Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre

Title: Nausea
Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
Genre: Classic
Pages: 253
Published: 1938

How do you reconcile your own existence in a world without meaning or purpose? With the decline of religion in a modern world, it is a question that many non-believers will find themselves asking – and some may find answers in Nausea, an undisputed classic of modern philosophical fiction.

From atheism springs existentialism – the philosophical movement led by 20th-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre – and from existentialism springs Nausea, Sartre’s first major exploration of the ideas he became famous for. It takes the form of a diary; fittingly, a journal of philosophical ideas and their effects on the philosopher who realises them. As Sartre’s prose unfolds – at times measured and sure, at times frantic and epiphanic – we begin to build a picture of the novel’s protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, a historian living alone in the town of Bouville. He dines at the Café Mably, researches the Marquis de Rollebon at the library with his friend the Autodidact, observes his fellow citizens and reminisces about his past. The details of Roquentin’s life, however, are deliberately unimportant; as Sartre’s creation, he serves to explore ideas which are much more universal.

Roquentin suffers from attacks of what he calls ‘Nausea’ – a crippling sense of the utter superfluity and randomness of himself and the world around him. It is out of laziness, Roquentin supposes, that the world looks the same day after day. His world is one without order or rules, where anything could happen at any time. Turning his attention to the people around him, he analyses the myriad of meaningless constructs that humans create to facilitate a comfortable illusion of order and continuity. Past, future, memory, progress, wisdom, adventure . . . as these constructs fall away from him, one by one, the knowledge of his own unmitigated existence drives him slowly insane.

Nausea, then, is not only an exploration of Sartre’s existentialist ideas. It is a cautionary tale for would-be philosophers. Perhaps it is better, Sartre acknowledges, to be ignorant and happy, like the young people the Autodidact sees admiring paintings without any idea of their meaning, and appearing to enjoy themselves regardless. They must have been pretending, responds Roquentin – an injection of Sartre’s own dry, self-mocking wit.

Indeed, the debilitating angst of Nausea begs an inevitable question of the reader: how is it that these can be Sartre’s thoughts, Sartre’s beliefs, when Sartre himself was neither mad nor depressed? The novel carries all the marks of Sartre’s life and work. Its ideas are those of his later philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness. Its port-town setting is strongly reminiscent of Le Havre in Haute-Normandie, where Sartre wrote Nausea in 1938. Connections can be spotted, here and there, between the novel and Sartre’s life – like the Autodidact, for example, Sartre spent time as a prisoner of war in Germany. Long passages of the novel are devoted to mocking and criticising the constructions and trivialities of bourgeois life, in accordance with the beliefs that led Sartre to decline the Nobel Prize for Literature when it was offered to him in 1964. (These passages form the most uninteresting sections of the novel, as the insipidity of bourgeois life threatens to carry over to Sartre’s prolix discussions of it.)

Yet, for all his links with the tormented Roquentin, Sartre remained content with his life to the end. In his own words: The only thing that I truly like to do is to be at my desk and write, especially about philosophy. Philosophy for him was not a source of angst, but a source of enjoyment. How did Sartre alleviate the pain of his own existence?

The answers may perhaps be found in the final few pages of Nausea, when the novel justifies not only Roquentin’s existence, but also its own. As he listens to his favourite record for the last time, Roquentin is struck by the permanence of the melody, which does not, in itself, exist, but which nonetheless endures, even despite the scratches on the vinyl. Through their creation of music, Roquentin realises, the composer and singer have cleansed themselves of the sin of existing. Inspired, he resolves to do the same by writing a novel, which will be beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence: the same novel that the reader now holds.

After all, what is literature but a medium for conveying ideas? Long after Sartre’s death in 1980, the ideas he conveyed will live on, and this is his justification for existing. Perhaps, then, Roquentin is not so far removed from Sartre after all. It is philosophy that has awakened him to reality, philosophy that has brought his world crashing down around him, and philosophy that will ultimately save him.