- Lacan, in the Sartre literary circle of the 1940s, went on to become a leading figure
of the 1970s and 1980s with his further synthesis of psychoanalysis with literary
theory. - Another literary niche, lowbrow entertainment for the working class, had always
existed, but was never a prestige motivator for intellectuals. Under modern market
conditions, aspirants for the highbrow market have lumped together everything
beneath their own standards, denigrating middle-class audience-oriented writings
as if they were indistinguishable from penny dreadfuls. - Contemporary evidence too shows that most professional writers make very little
income, and support themselves from other jobs; only a small fraction make a
decent living by writing (Kingston and Cole, 1986). - Once a critical mass is attained, the visible production of avant-garde works,
together with the palpable social milieu where intellectual values are held in high
esteem by concentrated groups, makes such a center a mecca for international
migrants. Other cities which locally passed the critical mass and became intellectual
centers within their own language zone—London, St. Petersburg, Vienna, New
York City, San Francisco—generally have been attractors only from their national
hinterlands. This operated for Paris too; aspirant Frenchmen such as Rimbaud
made the trek from the provinces. Paris alone became an international attractor
for literary intellectuals: Germans such as Heine and Marx in the 1830s and 1840s;
Russians such as Turgenev and Herzen in the 1850s; the Uruguayan Isidore
Ducasse, who published under the French pseudonym Lautréamont in the 1870s;
and a veritable lemming movement of American and British writers in the 1920s,
not to mention Spaniards (Unamuno, Picasso), Latin Americans, and Russian
exiles. It is notable that Germany has had less literary- geographical concentration
than other language zones. German intellectual production was dominated by
universities since their reform, and these kept up a decentralized network of
competition among some 20 centers. International sojourners in Germany had no
very central target, but wandered throughout the system. - Cohen-Solal (1987: 52–75); Biemel (1964). De Beauvoir’s pioneering feminist
work, The Second Sex (1949), comes at the height of the existentialist group’s fame
and its period of most intense political activity. Independent credit for creativity
goes only to those individuals who mark out a distinctive turf; de Beauvoir, who
had long contributed anonymously to the energy of the Sartre circle, now finds a
niche in which its themes of authenticity and rebellion can be applied without
forcing her into a break with her friends. Camus and Merleau-Ponty, by contrast,
find the path to independence only at the cost of splitting from the group. - This account is drawn from numerous sources (Boschetti, 1985: 88; Lacouture,
1975: 163–165; Lebesque, 1960: 165; Cohen-Solal, 1987: 111–116). Groethuysen,
originally Dutch, had studied under Dilthey at Berlin, and from the 1920s directed
Gallimard’s pacesetting literary magazine, Nouvelle Revue Française; he was an
intimate friend of the chief literary figures of the 1920s and 1930s, Gide and
Malraux, and acted as political-intellectual inspiration to the latter. It was the
Gallimard intellectuals who shaped Sartre’s path, turning the manuscript of his
first novel from a naturalistic shocker in the style of Céline, full of raw sexuality,
Notes to Pages 773–775^ •^1023