Sartre's 'Nausea': Text, Context, Intertext (review)

The conference that gave rise to the essays in this volume was motivated by a desire to consider La Nausée afresh, 'free from the baggage of traditional interpretations and the perspective of hindsight'. That the work has an existence that lies apart from the author and that meaning is the product of a negotiation between text and reader are unquestioned principles of the contemporary doxa, but several of the essays in this volume demonstrate how difficult it is, even for sophisticated readers to rid themselves of the tendency to think of literary characters as real people and to cease regarding authorial intention as a privileged mode of access to the text's meaning(s). L'Être et le néant has exerted a powerful gravitational pull on readers of La Nausée and the ten essays in this volume all attempt, in their different ways, to break free of its orbit. The authors employ a wide range of critical methodologies, ranging from varieties of intertextuality (Riffaterre and Kristeva), to Lacanian psychoanalysis and queer theory; in the process, however, some confusion occasionally arises as to the ontological status of literary characters: we read, for example, that Roquentin has hysterical symptoms, or that he is a 'receptacle for the conflicting drives that tears at him from all sides' (Poiana); elsewhere, Lawrence R. Schehr opines that the 'overly heterosexual Roquentin' has possible homosexual penchants (this is not the only essay in the volume to suggest that Roquentin is a closet paedophile). Two essays by philosophers (Thomas Martin and Chris Falzon) deal with Roquentin's expectations regarding the meaning of the world. Of the two, Falzon's is the more interesting, but both suffer from an apparent ignorance of the latest research — especially when that research was published in French: nearly all of Falzon's secondary sources pre-date 1980 and all are in English. It is one thing to unburden oneself of critical baggage, but that baggage still needs to have been acquired in the first place, if one is to avoid repeating the already-written. This is not to say that the volume is without original and valuable contributions. Elizabeth Rechniewski conducts an informative exploration of the failed relationship between Sartre and Suarès. Amanda Crawley-Jackson contributes an elegantly written and convincing exploration of the travel motif in La Nausée (one of two essays in the volume to deal with this important but relatively neglected Sartrean theme). The volume is carefully proofed and edited, and helpfully referenced, but the quality is somewhat uneven.