This article analyses the relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre's La Nausée (1938) and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), which share many textual details and a concern with the representation of traumatic loss. In both texts, there is an encounter with
contingency and a quest for an ethical form that might symbolize suffering. 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. Unable to find a form for his suffering –
as he terms it, 'souffrir en mesure' ['to suffer in time'] like the jazz tune which relieves his existential nausea – Roquentin ultimately retreats into narcissistic abstraction. 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 Nausée.
Journal of Romance Studies promotes innovative critical work in the areas of linguistics, literature, performing and visual arts, media, material culture, intellectual and cultural history, critical and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, gender studies, social sciences, and anthropology. The primary focus is on those parts of the world that speak, or have spoken, French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese, but work on other cultures may be included. Issues cross national and disciplinary boundaries in order to stimulate new ways of thinking about cultural history and practice.