Nausea () is a philosophical novel by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, published in 1938. It is Sartre's first novel.
The novel takes place in 'Bouville' (homophone of Boue-ville, literally, 'Mud town') a town similar to Le Havre. It comprises the thoughts and subjective experiences—in a personal diary format—of Antoine Roquentin, a melancholic and socially isolated intellectual who is residing in Bouville ostensibly for the purpose of completing a biography on a historical figure. Roquentin's growing alienation and disillusionment coincide with an increasingly intense experience of revulsion, which he calls "the Nausea", in which the people and things around him seem to lose all their familiar and recognizable qualities. Sartre's original title for the novel before publication was Melancholia.
The novel has been translated into English by Lloyd Alexander as The Diary of Antoine Roquentin and by Robert Baldick as Nausea.
Characters Antoine Roquentin – The protagonist of the novel, Antoine is a former adventurer who has been living alone in Bouville for three years. He has no friends and is out of touch with family, and often resigns himself to eavesdropping on other people's conversations and examining their actions from a distance. He settles in the seaport town of Bouville to finish his research on the life of an 18th-century political figure, the Marquis de Rollebon. During the winter of 1932 a "sweetish sickness," which he calls "the nausea", increasingly impinges on almost everything he does or enjoys. He tries to find solace in the presence of others, but exhibits signs of boredom and lack of interest when interacting with them. Because of his aloofness to the world and the people around him, he starts to doubt his own existence.
Anny – An English woman who was once Antoine's lover. After Antoine arranges to meet with her hoping it will ameliorate his condition, Anny makes clear to him she has changed considerably and must get on with her life.
Ogier P. – Generally referred to as "the self-taught man" or the Autodidact, he is a bailiff's clerk and an acquaintance of Antoine's. Ogier lives for the pursuit of knowledge and love of humanity, which inspires in Antoine much criticism and mockery, although he develops a strange compassion for him. Highly disciplined, he has spent hundreds of hours reading at the local library. He often speaks to Antoine and confides to him that he is a socialist.
Literary genre and style
Like many Modernist novels, La Nausée is a "city-novel", encapsulating experience within the city. It is widely assumed that Bouville in the novel is a fictional portrayal of Le Havre, where Sartre was living and teaching in the 1930s as he wrote it.
The critic William V. Spanos has used Sartre's novel as an example of "negative capability", a presentation of the uncertainty and dread of human existence so strong that the imagination cannot comprehend it.
The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel places La Nausée in a tradition of French activism: "Following on from Malraux, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus among others were all able to use the writing of novels as a powerful tool of ideological exploration." Although novelists like Sartre claim to be in rebellion against the 19th Century French novel, "they in fact owe a great deal both to its promotion of the lowly and to its ambiguous or 'poetic' aspects."
In his essay What Is Literature?, Sartre wrote, "On the one hand, the literary object has no substance but the reader's subjectivity ... But, on the other hand, the words are there like traps to arouse our feelings and to reflect them towards us ... Thus, the writer appeals to the reader's freedom to collaborate in the production of the work."
The novel, according to Sartre, is an intricate formal achievement modeled on much 18th-century fiction that was presented as a "diary discovered among the papers of...".
Hayden Carruth wonders if there are unrecognized layers of irony and humor beneath the seriousness of Nausea: "Sartre, for all his anguished disgust, can play the clown as well, and has done so often enough: a sort of fool at the metaphysical court."
Like many modernist authors, Sartre, when young, loved popular novels in preference to the classics and claimed in his autobiography that it was from them, rather than from the balanced phrases of Chateaubriand, that he had his "first encounters with beauty".David Coward in
Sartre described the stream of consciousness technique as one method of moving the novel from the era of Newtonian physics forward into the era of Einstein's theory of general relativity, in terms of writing style. He saw this as crucial because he felt that "narrative technique ultimately takes us back to the metaphysics of the novelist." He wanted his novelistic techniques to be compatible with his theories on the existential freedom of the individual as well as his phenomenological analyses of the unstable, shifting structures of consciousness.David H. Walker in
As a psychological novel Disdaining 19th-century notions that character development in novels should obey and reveal psychological law, La Nausée treats such notions as bourgeois bad faith, ignoring the contingency and inexplicability of life.
From the psychological point of view, Antoine Roquentin could be seen as an individual suffering from depression, and the Nausea itself as one of the symptoms of his condition. Unemployed, living in deprived conditions, lacking human contact, being trapped in fantasies about the 18th-century secret agent he is writing a book about, he establishes Sartre's oeuvre as a follow-up to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, or Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge in search of a precise description of schizophrenia. Rilke's character anticipates Sartre's.David Couzens Hoy in
However, Roquentin's predicament is not simply depression or mental illness, although his experience has pushed him to that point. Sartre presents Roquentin's difficulties as arising from man's inherent existential condition. His seemingly special situation (returning from travel, reclusiveness), which goes beyond the mere indication of his very real depression, is supposed to induce in him (and in the reader) a state that makes one more receptive to noticing an existential situation that everyone experiences, but may not be sensitive enough to let become consciously noticeable. Roquentin undergoes a strange metaphysical experience that estranges him from the world. His problems are not merely a result of personal insanity, which would be deprived of larger significance. Rather, like the characters in the Dostoevsky and Rilke novels, he is a victim of larger ideological, social, and existential forces that have brought him to the brink of insanity. Sartre's point in Nausea is to comment on our universal reaction to these common external predicaments.
Hayden Carruth wrote of the way that "Roquentin has become a familiar of our world, one of those men who, like Hamlet or Julien Sorel, live outside the pages of the books in which they assumed their characters ... It is scarcely possible to read seriously in contemporary literature, philosophy, or psychology without encountering references to Roquentin's confrontation with the chestnut tree, for example, which is one of the sharpest pictures ever drawn of self-doubt and metaphysical anguish. ... Certainly, Nausea gives us a few of the clearest and hence most useful images of man in our time that we possess; and this, as Allen Tate has said, is the supreme function of art."
More recently, younger French academics following Emmanuel Legeard have rather built upon cultural psychology to interpret the nausea feeling more metaphorically: "The feeling of nausea has spawned a series of implausible interpretations, but any truly involved reader should be able to apprehend through intuitive sympathy that nausea is disgust at the traumatic decomposition of the divine within existence, symptomatic of the discovery of the absurd, of the disenchantment of the world. Transcendence and providence were invented by man. Every being is meaningless "in itself". There is no God. But the experience through nausea ends up taking a positive turn: if God doesn't exist, then everything becomes possible. And that's how, with despair, true optimism begins."Also quoted in: Etudes Sartriennes, Université de Paris X, 2002 : « On a cherché à interpréter le sentiment de la nausée de mille façons différentes dont aucune ne me semble convaincante. Un lecteur attentif du roman de Sartre devrait être capable de comprendre par sympathie que cette nausée est le dégoût devant la décomposition du divin. C'est la découverte de l'absurde, le désenchantement du monde. La transcendance et la Providence sont des inventions humaines. Rien n'a de sens "en soi". Dieu n'existe pas. Mais la traversée de la nausée s'ouvre sur une promesse: si Dieu n'existe pas, alors tout est possible. Et c'est ainsi qu'avec le désespoir commence le véritable optimisme. »
As a work of philosophy Criticism of Sartre's novels frequently centered on the tension between the philosophical and political on one side, and the novelistic and individual on the other.
Ronald Aronson describes the reaction of Albert Camus, still in Algeria and working on his own first novel, L’Étranger. At the time of the novel's release, Camus was a reviewer for an Algiers left-wing daily. Camus told a friend that he "thought a lot about the book" and it was "a very close part of [himself]." In his review, Camus wrote, "the play of the toughest and most lucid mind are at the same time both lavished and squandered." Camus felt that each of the book's chapters, taken by itself, "reaches a kind of perfection in bitterness and truth." However, he also felt that the descriptive and the philosophical aspects of the novel are not balanced, that they "don't add up to a work of art: the passage from one to the other is too rapid, too unmotivated, to evoke in the reader the deep conviction that makes the art of the novel." He likewise felt that Sartre had tipped the balance too far in depicting the repugnant features of mankind "instead of placing the reasons for his despair, at least to a certain degree, if not completely, on the elements of human greatness." Still, Camus's largely positive review led to a friendship between the two authors.
Philosopher G. J. Mattey describes Nausea and others of Sartre's literary works as "practically philosophical treatises in literary form."
In his book Irrational Man, the philosopher William Barrett, in distinction both from Camus's feeling that Nausea is an uneasy marriage of novel and philosophy and also from Mattey's belief that it is a philosophy text, expresses an opposite judgment. He writes 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." Barrett says that, in other literary works and in his literary criticism, Sartre feels the pull of ideas too strongly to respond to poetry, "which is precisely that form of human expression in which the poet—and the reader who would enter the poet's world—must let Being be, to use Heidegger's phrase, and not attempt to coerce it by the will to action or the will to intellectualization."
The poet Hayden Carruth agrees with Barrett, whom he quotes, about Nausea. He writes firmly 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."
Barrett feels that Sartre as a writer is best when "the idea itself is able to generate artistic passion and life."