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Nausea (book)
Encyclopedia
Nausea is an epistolary novel
by the existentialist
philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre
, which was published in 1938 and written while he was teaching at the lycée of Le Havre
. It marks Sartre's first novel and one of his best-known.
The novel takes place in a town similar to Le Havre
and concerns a dejected historian, who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea
.
French writer Simone de Beauvoir
claims that La Nausée grants consciousness a remarkable independence and gives reality the full weight of its sense.
It is widely considered one of the canonical works of existentialism
. Sartre was awarded, though he ultimately declined, the Nobel Prize for literature
in 1964. The Nobel Foundation
recognized him "for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age." Sartre was one of the few people ever to have declined the award, referring to it as merely a function of a bourgeois institution.
The novel has been translated into English at least twice, by Lloyd Alexander
as "The Diary of Antoine Roquentin" (John Lehmann, 1949) and by Robert Baldick
as "Nausea" (Penguin Books, 1965).
Over time, his disgust towards existence forces him into near-insanity, self-hatred; he embodies Sartre's theories of existential angst, and he searches anxiously for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point. But finally he comes to a revelation into the nature of his being. Antoine faces the troublesomely provisional and limited nature of existence itself.
In his resolution at the end of the book he accepts the indifference of the physical world to man's aspirations. He is able to see that realization not only as a regret but also as an opportunity. People are free to make their own meaning: a freedom that is also a responsibility, because without that commitment there will be no meaning.
Like many Modernist novels, La Nausée is a "city-novel," encapsulating experience within the city. It is widely assumed that "Bouville" in the novel is a fictional portrayal of Le Havre
, where Sartre was living and teaching in the 1930s as he wrote it.
The critic William V. Spanos has used Sartre's novel as an example of "negative capability," a presentation of the uncertainty and dread of human existence, so strong that the imagination cannot comprehend it.
The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel places La Nausée in a tradition of French activism: "Following on from Malraux
, Sartre
, Beauvoir
, and Camus
among others were all able to use the writing of novels as a powerful tool of ideological exploration." Although novelists like Sartre claim to be in rebellion against the 19th Century French novel, "they in fact owe a great deal both to its promotion of the lowly and to its ambiguous or 'poetic' aspects."
In his What Is literature?
, Sartre wrote, "On the one hand, the literary object has no substance but the reader's subjectivity . . . But, on the other hand, the words are there like traps to arouse our feelings and to reflect them towards us . . . Thus, the writer appeals to the reader's freedom to collaborate in the production of the work."
The novel is an intricate formal achievement modeled on much 18th-century fiction that was presented as a "diary discovered among the papers of. . ."
Hayden Carruth
wonders if there are not unrecognized layers of irony and humor beneath the seriousness of Nausea: "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."
Like many modernist authors, Sartre, when young, loved popular novels in preference to the classics and claimed in his autobiography that it was from them, rather than from the balanced phrases of Chateaubriand
that he had his "first encounters with beauty."
Sartre described the stream of consciousness technique as one method of moving the novel from the era of Newtonian Physics forward into the era of Einstein's theory of general relativity. He saw this as crucial because he felt that "narrative technique ultimately takes us back to the metaphysics of the novelist." He wanted his novelistic techniques to be compatible with his theories on the existential freedom of the individual as well as his phenomenological analyses of the unstable, shifting structures of consciousness.
From the psychological point of view Antoine Roquentin could be seen as an individual suffering from depression, and the nausea itself as one of the symptoms of his condition. Unemployed, living in deprived conditions, lacking human contact, being trapped in fantasies about the 18th century secret agent he is writing the book about, shows Sartre's oeuvre as a follow-up of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment
and Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
in search of the precise description of schizophrenia
. Rilke's character anticipates Sartre's.
Roquentin's problem is not simply depression or mental illness, although his experience has pushed him to that point. Sartre presents
Roquentin's difficulties as arising from man's inherent existential condition. His seemingly special circumstances (returning from travel, reclusiveness), which goes beyond the mere indication of his very real depression, are supposed to induce in him (and in the reader) a state that makes one more receptive to noticing an existential situation that everyone has, but may not be sensitive enough to let become noticeable. Roquentin undergoes a strange metaphysical experience that estranges him from the world. His problems are not merely a result of personal insanity, without larger significance. Rather, like the characters in the Dostoevsky and Rilke novels, they are victims of larger ideological, social, and existential forces that have brought them to the brink of insanity. Sartre's point in Nausea is to comment on our universal reaction to these common external problems.
Hayden Carruth
wrote in 1959 of the way that "Roquentin 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. . . . 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."
Ronald Aronson describes the reaction of Albert Camus
, still in Algeria and working on his own first novel, L’Étranger
.
At the time of the novel's appearance, Camus was a reviewer for an Algiers left-wing daily. Camus told a friend that he "thought a lot about the book" and it was "a very close part of me." In his review, Camus wrote, "the play of the toughest and most lucid mind are at the same time both lavished and squandered." Camus felt that each of the book's chapters, taken by itself, "reaches a kind of perfection in bitterness and truth." However, he also felt that the descriptive and the philosophical aspects of the novel are not balanced, that they "don't add up to a work of art: the passage from one to the other is too rapid, too unmotivated, to evoke in the reader the deep conviction that makes the art of the novel." He likewise felt that Sartre had tipped the balance too far in depicting the repugnant features of mankind "instead of placing the reasons for his despair, at least to a certain degree, if not completely, on the elements of human greatness." Still, Camus's largely positive review led to a friendship between the two authors.
G.J. Mattey, a philosopher rather than a novelist like Camus, flatly describes Nausea
and others of Sartre's literary works as "practically philosophical treatises in literary form."
In distinction both from Camus's feeling that Nausea is an uneasy marriage of novel and philosophy and also from Mattey's belief that it is a philosophy text, the philosopher William Barrett
, in his book Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy
, expresses an opposite judgment. He writes that Nausea "may well be Sartre's best book for the very reason that in it the intellectual and the creative artist come closest to being conjoined." Barrett says that, in other literary works and in his literary criticism, Sartre feels the pull of ideas too strongly to respond to poetry, "which is precisely that form of human expression in which the poet—and the reader who would enter the poet's world—must let Being be, to use Heidegger
's phrase and not attempt to coerce it by the will to action or the will to intellectualization."
The poet Hayden Carruth
agrees with Barrett, whom he quotes, about Nausea. He writes firmly that Sartre, "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."
Barrett feels that Sartre as a writer is best when "the idea itself is able to generate artistic passion and life."
(1678), Honoré de Balzac
's Le Père Goriot
(1835), André Malraux
's La Condition humaine
(1933), and Annie Ernaux
's Une femme avec une grande kut (1988), all of which have scenes with men and women faced with choices and "provide literary expressions to concerns with personal identity that vary over time more in detail than in essence."
A main theme in La Nausée is that life is meaningless unless a person makes personal commitments that give it meaning. William Barrett emphasizes that the despair and disgust in Nausea contrast with the total despair of Céline
(who is quoted on the flyleaf of the French edition) that leads to nothing; rather, they are a necessary personal recognition that eventuate in "a release from disgust into heroism."
Barrett adds that, "like Adler
's, Sartre's is fundamentally a masculine psychology; it misunderstands and disparages the psychology of woman. The humanity of man consists in the For-itself, the masculine component by which we choose, make projects, and generally commit ourselves to a life of action. The element of masculine protest, to use Adler
's term, is strong throughout Sartre's writings . . . the disgust . . . of Roquentin, in Nausea, at the bloated roots of the chestnut tree . . ."
Mattey elaborates further on the positive, redeeming aspect of the seemingly bleak, frustrating themes of existentialism that are so apparent in Nausea: "Sartre considered the subjectivity of the starting-point for what a human is as a key thesis of existentialism. The starting-point is subjective because humans make themselves what they are. Most philosophers consider subjectivity to be a bad thing, particularly when it comes to the motivation for action. . . . Sartre responds by claiming that subjectivity is a dignity of human being, not something that degrades us." Therefore, the characteristic anguish
and forlornness of existentialism are temporary: only a prerequisite to recognizing individual responsibility and freedom. The basis of ethics is not rule-following. A specific action may be either wrong or right and no specific rule is necessarily valid. What makes the action, either way, ethical is "authenticity," the willingness of the individual to accept responsibility rather than dependence on rules, and to commit to his action. Despair, the existentialist says, is the product of uncertainty: being oriented exclusively to the outcome of a decision rather than to the process yields uncertainty, as we cannot decide the future, only our action.
In his "Introduction" to the American edition of Nausea, the poet and critic Hayden Carruth
feels that, even outside those modern writers who are explicitly philosophers in the existentialist tradition, a similar vein of thought is implicit but prominent in a main line through Franz Kafka
, Miguel de Unamuno
, D. H. Lawrence
, André Malraux
, and William Faulkner
. Carruth says:
Sartre has written,
"What is meant . . . by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives of him, is undefinable, it is only because he is nothing. Only afterwards will he be something, and he will have made what he will be."
If things—and also people—are contingent, if they "just are," then we are free and we create ourselves solely through our decisions and choices.
David Drake mentions that, in Nausea, Sartre gives several kinds of examples of people whose behavior shows bad faith, who are inauthentic: members of the bourgeoisie who believe their social standing or social skills give them a "right" to exist, or others who embrace the banality of life and attempt to flee from freedom by repeating empty gestures, others who live by perpetuating past versions of themselves as they were or who live for the expectations of others, or those who claim to have found meaning in politics, morality, or ideology.
In simply narrative terms, Roquentin's nausea arises from his near-complete detachment from other people, his not needing much interaction with them for daily necessities: "the fact of his alienation from others is important; as his own work ceases to entertain and to occupy him, Roquentin has nothing that could distract him from the business of existing in its simplest forms." As a practical matter, he could solve his problem by getting a job; but, as a device for developing the novel's theme, his aloneness is a way of making him (and the reader) recognize that there is nothing inherent in the objective nature of the world that would give any necessary meaning to whatever actions he chose, and therefore nothing to restrict his freedom. "[H]is perception of the world around him becomes unstable as objects are disengaged from their usual frames of reference," and he is forced to recognize that freedom is inescapable and that therefore creating a meaning for his life is his own responsibility. "Nothing makes us act the way we do, except our own personal choice."
"But," David Clowney writes, "freedom is frightening, and it is easier to run from it into the safety of roles and realities that are defined by society, or even by your own past. To be free is to be thrown into existence with no "human nature" as an essence to define you, and no definition of the reality into which you are thrown, either. To accept this freedom is to live "authentically"; but most of us run from authenticity. In the most ordinary affairs of daily life, we face the challenge of authentic choice, and the temptation of comfortable inauthenticity. All of Roquentin's experiences are related to these themes from Sartre's philosophy."
During the Second World War, the experience of Sartre and others in the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation of France emphasized political activism as a form of personal commitment. This political dimension was developed in Sartre's later trilogy of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom
) (1945–1949), which concern a vicious circle of failure on the part of a thinking individual to progress effectively from thought to action. Finally, for Sartre, political commitment became explicitly Marxist.
In 1945, Sartre gave a lecture in New York that was printed in Vogue
in July of that year. In it he recast his prewar works, such as Nausea, into politically committed works appropriate to the postwar era.
Marxism was not, in any case, always as appreciative of Sartre as he was of it. Mattey describes their objections:
and his phenomenological method. He received a stipend from the Institut Français, allowing him to study in Berlin with Husserl and Martin Heidegger
in 1932, as he began writing the novel.
Roy Elveton reports:
Following Husserl
, Sartre views absurdity as a quality of all existing objects (and of the material world collectively), independent of any stance humans might take with respect to them. Our consciousness of an object does not inhere in the object itself. Thus in the early portions of the novel, Roquentin, who takes no attitude towards objects and has no stake in them, is totally estranged from the world he experiences. The objects themselves, in their brute existence, have only participation in a meaningless flow of events: they are superfluous. This alienation from objects casts doubt for him, in turn, on his own validity and even his own existence.
Roquentin says of physical objects that, for them, "to exist is simply to be there." When he has the revelation at the chestnut tree, this "fundamental absurdity" of the world does not go away. What changes then is his attitude. By recognizing that objects won't supply meaning in themselves, but people must supply it for them – that Roquentin himself must create meaning in his own life – he becomes both responsible and free. The absurdity becomes, for him, "the key to existence."
Victoria Best writes:
Thus, although, in some senses, Sartre's philosophy in Nausea derives from Husserl
and ultimately from René Descartes
, the strong role he gives to the contingent randomness of physical objects contrasts with their commitment to the role of necessity. (Elveton mentions that, unknown to Sartre, Husserl himself was developing the same ideas, but in manuscripts that remained unpublished.)
Ethan Kleinberg
writes that, more than Husserl
, it was Martin Heidegger
who appealed to Sartre's sense of radical individualism. He says, "for Sartre, the question of being was always and only a question of personal being. The dilemma of the individual confronting the overwhelming problem of understanding the relationship of consciousness to things, of being to things, is the central focus" of Nausea. Eventually, "in his reworking of Husserl
, Sartre found himself coming back to the themes he had absorbed from Heidegger
's Was is Metaphysik?" Nausea was a prelude to Sartre's sustained attempt to follow Heidegger
's Sein und Zeit
by analyzing human experience as various ontological modes, or ways of being in the world.
In 1937, just as Sartre was finishing Nausea and getting it to press, he wrote an essay, The Transcendence of the Ego
. He still agreed with Husserl
that consciousness is "about" objects or, as they say, it "intends" them – rather than forming within itself a duplicate, an inner representation of an outward object. The material objects of consciousness (or "objects of intention") exist in their own right, independent and without any residue accumulating in them from our awareness of them. However, the new idea in this essay was that Sartre now differed in also believing that the person's ego itself is also "in the world," an object of consciousness to be discovered, rather than the totally known subject of consciousness. In the novel, not only Roquentin's consciousness but his own body also becomes objectified in his new, alarming perception.
And so Sartre parted company with Husserl
over the latter's belief in a transcendent ego, which Sartre believed instead was neither formally nor materially in consciousness, but outside it: in the world.
This seemingly technical change fit with Sartre's native predisposition to think of subjectivity as central: a conscious person is always immersed in a world where his or her task is to make himself concrete. A "person" is not an unchanging, central essence, but a fluid construct that continually re-arises as an interaction among a person's consciousness, his physiology and history, the material world, and other people. This view itself supported Sartre's vision of people as fundamentally both doomed and free to live lives of commitment and creativity.
Carruth points out that the antipathy of the existentialists to formal ethical rules brought them disapproval from moral philosophers concerned with traditional schemes of value. On the other hand, analytical philosophers
and logical positivists
were "outraged by Existentialism's willingness to abandon rational categories and rely on nonmental processes of consciousness."
Additionally, Sartre's philosophy of existentialism is opposed to a certain kind of rationalistic humanism. Upon the confession of the Self-Taught Man as to being a member of the S.F.I.O.
, a French Socialist party, Roquentin quickly engages him in a Socratic dialogue to expose his inconsistencies as a humanist. Roquentin first points out how his version of humanism remains unaffiliated to a particular party or group so as to include or value all of mankind. However, he then notes how the humanist nonetheless caters his sympathy with a bias towards the humble portion of mankind. Roquentin continues to point out further discrepancies of how one humanist may favor an audience of laughter while another may enjoy the somber funeral. In dialogue, Roquentin challenges the Self-Taught Man to show a demonstrable love for a particular, tangible person rather than a love for the abstract entity attached to that person (i.e. the idea of Youth in a young man). In short, he concludes that such humanism naively attempts to "melt all human attitudes into one." More importantly, to disavow humanism does not constitute "anti-humanism".
The kind of humanism Sartre found unacceptable, according to Mattey, is one that denies the primacy of individual choice. . . . But there is another conception of humanism implicit in existentialism. This is one that emphasizes the ability of individual human beings to transcend their individual circumstances and act on behalf of all humans. The fact is, Sartre maintains, that the only universe we have is a human universe, and the only laws of this universe are made by humans."
Although his earlier essays did not receive much attention, Nausea and the collection of stories Le Mur (The Wall), 1939
, swiftly brought him recognition.
Carruth writes that, on publication, "it was condemned, predictably, in academic circles, but younger readers welcomed it, and it was far more successful than most first novels."
Sartre originally titled the novel Melancholia. Simone de Beauvoir
referred to it as his "factum on contingency." He composed it from 1932 to 1936. He had begun it during his military service and continued writing at Le Havre
and in Berlin
.
Ethan Kleinberg reports:
Drake confirms this account.
The manuscript was subsequently typed. It was at first refused by the Nouvelle Revue Française
(N.R.F.), despite a strong recommendation from their reviewer, Jean Paulhan
. In 1937, however, the imprint's publisher, Gaston Gallimard
accepted it and suggested the title La Nausée.
Brice Parain, the editor, asked for numerous cuts of material that was either too populist or else too sexual to avoid an action for indecency. Sartre deleted the populist material, which was not natural to him, with few complaints, because he wanted to be published by the prestigious N.R.F., which had a strong, if vague, house style. However, he stood fast on the sexual material which he felt was an artistically necessary hallucinatory ingredient.
Michel Contat has examined the original typescript and feels that, "if ever Melancholia is published as its author had originally intended it, the novel will no doubt emerge as a work which is more composite, more baroque and perhaps more original than the version actually published."
first issued Lloyd Alexander's translation in 1949 as part of its New Classics library; a New Directions paperback edition was introduced in 1959.
Epistolary novel
An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents" such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use...
by the existentialist
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
, which was published in 1938 and written while he was teaching at the lycée of Le Havre
Le Havre
Le Havre is a city in the Seine-Maritime department of the Haute-Normandie region in France. It is situated in north-western France, on the right bank of the mouth of the river Seine on the English Channel. Le Havre is the most populous commune in the Haute-Normandie region, although the total...
. It marks Sartre's first novel and one of his best-known.
The novel takes place in a town similar to Le Havre
Le Havre
Le Havre is a city in the Seine-Maritime department of the Haute-Normandie region in France. It is situated in north-western France, on the right bank of the mouth of the river Seine on the English Channel. Le Havre is the most populous commune in the Haute-Normandie region, although the total...
and concerns a dejected historian, who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea
Nausea
Nausea , is a sensation of unease and discomfort in the upper stomach with an involuntary urge to vomit. It often, but not always, precedes vomiting...
.
French writer Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...
claims that La Nausée grants consciousness a remarkable independence and gives reality the full weight of its sense.
It is widely considered one of the canonical works of existentialism
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
. Sartre was awarded, though he ultimately declined, the Nobel Prize for literature
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
in 1964. The Nobel Foundation
Nobel Foundation
The Nobel Foundation is a private institution founded on 29 June 1900 to manage the finances and administration of the Nobel Prizes. The Foundation is based on the last will of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite....
recognized him "for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age." Sartre was one of the few people ever to have declined the award, referring to it as merely a function of a bourgeois institution.
The novel has been translated into English at least twice, by Lloyd Alexander
Lloyd Alexander
Lloyd Chudley Alexander was a widely influential American author of more than forty books, mostly fantasy novels for children and adolescents, as well as several adult books...
as "The Diary of Antoine Roquentin" (John Lehmann, 1949) and by Robert Baldick
Robert Baldick
Robert Baldick was a British scholar of French literature, writer, joint editor of the Penguin Classics series with Betty Radice and a well-known translator. He was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford....
as "Nausea" (Penguin Books, 1965).
Plot summary
Written in the form of journal entries, it follows 30-year-old Antoine Roquentin who, returned from years of travel, settles in the fictional French seaport town of Bouville to finish his research on the life of an 18th-century political figure. But during the winter of 1932 a "sweetish sickness", as he calls nausea, increasingly impinges on almost everything he does or enjoys: his research project, the company of an autodidact who is reading all the books in the local library alphabetically, a physical relationship with a café owner named Françoise, his memories of Anny, an English girl he once loved, even his own hands and the beauty of nature.Over time, his disgust towards existence forces him into near-insanity, self-hatred; he embodies Sartre's theories of existential angst, and he searches anxiously for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point. But finally he comes to a revelation into the nature of his being. Antoine faces the troublesomely provisional and limited nature of existence itself.
In his resolution at the end of the book he accepts the indifference of the physical world to man's aspirations. He is able to see that realization not only as a regret but also as an opportunity. People are free to make their own meaning: a freedom that is also a responsibility, because without that commitment there will be no meaning.
Characters
- Antoine Roquentin — The protagonist of the novel, Antoine is a former adventurer who has been living in Bouville for three years. Antoine does not keep in touch with family, and has no friends. He is a loner at heart and often likes to listen to other people's conversations and examine their actions. Even though he at times admits to trying to find some sort of solace in the presence of others, he also exhibits signs of boredom and lack of interest when interacting with people. His relationship with Françoise is mostly hygienic in nature, for the two hardly exchange words and, when invited by the Self-Taught Man to accompany him for lunch, he agrees only to write in his diary later that: "I had as much desire to eat with him as I had to hang myself." He can afford not to work, but spends a lot of his time writing a book about a French politician of the eighteenth century. Antoine does not think highly of himself: "The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so." When he starts suffering from the Nausea he feels the need to talk to Anny, but when he finally does, it makes no difference to his condition. He eventually starts to think he does not even exist: "My existence was beginning to cause me some concern. Was I a mere figment of the imagination?"
- Anny — Anny is an English woman who was once Antoine's lover. After meeting with him, Anny makes it clear that she has changed a considerable amount and must go on with her life. Antoine clings to the past, hoping that she may want to redefine their relationship, but he is ultimately rejected by her.
- Ogier P., generally referred to as "the self-taught man" or the Autodidact — An acquaintance of Antoine's, he is a bailiff's clerk who lives for the pursuit of knowledge and love of humanity. Highly disciplined, he has spent hundreds of hours reading at the local library. He often speaks to Roquentin and confides in him that he is a Socialist. By the end of the novel, he is caught making advances on a teenage boy at the library and strictly prohibited from setting foot in the building again.
Literary genre and style
Le Havre
Le Havre is a city in the Seine-Maritime department of the Haute-Normandie region in France. It is situated in north-western France, on the right bank of the mouth of the river Seine on the English Channel. Le Havre is the most populous commune in the Haute-Normandie region, although the total...
, where Sartre was living and teaching in the 1930s as he wrote it.
The critic William V. Spanos has used Sartre's novel as an example of "negative capability," a presentation of the uncertainty and dread of human existence, so strong that the imagination cannot comprehend it.
The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel places La Nausée in a tradition of French activism: "Following on from Malraux
André Malraux
André Malraux DSO was a French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman. Having traveled extensively in Indochina and China, Malraux was noted especially for his novel entitled La Condition Humaine , which won the Prix Goncourt...
, Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
, Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...
, and Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
among others were all able to use the writing of novels as a powerful tool of ideological exploration." Although novelists like Sartre claim to be in rebellion against the 19th Century French novel, "they in fact owe a great deal both to its promotion of the lowly and to its ambiguous or 'poetic' aspects."
In his What Is literature?
What is literature?
What Is Literature? is a 1947 book by Jean-Paul Sartre. The book is divided into three topics of discussion:...
, Sartre wrote, "On the one hand, the literary object has no substance but the reader's subjectivity . . . But, on the other hand, the words are there like traps to arouse our feelings and to reflect them towards us . . . Thus, the writer appeals to the reader's freedom to collaborate in the production of the work."
The novel is an intricate formal achievement modeled on much 18th-century fiction that was presented as a "diary discovered among the papers of. . ."
Hayden Carruth
Hayden Carruth
Hayden Carruth was an American poet and literary critic. He taught at Syracuse University.-Life:Hayden Carruth grew up in Woodbury, Connecticut, and was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the University of Chicago. He lived in Johnson, Vermont for many years...
wonders if there are not unrecognized layers of irony and humor beneath the seriousness of Nausea: "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."
Like many modernist authors, Sartre, when young, loved popular novels in preference to the classics and claimed in his autobiography that it was from them, rather than from the balanced phrases of Chateaubriand
François-René de Chateaubriand
François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand was a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian. He is considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature.-Early life and exile:...
that he had his "first encounters with beauty."
Sartre described the stream of consciousness technique as one method of moving the novel from the era of Newtonian Physics forward into the era of Einstein's theory of general relativity. He saw this as crucial because he felt that "narrative technique ultimately takes us back to the metaphysics of the novelist." He wanted his novelistic techniques to be compatible with his theories on the existential freedom of the individual as well as his phenomenological analyses of the unstable, shifting structures of consciousness.
As a psychological novel
Disdaining 19th-century notions that character development in novels should obey and reveal psychological law, La Nausée treats such notions as bourgeois bad faith, ignoring the contingency and inexplicability of life.From the psychological point of view Antoine Roquentin could be seen as an individual suffering from depression, and the nausea itself as one of the symptoms of his condition. Unemployed, living in deprived conditions, lacking human contact, being trapped in fantasies about the 18th century secret agent he is writing the book about, shows Sartre's oeuvre as a follow-up of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866. It was later published in a single volume. This is the second of Dostoyevsky's full-length novels following his...
and Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge was Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel. It was written while Rilke lived in Paris, and was published in 1910. The novel is semi-autobiographical, and is written in an expressionistic style...
in search of the precise description of schizophrenia
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of thought processes and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social...
. Rilke's character anticipates Sartre's.
Roquentin's problem is not simply depression or mental illness, although his experience has pushed him to that point. Sartre presents
Roquentin's difficulties as arising from man's inherent existential condition. His seemingly special circumstances (returning from travel, reclusiveness), which goes beyond the mere indication of his very real depression, are supposed to induce in him (and in the reader) a state that makes one more receptive to noticing an existential situation that everyone has, but may not be sensitive enough to let become noticeable. Roquentin undergoes a strange metaphysical experience that estranges him from the world. His problems are not merely a result of personal insanity, without larger significance. Rather, like the characters in the Dostoevsky and Rilke novels, they are victims of larger ideological, social, and existential forces that have brought them to the brink of insanity. Sartre's point in Nausea is to comment on our universal reaction to these common external problems.
Hayden Carruth
Hayden Carruth was an American poet and literary critic. He taught at Syracuse University.-Life:Hayden Carruth grew up in Woodbury, Connecticut, and was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the University of Chicago. He lived in Johnson, Vermont for many years...
wrote in 1959 of the way that "Roquentin has become a familiar of our world, one of those men who, like Hamlet
Hamlet
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601...
or Julien Sorel
The Red and the Black
Le Rouge et le Noir , 1830, by Stendhal, is a historical psychological novel in two volumes, chronicling a provincial young man’s attempts to socially rise beyond his plebeian upbringing with a combination of talent and hard work, deception and hypocrisy — yet who ultimately allows his passions to...
, live outside the pages of the books in which they assumed their characters. . . . 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."
As a novel — or as a philosophy textbook?
Criticism of Sartre's novels frequently centered on the tension between the philosophical and political on one side versus the novelistic and individual on the other.Ronald Aronson describes the reaction of Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
, still in Algeria and working on his own first novel, L’Étranger
The Stranger (novel)
The Stranger or The Outsider is a novel by Albert Camus published in 1942. Its theme and outlook are often cited as examples of existentialism, though Camus did not consider himself an existentialist; in fact, its content explores various philosophical schools of thought, including absurdism, as...
.
At the time of the novel's appearance, Camus was a reviewer for an Algiers left-wing daily. Camus told a friend that he "thought a lot about the book" and it was "a very close part of me." In his review, Camus wrote, "the play of the toughest and most lucid mind are at the same time both lavished and squandered." Camus felt that each of the book's chapters, taken by itself, "reaches a kind of perfection in bitterness and truth." However, he also felt that the descriptive and the philosophical aspects of the novel are not balanced, that they "don't add up to a work of art: the passage from one to the other is too rapid, too unmotivated, to evoke in the reader the deep conviction that makes the art of the novel." He likewise felt that Sartre had tipped the balance too far in depicting the repugnant features of mankind "instead of placing the reasons for his despair, at least to a certain degree, if not completely, on the elements of human greatness." Still, Camus's largely positive review led to a friendship between the two authors.
G.J. Mattey, a philosopher rather than a novelist like Camus, flatly describes Nausea
Nausea
Nausea , is a sensation of unease and discomfort in the upper stomach with an involuntary urge to vomit. It often, but not always, precedes vomiting...
and others of Sartre's literary works as "practically philosophical treatises in literary form."
In distinction both from Camus's feeling that Nausea is an uneasy marriage of novel and philosophy and also from Mattey's belief that it is a philosophy text, the philosopher William Barrett
William Barrett (philosopher)
William Christopher Barrett was a professor of philosophy at New York University from 1950 to 1979. Precociously, he began post-secondary studies at the City College of New York when 15 years old. He received his PhD at Columbia University. He was an editor of Partisan Review and later the...
, in his book Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy
Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy
Irrational Man subtitled "A Study In Existential Philosophy" is an influential book by William Barrett published in 1958 which served to introduce existentialism to the English speaking world...
, expresses an opposite judgment. He writes that Nausea "may well be Sartre's best book for the very reason that in it the intellectual and the creative artist come closest to being conjoined." Barrett says that, in other literary works and in his literary criticism, Sartre feels the pull of ideas too strongly to respond to poetry, "which is precisely that form of human expression in which the poet—and the reader who would enter the poet's world—must let Being be, to use Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
's phrase and not attempt to coerce it by the will to action or the will to intellectualization."
The poet Hayden Carruth
Hayden Carruth
Hayden Carruth was an American poet and literary critic. He taught at Syracuse University.-Life:Hayden Carruth grew up in Woodbury, Connecticut, and was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the University of Chicago. He lived in Johnson, Vermont for many years...
agrees with Barrett, whom he quotes, about Nausea. He writes firmly that Sartre, "is not content, like some philosophers, to write fable, allegory, or a philosophical tale in the manner of Candide
Candide
Candide, ou l'Optimisme is a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. The novella has been widely translated, with English versions titled Candide: or, All for the Best ; Candide: or, The Optimist ; and Candide: or, Optimism...
; he is content only with a proper work of art that is at the same time a synthesis of philosophical specifications."
Barrett feels that Sartre as a writer is best when "the idea itself is able to generate artistic passion and life."
As a novel of personal commitment
Steven Ungar compares Nausea with French novels of different periods, such as Madame de La Fayette's La Princesse de ClèvesLa Princesse de Clèves
La Princesse de Clèves is a French novel which was published anonymously in March 1678. It is regarded by many as the beginning of the modern tradition of the psychological novel, and as a great classic work. Its author is generally held to be Madame de La Fayette.The action takes place between...
(1678), Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
's Le Père Goriot
Le Père Goriot
Le Père Goriot is an 1835 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac , included in the Scènes de la vie Parisienne section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine...
(1835), André Malraux
André Malraux
André Malraux DSO was a French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman. Having traveled extensively in Indochina and China, Malraux was noted especially for his novel entitled La Condition Humaine , which won the Prix Goncourt...
's La Condition humaine
Man's Fate
Man's Fate is a 1933 novel written by André Malraux about the failed communist insurrection in Shanghai in 1927, and the existential quandaries facing a diverse group of people associated with the revolution...
(1933), and Annie Ernaux
Annie Ernaux
Annie Ernaux is a French writer.She won the Prix Renaudot in 1984 for her book La Place, an autobiographical narrative focusing on her relationship with her father and her experiences growing up in a small town in France, and her subsequent process of moving into adulthood and away from her...
's Une femme avec une grande kut (1988), all of which have scenes with men and women faced with choices and "provide literary expressions to concerns with personal identity that vary over time more in detail than in essence."
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of French writer and physician Louis-Ferdinand Destouches . Céline was chosen after his grandmother's first name. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and...
(who is quoted on the flyleaf of the French edition) that leads to nothing; rather, they are a necessary personal recognition that eventuate in "a release from disgust into heroism."
Barrett adds that, "like Adler
Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement as a core member of the Vienna...
's, Sartre's is fundamentally a masculine psychology; it misunderstands and disparages the psychology of woman. The humanity of man consists in the For-itself, the masculine component by which we choose, make projects, and generally commit ourselves to a life of action. The element of masculine protest, to use Adler
Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement as a core member of the Vienna...
's term, is strong throughout Sartre's writings . . . the disgust . . . of Roquentin, in Nausea, at the bloated roots of the chestnut tree . . ."
Mattey elaborates further on the positive, redeeming aspect of the seemingly bleak, frustrating themes of existentialism that are so apparent in Nausea: "Sartre considered the subjectivity of the starting-point for what a human is as a key thesis of existentialism. The starting-point is subjective because humans make themselves what they are. Most philosophers consider subjectivity to be a bad thing, particularly when it comes to the motivation for action. . . . Sartre responds by claiming that subjectivity is a dignity of human being, not something that degrades us." Therefore, the characteristic anguish
Anguish
Anguish is a term used in philosophy, often as a translation from the German Angst. It is a paramount feature of existentialist philosophy, in which anguish is often understood as the experience of an utterly free being in a world with zero absolutes...
and forlornness of existentialism are temporary: only a prerequisite to recognizing individual responsibility and freedom. The basis of ethics is not rule-following. A specific action may be either wrong or right and no specific rule is necessarily valid. What makes the action, either way, ethical is "authenticity," the willingness of the individual to accept responsibility rather than dependence on rules, and to commit to his action. Despair, the existentialist says, is the product of uncertainty: being oriented exclusively to the outcome of a decision rather than to the process yields uncertainty, as we cannot decide the future, only our action.
In his "Introduction" to the American edition of Nausea, the poet and critic Hayden Carruth
Hayden Carruth
Hayden Carruth was an American poet and literary critic. He taught at Syracuse University.-Life:Hayden Carruth grew up in Woodbury, Connecticut, and was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the University of Chicago. He lived in Johnson, Vermont for many years...
feels that, even outside those modern writers who are explicitly philosophers in the existentialist tradition, a similar vein of thought is implicit but prominent in a main line through Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
, Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was a Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher.-Biography:...
, D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
, André Malraux
André Malraux
André Malraux DSO was a French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman. Having traveled extensively in Indochina and China, Malraux was noted especially for his novel entitled La Condition Humaine , which won the Prix Goncourt...
, and William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
. Carruth says:
Sartre has written,
"What is meant . . . by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives of him, is undefinable, it is only because he is nothing. Only afterwards will he be something, and he will have made what he will be."
If things—and also people—are contingent, if they "just are," then we are free and we create ourselves solely through our decisions and choices.
David Drake mentions that, in Nausea, Sartre gives several kinds of examples of people whose behavior shows bad faith, who are inauthentic: members of the bourgeoisie who believe their social standing or social skills give them a "right" to exist, or others who embrace the banality of life and attempt to flee from freedom by repeating empty gestures, others who live by perpetuating past versions of themselves as they were or who live for the expectations of others, or those who claim to have found meaning in politics, morality, or ideology.
In simply narrative terms, Roquentin's nausea arises from his near-complete detachment from other people, his not needing much interaction with them for daily necessities: "the fact of his alienation from others is important; as his own work ceases to entertain and to occupy him, Roquentin has nothing that could distract him from the business of existing in its simplest forms." As a practical matter, he could solve his problem by getting a job; but, as a device for developing the novel's theme, his aloneness is a way of making him (and the reader) recognize that there is nothing inherent in the objective nature of the world that would give any necessary meaning to whatever actions he chose, and therefore nothing to restrict his freedom. "[H]is perception of the world around him becomes unstable as objects are disengaged from their usual frames of reference," and he is forced to recognize that freedom is inescapable and that therefore creating a meaning for his life is his own responsibility. "Nothing makes us act the way we do, except our own personal choice."
"But," David Clowney writes, "freedom is frightening, and it is easier to run from it into the safety of roles and realities that are defined by society, or even by your own past. To be free is to be thrown into existence with no "human nature" as an essence to define you, and no definition of the reality into which you are thrown, either. To accept this freedom is to live "authentically"; but most of us run from authenticity. In the most ordinary affairs of daily life, we face the challenge of authentic choice, and the temptation of comfortable inauthenticity. All of Roquentin's experiences are related to these themes from Sartre's philosophy."
As a novel of political commitment
The Roads to Freedom
The Roads to Freedom is a series of novels by Jean-Paul Sartre. Intended as a tetralogy, it was left incomplete with only three of the planned four volumes published....
) (1945–1949), which concern a vicious circle of failure on the part of a thinking individual to progress effectively from thought to action. Finally, for Sartre, political commitment became explicitly Marxist.
In 1945, Sartre gave a lecture in New York that was printed in Vogue
Vogue (magazine)
Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine that is published monthly in 18 national and one regional edition by Condé Nast.-History:In 1892 Arthur Turnure founded Vogue as a weekly publication in the United States. When he died in 1909, Condé Montrose Nast picked up the magazine and slowly began...
in July of that year. In it he recast his prewar works, such as Nausea, into politically committed works appropriate to the postwar era.
Marxism was not, in any case, always as appreciative of Sartre as he was of it. Mattey describes their objections:
From Husserl to Heidegger
Sartre was influenced at the time by the philosophy of Edmund HusserlEdmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
and his phenomenological method. He received a stipend from the Institut Français, allowing him to study in Berlin with Husserl and Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
in 1932, as he began writing the novel.
Roy Elveton reports:
Following Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
, Sartre views absurdity as a quality of all existing objects (and of the material world collectively), independent of any stance humans might take with respect to them. Our consciousness of an object does not inhere in the object itself. Thus in the early portions of the novel, Roquentin, who takes no attitude towards objects and has no stake in them, is totally estranged from the world he experiences. The objects themselves, in their brute existence, have only participation in a meaningless flow of events: they are superfluous. This alienation from objects casts doubt for him, in turn, on his own validity and even his own existence.
Roquentin says of physical objects that, for them, "to exist is simply to be there." When he has the revelation at the chestnut tree, this "fundamental absurdity" of the world does not go away. What changes then is his attitude. By recognizing that objects won't supply meaning in themselves, but people must supply it for them – that Roquentin himself must create meaning in his own life – he becomes both responsible and free. The absurdity becomes, for him, "the key to existence."
Victoria Best writes:
Thus, although, in some senses, Sartre's philosophy in Nausea derives from Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
and ultimately from René Descartes
René Descartes
René Descartes ; was a French philosopher and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day...
, the strong role he gives to the contingent randomness of physical objects contrasts with their commitment to the role of necessity. (Elveton mentions that, unknown to Sartre, Husserl himself was developing the same ideas, but in manuscripts that remained unpublished.)
Ethan Kleinberg
Ethan Kleinberg
Ethan Kleinberg is Associate Professor of History and Letters at Wesleyan University and Associate Editor of History and Theory. His research interests include European intellectual history with special interest in France and Germany, critical theory, educational structures, and the philosophy of...
writes that, more than Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
, it was Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
who appealed to Sartre's sense of radical individualism. He says, "for Sartre, the question of being was always and only a question of personal being. The dilemma of the individual confronting the overwhelming problem of understanding the relationship of consciousness to things, of being to things, is the central focus" of Nausea. Eventually, "in his reworking of Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
, Sartre found himself coming back to the themes he had absorbed from Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
's Was is Metaphysik?" Nausea was a prelude to Sartre's sustained attempt to follow Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
's Sein und Zeit
Being and Time
Being and Time is a book by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Although written quickly, and despite the fact that Heidegger never completed the project outlined in the introduction, it remains his most important work and has profoundly influenced 20th-century philosophy, particularly...
by analyzing human experience as various ontological modes, or ways of being in the world.
In 1937, just as Sartre was finishing Nausea and getting it to press, he wrote an essay, The Transcendence of the Ego
The Transcendence of the Ego
The Transcendence of the Ego is a philosophical and psychological essay written by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1934 and published in 1936...
. He still agreed with Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
that consciousness is "about" objects or, as they say, it "intends" them – rather than forming within itself a duplicate, an inner representation of an outward object. The material objects of consciousness (or "objects of intention") exist in their own right, independent and without any residue accumulating in them from our awareness of them. However, the new idea in this essay was that Sartre now differed in also believing that the person's ego itself is also "in the world," an object of consciousness to be discovered, rather than the totally known subject of consciousness. In the novel, not only Roquentin's consciousness but his own body also becomes objectified in his new, alarming perception.
And so Sartre parted company with Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
over the latter's belief in a transcendent ego, which Sartre believed instead was neither formally nor materially in consciousness, but outside it: in the world.
This seemingly technical change fit with Sartre's native predisposition to think of subjectivity as central: a conscious person is always immersed in a world where his or her task is to make himself concrete. A "person" is not an unchanging, central essence, but a fluid construct that continually re-arises as an interaction among a person's consciousness, his physiology and history, the material world, and other people. This view itself supported Sartre's vision of people as fundamentally both doomed and free to live lives of commitment and creativity.
Compared to other philosophies
La Nausée allows Sartre to explain his philosophy in simplified terms. Roquentin is the classic existentialist hero whose attempts to pierce the veil of perception lead him to a strange combination of disgust and wonder. For the first part of the novel, Roquentin has flashes of nausea that emanate from mundane objects. These flashes appear seemingly randomly, from staring at a crumpled piece of paper in the gutter to picking up a rock on the beach. The feeling he perceives is pure disgust: a contempt so refined that it almost shatters his mind each time it occurs. As the novel progresses, the nausea appears more and more frequently, though he is still unsure of what it actually signifies. However, at the base of a chestnut tree in a park, he receives a piercingly clear vision of what the nausea actually is. Existence itself, the property of existence to be something rather than nothing was what was slowly driving him mad. He no longer sees objects as having qualities such as color or shape. Instead, all words are separated from the thing itself, and he is confronted with pure being.Carruth points out that the antipathy of the existentialists to formal ethical rules brought them disapproval from moral philosophers concerned with traditional schemes of value. On the other hand, analytical philosophers
Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
and logical positivists
Logical positivism
Logical positivism is a philosophy that combines empiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge—with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions of epistemology.It may be considered as a type of analytic...
were "outraged by Existentialism's willingness to abandon rational categories and rely on nonmental processes of consciousness."
Additionally, Sartre's philosophy of existentialism is opposed to a certain kind of rationalistic humanism. Upon the confession of the Self-Taught Man as to being a member of the S.F.I.O.
Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière
The French Section of the Workers' International , founded in 1905, was a French socialist political party, designed as the local section of the Second International...
, a French Socialist party, Roquentin quickly engages him in a Socratic dialogue to expose his inconsistencies as a humanist. Roquentin first points out how his version of humanism remains unaffiliated to a particular party or group so as to include or value all of mankind. However, he then notes how the humanist nonetheless caters his sympathy with a bias towards the humble portion of mankind. Roquentin continues to point out further discrepancies of how one humanist may favor an audience of laughter while another may enjoy the somber funeral. In dialogue, Roquentin challenges the Self-Taught Man to show a demonstrable love for a particular, tangible person rather than a love for the abstract entity attached to that person (i.e. the idea of Youth in a young man). In short, he concludes that such humanism naively attempts to "melt all human attitudes into one." More importantly, to disavow humanism does not constitute "anti-humanism".
The kind of humanism Sartre found unacceptable, according to Mattey, is one that denies the primacy of individual choice. . . . But there is another conception of humanism implicit in existentialism. This is one that emphasizes the ability of individual human beings to transcend their individual circumstances and act on behalf of all humans. The fact is, Sartre maintains, that the only universe we have is a human universe, and the only laws of this universe are made by humans."
Early reception
In his Sartre biography, David Drake writes, Nausea was on the whole well received by the critics and the success of Sartre the novelist served to enhance the reputation he had started to enjoy as a writer of short stories and philosophical texts, mostly on perception."Although his earlier essays did not receive much attention, Nausea and the collection of stories Le Mur (The Wall), 1939
The Wall (Book)
The Wall by Jean-Paul Sartre, a collection of short stories published in 1939 containing the eponymous story "The Wall", is considered one of the author's greatest existentialist works of fiction...
, swiftly brought him recognition.
Carruth writes that, on publication, "it was condemned, predictably, in academic circles, but younger readers welcomed it, and it was far more successful than most first novels."
Writing and editing
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...
referred to it as his "factum on contingency." He composed it from 1932 to 1936. He had begun it during his military service and continued writing at Le Havre
Le Havre
Le Havre is a city in the Seine-Maritime department of the Haute-Normandie region in France. It is situated in north-western France, on the right bank of the mouth of the river Seine on the English Channel. Le Havre is the most populous commune in the Haute-Normandie region, although the total...
and in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
.
Ethan Kleinberg reports:
Drake confirms this account.
The manuscript was subsequently typed. It was at first refused by the Nouvelle Revue Française
Nouvelle Revue Française
La Nouvelle Revue Française is a literary magazine founded in 1909 by a group of intellectuals, including André Gide, Jacques Copeau, and Jean Schlumberger...
(N.R.F.), despite a strong recommendation from their reviewer, Jean Paulhan
Jean Paulhan
Jean Paulhan was a French writer, literary critic and publisher, director of the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française from 1925 to 1940 and from 1946 to 1968. He was a member of the Académie Française...
. In 1937, however, the imprint's publisher, Gaston Gallimard
Gaston Gallimard
Gaston Gallimard was a French publisher.He founded La Nouvelle Revue Française in 1908, together with André Gide and Jean Schlumberger....
accepted it and suggested the title La Nausée.
Brice Parain, the editor, asked for numerous cuts of material that was either too populist or else too sexual to avoid an action for indecency. Sartre deleted the populist material, which was not natural to him, with few complaints, because he wanted to be published by the prestigious N.R.F., which had a strong, if vague, house style. However, he stood fast on the sexual material which he felt was an artistically necessary hallucinatory ingredient.
Michel Contat has examined the original typescript and feels that, "if ever Melancholia is published as its author had originally intended it, the novel will no doubt emerge as a work which is more composite, more baroque and perhaps more original than the version actually published."
Translations
The American publisher New DirectionsNew Directions Publishers
New Directions Publishing Corp. is an independent book publishing company that was founded in 1936 by James Laughlin. The company was incorporated in 1964 as the New Directions Publishing Corporation and operates from New York City, and its books today are distributed by WW Norton & Company. Its...
first issued Lloyd Alexander's translation in 1949 as part of its New Classics library; a New Directions paperback edition was introduced in 1959.
See also
- ExistentialismExistentialismExistentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
- French literature of the 20th centuryFrench literature of the 20th century20th-century French literature is literature written in French from 1900 to 1999. For literature made after 1999, see the article Contemporary French literature. Many of the developments in French literature in this period parallel changes in the visual arts...
- NovelNovelA novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
- The Transcendence of the EgoThe Transcendence of the EgoThe Transcendence of the Ego is a philosophical and psychological essay written by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1934 and published in 1936...
External links
- Sartre, Nausea Thomas Sheehan's very comprehensive teaching notes from Stanford University – including chronologies, Sartre's own summary of the novel, selections from Heidegger and from Sartre's early essay Intentionality.
- Sartre, intentionality and praxis An article on Sartre's relation to Husserl, by Roy Elveton. From, Sens [public]: La Revue, mardi 30 janvier 2007.
- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980): Existentialism From the Internet Encyclopedia of PhilosophyInternet Encyclopedia of PhilosophyThe Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a free online encyclopedia on philosophical topics and philosophers founded by James Fieser in 1995. The current general editors are James Fieser and Bradley Dowden...
. It traces Sartre's philosophical development in detail. - Reading Guide for Sartre's Nausea from Rowan University Philosophy Department
- Lecture Notes: Sartre's "The Humanism of Existentialism" from UC Davis Philosophy Department
- Sartre & Peanuts Charlie Brown as an existentialist; from Philosophy Now: a magazine of ideas
- Jean-Paul Sartre. Biography and Bibliography at European Graduate SchoolEuropean Graduate SchoolThe European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland is a privately funded graduate school founded by the non-profit European Foundation of Interdisciplinary Studies. Its German name is Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien...
Philosophical Library. - The Visual Nausea Bogdan Radenkovic's photography essay about Sartre's La Nausée
- Michel Contat, De « Melancholia » à La Nausée. La normalisation NRF de la Contingence, Detailed account of changes that Sartre made to Melancholia to get it published as La Nausée. In French with English abstract near bottom.
- IMDb Publicity for Jean-Paul Sartre Selected bibliography of books and articles
- Sartre's First Try Vladimir Nabokov's highly negative and dismissive NY Times review: Sunday, April 24, 1949