Nausea (orig. French La Nausée) is a novel by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, published in 1938 and written while he was teaching at the lycée of Le Havre. It is one of Sartre's best-known novels.
The novel concerns a dejected historian in a town similar to Le Havre who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea.
It is widely considered one of the canonical works of existentialism. Sartre was awarded (but declined) the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. They recognized him, "for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age." Sartre was one of the few people to ever decline the award, referring to it as merely a function of a bourgeois institution.
In her La Force de l'Âge (The Prime of Life - 1960), French writer Simone de Beauvoir claims that La Nausée grants consciousness a remarkable independence and gives reality the full weight of its sense.
Written in the form of journal entries, it follows 30-year-old Antoine Roquentin who, returned from years of travel, settles in the fictional French seaport town of Bouville to finish his research on the life of an 18th-century political figure. But during the winter of 1932, a "sweetish sickness" he calls nausea increasingly impinges on almost everything he does or enjoys: his research project, the company of "The Self-Taught Man" ("The Autodidact" in some translations) who is reading all the books in the local library alphabetically, a physical relationship with a cafe owner named Francoise, his memories of Anny, an English girl he once loved, even his own hands and the beauty of nature.
Over time, his disgust towards existence forces him into near-insanity, self-hatred; he embodies Sartre's theories of existential angst, and he searches anxiously for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point. But finally he comes to a revelation into the nature of his being. Antoine faces the troublesomely provisional and limited nature of existence itself.
In his resolution at the end of the book he accepts the indifference of the physical world to man's aspirations. He is able to see that realization not only as a regret but also as an opportunity. People are free to make their own meaning: a freedom that is also a responsibility, because without that commitment there will be no meaning.
* Antoine Roquentin - the protagonist of the novel, a former adventurer that has been living in Bouville for three years. Antoine does not keep in touch with family, nor has any friends. He is a loner at heart and often likes to listen to other people's conversations and examine their actions. When asked by a man to accompany him for lunch, the protagonist agrees, only to write in his diary later that: "I had as much desire to eat with him as I had to hang myself." He is unemployed, but spends a lot of his time writing a book about a French politician of the eighteenth century. Antoine does not think too highly of himself: "The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so." When he starts suffering from the Nausea he feels the need to talk to Anny, but ultimately decides against telling her anything about it. He eventually starts to think he does not even exist: "My existence was beginning to cause me some concern. Was I a mere figment of the imagination?"
* Anny - an English woman, once Antoine's lover. After meeting with him, Anny makes it clear that she has changed a considerable amount and must go on with her life. Antoine clings to the past, hoping that she may want to redefine their relationship, but is ultimately rejected by her.
The consequences of living alone
I live alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing, I give nothing… When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow past; suddenly you see people pop up who speak and who go away, you plunge into stories without beginning or end: you make a terrible witness. But in compensation, one misses nothing, no improbability or, story too tall to be believed in cafes.
—1959 edition, pp 14-5
The unfamiliarity and hostility of physical objects
Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them. They are useful nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.
The unfamiliarity and hostility of other people
People who live in society have learned to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. Is that why my flesh is naked? You might say - yes you might say, nature without humanity… Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea.
—1964 edition, p 29
The unfamiliarity and hostility of one's own self
I tear myself from the window and stumble across the room; I glue myself against the looking glass. I stare at myself, I disgust myself: one more eternity. Finally, I flee from my image and fall on the bed. I watch the ceiling, I'd like to sleep.
—1959 edition, p 46
The Nausea
The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café, I am the one who is within it.
—1959 edition, p31
I grow warm, I begin to feel happy. There is nothing extraordinary in this, it is a small happiness of Nausea: it spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of out time - the time of purple suspenders, and broken chair seats; it is made of white, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain. No sooner than born, it is already old, it seems as though I have known it for twenty years.
—1959 edition, p 33
I am all alone, but I march like a regiment descending on a city… I am full of anguish: the slightest movement irks me. I can't imagine what they want with me. Yet I must choose: I surrender to the Passage Gillet, I shall never know what has been reserved for me.
—1959 edition, p 77
Unreality
Nothing seemed true; I felt surrounded by cardboard scenery which could quickly be removed….
—1959 edition, pp 106-7
The nature of time
I see the future. It is there, poised over the street, hardly more dim than the present. What advantage will accrue from its realisation. The old woman stumps further and further away, she stops, pulls at a grey lock of hair which escapes from her kerchief. She walks, she was there, now she is here . . . I don't know where I am any more: do I see her motions, or do I foresee them? I can no longer distinguish present from future, and yet it lasts, it advances little by little; the old woman advances in the street, shuffling her heavy, mannish brogues. This is 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.
—1969 edition, p 31
My whole life is behind me. I see it completely, I see its shape and the slow movements which have brought me this far. There is little to say about it: a lost game, that's all. Three years ago I came solemnly to Bouville. I had lost the first round. I wanted to play the second and I lost again: I lost the whole game. At the same time, I learned that you always lose. Only the rascals think they win. Now I am going to be like Anny, I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.
— 1969 edition, p 157
Life in stories, compared to real life
Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked onto days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition. From time to time, you make a semi-total: you say: I've been traveling for three years, I've been in Bouville for three years. Neither is there any end: you never leave a woman, a friend, a city in one go. . . . That's living. 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. You seem to start from the beginning: "It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a notary's clerk in Maromme. And, in reality, you have started at the end. It was there, invisible and present, it is the one that gives to words the pomp and value of a beginning. "I was out walking. I had left the town without realizing it. I was thinking about my money troubles." This sentence, taken simply for what it is, means that the man was absorbed, morose, a hundred leagues from an adventure, exactly, in the mood to let things happen without noticing them. But the end is there, transforming everything. For us, the man is already the hero of the story. His moroseness, his money troubles are already much more precious than ours, they are all gilded by the light of future passions. and the story goes on in the reverse . . . And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in a night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull, rich prizes, and he did not make his choice.
—1969 edition, pp 39-40
Intimations of reality
Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can't describe it; it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and I am here; the one who splits the night, and I am as happy as the hero of a novel.
Something is going to happen: something is waiting for me in the shadow of the Rue Basse-de-Vielle, it is over there, just at the corner of this calm street that my life is going to begin. . . .
The place is full. The air is blue with cigarette smoke and steam rising from damp clothing. The cashier is at her counter. I know her well: she's red haired, as I am; she has some sort of stomach trouble. She is rotting quietly under her skirts with a melancholy smile, like the odour of violets given off by a decomposing body. A shudder goes through me; she . . . she is the one who is waiting for me. . . .
When I found myself on the Boulevard do la Redoute again nothing was left by bitter regret. I said to myself: Perhaps there is nothing in the world I cling to so much as this feeling of adventure; but it comes when it pleases; 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?
—1969 edition, pp 54-56
After the realization
I take a few steps and stop. I savour this total oblivion into which I have fallen. I am between two cities, one knows nothing of me, the other knows me no longer.
—1969 edition, p 169
I can't say I feel relieved or satisfied, just the opposite, I am crushed. Only my goal is reached: I know what I have to know; I have understood all that has happened to me since January. The Nausea has not left me and I don't believe it will leave me so soon; but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.
—1959 edition, p 170
The novel concerns a dejected historian in a town similar to Le Havre who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea.
It is widely considered one of the canonical works of existentialism. Sartre was awarded (but declined) the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. They recognized him, "for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age." Sartre was one of the few people to ever decline the award, referring to it as merely a function of a bourgeois institution.
In her La Force de l'Âge (The Prime of Life - 1960), French writer Simone de Beauvoir claims that La Nausée grants consciousness a remarkable independence and gives reality the full weight of its sense.
Written in the form of journal entries, it follows 30-year-old Antoine Roquentin who, returned from years of travel, settles in the fictional French seaport town of Bouville to finish his research on the life of an 18th-century political figure. But during the winter of 1932, a "sweetish sickness" he calls nausea increasingly impinges on almost everything he does or enjoys: his research project, the company of "The Self-Taught Man" ("The Autodidact" in some translations) who is reading all the books in the local library alphabetically, a physical relationship with a cafe owner named Francoise, his memories of Anny, an English girl he once loved, even his own hands and the beauty of nature.
Over time, his disgust towards existence forces him into near-insanity, self-hatred; he embodies Sartre's theories of existential angst, and he searches anxiously for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point. But finally he comes to a revelation into the nature of his being. Antoine faces the troublesomely provisional and limited nature of existence itself.
In his resolution at the end of the book he accepts the indifference of the physical world to man's aspirations. He is able to see that realization not only as a regret but also as an opportunity. People are free to make their own meaning: a freedom that is also a responsibility, because without that commitment there will be no meaning.
* Antoine Roquentin - the protagonist of the novel, a former adventurer that has been living in Bouville for three years. Antoine does not keep in touch with family, nor has any friends. He is a loner at heart and often likes to listen to other people's conversations and examine their actions. When asked by a man to accompany him for lunch, the protagonist agrees, only to write in his diary later that: "I had as much desire to eat with him as I had to hang myself." He is unemployed, but spends a lot of his time writing a book about a French politician of the eighteenth century. Antoine does not think too highly of himself: "The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so." When he starts suffering from the Nausea he feels the need to talk to Anny, but ultimately decides against telling her anything about it. He eventually starts to think he does not even exist: "My existence was beginning to cause me some concern. Was I a mere figment of the imagination?"
* Anny - an English woman, once Antoine's lover. After meeting with him, Anny makes it clear that she has changed a considerable amount and must go on with her life. Antoine clings to the past, hoping that she may want to redefine their relationship, but is ultimately rejected by her.
The consequences of living alone
I live alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing, I give nothing… When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow past; suddenly you see people pop up who speak and who go away, you plunge into stories without beginning or end: you make a terrible witness. But in compensation, one misses nothing, no improbability or, story too tall to be believed in cafes.
—1959 edition, pp 14-5
The unfamiliarity and hostility of physical objects
Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them. They are useful nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.
The unfamiliarity and hostility of other people
People who live in society have learned to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. Is that why my flesh is naked? You might say - yes you might say, nature without humanity… Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea.
—1964 edition, p 29
The unfamiliarity and hostility of one's own self
I tear myself from the window and stumble across the room; I glue myself against the looking glass. I stare at myself, I disgust myself: one more eternity. Finally, I flee from my image and fall on the bed. I watch the ceiling, I'd like to sleep.
—1959 edition, p 46
The Nausea
The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café, I am the one who is within it.
—1959 edition, p31
I grow warm, I begin to feel happy. There is nothing extraordinary in this, it is a small happiness of Nausea: it spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of out time - the time of purple suspenders, and broken chair seats; it is made of white, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain. No sooner than born, it is already old, it seems as though I have known it for twenty years.
—1959 edition, p 33
I am all alone, but I march like a regiment descending on a city… I am full of anguish: the slightest movement irks me. I can't imagine what they want with me. Yet I must choose: I surrender to the Passage Gillet, I shall never know what has been reserved for me.
—1959 edition, p 77
Unreality
Nothing seemed true; I felt surrounded by cardboard scenery which could quickly be removed….
—1959 edition, pp 106-7
The nature of time
I see the future. It is there, poised over the street, hardly more dim than the present. What advantage will accrue from its realisation. The old woman stumps further and further away, she stops, pulls at a grey lock of hair which escapes from her kerchief. She walks, she was there, now she is here . . . I don't know where I am any more: do I see her motions, or do I foresee them? I can no longer distinguish present from future, and yet it lasts, it advances little by little; the old woman advances in the street, shuffling her heavy, mannish brogues. This is 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.
—1969 edition, p 31
My whole life is behind me. I see it completely, I see its shape and the slow movements which have brought me this far. There is little to say about it: a lost game, that's all. Three years ago I came solemnly to Bouville. I had lost the first round. I wanted to play the second and I lost again: I lost the whole game. At the same time, I learned that you always lose. Only the rascals think they win. Now I am going to be like Anny, I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.
— 1969 edition, p 157
Life in stories, compared to real life
Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked onto days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition. From time to time, you make a semi-total: you say: I've been traveling for three years, I've been in Bouville for three years. Neither is there any end: you never leave a woman, a friend, a city in one go. . . . That's living. 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. You seem to start from the beginning: "It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a notary's clerk in Maromme. And, in reality, you have started at the end. It was there, invisible and present, it is the one that gives to words the pomp and value of a beginning. "I was out walking. I had left the town without realizing it. I was thinking about my money troubles." This sentence, taken simply for what it is, means that the man was absorbed, morose, a hundred leagues from an adventure, exactly, in the mood to let things happen without noticing them. But the end is there, transforming everything. For us, the man is already the hero of the story. His moroseness, his money troubles are already much more precious than ours, they are all gilded by the light of future passions. and the story goes on in the reverse . . . And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in a night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull, rich prizes, and he did not make his choice.
—1969 edition, pp 39-40
Intimations of reality
Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can't describe it; it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and I am here; the one who splits the night, and I am as happy as the hero of a novel.
Something is going to happen: something is waiting for me in the shadow of the Rue Basse-de-Vielle, it is over there, just at the corner of this calm street that my life is going to begin. . . .
The place is full. The air is blue with cigarette smoke and steam rising from damp clothing. The cashier is at her counter. I know her well: she's red haired, as I am; she has some sort of stomach trouble. She is rotting quietly under her skirts with a melancholy smile, like the odour of violets given off by a decomposing body. A shudder goes through me; she . . . she is the one who is waiting for me. . . .
When I found myself on the Boulevard do la Redoute again nothing was left by bitter regret. I said to myself: Perhaps there is nothing in the world I cling to so much as this feeling of adventure; but it comes when it pleases; 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?
—1969 edition, pp 54-56
After the realization
I take a few steps and stop. I savour this total oblivion into which I have fallen. I am between two cities, one knows nothing of me, the other knows me no longer.
—1969 edition, p 169
I can't say I feel relieved or satisfied, just the opposite, I am crushed. Only my goal is reached: I know what I have to know; I have understood all that has happened to me since January. The Nausea has not left me and I don't believe it will leave me so soon; but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.
—1959 edition, p 170
Comments
Post a Comment
Thanks for leaving comments. You are making this discussion richer and more beneficial to everyone. Do not hold back.