Factory Journal by Simone Weil

First published: “Expérience de la vie d’usine,” 1942 (English translation, 1987)

Type of work: Diary

Time of work: 1934

Locale: Paris

Principal Personage:

• Simone Weil, a writer and mystic

Form and Content

In December of 1934, the French writer Simone Weil, teacher, scholar, political activist, and advocate for the underprivileged, was engaged as an unskilled laborer in the Alsthom factory, a plant near Paris that manufactured equipment for subways and streetcars. For the next several months, she worked at Alsthom, Carnaud, and Renault. This frail young woman’s activities and impressions were recorded in an unedited diary which became the source for several more polished but less graphic writings on factory life. The factory experience had a profound effect on Weil both as a political and social thinker and as one who sought a higher, more spiritual meaning for life. The undertaking made her tougher intellectually but more compassionate. Whether she set out merely to work as a participant-observer to gain insight into the culture of the proletariat, Weil found the working conditions dangerous, brutal, and absorbing. The resulting diary was not a political-sociological statement but a cry of empathetic identification. Weil found herself humiliated and enslaved: “Slavery has made me entirely lose the feeling of having any rights.” As a child, Weil had expressed sympathy for the poor; now, at the age of twenty-six, she saw herself as one with them.

The journal consists of about seventy pages of dated entries. Her brief comments are factual, almost painful, descriptions of her encounters with workers and machines. Weil details her attempts to make premium, to complete her pieces in the allotted time. Her efforts are unsuccessful and futile, and yet her rendition goes beyond pathos and takes on a tragic quality.

The journal contains her observations of the dehumanizing aspects of factory life and her suggested solutions to some of the greater problems. Because of her exhaustion and weakness, the diary entries are sparse, uneven, and focused on the practical and immediate. As a result of the simple harshness of the log, the author’s philosophical musings stand out. Rather than appearing as an observer or student of the worker and suffering poor, she constructs the journal in such a way that she becomes part of them. This transformation is accomplished by a purification of language explaining precisely what is taking place and how it affects her, the novice employee.

Though brief, the journal conveys an elemental message, as if the author found herself in a strange setting where only the most basic human qualities mattered. In such a place, she notes the uplifting effect of a smile or a considerate word. She will never forget, she writes, the foreman who took the time to be kind to her. Her entries show a deep interest and concern for the workers around her, and her jottings speak volumes about their lives.

“Factory Journal” records seemingly endless workdays which marked the author for life. Later, in the essay “Factory Work,” Weil wrote that she had perceived “the root of evil,” seeing that “things play the role of men, men the role of things.”

Critical Context

Weil’s assertion that submission and toil may become redemptive is similar to the moral of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s portrayal of forced labor found in his book Odin den Ivana Denisovicha (1962; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1963). Circumstances and setting differ, but both authors have placed the universal into the work scene. Nevertheless, “Factory Journal” would be better compared to Blaise Pascal’s masterpiece Pensees (1670; English translation, 1688); indeed, there are similarities in the unpolished notebook styles. To compare the jottings of the inexperienced Weil with those of the mathematical genius and mystic, however, is hardly reasonable. Nevertheless, Simone Weil has much in common with Pascal, as her later writings make clear. Like the earlier Frenchman, she sought the highest in a solitary quest. She also would wait upon the “fire divine,” which Pascal struggled to put into words in his account of a consuming mystical moment.

Simone Weil did not write great or epic literature, and the ideas expressed in her notebooks and essays are often paradoxical, contradictory, and unfinished. Consequently, critics have attempted to analyze her rather than her writings. Alfred Kazin’s interest, for example, was in the manner and direction of her life. Because some suspected the odor of sanctity around her life, there have been few neutral reactions to her. She has been measured by the highest expectations, primarily because she set herself forth as a chosen one. Albert Camus observed that she was the only great spirit of his times, while Kenneth Rexroth saw her life as “unholy folly.” Simone Weil had defined herself as a product of three traditions, Greek, French, and Catholic, and Catholic writers, especially those attracted toward a darker, or Manichaean, view of life, have seen her as a jewel. Czeslaw Milosz saw her as a “rare gift to the contemporary world,” but even those attracted to her have been troubled by a perceived arrogance (Graham Greene) or self-indulgence (T. S. Eliot). Hans Meyerhoff wrote about her denunciation of the influence of Israel on religious purity, finding it anti-Semitic; yet Elizabeth Jennings observed that Weil’s Jewishness was the most important thing in her life. Some critics have been troubled by Weil’s emphasis on suffering, and they have asked whether her own sense of affliction was indulgent or insincere. These are precisely the type of questions asked about anyone who has come close to the special province of the saintly.

Once critics point to the Frenchwoman’s lack of consistency and her hyperbolized logic, the central issue becomes her motivation and audacity. If she was a neurotic, death-seeking zealot, as some claim, her notebooks would be only interesting and “Factory Journal” would serve as a rather remarkable glance into the depersonalized milieu of the factory. If, one the other hand, her quest for spiritual meaning and social restructuring was authentic and marked by unusual sincerity, she must be seen in the light of a writer who could alter the mindset of her readers.

Critics have had difficulty labeling this woman, this heretic and Christian and Jew; she has been called both “left wing” and “right wing,” both radical and conservative. Nevertheless, Simone Weil had the ability to attract and speak directly to readers, both the common and the scholarly. The reason for this is found in the simplicity of her language and the profundity of her subjects. She wrote on great issues, speaking to those who travel, intellectually at least, on similar paths. That readers react so strongly to her is an indication of her power.

Bibliography

Coles, Robert. Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1987. An accessible biography that also deals with Weil’s hunger strike and her attitudes toward Christianity, Judaism, and Marxism.

Pétrement, Simone. Simone Weil: A Life. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976. An excellent biography for the leisurely reader, this book contains interviews and reminiscences of people who knew Simone Weil; a well-guided introduction to the writer’s work and thought.

Weil, Simone. Formative Writings, 1929-1941. Edited and translated by Dorothy Tuck McFarland and Wilhelmina Van Ness. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. A compilation of five early essays by Weil, newly translated from French into English, including “Factory Journal,” this edition presents Weil’s political and social activism in the context of her philosophical outlook.

Weil, Simone. The Simone Weil Reader. Edited by George A. Panichas. New York: McKay, 1977. An excellent anthology of important writings by Weil on a variety of topics; contains the later companion piece to “Factory Journal” called “Factory Work.”

White, George Abbott, ed. Simone Weil: Interpretations of a Life. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. A collection of ten critical essays on Weil’s works and life, including an essay on her work experience in factories and on farms.