Nausea (2 page)
In the quarter-century since Antoine Roquentin, the "hero" of Nausea, made his appearance, he has become a familiar of our world, one of those men who, like Hamlet or Julien Sorel, live
outside the pages of the books in which they assumed their characters. If it is not strictly correct to call him an archetype, nevertheless he is an original upon whom many copies, both fictional and actual, have been formed. This is not to say that Roquentin was the first "Existentialist man," or Nausea the first "Existentialist novel"; we have already spoken of the precursors. But Roquentin is a man living at an extraordinary metaphysical pitch, at least in the pages of the journal he has left us. His account of himself offers us many shrewd perceptions of life in our world that we appropriate, as parts of our cultural equipment, in defining our own attitudes. It is scarcely possible to read seriously in contemporary literature, philosophy, or psychology without encountering references to Roquentin's confrontation with the chestnut tree, for example, which is one of the sharpest pictures ever drawn of self-doubt and metaphysical anguish.
How did Roquentin arrive at his crisis of despair? It helps if the reader bears in mind a philosophical distinction that has been the source of endless debate over the centuries: the distinction between existence and essence. Take any object; a Venetian glass paperweight, for example. Its essence is everything that permits us to recognize it: its roundness, heaviness, smoothness, color, etc. Its existence is simply the fact that it is. This is the distinction that Roquentin discovers one day when he picks up a stone on the seashore and is suddenly overcome by an "odd feeling"; it is the feeling of being confronted by a bare existence. For him, quite unexpectedly, the essence of the stone disappears; he "sees through" it; and then as the days proceed he gradually discovers that all essences are volatile, until, in the confrontation with the chestnut tree, he finds himself in the presence of reality itself reduced to pure existence: disgusting and fearsome.
This is a point that all existential writers have repeated over and over: the detestability of existence. Jaspers has written: "The non-rational is found in the opacity of the here and now, ... in the actual empirical existence which is just as it is and not otherwise." Why is it not otherwise? Why is it at all? What is this is-ness? Isn't it simply nothing, or rather Nothingness, the unknowable, indispensable Void? What could be more absurd, "non-rational," meaningless? The mind of man, which he did not ask to be given, demands a reason and a meaningùthis is its self-defining causeùand yet it finds itself in the midst of a radically meaningless existence. The result: impasse. And nausea.
One by one Roquentin is offered the various traditionalmeans tor escaping his predicament, and his examination and rejection of them provide some of the most evocative scenes in the book. Rational humanism, as offered by the autodidacte who is trying to read all the books in the town library, seems at first a good, almost charming possibility, until it collapses in a scene of terrible comic force. The life of the town, its commercial and pietistic affectations, clearly is unacceptable. But even more important are the parts of himself that Roquentin finds he must now reject as useless. His love of travel, of "adventures," in short, of objective experienceùthis has no value. "For the thinker, as for the artist," William Barrett writes, "what counts in life is not the number of rare and exciting adventures he encounters, but the inner depth in that life." Hence Roquentin must turn within himself, but when he does so, where is the "inner depth"ùor rather what is it? Again, Nothingness. Neither the experience of the outside world nor the contemplation of the inner world can give meaning to existence. Perhaps the past has something to offer? Roquentin redoubles his efforts in connection with the research he has been engaged in for some time; but finds only that the myth of history cannot help himùit is gone, dead, crumbled to dust, its meanings are academic. Roquentin's last hope is love, human love, yet he knows now that this is a thin hope. He goes to meet his former mistress; expectantly, to be sure, but not confidently; and his defeat, when it occurs, is something that he had, in a sense, already acknowledged.
In his suffering Roquentin is reduced to nothing, to the nauseated consciousness of nothing. He is filled with meaningless, anarchic visions. Yet perhaps he is experiencing what Jaspers calls "the preparing power of chaos." At any rate suffering is the necessary prelude to the re-establishment of the self, as both philosophy and folk wisdom attest. Roquentin's way out of his predicament is not given in detail, but in his remarks about the jazz recording and about his own plans for future literary endeavors, he seems to indicate that he knows a means of survival. It is unfortunate that Sartre chose to call by the name of "jazz" a recording that, from Roquentin's description of it, most musically minded Americans will recognize as commercial pseudo-jazz; but this does not alter the validity of the point Sartre introduces through a reference to the music. What is the point? What is Roquentin's "way out"? The matter has been debated by many commentators, partly because it is not specified in the book, partly because it raises issues that extend far beyond the book. If
Roquentin's way out is to be through art, what use is it to the nonartist? What elements in the music make it suggestive of a possible mode of survival? What does "survival" mean in Roquentin's catastrophe? What is the real, ultimate relationship of Roquentin to his former mistress and to the people of Bouville? These are extremely important questions. But they cannot be decided in a few pages, nor can they be answered dogmatically by any individual reader. They are questions that Sartreùat least in this bookùpurposely leaves open.
Later in his philosophical development the idea of freedom became Sartre's main theme. Man, beginning in the loathsome emptiness of his existence, creates his essenceùhis self, his being ùthrough the choices that he freely makes. Hence his being is never fixed. He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death he would never end. Nor would his philosophy. "Existentialists," wrote the Irish philosopher Arland Ussher, "have a notable difficulty in finishing their books: of necessity, for their philosophyùstaying close to the movement of lifeùcan have no finality." To what extent this applies to Nausea the individual reader must decide.
Another question, even more difficult, is the line between jest and sermon in the novel. Sartre, for all his anguished disgust, can play the clown as well, and has done so often enough; a sort of fool at the metaphysical court. How much self-mockery is detectable in Roquentin's account of the chestnut tree? Some, certainly. The rhetoric at points turns coy: the "suspicious transparency" of the glass of beer, the trees that "did not want to exist" and "quietly minded their own business." And what does Roquentin mean, at the end of the episode, by the "smile of the trees" that "meant something . . . the real secret of existence"? What is the relationship between the smile of the trees and Roquentin's description of the jazz recording: "The disc is scratched and wearing out, perhaps the singer is dead. . . . But behind the existence which falls from one present to the other, without a past, without a future, behind these sounds which decompose from day to day, peel off and slip towards death, the melody stays the same, young and firm, like a pitiless witness"?
What is the "melody"? For that matter, what is the novel, which is another kind of melody? Is it a good novel? Is it a work of art? We know that Sartre, the philosopher, is also a marvelous writer; in the techniques of realistic fictionùthe construction of dialogue, the evocation of scene and moodùhe is the equal ofanyone. But a novel is more than technique; it is a self-consistent and dynamic whole. As if this weren't difficult enough, Sartre compounds the aesthetic problems by insisting that the novel must conform to the details of his philosophy. He is not content, like some philosophers, to write fable, allegory, or a philosophical tale in the manner of Candide; he is content only with a proper work of art that is at the same time a synthesis of philosophical specifications. A tall order; and the critics, although widely divergent in their interpretation of the substance of Nausea, seem to agree that Sartre, brilliant though his verbal gifts may be, has not quite brought it off. Germaine Bree and Margaret Guiton (in An Age of Fiction, 1957) have written: "When Sartre, the philosopher, informs us that we have an immediate intuition of existence in the sensations of boredom and of nausea, we tend to raise an eyebrow. But when Sartre, the novelist, describes this situation, we are almost convinced." William Barrett, a keener critic of the philosophy, has called Nausea Sartre's best novel "for the very reason that in it the intellectual and the creative artist come closest to being joined," but the joining is not complete: "Nausea is not so much a full novel as an extraordinary fragment of one." Similarly a recent anonymous critic, writing in the London Times Literary Supplement, has mentioned the "bite and energy . . . [of] the best pages of La Nausee." And so on and so on. The tone of reluctant praiseù"almost," "fragment," "the best pages"ùpervades nearly all the criticism of Sartre's fiction.
Literary critics are a cheerless, canny breed, inclined always to say that a given work has its good and bad points. Perhaps the best comment on their scrupulosity is that Nausea was published twenty-six years ago and they are still writing about it. Something must hold their attention. If it is not Sartre's novel-istic technique, then perhaps novelistic technique is not a just criterion of what is pertinent or valuable. Certainly Nausea gives us a few of the clearest and hence most useful images of man in our time that we possess; and this, as Allen Tate has said, is the supreme function of art.
William Blake once remarked that he had to create his own system of thought in order to avoid being enslaved by those of others, and Sartre has said that genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out. The power of Sartre's fiction resides in the truth of our lives as he has written it. The validity of his fiction resides not only in the genius but in the courage that he has invented as an example for the age.
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Editors' Note
These notebooks were found among the papers of Antoine Roquentin. They are published without alteration.
The first sheet is undated, but there is good reason to believe it was written some weeks before the diary itself. Thus it would have been written around the beginning of January, 1932, at the latest.
At that time, Antoine Roquentin, after travelling through Central Europe, North Africa and the Far East, settled in Bou-ville for three years to conclude his historical research on the Marquis de Rollebon.
THE EDITORS
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UNDATED PAGES
The best thing would be to write down events from day to day. Keep a diary to see clearlyùlet none of the nuances or small happenings escape even though they might seem to mean nothing. And above all, classify them. I must tell how I see this table, this street, the people, my packet of tobacco, since those are the things which have changed. I must determine the exact extent and nature of this change.
For instance, here is a cardboard box holding my bottle of ink. I should try to tell how I saw it before and now how I1 Well, it's a parallelopiped rectangle, it opensùthat's stupid, there's nothing I can say about it. This is what I have to avoid, I must not put in strangeness where there is none. I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything. You continually force the truth because you're always looking for something. On the other hand, it is certain that from one minute to the nextùand precisely a propos of this box or any other object at
1 Word left out.all 1 can recapture this impression of day-before-yesterday. I must always be ready, otherwise it will slip through my fingers. I must never2 but carefully note and detail all that happens.
Naturally, I can write nothing definite about this Saturday and the day-before-yesterday business. I am already too far from it; the only thing I can say is that in neither case was there anything which could ordinarily be called an event. Saturday the children were playing ducks and drakes and, like them, I wanted to throw a stone into the sea. Just at that moment I stopped, dropped the stone and left. Probably I looked somewhat foolish or absent-minded, because the children laughed behind my back. So much for external things. What has happened inside of me has not left any clear traces. I saw something which disgusted me, but I no longer know whether it was the sea or the stone. The stone was flat and dry, especially on one side, damp and muddy on the other. I held it by the edges with my fingers wide apart so as not to get them dirty.
Day before yesterday was much more complicated. And there was also this series of coincidences, of quid-pro-quos that I can't explain to myself. But I'm not going to spend my time putting all that down on paper. Anyhow, it was certain that I was afraid or had some other feeling of that sort. If I had only known what I was afraid of, I would have made a great step forward.
The strangest thing is that I am not at all inclined to call myself insane, I clearly see that I am not: all these changes concern objects. At least, that is what I'd like to be sure of.
10.301
Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them. I am quite at ease this evening, quite solidly terre-a-terre in the world. Here is my room facing north-east. Below the Rue des Mutiles and the construction-yard of the new station. From my window I see the red and white flame of the "Railwaymen's Rendezvous" at the corner of the Boulevard Victor-Noir. The Paris train has just come in. People are coming out of the old station
