Fanon, Frantz. Les damnés de la terre. Paris: Seuil, 1961.
——. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil, 1952.
Memmi, Albert. Portrait du colonisé (suivi de Portrait du colonisateur). Paris: Gallimard, 1957.
Perse, Saint-John. Eloges. In Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade), 1975.
All of Césaire’s plays and poetry collections are readily available in paperback editions, published either by Présence Africaine or Editions du Seuil. His “complete works” were somewhat prematurely collected by the Caribbean publisher Desormeaux in 1976. The still-definitive English translation of the poetry is Clayton Eshleman and Annette J. Smith, eds. and trans., Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). A French publisher brought out a fine edition of the collected volumes of the cultural review Tropiques (1941–45), for which Césaire himself wrote on occasion (Tropiques [Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1978]). His two most important essays in this collection are (with René Ménil), “Introduction au folklore martiniquais” (in Tropiques 4 [1942]) and “Poésie et connaissance” (in Tropiques 12 [1945]). The English translation of his play Une saison au Congo, mentioned in the text, is A Season in the Congo, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (City: Seagull Press, 2005). The complete poetry has been collected in La poésie, ed. Daniel Maximin and Ernstpeter Ruhe (Paris: Seuil, 1994).
Among the many excellent studies of Césaire’s work (apart from studies of individual works, such as Dominique Combe, Aimé Césaire: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993]) are A. James Arnold, Modernism and Négritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Bernadette Cailler, Proposition poétique: Une lecture de l’œuvre d’Aimé Césaire (Sherbrooke: Naaman, 1976; Paris: Nouvelles du Sud, 2000); Lilyan Kesteloot, Aimé Césaire (Paris: Seghers, 1979); Annie Lebrun, Pour Aimé Césaire (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1994); Jacqueline Leiner, Aimé Césaire: Le terreau primordial (Tübingen: G. Narr, 1993); Clément Mbom, Le théâtre d’Aimé Césaire ou La primauté de l’univesalité humaine (Paris: Nathan, 1979); and Ronnie Scharfman, Engagement and the Language of the Subject in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1987). Although some of these studies might appear dated, they provide essential insight into how Césaire’s literary work was received and into its wide impact.
Other very important approaches include a chapter in Edouard Glissant, L’intention poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1969); Raphaël Confiant’s book (listed above); Françoise Vergès’s “postcolonial reading of Aimé Césaire,” which follows the transcript of her conversations with Césaire in Aimé Césaire, Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai: Entretiens avec Françoise Vergès (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005); and Romuald Fonkoua, Aimé Césaire 1913–2008 (Paris: Editions Perrin, 2010), a critical biography. There have also been several collective volumes, including Roger Toumson and J. Leiner, Aimé Césaire: Du singulier à l’universel (Œuvres et Critiques 19, no. 2 [1994]). Perhaps one of the most telling accounts of Césaire’s influence is Césaire et nous: Une rencontre entre l’Afrique et les Amériques au XXIe siècle (Abidjan: Cauris, 2004) in which a most cosmopolitan constellation of writers, critics, and artists describe what Césaire’s writing has meant to them. It is based on a gathering held in Bamako to mark the writer’s ninetieth birthday. The centenary of Césaire’s birth will no doubt result in a number of remarkable reassessments of the importance and impact of his work.
Sartre’s La nausée and the Modern Novel
CHRISTOPHER PRENDERGAST
“Shrove Tuesday” (Mardi gras) is the heading of one of the entries in the diary of the fictional character, Antoine Roquentin, who is also the first-person narrator of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, La nausée, first published in 1938.1 However, to call it a “novel,” as did Sartre himself, is to beg a question or two, or at the very least to open questions of some import for the history of the modern French novel. First-person fiction in French has of course a long pedigree, directly connected to the invention of modern “interiority.” Although the relevant history runs back at least to the later seventeenth century, the principal literary context that matters here is that of the Romantic period and the nineteenth-century subgenre known as the roman personnel, whose main practitioners were Sénancour, Chateaubriand, Constant, Musset, Sainte-Beuve, Nerval, and Fromentin. This narrative type displayed an introspective structure of varying complexity. Some of them are “frame” narratives (drawing on the earlier eighteenth-century “memoir” novel, the most famous example being Prévost’s Manon Lescaut), with the first-person story embedded in a surrounding third-person framework that serves—not always so convincingly—as a skeptical corrective to the excesses of pure inwardness. One thing that these fictions have in common, however, is that they are all securely located in the perspective traditionally available to narrative: the retrospective view, looking back on a past completed (and generally withered); retrospection and introspection come together as if they were natural twins in the staging of the Romantic self’s surveys of its own interior landscape.
In the early twentieth century, both André Gide (in L’immoraliste) and, above all, Marcel Proust (in A la recherche du temps perdu) take first-person narrative and the exploration of subjectivity into new places but without abandoning the position of retrospect. Gide would use the diary—the “journal d’Edouard”—in his novel Les faux-monnayeurs as a component of it, but that too has many precedents and is not the same as casting a novel entirely as a journal. Like Sartre’s novel, Les faux-monnayeurs ends with a diary note that opens to an indeterminate future (“Je suis bien curieux de connaître Caloub” [I’m very curious to know Caloub] is its final sentence), but for the most part the experimental work of the novel remains subject to the laws of retrospect. In adopting the diary form, Sartre abandons—or at least appears to abandon (everything is in that “appears”)—the luxury of hindsight knowledge. The entry headed “Shrove Tuesday” installs hero, narrator, and reader in an irreducible “now,” blind to an unknown future and severed from the past (in his essay on John Dos Passos, Sartre claimed that the novel, even when written in the past tense, inhabits a permanent present), a work open to the sheer contingency of existence. A few years later, Albert Camus would reach for a similar effect of blank detachment from the imposing authority of narrative in the famous (and, for the translator, challenging) first sentences of L’étranger: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas” (Today, maman died. Or perhaps yesterday, I don’t know).2 In his review of L’étranger, Sartre expressed his admiration of this effect, singling out for special praise Camus’s use of the passé composé (Camus had already bestowed a large and genuine compliment on La nausée in his own review of the novel for Alger Républicain).
The diary form of writing would be used by others, including Simone de Beauvoir in her three-part tale, La femme rompue, in a manner designed to expose a rawness of experience that is the exact opposite of emotion recollected in tranquillity. But there is something special to the affinity of Sartre and Camus here. It marks a historical conjuncture, the one routinely expressed by the conjunction in the formula Sartre and Camus. That relation was to give way eventually to Sartre versus Camus, the moment of one of the most spectacular ruptures in postwar intellectual history. The interpretation and evaluation of that quarrel—centered on the general question of political violence, and more particularly, Soviet communism and later the Algerian War of Independence—have shifted over time and continue to this day (if, alas, with a tendency to sacrifice serious analysis to journalistic flourish). But, certainly from the point of view of twentieth-century literary history, the conjunction “and” is by far the more important term. The pairing is exemplary and involves a whole journey in the search for various answers, both theoretical and practical, to the question that was to furnish the title of a collection of essays by Sartre, What Is Literature? The most interestin
g (if not always successful) answers were not the essayistic ones, but the various attempts, in the genres of drama and narrative, to mold literary practice to the pressures of the historical moment. The plays of Sartre and Camus explored the problem of “action” as the relation of conventions of dramatic action to the urgencies of political, especially revolutionary, action (Les mains sales and Les justes). The latter also belongs with Camus’s attempts to imagine a “future” for tragedy (as outlined in his Athens lecture “The Future of Tragedy”), as did Sartre’s adaptation of Greek tragedy in his wartime play, Les mouches and later in the play Le diable et le bon Dieu. Politics was also at the heart of much of the narrative fiction, for example, Sartre’s trilogy, Les chemins de la liberté and Camus’s allegory of the Nazi occupation, La peste. But what above all remains for us of the umbilical phenomenon Sartre and Camus is the moment of La nausée and L’étranger, the former the big brother of the two, if only by virtue of precedence (Camus’s novel was published four years after the publication of La nausée).
Seminal works, each raises questions about “literature” and “life,” and their often contradictory and paradoxical relationship. In these terms, Sartre’s novel is the more important, not only by virtue of chronological precedence, but also because its address of this paradoxical relationship and its implications is the more focused and sustained of the two (this does not mean it is the “better” novel, a pointless ranking game). One way into this unsettling space is to return to the “Shrove Tuesday” entry in La nausée, with reference to a particular literary detail (the devil is in the detail, as they say, and he certainly is here). The entry 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 Barres. From this 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, and then from the French, since the connotations of the key term of the original are not adequately caught by the translation.
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.
(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 coeurs de sombres petites marées. Moi, je ne sais pas profiter de l’occasion: je vais au hasard, vide et calme, sous ce ciel inutilisé.)
The passage contrasts two attitudes to the sky, Anny’s and Roquentin’s. Anny’s gesture, as imagined by Roquentin, would be of an appropriating sort, domesticating the natural world in the attempt to make it conform to a literary model—the model of the “moment parfait,” which is taken over more or less wholesale from the “privileged moments” in 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 pictures of Proust’s fictional painter, Elstir, for which in turn—in a closed circular movement—his narrator seeks to provide a literary version (in Proust’s novel Elstir’s paintings are explicitly described as “metaphorical”).
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 that 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 was to be 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 the novel revolve. La nausée is a book that affirms the valuelessness of books, on the grounds that they furnish the stereotyped formulas 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 early in the novel, with the implication that the “knowledge” in question is entirely specious and that we would do better to dispense with it 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 postwar 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 parodied in Boris Vian’s very funny novel, L’écume 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 the 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 signposts 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 inquiry that seeks to relate the novel to the philosophical themes (largely of the phenomenological and existentialist sort) engaging Sartre’s attention at the time, and that would issue in what for many is Sartre’s magnum opus, L’être et le néant. This approach does, in fact, yield a set of potentially interesting questions. They have to do with whether or not the central emphases of the philosophical endeavor are of a kind that actively command—or, conversely, militate against—a literary mode of expression: for example, the drive toward “narrative” in L’être et le néant arising from the detailed phenomenological descriptions of behavior that Sartre explicitly posits as methodologically crucial to the enterprise of philosophy as such. Conversely, an argument can be made that there is a fundamental tension 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 recognize as a narrative structure. These again are matters for later. The point 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 ideas. The terms of such discussion effectively reduce the text of the novel to purely illustrative status—to being, as it were, the handmaiden of another order of discourse—and hence give no framework for addressing the far more interesting question: its status as a work of fiction.
From this lat
ter point of view, the date 1938 is a significant one in terms of twentieth-century literary history. La nausée stands roughly halfway between those forms of narrative experiment that, in France, we associate largely with the names of Proust and Gide, and those that later emerged under the collective, if essentially polemical, heading of the nouveau roman. The date marks the place of La nausée as a point of transition in the developing entry of the novel into what Nathalie Sarraute called its “era of suspicion,” the moment of a loss of faith in the paradigms of knowledge and understanding that the novel allegedly has reflected and sustained. As an object of “suspicion,” the novel can no longer be taken for granted as an instrument of discovery in the way it was for Balzac when he said of his own project, the Comédie humaine, that it gave supreme access to the sens caché (hidden meaning) of reality. In brief, the novel is no longer a reliable guide to anything, except perhaps—another paradox of course—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 skeptical paradigm, and the multiple paradoxes the paradigm generates, is ambiguous.
In this connection, let us consider another Sartrian metaphor, or more accurately, an analogy. Sartre once remarked that a great novel would be, inter alia, like a stone. That might not sound like a terribly promising basis on which to found a new narrative program; indeed, it might not seem to be anything we can make sense of at all. We might, however, recall 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 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”). More emphatically, he comes to see his own existence as a stone or at least as stonelike (“I existed like a stone”). Stone also provides the decisive element in Camus’s allegory of the absurd, his adaptation of the story of Sisyphus, whose perpetually defeated attempt to roll the boulder 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.
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