Putting it down to experience: ageing and the subject in Sartre, Munro and Coetzee

Abstract

This article will consider the kind of experience represented by old age, and whether we learn through this experience, or whether it falls outside our capacity or inclination to theorise and understand. It will look at ageing, and in particular ageing for women, through the lens of Sartrean philosophy – in relation to Sartre’s scepticism about gaining knowledge or character through simply living longer, and in relation to his position (endorsed by Simone de Beauvoir) that the body is no more than a necessary obstacle that might hamper our efforts to grasp the world (especially if we are women). In the light of the reflections on ageing and gender in Sartre and Beauvoir’s thought, it will use Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s model of the ‘midlife progress narrative’ to consider experience, knowledge and character in female ageing in the fiction of Alice Munro (‘Lichen’ [1985] and ‘Hold Me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass’ [1988]) and J.M. Coetzee (Elizabeth Costello [1999]).

Keywords:

• Experience
• ageing
• gender
• body
• realism
• Sartre
• Munro
• Coetzee

Notes

1. As Christina Howells has pointed out, Hazel Barnes translates infirme as ‘crippled’ but, in Howells’s words, ‘the sense is broader in French and includes, for example, the infirmity of old age’ (2009: 137; my emphasis).

2. Heike Hartung (2015) has looked at the way in which age functions in classic Bildungsromans, arguing that it already often disrupts the expectation of learning and progress there (especially when it manifests as illness), an argument I find persuasive but do not have the space to engage with here.

3. Samuel Johnson famously refuted Bishop Berkeley’s idea of non-existence of matter, the idea that the universe is ‘merely ideal’, in 1763 by kicking a stone and declaring: ‘I refute it thus’ (Boswell, 1935: I, 471; emphasis in original).