I thought that I would discuss the aesthetic solution, then the mystery Revel creates for himself to follow in the following post, but I think the two ideas are too inextricably linked to do this way. His aesthetic solution leads to the mystery, but the mystery itself is also an aesthetic solution, just of the mimetic type instead of the creative type.
***
Art imitates life, but, as Oscar Wilde taught us, life also imitates art. Jacques Revel, the protagonist of Passing Time, and his experience with the various aesthetic solutions demonstrates the verity of this statement. Revel begins his journals as an attempt at an aesthetic solution of the second type (what I've called the creative aesthetic solution), only he finds that it is more of a hindrance to his living than a help. Not only does he fall victim to the live/tell paradox Roquentin feared, spending time writing that he wanted to be spending out living in the city, but the project also encourages him to search for aesthetic solutions of the first type (what I've called the mimetic aesthetic solution, or archetypical superimposition).
As I understand it, Revel begins writing journal entries because he feels uncomfortable in the foreign city which doesn't have a place for him. Instead of recognizing him as a citizen like Paris did, Bleston sees him as an outsider. This means that Revel lives in Bleston as one of the marginalized, alongside other foreign residents like Lucien Blaise and the non-white population, like Horace Buck, both of whom Revel befriends in an attempt to feel more at home. Because he lives in the interstices of Bleston society, Revel's sense of identity and of subjectivity is at stake; as a non-native who doesn't speak the language very well, he doesn't receive the recognition as a subject that he needs from the community in order to maintain his sense of authentic self. Writing provides for Revel the kind of aesthetic solution the song provides for Roquentin; like the song promised inevitability to Roquentin, writing, because it commits ideas to a physical form, promises irrefutability to Revel. Writing, then, helps Revel preserve his identity against the various pressures and ignorances of the foreign city.
However, the solution proves less fruitful for Revel than it did for Roquentin. Whereas Roquentin wrote (what I've assumed was) his autobiography with the knowledge that he was creating a fiction, Revel believes that his daily autobiography will document fact. His project is very like Roquentin's biographical project of the Marquis de Rollebon; in both instances the authors are attempting to recreate experience authentically, and, in both cases, the authors find that this is an impossible task.
Because of the difficulty he encounters in documenting his experience and because writing does concretize what would otherwise remain ephemeral, causing the individual to focus on thing that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, Revel convinces himself that the city, which was originally just unpleasant for its foreignness, is really a foe conspiring against him. He becomes absorbed in his process of writing, and consequently allows a causal relationship to develop between the fiction (of his writing and reading) and reality. He begins setting fires around the city, which he mentions in the entries but doesn't admit as his own handiwork until late in the novel. He burned his first copy of the Bleston map and had to buy another one to replace it. He would have burned the whole stack of papers that contained his journal, too, he says, except that there were so many. He even feels that Bleston attacked his friend, H.C. Hamilton (George Burton, the author of the mystery novel), because it could not make him burn the negative of the author taken at a fair-ground game (280). "And now I cannot look at this negative without a sort of dizzy terror, without seeing it as proof that i have indeed lost myself, that I am the helpless plaything of a mighty secret power," (143). I think that he believes that "mighty secret power" to be the city of Bleston, but I think that really it is the fiction he himself has created but cannot seem to stop.
***
The process of examining the events of his life from 6 months distance in order to write them sheds light on events which seem important from the present position (as we've already discussed, events are not objective things that can be remembered, but subjective ideas that are reformed at each remembrance). In combination with a mystery novel called The Bleston Murders which takes place in the very same city and which Revel comes to rely on as a guide to the city, his obsessive journaling leads him to adopt a secondary aesthetic solution in addition to the journaling exercise which was supposed to help him maintain his identity against the non-recognition of the foreign city. He becomes a Detective in a real-life mystery novel, which he creates after the example of the actual novel.He becomes convinced that The Bleston Murders, written by a Bleston native under a pseudonym whom Revel meets in a Chinese restaurant, is really the veiled testimony of a witness to real murders. “It was as though a trail had been laid for me, at each stage of which I was allowed to see the end of the next stage," he says early in his journal, "a trail which was to lead me hopelessly astray,” (82). Revel becomes obsessed with finding the murderer, so much so that he accidentally(-on-purpose?) reveals the real identity of the author, breaking his promise of confidence to the man, and finally entrenches himself so deeply in his fictions that he suffers intensely on a personal level.
Nonetheless, he can't help but follow the trail. When the a black Morris car hits the author, George Burton, shortly after Revel allows his identity to be revealed to the public, Revel writes about the accident as the "accident"; he does not believe that George was struck by the car by accident. He believes that the "accident" was really a botched attempt at murder perpetrated by the real-life killer portrayed in the novel, The Bleston Murders. I'm not completely clear on whether or not any foul play was ever at hand, (it's difficult to tell with such an unreliable narrator!) but I tend to believe it was not. There is a driver of a black Morris visible in the text, but Revel refuses to consider its driver, James Jenkins, as a suspect for ages, and when he does connect the dots, he decides that there must not have been any cruel intent behind the accident after all (289).
In addition to the mimetic position of Detective he takes from The Bleston Murders, Revel also creates roles from a tapestry he's seen at a museum depicting the story of Theseus. He himself, as the protagonist of his own story, is Theseus, and each of his closest acquaintances has a counterpart on the tapestry. The tapestry, then, becomes a third stratum of fiction overlaid on his reality (the first two being the journal-writing and detective fictions). The original creative aesthetic solution has bred two mimetic solutions, with disastrous conclusions for Revel's real life.
Apart from his imagined role in the injury of Burton, Revel suffers the double-loss of love. His first love in Bleston is Rose Bailey. Though he would later deny that he ever loved her, it's clear to the reader from the amount of time he spends talking about her and the way he in which he describes her that he clearly did have feelings for her. However, his best friend Lucien Blaise becomes involved with Rose, so Revel isn't able to pursue his first love interest. In light of this failure, Revel shifts his attentions to Ann, her sister, who he repeatedly refers to as the Ariadne to his Theseus. He wastes too much time in this instance, too, and eventually finds that Ann has been engaged to his first Bleston friend, James, the driver of the Morris.
I think it's likely that Revel lost these two loves because he didn't believe it necessary to pursue them. They were involved in his fictions, Rose in his journals and Ann in his Theseus story, so, to him, they were already his. Then, when they are taken from him, he attempts to revise his fiction so that they weren't ever there to begin with; when Rose is taken, he transfers his affections to Ann. When Ann is taken, he really is distressed. He expresses his horror quickly in his journal, without lingering to explore like he has done elsewhere, saying simply,
"I should have liked to burn out my eyes which had only served to deceive me, my eyes and all these pages I have written... / A fresh wave of horrible laughter breaks about me,"(262).
He seems to be aware of the fact that it is his fictions which have cost him the girl, but he's unable to change his course. Then, in a later entry when he is thinking back on the loss, his style of prose changes from the relatively formal tone he's kept through most of the novel to a more poetic structure, with each paragraph beginning with "Ann" and ending with a comma in a sort of refrain on her name (276).
Because this suggests that Revel realizes the cause of his suffering and because that suffering actually changes the style in which he lays down his autobiography, I would suggest that the trauma of losing Ann shakes Revel out of his secondary fantasy of Theseus, if not also out of his detective fantasy. Ruppert noted in his article on Nausea and Malte that Roqentin sees Lucie as "better off in this condition [of emotional turmoil], immobilized by the absoluteness of her suffering," (Sartre 41 quoted in Ruppert 22). He goes on to say that, "In this case it is pure subjectivity rather than pure objectivity that provides the release from ambiguity; Lucie has lost awareness of her objective existence in the consuming fires of her emotions," (22). It makes sense, then, that the all-consuming pain of losing a second love would shock him out of the fictions, since the intensity of the pain creates a sense of pure subjectivity, making the function of a fiction, which is to makes sense of one's objectivity, temporarily unnecessary.
***
It seems almost inevitable to me that Revel should fall into the Detective role since he's read a novel taking place in the very city in which he's found himself, a city which he hardly knows and in which he is a stranger. The book offered him his first insights into the city, helped him discover restaurants he liked (the Oriental Rose), and uncover interesting historical and artistic details (the Murderer's Window at the Old Cathedral).
Furthermore, the fact that it is a mystery suits it particularly well to adaptation as an archetypical solution. Whereas most novels begin with an ending prefigured, but carefully hidden until the last pages of the book, a mystery begins with the ending and works backward to the beginning. This means that Revel has no trouble applying Mystery to his life; any event can be the central point of the mystery, and the rest relies on finding clues which he can relate back to that event. It's easy to live a mystery and impossible to live a novel, yet they both achieve the same sort of goal: they structure existence and give it meaning.
In this way, what appeared at first to be a mimetic aesthetic solution turns out to really be a creative solution; instead of the Detective role being merely a projection of the mystery novel onto reality, it actually gives Revel the same kind of power over his life that Roquentin finds in writing autobiography. It would appear that Revel's solution is empty, however, because whereas Roquentin is able to give something back to society in the form of his novel, Revel merely lives his fiction, and in fact does damage because of it. Though a more viable solution, living a mystery proves much more destructive to the individual and reductive in society, as it produces false symbols and decreases the potential for communication, whereas the aesthetic solution in Nausea proves finally useful. Though it may seem like living authentically is the more beneficial solution, I'd say that between the examples of Nausea and Passing Time, the hermit writer role is actually the more socially responsible solution.
3rd
Floor KJ, Hamilton College, NY - 31 March 2013.
