In the context of specifically literary theory and practice, this 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 seashore. 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’s answer is an unequivocal no, on the grounds that its perfection is merely accidental, a result of the play of contingent forces, whereas a condition of the aesthetic artifact is the conscious, ordering activity of the human mind and the human hand. The other example is Francis Ponge’s short, and deceptively simple, prose poem “Le galet” (“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 objectifying 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 stonelike 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 is a novel that would resemble the stone in its pure contingency, a novel so unself-conscious, 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 analyzed in terms of this program, are very open questions indeed.
It is nevertheless around a fantasy of this sort—a modernist reinvention of the ancient idea of mimesis—that a good deal of La nausée is organized. In the first place, what underlies it is precisely what in principle is entailed by Roquentin’s experience of nausea. The emotional symptoms and consequences of Roquentin’s moments of nausea—with the beach pebble, the beer glass, the tree root, and so forth—have been much discussed, generally in a philosophical context, and occasionally as representing less a philosophical outlook than a psychiatric condition. The 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.” 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 breakdown 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 storehouse of information, a source of messages we can confidently decode, as the place of an “inconsequential buzzing.”
Within this generalized dissolution of all human systems of ordering and representation, there is, however, one that comes in for particularly intensive 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—long, but worth quoting at length:
This is what I have been thinking: for the most commonplace 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 one go. … That’s living. But when you tell about life, everything changes; only it’s a change nobody notices: the proof of that is that people talk about true stories; events take place one way and we recount them the opposite way. … I wanted the moments of my life to follow one another in orderly fashion, like those of a life remembered. You might as well try to catch time by the tail.
The central emphasis of this way of looking at narrative lies in the opposition of two terms: “event” (événement) and “adventure” (aventure). Much has been made of this distinction, partly because of its relation to Sartre’s philosophical writings, partly because of its bearing on recurring problems of twentieth-century narrative theory. In fact, the point at issue is, on the surface at least, a relatively simple one. “Events” are what occur in real life; “adventures” are what occur in books (although they can also occur in real life to the extent that we model our lives on books). Events constitute free-floating, undetermined, discontinuous series of “happenings.” Adventures, on the other hand, are happenings converted into significant order, causal sequence, meaningful pattern; in brief, adventure equals event plus intelligibility. The intelligibility in question is basically of a temporal sort. Time, in the aspect of event, is time in its “everyday slackness,” where “days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason,” as “an endless monotonous addition.” The time of adventure, on the other hand, is time “caught by the tail.” It not only, according to the classic Aristotelian formula, has a beginning, a middle, and an end, portents and resolutions, anticipations and closures. Above all, it is time organized in function of a significant end, time organized teleologically. Narrative versions of experience occupy a structure wherein what comes before is determined by what comes after—in the world of story “the end is always there, transforming everything.” In story, everything is, so to speak, back to front: life as narrative is one that “unrolls backwards: the minut
es don’t pile up haphazardly one after another any more, they’re snapped by the story’s end which draws them toward it and makes each of them draw to it in its turn the moment that precedes it.”
In this conflation of remarks we can read the terms of Roquentin’s (and Sartre’s) critique of the presuppositions and procedures of narrative (this is also what principally caught Camus’s eye when he reviewed the novel for Alger Républicain, an attitude to storytelling that he would carry over into the writing of L’étranger, if in a less explicitly advertised fashion). Narrative (or adventure) imposes factitious order on the contingent disorder of experience; it makes artificial sense of what is inherently without sense; it attributes design and purpose to what is formless and superfluous. Stories, in brief, are an epistemological confidence trick. In itself, this set of propositions is hardly news—we can find a virtually identical set of ideas in, say, Gide’s notion of narrative as “forgery” or “counterfeiting,” not to mention a whole number of other sources (moreover, by no means confined to what is often assigned to the preserve of “modernism”). What gives Sartre’s version of this particular theme its particular edge, or sense of urgency, is that it is not limited to querying a purely epistemological order. Or rather, the epistemological doubts over the credentials of narrative are closely linked to considerations of a social and ideological character. Stories, as narrative orderings, are not just sources of error, they are also sources of dishonesty (or what Sartre calls “bad faith”). The fictions consecrated by fiction itself serve discredited utilitarian ends. For we do not simply recount or listen to “stories”; we perceive ourselves and others, we arrange our lives, construct our worlds according to their comfortable and comforting dispositions: “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.”
The life of Roquentin represents a concerted and anguished attempt to cast off the blandishments of story in order to face reality in its non-narrative “nakedness,” the “obscene nakedness” that appears before one’s eyes when the “veneer” of all human fictions has “melted.” The difficulty with this otherwise courageous project (if we accept the assumptions that lie behind it) is that Roquentin’s “life” is for us precisely a life recounted, directly in the form of the diary he keeps, indirectly as a “novel” written by Sartre. And the question, of course, is: How do we situate this story in relation to the devaluation of story proposed by Roquentin himself? What exactly is the status of this devaluation? Does the charge of bad faith refer only to a certain class of narratives (from which Sartre’s narrative is exempt on the grounds that it gives us something radically different from the traditional fare); or does it refer to all forms of storytelling, as a disposition inherent in narrative as such, or indeed, more broadly, to any kind of articulated account of the world? Is La nausée a book that remains faithful to the implications of “nausea”? Or are the terms of the argument such as to make that sort of claim a contradiction in terms? And, if the latter, to what extent does La nausée show an awareness of this paradox? One way of putting all these questions in a kind of shorthand would be to ask: Is La nausée “stone” or “story”? More precisely, does this set of alternative scenarios represent a set of realistic choices?
If we follow the implication of the stone metaphor (the idea of a novel free of bad faith, which surrenders itself to the world’s contingency), we will of course come up with something. We might point to the device of the story-that-crumbles: for instance, in the passage cited earlier, the story of the woman in Hamburg, Erna, reconstructed as “adventure” and then deconstructed back into “event,” the latter version cancelling out the presuppositions of the former. Also, there are the ways of handling time made possible by manipulating the conventions of the diary form: first, the sense of narrative indeterminacy in the undated “first” entry and, as already noted, the wonderfully suspended yet dismal future tense on which Roquentin’s manuscript closes (“Tomorrow it will rain over Bouville”); second, the frequent movements between tenses, in a manner that suggests a certain merging of narrated and narrating time, as in the Paris restaurant episode: “When I felt tired I came into this café and fell asleep. The waiter has just woken me up, and I am writing this while I am half-asleep. Tomorrow I shall go back to Bouville.” This strategy of shifting temporal perspective is evidently designed to evoke a life as it is being lived. Instead of that commanding narrative preterite of classic fiction whereby, in Roland Barthes’s phrase, life is converted into “destiny” (a cognate of Sartre’s aventure), here we see an attempt to match the rhythms of writing to the texture of existential reality itself—in which past, present, and future, along with memory, experience, and project are not allowed to settle down into some prearranged design.
Finally, we could cite certain critical experiences with and in language: the famous incident connected with the tree root in the public garden, where that primary instrument of differentiation and classification, the principle of naming, breaks down; in Roquentin’s words, “things have broken away from their names … I am in the midst of Things that cannot be given names” (a foretaste of the crazed, endlessly defeated attempt to name in Beckett’s L’innommable). The implication is that, stripped of the human and humanizing labels that language confers, things appear before Roquentin in their original ontological condition of pure contingency. A similar implication could be drawn from the various hallucinated sequences of La nausée (for example, the episode where Roquentin roams the streets in a semi-demented state after having read the newspaper item about the raped and strangled girl); in the interpenetration of fact and fantasy, what comes under pressure is syntax itself: the sentences both proliferate and disintegrate at the same time, in a wild interchange of subjects and predicates, no longer capable of holding together that system of identity and difference from which alone the consolations of intelligible reality can be had.
These, then, would be so many marks of a narrative trying to escape from the bad faith of traditional story, in search of a new kind of narrative authenticity. But it is precisely here that we encounter all the critical paradoxes of which I have already spoken. The features I have listed may be deemed “figures” in the effort to dramatize the senselessness of existence, but they are not themselves senseless. They make sense, if only of that senselessness, in the same way that to talk of the unnameability of objects is still to name them (if only as the “unnameable”—the paradox around which Beckett’s L’innommable endlessly circulates). That is, the linguistic and literary apparatus of La nausée is not like the pebble on the beach picked up by Roquentin or by Valéry’s Socrates; its elements are not random and contingent, but the product of human choices made within a uniquely human medium. They are “devices” (in the strong sense given to the term by the Russian Formalists) designed to create certain impressions and effects, not the random outcomes of natural forces. One intended impression is of course what it is like to experience the world as pure contingency, but they are not themselves contingent. On the contrary, they are items in a rhetorical and narrative repertoire, as indeed is everything else in La nausée. Perhaps one could make the nature of the paradox a little clearer by returning to that aspect of the text with which I began: the use of metaphor.
For a text whose presuppositions would seem to demand the systematic elimination of metaphor, it is perhaps surprising that La nausée is absolutely saturated in it. What, for example, are we to make of bits of newspaper described as “sedate as swans,” or Adolphe’s braces possessing a “sheep-like stubbornness”? Is this simply Sartre, as Robbe-Grillet would have it, being unreflectingly guilty of the very anthropomorphism that his own argument would require him to refuse? One rather sophisticated account of Sartre’s metaphors (Fredric Jameson’s) advances the view that Sartrian metaphor is really “false metaphor.” By this is meant a process of exaggeration whereby the traditional cl
aims and implications of metaphorical representation are undermined; through the use of hyperbole, willfully exaggerated or excessive metaphorical development, Sartre decomposes metaphor; through its very excess, metaphor announces itself as metaphor, a literary construct whose very literariness is the mark of its distance from reality. The classic example is the elaborate figurative structure built around the episode of the tree root: “… that long dead snake at my feet, that wooden snake. Snake, claw or root, it doesn’t matter … that big rugged paw … that hard, compact sea-lion skin … a small black pool at my feet … a greedy claw, tearing the earth, snatching its food from it.”
Metaphor, in this context, is “false” in so far as our expectations of its expressive power are constantly defeated; the figures are dramatic yet impotent, a series of figures in which one displaces the others, yet where all, individually or collectively, circle around what they can never express. It is the dance of figurative language around an absence—the existential reality of the root (its “superfluity”) on which metaphorical discourse (or indeed any linguistic form at all) can never gain purchase. This is an interesting argument, and it does help to make sense of some of Sartre’s more baroque inventions. It does, however, have an unwarranted implication. In this view, metaphorical excess in La nausée not only leads us to posit a reality “beyond” metaphor (beyond the humanizing appropriations of language), it also creates the possibility of passing through that excess into direct contact with reality itself; metaphor, undone, gives the occasion for transforming absence into presence. Thus, in the example of the root, “beyond” its diverse figurative representations, so baroque as to blow up in our faces, we “somehow” (Jameson’s word) sense the reality of the root as a pure physical substance. This, however, will not do (as the implied unease of the impressionistic “somehow” itself indicates). Neither in Sartrian metaphor, nor in any other, is there a “beyond” to which the text gives us access. The metaphor is the space and ground of our activity as readers; we are held within the metaphorical play of the text because there is nowhere else for us to go, except perhaps toward silence. To take the central, most extended example of the text, as readers we can know what is entailed by the experience of “nausea” only by being told what it is like—that is, through a set of metaphorical representations of which the key term is, precisely, “nausea” itself. La nausée doesn’t give us nausea (unless we happen very violently to take against it); it gives us “Nausea,” an abstraction as metaphor and hence as the representation of an experience rather than the experience itself.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 73