Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Coming of Age”
Beauvoir, Simone de: The Coming of Age G.P. Putnam, New York, 1972, 585 pages. (No ISBN but Library of Congress number is 75-189781.)
(Swans - February 11, 200 
Simone de Beauvoir has always been ahead of her times. In 1949, she wrote The Second Sex, a groundbreaking feminist text that would eventually become necessary reading for the women’s liberation movement two decades later. In 1970, just around the time that movement was taking to the streets, she wrote another book titled The Coming of Age that is equal to the first in terms of its profound understanding of the human condition. Now that many feminists weaned on The Second Sex have reached their sixties (Beauvoir was 62 when she wrote The Coming of Age) they might benefit from her wisdom, which as all wisdom deepens with age. This is not to speak of men of a certain age as well, who as members of the baby boomer generation are coping with the issues of aging.
On February 4, 2008, The New York Times published an article in the science section written by Jane E. Brody titled “A Heartfelt Appeal for a Graceful Exit” that defended assisted suicide. Brody, born in 1941, concludes:
I for one have made my wishes clear to my family. When the tortures of a continued existence with no hope of recovery outweigh the benefits of maintaining that existence, I want out. And I hope that those who love me will find a way to make that happen.
Although death is the climax of the aging process, Simone de Beauvoir’s main focus is on old age itself rather than dying, which she accepts in good existential fashion as an inescapable fate, much like the rock that keeps rolling back on Sisyphus. Using the same combination of Marxist sociology, phenomenological philosophy, and Freudian psychology that served The Second Sex so well, Beauvoir ranges across centuries and continents to render the definitive statement on growing old. In her preface, she writes:
Old age is not a mere statistical fact; it is the prolongation and the last stage of a certain process. What does this process consist of? In other words, what does growing old mean? The notion is bound up with that of change. Yet the life of the foetus, of the new-born baby and of the child is one of continuous change. Must we therefore say, as some have said, that our life is a gradual death? Certainly not. A paradox of this kind disregards the basic truth of life — life is an unstable system in which balance is continually lost and continually recovered: it is inertia that is synonymous with death.
It should be said at the outset that Beauvoir’s prose, as obvious from the quote above, is as pellucid as a mountain stream. Despite her training in continental philosophy, nobody could ever mistake her writing with Merleau Ponty’s or her long-time companion Jean-Paul Sartre. Although she is dealing with very complex subjects, often having contradictory aspects (and what can be more contradictory than the life/death duality?), she explains herself using language that should be a model for aspiring serious writers.
It’s true that intellectuals like de Beauvoir “were a culmination of a century-old intellectual tradition”. But that tradition tended toward the universal and abstract. It’s why many subsequent feminists have attacked de Beauvoir’s positions. They didn’t recognize their womanhood in the model she proposed. In our praise for her we ought not to overlook this contradiction. It’s interesting that when Nelson Algren, himself getting older, reviewed “The Coming of Age”, he “accused Simone of obsessive detail, obvious truths, an inaccurate memory, and a gullibility he personally had witnessed.”(B. Drew’s biography of Algren) In defense of Sartre’s prose, the obscurity is mainly in his philosophical writing. No one of his generation, including de Beauvoir, wrote more clearly than Sartre in books like “Les Mots”.
Comment by Peter Byrne — February 12, 2008 @ 5:39 pm
Now you have the National Organization of Women calling Ted Kennedy a sellout of women’s causes, for not supporting Hillary Clinton. Clinton wasn’t the first blond he told to swim or sink.
I reprinted at my blog, your old No Country review, to stir things up.
Comment by Renegade Eye — February 13, 2008 @ 4:09 am
You can see some of that naivete of de Beauvoir’s (and her valet like position w/Sartre) in the french documentary about Sartre.
What a menage a trois: Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Algen - Walk on the Wild Side, indeed…
Comment by Marc — March 17, 2008 @ 3:38 pm