Existential Realism: Reading American Novels the French Way

© 2022 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System n her travelogue America Day by Day (1947), Simone de Beauvoir recounts an argument over literature she had with Dwight MacDonald, Lionel Abel, William Phillips, and possibly Philip Rahv, key members of the New York Intellectuals. Since the mid-1930s, a handful of American novelists had been in vogue in France, prominent among them William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, Dashiell Hammett, and Richard Wright. Rahv had already complained in 1940 that “[t]he intellectual is the only character missing in the American novel, which contains everything except ideas” (414), and this seems to have been the central complaint as Beauvoir tells it. They scorned recent American fiction for its “unaesthetic and superficial realism. Description of behavior has replaced a deeper psychology, and documentary precision has replaced invention and poetry” (Beauvoir, America 54). Beauvoir agreed with their characterization, but for her, these features were strengths, not flaws. The existentialists believed that French literature had grown stale and that American fiction offered “lessons in a renewal of the art of writing” that could teach French authors how to “give philosophy itself a novelistic form” (Sartre, “American Novelists” 118; Beauvoir, “American Renaissance” 110). They appreciated the emphasis on unconceptualized experience in American fiction, the same feature Rahv lamented. K E V I N S P E N C E R