6

The necessity of contingency:

Nausea

W

ehavewitnessedSartre’s initial encounter with and subse-
quent haunting by the problem of contingency. Years later he will
insist that “the essential nature of faticity is for each individualthe
necessity of hiscontingency.^1 If we can rely on Sartre’s memory, he first
experienced this phenomenon as a child when leaving the movie theater
where he had witnessed the “necessity” of a narrative contained in the
spool of film on the projector’s wheel. The contrast with the randomness
and unpredictability of the world to which he returned on leaving the
theater shocked him profoundly. He carried the effects of this experience
in his “factum” (as the Normaliens used to call their polemical pamph-
lets) on contingency for the next two decades, depositing them in the
novel that made his reputation.^2
One of the few works by which Sartre would later admit he hoped to
be remembered,^3 Nauseais the paradigm of a philosophical novel. It
embodies the tension between philosophy and literature, concept and
image, life and art, that marked much of his public life. It was Beauvoir
who convinced him to transform his projected theoretical treatise on

(^1) CDRii: 204.
(^2) Regarding the “factum,” aside from definitions found in the Collins-Robert French diction-
ary that carry a polemical, even violent tone, Michel Contat observes: “Sartre and Nizan used
to callfactums[sic] the literary works that they were considering writing and publishing”
(Michel Contat,Pour Sartre[Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008 ], 103 ,n. 3 ;
3 hereafterPS).
After namingSituations,Saint Genet, theCritique of Dialectical ReasonandThe Devil and the
Good Lordas the works he hopes to see the new generation take up and read, Sartre adds “and
thenNauseatoo, since from a purely literary point of view, I think it’s the best thing I have
done” (interview with Michel Contat, “Self-Portrait at Seventy,”L/S 24 ). In the view of
many, it counts among “the major literary productions of the twentieth century” (OR 1658 ).
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