March 10, Post 1

This is a blog based on some journal entries I've written as part of my undergraduate Comparative Literature thesis, which I intend to continue writing in this new format. 1

I'm looking at Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Nausea (La Nausée) and Michel Butor's Passing Time (L'Emploi du temps). That's all that has been certain up until now as far as a "topic" goes, though "self-narration," which I have since realized is more commonly known as "autobiography," and "event" are definitely key terms. Today's formulation of my topic is this: how does one fictionalize the self, and how does the compulsion to do so limit the scope of possible action (in Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea and Michel Butor's Passing Time)?

Because these two novels depict protagonists journaling as a means of understanding their experiences (I'll be nominating that statement for Understatement of the Year...) I began journaling myself. My hope is that these posts will either provide the forum that I need in order to get my thoughts straight, or, in the best case scenario, that I will be able to incorporate this exercise into my final thesis product in some unique way, shape, or form.

I've taken my cue from Derrida, author of the "event,"at least in the scope of my academic experience, and his tendency toward neologisms in choosing the URL "eventualizing," which is an amalgamation of Event, Eventual, Fictionalizing. 2 It seems appropriate to me since I've found fictionalizing the "event" to be central to autobiography, and that this cognitive/literary process of fictionalizing as well as the thesis process I'm pursuing are either impossibly complex or actually impossible undertakings. I hope, for my own sake, that it's the former. I particularly like the word "eventual" because of the connotations I have with the word "éventuallement" in French which, though it looks like a cognate, actually does not carry the same connotation of inevitability as does its English counterpart, instead meaning only "possibly." For me, then, the word is a sort of negation of itself - the english denotation is of some sort of inevitability or telos, and the french denotation is of a conditional nature - which contradiction I find annoyingly, perfectly derridean. Thus: event + eventual + fictionalizing => eventualizing. 3

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I have been taught to hate the word "irony" due to it popular overuse, but it really is painfully ironic that I should find myself trying to "catch up" to today's date in this blog, though my journals begin a few weeks ago, since it is this very endeavor which ruins Butor's narrator, Jacques Revel. A french native, Jacques has come to the fictional city of Bleston, England, for a year to work as a translator for the local firm Matthews and Sons. Six months in to his stay, he begins keeping a journal,  but, instead of beginning with the present day, Thursday, May 1, he chooses to backtrack to October, to the day of his arrival in the city. He believes that, through the meticulous implementation of a journaling schedule, he can catch up to his current experiences. However, as the novel progresses, we see him not only fall further behind schedule, as the gap between the content of the entires and the date of their penning grows from 6 to 7 months, before he eventually becomes absorbed in re-narrating the events he has already set down, so that the times under consideration include the time of (re)narration (his present), the time of original narration, and the time originally narrated. He discovers what we could call the non-saturation of the event, or, more simply, the impossibility of ever telling the story of oneself because that story is constantly recast in the mind as time and experience march on.

I can't wait to see if I fail as spectacularly as did Jacques.

KJ/Burke Library, Hamilton College - 10 March 2013.