of his life: “I am subject to these sudden transformations...This is what
has given my life such a jerky, incoherent aspect...Shall I go off again,
leaving my research, my book and everything else unfinished?” (Nausea
12 – 13 ). The option to reject this project that has defined him up to this
point, the stark realization that the necessities of his life are contingent
on his ongoing commitment – the nauseous sense of his own possibilities
is starting to dawn on him again. Such “transformations” or, as Sartre
will say in later works, “conversions,” though rare, accompany our
freedom the way that possible annihilation of the world accompanies
the sustaining power of Descartes’s creating and conserving God.^19 But
where Descartes finds salvation from the contingency of his existence in
Providence – the belief that the Universe cares – the refuge of Sartre’s
antihero is art.^20
Soon this attack is followed by Roquentin’s asking the waitress to play
his favorite tune, “Some of these Days,” on the phonograph. Like his
childhood experience of the necessity of the story rolled into the spool on
the projector, here the “band of steel” conceals the inevitability of the
song it contains: “A few seconds more and the negress will sing.^21 It
seems inevitable so strong is the necessity of this music: nothing can
interrupt it, nothing which comes from this time in which the world has
fallen” (Nausea 34 ). As the music fades, the speaker senses that “some-
thing has happened...The Nausea has disappeared” (Nausea 34 ).
A recurrence of this feeling of the sheer contingency of existence, after
reaching its dramatic climax in the famous meditation on a tree root
halfway through the story, is again alleviated by the same recording.
Liberation from the nauseous experience of the contingency of our
temporal existence seems achievable by appeal to the experience of the
necessity unfolded in the “other” temporality of art.
The story from beginning to end is plagued with the nauseating
experience of contingency and its possible relief, if not cure, by appeal
to aesthetic temporality. InThe Imaginary, with which this work stands
in dialogue, Sartre had distinguished the time of the imaginary from the
(^19) See “Cartesian Freedom,” in Jean-Paul Sartre,Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans.
20 Annette Michelson (New York: Crowell-Collier,^1962 ),^180 –^197 ; hereafterLPE.
According to Georges Poulet, Sartre “conceived his novel as a parody on theDiscourse on
21 Method”(Le Point de de ́part[Paris: Plon,^1964 ],^227 ).
Actually, the woman associated with this song, Sophie Tucker, is white. For the likely
explanation for Sartre’s error, seeOR 1747.
Ontological sickness and its aesthetic cure 143