Both Malte Laurids Brigge and Antoine Roquentin are young writers living with dubious purpose in the shabby, if not squalid milieu of a large French city. Alienated from the past as well as from the environs, each begins a diary in response to a sudden intensification of perception. Both diaries stress Angst, angoisse, and the disintegration of personal identity, and each also documents attempts to reconstitute the integrity of self and world. These and other parallels in image, motif, and theme between Rainer Maria Rilke's Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) and Jean-Paul Sartre's first novel La Nausée (1938) have already been recorded, but no one has investigated their relationship in detail. Admittedly, some of the parallels are trivial, while others represent concerns held in common by numerous twentieth-century authors. Yet close reading of several compact passages will demonstrate more than a casual similarity in setting or problematic. In at least nine major instances, La Nausée recapitulates neatly discrete metaphoric configurations and extended images prefigured in Malte.

It is not a new observation that Sartre derived important motifs in his first novel from his omnivorous reading. Can the identification of Malte as one more source for La Nausée have more than marginal interest? It can, I submit, if Sartre's creative response to Malte exhibits a consistent pattern of reinterpretation. The resonance between the two works then constitutes a kind of dialogue which illuminates the characteristic themes of both. What name shall we give this resonance? Cautious readers will prefer to explore it in terms of motivic and metaphoric analogy, especially in the absence of any evidence for a more specific intention on Sartre's part…. Perhaps,… the resonance is merely an unconscious persistence of poetic vision. For this reader, however, some of the parallels are too extended, too detailed to admit this explanation. They imply a more deliberate artistic intent. The pattern of reinterpretation they reveal suggests an intriguing hypothesis: that Sartre sought to parody the tone and value system of Rilke's novel. If the parallel passages do exhibit parodic intent, it is only in the formal sense of that word. Sartre's parody is not principally satiric, though satiric content is not foreign to it. In general, he appropriates the structure of Rilke's motifs and images while negating the thematic significance they bore in Malte. (pp. 53-4)

Malte and La Nausée are participants in the tradition of the diaristic novel. One convention of that form is the encapsulation of the diary proper in a fictitious editorial commentary. The differing manner in which Rilke and Sartre treat this convention illustrates an important distinction between their respective narrative stances…. [In Malte, the] intrusion of the editor is always succinct and betrays no editorial personality…. Sartre's treatment of the editorial convention, on the other hand, is distinctly ironic and concentrated within the first few pages of his work. His point once made, he abandons the device…. This barrage of scholarly impedimenta establishes Sartre as an ironic manipulator of the diaristic-novel convention which Rilke had simply accepted as a tool in the orchestration of his novel. Roquentin-Sartre's ironic ambivalence toward forms and values accepted by Malte-Rilke can be observed repeatedly in the parallel passages to be discussed. Here, of course, no specific dependence on Rilke need be inferred.

Another obvious but superficial point of contact between Malte and La Nausée is the employment of eyes and hands as symbols of perceptive understanding and effective interaction with the world, respectively. (pp. 54-5)

Both Malte and Roquentin have suddenly experienced an inexplicable and threatening alteration in their perception of everyday existence. Malte immediately recognizes that this change is actually a penetration into uncharted regions of the self…. [He] launches the continuing motif of "learning to see."

A more tentative voice speaks in the first pages of La Nausée, but the basic elements of Malte's situation are repeated in Roquentin's words…. (p. 56)

The parallelisms of literary form, setting, personal problematic, and even symbolic vocabulary mentioned until now provide some material for a general comparison of Malte and La Nausée, but they are only preliminary to our discussion of related imagery. The instances of extended correspondence between the two works will be presented in three somewhat arbitrary sections: first, images and motifs expressing alienation from society; second, those relating to the dissolution of personal identity; and finally, those concerning the potential solutions which might permit the narrator to reintegrate himself into the social and the very physical world.

The primary symbol of the social integration and security which both narrators lack is the house. Rilke's use of this symbol takes the most varied forms…. Sartre's usage is more limited. (pp. 56-7)

A strain of unresolved nostalgia does emerge from Roquentin's reverie, but his images, unlike Malte's, ultimately stress the pettiness of an existence he does not aspire to. (p. 58)

If we accept, for the moment, the hypothesis that La Nausée stands in a direct relationship to Malte, Roquentin's reflections on the [homelessness] theme can be read as a response to Malte's self-pity…. The parallels here might, of course, be fortuitous. The house is, after all, almost a natural symbol for security and none of the specific points of similarity is truly distinctive…. Yet it is only one of several such passages; closer reading shows that it broaches many of the characteristic themes of Sartre's hypothetical dialogue with Rilke.

It is relevant, for example, that Malte does indeed possess a past, one which is unhappily inaccessible to him at present. Roquentin, on the other hand, lacks any facility for storing his past…. Roquentin recognizes that it is necessary to abjure the comfort of a self-definition imposed by the past. Malte, for his part, is ambivalent toward the past. In spite of his fear of an externally imposed self-definition, he is unable to renounce his longing for the security of a stable tradition. Although Sartre in La Nausée had not yet clearly formulated his concept of free human life as a projet continually redefined by the future, his rejection of the stable order of the past is already apparent. It constitutes a recurrent element of contrast between the value systems of the two works.

A second repository of traditional values in both works is the portrait gallery. The hallowed aura which suffuses Malte's candlelight expedition to the gallery at Urnekloster well suits the mystique surrounding his ancestral past in the novel. Just as the mansion is disjunct in Malte's memory, so too, only some of the figures in his heritage are known to him. Malte is not an integral part of this tradition: his portrait does not hang in the gallery. The painting of the boy Erik Brahe is the last. The parallel passage in La Nausée is set in the municipal museum of Bouville. Roquentin's own familial heritage is nowhere mentioned in the book, and as for pictures—he is even unable to recognize his former mistress Anny from an old photograph…. His alienation from the pretension of the museum to preserve the past is evident as he enters…. There is none of the romantic heightening here that Malte perceives in the lives of those portrayed at Urnekloster…. Anyone who approaches these stolid bourgeois with something akin to the emotional intensity seen in Malte becomes the butt of Sartre's satire.

A principal focus of Malte's recollections of the portrait gallery is the painting of little Erik Brahe. (pp. 58-9)

In [Sartre's] museum at Bouville, there hangs a comparable portrait [of a cadet]. (p. 60)

The parallels as well as the contrasts between this cadet and little Erik are telling. The ludicrous comments of the sentimental lady in La Nausée establish a trivial tonality for the passage which is quite the opposite of the funereal grandeur of Rilke's treatment of Erik. The boys themselves, however, in each case retain a certain dignity. The important symbol of the eyes is a focal point of the descriptions…. Roquentin-Sartre's ironic exaggeration of conventional sentiment further delineates his self-willed isolation from traditional social values. The genuine melancholy of Malte can have no place in La Nausée.

A similar technique of ironic exaggeration is evident in two further instances. In both of them, ideas expressed quite seriously by Malte are transformed in the mouth of the pathetic-comic figure of the autodidact. (pp. 60-1)

Do these passages contain enough evidence to confirm that La Nausée does indeed contain deliberate echoes of Malte? In no single case is Sartre so blatant a parodist as to establish the relationship beyond all question. The echo becomes incontrovertible only if we attend carefully to the aggregate of approximate parallels….

The problem of personal identity—loss of a sense of self and of control over one's external image—is associated in both works with a complexly intertwined symbolism of face, mask, mirror, and the theater. The motif of changing one's face as if it were a mask, or of putting on a real mask is especially prominent in Malte. Frequently, it represents the tension between the desire to shelter the self in a well-defined persona and the fear of sacrificing all independence to one's image. (p. 62)

In La Nausée, the attempt to create a heightened reality amid theatrical props is the disconcerting affectation of Roquentin's former mistress, the actress Anny. Her attempts are not confined to the stage; they shape her real life as well…. [In] later years, Anny admits to disillusionment: Not only are there no perfect moments in her (artificially arranged) real life, there are none even on the stage. (pp. 62-3)

Once again, Sartre's novel denies the very existence of a reality that is merely depicted as elusive in Malte. While Malte experiences confusion at the disintegration of self and tradition, he never relinquishes his awareness of an order and truth which one might somehow approach if only a proper method could be found. It is this possibility which haunts him. Roquentin confronts a world which is ultimately absurd—or seems so most of the time.

Further illustrations of this dichotomy center upon the symbols of the mirror and the hand. The peculiar capacity of the mirror to fix an image, thereby "realizing" it, makes it an important tool in both novels for those who seek an objective reality free from the vagaries of subjective interpretation. For one who is pure and at one with himself, peering into a mirror reinforces the harmony between the self and one's external image. (pp. 63-4)

Young Malte's most memorable encounter with a mirror is in the scene in which he dresses himself in an old masquerade costume. As he rushes to the mirror, his image suddenly assumes independent existence…. The mirror thus becomes the instrument of one of the chief dangers to the self in Malte, the imposition of a fixed identity from without.

Roquentin's confrontation with the mirror exposes a different danger, but one no less characteristic for La Nausée. He need not fear an externally imposed fixation of the self; on the contrary, the central danger to the self in La Nausée is the utter disintegration of any coherent self-image. Roquentin attempts to avoid the mirror, which can reduce his face to its absurd components, but its power is as great as the mirror in Malte; it is a trap…. Like Malte, Roquentin must succumb to the coercive power of the mirror and is only freed from it by collapsing. Other details of his experience are, of course, very different from Malte's: the mirror here objectifies not a mask, but Roquentin's own face. The horror of alienation is not caused, as in Malte, by an abandonment or obscuring of one's true self, but by the recognition that the components of one's own person are contingents devoid of inherent logic or significance.

The last group of passages dealing with the disintegration of personal identity is united by one of the most frequently recurrent symbols of purposeful interaction with the world in both works, the hand. The representation of the hand as a grotesque sea creature, now twitching, now dead, at once independent of the narrator's volition and yet still a part of him, is one of the least conventional images shared by these works. Young Malte experiences the disintegration of the effective self which this image symbolizes while he is grouping for a lost pencil under his drawing table. (pp. 64-5)

In a separate passage, the hand appears not only as independent of Malte, but as subservient to some unfathomable external power, "das Grosse," which usurps his potency by transforming his hand into a dead animal…. The recurrence of this unusual configuration, the transformation of the disembodied hand into a dead (marine) creature by some impersonal force, is one of the most extended proofs that Sartre utilized images from Malte in La Nausée. In Roquentin's idiom, the impersonal force is termed "la Chose."… "La Chose" flows into Roquentin, filling him, just as "das Grosse" swelled within young Malte. But for Sartre, it would be philosophically inadmissible to represent this sinister power as a truly independent, transcendent entity in the way that Rilke—in this instance at least—represents "das Grosse." Roquentin quickly recognizes that "la Chose, c'est moi." It is his own existence, the sense of the absolute contingency of that existence, which annihilates the concept of purposeful action symbolized by the hand. (pp. 65-6)

[The] inanimate world which vibrates with a secret significance in Malte is infused with lack of meaning in La Nausée.

On one occasion, however, even the sort of radical contingency that is thematic in La Nausée is briefly prefigured in Malte. Although the surrealistic images used to illustrate the potential discontinuity of reality are totally disparate in the two novels, both identify them as a primary source of Angst or angoisse. The awareness that anything might happen frequently overwhelms Roquentin…. A grotesque catalog of just what might occur is later constructed by Roquentin as a kind of vicarious revenge for the insensitivity he perceives in the city he is about to leave…. The vindictive bitterness of Roquentin's catalog is absent [with Malte, there being] more emphasis on the psychopathology of Malte's anxiety than on the discontinuity of reality. Malte's vision is rationally explained as the product of delirium; Roquentin's is a particularly plastic representation of the contingency theme that suffuses the entire novel. These passages are thus related only in their surrealism, but they deserve mention as extreme points in a process of disintegration which extends beyond the problematic of reconciling self and image to a questioning of the rational continuity of all existence.

The third constellation of related motifs is comprised of the potential solutions for the isolation and fragmentation experienced by the two narrators. Both Rilke and Sartre present four major modes of solution: immersion in history, recapitulation of one's own past, interaction with other "outsiders" in the present, and escape into the timeless realm of art. Although these solutions are weighted very differently in each work, all are present in both, and the last two are linked by sets of parallel images. (pp. 66-7)

The by-now-familiar configuration recurs: an aspect of reality which refuses to disclose its secrets to Malte is represented in La Nausée as a simple void. (p. 68)

In Malte, the aristocratic world is passing, but with a melancholy grace; Sartre's bourgeoisie lacks even this.

In spite of repeated encounters with kindred social outcasts, neither narrator can resign himself to acknowledge a relationship with them openly. This would be tantamount to accepting a precise self-definition, which neither is able to do. Only one possibility of salvation remains: escape into the ordered realm of art. To represent art as a timeless refuge from the transience of life is, of course, an ancient cliché: ars longa, vita brevis. In significant passages, however, both Rilke and Sartre represent the liberating power of art as a function of its rhythmic regularity—a much more distinctive construction of the familiar topos. (pp. 69-70)

[It] would be foolish to suggest that the totality of La Nausée, or even the full implications of any single passage here discussed, could be exhausted by considering them as a reaction to Rilke's Malte. Yet the parallels between the works are so numerous and—on occasion—so specific, that coincidental similarity seems excluded. The pattern of correspondence, however, is illuminating even if we refuse to speculate on the origins or intentionality of the relationship. By contrasting small details in a whole series of similar images, we underscore the characteristic differences in the social and philosophical habitus of each novel…. The distinctions on the philosophical plane are no less pointed, though devoid of satire. Repeatedly, situations which bring Malte face to face with the difficulty of gaining insight into the noumenal power of the universe are occasions for Roquentin to experience the absence of such an absolute force: Malte's omnipotent Grosse is deflated to a figment of the self in Roquentin's Chose; … the past that Malte struggles to reinterpret is for Roquentin a virtual nonentity; even the comforting permanence of art which calms Nikolaj Kusmitsch pleases Roquentin only because art escapes the permanence of existence. The thematic reversals are so neat and the sheer number of correspondences so great that I find it impossible to attribute them to coincidence or unconscious recollection. I read these passages in La Nausée as Sartre's deliberate reevaluation, utilizing Rilke's own imagery, of the values cherished by Malte Laurids Brigge. (p. 71)

Laurence Gill Lyon, "Related Images in 'Malte Laurids Brigge' and 'La Nausée'," in Comparative Literature (© copyright 1978 by University of Oregon), Vol. XXX, No. 1, Winter, 1978, pp. 53-71.∗