One sort of madness consists in seeing the accidental (or contingent) as necessary. We meet someone and later think that the meeting was fated; it was written in the stars. In La Nausée (1938), Sartre explores this issue. Nothing is actually necessary; it’s all contingent. Everything that has happened could have happened differently—or not have happened at all.
Tag: James Joyce
Joyce, Parnell, and literature as a social subsystem
For Joyce, nationalism was a reactionary politics. As Len Platt wrote in an introductory essay to Finnegans Wake, Joyce came to decry all form of nationalism, linking it to racism and eugenic movements. The language he invented for Finnegans Wake, “Wakesese,” actively resisted nationalism, monoculturalism, and monolingualism.
