Sartre's second century

CHAPTER FOUR
TEMPORALITY AND THE DEATH
OF LUCIENNE IN NAUSEA
CAM CLAYTON
Sartre's celebrated novel, Nausea (1938), is usually interpreted by way
of the themes of contingency, absurdity, nausea, and freedom. There has
been little attention given to the role of temporality and the temporal
structure of consciousness in understanding and explaining the strange
malaise of Sartre's protagonist, Antoine Roquentin. It is by way of Sartre's
conception of temporality, as presented in Being and Nothingness (1943),
that I propose to interpret Nausea in this chapter. 1
There is one scene in particular in Nausea that commentators have
struggled to explain and therefore often ignore. Roquentin is at the library
doing historical research for a biography on which he is working. His
journal entry describes the difficulty he is having making sense of, and
giving order to, the past. Sartre thereby signals that temporality and man's
relationship to the past is the theme of this section of the book. Roquentin
is struggling to understand whether and, if so, how the past can continue to
exist through him and through his writing. He asks: "How can I, who have
not the strength to hold to my own past, hope to save the past of someone
else?" 2 Only two days after declaring that this work "represents the only
justification for my existence", 3 Roquentin gives it up declaring that "the
past did not exist". 4
The journal entry then takes a strange turn when Roquentin reads about
the rape and murder of a little girl named Lucienne. This news triggers a
1 A previous draft of this chapter was given as a paper at the 15 th Biennial
Conference of the North American Sartre Society at Fordham University,
Manhattan, New York City, 27-29 October 2006.
2 Nausea, 95.
3 Ibid., 70.
4 Ibid., 96.