Sartre's second century

Temporality and the Death of Lucienne in Nausea 47
sort of panic attack in which Roquentin becomes sexually aroused, admits
to a desire for rape, and gives details of the rape from the point of view of
the rapist. There is no previous mention of Lucienne in the book, and the
reader is left to wonder how and why Roquentin's anxiety about the past
and about existence would be catalysed by this news into such a sexualised
episode of panic and self-doubt. The scene seems to represent a thematic
break from the discussion of temporality leading up to it. But it is by
examining the journal entry as a whole in the context of the theme of
temporality that I think we can find an explanation for Roquentin's strange
reaction. I shall argue that Roquentin's reaction to the news of Lucienne's
rape and murder is a demonstration of the temporal structure of
consciousness. By examining this section of Nausea in parallel with
Sartre's discussion of temporality in Being and Nothingness, we shall see
that the desire for rape that Roquentin admits to, and the details of the
rape, are all fragments of his own past. This hypothesis will suggest, in
other words, that Roquentin raped and murdered little Lucienne.
In trying to make sense of time and the past, Sartre has Roquentin
formulate two conceptions of time that Sartre will later specifically argue
against in the section on temporality in Being and Nothingness. First, let
us quote Roquentin:
The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even in my thoughts. It
is true that I had realised a long time ago that mine had escaped me. But
until then I believed that it had simply gone out of my range. For me the
past was only a pensioning off: it was another way of existing, a state of
vacation and inaction; each event, when it had played its part, put itself
politely into a box and became an honorary event [...]. Now I knew: things
are entirely what they appear to be—and behind them [...] there is
nothing. 5
Originally, Roquentin thinks that the past exists, though in a state
disconnected from the present and unable to affect the present. However,
his estrangement from his own past, and his inability to resuscitate the past
by way of his historical research, lead him to conclude that the past does
not exist and that he is "forsaken in the present". 6 On the one hand we
have the idea that the past exists, but ineffectually isolated from the
present, and on the other hand we have the idea that the past does not exist
at all.
5 Ibid., 96.
6 Ibid., 95.