teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees
everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he
were telling a story.
But you have to choose: live or tell.
I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life
remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.
(Nausea 39 – 40 )
Yet, even if we take with caution Sartre’s subsequent identification with
Roquentin (or with Mathieu inThe Roads to Freedom), one cannot avoid
reading this first novel as autobiographical in significant ways. In par-
ticular, it dramatizes Sartre’s own commitment to the creatively tensive
world of writing philosophy in a metaphorical mode or producing the
imaginary with a philosophical bite. If one recalls his own emotional
upheaval with the mescaline experience and the accompanying or result-
ant depression, the existential malady depicted inNausearings true. And
both the actual and the fictional “cures” are due to writing, though in
Sartre’s case at least, a life-long neurosis – his inability to leave a page
blank – has merely trumped a transitory one, real or proposed. The
prevalent view that associates Roquentin’s erstwhile girlfriend Anny with
Simone Jollivet, Sartre’s first love, exhibits another autobiographical
twist to the novel. In other words, writing and living may coalesce when
the story is obliquely one’s own: a novel that is true.^33
And yet the problem persisted. An entry in his War Diary for
December 1 , 1939 confesses:
I don’t think I’m being overly schematic if I say that the moral problem which has
preoccupied me up till now is basically that one of relations between art and life.
I wanted to write – there was no doubt about that and never has been. However, apart
from these strictly literary labors there was “the rest” – in other words, everything:
love, friendship, politics, relations with oneself, if you will.
(WD 72 )
This led him to distinguish three periods in his life: a period of optimism
when he was “a thousand Socrates” and constructed a “metaphysical
(^33) This is how Raymond Aron characterizes history in general (IPH 509 andMagazine
Litte ́raireno. 198 [September 1983 ]: 37 ) and how Sartre on more than one occasion describes
bothThe Family Idiotand his autobiography,Words.
148 The necessity of contingency:Nausea