/
634
ROBERT GREER COHN
against the tradition of the ruling society-while remaining in its
framework, depending on
it
for their livelihood-but also re–
volted against the very language which expressed and justified
it:
hence phenomena like dada, futurism, literary "terrorism,"
and the myriad voices of Cretans calling
all
Cretans liars.
Though we may feel that the Marxist glasses are hardly
the
most favorable for a clear view of such matters, Sartre's refur–
bished lenses will do for a rough estimate; and we m<ily go on
from there to add that the Sartre of
La N ausee
(1938, aetat 33)
was still very much a child of this climate: the epigraph from
Celine: "He's a fellow without collective importance, he's just a
plain individual," the parodies of modern figures like Proust and
Gide, the <iltmosphere of thorough revulsion against the
renti~r
self (Roquentin is financially independent and mortally bored),
frenzied discontent with all manner of patness or smugness....
And, true to the doubleness of the mood, the half-way nature of
the revolt, even as he tries to purge himself of the past via sym–
bolic vomitives, he is held by its magnetism and owes
his
best
pages to its delicate, highly-evolved means of expression. The
very nature of pastiche implies this doubleness, as it had with
Proust's own parodies of Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourts; and,
whatever the relative dosage of irony and subjugation, Proust is
surprisingly often present in this little masterpiece: in the uneasy
and cerebral love-affair of Anny and Roquentin, with its "privi–
leged moments" and their CilWareness of the "irreversibility of
time"; in the themes of solitude, of perversion, of the visions
induced by place-names, of the sudden crystallization of emotion
triggered by insignificant objects (like the muddy shingle,
the
oak-tree roots), and above all the haunting little melody (here
modified to a saxophone air) which brings on the revelation of
a possible artistic vocation. Ironic, certainly; and
<iilso
a study
in
fascination amounting to 'something like obsession.
There are some other aspects of the
entre-deux-guerres
'era
which Sartre does not mention. For example, it
seemslik~ly
that
the impact of World War I, in many ways more ,horrible than
