When the thirty-one-year-old Jean-Paul Sartre, a refractory philosophy teacher in Le Havre (“it is one thing to enjoy talking with your students and giving lectures, it is quite another to see yourself as a prof surrounded by other profs giving magisterial lectures and maintaining discipline in class: I didn’t like my colleagues, I didn’t like the atmosphere of the lycée”), having already published an essay L’Imagination with Alcan in 1936, submitted his first novel Melancholia to Gallimard later that same year, it was rejected, despite a favorable reader’s report by Jean Paulhan; in an interview some thirty-five years later, Sartre remarked: “I took this hard: I had put all of myself into a book I worked on for many years; it was myself that had been rejected, my experience that had been excluded.” Sartre had begun writing what he called his “factum on contingency” at the age of twenty-six, and was subsequently to acknowledge influences ranging from Valéry and Céline to Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; he was convinced of his novel’s worth through and beyond the prestige of its derivations.
Resubmitted to Gallimard in April 1937 with powerful recommendations from Charles Dullin and Pierre Bost, Sartre’s novel was at last accepted, though the title was judged “inadequate,” as were certain “raw” episodes in the text—Roquentin’s transactions with chambermaids in the Hotel Printania, details of low life in Bouville (mudville, after all), and scenes of Roquentin’s past. Sartre agreed to cuts, and suggested an alternative title: The Extraordinary Adventures of Antoine Roquentin, supplemented (and contradicted) by a bande publicitaire that would confess (or exult): “There are no adventures.” I treasure this suggestion as the sole example I can come up with of an eighteenth-century “libertine” irony in Sartre’s entire oeuvre. This too-playful formula (after all, the work had originally been called Melancholia!) was also rejected, and finally Gaston Gallimard himself came up with a title which famously prevailed for the novel itself (and in some thirty translations the world over: how deceived we should be, as the French say when they mean disappointed, if confronted today by a novel with that original, all-too-human, sentimental or psychiatric appellation). Though Gaston Gallimard’s title has remained more closely identified with the author than that of any other of his fictions or plays, Sartre as well as Simone de Beauvoir had reservations about “nausea,” apprehensive that such title would inspire a “naturalistic” reading of his experimental metaphysical novel. But what actually happened is that the word somehow changed its meaning because of the novel’s title: capitalized and clearly in reference to the novel, “Nausea” no longer evokes physical malaise to the point of vomiting, but is a nickname for existential anguish.
La Nausée was published the following April, and Sartre’s only book of short stories, Le Mur, written during the same years as the novel, was published in February 1939. It is these two works (of both Lloyd Alexander is the fortunate and gifted English translator, though I cannot resist the collegial privilege of pointing out that in a list of Annie’s personal stage properties on page 136, “shawls, turbans, mantillas, Japanese masks, pictures of Epinal,” the last item will necessarily confront the non-French reader with an enigma unless it is explained that images d’Épinal are not representations of a cotton-manufacturing town in NE France just south of Nancy, but old-fashioned conventionalized figures on printed fabrics, often affectionately collected and reproduced as illustrations in sentimental children’s books), and especially the novel in the reader’s hands, which afford Sartre his place as a decisive figure in modern fiction: within a decade of its publication La Nausée became a sort of modern classic, without thereby losing—in the minds of its enormous readership—its virulence, its emotional charge, its abiding fascination. This, on the one hand, because of its realistic power (Sartre was right about the effect of this particular kind of post-Zola treatment, but wrong to fear that it would damage a reader’s appropriate response to his essential, or rather his existential enterprise), for Nausea is indeed a primary document of the everyday life and social anxiety of the ‘thirties; but on the other hand, in formal terms and on account of its philosophic-fictional problematics, the work marks out a new and extremely influential departure for fiction, and was immediately taken by many French critics as the index of a “liberation” for the French novel (of course, as Alain Robbe-Grillet has reminded us some three decades later, all novels need to be liberated: literature is its own oppressor and must be its own emancipator).
Indeed it is by such novelistic problematics (narrative ambiguity, disintegration of character, repudiation of psychology, sportive experimentation of style) that Nausea inaugurated and was followed and favored by a healthy proportion (however dubious that adjective) of the French novels of the second half of the twentieth century.
In the procession of Sartre’s literary works, Nausea would seem to occupy a privileged site: it is the “founding” work on which all subsequent texts may be said to rest, however fitfully—significantly, this first novel has never been disowned or disestablished by its author—and it is a work of experiment and transition informing all his productions to come, even as it is retrospectively modified by them. At some thirty years’ distance, it is answered, complemented and opposed by The Words, which immediately upon publication was cited as Jean-Paul Sartre’s other most decisive literary triumph. The author himself unhesitatingly acknowledged a preference for the earlier work; in an interview with the dogged editors of the Pléiade edition of Sartre’s novels, he remarked: “Ultimately, I stand by one thing, which is Nausea. . . . It’s the best of what I’ve done.”
Perhaps not incidentally, the exhaustive scholarship which Messers Contat and Ribalka have provided in their splendid edition and on which I have drawn to a very minor extent (in comparison to the documentary riches they afford) offers a diverting illumination with which to conclude these prefatory observations. A roquentin, they tell us, has as its primary meaning in the Larousse Dictionary of the Nineteenth Century: “A name formerly given to songs composed of fragments of other songs and linked together as in a cento, so as to produce bizarre effects by changes in rhythm and abrupt breaks in the succession of thoughts.” They note that Nausea continually refers to other ways of speaking, even as it rejects them, and that Antoine Roquentin himself appears to be a man who listens to and copies others’ discourse in order to reconstitute it, half seriously, half comically, in his diary. Sartre himself, they add, was familiar with this meaning of “roquentin,” but assured them it had had no influence on the composition of his text nor on the choice of his hero’s name.