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PARTISAN REVIEW
counts of philosophical positions with a neat temporal progression:
first came Sartre the writer, then Sartre the activist. First we can re–
count Sartre's life by chronicling his thought, then, for the postwar
period, we can ignore the relatively unimportant writings and focus
on the public gestures, the persona. But it is too neat. Hayman's bi–
ography necessarily has a double focus: the incongruity, the irrecon–
cilable conflict between thought and action, word and deed.
The straightforward temporal distinction between early Sartre
and late Sartre is equally disrupted by a consideration of the early
works. After all,
Nausea
may be a rather hermetic novel that incor–
porates more than a few techniques of late surrealism; at the same
time it must be seen as an accomplishment of the existentialist credo
that would prove crucial for all of Sartre's postwar strategies: con–
sciousness (to paraphrase or parody Husserl) is always consciousness
of
something else. There is no "inside" of consciousness, there is no
"inner" life. Roquentin's vision of the melting tree root in the public
park is not a subjective fantasy: it is a vision of the fundamental con–
tingency that characterizes the physical world, a contingency that
the bourgeois, in their pomposity, refuse to recognize. Sartre's de–
scriptive style in this novel was meant to convey the idea that con–
sciousness was not inward-turning or self-constituting, but rather
that it was never separable from what it perceived: consciousness
was a great "clarifying wind," transparent, empty, and somehow
cleansing. Consciousness - or "Man" - could not be reduced to a
self-digesting substance. Even the emotional reaction that seemed to
characterize certain perceptions (fear before a horrible mask, fot ex–
ample) was somehow inherent in the object perceived, not in the
consciousness of the perceiver. Roquentin's nausea was not "in" him;
on the contrary, it was the attribute of the root, of the park, of all of
nature.
From the outset, then, we see in Sartre a refusal of "literature"
that conveys or embodies nothing more than a "self" that constitutes
itself in a solipsistic manner . As with so many French authors of the
1930s, Sartre's enemy here was Proust. In this sense, Sartre's project
never changed: from beginning to end he was concerned above all
with the opening toward the outside, the consciousness of something
else, be it a tree root or the "situation of the writer in 1947." The ex–
terior, the contingent, that which could not be neatly contained as
an "adventure" with beginning, middle, and end, was always, im–
possibly, his "subject."
But this led to a tremendous problem as well, one that also is
