Nausea

Black and white relief of a young man looking stricken with a hand to his chest, an image of his face imposed again to the left

There’s an excerpt from “Nausea” below, which was written by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and published in 1938. Perhaps his best known work, it was written in the form of a diary, listing every sensation, feeling and thought. The protagonist, Antoine Roquentin by name and a historian by trade has been marked by incredibly low spirits. He finds his surroundings and various inanimate objects of his acquaintance completely unmoved by his perceptions of them. He feels the world has been infringing upon his faculties, specifically that of defining himself in relation to said world because the objects, you see, have been reduced to pure from, disconnected from their titles and uses. Set in 1932 in the fictional French town of Bouville, Antoine, at heart a loner, goes about his days running into the Self Taught Man (whose main hobby, it seems, is going through the library in alphabetical order, and who seems to be a project in himself), completing his research, ruminating on his lost love Anny and carrying on the various relationships loners inadvertently build while going about small town life. Antoine’s revulsion at existence grows to overtake what joy and peace he used to find, though, throwing him into nausea for longer and longer stretches of time, until he finally comes to a revelation concerning existence and himself.

I had a demon of a time choosing an excerpt. Below is a conversation between the Self Taught Man and Antione Roquentin.

“Every Sunday I used to go to Mass. Monsieur, I have never been a believer. But couldn’t one say that the real mystery of the Mass is the communion of souls? A French chaplain, who had only one arm, celebrated the Mass. We had a harmonium. We listened, standing, our heads bare, and as the sounds of the harmonium carried me away, I felt myself at one with all the men surrounding me. Ah, Monsieur, how I loved those Masses. Even now, in memory of them, I sometimes go to church on Sunday morning. We have a remarkable organist at Sainte-Cecile.”

“You must have often missed that life?”

“Yes, Monsieur, in 1910, the year of my liberation, I spent many a miserable months. I didn’t know what to do with myself, I was wasting away. Whenever I saw men together I would insert myself into their group. It has happened to me,” he added, smiling, “to follow the funeral procession of a stranger. One day, in despair, I threw my stamp collection in the fire….But I found my vocation.”

“Really?”

“Someone advised me…Monsieur, I know that I can count on your discretion. I am—perhaps these are not your ideas, but you are so broad-minded–I am a Socialist.”

He lowered his eyes and his long lashes trembled:

“I have been a registered member of the Socialist Party, S.F.I.O., since the month of September 1921. That is what I wanted to tell you.”

He is radiant with pride. He gazes at me, his head thrown back, his eyes half-closed, mouth open, looking like a martyr.

“That’s very fine,” I say, “that’s very fine.”

“Monsieur, I knew that you would commend me. And how could you blame someone who comes and tells you: I have spent my life in such and such a way, I am perfectly happy?”

He spreads his arms and presents his open palms to me, the fingers pointing to the ground, as if he were about to receive the stigmata. His eyes are glassy, I see a dark pink mass rolling in his mouth.

“Ah,” I say, “as long as you’re happy….”

“Happy?” His look is disconcerting, he has raised his eyelids and stares harshly at me.

“You will be able to judge, Monsieur. Before taking this decision I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, and that I would be even more alone in death than in life.” He strengthens himself, his cheeks swell.

“I am no longer lonely, Monsieur. I shall never be so.”

“Ah, you know a lot of people?” I ask.

He smiles and I immediately realize my mistake.

“I mean that I no longer feel alone. But naturally, Monsieur, it is not necessary for me to be with anyone.”

“But,” I say, “what about the Socialist section….”

“Ah! I know everybody there. But most of them only by name. Monsieur,” he says mischievously, “is one obliged to choose his friends so narrowly? All men are my friends. When I go to the office in the morning, in front of me, behind me, there are other men going to work. I see them, if I dared I would smile at them, I think that I am a Socialist, that all of them are my life’s goal, the goal of my efforts and that they don’t know it yet. It’s a holiday for me, Monsieur.”

His eyes question me; I nod approval, but feel he is a little disappointed, that he would like more enthusiasm. What can I do? Is it my fault if, in all he tells me, I recognize the lack of the genuine article? Is it my fault if, as he speaks, I see all the humanists I have ever known rise up? I’ve known so many of them! The radical humanist is the particular friend of officials. The so-called “left” humanist’s main worry is keeping human values; he belongs to no party because he does not want to betray the human, but his sympathies go towards the humble; he consecrates his beautiful classic culture to the humble. He is generally a widower with a fine eye always clouded with tears: he weeps at anniversaries. He also loves cats, dogs, and all the higher mammals. The Communist writer has been loving men since the second Five-Year Plan; he punishes them because he loves. Modest as all strong men, he knows how to hide his feelings, but he also knows, by a look, an inflection of his voice, how to recognize, behind his rough and ready justicial utterances, his passion for his brethren. The Catholic humanist, the late-comer, the Benjamin, speaks of men with a marvellous air. What a beautiful fairy tale, says he, is the humble life of a London dockhand, the girl in the shoe factory! He has chosen the humanism of the angels; he writes, for their edification, long, sad and beautiful novels which frequently win the Prix Femina. Those are the principal roles. But there are others, a swarm of others: the humanist philosopher who bends over his brothers like a wise elder brother who has a sense of responsibilities; the humanist who loves men as they ought to be, the one who want to save them with their consent and the one who will save them in spite of themselves, the one who wants to create new myths, and the one who is satisfied with the old ones, the one who loves death in man, the one who loves life in man, the happy humanist who always has the right word to make people laugh, the sober humanist whom you meet especially at funerals or wakes. They all hate each other: as individuals, naturally not as men. But the Self-Taught Man doesn’t know it: he has locked them up inside himself like cat in a bag and they are tearing each other in pieces without his noticing it.

He is already looking at me with less confidence.

“Don’t you feel as I do, Monsieur?”

“Gracious…”

Under his troubled, somewhat spiteful glance, I regret disappointing him for a second. But he continues amiably:

“I know: you have your research your books, you serve the same cause in your own way.”

My books, my research: the imbecile. He couldn’t have made a worse howler.

“That’s not why I’m writing.”

At that instant the face of the Self-Taught Man is transformed: as if he had scented the enemy. I had never seen that expression on his face before. Something has died between us.

“But…if I’m not being indiscreet, why do you write, Monsieur?”

“I don’t know: just to write.”

He smiles, he thinks he has put me out:

“Would you write on a desert island? Doesn’t one always write to be read?”

He gave this sentence his usual interrogative turn. In reality, he is affirming. His veneer of gentleness and timidity has peeled off; I don’t recognize him any more. His features assume an air of heavy obstinacy; a wall of sufficiency.

I still haven’t got over my astonishment when I hear him say:

“If someone tells me: I write for a certain social class, for a group of friends. Good luck to them. Perhaps you write for posterity….But, Monsieur, in spite of yourself, you write for someone.”

He waits for an answer. When it doesn’t come, he smiles feebly.

“Perhaps you are a misanthrope?”

I know what this fallacious effort at conciliation hides. He asks little from me: simply to accept a label. But it is a trap: if I consent, the Self-Taught Man wins, I am immediately turned round, reconstituted, overtaken, for humanism takes possession and melt all human attitudes into one. If you oppose him head on, you play his game; he lives off his opposition. There is a race of beings, limited and headstrong, who lose to him every time: he digests all their violence and worst excesses. He makes a white, frothy lymph of them. He has digested anti-intellectualism, manicheisms, mysticism, pessimism, anarchy and egotism: they are nothing more than states, unfinished thoughts which find their justification only in him. Misanthropy also has its place in the concert: it is only a dissonance necessary to the harmony of the whole. The misanthrope is a man: therefore the humanist must be misanthropic to a certain extent. But he must be a scientist as well to have learned how to water down his hatred, and hate men only to love them better afterwards.

I don’t want to be integrated, I don’t want my good red blood to go and fatten this lymphatic beast: I will not be a fool enough to call myself “Anti-humanist.” I am not a humanist, that’s all there is to it.

“I believe,” I tell the Self-Taught Man, “that one cannot hate a man more than one can love him”

The Self-Taught Man looks at me pityingly and aloof. He murmurs, as though he were paying no attention to his words:

“You must love them, you must love them…”

“Whom must you love? The people here?”

“They too. All.”

He turns towards the radiant young couple: that’s what you must love. For a moment he contemplates the man with white hair. Then his look returns to me: I read a mute question on his face. I shake my head:

“No.”

He seems to pity me.

“You don’t either,” I tell him, annoyed, “you don’t love them.”

“Really, Monsieur? Would you allow me to differ?”

He has become respectful again, respectful to the tip of his toes, but in his eyes he has the ironic look of someone who is amusing himself enormously. He hates me. I should have been wrong to have any feeling for this maniac. I question him in my turn.

“So, those two young people behind you-you love them?”

He looks at them again, ponders:

“You want to make me say,” he begins, suspiciously, “that I love them without knowing them. Well, Monsieur, I confess, I don’t know them….Unless love is knowing,” he adds with a foolish laugh.

“But what do you love?”

“I see they are young and I love the youth in them. Among other things, Monsieur.” He interrupts himself and listens: “Do you understand what they’re saying?” Do I understand? The young man, emboldened by the sympathy which surrounds him, tells, in a loud voice, about a football game his team won against a club from Le Havre last year.

“He’s telling a story,” I say to the Self-Taught Man.

“Ah! I can’t hear them very well. But I hear the voices, the soft voice, the grave voice: they alternate. It’s…it’s so sympathetic.”

“Only I also hear what they’re saying, unfortunately.”

“Well?”

“They’re playing a comedy.”

“Really? The comedy of youth, perhaps?” he asks ironically. “Allow me, Monsieur, to find that quite profitable. Is playing it enough to make one young again?”

I stay deaf to his irony; I continue: “You turn your back on them, what they say escapes you. …What color is the woman’s hair?”

He is worried: “Well, I…” He glances quickly at the young couple and regains his assurance. “Black!”

“So you see!”

“See what?”

“You see that you don’t love them. You wouldn’t recognize them in the street. They’re only symbols in your eyes. You are not at all touched by them: you’re touched by the Youth of the Man, the Love of Man and Woman, the Human Voice.”

“Well, doesn’t that exist?””

“Certainly not, it doesn’t exist! Neither Youth nor Maturity nor Old Age nor Death…”

The face of the Self-Taught Man, hard and yellow as a quince, has stiffened into a reproachful lockjaw. Nevertheless, I keep on:

“Just like that old man drinking Vichy water there behind you. I suppose you love the Mature Man in him: Mature Man going courageously towards his decline and who takes care of himself because he doesn’t want to let himself go?”

“Exactly,” he says definitely.

“And you don’t think he’s a bastard?”

He laughs, he finds me frivolous, he glances quickly at the handsome face framed in white hair:

“But Monsieur, admitting that he seems to be what you say, how can you judge a man by his face? A face, Monsieur, tells nothing when it is at rest.”

Blind humanists! This face is so outspoken, so frank-but their tender, abstract soul will never let itself be touched by the sense of a face.

“How can you,” the Self-Taught Man says, “stop a man, say he is this or that? Who can empty a man! Who can know the resources of a man?”

Empty a man! I salute, in passing, the Catholic humanism from which the Self-Taught Man borrowed this formula without realizing it.

“I know,” I tell him, “I know that all men are admirable. You are admirable. I am admirable. In as far as we are creations of God, naturally.”

He looks at me without understanding, then with a thin smile: “You are undoubtedly joking, Monsieur, but it is a true that all men deserve our admiration. It is difficult, Monsieur, very difficult to be a man.”

Without realizing it he has abandoned his love of men in Christ; he nods his head, and by a curious phenomenon of mimicry, he resembles this poor man of Gehenna.

“Excuse me,” I say, “but I am not quite sure of being a man: I never found it very difficult. It seemed to me that you had only to let yourself alone.”

• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation (June 1969)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811201880
• ISBN-13: 978-0811201889
• Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
• Translator: Lloyd Alexander