Between Philosophy and Literature: Simone de Beauvoir’s Concept of the Metaphysical Novel

Abstract

Reconciliation of philosophy and literature was Simone de Beauvoir’s early interest. Later, when she became an existential writer, as well a philosopher as a novelist, Beauvoir gave a lecture on the relation between those two parts of human creation. She considered on what makes a “good novel” (imaginary experience that is as complete as lived experience), stating that writer’s appeal to reader’s freedom is necessary for novel to be a real adventure of the mind. Analyzing the ways in which philosophers make their philosophies and opposing to the universalistic and abstract theories, she claimed that metaphysics has a special value here: as a singular human beings, as concrete beings-in-the-world, we are metaphysical. Hence, a metaphysics and the novel can be united in the form of metaphysical novel that reconstructs everyday individual metaphysical experiences and “strives to grasp man in relation to the totality of the world”. According to Beauvoir, existentialism which aim being exactly the same as metaphysical literature is the best adopted of philosophical thoughts to express itself in the literary form of the novel.