Writing, experience, and literary experience in Montaigne’s Essays and Sartre’s Nausea

Abstract

This article begins with an analysis of the semantic, tropological, and metaphysical associations of our modern concept of “experience,” which distinguish its form and contents from other opposing concepts. These not only include such general notions as Reason, Education, and Science, they also point to how “experience” has been thought, and lived, in opposition to the verbal and representational media of texts, printed books, and writing in general. Deconstruction (Derrida) and media theory (McLuhan) provide us with ways of understanding how the emergence of our concept of “experience” relied on, as much as it opposed, the media of writing and books, and their surrounding practices and institutions (like reading and schooling). “Experience” per se is perhaps unthinkable without such media and their institutionalized practices. More than modern theory, however, it is one of the major functions of modern literature to display this relation of conflict and dependence, and, even, to embody it in its very form in literary writing. Beyond the opposition of writing and “experience” is thus posed the question of the nature of the equivocal concept of “literary experience.” What would such a thing entail? This article explores this concept through two texts that attempt to bring “experience” into their very form: Montaigne’s Essays and Sartre’s Nausea.