[One] of the principal questions of Les Mandarins is whether or not literature is possible for the politically committed writer. (pp. 177-78)

[It] was Simone de Beauvoir who discovered alienation as the specific anguish of the French writer during the years of the Algerian Revolution. As the number of massacres and tortures mounted in the mid-fifties, she was to experience for the first time the sense of being an exile in one's own land…. (p. 178)

The question of what possibilities are open to the writer … before the advent of a society in permanent revolution, is … explored by Simone de Beauvoir in Les Mandarins. Reflecting the increasing sense of loss and isolation felt by the intellectual left as the post-war years slipped into the Cold War era, her novel strikes a note of cynicism…. Perhaps the most somber moment of the book occurs when the two writers, Henri and Dubreuilh, confront together the decay of their own intellectual and political integrity in the face of a morally bankrupt society. Henri's surprising confession to Dubreuilh of the false testimony he bore in favor of his girlfriend, who had indulged in sexual fraternization with a German during the war, and Dubreuilh's even more surprising casual acceptance of it leave the reader with a shocked hopelessness: if a society reaches a certain degree of political sloth and corruption, there may no longer exist a "real" much less a "virtual" public, and the writer may indeed have no role to play at all. (p. 179)

We find in Les Mandarins … a whole spectrum of attitudes toward literature. On one end is Dubreuilh, with his desire to replace literature by politics, whose world had fallen apart at the Liberation, when the political and intellectual realms began to diverge. Not knowing how to deal with the new situation, he has decided that any book he would write would be either "harmful" or "insignificant." On the other end we find the irremediably bourgeois Lambert, who, although he too is having trouble in writing, would ultimately not reject an "insignificant" literature redeemed by style…. In the middle is Henri, who oscillates between Dubreuilh's pessimism and his own genuine enthusiasm for the idea of writing another novel. Interestingly enough it is Dubreuilh who encourages Henri to continue writing novels, as if he were attempting vicariously to revive his own interest. He is also concerned with the political consequences of possible paths for literature of the left. On the one hand he cautions Henri against a literature of pure propaganda; on the other, he voices fear that if the left fails to produce, literature of the right will eclipse it. The esthetic he proposes seems to approach Sartre's idea of literature as a "recuperation of the world." The fictional universe is at once alive, rich, and modifiable…. (p. 180)

It would seem that Simone de Beauvoir continued this debate with herself, for we find toward the end of the third volume of her memoirs a particularly embittered reflection on the impasse reached by French literature since the end of World War II. Worn out by the political and moral turmoil of the Algerian war, she states that literature—and especially that of her own country—provided her then with nothing…. [How] can the novel be saved from "insignificance" without resorting to the stratagems of a Lambert or of the nouveau roman?

The answer to a large extent depends on the experience and utilization of alienation by the writer. (pp. 180-81)

Simone de Beauvoir, who came of political age after the war, experienced alienation predominantly as negativity, contestation by a minority, with whom she did feel solidarity, of the power of the collectivity. She may have experienced briefly, at the Liberation, [a] positive sense of being French. But as she was to view the oppressive force during the Algerian war period as coming from within the collectivity itself, she was to feel with growing regret how deeply she was not French. Because the solidarity of the left began to crumble almost immediately after the Second World War, Sartre's vision of the "public" was progressively undermined, and his and Simone de Beauvoir's increasingly bleak views on literature converged. Sartre's concept of a committed literature is based on the assumption that the real and virtual publics exist. If they are found wanting, does the whole theory collapse? Not necessarily, but the question becomes one of priorities. The public must then be created, and the road to realization of this goal would seem to be political, not literary. The overwhelming vote cast for de Gaulle in the 1958 referendum served only to confirm for Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir the urgent necessity of according priority to political writing and activity. (p. 181)