Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre, (tr. Robert Baldick)
Nausea is unabashedly a philosophical novel, one in which
the focus is on the emotional and mental processes of the protagonist, Antoine
Roquentin, as he deals with the ramifications of living in a meaningless world.
This is not to say that there is no plot, but rather, one has the impression
that the plot is secondary, and is fleshed out insofar as it serves to advance
Sartre’s philosophical discussions on existence.
Roquentin resides in Bouville, a gloomy fictional port in
France (literally ‘city of mud’), in order to write a history book on the 18th
Century Marquis de Rollebon, who has left substantial documents in the city’s
archives. He is afflicted bouts of what he dubs as ‘Nausea’ in which he is
overwhelmed by the fullness of existence of the inanimate objects that surround
him. This, coupled with his disdain for the unreflecting, banal and staid
bourgeois lives of most of the city’s inhabitants around him, drives him to
isolation from the rest of society. In a series of escalating episodes of
‘Nausea’, Roquentin becomes increasingly dejected and even almost insane as he
recognises the unbearable combination of both the superfluity and
over-abundance of existence. However, by the end of the novel, Roquentin comes
to accept ‘this freedom [that] is rather like death’, and seizes the
opportunity to make a choice to live as an artist, resolving to write a work
that is ‘beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence
… A book. A novel.’ Thus, with a metafictional flourish, Nausea culminates as a document of its own making.
The ending is no surprise. A recurring ideal that Roquentin
aspires to is the idea of necessity, one which he repeatedly touches upon in
his diary entries, and an ideal that is necessarily impossible in a world of
pure arbitrary existence. First, he does so in reference to the Negress’ Song
that he enjoys playing in his visits to the café. He describes it thus:
‘It seems inevitable, the necessity of this music is so strong: nothing can interrupt it, nothing which comes from this time in which the world is slumped; it will stop of its own accord, on orders. If I love that beautiful voice, it is above all because of that: it is neither for its fullness nor its sadness, but because it is the event which so many notes have prepared so far in advance, dying so that it might be born.’
The inevitability of the musical progression leading to the
entrance of the singer’s voice, for Roquentin, defies, albeit temporarily, the
arbitrariness of existence that is the default state of the world. As a
consequence, it endows that which the music soaks with a sense of meaning that
gives Roquentin a respite from his ‘Nausea’. In the music, ‘that movement of my
arm unfolded like a majestic theme … it seemed to me that I was dancing.’
He touches upon the idea of necessity again in his obsession
with finding a sense of ‘adventure’ in his life, and builds upon the earlier
musical motif:
‘Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn’t let itself be extended; it achieves significance only through its death. Towards this death, which may also be my own, I am drawn irrevocably. Each moment appears only to bring on the moments after. To each moment I cling with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplaceable – and yet I would not lift a finger to prevent it from being annihilated. … And then all of a sudden something breaks off sharply. The adventure is over, time resumes its everyday slackness.’
Roquentin’s realisation is that much like music, a sense of
meaning (and by extension, adventure) can only be obtained through the act of
recounting, or in other words, imposing the artificial construct of narrative
logic to what is otherwise an unrelated series of random arbitrary events in
existence. This is because the act of narration weaves together events and
imparts on them a chain of necessity whose meaning is founded upon the end of
the narrative that the events lead to. It is in this vein that Roquentin
realises that he ‘wants the moments of my life to follow one another in an
orderly fashion like those of a life remembered.’ The culmination of this
desire to impose meaning and order to his life via structuring and recounting
it in narrative (with Roquentin’s implied authorship of this novel) is thus no
surprise, and a clever self-referential conclusion.
For a philosophical novel to be effective, it has to achieve
a difficult balancing act between expounding an idea or an argument and pulling
off a convincing narrative. Nausea is
largely successful on both counts, though it strays into an excessively didactic
mode at times, where Sartre expresses his ideas a bit too directly and seems to
slip into the mode of writing a treatise rather than a novel. Very noticeably,
Roquentin is a shadowy presence throughout the novel whose past, though
mentioned in glimpses, is, on the whole, obscure. Roquentin himself is aware of
his constructed nature as a character as he writes regarding his historical
project on the Marquis: ‘How on earth can I, who haven’t had the strength to
retain my own past, hope to save the past of somebody else?’ Nevertheless,
despite this intentional fictionality, he sufficiently engages the readers’ hearts
and minds, and it does seem fitting that a novel intent on showing us the
fictionality of reality itself has a protagonist self-conscious about his
fictionality.
At his most effective, in some delicately executed passages,
Sartre compellingly evinces the gradual transformation of Roquentin’s thought
processes from anguish at the raw arbitrariness of existence to acceptance of
the burden of taking up the challenge of making meaning in the world. Nausea may not be flawless, but it is
well worth a read for its flashes of insight and the important legacy it has
left on modern literature.
