Sartre

Christina Howells

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317893806
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1996. This text provides an introduction to the historical and cultural context of Sartre and his work. It explores and explains the conflicting critical reactions to Sartre's work. A glossary of critical terms and cultural references provides background information.

1 CHRISTOPHER PRENDERGAST Of stones and stories: Sartre’s La Nausée*

This essay explicitly rejects phenomenological and existentialist interpretations of La Nausée in favour of an approach to the text as narrative. It situates the novel in the literary history of modernism, and explores its relationship to the problems and paradoxes generated by the self-consciousness and irony of the modern novel. An exemplary analysis of La Nausée as literature.

Shrove Tuesday (Mardi gras) is the heading of one of the entries in Roquentin’s diary. It begins with a nightmare in which Roquentin and two friends do something decidedly vulgar with a bunch of violets to the ultra-right-wing French writer Maurice Barrès. From this somewhat flamboyant beginning the episode shifts to more mundane matters: the receipt of a letter from his former mistress Anny, lunch at the restaurant in the rue des Horloges, leaving the restaurant to walk the streets of Bouville. The entry closes with the following passage. I shall quote it first of all from the English translation (as I shall most of the other passages for discussion), and then from the French, since the connotations of the key term of the original are not adequately caught by the translation.¹

The rain has stopped, the air is mild, the sky is slowly rolling along beautiful black pictures: this is more than enough to make a frame for the perfect moment; to reflect these pictures, Anny would cause dark little tides to be born in our hearts. But I don’t know how to take advantage of this opportunity: I wander along at random, calm and empty, under this wasted sky.

(p. 104)

La pluie a cessé, l’air est doux, le ciel roula lentement de belles images noires: c’est plus qu’il n’en faut pour faire le cadre d’un moment parfait; pour refléter ces images, Anny ferait naître dans nos cœurs de sombres petites marées. Moi, je ne sais pas profiter de l’occasion: je vais au hasard, vide et calme, sous ce ciel inutilisé.

(p. 103)

The passage contrasts two attitudes to the sky, that of Anny and that of Roquentin. Anny’s gesture, as imagined by Roquentin, would be of an appropriating sort, appropriating the natural world in the attempt to make it conform to a literary model – the model of the ‘moment parfait’, which is taken over wholesale from Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Anny’s transformed sky is a literary sky; it is infested with metaphor, the verbal equivalents of an attempted pictorial framing, not unlike the Proustian sky filtered through the forms of Elstir’s paintings, for which in turn – in a closed circular movement – the narrator seeks to provide a literary version. Roquentin’s sky is utterly different: it is merely vacant, it does not lend itself to metaphorical appropriations. It remains – this is the key term which the English ‘wasted’ does not adequately render – it remains ‘inutilisé’. There is however a difficulty here. The phrase ‘ciel inutilisé’ is itself metaphorical. The negative prefix is, of course, designed to refuse the consoling, emotionally utilitarian orderings of the natural world made available by metaphor. There is nevertheless a paradox: the paradox whereby Roquentin deploys metaphor to reject metaphor. I shall return at a later point, and in greater detail, to the particular question of metaphor in La Nausée (it is, by the way, the main theme of Robbe-Grillet’s criticism of Sartre’s novel). For the moment I simply want to use the example as an illustration of a more general paradox, for it is around this paradox that most of the interesting questions of La Nausée revolve. La Nausée is a book which affirms the valuelessness of books, on the grounds that they furnish the stereotyped formulae of inauthentic living; they give the forms and alibis of ways of living that, in the terms of Sartre’s existentialist morality, are manifestations of ‘bad faith’. ‘It seems to me as if everything I know about life I have learnt from books’, remarks Roquentin, with the implication that the ‘knowledge’ in question is entirely specious and, therefore, that which we would do better to dispense with altogether. Yet we, as readers, know about this claim only because Roquentin has noted it in his diary, or, more pertinently, because it appears in a book by Jean-Paul Sartre. Moreover, it is perhaps one of the nicer ironies of the subsequent destiny of La Nausée that this book, which loudly proclaims that we should not live our lives through books, was to become both myth and model for a whole post-war generation; the frequency with which intellectuals, and not only on the boulevards and in the cafés of Paris, were seized with bouts of contingency-sickness must certainly be ascribed in part to their having read La Nausée. (This aspect of the matter is, incidentally, parodied in Boris Vian’s very funny novel, L’Ecume des jours, where one of the characters displays a morbid enthusiasm for the writer Jean-Sol Partre, author of the influential novel, Le Vomi, and philosophical essay, Paradoxe sur le Dégeulis.)

The paradoxes thus proliferate in a variety of directions, and I shall come back at a later juncture to a few more. Their general form should, however, be clear, and indeed already familiar as one of the sign-posts in the landscape of the modern novel as a whole: they point to that paradoxical disposition of modern narrative to query or repudiate the genre of which it is itself a member. In this respect it is worth recalling the date of La Nausée’s publication: 1938. The significance of that date can be construed in a number of different ways. Perhaps the most familiar – although in many respects unsatisfactory – is the line of enquiry which seeks to relate La Nausée to the philosophical themes (largely of the phenomenological and existentialist sort) engaging Sartre’s attention at the time, and which were to issue in what for many is Sartre’s magnum opus, L’Etre et le néant. There is here in fact a set of potentially interesting questions. They have to do with whether or not the central emphases of the philosophical endeavour are of a kind that actively command, or conversely militate against, a literary mode of expression: for example, what we might call the drive towards ‘narrative’ in L’Etre et le néant arising from the detailed phenomenological descriptions of behaviour which Sartre explicitly posits as methodologically crucial to the enterprise of philosophy as such. On the other hand, there is the argument that there is a fundamental tension, or ‘dissonance’, between the claims of existentialist doctrine and the basic generic requirements of narrative: broadly, the incompatibility of, on the one hand, the existentialist proposition that the world is wholly contingent and the individual wholly free, and, on the other, the anticipatory and foreclosing operations vital to anything we might plausibly recognise as a narrative structure. These again are matters to which I shall return. The point I want to make here is a far more limited one: that it does not seem a particularly profitable exercise to discuss La Nausée, as it is so often discussed, as a fictionalized version of a series of philosophical themes; the terms of such discussion effectively reduce the text of La Nausée to purely instrumental status – to being, as it were, the handmaiden of another order of discourse – and hence give no framework for addressing the far more important question: its status as a work of fiction.

From this latter point of view the date 1938 is of some interest in terms of twentieth-century literary history. La Nausée stands roughly half-way between those forms of narrative experiment which, in France, we associate largely with the names of Proust and Gide, and those which later emerged under the collective if essentially polemical heading of the nouveau roman. Although I am not here concerned with tracing lines of influence, either backwards or forwards, the date of publication of La Nausée perhaps indicates its place as a point of transition in the developing entry of the novel into what Nathalie Sarraute has called its ‘age of suspicion’. That is, La Nausée is mapped out on an experience of what we might term a generalised epistemic anxiety, a loss of certainty in familiar paradigms of knowledge and understanding, and within which the novel itself, and the models of intelligibility it characteristically sustains, become a privileged object of ‘suspicion’. The novel can no longer be taken for granted as an instrument of discovery. Its hermeneutic credentials are no longer unproblematical in the way they were for Balzac when he said that the novel gave supreme access to the sens caché of reality. In brief, the novel is no longer a reliable guide to anything, except perhaps (if written in a certain way – what the French would nowadays call a ‘self-deconstructing’ way) as a guide to the absolute unreliability of everything. Sartre’s novel is centrally situated within this general problematic. Part of its specific interest however is that its precise location in these terms is somewhat uncertain. Its position with regard to the sceptical paradigm, and the multiple paradoxes the paradigm generates, is ambiguous. How La Nausée engages with this ambiguity, what kind of awareness it shows of its nature and implications, are what I chiefly want to talk about.

In this connection we might perhaps start by citing another Sartrean metaphor, or more accurately an analogy. Sartre once remarked that a great novel would be, inter alia, like a stone. That might not sound a terribly promising basis on which to found a new narrative programme; indeed, it might not seem to be anything we can make sense of at all. We might however recall here that stones (and their variants, pebbles, rocks, boulders) have enjoyed a rather vigorous symbolic life in a great deal of modern French thinking. It is, of course, central to La Nausée itself, in that Roquentin’s first experience of existential nausea comes when he picks up a pebble on the beach (‘that pebble’, he later reminisces, ‘the origin of this whole wretched business’). Elsewhere it provides the decisive element in Camus’ allegory of the Absurd, his adaptation of the story of Sisyphus, whose perpetually defeated attempt to roll the boulders up to the top of the mountain illustrates the permanent contradiction between the human desire for meaning and the world’s resistance to that desire (in the terms of La Nausée, the contradiction between the desire for ‘story’ and the anguish of ‘contingency’). In the context of specifically literary theory and practice, our stone or pebble turns up in at least two other important contexts. First, in the brilliant, though nowadays little read, imaginary Socratic dialogue by Valéry, Eupalinos. Valéry’s Socrates picks up a pebble while walking along the sea-shore. Washed for centuries by the sea, the pebble, in terms of smoothness and roundness, is perfect. The question it prompts is whether a perfection produced by the random forces of nature can properly be compared to the perfection of a work of art. Socrates’ answer is an emphatic ‘No’, on the grounds that its perfection is accidental, a result of the play of contingent forces, whereas a condition of the aesthetic artefact is the conscious, ordering activity of the human mind and the human hand. The other example I should like to note here is Francis Ponge’s short, and deceptively simple, prose poem, ‘Le Galet’ (or ‘Beach Pebble’). Ponge’s pebble is also perfect, but its status is ambiguous. It is not clear whether the real object of Ponge’s attention is the thing itself or the word galet which denotes it; his poem oscillates ambiguously and ironically between the referential and self-reflexive functions of language, apparently miming the material properties of the thing when in fact exploring, and playing with, the material properties of the word – not so much a naming of objects as an object-ifying of names. It is a deliberately cultivated, and in its implications wide-ranging, ambiguity, raising in its own low-key way the characteristic ‘modernist’ queries about the possibilities and constraints of the relation between language and reality.

Stones thus appear to get around quite a lot in the modern French literary consciousness. But Sartre’s novelistic stone or stone-like novel is quite different from either Valéry’s or Ponge’s respective pebbles. What Sartre has in mind is neither Ponge’s ambiguous interlacing of the referential and self-reflexive, nor Valéry’s rigorously classical insistence on the ordering power of imagination and convention. What Sartre envisages – it is in fact an extraordinarily naive version of a very naive traditional theory of mimesis – is a novel that would resemble the stone in its pure contingency, a novel so unselfconscious, so freed from artifice and convention, as to give us an unmediated image of the raw chaos of things, the world in its pure, meaningless ‘being-there’. It is, of course, fantasy. What such a novel might conceivably look like and, more pertinently, to what extent La Nausée can be intelligibly analysed in terms of this programme, are very open questions indeed.

It is nevertheless around a fantasy of this sort that a good deal of La Nausée is organised. In the first place, what underlies it is precisely what in principle is entailed by Roquentin’s experience of nausea. The symptoms and consequences of Roquentin’s moments of nausea – with the beach pebble, the beer glass, the tree root, etc. – have been much discussed, and I don’t propose to rehearse them in any detail here. Nor do I propose to discuss either their philosophical context (the existentialist theory of contingency) or the view that they represent less a philosophical outlook than a psychiatric condition; the recuperative implication of the latter view is that all Roquentin’s troubles could be adequately dealt with were he to see a good doctor – the riposte to which is given by La Nausée itself, in the figure of Dr Rogé, voice of Experience and Wisdom, whose wisdom consists in ‘always explaining the new by the old’. But, in the most general terms, Roquentin’s nausea is the symptomatic expression of the falling away of all familiar frames of reference. It entails the abolition of difference, the break-down of classification, the erasure of distinctions, in a process whereby identities fuse and merge to form a soft, gelatinous mess within which no structure of differentiation and intelligibility can any longer hold. In Roquentin’s words, nausea spells the disappearance of ‘the world of human measures’, the rubbing-out of the ‘feeble landmarks which men have traced on the surface [of things]’. Nausea is akin to an experience of ‘melting’: ‘The veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, in disorder – naked, with a frightening, obscene nakedness’. Or, in Roquentin’s aural metaphor, the world is not so much a store-house of information, a source of messages we can confidently decode, as the place of an ‘inconsequential buzzing’.

Within this generalised dissolution of all human systems of ordering and representation, there is however one that comes in for particularly heavy treatment: the system of narrative. ‘Stories’ (‘histoires’) are at once a prop and a mask; they support us, make our world habitable, by blinding us to the pure superfluity of existence, the unmotivated or (in Sartre’s slightly more moralistic way) ‘unjustifiable’ nature of our being-in-the-world. From this point of view the key passage in La Nausée is the following; it is a long one, but worth quoting at length:

This is what I have been thinking: for the most common-place event to become an adventure, you must – and this is all that is necessary – start recounting it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it. But you have to choose: to live or to recount. For example, when I was in Hamburg, with that Erna girl whom I didn’t trust and who was afraid of me, I led a peculiar sort of life. But I was inside it, I didn’t think about it. And then one evening, in a little café at St Pauli, she left me to go to the lavatory. I was left on my own, there was a gramophone playing Blue Skies. I started telling myself what had happened since I had landed. I said to myself: ‘On the third evening, as I was coming into a dance-hall called the Blue Grotto, I noticed a tall woman who was half-seas-over. And that woman is the one I am waiting for at this moment, listening to Blue Skies, and who is going to come back and sit down on my right and put her arms around my neck’. Then I had a violent feeling that I was having an adventure. But Erna came back, she sat down beside me, she put her arms around my neck, and I hated her without knowing why. I understand now: it was because I had to begin living again that the impression of having an adventure had just vanished. When you are living, nothing happens. The settings change, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are never any beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, it is an endless monotonous addition. … There isn’t any end either: you never leave a woman, a friend, a town in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Of stones and stories: Sartre’s La Nausée
• 2 La Nausée: ‘Une Autre Espèce de livre’
• 3 Sartre’s La Nausée: Fragment of an analytical reading
• 4 La Nausée and the question of closure
• 5 Politics and the private self in Sartre’s Les Chemins de la liberté
• 6 Crime: a floating signifier in Sartre’s Les Mouches
• 7 Huis clos: Distance and ambiguity
• 8 Reference vs repetition, or the predicament of the actor
• 9 The revolutionary hero revisited
• 10 Three methods in Sartre’s literary criticism
• 11 Applying the tourniquet: Sartre and punning
• 12 A parodic strategy – Sartre’s Les Mots
• 13 Philosophy and auto(bio)graphy: The exemplary case of Jean-Paul Sartre
• 14 The dialectic of narcissism
• 15 The staging of desire
• Glossary
• Notes on Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index