Being” inBeing and Nothingness(xlviii). We shall pursue this in the
following chapter.
Roquentin’s famous experience of the contingency of existence before
the chestnut tree root in a public garden on a Sunday afternoon is the
imaginative anticipation of the phenomenological ontology articulated in
Being and Nothingnessa few years later. It joins the bodily changes of the
emotional subject that we saw conjuring, as if by magic, the changed world
that had previously threatened, or limited, our normal existence. And it
gestures toward another embodied “argument” that reveals our embarrass-
ment before the Other’s gaze inBeing and Nothingness. These and many
other examples should temper the easy accusations of unqualified Cartes-
ianism aimed in Sartre’s direction. For all that, it must be admitted at this
point that there is a duality operative in his writings, but it is not that of the
classical Cartesian “thinking thing” and “extended thing”; rather, it evinces
a dualism ofspontaneityandinertia. This duality, of possibly Bergsonian
provenance, continues into theCritique of Dialectical Reasonnotwithstand-
ing its apparent subsumption in the pervasive dialectic of that work.
Reflecting on the philosophical message of Roquentin’s neurosis and
its abatement, if not cure, with the experience of the work of art, Sartre
remarked to Beauvoir:
I recall thatNauseawas somewhat out of step with my own ideas. That is, I no longer
aimed at creating other-worldly objects like truth or beauty, as I thought of doing
before I met you. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted but I knew it wasn’t a beautiful
object, a literary object, an academic object that was being created; it was something
else. From this point of view, Roquentin marked the end of a period rather than the
beginning of another.
(Ce ́r 266 )
That terminating period was when Sartre regardedNauseaas a “meta-
physical essence” that was concretized every time the reader engaged
with the text, not unlike the response to the invitation of the Spanish
King described inThe Imaginarywhen viewing his portrait. “I began
Nauseawith that belief but by the end no longer held it” (Ce ́r 266 ).
Pursuing the path of the imaginary:The Roads to Freedom
Nauseahad scarcely appeared in 1938 when Sartre began work on his
“novel” (as distinct from his factum), a projected multivolume
154 The necessity of contingency:Nausea