March 31, Post 13

This is the first time I've been unsure where to go in my next post. Up until this point, I've been so behind that there was not question of what needed to be done, it was only a question of what needed to be done first. Now I know that I need to look at Passing Time, but I'm not sure if I've finished with Nausea. I'm sure that I haven't, in fact, but having written out an outline for the project, I see that the project doesn't separate too neatly along the axis of the books; there is a rough separation between the two problems I've identified with autobiography.

The first is what I've called the Problem of the Endless Present, which Roquentin addresses throughout his entries, particularly in the passage about the woman walking down the street and down the corner. Because it's in Nausea that I see this problem addressed, I align this problem with Sartre.

The second is the Problem of Inclusion. I've already discussed how Roquentin recognizes this problem when he makes an amendment to an entry because he feels like he hasn't told the truth about the day without including the fact that he couldn't pick up the newspaper off of the street. However, Revel struggles visibly with this problem throughout the entire novel, so I align this problem with Butor.

It's never as simple as that, though. The first problem creates the desire to accept an aesthetic solution in Roquentin, but Revel, the protagonist of Passing Time, seems to choose an aesthetic solution for a different reason. Both characters eventually face the problem of inclusion, but not because they both first encountered the problem of the endless present.

Roquentin begins with a journal in response to his recognition of the problem of the endless present, through which he finds his solution of the novel (which I've concluded is an autobiographical undertaking). This solution would necessarily involve the problem of inclusion, which he has already discovered in writing his journal, but we don't see him battle with that process since the novel ends when he decides to write his own novel.

Revel begins with a journal in response to feeling lost in the new city of Bleston. He is a French native who's just come to the English city to work for a firm for a year. He doesn't like the city, probably, I think, because he doesn't feel like he has a place in it. His resort to writing journal entries is itself then an aesthetic solution, but his is less successful than is Roquentin's; instead of providing him solace or helping him discover his identity in the city, the exercise eventually only multiplies his problems.

Revel's decision to write is thus not inspired by the first problem as is Roquentin's, but he does encounter the second problem in his work. The two novels line up, then, not along-side one another or as two halves of the project, but like a Venn Diagram: Roquentin covers the problem of endless present and the aesthetic solution and offers a glimpse into the problem of inclusion, while Revel begins with an aesthetic solution and explores the problem of inclusion. I think the novels complement each other well, even if they aren't immediately easily categorizable in terms of the project. Which is a tremendous relief, since it's much too late to choose another novel at this point in the game.

3rd Floor KJ, Hamilton College, NY - 31 March 2013.