“Nausea,” in short, is a literary term, in a text for which something called “literature” is the problem. La nausée is one of Sartre’s (several) answers to the question “What is literature?”—an answer in the mode of radical skepticism vis-à-vis the function and value of literature. “I must beware of literature,” remarks Roquentin. The remark is programmatic, defining an entire stance toward the literary enterprise. But a paragraph later we find him musing, “the next day I felt as disgusted as if I had awoken in a bed full of vomit.” “Vomit” is another word for “nausea.” “I have no need to speak in flowery language,” notes Roquentin as he defines literature as an object of wariness (“I must beware”) or object of “suspicion.” “Vomit” is manifestly a case in point, the antithesis of the florid. But it is certainly literary, as is the whole of the texture of La nausée. For the reality of La nausée is that of literature and not of “existence.” Individual stories may crumble, but a general story is told (the life of Roquentin) in ways that do not massively offend our standard expectations of intelligibility. Time, in our ordinary experience of it, is certainly questioned, but equally certainly does not disappear. Metaphor may be made to behave in peculiar, self-deconstructing ways, but it still behaves as metaphor. Syntax, in both the strict grammatical sense and the looser sense of the syntax of narrative, may at certain junctures be threatened, but it never completely falls apart.
The main point in stating all this, however, is not to say that La nausée is a safe, traditional novel after all (an uninteresting, even foolish claim), but that, given the rigidities often found in the twentieth-century forms of the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, the general categories in question, though they may be equivocated, strained, and stretched in a variety of ways, cannot simply collapse. Without those properties, narrative would be what Roquentin describes the world as being: an “inconsequential buzzing.” That might be good existentialist ontology, but it is doubtful whether writing based on such a formula would retain our attention for very long. A text that was an “inconsequential buzzing” might be many things (it might, for instance, be in some way like a stone, a brute fact of nature), but it would not be a text. It should, of course, be clear where all this is leading us. If novels are written in bad faith, then, to some degree, they are necessarily so. As Frank Kermode argued in The Sense of an Ending, the truth of the world may be contingency, but it is not the truth or reality of narrative; for narrative to exist, it must possess, as constitutive conditions of its existence, properties that a contingency theory denies to the world.
One answer to such a dilemma would be to abolish narrative, or, more radically—since the extreme point of the argument touches language itself—to command silence. This is one of the alternatives of the choice starkly presented by Roquentin: “il faut vivre ou raconter” (you have to choose: to live or to recount). The choice is stark, and it confronts an entire strain of modern literature. But we have to be clear about which way Sartre here goes. He has chosen to recount, and so too will Roquentin, his exit from the novel being an entry into the literary vocation. Quite what we are to make of Roquentin’s decision to write is highly uncertain. There could be an intended irony here, an ironic back-reference to the figure for whom “literature” is the royal road to salvation, and whose own novel ends with its hero embarking on the writing of a novel that is (probably) the novel we have just read: Proust. Sartre’s irony would thus be anti-Proustian, and Roquentin’s turning to literature as a means of personal redemption would then be understood as the adoption of a regressive escape route, modeled on the apotheosis of the Proustian narrator, just as Anny’s (derided) philosophy is modeled on the Proustian epiphany of the “moment parfait.”
It could, on the other hand, be taken straight, implying Sartre’s belief in a form of literary consciousness and a literary practice situated beyond the infested realm of “bad faith.” One suspects that the latter implication is certainly the case; Sartre seems as committed to his hero’s vocabulary of “salvation” as Roquentin himself. This was one of Camus’s reservations in his review of the novel, seeing in it a new version of the “salvational” conception of literature, as that which might “justify” an existence (in a mocking echo of Descartes, he summarized it in the formula “I write, therefore I exist”). The difficulty lies in squaring the decision to write with the logic that informs Roquentin’s insistence that we must choose between the irreconcilables of “living” and “telling.” Indeed, the exact terms in which Roquentin evokes his literary project chime oddly with what he has earlier been at pains to stress: “Another kind of book. … The sort of story, for example, that could never happen, an adventure. …A book. A novel. …” “Story”? “Adventure”? “Novel”?—these, of course, are the very terms, reserved in the earlier assault on human fable-making for his utmost contempt, now reappearing as the main emphases of an affirmed and affirmative literary program, one that will “make people ashamed of their existence.”
But in what ways will this be “another kind of book,” different from the books he has previously denounced? A further difficulty here is that we are given very little detail as to what this program will in practice involve. The chief clue is through the analogy with the haunting jazz song “Some of These Days.” Yet, despite some metaphysical mutterings about transforming “existence” into “being,” the analogy is not particularly informative. What, then, makes it so special? In particular, why is the jazz melody attributed “redeeming” and “cleansing” powers, whereas the “consolation” Roquentin’s aunt derived from Chopin’s Preludes after her husband’s death merely fills him with disgust? What makes jazz authentic and Chopin fraudulent? There is also a further Proustian context here. Proust, a great admirer of Chopin, is also the creator of the fictional composer, Vinteuil, whose sonata and septet would prove so decisive in the aesthetic education of his narrator. “Some of These Days” looks like another ironic rejoinder to Proustian doctrine (and the drawing room world to which it belongs): cool, hip, demotic versus sophisticated, rarefied, elite.
In fact, the celebration of the jazz melody simply displaces, rather than resolves, the problem that confronts both Roquentin and the reader of La nausée: What does it mean to write? Does Roquentin’s project represent a way of overcoming the problematical disjunction between “recounting” and “living” without being caught in the morass of mauvaise foi? If so, what grounds does La nausée itself offer for us to be able to believe in this as a convincing possibility? On the other hand, if Roquentin’s projected book is the object of Sartre’s irony, what then are the implications of the ironic stance for the fact that Sartre himself has written a book? The problem, it will be seen, is entirely circular, its logical structure akin to the conundrum of the Cretan Liar paradox (a Cretan says all Cretans are liars; if true, then false). It is not, however, a question of shredding La nausée in the logic-chopping machine or of turning the circle into a noose with which to hang Sartre; that is ultimately a sterile game to play, and moreover, it can be played with very many modern writers indeed. The question bears less on the fact that La nausée is inescapably inscribed within paradox than on how much awareness it shows of its own paradoxical nature. Does it generate a level of self-reflexive monitoring large enough to make the critique of fictions it contains a full-fledged auto-critique? Is it a fiction that, in questioning the value of fictions, remains alert to its own fictive character? Or does it tacitly seek to proclaim itself as “another kind of book,” one that closes the gap between fiction and existence, language and thing, “story” and “stone”?
The latter, we have seen, is an impossible dream (it is also a very ancient one). It would be bizarre if Sartre, while seduced by the dream, were not also aware of its impossibility; indeed, the first section of La nausée itself virtually permits of no other conclusion. Yet it is not certain. La nausée hesitates over its relation to the paradoxes it inhabits. It is a novel that cannot quite make up its mind as to what it is, what it would l
ike to be, what it could be. It is emphatic (even moralistically so) in its rejections (seeking to sweep away a whole tradition of narrative as the debris of a bankrupt bourgeois culture). But it is unclear in its prescriptions, explicit or tacit. For many, the hesitation is fatally disabling, the sign of a fundamental incoherence. It is, however, equally arguable that its confusions are in some ways an exemplary illustration of the dilemmas of the modern novel; that, through those very confusions, it meets head-on, if somewhat awkwardly, the difficulties that the more sophisticated ironical cleverness of other novelists tends to elide (the self-conscious shading into the self-regarding). Sartre’s novel is anything but self-regarding, and it is historically decisive in taking us to where we still are—in the “era of suspicion.”
NOTES
1. The following is an adapted and expanded version of an essay that first appeared in Teaching the Text, ed. Susanne Kappeler and Norman Bryson (London: Routledge, 1983).
2. “Mother died today” is the usual translation, but there is a compelling argument for retaining the French “maman” as well the original word order: “Today, maman died.” This still leaves the yawning, and perhaps unbridgeable, gap between the grammar of “est morte” and “died.”
WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
Barthes, Roland. Le degré zéro de l’écriture. Paris: Gonthier, 1968.
Beauvoir, Simone de. La femme rompue. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.
Camus, Albert. L’étranger. In Théâtre, Récits, Nouvelles. Paris: Gallimard, 1962.
———. The Outsider. Translated by Joseph Laredo. London: Penguin, 1982.
———. “La nausée de Jean-Paul Sartre.” In Essais. Paris: Gallimard, 1965.
Field, Trevor. Form and Function in the Diary Novel. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989.
Jameson, Fredric. Sartre: The Origins of a Style. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961.
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.
Ponge, Francis. Le parti pris des choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1979.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Pour un nouveau roman. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963.
Sarraute, Nathalie. L’ère du soupçon: Essais sur le roman. Paris: Gallimard, 1956.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Explication de L’étranger” and “A propos de John Dos
Passos.” In Situations 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1947.
———. La Nausée. In Oeuvres romanesques. Paris: Gallimard, 1981.
———. Nausea. Translated by Robert Baldick. London: Penguin, 1965.
———. Qu’est-ce que la littérature? Paris: Gallimard, 1964.
Valéry, Paul. Eupalinos, ou l’architecte. Paris: Gallimard, 1924.
Vian, Boris. L’écume des jours. Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1965.
Beckett’s French Contexts
JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ
Usually, the question of deciding whether Samuel Beckett can be considered a “French writer” is solved by biographical explanations: The younger Beckett had absorbed too much English literature, and his first essays, stories and poems were too allusive, loaded with puns and arcane references, too self-consciously literary. In awe of his literary mentor James Joyce, to whom he owed the decision to become a creative writer instead of an academic, he upstaged the older Irish writer, who had started writing in a variety of idioms. French allowed Beckett to outgrow Joyce and forget his enormous influence. Writing in another language offered an exit, a path leading to a recognizable minimalism because French afforded the possibility of writing “without style.” The story has been told often. There is now a subsidiary industry within Beckett scholarship that is devoted to analyses of Beckett’s bilingualism, providing comparisons between French and English versions of the main works. While this is encouraging for the promotion of translation studies, the previous narrative can be questioned or complicated. Beckett’s decision to write in French cannot be divorced from two other questions: the broader question of modernism defined as an international category, which entails the absence of a clear parallelism between high modernism in the Anglo-Saxon domain, the marginal status of “modernism” in France, and the no less different status of modernism in Ireland. Then, there is the difficult problem of understanding “style” as a term that migrates between different languages and cultures but that is inevitably referred back to specific literary traditions. Beyond the generic pigeonholing, I will argue that the idea of “writing without style” was a very “French” preoccupation at the time when Beckett became a French writer.
Beckett is often considered a modernist, albeit with qualifications: a “late” modernist, according to Tyrus Miller, or the “last” modernist, according to Anthony Cronin. If we look at one of the best collections of essays dealing with the topic—Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska’s Modernism—we can see that Beckett occupies a special position. Anders Olsson’s chapter, “Exile and Literary Modernism,” gives pride of place to Beckett. Beckett is described as a “voluntary exile,” like Joyce, who moreover developed a “uniquely bilingual career as a writer entirely in exile.” Olsson analyzes Beckett’s constant effort to “disassociate himself from the land of his birth” intent upon using the French language “as a means to conquer a plain idiom in line with his reductive vision.” This entails a familiar story about losing in idiomatic freshness to gain something at another level: “Beckett’s new French narration is more purified, less connotative and witty than the earlier prose, a fact that makes it possible to claim that he loses something in order to gain something else.” I will return to this analysis to nuance it. What is more relevant is the fact that, within this same book, Beckett is not mentioned once in the chapter titled “French Literary Modernism,” by Kimberley Healey. In it, Healey is right to start by asserting that French modernism did not exist, and she presents a competent analysis of “modernity” as a specific French tradition that takes Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Lautréamont as its beacons. However, since Healey discusses the nouveau roman in terms of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, and Marguerite Duras, one would expect at least a passing reference to Beckett, who shared with them a publisher and important ideas. This omission testifies to a difficulty facing Beckett: he is not to be situated in Irish modernism, he is not a high modernist, and his bilingual status prevents him from being claimed as a French modernist.
Can Beckett escape completely from the confines of Irish modernism? Before arguing that Beckett can and should be considered a “French author,” one needs to see what his link with the Irish situation might be, even though this is a site that he is supposed to have abandoned. Here, one cannot avoid paying attention to the nagging problem of languages; Gaelic was not only a language to speak in, as for those who were advocating its return, but one to think and write in. This was a recurrent problem for the Irish “moderns.” When Irish authors like Yeats and Synge began “modernizing” themselves, they faced the issue of the lost native tongue, the idiom that many of them considered a backward “dialect,” especially when compared with the rest of European culture. The Irish predicament emerges clearly in an ironic account of early Irish modernism provided by George Moore, one of its main participants.
Moore had lived in Paris and knew the French scene intimately. In his autobiography, Hail and Farewell, Moore explains that Yeats happened to be stymied by writer’s block as he planned to revise stories published in magazines for his collection The Secret Rose, and was then hoping to transform one into a play. Moore, always obliging, worked on one story and found a solution. Yeats was not satisfied. Moore thought that Yeats was searching for the mot juste but then realized that Yeats was not looking for the right word but for the right language. Moore asked whether Yeats planned to write his stories in Irish. No, Yeats did not know any Irish. He was looking for a different language and a new style as well. Yeats explained that he wanted his stories to be understood by Sligo peasants. Moore suggested writing in brogue, the comical sort of Angl
o-Irish, which was rejected by Yeats. They compared the merits of dialects and major languages like Latin, English, and French, until their discussion led to an apparently absurd proposition: they would use three languages, English, French, and Gaelic, to attain what they wanted, after Moore had exclaimed: “I’d sooner write the play in French.” Yeats jumped on the idea and insisted that a detour through French would provide the solution to their linguistic dilemma. First, Moore would translate Yeats’s work into French. Moore continued, “Lady Gregory will translate your text into English. Taidgh O’Donoghue will translate the English text into Irish, and Lady Gregory will translate the Irish text back into English.” Moore went to France and sent Yeats a French version. His memoir quotes a few pages in French, which include dialogue like this:
A History of Modern French Literature Page 74