What I mean by “event” is not what Antoine Roquentin, the
protagonist of Sartre’s novel and author of the journal entries of which it is
composed, means by “event,” though it occurs to me that it may be only a
question of scale that ultimately separates the two ideas.
EVENTS
The term first appears in Lloyd Alexander’s translation in the “Undated Pages” which the journal’s editors group at the beginning of
the collection, as they appear to date to a period slightly preceding the first
of the dated pages.[1] Here,
Roquetin writes about the possibility that he will begin keeping a journal in
order to track and identify the cause of what he will eventually term “the
Nausea,” (Sartre 18 - see Bibliography post for full citations). Though I would argue that he has trouble beginning anything,
Roquentin appears loathe to begin this project because he considers himself in
the activity as “a little girl [writing daily impressions] in her nice new
notebook,“ (3).[2] Instead of beginning, then, he hedges,
waffling between actually journaling and doing what we could call
“meta-journaling”; he writes about his experience – that is to say, about the
feeling of unease he’s considering tracking (i.e., journaling) - but he is also exploring the limitations of
the enterprise (meta-journaling).
It’s in this meta-journalistic vein that he first introduces
the word “event”:
“Naturally, I can write nothing
definite about this Saturday and the day-before-yesterday business. I am
already too far from it; the only thing I can say is that in neither case was
there anything which could ordinarily be called an event,” (2).
He then writes what did happen Saturday. He had been at the beach, surrounded by children and ducks and
drakes, and had lifted a stone from the shore in order to throw it into the sea, but he stopped short. Instead of following through on his initial impulse, he dropped the stone to the ground and left. He does not give an explanation, except that he saw something which "disgusted" him.
What he has just recounted unquestionably qualifies as an experience, as he has a conscious memory of its happening to him. In terms of the novel, I am even inclined to call it an Event, yet Roquentin specifically defines it as a non-event.
Making the determination according to my criteria is difficult, since it involves determining the relative agency Roquentin enjoys in the telling of his experiences. Such is the inevitable problem of the fictional mise en abîme. If we consider him as the author of his journal, then the experience is only an Event (with a capital "E") if he believes that it is. However, once the experience is written, it becomes autobiography. It now has the potential to be read, and, if read, it will be expected to conform to certain conventions. One such convention is that the experiences recounted in an autobiographical work have special importance in the development of the writer's life. The decision of the experience's "Event-hood,"then, relies on the position we take as readers when digesting his journal; are they just empty scribbles or do they demonstrate important psychological states? I think that the answer is clear, though not the extent to which it is necessary.
If, on the other hand, we consider him as the character of the novel, then it seems escapable that the experience is an Event because of its special potential for creating meaning in the novel. It comes in what Peter Rabinowitz has called a "privileged position," meaning one of those select places in a novel which, in the novels we westerners grew up reading, housed particularly important information. Since it's from these kinds of novels that we've learned to read, we give importance to these positions in novels, even if the narrator doesn't do so him/herself. This episode occupies a position in the exposition of the novel; it's on page 2. Coming so close to the beginning of the work, it receives special attention from the audience.
Interestingly enough, Nausea thwarts the convention of first lines as second only in importance to final ones by giving the editors the first word. Page 1 of a novel typically begins with half a page of white space with "Chapter 1: The Beginning" or something of the like printed in the center, then comes a witty or insightfully thumb-in-cheek introduction to the characters and their life situations... Nausea, in contrast, begins Page 1 at the top of the page with a "Note from the editor." There is no editor of a novel; this is unquestionably part of the work, but it distances itself from the rest of the work by claiming editorial authority. The "Undated Pages" occupy the second half of the page, yet, because of the epistolary form, there is no classical exposition of character and situation. There is only Roquentin and his existential anxiety. What I'm getting at is that the editor's note is the true beginning of the novel, but it obscures itself by claiming separation.
According to the editors, then, this non-event is an event, as it spurs the journal-writing initiative which constitutes the work they've collected for publications. It seems like we've got a double endorsement of this experience's event hood: that of Sartre, the author of the novel, and of the editors, the party responsible for the publication of the journal. Objectively, then, it seems really to be an event, but it is central to my argument that this decision can have only come after the rest of the journal was written.
What he has just recounted unquestionably qualifies as an experience, as he has a conscious memory of its happening to him. In terms of the novel, I am even inclined to call it an Event, yet Roquentin specifically defines it as a non-event.
Making the determination according to my criteria is difficult, since it involves determining the relative agency Roquentin enjoys in the telling of his experiences. Such is the inevitable problem of the fictional mise en abîme. If we consider him as the author of his journal, then the experience is only an Event (with a capital "E") if he believes that it is. However, once the experience is written, it becomes autobiography. It now has the potential to be read, and, if read, it will be expected to conform to certain conventions. One such convention is that the experiences recounted in an autobiographical work have special importance in the development of the writer's life. The decision of the experience's "Event-hood,"then, relies on the position we take as readers when digesting his journal; are they just empty scribbles or do they demonstrate important psychological states? I think that the answer is clear, though not the extent to which it is necessary.
If, on the other hand, we consider him as the character of the novel, then it seems escapable that the experience is an Event because of its special potential for creating meaning in the novel. It comes in what Peter Rabinowitz has called a "privileged position," meaning one of those select places in a novel which, in the novels we westerners grew up reading, housed particularly important information. Since it's from these kinds of novels that we've learned to read, we give importance to these positions in novels, even if the narrator doesn't do so him/herself. This episode occupies a position in the exposition of the novel; it's on page 2. Coming so close to the beginning of the work, it receives special attention from the audience.
Interestingly enough, Nausea thwarts the convention of first lines as second only in importance to final ones by giving the editors the first word. Page 1 of a novel typically begins with half a page of white space with "Chapter 1: The Beginning" or something of the like printed in the center, then comes a witty or insightfully thumb-in-cheek introduction to the characters and their life situations... Nausea, in contrast, begins Page 1 at the top of the page with a "Note from the editor." There is no editor of a novel; this is unquestionably part of the work, but it distances itself from the rest of the work by claiming editorial authority. The "Undated Pages" occupy the second half of the page, yet, because of the epistolary form, there is no classical exposition of character and situation. There is only Roquentin and his existential anxiety. What I'm getting at is that the editor's note is the true beginning of the novel, but it obscures itself by claiming separation.
According to the editors, then, this non-event is an event, as it spurs the journal-writing initiative which constitutes the work they've collected for publications. It seems like we've got a double endorsement of this experience's event hood: that of Sartre, the author of the novel, and of the editors, the party responsible for the publication of the journal. Objectively, then, it seems really to be an event, but it is central to my argument that this decision can have only come after the rest of the journal was written.
The second time the word appears in the text, it is, again, used in negative sense: “I wanted to and could not pick up a paper lying on the
ground. This is all and it is not even an event,” (9). Just as we saw in the first example, the thing recounted is an event, from an audience's privileged perspective of hindsight. This classification on Roquentin's part is further suspect because he's not only written the experience, but he's made a point of adding this "non-event" to an account which he considered otherwise incomplete, saying “I
haven’t told the truth – at least, not the whole truth,” (9).
What Roquentin here discovers is linked to the retroactive nature of event determination, and is what I consider the central problem to autobiography: the problem of inclusion. What must be included in your story? What details are necessary and which are contingent? He finished writing the entry, read it, and found it lacking. The fact that he only felt the importance of the experience in retrospect, and still cannot call it "an event" illustrates the difference between writing as immediate an impression as can be achieved and in writing an autobiographical account. Temporal distance increases the amount we fictionalize (as I myself have recently learned the hard way); authenticity and time seem to be inverse functions, though I'll argue that authenticity is one of those ideals that doesn't translate into practice. I hope to return to this question of inclusion later in my inquiry, probably in conjunction with my consideration of Passing Time.
What Roquentin here discovers is linked to the retroactive nature of event determination, and is what I consider the central problem to autobiography: the problem of inclusion. What must be included in your story? What details are necessary and which are contingent? He finished writing the entry, read it, and found it lacking. The fact that he only felt the importance of the experience in retrospect, and still cannot call it "an event" illustrates the difference between writing as immediate an impression as can be achieved and in writing an autobiographical account. Temporal distance increases the amount we fictionalize (as I myself have recently learned the hard way); authenticity and time seem to be inverse functions, though I'll argue that authenticity is one of those ideals that doesn't translate into practice. I hope to return to this question of inclusion later in my inquiry, probably in conjunction with my consideration of Passing Time.
So far, then, we have two (dubious) examples of non-events,
and no positive identifications. The third time I’ve circled the word “event”
in my book comes during his crisis of "adventure". Here, Roquentin is struggling to name an adventure he's had, and comes up with a memory of a brush with death: once, a Moroccan attempted to stab him to death, but Roquentin hit him in the face and escaped. Though he can't say that this was actually an adventure, he does assert that “in any case, it was an event which happened to ME,” (37). So he has finally experienced an event, but it comes at the price of "adventure". Is this just an exchange between pieces of diction, or does Roquentin see a difference in events and adventures? If so, is it a categorical difference, or is it a matter of degree?
ADVENTURES
We are first introduced to the terminology by Roquenin, who
applies the term to the "gestures, attacks, counterattacks, turns of luck,”
made by a group of men playing cards (23). It seems an appropriate term and, at least for me, passes in the first reading without particular notice. Each turn for the card players is an event with a beginning (he surveys his cards), rising action (he makes a choice), and a climax (he wins/loses the hand). This scene is variably dramatized and it's easy to see the individual actions of the game as little adventures within the greater structure of Poker.
At that point, Roquentin asserts (with seeming gratuitousness): “I have had real adventures,” (23).
However, when the Self-Made-Man later asks him about these great many adventures he must have had while traveling, Roquentin finds that he is not immediately sure that he has ever had any adventures.
At that point, Roquentin asserts (with seeming gratuitousness): “I have had real adventures,” (23).
However, when the Self-Made-Man later asks him about these great many adventures he must have had while traveling, Roquentin finds that he is not immediately sure that he has ever had any adventures.
As was the case in the first example of "event", Roquentin's problem here is one of conceptualization, not of actual experience; of course he's had what could sometimes be called experiences - he narrowly escaped being killed! - so, if he were in the correct position, he could claim to have had the kind of adventures the Self-Taught-Man envies him for having had (the getting-lost-in-a-foreigh-country kind). However, as I mentioned in my first post, it seems to me that Roquentin has a different understanding of "adventure" than does the Self-Taught-Man. Whereas the latter associates adventure and unpredictability, Roquentin associates adventure with inevitability. To him, an adventure is “something … beginning in order to end,” (37, italics are my own).
It's because of this articulation of adventuring that I consider Nausea to be an early example of what Rabinowitz calls the "ironic-grasping-at-straws-in-the-meaningless-abyss" kind of novel prevalent since the 1950s (179). In these works, (for which he cites Passing Time as a recent example), the hero attempts to superimpose fictional structures on their lives and, because life lacks the teleology fiction enjoys, acts foolishly and often ruinously. Roquentin expects his life to follow the same kind of structure as would a novel, so he wants to find the adventure in life.
However, Roquentin recognizes, as Revel does not, that his experience deviates from his expectation. Like having experienced an Event, having had an adventure is a matter of fictionalizing experience. He has had no adventures because adventures do not happen; they are created, and, when it comes to autobiography, they, like events, are necessarily created in retrospect or, as Roquentin puts it, “adventure … only makes sense when dead,” (37).
I would suggest that "adventure" is roughly the same as "Event" (though I want to stress that Roquentin himself never relates event to adventure - ex: see page 56), but that it implies a sense of necessity which my original idea of Events did not. In that way, it's a terrific term (my new favorite one, as a matter of fact!) for describing Events in autobiography (or in fiction as a whole). Adventure adds another level of determination to Event; whereas an Event merely needs to be created in retrospect, adventure needs to be created in retrospect with the knowledge that it exists as a unit. I think that an Event begins an adventure (the event of the stone begins the journaling adventure which ends in either the decision to write a novel, which I'll discuss presently, or in the publication of the journal itself), but that an adventure can be as small in scale as an event (I could cast the event of the stone in terms of adventure just as I did with the gestural adventures of the card players). Generally, though, I'd say that adventure subsumes the idea of event and adds to it the idea of a telos, or a necessary, prefigured end, or fate. Adventure's a cool word, right? Do you see why I like this book?
THE AESTHETIC SOLUTION to life without adventure
"But you have to choose: live or tell," (39). Unfortunately, Roquentin's revelation about the impossibility of living adventures leaves him a little out of sorts.Roquentin years for adventure: "I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail," (40). He searches for them (56), and is bitterly disappointed when the sense of adventuring disappears:
I began to tell myself what had happened since I landed... I felt violently that I was having an adventure. But then Erna came back... and aI hated her without knowing why. I understand now: one had to begin living again and the adventure was fading out. 39
Painfully aware of his clumsy, non-literary existence as a living thing, Roquentin suffers, even going so far as to stab himself in the hand because, "Why not? It would be a change in any case" (100).
Finally, while he is despairing, listening to his favorite song, “Some of
these days,” Roquentin changes his mind about adventure yet again; he feels that he surely has had real adventures. Listening to the song makes him feel that he, like the song itself, has been lifted out of brute time (I’d call it chronos)
and thus out of the relentless flow of experience that causes his nausea.
He realizes that his book about the Marquis de Rollebon was a failure (as in, he couldn't finish it) because he chose the wrong kind of subject; "an existant can never justify the existence of another existant," (178). The impulse to write was correct, he only needs to write "a story, for example, something that could never happen, an adventure" instead of a biography. It's through this endeavor that he believes he may one day find peace with himself and his existence, having finally achieved an adventure:
"Perhaps one day, thinking precisely of this hour... perhaps I shall feel my heart beat faster and say to myself: 'That was the day, that was the hour, when it all started. And I might succeed - in the past, nothing but the past - in accepting myself."178
The song, then, presents him with the "aesthetic solution"; his existential problems are answered gy the supposedly transcendental power of art. Because of his literary background, he adopts the solution in the form of a novel-writing project.
I assume he must have achieved this goal (the first one in his life, it seems) because the editors who open the novel have taken an interest in recovering his journal, which, if had he not published a novel, would surely be as unsought as are my own journal entries. I would have liked to know what sort of "story" he wrote; whether it was what we would usually call an autobiography or a work of fiction. It doesn't really matter, in the end, but it would shed some light on the role the journals played in his development. Since I've been considering journaling as a micro-form autobiography, one which is as little fictionalized as possible, I would have liked to know if it was by continuing this practice, but on a much larger scale, that he realized his adventure, or if it was just the act of finishing something which gave him the sense of having had an adventure. Is it the activity or the content that matters? Its at times like this that I wish I'd read Proust.
He realizes that his book about the Marquis de Rollebon was a failure (as in, he couldn't finish it) because he chose the wrong kind of subject; "an existant can never justify the existence of another existant," (178). The impulse to write was correct, he only needs to write "a story, for example, something that could never happen, an adventure" instead of a biography. It's through this endeavor that he believes he may one day find peace with himself and his existence, having finally achieved an adventure:
"Perhaps one day, thinking precisely of this hour... perhaps I shall feel my heart beat faster and say to myself: 'That was the day, that was the hour, when it all started. And I might succeed - in the past, nothing but the past - in accepting myself."178
The song, then, presents him with the "aesthetic solution"; his existential problems are answered gy the supposedly transcendental power of art. Because of his literary background, he adopts the solution in the form of a novel-writing project.
I assume he must have achieved this goal (the first one in his life, it seems) because the editors who open the novel have taken an interest in recovering his journal, which, if had he not published a novel, would surely be as unsought as are my own journal entries. I would have liked to know what sort of "story" he wrote; whether it was what we would usually call an autobiography or a work of fiction. It doesn't really matter, in the end, but it would shed some light on the role the journals played in his development. Since I've been considering journaling as a micro-form autobiography, one which is as little fictionalized as possible, I would have liked to know if it was by continuing this practice, but on a much larger scale, that he realized his adventure, or if it was just the act of finishing something which gave him the sense of having had an adventure. Is it the activity or the content that matters? Its at times like this that I wish I'd read Proust.
The aesthetic solution is not without its
drawbacks, as Peter Rupert points out in his article “The Aesthetic Solution in
Nausea and Malte Laurids Brigge” (1977), but for now, I want to give poor Roquentin time to enjoy his long-sought success, whatever the means may be by which he achieved it.
Everywhere => Hospital Office - 23 March 2013
Everywhere => Hospital Office - 23 March 2013
[1]
(It’s worth mentioning here that these Editors are, however, still fictional
characters, or rather comprise one character unit, as they are undifferentiated
and only speak as the group, and that, consequently, this “Editors’ Note”
precedes the collection of Roquentin’s journal entries, but antecedes the
Forward to the novel written by Richard Howard.)
[2] (I
am assuming that he does not want to
be a little girl with a nice new notebook since that’s what the diminutives
imply. Having once been one such little girl, I can vouch for the experience as
one of life’s nicer pleasures.)
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