Nausea

by Jean-Paul Sartre

A roquentin, they tell us, has as its primary meaning in the Larousse Dictionary of the Nineteenth Century: “A name formerly given to songs composed of fragments of other songs and linked together as in a cento, so as to produce bizarre effects by changes in rhythm and abrupt breaks in the succession of thoughts.” They note that Nausea continually refers to other ways of speaking, even as it rejects them, and that Antoine Roquentin himself appears to be a man who listens to and copies others’ discourse in order to reconstitute it, half seriously, half comically, in his diary.

Jean-Paul Sartre described existentialism as “the attempt to draw all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism.”

Sartre uses the fictionality of his fiction to ask us to reflect on the fictionality — or at least, the arbitrariness — of reality itself.

The Self-Taught Man is ridiculous because he is a soft-hearted humanist, and because he has got all his knowledge from books. Yet there is nothing to suggest that Roquentin is not equally as impoverished, and merely hiding his poverty behind a panoply of place names.

nothing is simply itself.

Sartre who, after the Second World War, became increasingly political and increasingly intolerant of what he saw as bourgeois or Western softness. Though this later Sartre had complicated relations with orthodox Marxism, his own brand of Marxist existentialism had oddly uncomplicated relations with Western capitalism: he simply believed that violent revolution should sweep capitalism away. He denounced the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, but argued that only socialism, not the bourgeois notions of justice and human rights, could condemn it. In 1961, in his introduction to Franz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre, he wrote: “Il faut tuer. Abattre un Européen, c’est faire d’une pierre deux coups, supprimer en même temps un opprimeur et un opprimé.” — “It is necessary to kill. To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to eliminate at the same time an oppressor and an oppressed.”

Sartre argues that the self must be understood in relation to the world of things. The self wants to have the unthinking solidity of things (what Sartre calls the “en-soi,” or “in-itself”). But the self is never simply itself, it is always “for itself,” or “pour-soi.” The self is nothing, has no meaning, though it is the source of all meanings.

Bad faith is the best proof, argues Sartre, that we are indeed free and that we know it.

Sartre’s vision of humans as alone and perpetually deciding what kind of humans they will become — his sense of the doom and the responsibility of this burden — was popular in a Europe poisoned by war and stupefied by, shamed by, questions of responsibility and free will.

Camus continued to live under a religious shadow, wherein the battle was always with the terms handed to us by life — a secular version of man’s battle with the Gods. Life was a religious sentence for Camus; he never quite relinquished the idea that meaning has left a residue of itself in the world. Sartre found Camus’s religiosity frustrating, and said so; it was, along with political differences, one of the reasons for the break between the two men in the early 1950s. Sartre, though his language is sometimes religious, never had any time for religion. Camus was a tragic religionist, really; Sartre was, as he described himself, “a providential atheist.”

The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.

Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up: I forget them almost immediately.

You must be just a little bit lonely in order to feel them, just lonely enough to get rid of plausibility at the proper time. But I remained close to people, on the surface of solitude, quite resolved to take refuge in their midst in case of emergency.

I know all that, but I know there is something else. Almost nothing. But I can’t explain what I see. To anyone. There: I am quietly slipping into the water’s depths, towards fear.

I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven’s name, why is it so important to think the same things all together.

We had a horrible fear of him because we sensed he was alone.

I recall better what I felt the other day at the seashore when I held the pebble. It was a sort of sweetish sickness. How unpleasant it was! It came from the stone, I’m sure of it, it passed from the stone to my hand. Yes, that’s it, that’s just it—a sort of nausea in the hands.

I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. These are honest hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I sense so definitely that they come from me, and that they are simply a way of unifying my own knowledge.

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. An odd moment in the afternoon.

They don’t know the name of this bronze giant but they see clearly from his frock coat and top hat that he was someone from the beau-monde. He holds his hat in his left hand, placing his right on a stack of papers: it is a little as though their grandfather were there on the pedestal, cast in bronze. They do not need to look at him very long to understand that he thought as they do, exactly as they do, on all subjects. At the service of their obstinately narrow, small ideas he has placed the authority and immense erudition drawn from the papers crushed in his hand. The women in black feel soothed, they can go peacefully minding their own business, running their households, walking their dogs out: they no longer have the responsibility of standing up, for their Christian ideals the high ideals which they get from their fathers; a man of bronze has made himself their guardian.

He has read everything; he has stored up in his head most of what anyone knows about parthenogenesis, and half the arguments against vivisection. There is a universe behind and before him.

And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left: he will say to himself, “Now what?”

This is time, time laid bare, coming slowly into existence, keeping us waiting, and when it does come making us sick because we realise it’s been there for a long time.

Something is beginning in order to end: adventure does not let itself be drawn out; it only makes sense when dead.

All of a sudden something breaks off sharply. The adventure is over, time resumes its daily routine. I turn; behind me, this beautiful melodious form sinks entirely into the past.

This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell.

Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.

But everything changes when you tell about life; it’s a change no one notices: the proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be true stories; things happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense.

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.

They were greedily awaiting the hour of soft shadows, of relaxation, abandon, the hour when the screen, glowing like a white stone under water, would speak and dream for them.

the sea glittered through the interstices.

Fishing smacks lay on the sand not far from sticky blocks of stone which had been thrown pell-mell at the foot of the jetty to protect it from the waves, and through the interstices the sea rumbled.

For the moment they wanted to live with the least expenditure, economize words, gestures, thoughts, float: they had only one day in which to smooth out their wrinkles, their crow’s feet, the bitter lines made by a hard week’s work. One day only. They felt the minutes flowing between their fingers; would they have time to store up enough youth to start anew on Monday morning?

For a moment I wondered if I were not going to love humanity. But, after all, it was their Sunday, not mine.

it is over there, just at the corner of this calm street that my life is going to begin. I see myself advancing with a sense of fatality.

Perhaps there is nothing in the world I cling to as much as this feeling of adventure; but it comes when it pleases; it is gone so quickly and how empty I am once it has left. Does it, ironically, pay me these short visits in order to show me that I have wasted my life?

Yesterday I didn’t even have the excuse of drunkenness. I got excited like an imbecile. I must wash myself clean with abstract thoughts, transparent as water.

You see a woman, you think that one day she’ll be old, only you don’t see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure.

Work today. It didn’t go too badly; I wrote six pages with a certain amount of pleasure.

The past is a landlord’s luxury. Where shall I keep mine? You don’t put your past in your pocket; you have to have a house. I have only my body: a man entirely alone, with his lonely body, cannot indulge in memories; they pass through him. I shouldn’t complain: all I wanted was to be free.

As long as you stay between these walls, whatever happens must happen on the right or the left of the stove. Saint Denis himself could come in carrying his head in his hands and he would still have to enter on the right, walk between the shelves devoted to French Literature and the table reserved for women readers. And if he doesn’t touch the ground, if he floats ten inches above the floor, his bleeding neck will be just at the level of the third shelf of books. Thus these objects serve at least to fix the limits of probability.

How serpentine is this feeling of existing—I unwind it, slowly. . . . If I could keep myself from thinking! I try, and succeed: my head seems to fill with smoke . . . and then it starts again: “Smoke . . . not to think . . . don’t want to think . . . I think I don’t want to think. I mustn’t think that I don’t want to think. Because that’s still a thought.” Will there never be an end to it? My thought is me: that’s why I can’t stop.

I put my left hand on the pad and stab the knife into the palm. The movement was too nervous; the blade slipped, the wound is superficial. It bleeds. Then what? What has changed? Still, I watch with satisfaction, on the white paper, across the lines I wrote a little while ago, this tiny pool of blood which has at last stopped being me.

All is full, existence everywhere, dense, heavy and sweet. But, beyond all this sweetness, inaccessible, near and so far, young, merciless and serene, there is this . . . this rigour.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.

I feel so far away from them, on the top of this hill. It seems as though I belong to another species. They come out of their offices after their day of work, they look at the houses and the squares with satisfaction, they think it is their city, a good, solid, bourgeois city. They aren’t afraid, they feel at home. All they have ever seen is trained water running from taps, light which fills bulbs when you turn on the switch, half-breed, bastard trees held up with crutches. They have proof, a hundred times a day, that everything happens mechanically, that the world obeys fixed, unchangeable laws.

And I, too, wanted to be. That is all I wanted; this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bonds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note. That could even make an apologue: there was a poor man who got in the wrong world. He existed, like other people, in a world of public parks, bistros, commercial cities and he wanted to persuade himself that he was living somewhere else, behind the canvas of paintings, with the doges of Tintoretto, with Gozzoli’s Florentines, behind the pages of books, with Fabrizio del Dongo and Julien Sorel, behind the phonograph records, with the long dry laments of jazz. And then, after making a complete fool of himself, he understood, he opened his eyes, he saw that it was a misdeal: he was in a bistro, just in front of a glass of warm beer. He stayed overwhelmed on the bench; he thought: I am a fool. And at that very moment, on the other side of existence, in this other world which you can see in the distance, but without ever approaching it, a little melody began to sing and dance: “You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.”

I understand that too: the disc is scratched and is wearing out, perhaps the singer is dead; I’m going to leave, I’m going to take my train. But behind the existence which falls from one present to the other, without a past, without a future, behind these sounds which decompose from day to day, peel off and slip towards death, the melody stays the same, young and firm, like a pitiless witness.

I think of the man out there who wrote this tune, one day in July, in the black heat of his room. I try to think of him through the melody, through the white, acidulated sounds of the saxophone. He made it. He had troubles, everything didn’t work out for him the way it should have: bills to pay—and then there surely must have been a woman somewhere who wasn’t thinking about him the way he would have liked her to—and then there was this terrible heat wave which turned men into pools of melting fat. There is nothing pretty or glorious in all that. But when I hear the sound and I think that that man made it, I find this suffering and sweat . . . moving. He was lucky. He couldn’t have realized it. He must have thought: with a little luck, this thing will bring in fifty dollars. Well, this is the first time in years that a man has seemed moving to me.

an existant can never justify the existence of another existant.