s sixth single, which is a take on the story in this book. To call this an underrated existentialist classic might be a little bit of a stretch, because I don’t think that it is presenting a theory, or the theory that existence precedes essence, or anything like that. But it is a meditation on the kinds of questions, and the kinds of reasons, why people might come to that theory. I’m reluctant to give anything away. The book was first published in 1969, but was set in 1958 and 1918, moving between the end of the First World War and a period forty years later. The central character, Charlotte Makepeace, comes to understand the role of her social setting and the temporal sequence of her life in forming who she is, in a way that wouldn’t have been obvious to her, had she not been through the adventures that she’s gone through. I don’t know. There was a lot of literature around at the time that was influenced by existentialism in various ways, though it tended to have been influenced by the Camus model of a lone alienated figure rather than this socially-embedded existentialism that you get in the works of Beauvoir. I have read an interview with the author where she says she was surprised that a lot of people consider it a book about identity, because that’s not what she had in mind when she was writing it. But I’m not sure really what that amounts to, because people mean different things by ‘identity’. I think it’s clearly a meditation on what makes a person who they are, the historical contingencies of that, the people you’re around, the larger historical context, and the navigation of all that is available to you at your particular stage of life. As I mentioned, one part of the story is at the end of the First World War, a major shock to European culture, and then the other part of the novel is 40 years later. Not only is the First World War well and truly over, but we’ve seen its ramifications in the Second World War as well by then. I would recommend it for adults, yes. I think I would recommend it as a children’s book as well. Perhaps it sounds a little sophisticated, but the lead character is ten years old and the story is told entirely from her perspective. The way in which a reading of this book might cause you to come to question your own identity, and see your personality as a reflection of the contingencies of your background and upbringing, is perhaps the kind of realisation you wouldn’t want children to have too early in their lives. But it is certainly something to recommend to teenagers. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes. It’s about the construction of race itself. It’s the latter for sure. One of the reasons why people are becoming interested again in existentialism is that there’s been a resurgence of interest in identity and in the origins of identity , especially gender and racial identity. This is why there’s a resurgence of interest in Beauvoir and Fanon. I absolutely think their analyses of the way sedimentation occurs, and of the prospects for a person moving away from a sedimented outlook, speak very directly to contemporary concerns. The other books I’ve recommended are relevant to these concerns too, just less directly."