4 - Negotiating autobiography

Summary

Beauvoir declares her autobiographical intentions frequently: in her memoirs (in paratextual statements à la Rousseau), in interviews and notably in a lecture given in Japan in 1966. These statements have frequently been received as authorial directives by critics who perhaps underestimate the philosophical and political dimensions of Beauvoir's autobiography. Given the importance of the Other in her notion of subjectivity and the Other's role in the production of subjectivity in auto/biography and memoirs, these statements are unremarkable. They form part of Beauvoir's negotiation of auto/biography with the reader and reflect her view that selfhood and auto/biography are intersubjectively produced. These explicit negotiations with the reader will be considered in this chapter. They take place in the prologues, mid-textual reflections on the autobiographical task and conclusions to the texts. It will be argued that she exploits these paratextual spaces to negotiate with a reader-collaborator the production of the life within a testimonial frame-work of autobiography.

MÉMOIRES D'UNE JEUNE FILLE RANGÉE

It is extraordinary, perhaps, that Beauvoir does not explicitly negotiate with the reader from the outset in the Mémoires, but rather in La Force de l'âge. This may be because she initially had no intention of writing a sequel to the Mémoires, as is evident from a letter she wrote to Nelson Algren on 2 January 1959, in which she told him that she had enjoyed writing the story of her childhood, that it had sold well, but that she did not know what to write next, especially in the current political situation, namely that of the Algerian War.