(1) He describes La Nausee (1938) as 'l'aboutissement litteraire de la theorie de l'homme seul' -a free and independent individual who stands in opposition to society (Sartre 1976: 176-7). In 'Autoportrait a soixante-dix ans' Sartre claims that his experiences during the Second World War caused his politicization. Keywords: To the Lighthouse La Nausee mourning melancholy trauma art narrative In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe's post-Impressionist quest to represent her spiritual love for Mrs Ramsay in portraiture is more successful: in its eschewal of narcissistic signature and its hospitality to difference, Lily's vision becomes an aesthetic space of encounter with the (m)Other, removed from the melancholic, narcissistic project of novel-writing that Roquentin envisages at the end of La Nausee. Unable to find a form for his suffering-as he terms it, 'souffrir en mesure' like the jazz tune which relieves his existential nausea-Roquentin ultimately retreats into narcissistic abstraction. Roquentin's melancholic quest for an aesthetic vision to render loss constructs a false dichotomy of history versus art, in which the relation with the Other is abjected. In both texts, there is an encounter with contingency and a quest for an ethical form that might symbolize suffering. This article analyses the relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre's La Nausee (1938) and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), which share many textual details and a concern with the representation of traumatic loss.
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