Nausea (novel)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre's first novel, was published in 1938 under a title Sartre had not originally chosen. He had called it Melancholia, a name drawn from an engraving by Albrecht Durer. The publisher Gaston Gallimard pressed for the change, and what emerged was a book that Simone de Beauvoir, one of its earliest readers, described as a "factum on contingency." The questions it raises are not exactly plot questions. They are stranger than that. Why does a man staring at the roots of a chestnut tree suddenly feel that the world has lost all meaning? Why do familiar objects cease to be recognizable? And what does a French philosopher's peculiar brand of disgust have to say about the freedom available to every human being? The full story of this novel winds through the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the editorial decisions of the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, and a friendship between two of the twentieth century's most consequential writers.

• 2. Antoine Roquentin's World

  ›

  Antoine Roquentin has been living alone in Bouville for three years when the novel begins. Bouville is a fictional seaport, its name a homophone of the French for "mud town," and it closely resembles Le Havre, where Sartre was living and teaching as he wrote. Roquentin is a former adventurer who has settled there to complete a biography of the Marquis de Rollebon, an 18th-century political figure. He has no friends, is out of touch with his family, and often eavesdrops on other people's conversations rather than joining them. During the winter of 1932, a "sweetish sickness" begins to encroach on almost everything he does. He calls it "the Nausea." Roquentin tries to find relief in the company of others, but even that fails him. He grows bored when people are near and doubtful about his own existence when they are gone. Sartre populates the novel with only a handful of acquaintances for Roquentin. Among them is Anny, an English woman who was once his lover. When he arranges to see her hoping it might lift his condition, she tells him she has changed and must get on with her life. There is also Ogier P., a bailiff's clerk known as the Autodidact, who has spent hundreds of hours reading through the local library and confides to Roquentin that he is a socialist. Roquentin listens to him with a mixture of mockery and strange compassion.

• 3. Writing and the Chestnut Tree

  ›

  Sartre composed the novel between 1932 and 1936, beginning during his military service and continuing at Le Havre and in Berlin. He received a stipend from the Institut Francais that allowed him to study in Berlin for the academic year 1933. While there, he did not attend university courses or work directly with Husserl or Heidegger; instead, he read Husserl independently and worked on a second draft of the novel. When the manuscript was eventually submitted to the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, it was at first refused, despite a strong recommendation from the reviewer Jean Paulhan. In 1937, the publisher Gaston Gallimard reversed that decision and accepted it, proposing the new title La Nausee. The editor Brice Parain then asked for cuts to material he considered too populist or too sexual. Sartre deleted the populist passages without much resistance, because he wanted to appear under the prestigious N.R.F. imprint. On the sexual material, he refused. He considered it an artistically necessary hallucinatory ingredient. What survives is what readers encounter at the chestnut tree, the scene that the poet and critic Hayden Carruth called "one of the sharpest pictures ever drawn of self-doubt and metaphysical anguish." Michel Contat, among Sartre's closest collaborators, examined the original typescript and concluded that if the novel were ever published as Sartre had first intended it, it would emerge as "more composite, more baroque and perhaps more original than the version actually published."

• 4. Contingency as Philosophy

  ›

  Simone de Beauvoir was among the first to recognize that Nausea was not simply a novel about a depressed man. She described coming to understand "the wealth of meaning" in what Sartre called his "theory of contingency," which she saw as containing "already the seeds of all his ideas on being, existence, necessity, and liberty." Sartre had no interest in separating philosophy from literature, and he followed the phenomenological maxim of Edmund Husserl, "to the things themselves," to lead readers directly to the experience of reality rather than an abstract argument about it. For Sartre, following a view he took from Nietzsche, reality is fundamentally contingent: it is utterly groundless, without inherent meaning. In the novel, this realization strikes Roquentin not as an intellectual conclusion but as a lived experience. When he sits at the base of a horse chestnut tree in a park, he receives, in Sartre's telling, a piercingly clear vision of what the Nausea actually is. Existence itself, the bare property of being something rather than nothing, is what has been slowly overwhelming him. Words fall away from objects. He is confronted with pure being. By recognizing that objects carry no meaning in themselves, Roquentin grasps that he must create meaning in his own life. Responsibility and freedom arrive together. The philosopher G. J. Mattey described novels like this one as "practically philosophical treatises in literary form," and Sartre's lecture delivered in Paris on the 29th of October 1945 later spelled out the stakes: "man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards defines himself."

• 5. Camus Reads the Book

  ›

  When Nausea was published, Albert Camus was in Algeria, working on his own first novel, L'Etranger, and reviewing books for an Algiers left-wing daily. Ronald Aronson records that Camus told a friend he "thought a lot about the book" and it was "a very close part of himself." In his review, Camus wrote that in Nausea, "the play of the toughest and most lucid mind are at the same time both lavished and squandered." He felt that each chapter, taken by itself, "reaches a kind of perfection in bitterness and truth." His objection was structural. He found that the descriptive and philosophical elements of the novel did not add up to a unified work of art: the passage from one to the other was "too rapid, too unmotivated." He also felt that Sartre had gone too far in depicting the repugnant features of humanity, without placing enough weight on what he called "the elements of human greatness." The philosopher William Barrett, by contrast, reached the opposite verdict. Writing in his book Irrational Man, Barrett argued 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." The poet Hayden Carruth sided firmly with Barrett. Carruth wrote 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." Camus's largely positive review, despite its reservations, led to a friendship between the two writers.

• 6. Reception and Translations

  ›

  On publication, Nausea was condemned in academic circles but welcomed by younger readers. It was, as Carruth noted, far more successful than most first novels. The success also lifted Sartre's growing reputation as a writer of short stories and philosophical texts. Nausea and his story collection The Wall together brought him swift recognition after years in which his earlier essays had attracted little attention. The North American publisher New Directions first issued an English translation by Lloyd Alexander in 1949, under the title The Diary of Antoine Roquentin, as part of its New Classics library. A New Directions paperback edition followed in 1959. A second English translation, by Robert Baldick, was published in the UK by Penguin Books in 1965. Penguin reissued it in 2000 with an introduction by James Wood. The novel reached other languages as well. In 1994, Ranjan Premathilaka Hapuarachchi translated it into Sinhala; the State Printing Corporation of Sri Lanka published that edition. The late Lebanese novelist Suhayl Idris translated it into Arabic. In 1945, Sartre gave a lecture in New York that was printed in Vogue that July, recasting his prewar works, including Nausea, as politically committed writing appropriate to the postwar era. The Marxist reception in France was cooler: Marxist thinkers accused existentialism of prioritizing individual subjectivity over the solidarity and material determinism they considered central to their own project, calling existentialism a bourgeois philosophy.