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4. Living with Nausea
- University of Nebraska Press
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87 IV Living with Nausea Sartre and Roquentin The state of nausea that precedes vomiting, and from which vomiting will deliver us, encloses us on all sides. Yet it does not come from outside to confine us. We are revolted from the inside; our depths smother beneath ourselves; our innards “heave.” Emmanuel Levinas The “undated pages” [“feuillet sans date”] that open Antoine Roquentin’s diary in Sartre’s Nausea reveal the circumstances that led their author to writing.1 Plagued by an overwhelming sense of estrangement, Roquentin decides to keep a diary in the hope that it will help him “to see clearly” (1) [“voir clair” (5)] and ameliorate his troubled condition. Bracketing all presuppositions about the nature of the external world, Roquentin proceeds to observe and represent objects as he perceives them, as they are revealed to his consciousness in their “pure” immediacy: Let none of the nuances or small happenings escape even though they might seem to mean nothing. And above all, classify them. I must tell how I see this table, the street, the people, my packet of tobacco. (1, emphasis added) Ne pas laisser échapper les nuances, les petits faits même s’ils n’ont l’air de rien, et surtout les classer. Il faut dire comment je vois cette table, la rue, les gens, mon paquet de tabac. (5) Roquentin’s epistemological desire “to see clearly” sets the philosophical 88 Living with Nausea tone of the novel, inviting the reader to situate Sartre’s protagonist within the long-established Cartesian tradition of self-knowledge. Yet what Sartre is actually doing with this familiar tradition is decidedly less clear. The note from “the Editors” that precedes the diary and purportedly guarantees , in terms that hark back to eighteenth-century literary conventions, the authenticity of the work at hand, already casts doubts on the timeliness and success of the epistemological project that readers are about to witness. For some critics, Sartre’s attitude toward his philosophical subject matter qualifies as parodic. Georges Poulet, for example, remarks: “The Sartrean Cogito appears . . . as a sort of tragic caricature of Descartes’ Cogito. Sartre is well aware of this, moreover, and deliberately conceived his novel as a parody of the Discourse on Method.”2 For others, the kernel of truth lies in the novel’s disclosure of the nature of consciousness. Geneviève Idt, for example, argues that once Roquentin’s subjectivity is stripped of all facticity or accidental attributes, what is left is nothing but an anonymous consciousness: “Over the course of the text, Roquentin seems to lose the individual characteristics of his self. In the end, when he says “I,” he uses an empty form, a purely grammatical subject. It is the abstract “I” used by philosophers from Descartes to Husserl to describe the workings of a pure consciousness.”3 As evidence she cites Roquentin’s sudden and lucid awareness of the hollowness of the word “I”: “Now when I say ‘I,’ it seems hollow to me” (170) [“A présent, quand je dis ‘je,’ ça me semble creux” (200)]. Whatever the philosophical message attributed to it, what remains undeniable is the novel’s irresistible philosophical lure and appeal. Sartre himself has, of course, greatly contributed to the novel’s accommodation of (existentialist) philosophy, describing Nausea as the “expression [la mise en forme] of a philosophical idea,”4 a prelude, as it were, to his philosophical tome Being and Nothingness, which he published five years later, in 1943. ReadingNauseawithBeingandNothingnesshasobviousinterpretivebenefits; aside from helping to elucidating confusing passages, such a reading situates Nausea within a well-established philosophical tradition and its author’s own intellectual trajectory. Moreover, the novel ostensibly allegorizes, through the “adventures” of his protagonist, something eternal (that is, truthful) about the existential condition, the absurdity of life and the ultimate meaninglessness of the world. Or to quote the summary blurb on the back cover of the English translation: “Roquentin’s efforts to come to terms with life, his philosophical and psychological struggles, give Sartre the opportunity to dramatize the [52.14.221.113] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 21:27 GMT) 89 Living with Nausea tenets of his Existentialist creed.” By emphasizing the novel’s humanist or timeless question of individual struggle, along with its author’s existentialist philosophy (which had been well established by 1964, the year the English translation came out), the blurb functions to legitimize the novel’s exemplarity and canonical value. Reading the novel this way, however, is invariably to submit to what...