Nausea

"I chose Nausea for several reasons. One is that it’s the first existentialist book that I ever read. It’s what first made me curious to learn more, and that’s exactly what the book does. It’s readable, it’s powerful, it’s sometimes a bit ridiculous, but it’s intense. Although it is a novel, it’s a novelization of philosophical ideas, so you approach the philosophy through one literary character’s individual crisis and you approach that crisis through a sequence of ideas. It’s the story of a man called Roquentin, who undergoes a kind of philosophical nervous breakdown while he’s trying to write a biography of an 18th century character, the Marquis de Rollebon. He tries to narrate a coherent story about that life, but instead Roquentin finds himself overwhelmed by things . The sheer physical being of the world around him causes a kind of nauseous horror and this crisis leads him to think about what are, in fact, all sorts of existentialist questions: what it is to be free, what it is to be human, what is to be able to look at other people and be looked at by other people, to be in time, to be in history, to try and impose some kind of sense or narrative on the raw facts of existence. It’s just a fascinating book and a great way into existentialism. You might not come out of it with a very sophisticated conceptual system of existentialist ideas, but you do come out of it — well I did anyway! — with curiosity to read more. It leads you on to his great work, Being and Nothingness , which explores the same ideas, but from a philosophical perspective. There’s also a little book called Existentialism and Humanism which could be a good one to go on to from Nausea . It’s a very short and very approachable primer of Sartre and existentialism, mainly from an ethical point of view. Sartre himself gave it as a lecture, but he didn’t really expect it to be turned into a text that would be a common starting point in existentialism, and he always slightly thought it didn’t represent his ideas very well. So if you enjoyed Nausea , then maybe just go for the big one, and plunge into Being and Nothingness . Yes, that’s something we really lost in philosophy, particularly the Continental tradition that followed after existentialism: structuralism, deconstruction, post-modernism. We lost the sense that life matters, being a human being matters, what we choose to do with our lives matters. Sartre passionately felt that, and it led him to some very strange areas. He became involved with Marxist-Maoist politics, for example. But he did that because he thought that we can make human life better, we can actually make a difference in the real world. That was lost with subsequent generations, where philosophy and literature became a bit of a game, a bit of play between different textual significances. I love that passion in existentialism, and particularly in Sartre. He cares about what he’s saying. He cares about how you choose to live a human life. We always need that. There’s never been a time in human history when we don’t need that kind of involvement and engagement. Yes. He saw himself as more of a writer than a philosopher. His great passion as a child and young man was to write — and he went on to write in almost every genre except poetry. He even wrote a few lyrics for songs. He was willing to explore ideas in whatever format worked. And the genres were often mixed. With Nausea , the drama unfolds as a philosophical drama. But when you turn to Being and Nothingness — which is supposed to be a work of philosophy — you find that a lot of the ideas in it unfold as little stories, little narratives. That’s one of the great attractions of the book, that he has great examples, these famous little stories — about sitting in a café, waiting for your friend to turn up. The friend doesn’t turn up, so then the absence of the friend is almost a physical presence in the café. He tells little stories about skiing, about peering through a key hole and being a voyeur and then somebody catches you: they turn the corner on the stairs and see you peering through someone else’s keyhole and suddenly the whole situation is reversed and you feel self-conscious. All these little stories are ways of embodying and dramatizing the philosophy. There are so many vivid images, particularly images of horror — of people turning into these strange, hallucinogenic lobster-like creatures. There’s a moment when he’s looking at the roots of a chestnut tree and their sheer physical being just overwhelms him. But the one that sticks most in my mind is this little scene where he’s watching two people walk towards each other around the corner and it’s under a streetlamp at night. He can see both of them, but they can’t see each other, and it looks like they’re going to collide. I can’t remember if they don’t collide or they do and just walk on, but the point is that no story emerges from it. It looks like the beginning of a love story or a murder scene — an adventure of some kind. But in real life there are no adventures, there are just these things that either happen or they don’t quite happen, they’re near-misses. That’s the stuff of most everyday life. It’s slightly off the main track of Nausea , but it’s just a lovely little scene, and again typical of Sartre. He has a serious point to make, but he conveys it through a fictionalized moment."

"It’s a diary of Roquentin, a 30-year-old Frenchman (although in the novel he feels much older to me) who’s been travelling, and he’s come back to France and is narrating his days and his experience of being a misanthrope and being ill at ease with himself. He gives this malaise the name ’nausea’: which I think is some kind of consciousness of your own existence, and the existence of everything else, and the horror and disgust he has at that and at himself. I suppose the question is whether Sartre is describing some kind of real existential condition, whether he’s having an insight into human nature, or whether actually this really isn’t at all how we think and feel and live, in which case Roquentin is mentally ill. So the question of mental illness comes down to whether Sartre’s right about his philosophy, which is an interesting question."