An open letter the editorial committee, management, directors, share- and stakeholders of Gallimard and the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade
Madame, Sir:
In public estimation and by commercial determination, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade has become the global reference for nearly 1000 year of French literary heritage and achievement. The memoirs of Simone de Beauvoir, but not Le Deuxième Sexe (“The Second Sex”), for which she is best-known and honored around the globe, were added in May 2018. De Beauvoir figures with 10 or so other women writers.
Muted protest at the dis-inclusion of this key work of modern consciousness gained no public traction in May and June. Most news coverage focused on the virtual absence of women in the Pléiade list and – 36 years after de Beauvoir’s peer, friend and intimate associate Jean-Paul Sartre’s inclusion in what is, in effect, the French canon – the tardiness of hers. De Beauvoir died in 1986.
I write not to protest but to tell readers and the Pléiade editorial committee and the Gallimard management, owners and stakeholders categorically that it is impossible that Le Deuxième Sexe does not figure as de Beauvoir’s literary contribution to France and the world.
I have tried to think of all this in terms of champs des possibles, as we say. But it is impossible. The dis-inclusion of Le Deuxième Sexe will not do. Impossible, it cannot stand. Impossible, it must not continue.
My imagination had not previously compassed in such friends this meanest sort of self-deluding woman-hating: impossible! But true.
Universally practiced by those who scorn it, self-deluding woman-hating is the transubstantiation of this, our Age of Reason. The dis-inclusion of the Le Deuxième Sexe from the Pléiade is but one of its more public, spectacularly disheartening, proofs.
Impossible: Simone de Beauvoir’s most signal contribution to literature is absent in presence of full ranges of exemplary works by contemporaries or near-contemporaries or compagnons de route such as Jean-Paul Sartre or René Char or Albert Camus or Jean Cocteau or Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
Impossible: the historical, contextual and cultural insensitivity such neglect involves.
Impossible: that the Pléiade should offer what amounts to a boorish insult to de Beauvoir as an intellectual by including her personal memoirs but none of her novels, none of her essays and finally not the universally acclaimed chef d’oeuvre of her spirit. What next? Will her bidet come to figure with Sartre’s escritoire in displays of the celebrated couple’s memorabilia?
Impossible: Le Deuxième Sexe is absent from the collection because the prose is a slog. “One is not born a woman but becomes one” may be dry, but it is one of the most succinct statements of a complex truth one is ever likely to come across.
Impossible, too, that the weight of outworn balderdash dims her prose so much that it extinguishes the impact of her revolutionary analysis of gender, especially when a big part of the merit of such included works as Sartre’s classic La Nausée, is a combination of balderdash and post-war angst. Lugubriousness has dimmed Rousseau’s light not at all. Why should it dim de Beauvoir’s?
Impossible: that Le Deuxième Sexe is absent from the canon because it is not a “work of imagination” in the image of the oeuvres romanesques Le Petit Prince or L’Etranger or La Nausée. Written to accommodate what the authors considered new perspectives, these three works, among many others of the time, including Le Deuxième Sexe, are explicitly and passionately about the fundamental importance, condition and engagement of the individual. Impossible: that de Beauvoir could have written her cri du coeur for the (female) individual in the novelistic-style adopted by Saint-Exupery or Camus or Sartre for their own cris du coeur.
Impossible: that the Le Deuxième Sexe, an exact, penetrating antiphony, complement, even necessary antidote, to the pretensions, assumptions, analyses and conclusions not only of these three associated works but also to those of all that precede and follow them is absent from the French canon.
When it comes right down to it, then, including Le Deuxième sexe in the Pleiade collection is a question of deference to creative depth and sweep, not just recognition of literary merit.
The Pleiade editorial committee really had only to sit down together and ask themselves if the Little Prince or Mersault (especially Mersault!) or Roquentin would have been different if their respective authors had had even a faint glimmer of understanding of what Simone de Beauvoir wrote so clearly of. That the committee has not yet done so is down to only de Beauvoir’s reproductive equipment.
I call on all friends of France, its ideals and literature, to remind the Pléiade editorial committee, management, directors, share- and stakeholders of Gallimard of the cultural and intellectual responsibilities they have taken on with ownership of Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
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