INTRODUCTION
I.
In a lecture delivered in 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre described existentialism as “the attempt to draw all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism.” Nausea, which appeared seven years earlier, in 1938, represents an early installment in this process of atheistical traction. It thus belongs alongside Camus’s novel The Stranger, and his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus; books which likewise commit themselves to the prosecution of difficult consequences, and which, like Nausea, are only partially convincing in the responses or solutions they propose to the realization that, after God, life is without meaning.
Nausea, then, belongs to a rare genre — or several rare genres. It is one of the few books devoted to the logical exploration of a world without meaning. It is a philosophical novel which, if it does not quite propose philosophical arguments in the formal sense, discusses and dramatizes them. In addition, it is one of those books — like The Prelude, or Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge — which becomes the document of its own making. That is to say, in such books, the writer-narrator talks about writing, and exhorts himself to write a great, solving work: only slowly do we realize that we are reading that very work. The self-exhortation is the literary achievement, if we can only see it. Sartre ends Nausea by making the narrator, Antoine Roquentin, pledge to write something that would be “beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence. . . . A book. A novel.”
Sartre’s novel also prefigures the French nouveau roman and the work of Beckett. His narrator has a shadowy, fictive quality. He is in the port town of Bouville (i.e. Mudtown; possibly based on Le Havre, where Sartre taught for several years), where he is working on a historical work, about the life of the Marquis de Rollebon, an eighteenth-century diplomat and traveler. He goes for walks in the town; watches his solidly bourgeois fellow-citizens; writes his book; goes to the library; has occasional encounters with a man he has nicknamed the Self-Taught Man; thinks about his former lover, Anny, and so on. He seems to be a real enough character, and even tells us that he is thirty years old. Yet whenever Roquentin talks about his past, it has the studied randomness and the glamorous opacity of espionage. He is a spy from the world of nothingness. For instance, he talks carelessly about having been in an unlikely number of places: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers, Meknes, Saigon, Aden, Hanoi, Angkor. “When she [Anny] was in Djibouti and I was in Aden”; or “Six years ago . . . I decided to leave for Tokyo”; or “the same discouragement I had in Hanoi — four years ago when Mercier pressed me to join him.” We hardly believe that Roquentin was ever in Hanoi; and nor, we suspect, did Beckett, who may have borrowed the name, Mercier, for his novel Mercier and Camier.
Sartre flourishes this fictive quality, and Roquentin, of course, does not believe in his past anyway. When he abandons his work on Rollebon, he writes: “How can I, who have not the strength to hold to my own past, hope to save the past of someone else?” The reader senses that Sartre wants to alert us to Roquentin’s fictionality, to let us know, in the style of Beckett and the nouveau roman, that Roquentin is a thoroughly unstable invention who has no real past outside the words of his creator. This is not just a literary game. As Beckett does, Sartre uses the fictionality of his fiction to ask us to reflect on the fictionality — or at least, the arbitrariness — of reality itself. Nausea’s very subject is the randomness, the contingency, the superfluity, of the world; where better to begin than with Roquentin’s own randomness, his contingency as an invented character? It is as if Sartre is saying to us “How can you expect my character to be solidly real, to be anything other than obviously imaginary, when everything is contingent anyway? My character has been deformed out of reality by his own nihilism, his own metaphysical nothingness.”
Nevertheless, Roquentin, while never a character of great depth in the traditional sense, and while always shadowy, has enough vitality — the vitality of his creator — to interest and involve us. Roquentin, like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, is a sufferer and a militant. He is at war with the town in which he lives, at war with the regulars at his café, at war with Anny and the Self-Taught Man, and at war with himself, or with pieces of himself. For the two principal characters with whom he interacts, Anny and the Self-Taught Man, are in some way Antoine’s doubles. (A further borrowing, perhaps from Dostoevsky.) He ridicules the Self-Taught Man, who is laboring through his education by reading the library’s books alphabetically, author by author. The Self-Taught Man is ridiculous because he is a soft-hearted humanist, and because he has got all his knowledge from books. Yet there is nothing to suggest that Roquentin is not equally as impoverished, and merely hiding his poverty behind a panoply of place names. When the Self-Taught Man comes to Roquentin’s room, to look over the photographs of Roquentin’s supposedly wide travels, he is handed only a packet of “photographs” (never explicitly linked to Roquentin, and not necessarily taken by Roquentin) of “Spain and Spanish Morocco.” Anny, too, is a kind of alter ego of the narrator. Near the end of the book, when Roquentin finally meets Anny again, she laments, in words similar to Roquentin’s, that “it isn’t good for me to stare at things too long,” and continues: “in London, we had separately thought the same things about the same subjects, almost at the same time.”
Roquentin is a solipsist, trapped in a terrible echo-chamber of the self, haunted by the sonics of his inflamed personality. But alongside his Dostoevskyan anger, and his Céline-like contempt for the bourgeois masses, Roquentin is visited by a deeper, more philosophical ailment: he falls into bouts of what he calls his “Nausea.” These are episodes in which, afflicted by his sense that there is “absolutely no more reason for living,” he is simultaneously alienated from and over-immersed in reality. He is overcome in a café, in a street, in his study. He feels that “nothing seemed true, I felt surrounded by cardboard scenery which could quickly be removed. . . . I murmured: ‘Anything can happen, anything.’” Reality begins to lose its familiar outlines. Words, for instance, no longer seem to refer to their referents. At one point, Roquentin realizes that the seat he is on is a seat only by name: “it could just as well be a dead donkey. . . . Things are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic, and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things.”
Yet, while reality begins to melt from him, it also becomes viscous. Suddenly, he is plunged into the thick heavy abundance of existence. In his periods of nausea, Things — a pebble, a beer glass, a tree, his own hand — oppress Roquentin with their heavy contingency and their awful superfluity. He feels his own flesh as mere lazy, vegetating fat. Why does this flesh exist? Why does the tree exist? Why are there so many trees, all of them producing leaves and branches and roots? In the town park, Roquentin is overcome by a sense of humans as “a heap of living creatures . . . we hadn’t the slightest reason to be there, none of us, each one, confused, vaguely alarmed, felt in the way in relation to the others. In the way: it was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these gates, these stones.” And he continues: “I, too, was In the way.” This obstructive superfluity does not strike him as, in some way, part of the mysterious generosity of life (as religionists, and even some scientists, argue that nature’s crooked abundance, its beautiful excess, could only come from God). Far from it. The abundance of life strikes him as “dismal, ailing, embarrassed at itself.” He looks again at the trees, and decides that they did not want to exist but are unable to kill themselves. So they go on, like good little bourgeois, performing “all their little functions, quietly, unenthusiastically.”
Roquentin concludes that nothing is simply itself. “The simplest, most indefinable quality had too much content, in relation to itself, in its heart. . . . The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. . . . All is free. . . .”
The episode in the park, which occurs towards the end of the novel, represents one of its climaxes, and is certainly the novel’s longest and finest passage of philosophical essayism. But the novel has prepared us for this, for Roquentin has been falling in and out of smaller bouts of nausea throughout the story. One of his fiercest apprehensions, linked to, but less generalized than his sense of life’s pointlessness, concerns his awareness that life’s occurrences are random. Life resembles the pack of cards which he sees earlier in the novel. When we play at cards, we invest each card with a useless significance; for what is more random than that fine King of Hearts, say, which we hold in our hands? “Mighty king, come from so far, prepared by so many combinations, by so many vanished gestures. He disappears in turn, so that other combinations can be born, other gestures, attacks, counterattacks, turns of luck, a crowd of small adventures.”
Roquentin sees the randomness of his own life, and indeed mournfully wallows in it. Finding, by chance, a copy of Eugénie Grandet open at page 27, he starts reading the novel, which he has never read before, at page 27. At another moment he goes out for a walk, and comments: “I go out. Why? Well, because I have no reason not to.” If most people’s lives are positively structured by randomness without their knowing it, Roquentin’s life has become negatively structured by randomness, for he knows that it has become impossible to choose one course of action over another, and he is immobilized by it. Later, he announces, ironically: “I am free: there is absolutely no more reason for living . . . this freedom is rather like death.” He is free only in the sense that he could do anything at all; but he is not really free, because to be able to do anything at all is to be able to do nothing, since meaningful differentiation between choosing and not choosing has been lost.
Sartre sees that we structure life by absences, by nullity. Take words, for instance. We call a tree a “tree” partly by rejecting all the other names a tree could possibly have (cat, ball, dog, trombone, and so on). We stay in, one morning, partly because we think we cannot go out (I must get this introduction finished this morning!). We choose someone to love only by not choosing to love millions of others; yet we canonize our entirely random decision by ignoring, indeed inverting, its randomness, and enrobing ourselves in the garments of inevitability: we like to say, “we were made for each other,” or “fate picked the two of us out.”
But when life is properly seen to be random, excruciatingly experienced as random, as Roquentin experiences it, this tenuous structure of rejection and choice, of absence and presence, has disappeared and has been filled up by random presence, by superfluity, pointless plenitude. When one sees life as truly random, one can, as Roquentin fears, “do anything.” But it would be a mistake to imagine that this is then freedom, while those who do not see life’s randomness are still stupidly unfree. Is Roquentin free, because of what he now knows? Not at all. He is no freer than his blind fellow citizens. He can do everything but nothing. He is “free” only in the sense that he is really unfree; he is “alive” only in the sense that he is really dead.
Perhaps there is some consolation, however, in having pierced the veil of this terrible paradox of freedom. The citizens of Bouville, whom Roquentin watches going about their everyday business, are still veiled in ignorance of their arbitrariness. They are as unfree as Roquentin, yet they hide the terrible imprisonment of their existences by unthinkingly getting up, going out to work, relaxing on Sundays, and so on. They wrongly imagine that they have chosen this form of life, when of course it has chosen them.
Roquentin visits the local art gallery, and looks at the portraits of the town notables, the burghers who have made it what it is. These he calls “the Bastards” (les Salauds). He is filled with revulsion. These pompous civilians imagine that their lives have meaning, and they believe that these paintings solemnize and preserve their imperishable achievements. They are merely examples of what Sartre would later call “mauvais foi” or “bad faith”: they have concealed from themselves the awful dilemma of their existences.
The scene in the gallery is perhaps the only weak one in the book. It is too long, too heavy-handed, and somewhat cruel. Roquentin looks at the portrait of Rémy Parrottin, by Renaudas. And then a bourgeois couple enters the gallery, impressed by precisely what revolts Roquentin. The man exclaims: “Parrottin of the Academy of Science . . . by Renaudas of the Institute. That’s History!” We are supposed to laugh at this man’s mindless veneration, his respect for musty institutions. This man is clearly a walking dictionary of idées reçues. Yet instead, we feel the fat hand of didacticism; we feel Sartre urging us to agree with Sartre. There is something a little propagandistic about the scene (as Sartre’s later novels would become increasingly didactic). Of course, the mockery of the bourgeoisie is a fine French tradition; but Sartre here lacks Flaubert’s delicacy, and the scene perhaps reminds us of another moment in a gallery, in Sentimental Education, when Frédéric is walking his uneducated mistress, Rosanette, through a room in the palace at Fontainebleau. Gazing vacantly around her at the portraits, Rosanette absurdly pronounces: “All this brings back memories!” Her comment is foolish, yet its helplessness, and its absurd comedy, stir our sympathy and make Rosanette human. The man who says “That’s History!” is not really human, he is Sartre’s victim.
The scene perhaps prefigures that later Sartre who, after the Second World War, became increasingly political and increasingly intolerant of what he saw as bourgeois or Western softness. Though this later Sartre had complicated relations with orthodox Marxism, his own brand of Marxist existentialism had oddly uncomplicated relations with Western capitalism: he simply believed that violent revolution should sweep capitalism away. He denounced the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, but argued that only socialism, not the bourgeois notions of justice and human rights, could condemn it. In 1961, in his introduction to Franz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre, he wrote: “Il faut tuer. Abattre un Européen, c’est faire d’une pierre deux coups, supprimer en même temps un opprimeur et un opprimé.” — “It is necessary to kill. To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to eliminate at the same time an oppressor and an oppressed.” One cannot help reflecting on the irony that the celebrated philosopher of freedom, the great atheist, maintained an almost religious faith in an ideology that vandalized the very face of freedom.
In fact, Sartre was largely unpolitical during the 1930s (he did not vote), and Nausea is political only, as it were, at its margins. Still, Sartre intends us to register that the town’s notables are not only myopics of bad faith, but representatives of France’s right wing. Roquentin lingers over a portrait of Olivier-Martial Blévigne, who broke a town dock strike in 1898, who was an anti-Dreyfusard (i.e. a conservative or anti-Semitic opponent of Dreyfus’s innocence) and whose face “resembles Maurice Barrés,” the President of the League of Patriots. Blévigne’s biography fairly screams “conservative”; again, we may feel that Sartre’s hammer is a little heavy here. But perhaps something subtler is intended. For though his novel seems to be set in the 1920s, Sartre may mean us to ponder the conservative ideology that had been burgeoning throughout the 1930s, and that would bloom, in some quarters, into Nazism and collaborationism a few years after the publication of Nausea. The Nazified intellectual Robert Brasillach, for instance, who was executed in February 1945 for his wartime collaboration with the Germans, had written in 1931, in his book on Virgil: “the land we are part of is above all this well-worn landscape, these well-seasoned words, the supreme ease we feel in rediscovering a street corner, the corner of a sentence, the corner of a memory.” These sentences appear in a chapter entitled “La Terre et les Morts” (“The Soil and the Dead”), taken from Maurice Barrés’s novel of that name. For the likes of Brasillach, a France of ancient custom and inherited principle was threatened by atheists, republicans, leftists, rootless Jews, governmental bureaucrats, and a writer like Sartre. It is not hard to see that, within this context, Roquentin’s apprehension of life’s randomness has a specific political charge, whether he knows it or not (he appears not to). For in Roquentin’s unanchored world, there can be no such thing as “well-seasoned words,” or the pleasure of an old street corner. In Roquentin’s world there are only Things without names, and the terrifying, endless rediscovery of the entirely arbitrary. No street corner has any justification over another one. Custom dissolves into nothingness.
II.
Nausea appeared five years before Sartre’s great book Being and Nothingness, and its philosophical adventures presage that later work. In both works, freedom is the issue at stake. Roquentin sees the terrible unfreedom of most people’s lives. He believes himself to be free, but his freedom is without value, because his sense of life’s randomness has robbed him of meaningful choice. Perhaps only at the end of the novel, when he appears to choose art and the life of the artist, does he make a meaningful, free choice. Being and Nothingness systematized the anguished paradoxes and ironies of Nausea. In it, Sartre argues that the self must be understood in relation to the world of things. The self wants to have the unthinking
solidity of things (what Sartre calls the “en-soi,” or “in-itself”). But the self is never simply itself, it is always “for itself,” or “pour-soi.” The self is nothing, has no meaning, though it is the source of all meanings. It desires to coincide with the unfree, unconscious nature of the en-soi but is unable to. Put more simply, the self is entirely free, unstable, and impermanent, and knows this. From this sense of absolute freedom is born anguish, a sense of dread. Thus the self will try to hide its liberty from itself, in acts of bad faith. Bad faith is the best proof, argues Sartre, that we are indeed free and that we know it.
Sartre’s vision of humans as alone and perpetually deciding what kind of humans they will become — his sense of the doom and the responsibility of this burden — was popular in a Europe poisoned by war and stupefied by, shamed by, questions of responsibility and free will. In the political context of the post-war, it was as if Sartre’s whole philosophy revealed that one is never simply — as the Nazi phrase had it — “acting on orders.” His thought is both optimistic and anguished. It is anguished because he sees that we are sentenced by our freedom, imprisoned by it (since it makes us afraid); optimistic because Sartre believed that we are truly free and can indeed make free choices. Roquentin is in some sense a prototype of Sartre’s later notion of the self. He is a pour-soi colliding with the en-soi of his surroundings, and he knows this. But his self-awareness seems to offer him no actual freedom. Not because, like his fellow-citizens, he runs away from freedom, but because he appears to having nothing to do with his freedom, nothing to commit it to. In some sense, his freedom has been corroded by his sense of his own freedom. (This paradox is best found in Sartre’s comment that the French were most free while occupied by the Nazis.)
Only at the end of the novel does a chink of hope glance on this hero. Sitting in a café, about to depart for a new life in Paris (an utterly random and pointless gesture), he asks to hear again his favorite song, “Some of These Days.” He scoffs, in his bourgeois-bating way, at the idea that music “consoles.” Those idiots who go to hear Chopin or Wagner and emerge “refreshed”! But he begins to think about this melody sung by a black woman and written by a Jew. The tune is untouchable, in a sense. There is a scratch in the café’s record, but the tune plays on, unaware of the scratch. This is because the melody exists beyond its record player, beyond the instruments that play it. “It is beyond . . . it does not exist, because it has nothing superfluous: it is all the rest which in relation to it is superfluous. It is.” The melody stays the same. And what about the man who wrote it? Doesn’t Roquentin envy this man a little? Doesn’t he wish that he himself had written this tune? Such people, he thinks, are a little like the dead, or the heroes of novels: “they have washed themselves of the sin of existing.” Might it be possible to “justify your existence then? Just a little?” He reflects that this is the first time for years that he has been moved by the idea of a man.
Roquentin wonders if he could do the same as the man who wrote the tune. Not in music, but in the realm of art. Not a history book, because that is about what has existed, and existence is pointless, is not necessary. But perhaps an invented story, about something that has never existed: “It would have to be beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence. . . . A book. A novel.” Roquentin’s revelation is moving, because Sartre is delicate, artistically delicate. He stretches Roquentin’s argument with himself over several pages, he does not hustle things. We believe in it as a process of thought.
Whether we believe in it as thought is another question. If this is Sartre’s “solution” to the realization of pointlessness, and we must take it as such, it seems gestural only. Nor does it escape Roquentin’s own earlier dismissal of those who take “consolation” in art. What is this but a bourgeois consolation in art, yet one merely performed at a slightly higher intellectual level than the passively bourgeois?
Camus reviewed Nausea when it appeared and, while dazzled by the book, disliked its philosophy. He did not make explicit his objection, but one can surmise that he disliked Sartre’s fatalism. For Camus, the realization that life is absurd is the beginning of a stoic battle against that absurdity. Camus concluded, in The Myth of Sisyphus, that it was not acceptable for the absurd person to commit suicide, but that to live, and live rebelliously, “with my revolt, my freedom, and my passion,” was the best way of both acknowledging and rejecting death. Sartre by contrast, at least in this novel, has got beyond — or never reaches — such a state of flushed challenge. In the park, Roquentin thinks about killing himself, but comes to the perfectly logical conclusion that given life’s randomness, suicide too would be random, and thus meaningless: “But my death itself would have been superfluous.” In other words. Roquentin is already dead, so why bother killing himself? Certainly, this would have seemed intensely fatalistic to Camus.
Although Camus argued that after God we create our own meaning, one feels that he never really believed in self-determination
as absolutely as Sartre did. Camus continued to live under a religious shadow, wherein the battle was always with the terms handed to us by life — a secular version of man’s battle with the Gods. Life was a religious sentence for Camus; he never quite relinquished the idea that meaning has left a residue of itself in the world. Sartre found Camus’s religiosity frustrating, and said so; it was, along with political differences, one of the reasons for the break between the two men in the early 1950s. Sartre, though his language is sometimes religious, never had any time for religion. Camus was a tragic religionist, really; Sartre was, as he described himself, “a providential atheist.”
Yet for all their differences, Camus and Sartre resemble each other most powerfully in the “solutions” they propose to the meaninglessness of existence. Roquentin thinks of writing a novel, and Camus tells us that we must fight life with our revolt, our freedom, and our passion. Are Camus’s terms really any more stringent than Sartre’s? Recall that Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, suggests that, in an effort to outwit the absurd, we might live various roles: as writer, as conqueror, as seducer, as actor. Is Roquentin any different, really? He fancies himself something of a traveler (whether he has actually been anywhere or not): thus, a conqueror. He fancies himself something of a lover, telling us cynically about the patronne of the café with whom he sleeps. He places his faith in the life of the writer. And his former lover Anny argues that when she was an actor, on the London stage, she experienced a series of “perfect moments,” moments wherein she briefly outwitted the dragging arbitrariness of things. So Nausea, in fact, moves through most, if not all, of Camus’s proposed categories of “salvation.”
If Camus and Sartre resemble each other in this area, it is because it is impossible to “solve” the dilemma of the realization that “one cannot define existence as necessity,” or that “there is absolutely no more reason for existing.” Since both thinkers conclude that we must continue to live, both are pushed to logical contradiction: both have to furnish non-arbitrary or necessary reasons for continuing to live in an arbitrary or non-necessary world. Inevitably, they lack the theological consistency of another great thinker active at this time, Simone Weil, who believed in God and in the incarnation of Christ.
Both Sartre and Camus arrived at the idea that this life must be lived, in Camus’s phrase, without appeal. But neither can prove that this must be the case. They can only suggest it, describe a suggestion. Both, finally, are forced into the realm of the gestural, the metaphorical. This is appropriate in the novel, for it is the language of art. It is not the language of the actual so much as of the possible — where “possible” means potential. It is the realm of active utopia. Camus, to my mind, was the deeper thinker, even if never the abler philosopher: his politics paid attention to actual conflict and did not fawn at the heels of tyranny and extremism; his philosophy, because it was so tinged with theology, encodes within itself a greater sympathy towards failure; because Camus stressed the struggle with life’s terms rather than the pure capacity to choose, his thought touched, and touches, more lives than Sartre’s. Paradoxically, though Sartre was not religious, he had an almost religious faith in man’s ability to be free, to choose. This can give his work an unworldly air, and gives his later politics an unworldly monstrousness. Camus, the more religious thinker, was actually much more realistic about the tragic, constrained, Sisyphean nature of our ordinary daily imprisonment. Camus asked us to fight that imprisonment, if necessarily wearily and repetitively; Sartre hoped that we could simply explode the prison.