Nauséographie de Sartre (review)

‘N’a-t-on pas tout dit sur La Nausée de Sartre?’ (p. 11) asks Cornille. Clearly not. Cornille believes he has something new to say about Sartre, but he keeps us waiting until Part 2 of the book to find out what it is. Part 1 consists of five chapters dealing mostly with La Nausée and Le Mur. The contention that informs these opening chapters is that Sartre was a much more prolific plagiarist than has so far been recognized; a plagiarist of others’ work, but also, and crucially for Cornille’s over-arching thesis, a systematic and deliberate self-plagiarist. Much has been written about the use of pastiche, parody and citation in La Nausée, but Cornille argues that critics have thus far only skimmed the surface. The first chapter details extensive ‘borrowings’ from Céline and Maupassant. The latter is particularly interesting in light of the harsh words that Sartre reserved for Maupas-sant’s ‘degraded realism’ in Qu’est-ce que la littérature? There follows an exploration of exoticism in La Nausée, ‘Dépaysement’ and La Reine Albemarle ou le dernier touriste. Turning his attention to Le Mur, Cornille then attempts to demonstrate that certain episodes in Malraux’s La Condition humaine provided Sartre with the central idea of ‘Le Mur’, just as Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs substantially ‘inspired’ the author of ‘L’Enfance d’un chef’, but the claim that the middle section of that novella is little more than a ‘copie dégradée’ (p. 117) of Gide’s anti-novel is clearly excessive. The final chapter of Part 1 is the strongest. Cornille follows the trail of the name Lucien (‘L’Enfance d’un chef’) and its variants Lucienne/Lucille (La Nausée and ‘Intimité’) and argues convincingly that they all originate in a short story by Maupassant (La Petite Roque) that deals with the rape and murder of a young girl—a source that had escaped the editors of the Pléiade Oeuvres romanesques. It is in Part 2 that Cornille finally unveils his controversial thesis, namely that Les Mots mirrors quite deliberately and systematically, Sartre’s first novel, La Nausée. Furthermore, that this ‘autotextuality’—or self re-writing—was an attempt on Sartre’s part to ‘redeem’ his first novel, a novel that he had always secretly known to be, if not plagiarized, then at least overly derivative. Unfortunately, Cornille produces far too little sound textual evidence to support such a strong claim, and the increasing density of rhetorical questions serves only to draw the reader’s attention to the fundamental weaknesses of the argument. Cornille frequently feigns astonishment that ‘tout le gratin des études sartriennes’ (p. 145) failed to see, in the collective volume Pourquoi et comment Sartre a écrit ‘Les Mots’?, what he, by implication a mere amateur, has seen; he might have considered the possibility that one can only see what is actually there. . . Cornille is a sensitive and perceptive reader, and the merit of his approach is that it remains resolutely literary in its close adherence to the letter of the text. The weakness of the book is the lack of any kind of theoretical frame that might allow the reader to ‘make sense’ of the textual echoes and resonances that Cornille so painstakingly brings to light.