Sartre’s siren

‘Some of These Days’ appears frequently in La Nausée , and is, the protagonist imagines, sung by ‘une Négresse’. It is likely, however, that Sartre was familiar with the recording by Sophie Tucker, a Jewish Ukrainian American vaudeville and blackface songstress known as the ‘last of the red-hot mamas’. This article reads La Nausée alongside work on ‘blacksound’. It thus moves beyond an analytic that considers the mus(e)ical role that the song plays only in terms of gender by reframing the (mis)hearing – of Sophie Tucker’s blacksound – as fundamental to the function of the song in the narrative. Thus it both insists on the constitutive role of blacksound (as ‘the sonic and embodied legacy of blackface performance’) in Roquentin/Sartre’s existential musings and foregrounds the value of analysing the implied audibility of ostensibly ‘silent’ literary works to better understand the role that sound/music plays in the construction of whiteness and its continued domination.