Les Belles Images, "The Pretty Pictures": the title is ironic. It tells us that Simone de Beauvoir intends her novel to be a criticism of idealism. Less obviously, it refers to a Sartrian conception of the image which we need to understand if we are to grasp the full significance of the novel. The "pretty pictures" from which it takes its title refer not to the mental images of classical psychology but to an "attitude of absence" or a flight from everyday existence. The narrative technique used in this novel seems particularly adapted to its subject, which is the séparation made by the narrator's consciousness between the real and the imaginary. The language plays on metaphors dealing with various forms of pictures: posters, reflections in mirrors, television screens, photographs, films, kaleidoscopes, frescoes. More interesting still is the fact that not only is the narrator's own speech such as to disintegrate the "pretty pictures" which, in her immediate surroundings, take the place of reality, but it also makes what is real insubstantial, it brings about a désubstantification of the real.
In this book it is no longer a question, as in the earlier novels of Simone de Beauvoir, Les Mandarins, for example, of bringing a heroine to an awareness of the emptiness of her existence and of her separation from the apparently justified existence of others. On the contrary, now it is in the lives of her relatives that the narrator and leading character, Laurence, has to discover emptiness and unauthenticity. More exactly, she is led to realize the "unreality" of the reality around her. This demands of her a sense of the true and the false, a sense which cannot come to her from any rational evidence.
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