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| Nausea |
Sartre wanted to write a philosophical novel and produced, in Nausea, something more uncomfortable than philosophy: a first-person account of what it actually feels like when the structures of meaning that organize ordinary life begin to dissolve. The experience Sartre describes is precise and vertiginous, and reading the novel in the right frame of mind is genuinely disorienting.
Antoine Roquentin keeps a diary in the provincial French town of Bouville, ostensibly while researching a historical biography that increasingly fails to interest him. The diary's early entries are tentative, noticing something wrong but unable to name it. Then the wrongness intensifies. Objects begin to seem excessive — present in a way they weren't before, their existence asserting itself without justification. A pebble on the beach. The root of a chestnut tree. His own hand, examined in a café, suddenly strange and overwhelming in its mere factual presence.
The nausea of the title is not metaphorical, or not only metaphorical. Sartre renders it as physical sensation — a welling up, a feeling of surfeit — that accompanies the confrontation with existence stripped of the meanings usually attached to it. Things simply are. There is no reason they should be this way rather than another way, no reason they should be at all. This recognition, for Roquentin, is not liberating. It is nauseating.
Sartre uses the Self-Taught Man — a fellow library-goer who is reading his way through the entire collection in alphabetical order, an encyclopedic project of self-improvement — as Roquentin's comic and melancholy foil. The Self-Taught Man's humanism, his belief in the progress and perfectibility of human beings, is rendered with a satire so gentle it takes a moment to recognize as satire. He is not wrong to believe in connection and learning; he is simply wrong to think those beliefs will protect him from the contingency of existence.
In the novel's famous centerpiece, Roquentin sits in a park and is overwhelmed by the chestnut tree root — its sheer thereness, its absolute facticity, its complete indifference to any human category or meaning. It is one of the few scenes in literature that actually enacts philosophical insight rather than describing it. You feel the point rather than understand it.
Nausea ends with Roquentin finding a provisional answer in art — specifically in a jazz record, in the possibility that a melody, by its necessity and form, can briefly transcend the contingency that makes everything else feel so overwhelming. Whether this solution holds is left deliberately open. Sartre was too honest a thinker to close the question his novel had opened.
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