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Literary Drifts

In 1952, between 23rd and 28th August, Michèle Bernstein spent time in the French port of Le Havre, Normandy seeking out the places that had inspired Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea, or so we learn from some fragments left by Patrick Straram, collected together as Les bouteilles se couchent.  The Sartre novel which inspired Michèle Bernstein was from 1938; it was Sartre's first published novel. Sartre set the story in the port city on the estuary of the river Seine in Normandy where he had been a schoolteacher.  Nausea is written as diary entries, with street-names that should be easy to find for any literary dériviste; in the quotation from Nausea below, the narrator, Antoine Roquentin has just come out of the library. A bronze statue of Gustave Impetraz stands nearby:




Thursday, 11.30

I have worked two hours in the reading-room. I went down to the Cour des Hypotheques to smoke a pipe. A square paved with pinkish bricks. The people of Bouville [Le Havre] are proud of it because it dates from the eighteenth century. At the entrance to the Rue Chamade and the Rue Suspedard, old chains bar the way to vehicles. Women in black come to exercise their dogs glide beneath the arcades’   Jean-Paul Sartre 1938.


  Like Michèle Bernstein in 1952, Sonia Anton of the Université du Havre has been inspired to explore Sartre’s street-names in Le Havre and has published a web project to share her results through the Groupe de Recherches Identités et Cultures. 

Michèle Bernstein’s two novels have been re-issued in French and in English translations.  La Nuit, The Night, provides the literary urban detective rich street clues for a drift of détournement through Paris, for instance it opens:

A disused metro entrance sits at the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Germain where it meets Boul'Mich; it's been abandoned a long time and is bordered by the railings of a private garden'. Michèle Bernstein 1961 La Nuit (translation mine)




The novels, Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre and La Nuit by Michèle Bernstein are explored above for their literary geographies. The catalyst for this discovery came from the book of fragments by Patrick Straram, collected together as Les bouteilles se couchent. 




Brittany Ferries have resumed their regular sailings from Portsmouth to Le Havre in Normandy. 






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