Cowboy Time: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

The Wild West. There is something evocative about cowboys and Indians, big, open spaces, horseback rides, gunfights and barfights. The period of the Old West is a mythic period, yet also one that seems particularly close to us, particularly recent. As a comparatively lawless zone, it enables a more fluid morality, placing responsibility into the hands of individuals. As a place of violence, it makes us think more explicitly about the nature of human life and of its destiny. Westworld’s first season is probably my favourite television series; Butcher’s Crossing is one of my favourite books. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses is another excellent Western, one consciously concerned with the way we construct and think of myth. As a coming-of-age story it is less brutal than McCarthy’s earlier Blood Meridian, but it still forces us to confront the truth of a harsh world.

Growing up is a matter of finding the truth beneath illusions. The Wild West is perhaps one of the ultimate illusions. It is a series of legends obscuring one of the most brutal periods of a brutal country, where murder, rape, and pillage were nothing and where whole cultures were annihilated at the pull of a trigger. John Grady, the sixteen-year-old hero of All the Pretty Horses, discovers the terrible vacuum underneath his idea of the world. His story is not a rejection of the West, but one where he becomes the kind of man who can survive in the West as it actually existed. It is the origin story of a real cowboy.

A desert.

The Plot: The Cowboys and their Trip

All the Pretty Horses takes place shortly after the end of the Second World War, a time long beyond the end of the Wild West by most reckonings. The story begins with the funeral of John Grady’s maternal grandfather, the last male of the Grady line. Although his last name is Cole, after his father, John Grady’s respect for his grandfather leads him to go by his grandfather’s name instead. It is the first act of controlling one’s own identity featured in the book.

All is not well for the cowboys in the post-war period. The ranch where John Grady grew up is being sold, and both his mother and father are unable to provide parental support. Even his relationship with a local girl doesn’t seem worth bothering over anymore. Meanwhile, the landscape of great open spaces is becoming enclosed and dotted with oil derricks, as America consolidates its post-war economic ascendency. And so, with his friend Lacey Rawlins, and their horses, Redbo and Junior, in tow John Grady decides to head to Mexico in search of a better life.

“If I don’t go will you go anyways?”

John Grady sat up and put his hat on. “I’m already gone,” he said.

McCarthy has such verve for pithy, cinematic one-liners, and indeed his prose style as a whole owes much to cinema, with its emphasis on framing shots of its characters, often from unusual angles. People are often described not as they are, but how they are seen reflected within a window or glass object. In addition to being very cool, this flourish draws our attention to a certain distance between reality and our perception of it. Which is one of the key ideas of the book.

John Grady and Rawlins are always thinking of themselves through the lens of the Wild West and its myths. When they encounter a fellow escapee, a boy called Jimmy Blevins riding on a horse that is almost certainly stolen, they wonder whether they look like desperados to him. When they get new boots they are particularly excited because it appears that now they will really look like cowboys.

John Grady and Rawlins make it to Mexico. They start work on a big hacienda, or large estate. And John Grady falls in love with the owner’s daughter, a beautiful young lady named Alejandra. When she reciprocates his feelings, the scene is set for a passionate and illicit romance, but McCarthy allows us no rest, sending his story into Mexican prisons, through gunfights, and much more besides. Along the way John Grady becomes a real cowboy – scarred, rough, and more than a little heroic.

Truth

Becoming a cowboy is not just a question of going to Mexico, or stealing a horse. It is to engage in the mythmaking process that characterises the Wild West. If Blood Meridian was a shattering of our illusions about the West, All the Pretty Horses shows us how myths can instead be constructed. Thrown in jail because of his association with Blevins, initially John Grady speaks the truth as he understood it, explaining that he has nothing to do with Blevins’ criminal misdeeds to the police captain. It does not work. “You see. We can make the truth here. Or we can lose it”, says the captain. The character of the captain represents authority, embodying the truism that history is written by the victors. John Grady tries to protect his personal truth at first, but it is impossible to maintain that against the strong powers of the world.

When revenge comes, John Grady no longer describes the truth. He says what needs to be said to create a legend – he makes a legend out of himself, without consideration for whether strictly speaking what he says is true. For after all, who cares about the truth? Certainly not the captain, whose whole life is built upon the shame that came from a single moment of cowardice. The Wild West is a place where survival is difficult for those who are merely themselves. But for those who can stretch themselves into the boots of a myth, so long as they can shoot a rifle too, those people will flourish. Perhaps.

Nature and the World

“In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

These words come from Alejandra’s grandmother, and they speak the central truth of All the Pretty Horses. Whatever hopes we may have, whatever dreams, they will prove worthless and firewood for an uncaring world. Early in the novel there is a bush into which countless little birds have been blown and impaled by the force of a great storm. It’s nothing special, just another description among many, but it too hints at the nature of the world. If there is a God, and the characters of McCarthy’s novel aren’t entirely sure on that front, then He doesn’t seem to care very much for his creation.

If anything, McCarthy sees the world as shaped by Man, and Man’s violence. I use the old-fashioned Man in part because McCarthy’s world is a Man’s world, and men are to blame for it. All the Pretty Horses is full of the traces of destruction men have wrought. From the oil derricks to the breaking of the horses, there seems no place where we have not brought pain and destroyed sacredness. The wild horses are deprived of their “communion” once they have been captured and broken. I know McCarthy is guilty of using biblical language liberally, but here it is entirely valid – we have broken the natural, spiritual bond of the animals, all that we might make use of them.

At another point McCarthy describes a storm thus: “as if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.” Our world is made unnatural, industrial, by the simile. Yet who can say that the world we live in now is natural anymore? So much of it is covered by the traces of Man and his violence. The deepest desert has scraps of blue and black from discarded plastic. It is hard to be proud of ourselves, knowing both what we are capable of, and what we as a people have already managed.

The Values in the World

All the Pretty Horses does not suggest things will get better, either – it is no narrative of progress: “No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold”, and our hearts are not build for peace. We may transition from horses to pickups, from carriages to airplanes, but in the end one thing remains – we are a violent species, and we like war.

Yet unlike, I think, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses is a relatively positive book, finding in the amoral world values worth holding on to. First of all, and unmistakable, is beauty. It is somewhat silly to mention it, but even the novel’s title suggests this. And McCarthy’s style is awesome. It takes some getting used to, especially because it is so brazen in its approach – deliberately biblical, experimental, raw. But once we start running along McCarthy’s tracks, so to speak, we notice moments and phrases of such beauty that they make one want to cry:

“She rode with her hat pulled down in the front and fastened under her chin with a drawtie and as she rode her black hair twisted and blew about her shoulders and the lightning fell silently through the black clouds behind her and she rode all seeming unaware down through the low hills while the first spits of rain blew on the wind and onto the upper pasturelands and past the pale and reedy lakes riding erect and stately until the rain caught her up and shrouded her figure away in that wild summer landscape: real horse, real rider, real land and sky and yet a dream withal.”

That last clause is so unbelievable. I mean, it doesn’t even have to mean anything – it just sounds so good that I cannot get it out of my head.

And besides beauty, there are virtues too. Even old-world Wild West virtues. John Grady sticks up for the little guy; he tolerates no abuses of unearned authority; he is heroic and fearless. He falls in love and doesn’t let society get in the way, and he is a good friend to Rawlins. Even if his world is dying, John Grady is still a good guy by its own value system.

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting…

Conclusion

I write this review in the desert sands of Jordan, the place of my own little Wild West adventure. All the Pretty Horses is one of those books I know I will read again. It contains that richness that always disheartens me when I try to write about books for this blog – there is simply too much to say, and what I write can do justice to almost nothing of the book’s power.

I love the easy themes, of loyalty and friendship and love, just as much as I love the darker, or more complex ones, hidden beneath the surface of the work, such as the ambiguous position of American power, or the bleak and empty moral content of the world. Most of all, perhaps, I love the language. Whether it is the pithiness of John Grady’s one-liners or the epic sweep of McCarthy’s landscapes and storms, All the Pretty Horses is a beautiful book.

Two Postmodern novellas – A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects

A friend of mine is named Antonia, after A.S. Byatt, which was reason enough for me to want to read the author. If any writer can inspire someone so much that they are willing to name their child after them, then that author must be doing something right. I asked my Antonia where to begin with Byatt (thankfully, Antonia is a fan of her namesake) and she suggested I try this collection of two novellas, Angels and Insects. The two stories here, “Morpho Eugenia” and “The Conjugial Angel” are both set in the Victorian period and engage with anxieties relating to the advance of science and its relation to the spirit.

“Morpho Eugenia” tells the story of how a young explorer’s experience of the Amazon and study of Darwin draw him into conflict with the patriarch of an English country home who does not want to see science undermine his religious beliefs. “The Conjugial Angel”, meanwhile, is the story of a group of spiritualists at a séance and the relationship between Emily Jesse, née Tennyson, and her dead fiancé, Arthur Hallam, who was immortalised through her brother Alfred’s poem “In Memoriam”.

Byatt is often named as a postmodernist English writer, and Angels and Insects provides ample evidence for that claim. These novellas are formally inventive, with scientific quotations, real characters, stories-within-stories, and plenty of poetry. At the same time, their settings and topics make them cousins to the German novellas of the nineteenth century, which like Angels and Insects were highly symbolic works, densely packed and interpretatively complex. Byatt’s intelligence is unmissable – she clearly did her reading, whether it be on mediums or on entomology. But is there a heart here, too? I propose to focus on the first story, “Morpho Eugenia”, to answer.

Morpho Eugenia

Morpho Eugenia is a clever and decidedly strange novella. It begins with William Adamson having returned to his benefactor’s home from an expedition to the Amazon, penniless after a shipwreck. Lord and Lady Alabaster have a great many children, and William finds himself falling in love with the eldest daughter, Eugenia. A marriage would be inappropriate, because of the differences in their stations, but William so impresses Lord Alabaster that eventually he grants him his daughter’s hand, and the two end up wedded together. At the house and surrounding estate, William works to sort through Lord Alabaster’s collection of scientific specimens – though the old man does not leave the house himself, still he has his passions and interests.

In addition, William helps Lord Alabaster with a book the latter is working on. Lord Alabaster is determined to prove the “argument by design” – that nature’s complexity proves God’s existence. William, a Darwinist, is to help Alabaster by challenging his ideas. William’s final role is to provide some education for the younger Alabaster children, and to this end he builds various exhibits in the house – anthills to be monitored, and the like. In this he is helped by the servants and by a young woman attached to the household, Matty Crompton.

Insects and People

At first “Morpho Eugenia” appears to set itself up to be a standard tragic love story, as so many novellas are – I thought of Storm’s “Aquis Submersus” and Hofmann’s “Sandman” when William wrote in his diary that fatal phrase “I shall die if I cannot have her”, referring to Eugenia. Instead, William marries Eugenia quite successfully, and they produce many children of their own over the course of the story. But at this point the story seems to take on another classic novella idea – that of madness. William has returned from a world untouched by civilization, as his fellow Englishmen might understand it, to a luxurious country estate. Yet from the first moments, when William takes part in a ball, he finds himself noting many similarities between the two worlds- from the elaborate dresses of Amazon women and young British ladies, to the dances themselves.

As time goes on, these comparisons become more and more forceful. Eugenia, whose name connects her to the butterfly, morpho eugenia (of the novella’s title) is described like an insect in her pregnancy: “his wife slept alone in her white nest, and swelled slowly, developing large breasts and a creamy second chin.” When Eugenia keeps producing twins, the comparison gets even stronger – she seems less and less human to him. Meanwhile, the aristocratic house and the anthills are also a site of obvious comparison. For the powerful figures of both places are served by countless servants, darting through dark corridors. William’s sanity seems constantly under threat of splitting in this world, and he longs for the Amazon he left behind. 

But with that said, I think Byatt’s story hints at a madness that never truly arrives. William does not do anything in the novella, and his thoughts ultimately remain more or less under control. Perhaps the place where the insect-human comparison is most forceful is in the story’s treatment of the aristocracy, who are depicted as either indolent, or selfish, or outright cruel. Edgar Alabaster, who despises his new brother-in-law, is once found by William as he forces himself upon one of the servant girls. When William tries to stop him, Edgar declares that she – still a child – is “a nice little packet of flesh”. What appears to be William’s unstable psyche is used more effectively for social critique, suggesting that human beings may not be nearly so respectable as our insectoid brethren.

Religion and Science

William’s father, a butcher, believed in a God of hellfire and brimstone. William himself has little sympathy for religion as a result. Both stories in Angels and Insects are set after Charles Darwin’s work had revolutionised our understanding of the development of life on earth, and many of the key characters feel the impact of Darwin’s views upon the validity of their faith in God. Lord Alabaster has collected crate upon crate of animal and insectoid specimens from around the world, and he asks William to “make sense of it, lay it all out in some order or other” during his stay. His decision reflects a feeling that religion can no longer order the world, and that it must surrender that right to science. At the same time, Alabaster – who trained as a priest – is unable to relinquish his faith. Over the course of the novella, he makes spirited – but unbelievable – defences of God’s creation. At one point he suggests that love provides evidence of God’s existence. But William is ultimately only annoyed by these suggestions, based as they are not on reason at all.

There are many who refuse to believe in a world without God. When William raises the possibility to Alabaster the latter is aghast: “I cannot believe that, Mr Adamson. I cannot. It opens the path to a dark pit of horrors.” And “Morpho Eugenia”, with the constant presence of insects, reducing human beings into creepy-crawlies, certainly hints at what a horrific world such a godless world would be for some of its inhabitants. And yet at the same time, it falls into the clear anti-aristocratic undertone of the work. If there is no God, then why do the idle rich inhabit great country houses, while servants toil and suffer rape and abuse without a word of complaint. The Alabaster house becomes a microcosm of the world, and it shows how fragile that world is.

Formal Ingenuity

“Analogy is a slippery tool” says William at one point. “Men are not ants”. This is perhaps one of the key phrases of the novella. Another is “things are not what they seem”, which Matty Crompton offers. Byatt is great at confusing us by the sheer density of her reference and allusion. She quotes from the scientific treatises of the day freely alongside poetry, so that we feel she is hinting at much more than what she spells out. Men may not be ants, but “Morpho Eugenia” asks us to what extent a comparison is valid, and what kind of a comparison. Each metaphor is developed constantly, and always taken in new directions. My only complaint is that Byatt’s descriptions are far too rich, too colourful, so that she can belabour her ideas too heavily at times. The story would have been better, shorter, in other words.

To be told that things are not what they seem is to encourage us always to be on the lookout for new interpretations. Byatt includes a story, written by Matty Crompton, alongside scientific descriptions written by William himself. Each of these appears only tangentially related to the story, at least at first. But we know that something is there, and if we have the energy for it, certainly the story has a wondrous richness to it that will reward further thought and analysis.

The Heart of the Story

Yet I cannot say it came together perfectly. Leaving aside the overly flowery descriptions, and the occasionally clunky dialogue – characters often speak as though they are scientific treatises themselves – another problem in “Morpho Eugenia” is a certain absence of heart. William’s love for Eugenia turns out to be false, and this is understandable. There’s an easy moral in that about the fallibility of the heart and whirlwind romances. But the actual meat of the story has very little to get us emotionally invested. William’s madness never goes anywhere, meaning that we just have to read repeated unpleasant descriptions of women as egg-laying ants and vice versa without there being anything at stake. In the final ten pages of the story there is a turnaround, suddenly there is a character worth caring about and some action we might call heroic, but it is rather too late. There’s too much mush beforehand.

The Conjugial Angel

The second novella of Angels and Insects, “The Conjugial Angel”, is focused on a group performing seances to communicate with the world beyond. This kind of thing was popular in the latter part of the 19th century – there’s a bit of it in Anna Karenina, for example – and was inspired by the works of the Swedish mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, who had apparently visited Heaven and had a guided tour. There are several characters at the séance, but the focus is on Emily Jesse, who was once Emily Tennyson, sister of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Emily was once engaged to Arthur Hallam, about whom Tennyson wrote his great long poem “In Memoriam”. That poem is quoted liberally throughout the text, which is nice because it’s a lovely piece of work.

During the séance Emily hopes to hear from Arthur. Though she has now married – and been married for decades – still she treasures the memory of her first love.

Representing the dead

I do not want to go into the details of “The Conjugial Angel” – it has an even weaker plot than “Morpho Eugenia”, and the themes do not come together quite so well. However, what it does do of interest is depict the dead. Authors regularly use real figures in their stories – after all, it is part of the appeal of historical fiction. But using dead people is another matter. Even today, in our comparatively godless world, there is something of a taboo on the dead – we try not to speak ill of them. Byatt brings Arthur Hallam back as a spirit to guide the automatic writing at the séance, and I felt more than a little uncomfortable by the whole idea. I began writing in my margins that this was hugely inappropriate and morally absurd.

But then Byatt gives our medium, alone at home, another vision of him. I shall not spoil the details but it is one of the most extraordinary sequences I have yet read in a work of fiction. There was a gruesome, terrifying intensity to it. I felt as though Byatt truly had brought the dead man, maggot-stained, back to life, and I was so impressed. For that reason alone this novella is worth reading.

Conclusion

German novellas, which I know well, are focused on individual characters much more than on the plot or society which form the centres of novels. The force of a strong character can sustain a novella-length work, but rarely manages to sustain something longer. The plot of a novella cannot be a situation, because these are better suited for short stories; while a drawn-out plot often needs the development of a novella to truly draw us in. For that reason, though novellas are jewel-encrusted – densely symbolic and full of things to think about – they work best when driven by a character. The character of William Adamson does not provide sufficient backbone in “Morpho Eugenia” to make us want to keep reading, however clever the work is. The really interesting character is hidden from view until near the end, at which point we’ve already decided whether we’ll read the story or not.

I anticipate criticism from those who’ve read the story that even this is part of Byatt’s argumentation, such as: the character cannot be more prominent, because the story is drawing our attention to certain oppressive structures, class and gender among others. Even so, a story must make us want to read it. “The Conjugial Angel”, meanwhile, is burdened by the focus Byatt places on the different characters. Emily Tennyson’s story is the most interesting, and with less of the trimmings and lengthy descriptions, it could have been even more effective.

Byatt is extremely intelligent, and I like her formal ingenuity. But my criticism actually has nothing to do with her postmodernism, and everything to do with the foundations of stories, such as they have existed for thousands of years. Her descriptions are too long, too florid; her characters don’t always speak like human beings; and the stories would be more effective, thematically and from a storytelling perspective, if they were a bit shorter and more focused.

Yet all the Angels and Insects collects two provocative and interesting examples of the novella genre, and it is a book well worth trying.

Why Live Existentially? Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity

I appreciate that most people are not much interested in philosophy. I myself am not particularly interested in questions about metaphysics or the meaning and origin of knowledge, even though plenty of thinkers believe that without understanding these things we cannot even begin to approach those questions which I do find interesting. Those questions are simple – what is a good life, what must we do, where does our meaning come from, and is it to be found at all? Existentialism appeals because it deals with questions relating to our existence, rather than that which may lie beyond it or beneath it. Its focus is on the concrete, the practical, the real and the possible. For that reason it has appealed to many artists and people who are engaged in the business of being alive.

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity is an essay, or rather series of essays, that aims to introduce existentialism to the common reader. I cannot compare it with Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism, which was also written in the period immediately after the end of the Second World War and has a similar goal, because I have not read that work yet. However, I have heard many suggestions that de Beauvoir’s piece is a better introduction than her partner’s is to the existentialist project among primary sources. I certainly came away from the book with some understanding of existentialism, at least as de Beauvoir sees it, and this is what I will try to share in the following piece.

The book’s structure is relatively simple. The first essay is a kind of introduction, the second essay explains why people who do not follow existentialism’s tenets are likely to cause trouble in the world, and the final essay explores all the cool things about life under existentialism. Obviously, de Beauvoir’s views are distinct from those of her fellow existentialists like Sartre or Heidegger, so here when I write “existentialism” I mean de Beauvoir’s particular take on it.

Introduction – The World According to Existentialism

Beyond us, there is nothing. There’s neither a higher power nor any other source for our values that cannot be challenged. Existentialism’s world is a world continually in flux, with nothing to hold on to. To say that things are solid, completely solid, whether tradition or morals or whatever, is to lie to oneself and hide from the nature of things. Instead, “it is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting”. In other words, we need to work things out for ourselves without relying on the old certainties of life. For each one of us “it is a matter of knowing whether [we] want to live and under what conditions”. Once we have worked out the answers for ourselves, we must live them. But this is much easier said than done.

Dostoevsky is often considered an early existentialist. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan forcefully and terribly argues that if there is no God, then “everything is permitted”. De Beauvoir equally forcefully disagrees. On the contrary, “far from God’s absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements.” There is no redemption except that which we give ourselves, and no redeeming grace. Freedom in de Beauvoir’s world is dizzying, and it requires us to assume responsibility for our actions. Her enemies in The Ethics of Ambiguity are those people who, consciously or unconsciously, hide from that responsibility.

We are free to do what we want without being bound by past values, but as stated above that does not mean we are given license to do anything. “To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future”. By freedom de Beauvoir means the opportunity to create our own paths in life and follow them, acting to grow and develop ourselves. Defined in this way, freedom means we should not impede others as they pursue their own paths, because although our projects are personal, our freedom is increased when more people are free around us. A despot can do what he or she wants, but they are less free when their people are not free. This is because we are connected with other people, whether we want it or not: “no project can be defined except by its interference with other projects”. The more projects are successfully being pursued, the more our collective freedom is increased.

This means that we must be individualistic, according to de Beauvoir, but not solipsistic. And the fact that we need others to be free in order to fully realise our own freedom is where the ethical component of The Ethics of Ambiguity comes from. For although there are no absolute and unchallengeable values, anyone who cares for freedom must necessarily desire its increase. (Hey, isn’t freedom an absolute value for de Beauvoir?)

Women and colonised peoples were the main targets of de Beauvoir’s rallying cry. In many cases unaware of their freedom, the women of the mid-20th century lived sad, deprived lives. Likewise, many colonised peoples did not realise they could and should be free. Under existentialism, we have a duty to help them free themselves from oppression, because in their freedom “new possibilities might be opened to the liberated slave and through him to all men”.

What’s so bad about not being an existentialist?

This mumbling about freedom is probably slightly less vague in the original than in my retelling of it, but nevertheless readers may say that they don’t want freedom for the women, or perhaps more reasonably, that they value tradition, order, organisation. De Beauvoir has no love for conservatives, and the second essay of The Ethics of Ambiguity explores why we have an obligation – a responsibility – to be free. Looking at various groups – the “sub-man”, the “serious man”, “nihilist,” “adventurer”, and others, she explains how their lack of freedom is harmful not just to them, but to everyone.

The Sub-Man

The “sub-man” is someone who merely exists. He acts without a plan or unifying idea. “By the incoherence of his plans, by his haphazard whims, or by his indifference, he reduces to nothingness the meaning of his surpassing” – in other words, he destroys his freedom by hiding from it. As a result, he enters a vicious circle: “the less he exists, the less is there reason for him to exist, since these reasons are created only by existing”. Such a man suffers through life, or at best, is indifferent to it. But because he does not grasp his freedom, he is vulnerable to being grasped by others. A sub-man is dangerous because others can control him and use him for evil ends – de Beauvoir might have had in mind the widely-publicised trials of Nazis in the postwar period, and the ambiguous condition of the German people themselves, who had in many cases so blindly followed orders.

The Serious Man

The “serious man” is by contrast someone who does have an idea. He sets himself up with an ideal and allows nothing to challenge it. He betrays his own freedom by ignoring it as soon as he has used it once – in the act of choosing his ideological goal. The serious man “puts nothing into question” and thereby sees the whole world through the prism of utility. Is something useful for his goals, or not? And this means that he comes to devalue everything around him, especially people. De Beauvoir gives as an example the colonial administrators who valued Empire more than they did the lives of the inhabitants of their colonies, with the result that the building of a railroad became infinitely more important to them than any native lives lost in the process. At the same time though, these men are dependent upon their idol. As soon as they lose it, their life is filled with anxiety and despair. One thinks here of certain businessmen or generals whose retirement deprives their lives of their meaning. Because they do not value freedom, but only the governing idea they choose for themselves, their life collapses when that same idea is removed or fails.

The Nihilist

“Nihilism is disappointed seriousness which has turned back upon itself”. A nihilist wishes to believe in the same idols that serious people do, but they can’t, making them revolt against them. Revolt is an important part of The Ethics of Ambiguity, but not as the nihilist does it. Unable to find the seriousness within themselves, they destroy the sources of seriousness – the idols – of others. They end up destroying anything that anyone values, in order to confirm their own view of the world as meaningless. This is a mistake, in de Beauvoir’s view. “The nihilist is right in thinking that the world possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing. But he forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and to make himself exist validly”. The nihilist basically forgets to be free; he forgets that beyond the idols there lies something worth valuing – freedom itself.

The Adventurer

Adventurers are fun characters. At first they seem to be perfect existentialists – they focus on action, not on idols or rumination. They also are driven by a swashbuckling enjoyment of life – one thinks of Don Juan. All this is good, but there are a number of issues within the adventurer’s hedonism which de Beauvoir highlights. The first is solipsism – the adventurer does not value freedom for itself, so they do not care about others at all – “the adventurer shares the nihilist’s contempt for men”. Also, adventurers often have secret goals, making them serious, even though they hide it – for example, the pursuit of glory, money, power. The main problem is this lack of respect for freedom, however, because it means that “favourable circumstances are enough to transform the adventurer into a dictator.” And in 1948 nobody was a fan of those.

What’s so good about being an existentialist?

Those were the bad guys, but what I liked about The Ethics of Ambiguity is de Beauvoir’s depiction of the good guys and how existentialism makes life exciting. Of all the ways of being, existentialism is the one, in de Beauvoir’s view, that is most firmly rooted in lived experience. It has its virtues, ones that are unambiguous: “What is called vitality, sensitivity, and intelligence are not ready-made qualities, but a way of casting oneself into the world and of disclosing being”. These are valuable because “the reward for these spontaneous qualities issues from the fact that they make significances and goals appear in the world. They discover reasons for existing”.

To be free is to live in a world of ambiguity, but it is also to live in a world of potential. De Beauvoir quotes Heidegger: man is “infinitely more than what he would be if he were reduced to being what he is”. In other words, we should never be treated as what we are because we are always capable of growth. The great power of freedom is that it provides a secular redemption to make up for the religious one we lose – we can always change our path, and no moment is too late to change ourselves.

At the same time, we get on with the business of being alive. Our projects build ourselves up – the future, “prolonging my existence of today, will fulfil my present projects and will surpass them toward new ends”. There is no reason to fear death, because it is precisely through death and failure and our limitations that meaning is possible: “a man who would aspire to act upon the totality of the universe would see the meaning of all action vanish”. If we look too far in the future, as de Beauvoir suggests the Marxists do with their utopian dreaming, then all of our action is devalued: “from that formless night we can draw no justification of our acts, it condemns them with the same indifference; wiping out today’s errors and defeats, it will also wipe out its triumphs”.

The future matters to us only insofar as it exists to us – we must live in the moment, and in the potential of the future. To live entirely in the present is to devalue others, while to live too far in the future is to devalue everything. De Beauvoir has a lovely phrase against those who think too far ahead: “an action which wants to serve man ought to be careful not to forget him on the way”. She wishes our ethics to be concrete, to be focused on specific moments. She does not condemn violence when fighting oppression, but instead asks us each time to consider whether it is what is needed or not. This may seem frustratingly vague, but the point is to make us constantly question ourselves. De Beauvoir’s freedom means we must erect no idols, but instead ask ourselves, again and again, whether what we are doing is right, and how it is contributing towards our goals. We must never say “it is useful”, but rather “it is useful for me, for this goal, now”.  

All this may sound rather challenging. We must choose our projects, we must work constantly upon our growth and the attainment of our goals. Nevertheless, de Beauvoir makes it clear that life needs joy too, for freedom without joy is nothing: “the movement toward freedom assumes its real, flesh and blood figure in the world by thickening into pleasure, into happiness”. All the gains in the world, and all the development, “have no meaning if we are not moved by the laugh of a child at play. If we do not love life on our own account and through others, it is futile to seek to justify it in any way”. As important as it is to worry about freedom and good faith, I’m glad that de Beauvoir remembers that we must have our joy. And indeed, I struggle to see how life would be worth living if we lost our sensitivity to that.

Conclusion

The pursuit of a meaning that “is never fixed, that… must be constantly won”, sounds a reasonable approach to living. It appeals a lot to a 23-year-old who has finally finished university and is now alone in the big world, trying to work out what it is he must do with himself. I cannot critique the philosophy behind de Beauvoir’s suggestions – the first essay has a lot of beings and existences and other such terminology that I struggled to appreciate or fully wrap my head around. Can I critique it as a way of life? Perhaps. If we value happiness more than freedom, we may be dismayed at the unhappiness de Beauvoir’s demands of revolt could potentially cause. To bring consciousness of their oppression to the working classes, to the colonised, to women, is to invite them to become aware of suffering that may sometimes be hidden from them. That they would be happy later is perhaps a not all that important. For that reason, de Beauvoir will convince no conservatives to abandon their values and traditions, and her chaotic ambiguous freedom will never appeal to those who prefer order. It is not clear whether it would necessarily create a better world either.

And yet, for an individual, this philosophy cannot help but be attractive. The consequences for one who is indecisive are great. Existentialism, in de Beauvoir’s mode, is a call to action, to responsibility. That’s cool. I like that. I recently read Sarah Bakewell’s brilliant At the Existentialist Café and one thing I found awesome about it was just how awesome de Beauvoir and Sartre really were. They lived existentialism. Where Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism, however admirable, had him torturing himself with self-doubt, de Beauvoir and Sartre were having fun, having sex, and being free. To have there be congruence between one’s words, thoughts, and actions – there can be no greater thing. And de Beauvoir’s essays are a valuable call to action to that end.

For more from the Paris of the mid-20th-century, read my piece on Boris Vian’s Mood Indigo, also known as Froth on the Daydream.