ABSTRACT
Nausea, and the Sex of Writing will be the title of a book I hope to publish in the future. For the moment, I will select one insignificant detail from a famous scene: the cafe scene, the 'Rendez-vous des Cheminots', in which Roquentin finally experiences Nausea with a capital N: 'Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea.'l Written thus, the Nausea attains in this passage its capital status. Novelistic language is endowed with and doubled by its imperious, even imperialistic, metalanguage which seems a priori to exclude any commentary or, what is perhaps the same thing,to include it. Can one say anything better, or simply say anything more about the Nausea than what is said about it in the text? What remains to be seen by the critical eye? Nothing no doubt, except this insignificant detail: the Nausea scene ends with a game of cards described in some detail, and the game itself ends at the very moment Roquentin gets up as a 'dog-faced young man' exclaims: 'Ah! The nine of hearts.' I could therefore call this essay: 'The Nine of Hearts: Fragment of an Analytic Reading of La Nausee.'
