Beauvoir shaped Sartre’s fiction by pushing him toward plot and suspense

Evidence

Sartre’s fiction is not always sparkling; it varies. So does Beauvoir’s, but at her best she was a more natural fiction writer than he was. She took more care over plot and language, and she subordinated raw ideas to the play of character and event more readily. She was also good at spotting where Sartre went wrong. As he struggled with revisions of the Melancholia manuscript in the mid-1930s, she read his drafts and urged him to inject some of the suspense they enjoyed so much in films and detective stories. He obeyed. He also appropriated this principle as his own, remarking in an interview that he had tried to make the book a whodunnit in which the clues lead the reader towards the guilty party — which was (and this is no great spoiler) ‘contingency’. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 353

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the intellectual partnership dynamics that echo Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s philosophical complementarity discussed elsewhere; also relates to the reader’s interest in how literary form carries philosophical content. — connects to: Sartre and Beauvoir deliberately lived their philosophy of freedom in their relationship — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 50; Sartre layered multiple satirical targets into his story, borrowing from Beauvoir — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 516; Beauvoir deliberately concealed cases where she led Sartre intellectually — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 42

Broader Connections

• Sartre layered multiple satirical targets into his story, borrowing from Beauvoir #expands (0.85) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 516
• Beauvoir deliberately concealed cases where she led Sartre intellectually #expands (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 42