Partners in slime: The liquid and the viscous in Sarraute and Sartre

Romanic Review, May 2001 by Willging, Jennifer

In one of the final sections of L'Etre, "De la qualiterece de l'eSartre uses the slimy or the viscous as an example of a material quality, among an infinite number of qualities, that belongs to the en-soi (all material phenomena in the world) and that is imbued with psychic meaning or value in its revelation to human consciousness, the pour-soi. For the author of L'Etre, the slimy has exclusively negative psychic value because it resists appropriation by the pour-soi, whose attempts at appropriation of the en-soi are part of its necessary and continual project to give meaning to a world that is meaningless in and of itself. Indeed, the slimy not only resists appropriation by the pour-soi but turns the tables and attempts itself to appropriate the poursoi. The slimy is especially nefarious because it exerts a certain fascination upon the pour-soi; it seems to beckon it into its compliant softness: "Le visqueux est docile. Seulement, au moment megrave; je crois le posseder, voile que, par un curieux renversement, c'est lui qui me possede. C'est la qu'apparaicaractentiel: sa mollesse fait ventouse" (655 author's emphasis). The slimy is neither like water, which in its purity and transparency leaves no trace upon that which it touches (656), nor like solids, which can be manipulated wthout danger by the pour-soi:

L'objet que je tiens dans ma main, s'il est solide, je peux le la quand il me plait; son inertie symbolise pour moi mon entiesance: je le fonde, mais il ne me fonde point; c'est le pour-soi qui ramasse en lui-men-soi et qui l'eusqu'a la dignite soi, sans se compromettre, en restant toujours puissance assimilante et creatrice; c'est le pour-soi qui absorbe l'en-soi. [... ] Mais voici que le visqueux renverse les termes: le pour-soi est soudain compromis. (655 author's emphasis)

When attempts are made to mold the slimy, it spontaneously "melts" back into an inchoate mass and so cannot be used as a tool for the realization of the pour-soi's projects. It clings when touched, sucks inward when penetrated; it invites in but will not release, depriving the pour-soi of its most essential quality, that which distinguishes it above all from the en-soi: its liberty.

Before publishing this formal analysis of the slimy in L'Etre et le neant, Sartre had already explored the theme in his 1938 novel, La Nausee. In the climactic scene in the public garden of Bouville (a town whose very name calls to mind the sliminess of mud), Roquentin suddenly intuits the undifferentiated, powerless, and contingent character of nature and objects, their "gratuite parfaite" (La Nausee 187). What he sees when he looks upon the garden are no longer distinct objects, but an oozing, indistinct mass of goo: "la racine, les grilles du jardin, le banc, le gazon rare de la pelouse, tout ca s'etait evanoui; la diversite des choses, leur individualite n'etait qu'une apparence, un vernis. Ce vernis avait fondu, il restait des masses monstrueuses et molles, en desordrenues, d'une effrayante et obscene nudite" (182). The root of the chestnut tree next to him is "une petite mare noire a [s]es pieds" (187). "Est-ce que je l'ai rOve, cette norme presence?" he ponders later. "Elle etait la, posee sur le jardin, degringolee dans les arbres, toute molle, poissant tout, tout epaisse, une confiture. Et j'etais dedans, moi, avec tout le jardin" (191). His first visceral reaction at the sight of this "confiture" is fear, but his next is anger, anger at the pure gratuity and meaninglessness of this mess deprived, as it seems to him now, of human intention: "je trouvais ca si bete, si deplace, je haissais cette ignoble marmelade. Il y en avait, il y en avait!" (191). It is here in the garden that Roquentin fully comprehends the origin of his bouts of nausea, which is the en-soi's revelation of its true nature to him. The world is only full of distinguishable objects when human consciousness chooses to intend those objects, when it chooses to distinguish them one by one from the gelatinous mass of being and to raise them up to its own level. But when Roquentin doubts his choices and projects, principally that of writing the biography of an eighteenth-century statesman, the concrete objects around him seem to melt away into a pool of slime.