“I have no need to speak in flowery language. I am writing to understand certain circumstances. I must be aware of literature. I must let my pen run on, without searching for words”. In Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938) the existential philosophy, which aims at the definition of the self in face of life’s contingency, also takes the form of fictional critique. The novel can be read as part of Sartre’s invective on organic textual constructions, opposing itself to some elements that configure the fundaments of a romantic realism, like normative language, plot linearity and end-driven narratives.
The project of dismantling of the organic narrative by the avant-garde constituted an attack on the institutionalised object of art; except that in Nausea this aspect seems to have been cast aside in detriment of Sartre’s politico-philosophical system. Antoine Roquentin’s diary is the medium through which Sartre embodies his theories of existential angst, but it can also be seen as an attempt at breaking down the walls that restricted the realist conception of novel. However, in this aesthetic undertaking, Sartre seems to have succeed only partially; yet, his work represents an important step in the foundation of the avant-gardiste movement, and made way for more radical ruptures that were to come about later.
If in relation to its content Nausea points to the end of adventures, and to the impossibilities of narrating stories, these instances do not get to be materialised in the form, which still obeys a sense of memory and orderly progression. The colloquial choice of language and “innovative” use of the diary artifice, in order to bring the narrative to the experiential first person point of view, avoiding unwanted verbal tenses; still conforms to the conventionality of being a day-by-day report of facts, which submits the work to novelistic conventionalities of temporal landmarks. If in the content level the character’s world is disintegrating, in its structure, Nausea is still very much compromised with the pretences of a referential world and the customs of the traditional novel. As I will try to show, a broader rupture, in the direction of a genuine dismantling in the idea of stable narration, is only to be made by the time Beckett writes Molloy (1950)[1].
Nausea embarks on the thoughts and feelings of Antoine Roquentin, a 30 years old man, who has been dwelling on a French village by the sea (an imaginary town named Bouville) after spending a few years travelling around the globe. When the diary starts, Roquentin has been occupied writing a historical research about the Marquis de Rollebon, an 18th century political figure; but his certainties begin to deteriorate in the winter of 1932 when he is assaulted by a “sweetish sickness” that impregnates the affairs which had fulfilled his life up to that point. He initiates the diary as an attempt to convey his feelings of meaninglessness regarding his life, and a general growing repugnance in relation to the material world, including the conscience of his own physicality.
“I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. There are reasonable hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I am only too aware that they come from me, that they are simply a way of unifying my own knowledge. Not a single glimmer comes from Rollebon’s direction. Slow, sulky, the facts adapt themselves at a pinch to the order I wish to give them, but it remains outside of them. I have the impression of doing a work of pure imagination. And even so, I am certain that characters in a novel would appear more realistic, or in any case more amusing” (Sartre, p.26).
The plausibility of telling stories is challenged in Nausea, as the novel puts into question the problem of Mimesis, evidencing the impossibility of narrating organic stories in the light of the 20th century. This awareness is an aspect that seems central to the book, along with the way of perceiving “subject” and its connection with the “object” of perception. However Sartre is not the first one to consider these issues, in fact, he discusses these questions of representation based on the work of other writers, like Marcel Proust and André Gide, who had previously defied the art of narrative and portraiture in their novels. With both Proust and Gide, the novel became more “reflexive”, more concentrated in its own specificities as a genre, re-evaluating its artistic function in relation to the world. As well as novel writing, other forms of art also experimented with aesthetic perspectives in the early 20th century. Dadaism and Surrealism, for example, also explored matters of plausibility, testing out the dissolution of rational thought as a reaction to 19th century certainties about the comprehension of the world through scientific enquiry and detached observation. However, Nausea itself is not as experimental as posterior modernist developments of the novel will be; its merit primarily consists of being a link between philosophy and aesthetics, or , from a different angle, an introduction to what subsequently will become a non-organic variety of perspectives on the subject/object connection, including the reader/text relationship.
The sartrian “hero”, Antoine Roquentin enunciates himself as a social dropout, but in fact, throughout the novel, society is constantly kept at a save analysing distance. His self-imposed solitude is created only by contrast with the existence of a social tissue which is there for reference and from which all his mistrusts derive. “I can see the future. It is there, stationed in the street, hardly any paler than the present”, Roquentin says. Lacking family bonds, passion for some kind of work, or another social attachments that may provide him with a meaningful reason to live (but Roquentin reckons these are false premises to hang on to), he finds no reason that may justify existence.
“The essential thing is contingency. I mean that, by definition, existence is not necessity. To exist is simply to be there; what exists appears, lets itself be encountered, but you can never deduce it. There are people, I believe, who understood that. Only they have tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a casual necessary being. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not an illusion, an appearance that can be dissipated; it is absolute, and consequently perfect gratuitousness. Everything is gratuitous, that park, this town, and myself.” (Sartre, p.188)
Apart from writing about the enigmatic Marquis, Roquentin does not do any other kind of work. Living alone in a pension, with no close friends or misses, he has a lot of free time to think about contingencies. Roquentin is a bachelor leading a petit bourgeois life style who seems to feel a sudden “coming of age”, a coming of mature age. His physical maturity contrasts with a child-like anger in the way he articulates himself in the diary, his expressions of social resentment border acute depression. Roquentin’s disintegration seems have reached a stage where he realises that part of his life has been, and he feels that something has to be done with what is left of it. However the way he “resolves” the conflict in the end of the novel can hardly make any difference to the existential frame he established.
The need to make something useful out of his existence seems to be settled in the end of the diary in a rather awkward manner. The tension built up in the novel, all the soul searching Roquentin goes through, does not live up to the denouement. His solution of setting off to Paris, intending to write a novel seems to be a naïve (and literary) way to disentangle the existential conflict stirred throughout the book. Can a change in the subject of his writing sort out the matters of contingency proposed? Is not this future novel-to-be just another invented “casual necessity”, to avoid facing the contingency?
Other then this apparent inconsistency, there seems to be further vestiges of literacy in the book; the “Annie episode” is particularly problematic in the sense that it bears some reminisces of the conventional novel. The “lost love” of Roquentin is a theme that maintains the narrative going on all the way to the end. The situation raised creates much expectation, leads to be followed by the reader, and it is then unravelled in a melodramatic conversation inside a hotel room. The idea of narration is not completely abandon by Sartre and some moments of literary cliché, conforming to plot, memory and linearity, can still be observed in Nausea. In the same episode, as well as this thematic shortcoming, there seems to be also a theoretical one.
After getting the cold shoulder from his ex-lover Annie in the hotel room, Roquentin still goes to the station and practically waves her off with her younger man. Still Roquentin finds a way to justify it, claiming that at least he had her “last love in life”. But apart from the pretentious statement (we will give that to a broken heart, after all man with a sorrow is much more elegant) he fails to take in consideration a further development of his own point. If life is contingent, absurdities are out there, very likely to happen, including indulgences which may bring the inebriation of “love” to a touching distance again. There is no such thing as “outliving” oneself if live is contingent, once one realises the essence of nature is transmutation and “being” is a temporary state of mind and body. The rational frame of exploration, based on ego, proposed by sartrian existentialism can not account for an integral outlook of life, missing out on broader systems of synergy which compose existence beyond the individual. Without conforming to religious explanations, one is not self-contained but part of a whole synergetic body of matter, and there is project for all this, although it is not given. Meanwhile, one ought to indulge than sulk.
A further step in the dismantling of the novel, this time truly falling away from the residues of consciousness and plausibility, can be observed in the “episode of A and C”, found in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. “Perhaps I’m inventing a little, perhaps embellishing … .But perhaps I’m remembering things” (Beckett, p.9). Beckett carries on ideas proposed by Sartre, taking to the next level the fusion of writing/being concepts, restating it in a much stronger attack on bourgeois Humanism and Literature. Beckett is able to realise this juncture not only in the content but in the form as well; establishing a radical modernism which will not only attempt, but empty the work of all organicism, actually cracking the idea of referential world stability with a narrative free from linearity. “perhaps I am confusing several different occasions, and different times… .And perhaps it was A one day at a place, then C another at another” (Beckett, p.12). In terms of organicism the “episode of A and C” really leads no where. It ends as it begins, abrupt and unexplained, not giving in to memory or fact, leaving the reader to its own conclusions.
But modernist ideals should be understood as construction, Sartre provided some material for Beckett to build upon. The dialogue between the two writers seems to be particularly explicit in the following episodes: “I remember better what I felt the other day on the sea-shore when I was holding the pebble. It was a sort of sweet disgust. How unpleasant it was! And it came from the pebble, I’m sure of that, it passed from the pebble into my hands. Yes, that’s exactly it: a sort of nausea in the hands.” (Sartre, p.22.). The opening scene of Nausea shows Roquentin on the beach staring at the skyline when suddenly he finds himself anguished, appalled by the rawness of existence. It is worth to point out the name chosen for the character seems to be a quite symbolic suggestion of “rock”.
Samuel Beckett appears to revise this episode transforming Sartre’s existential pebble into a similar scene in Molloy, in which the drifter plays a game of rotating little stones in his pocket and sticking them in his mouth. Also the confrontation with the subject of death assumes a mockery tone not found in Nausea. “The confusion of my ideas on the subject of death was such that sometimes I wondered, believe me or not, if it wasn’t a state of being even worse that life. (…) I spent sometime at the seaside, without incident (…) . In the sand I was in my element (…) . I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones.” (Beckett, p.68-70). An amusing situation begins to be created as Molloy elaborates on a system of circulating the stones in his pocket and mouth without repeating them twice. The exchange of themes and images seems to connect the two writers, however Molloy behaves with sheer disdain in relation to the existentialist nausea. “But deep down I didn’t give a fiddler’s curse about being without, when they were all gone they would be all gone, I wouldn’t be any worse off, or hardly any. And the solution to which rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed (Beckett, p.74) . In this scene I should note what could be an indication of a discussion around literary “taste”. By sticking the stones in his mouth and sucking them, perhaps Molloy was making a reference, surely a mocking one, to good taste in literature. If that is so, all the ruptures promoted by the avant-guard present a setback: the authors could not actually let go of Literature, it implicitly remains there as source and starting point to any textual experimentation.
This kind of writing proposed in Molloy, is not only technical or stylistic rebellion, it is in fact a rejection of institutionalised art with the objective of removing it from its official discourses. In the essay Avant-Garde and Engagement, Peter Burger points to the integration between modernist writing and the desire of a social practice, he says that “the concept of engagement prior and subsequent to the avant-garde movements is not the same”. (Burger, p.58). Still according to the critic the important point to be made in this organic vs. non-organic, realist vs. avant-gardiste debate, it the assault made to the art in bourgeois society, because it made recognisable the celebrated convention that art was. It is his opinion that, “the historical avant-gardes movements were unable to destroy art as an institution; but they did destroy the possibility that a given school can present itself with the claim to universal validity. That ‘realistic’ and ‘avant-gardiste’ art exist side by side today is a fact that can no longer be objected to legitimacy. The meaning of the break in the history of art that the historical avant-garde movements provoked does not consist in the destruction of art as an institution, but in the destruction of the possibility of positing aesthetic norms as valid ones” (Burger, p.62). Of course no form of art can last forever, the avant-guard had its significance and importance in its historical period by dismantling the pretences of the realist novel, but it is only normal that today we have to go to museums to see modernist art. The same seems to be true for the novel, the ideas promoted by the avant-guard did not last forever, but after them new attempts at the novel will not be the same.
The modernist argument against the institutionalised artistic expressions is particularly strong in Nausea. It is specifically illustrated in the relationship Roquentin maintains with the Autodidact, a man who is reading all the books in the library in alphabetical order. The autodidact is the portrait of an intellectual without critical spirit, while Roquentin stands for the critical fibre in its pure estate. The autodidact care for his fellow human being is perverted, tainted with touches of pederasty and paedophilia; the politeness he displays is only a crust that disguises his sadistic love of mankind. This despicable character can be read in the novel as representative of the ridicule of a culture Roquentin is sceptical about. One of Sartre’s objectives here was to criticise the concept of Humanism, which according to him, is to blame for the hypocrisy of bourgeoisie and its institutions.
Roquentin has an insight of this “false culture” while looking at a portrait of the Marquis de Rollebon, he says: “The power of art is truly admirable. Of this shrill-voiced little man, nothing would go down to posterity except a threatening face, a superb gesture, and the blood-shot eyes of a bull” . (Sartre, p.137). At that point he had just found out that by a trick of perspective the Marquis was transformed in something quite different from who he was in reality, the proportions in the picture were altered so the subject would appear to be bigger. Roquentin then extends his thoughts of mimesis to other realms, concluding that in literary writing, representations were not being done any different then exalting certain features and people for effect. This reflection leads him to a series of other questioning, such as, the impossibility of adventures, the confluence between writing and living and the death of organic narration, given that life itself is contingent and does not follow any specific order.
“I haven’t had any adventures. Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But not adventures. It isn’t a matter of words; I am beginning to understand … Adventures are in books. And naturally, everything they tell you about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It was this way of happening that I attached so much importance … Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn’t let itself be extended; it achieves significance only through death (…) 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 live. But I was inside it, I didn’t think about it (…) 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. As if there could possibly be such a thing as true stories; events take place one way and we recount them the opposite way. You appear to begging at the beginning: ‘It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a solicitor’s clerk at Marommes’. And in fact you have begun at the end. It is there invisible and present, and it is the end which gives these few words the pomp and the value of a beginning … and we have the impression that the hero lived all the details of that night like annunciations, promises or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to everything that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the fellow was walking in a darkness devoid of portents, a night which offered him its monotonous riches pell-mell, and he made no choice.(…) I wanted the moments of my life to follow one another in an orderly fashion like those of a life remembered. You might as well catch time by the tail”. (Sartre, p.58-63)
The dismantling of the organic narrative by the avant-garde movements was interpreted by Lukács as a drawback in the evolution of a social realism. He endorses the organic work of art (realist in his terminology) as a superior aesthetic model, and he discards the avant-gardiste approach as decadent. Lukács believed that only organic representations in the novel could generate meaningful changes in society. Criticising this “bad” reality, the non-organic aspects inherent to the modernist works, he claims that: “a similar attenuation of reality underlies Joyce’s stream of consciousness. It is, of course, intensified where the stream of consciousness is itself the medium thought which reality is presented. And it is carried ad absurdum where the stream of consciousness is that of an idiot - consider the first part of Faulkner’s Sound and Fury or, still a more extreme case, Beckett’s Molloy.”[2]. Later developments in the novel made Lukács reconsider his position, he talks about his misjudgements and the actual reach of his theories in the preface to Theory of the Novel.
His methodology seems to adopt essential elements of Hegelian philosophy (confrontation classic vs. romantic) which he seems to have transposed to opposition between realistic vs. vanguadist. Lukács seems to go along with the Hegelian view, that the organic work constitutes the absolute artistic perfection. However while Hegel points his preferences towards Greek art, Lukács puts it in terms of the realistic novel. Unlike the German philosopher, who believed that the culmination of art belonged to the past, Lukács believes in the possibility of a social realism in the 20th century.
On the other hand, Adorno defends the avant-gardiste non-organicism work. He thinks the avant-garde expression is the only possible and authentic expression after 1848, and in spite of also having affinities with Hegelian thought, he avoids altogether the opposition that Lukács defended.
Both opinions seem to stem from Hegel’s notion of a historicized aesthetics, but unlike Lukács, who condemned the modernist novel as aesthetic regression, Adorno tries to show how the avant-guard presents itself as a historical necessity of alienation in late-capitalist society. It is Adorno’s opinion that measuring a modernist work up against the organic coherence of the classical and realistic work would be improper and theoretically unviable. While Lukács believed the avant-garde to be the alienation of the bourgeois intellectual in the face of the necessity of a socialistic transformation, Adorno does not compromise with this political point of view, and he reckons that any attempt to produce organic (realist for Lukács) novels, would be a regression, in a world that is not believed to be a “whole” anymore, even though the contents may say otherwise. (This means that no historical dialectics between form and content will be considered higher that the other). In a debate that is already historical in itself, there is no “correct” position.
By way of conclusion, I have tried to elaborate a reading of Sartre’s Nausea highlighting its fictional characteristics. However I acknowledge the philosophical intents the author had and how he used this novel largely as a vehicle to conveys his system of ideas. As a modernist novel I sustain that Nausea still conforms to some traces of the traditional novel structure, specially if contrasted with later modernist textual experimentation. I opposed it to Samuel Beckett’s Molloy to stress remains of organicity in the story.
In spite of the questionings the protagonist Antoine Roquentin goes through, on the whole, the sartrian novel seems unable to transpose his ideas to the form of the novel, and creates a feel of “artificiality” with a denouement that does not become the material he stirred. I also approximated Nausea and Molloy by means of a scene where a textual conversation seems to be going on. Although the modernist project constituted an invective on the institutionalised bourgeoisie art, and its modes of representation; the outcome seem to be that as far as this rupture can be pushed Literature is kept there for reference.
Bibliography
BARTHES, R. Le Degré Zéro de L´Écriture. Paris, Seuils,1964.
The project of dismantling of the organic narrative by the avant-garde constituted an attack on the institutionalised object of art; except that in Nausea this aspect seems to have been cast aside in detriment of Sartre’s politico-philosophical system. Antoine Roquentin’s diary is the medium through which Sartre embodies his theories of existential angst, but it can also be seen as an attempt at breaking down the walls that restricted the realist conception of novel. However, in this aesthetic undertaking, Sartre seems to have succeed only partially; yet, his work represents an important step in the foundation of the avant-gardiste movement, and made way for more radical ruptures that were to come about later.
If in relation to its content Nausea points to the end of adventures, and to the impossibilities of narrating stories, these instances do not get to be materialised in the form, which still obeys a sense of memory and orderly progression. The colloquial choice of language and “innovative” use of the diary artifice, in order to bring the narrative to the experiential first person point of view, avoiding unwanted verbal tenses; still conforms to the conventionality of being a day-by-day report of facts, which submits the work to novelistic conventionalities of temporal landmarks. If in the content level the character’s world is disintegrating, in its structure, Nausea is still very much compromised with the pretences of a referential world and the customs of the traditional novel. As I will try to show, a broader rupture, in the direction of a genuine dismantling in the idea of stable narration, is only to be made by the time Beckett writes Molloy (1950)[1].
Nausea embarks on the thoughts and feelings of Antoine Roquentin, a 30 years old man, who has been dwelling on a French village by the sea (an imaginary town named Bouville) after spending a few years travelling around the globe. When the diary starts, Roquentin has been occupied writing a historical research about the Marquis de Rollebon, an 18th century political figure; but his certainties begin to deteriorate in the winter of 1932 when he is assaulted by a “sweetish sickness” that impregnates the affairs which had fulfilled his life up to that point. He initiates the diary as an attempt to convey his feelings of meaninglessness regarding his life, and a general growing repugnance in relation to the material world, including the conscience of his own physicality.
“I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. There are reasonable hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I am only too aware that they come from me, that they are simply a way of unifying my own knowledge. Not a single glimmer comes from Rollebon’s direction. Slow, sulky, the facts adapt themselves at a pinch to the order I wish to give them, but it remains outside of them. I have the impression of doing a work of pure imagination. And even so, I am certain that characters in a novel would appear more realistic, or in any case more amusing” (Sartre, p.26).
The plausibility of telling stories is challenged in Nausea, as the novel puts into question the problem of Mimesis, evidencing the impossibility of narrating organic stories in the light of the 20th century. This awareness is an aspect that seems central to the book, along with the way of perceiving “subject” and its connection with the “object” of perception. However Sartre is not the first one to consider these issues, in fact, he discusses these questions of representation based on the work of other writers, like Marcel Proust and André Gide, who had previously defied the art of narrative and portraiture in their novels. With both Proust and Gide, the novel became more “reflexive”, more concentrated in its own specificities as a genre, re-evaluating its artistic function in relation to the world. As well as novel writing, other forms of art also experimented with aesthetic perspectives in the early 20th century. Dadaism and Surrealism, for example, also explored matters of plausibility, testing out the dissolution of rational thought as a reaction to 19th century certainties about the comprehension of the world through scientific enquiry and detached observation. However, Nausea itself is not as experimental as posterior modernist developments of the novel will be; its merit primarily consists of being a link between philosophy and aesthetics, or , from a different angle, an introduction to what subsequently will become a non-organic variety of perspectives on the subject/object connection, including the reader/text relationship.
The sartrian “hero”, Antoine Roquentin enunciates himself as a social dropout, but in fact, throughout the novel, society is constantly kept at a save analysing distance. His self-imposed solitude is created only by contrast with the existence of a social tissue which is there for reference and from which all his mistrusts derive. “I can see the future. It is there, stationed in the street, hardly any paler than the present”, Roquentin says. Lacking family bonds, passion for some kind of work, or another social attachments that may provide him with a meaningful reason to live (but Roquentin reckons these are false premises to hang on to), he finds no reason that may justify existence.
“The essential thing is contingency. I mean that, by definition, existence is not necessity. To exist is simply to be there; what exists appears, lets itself be encountered, but you can never deduce it. There are people, I believe, who understood that. Only they have tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a casual necessary being. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not an illusion, an appearance that can be dissipated; it is absolute, and consequently perfect gratuitousness. Everything is gratuitous, that park, this town, and myself.” (Sartre, p.188)
Apart from writing about the enigmatic Marquis, Roquentin does not do any other kind of work. Living alone in a pension, with no close friends or misses, he has a lot of free time to think about contingencies. Roquentin is a bachelor leading a petit bourgeois life style who seems to feel a sudden “coming of age”, a coming of mature age. His physical maturity contrasts with a child-like anger in the way he articulates himself in the diary, his expressions of social resentment border acute depression. Roquentin’s disintegration seems have reached a stage where he realises that part of his life has been, and he feels that something has to be done with what is left of it. However the way he “resolves” the conflict in the end of the novel can hardly make any difference to the existential frame he established.
The need to make something useful out of his existence seems to be settled in the end of the diary in a rather awkward manner. The tension built up in the novel, all the soul searching Roquentin goes through, does not live up to the denouement. His solution of setting off to Paris, intending to write a novel seems to be a naïve (and literary) way to disentangle the existential conflict stirred throughout the book. Can a change in the subject of his writing sort out the matters of contingency proposed? Is not this future novel-to-be just another invented “casual necessity”, to avoid facing the contingency?
Other then this apparent inconsistency, there seems to be further vestiges of literacy in the book; the “Annie episode” is particularly problematic in the sense that it bears some reminisces of the conventional novel. The “lost love” of Roquentin is a theme that maintains the narrative going on all the way to the end. The situation raised creates much expectation, leads to be followed by the reader, and it is then unravelled in a melodramatic conversation inside a hotel room. The idea of narration is not completely abandon by Sartre and some moments of literary cliché, conforming to plot, memory and linearity, can still be observed in Nausea. In the same episode, as well as this thematic shortcoming, there seems to be also a theoretical one.
After getting the cold shoulder from his ex-lover Annie in the hotel room, Roquentin still goes to the station and practically waves her off with her younger man. Still Roquentin finds a way to justify it, claiming that at least he had her “last love in life”. But apart from the pretentious statement (we will give that to a broken heart, after all man with a sorrow is much more elegant) he fails to take in consideration a further development of his own point. If life is contingent, absurdities are out there, very likely to happen, including indulgences which may bring the inebriation of “love” to a touching distance again. There is no such thing as “outliving” oneself if live is contingent, once one realises the essence of nature is transmutation and “being” is a temporary state of mind and body. The rational frame of exploration, based on ego, proposed by sartrian existentialism can not account for an integral outlook of life, missing out on broader systems of synergy which compose existence beyond the individual. Without conforming to religious explanations, one is not self-contained but part of a whole synergetic body of matter, and there is project for all this, although it is not given. Meanwhile, one ought to indulge than sulk.
A further step in the dismantling of the novel, this time truly falling away from the residues of consciousness and plausibility, can be observed in the “episode of A and C”, found in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. “Perhaps I’m inventing a little, perhaps embellishing … .But perhaps I’m remembering things” (Beckett, p.9). Beckett carries on ideas proposed by Sartre, taking to the next level the fusion of writing/being concepts, restating it in a much stronger attack on bourgeois Humanism and Literature. Beckett is able to realise this juncture not only in the content but in the form as well; establishing a radical modernism which will not only attempt, but empty the work of all organicism, actually cracking the idea of referential world stability with a narrative free from linearity. “perhaps I am confusing several different occasions, and different times… .And perhaps it was A one day at a place, then C another at another” (Beckett, p.12). In terms of organicism the “episode of A and C” really leads no where. It ends as it begins, abrupt and unexplained, not giving in to memory or fact, leaving the reader to its own conclusions.
But modernist ideals should be understood as construction, Sartre provided some material for Beckett to build upon. The dialogue between the two writers seems to be particularly explicit in the following episodes: “I remember better what I felt the other day on the sea-shore when I was holding the pebble. It was a sort of sweet disgust. How unpleasant it was! And it came from the pebble, I’m sure of that, it passed from the pebble into my hands. Yes, that’s exactly it: a sort of nausea in the hands.” (Sartre, p.22.). The opening scene of Nausea shows Roquentin on the beach staring at the skyline when suddenly he finds himself anguished, appalled by the rawness of existence. It is worth to point out the name chosen for the character seems to be a quite symbolic suggestion of “rock”.
Samuel Beckett appears to revise this episode transforming Sartre’s existential pebble into a similar scene in Molloy, in which the drifter plays a game of rotating little stones in his pocket and sticking them in his mouth. Also the confrontation with the subject of death assumes a mockery tone not found in Nausea. “The confusion of my ideas on the subject of death was such that sometimes I wondered, believe me or not, if it wasn’t a state of being even worse that life. (…) I spent sometime at the seaside, without incident (…) . In the sand I was in my element (…) . I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones.” (Beckett, p.68-70). An amusing situation begins to be created as Molloy elaborates on a system of circulating the stones in his pocket and mouth without repeating them twice. The exchange of themes and images seems to connect the two writers, however Molloy behaves with sheer disdain in relation to the existentialist nausea. “But deep down I didn’t give a fiddler’s curse about being without, when they were all gone they would be all gone, I wouldn’t be any worse off, or hardly any. And the solution to which rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed (Beckett, p.74) . In this scene I should note what could be an indication of a discussion around literary “taste”. By sticking the stones in his mouth and sucking them, perhaps Molloy was making a reference, surely a mocking one, to good taste in literature. If that is so, all the ruptures promoted by the avant-guard present a setback: the authors could not actually let go of Literature, it implicitly remains there as source and starting point to any textual experimentation.
This kind of writing proposed in Molloy, is not only technical or stylistic rebellion, it is in fact a rejection of institutionalised art with the objective of removing it from its official discourses. In the essay Avant-Garde and Engagement, Peter Burger points to the integration between modernist writing and the desire of a social practice, he says that “the concept of engagement prior and subsequent to the avant-garde movements is not the same”. (Burger, p.58). Still according to the critic the important point to be made in this organic vs. non-organic, realist vs. avant-gardiste debate, it the assault made to the art in bourgeois society, because it made recognisable the celebrated convention that art was. It is his opinion that, “the historical avant-gardes movements were unable to destroy art as an institution; but they did destroy the possibility that a given school can present itself with the claim to universal validity. That ‘realistic’ and ‘avant-gardiste’ art exist side by side today is a fact that can no longer be objected to legitimacy. The meaning of the break in the history of art that the historical avant-garde movements provoked does not consist in the destruction of art as an institution, but in the destruction of the possibility of positing aesthetic norms as valid ones” (Burger, p.62). Of course no form of art can last forever, the avant-guard had its significance and importance in its historical period by dismantling the pretences of the realist novel, but it is only normal that today we have to go to museums to see modernist art. The same seems to be true for the novel, the ideas promoted by the avant-guard did not last forever, but after them new attempts at the novel will not be the same.
The modernist argument against the institutionalised artistic expressions is particularly strong in Nausea. It is specifically illustrated in the relationship Roquentin maintains with the Autodidact, a man who is reading all the books in the library in alphabetical order. The autodidact is the portrait of an intellectual without critical spirit, while Roquentin stands for the critical fibre in its pure estate. The autodidact care for his fellow human being is perverted, tainted with touches of pederasty and paedophilia; the politeness he displays is only a crust that disguises his sadistic love of mankind. This despicable character can be read in the novel as representative of the ridicule of a culture Roquentin is sceptical about. One of Sartre’s objectives here was to criticise the concept of Humanism, which according to him, is to blame for the hypocrisy of bourgeoisie and its institutions.
Roquentin has an insight of this “false culture” while looking at a portrait of the Marquis de Rollebon, he says: “The power of art is truly admirable. Of this shrill-voiced little man, nothing would go down to posterity except a threatening face, a superb gesture, and the blood-shot eyes of a bull” . (Sartre, p.137). At that point he had just found out that by a trick of perspective the Marquis was transformed in something quite different from who he was in reality, the proportions in the picture were altered so the subject would appear to be bigger. Roquentin then extends his thoughts of mimesis to other realms, concluding that in literary writing, representations were not being done any different then exalting certain features and people for effect. This reflection leads him to a series of other questioning, such as, the impossibility of adventures, the confluence between writing and living and the death of organic narration, given that life itself is contingent and does not follow any specific order.
“I haven’t had any adventures. Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But not adventures. It isn’t a matter of words; I am beginning to understand … Adventures are in books. And naturally, everything they tell you about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It was this way of happening that I attached so much importance … Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn’t let itself be extended; it achieves significance only through death (…) 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 live. But I was inside it, I didn’t think about it (…) 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. As if there could possibly be such a thing as true stories; events take place one way and we recount them the opposite way. You appear to begging at the beginning: ‘It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a solicitor’s clerk at Marommes’. And in fact you have begun at the end. It is there invisible and present, and it is the end which gives these few words the pomp and the value of a beginning … and we have the impression that the hero lived all the details of that night like annunciations, promises or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to everything that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the fellow was walking in a darkness devoid of portents, a night which offered him its monotonous riches pell-mell, and he made no choice.(…) I wanted the moments of my life to follow one another in an orderly fashion like those of a life remembered. You might as well catch time by the tail”. (Sartre, p.58-63)
The dismantling of the organic narrative by the avant-garde movements was interpreted by Lukács as a drawback in the evolution of a social realism. He endorses the organic work of art (realist in his terminology) as a superior aesthetic model, and he discards the avant-gardiste approach as decadent. Lukács believed that only organic representations in the novel could generate meaningful changes in society. Criticising this “bad” reality, the non-organic aspects inherent to the modernist works, he claims that: “a similar attenuation of reality underlies Joyce’s stream of consciousness. It is, of course, intensified where the stream of consciousness is itself the medium thought which reality is presented. And it is carried ad absurdum where the stream of consciousness is that of an idiot - consider the first part of Faulkner’s Sound and Fury or, still a more extreme case, Beckett’s Molloy.”[2]. Later developments in the novel made Lukács reconsider his position, he talks about his misjudgements and the actual reach of his theories in the preface to Theory of the Novel.
His methodology seems to adopt essential elements of Hegelian philosophy (confrontation classic vs. romantic) which he seems to have transposed to opposition between realistic vs. vanguadist. Lukács seems to go along with the Hegelian view, that the organic work constitutes the absolute artistic perfection. However while Hegel points his preferences towards Greek art, Lukács puts it in terms of the realistic novel. Unlike the German philosopher, who believed that the culmination of art belonged to the past, Lukács believes in the possibility of a social realism in the 20th century.
On the other hand, Adorno defends the avant-gardiste non-organicism work. He thinks the avant-garde expression is the only possible and authentic expression after 1848, and in spite of also having affinities with Hegelian thought, he avoids altogether the opposition that Lukács defended.
Both opinions seem to stem from Hegel’s notion of a historicized aesthetics, but unlike Lukács, who condemned the modernist novel as aesthetic regression, Adorno tries to show how the avant-guard presents itself as a historical necessity of alienation in late-capitalist society. It is Adorno’s opinion that measuring a modernist work up against the organic coherence of the classical and realistic work would be improper and theoretically unviable. While Lukács believed the avant-garde to be the alienation of the bourgeois intellectual in the face of the necessity of a socialistic transformation, Adorno does not compromise with this political point of view, and he reckons that any attempt to produce organic (realist for Lukács) novels, would be a regression, in a world that is not believed to be a “whole” anymore, even though the contents may say otherwise. (This means that no historical dialectics between form and content will be considered higher that the other). In a debate that is already historical in itself, there is no “correct” position.
By way of conclusion, I have tried to elaborate a reading of Sartre’s Nausea highlighting its fictional characteristics. However I acknowledge the philosophical intents the author had and how he used this novel largely as a vehicle to conveys his system of ideas. As a modernist novel I sustain that Nausea still conforms to some traces of the traditional novel structure, specially if contrasted with later modernist textual experimentation. I opposed it to Samuel Beckett’s Molloy to stress remains of organicity in the story.
In spite of the questionings the protagonist Antoine Roquentin goes through, on the whole, the sartrian novel seems unable to transpose his ideas to the form of the novel, and creates a feel of “artificiality” with a denouement that does not become the material he stirred. I also approximated Nausea and Molloy by means of a scene where a textual conversation seems to be going on. Although the modernist project constituted an invective on the institutionalised bourgeoisie art, and its modes of representation; the outcome seem to be that as far as this rupture can be pushed Literature is kept there for reference.
Bibliography
BARTHES, R. Le Degré Zéro de L´Écriture. Paris, Seuils,1964.
__________.The Rustle of Language. Transl. by Richard Howard. Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1989.
BECKETT, S. Molloy. London, Calder and Boyars, 1966.
BROOKER, P. et ali. Modernism/Postmodernism. Essex, Longman,1992.
SARTRE, J.P. Nausea. London, Penguin, 1963.
WILLIAMS, R. The Long Revolution. Ontario, Broadview Press, 2001.
Notes:
[1] First English translation in 1955.[2] IN: LUKÁCS, G. The Ideology of Modernism.
