by Iris Murdoch
I
THE DISCOVERY OF THINGS
La Nausée1 was Sartre’s first novel, and it contains all his main interests except the political ones. It is his most densely philosophical novel. It concerns itself with freedom and bad faith, the character of the bourgeoisie, the phenomenology of perception, the nature of thought, of memory, of art. These topics are all raised as consequent upon a certain discovery, of metaphysical interest, which is made by the hero, Antoine Roquentin. This discovery, put in philosophical jargon, is the discovery that the world is contingent, and that we are related to it discursively and not intuitively.
Roquentin is standing on the sea shore. He has picked up a pebble which he is about to throw into the sea. He looks at the pebble—and a curious sickly horror overcomes him. He drops it and goes away. There follow other experiences of the same sort. A fear of objects invades him—but he cannot decide whether it is he or they that have changed. Looking at a glass of beer, at the braces of the café patron, he is filled with a ‘sweetish sort of disgust’ (une espèce d’écoeurement douceâtre). He looks at his own face in a mirror, and suddenly it seems to him inhuman, fishlike. He subsequently makes the discovery: there are no adventures. Adventures are stories, and one does not live a story. One tells it later, one can only see it from the outside. The meaning of an adventure comes from its conclusion; future passions give colour to the events. But when one is inside an event, one is not thinking of it. One can live or tell; not both at once. When one is living, nothing happens. There are no real beginnings. The future is not already there. Things happen, but not in the way that Roquentin had liked to imagine when he believed in adventures. What he had wanted was the impossible: that the moments of his life should follow each other like those of a remembered life, or with the inevitability of the notes of a familiar tune. He thinks, too, of his own work: he is writing the life of the Marquis de Rollebon. Yet this story which Roquentin is unravelling from letters and documents is not the real life which Rollebon lived. If he cannot even retain his own past, thinks Roquentin, how can he save that of another? He sees it all in a flash: the past does not really exist at all. There are the traces, the appearances—and behind them nothing. Or rather, what there is is the present, his own present—and what is this? The ‘I’ that goes on existing is merely the ever-lengthening stuff of gluey sensations and vague fragmentary thoughts.
Roquentin visits the picture gallery, and looks at the self-satisfied faces of the bourgeoisie. These people never felt that their existences were stale and unjustified. They lived surrounded by institutions of state and family, and borne up by a consciousness of their own claims and virtues. Their faces are éclatant de droit—blazing with right. Their lives had a real given meaning, or so they imagined; and here they are, with all that added sense of necessity with which the painter’s thought can endow them. Roquentin’s own recent experience has given him a special sense of the bad faith of these attempts to clothe the nakedness of existence with such trimmings of meaning. Salauds! he thinks, as he returns to his own nausée.
This malaise now moves towards a climax, and its metaphysical character is made more clear. Roquentin is staring at a seat in a tramcar. ‘I murmur: it’s a seat, as a sort of exorcism. But the word remains on my lips: it refuses to go and rest upon the thing . . .’ ‘Things are delivered from their names. They are there, grotesque, stubborn, huge, and it seems crazy to call them seats or to say anything whatever about them.’ He continues his reflections in the public park: though he has often said, for instance, ‘seagull’, he has never before felt that that which he named existed. Before he had thought in terms of classes and kinds; now what is before him is a particular existing thing. ‘Existence had lost the inoffensive air of an abstract category: it was the very stuff of things.’ He fixes his eyes upon the root of a chestnut tree. Then comes the final and fullest revelation. ‘I understood that there was no middle way between non-existence and this swooning abundance. What exists at all must exist to this point: to the point of mouldering, of bulging, of obscenity. In another world, circles and melodies retain their pure and rigid contours. But existence is a degeneration.’
Roquentin, who has abandoned his book on Rollebon, decides to leave. He sits in the café and listens for the last time to his favourite gramophone record: a Negress singing Some of these days. Often before, while listening to this melody, he has been struck by its pure, untouched, rigorous necessity. The notes follow one another, inevitably, away in another world. Like the circle, they do not exist. They are. The melody says: you must be like me. You must suffer in rhythm. I too, I wanted to be, thinks Roquentin. He thinks of the Jew who wrote the song, the Negress who sings it. Then he has another revelation. These two are saved, washed of the sin of existing. Why should he not be saved too? He will create something, a novel perhaps, which shall be beautiful and hard as steel, and will make people ashamed of their superfluity. Writing it, that will be a stale day to day task. But once it is complete, behind him, he will be thought of by others as now he thinks of the Jew and the Negress. Some pure radiance from his work will fall then upon his own past—and he will be able to recall his past without disgust, and to accept it. With this resolution of Roquentin’s the novel ends.
This peculiar book lives on many levels. It is a sort of palimpsest of metaphysical aperçus. It gives expression to a pure metaphysical doubt, and also analyses that doubt in terms of contemporary concepts. It is an epistemological essay on the phenomenology of thought; it is also an ethical essay on the nature of ‘bad faith’. Its moral conclusions touch aesthetics and politics. Most of all, though, its power resides in its character as a philosophical myth, which shows to us in a memorable way the master-image of Sartre’s thinking. Let us look at these aspects one by one.
The metaphysical doubt which seizes Roquentin is an old and familiar one. It is the doubt out of which the problem of particularity and the problem of induction arise. The doubter sees the world of everyday reality as a fallen and bedraggled place—fallen out of the realm of being into the realm of existence. The circle does not exist; but neither does what is named by ‘black’ or ‘table’ or ‘cold’. The relation of these words to their context of application is shifting and arbitrary. What does exist is brute and nameless, it escapes from the scheme of relations in which we imagine it to be rigidly enclosed, it escapes from language and science, it is more than and other than our descriptions of it.
Roquentin experiences the full range of the doubt, and he experiences it in a characteristically up-to-date way. He feels doubts about induction (why not a centipede for a tongue?) and about classification (the seagull), distress at the particularity of things and the abstractness of names (the tramway seat, the tree root). He sees reality as fallen and existence as an imperfection. He yearns for logical necessity in the order of the world. He wishes that he could know things through and through and experience them as existing necessarily. He wishes that he himself existed necessarily. He feels the vanity of these wishes. What Roquentin has in common with Hume and with present-day empiricists is that he broods descriptively upon the doubt situation, instead of moving rapidly on to the task of providing a metaphysical solution. Roquentin does not feel so sure that rational knowledge and moral certainty are possible; he examines piecemeal the process of thinking, the commonplaces of morality, and accepts the nihilistic conclusions of his study. A further result of his brooding over the doubt is the neurotic distress about language which then assails him; in this respect too Roquentin is of his age. But what marks him out as an existentialist doubter is the fact that he himself is in the picture: what most distresses him is that his own individual being is invaded by the senseless flux; what most interests him is his aspiration to be in a different way.
Roquentin’s sensations are not in themselves so rare and peculiar. We all of us experience, for instance, that sense of emptiness and meaninglessness which we call ennui. In so far as Sartre exaggerates in Roquentin our ordinary feelings of bore
dom and loss of meaning this is in order to bring home to us a point which ‘carelessness and inattention’ usually obscure. What is a thought? asks Sartre, and attempts a reply which, like that of Professor Ryle, surprises us in proportion to its exactness. It is bodily feelings, it is words that surge up and vanish, it is a story I tell myself later. When we look at it closely, meaning vanishes—as when we repeat a word over and over, or stare at our faces in a mirror. If we consider our lives from moment to moment we observe, as Roquentin does, how much of the sense of what we are doing has to be put in afterwards. We observe the fabricated and shifting character of our memories. Meaning vanishes—yet we have to restore it.
In doing so, can we avoid lying? Roquentin asks himself. This is one of the central questions of the book. His acute feeling of the breakdown of meaning makes him look with clairvoyant amazement upon the bourgeoisie, past and present, of the town where he is living. He observes, with a fury which echoes the belle haine of his author, the pretentious trappings of the bourgeois Sunday. These trappings, these ideas of law and right, hide the nakedness of reality, of existence. But could one ever do without the trappings? To be outside society, to have lost one’s human dignity, often appears to have for Sartre a positive value. Gauguin and Rimbaud are minor saints in the existentialist calendar for this reason. To have ‘gone away’, literally or spiritually, from the rest of humanity may be at least a step away from bad faith, towards sincerity. Roquentin, when he is enlightened, feels himself to have lost his role as a social human being. He might, he feels, do anything. It is important that Roquentin has no être-pour-autrui, no close connexion with other people and no concern about how they view him; it is partly this that enables him to be such a pure case. His only confidante is his former mistress, Anny, who is his alter ego. Roquentin’s introspections have, as a result of his loneliness, a peculiar purity. His temptations to play-act are reduced to a minimum. The conclusions of his analysis, however, seem to be fairly negative ones. What he learns is this. We must live forwards, not backwards. Not only every generation but every moment, is ‘equi-distant from eternity’. We are not to live with our eye on History or on our biographer—to do so involves us in mauvaise foi and destroys the freshness and sincerity of our projects. As language may solidify and kill our thoughts, so our values may be solidified if we do not subject them to a continual process of breaking down and re-building. This much is implicitly suggested by the analysis—but Sartre does not explain or examine it. La Nausée offers no clear answer to the ethical problems which it raises. It reads more like a corrective, a sort of hate poem—whose negative moral is: ‘only the salauds think they win’, and its positive moral: ‘if you want to understand something you must face it naked.’
Yet Roquentin does finally resolve the doubt; or at any rate he finds a means of personal deliverance from the curse of existing. Roquentin is a Platonist by nature. His ideal mode of being, to which he often recurs in thought, is that of a mathematical figure—pure, clear, necessary and non-existent. The little tune, in which the notes die willingly one after the other, also has a kind of necessity —and it is through the little tune that Roquentin finds his rather dubious salvation. He thinks of the Negress and the Jew who created it as having been somehow saved by the song. Their salvation does not lie, presumably, simply in their being thought about by others—if this were salvation then Herostratus is saved too. (Herostratus set fire to the temple of Diana at Ephesus in order to be remembered. Sartre studies a modern version of this character in Le Mur.) Nor are they saved because they have created a great work of art; Sartre chooses Some of these days as the vital song partly no doubt for this reason, that it is not a great achievement. What then is the salvation which Roquentin hopes for? We have to work this out from one or two obscure phrases at the very end. ‘A moment would come when the book would be written, would be behind me, and I think that a little of its radiance would fall upon my past. Then perhaps through it I could remember my life without disgust . . . I should be able, in the past, only in the past, to accept myself.’
Others have hoped for salvation through art: Virginia Woolf, who attempts ‘to make of the moment something permanent’ by finely embalming it; Joyce, who tries to change life itself into literature and give it the cohesion of a myth; Proust who seeks by reminiscence to bind up and catch in the present the stuff of his own past. What Roquentin here proposes to himself seems different from any of these. He does not imagine that while writing his novel he will experience any sense of justification or escape from absurdity. Nor does he think that he can rest upon having written it—being an author. To do this would be to fall into the very traps which he has himself exposed elsewhere—to attempt to catch time by the tail. It is rather that through the book he will be able to attain to a conception of his own life as having the purity, the clarity and the necessity which the work of art created by him will possess. This is what I take Sartre to mean by ‘the radiance falling on the past’. Yet this is a very thin and unsatisfactory conclusion. A novel may be thought of as aspiring to the condition of a circle—though the comparison seems less suitable here than in the case of any other art. It certainly may be thought of as conferring upon an image of life and character a certain tense self-contained form, a sort of internally related necessity. But how is Roquentin, the creator, to transfer these yearned-for properties to, even, his own past? If no present thoughts of his own can confer necessary form upon his past, then neither can a partial image of that past, worked up into the wholeness of a work of art, confer the necessity. Any such sense of necessity must be illusory, for reasons which Roquentin has been offering all through the book. The best which he could hope would be to achieve a momentary sense of justification by contemplating the formal beauty of his novel and saying to himself very rapidly: ‘I did that’.
The interest of La Nausée does not lie in its conclusion, which is merely sketched in; Sartre has not developed it sufficiently for it even to pose as a solution to the problem. Its interest lies in the powerful image which dominates it, and in the descriptions which constitute the argument. These evocations of the viscous, the fluid, the paste-like sometimes achieve a kind of horrid poetry, calling up in the reader—as do so many passages in the work of Sartre—une espèce d’écoeurement douceâtre, the sweetish sort of disgust which is one form of la nausée itself. Yet the effect is not always unpleasant. Sartre is much concerned with the real nature of perception. He dwells on the interpenetration of sensible qualities and on the unlikeness of what we ‘really see’ to our dried-up concept of the visible world. We are invited to rediscover our vision. The things which surround us, usually quiet, domesticated and invisible, are seen suddenly as strange, seen as if for the first time. The result may be disconcerting and surrealistic, and it may be impressive too. ‘The real sea is cold and black, full of creatures; it crawls beneath that thin green film that is made to cheat us.’ The vision of the phenomenologist has something in common with that of the poet and the painter.
What kind of book is La Nausée? It seems more like a poem or an incantation than a novel. We find its hero interesting, but we do not find him particularly touching. Sartre says in L’Etre et le Néant that pure introspection does not reveal character. Roquentin is depicted as so lacking in the normal vanities and interests of a human being as to be rather colourless. Even his sufferings do not move us, for he himself is not their dupe. The solidity and colour of La Nausée are as it were cast out of Roquentin’s excessively transparent consciousness on to the things that surround him. The transparent hero in the absurd world reminds us of the work of Kafka. But La Nausée is not a metaphysical tale, like The Castle, nor is the absurdity of Sartre the absurdity of Kafka. Kafka’s K. is not himself a metaphysician; his actions show forth, but his thoughts do not analyse, the absurdity of his world. The hero of La Nausée is reflective and analytical; the book is not a metaphysical image so much as a philosophical analysis which makes use of a metaphysical image. This, its consistently ref
lective, self-consciously philosophical character, is what distinguishes it too from other novels which brood equally upon the senseless fragmentation of our experience or on the fabricated nature of its apparent sense: Virginia Woolf displaying the idle succession of moments, Proust telling us that what we receive in the presence of the beloved is a negative which we develop later, Joyce piling up details until no story contour is visible any more.
Kafka’s K. persists in believing that there is sense in the ordinary business of human communication. His world is full of pointers which the hero feels bound to attend to, and to which he attends forever hopefully, although it always seems that in the end they point nowhere. In all his activities he hopes for sense, without anywhere cornering it. Sartre’s hero, after his enlightenment, no longer seeks for sense anywhere except in the one place where he knows it resides, that is in the intelligibility of melodies and mathematical figures. He is unmoved by the fact that these are man-made fictions; it is their pure form which rescues them from absurdity. Roquentin’s plight appears to be a philosopher’s plight, while K.’s is that of everyman. We do not in fact resign ourselves to finding the everyday world a senseless place —but in so far as we find it harder and harder to make sense of certain aspects of it, we recognise K.’s dilemma as our own.
Roquentin’s problem is not the usual human problem. He is incurably metaphysical by temperament and lives totally without human relations. But nevertheless Sartre does, I think, intend to offer us here an image of the human situation in general. What he undoubtably does succeed in displaying to us is the structure of his own thought. La Nausée is Sartre’s philosophical myth. Why, asks Gabriel Marcel, does Sartre find the contingent over-abundance of the world nauseating rather than glorious? What is, for him, the fundamental symbol?
