On Sartre’s Existentialism and the Possibility of Good Faith Living
Allow me to give an account of what I take Sartre to mean by 'good faith' by way of his novel Nausea, and by contrast with claims put forth about 'bad faith' in his later more analytic work, Being and Nothingness. Sartre says precious little explicitly about this conception in either work, but he does give us license to read between the lines, where, in the closing paragraphs of Nausea, Antoine Roquentin (having failed to resuscitate history in the form of the Marquis de Rollebon) resolves to write a book about which "you would have to guess, behind the printed words, behind the pages, at something which would not exist, which would be above existence."[N, p.178] Only such a book would be of the kind that would allow him to remember his life "without repugnance."[N, p.178] My intention here then is to make a good faith attempt to uncover what Sartre might have meant by this passage and others with which it is masterfully interwoven.
One might claim a sort of eidetic reduction in this enterprise, in as much as it is an attempt to pass beyond the concrete phenomenon of this 1938 novel toward the essential meaning it might have for us all.[B&N, p.802]_ It takes reading with a special kind of empathy, perhaps, to see the inward experience of these characters as if it were our own--in form, if not in content._ But if we listen carefully to what is learned from beginning to end, and bring together moments from throughout the book in order to connect themes that repeat as he reflects on them in cycles, then we can reconstruct, in a sense, the meaning of this story, the moral, if you will. A more cynical reader might think it a pie-in-the-sky effort, too idealistic, digging as deeply as one must for a good faith moral to this tale of woe and alienation which, on the surface, seems clearly to be about bad faith. But, as looks can be deceiving (like many great novels with similar concerns) one need only withdraw into the frame of Nausea to find the level at which the agent is reflecting on the lesson's learned by the experiences revealed; and from this view, this journal-narrative proves itself to be about this process of self-reflection essentially. In this process, far more is revealed than is apparent on the surface. Sartre gives us much to go on to help us connect the many deep themes--including the relation between subjects and their objects, the phenomenon of shifting paradigms of consciousness, the project of historical analysis, the dubious value of humanism, of authority, and of writing itself; what Sartre calls "the IDEA"; of adventures, happiness, time, and perfect moments. This seems, perhaps, too much to chew on, at first--until we see how tightly interwoven these themes are in this work, and how explicit his ultimate conclusions about them prove to be.
It is significant however that Sartre footnotes any direct description of authenticity and good faith in Being and Nothingness, where he notes that, "If it is indifferent whether one is in good or in bad faith (if only because bad faith reapprehends good faith and slides to the very origin of the project of good faith) that does not mean that we can not radically escape bad faith. But this supposes a self-recovery of being which was previously corrupted._ This self-recovery we shall call authenticity, the description of which has no place here," says Sartre.[B&N, p.116]_
It is my sense that Sartre holds this possibility of self-recovery as central to the moral to Nausea, and in that he never addresses the subject directly, assumes the Taoist/Socratic view that truth cannot be described positively, i.e. cannot be specifically defined, as if captured with words, and thus known wholey from outside in. Rather, it can only be known in the experience of discovery, and thus, from the inside out._ Thus, I think Sartre intends to help us understand authenticity and good faith and self-discovery--call it what you will--by way of contrast with the experience of nothingness that life appears in the absence of good faith motives. It is the apparent lack of authenticity in many of the surface interactions of this book, indeed, this world, which is to say, the abundance of ulterior motive, which brings the very possibility of good faith living to mind._
Toward reconstruction of Sartre's intention then, I would like to examine and develop these key themes from Nausea, and to support this exegesis with analysis from Being and Nothingness, and this, in order to shed light on the good faith moral of this tale about the existential possibilities which remain, still and always, ours.
At the opening of this 1938 novel, we find our protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, lamenting the futility of keeping a journal, the problem being that one exaggerates everything unimportant, and cannot find words for that which truly matters. We are alerted then at the outset to one question to be answered; for, as he says, "In one case only it might be interesting to keep a diary; it would be if..."[N, p.3] If what? The meaning of his writing goes on to become a central and deeply woven theme throughout his journaling, which he is careful to point out is only the telling of a tale, after the fact, and there are limits to what one can say about the past. "When you want to understand something you stand in front of it, alone, without help: all the past in the world is of no use."[N, p.69]
Reflecting on his recent shift in consciousness, Roquentin thinks it at first to be "an abstract change without object."[N, p.4] "I am subject to these transformations," he says, these "veritable revolutions."[N, p.5] As he's felt at other times when his passion was dead and he experienced himself to be empty and meaningless [N, p.5], now too, he explains, objects seem to have power over him, not him over them, as he ultimately concludes should be: "Objects should not touch because they are not alive," he says, "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."[N, p.10] For example, when he held the pebble at the seashore--he thinks the Nausea to have come from the stone, he protests (somewhat too much, as if to suggest he himself knows better); "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."[N, p.11] Thus, he speculates, "Objects are not made to be touched. It is better to slip between them, avoiding them as much as possible."[N, p.122]
Like the Self-Taught Man, Roquentin finds himself stuck in the push and pull of his objective world, the absurdity, the slime, the contingency of his own existence; "the disorder, the day to day drift."[N, p.175] Reacting to the blue shirt with the purple suspenders, Roquentin insists, "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 cafe, I am the one who is within it."[N, p.19-20] We see through his and the eyes of other characters how discouraging this facticity, as Sartre calls it, is--the "brute fact of being this For-itself in the world."[B&N, 801; emphasis added] It would seem that Nausea, then, has to do with the sensation one sometimes has of tumbling out of control in a sea of external forces, i.e. the feeling of internal powerlessness (or is it merely failure to navigate?) like being drunk with imbalance. In the face of these moving constraints, apparently overwhelming from this inside-out perspective, he proclaims that, "too tell the whole truth...I am no longer free, I can no longer do what I will."[N, p.10]
But, as he notes, beware of "the way we can lie, putting reason on our side."[N, p.9] His earlier attribution of causality to the stone seems, in a considered view, to be a bad faith attempt to blame the world for his condition; to make Roquentin, effectively, a result of things over which he pretends no control, rather than to give him responsibility for being the cause of his reality, of his own happiness and or self-disgust--and he seems to already know this at the outset. We discover through the Self-Taught Man, who is clearly the cause of his own disgust and lives with the horror of knowing how responsible he is for the way others see and remember him, that we might have acted differently... when we still had the chance, the choice, But the past is the past, and we live in the present with the consequences of the choices we made there, in the past, and the dreams or dread of how we might yet be, in the future.
And yet, while we are inescapably engaged in the world, we are not entirely constrained by this facticity, so we cannot reasonably use it as an excuse for bad faith action. Try as we might to feign powerlessness among objects, we actually do have the power to act as we choose, Sartre reminds us at length in Being and Nothingness--for we are more the cause than the effect of the world around us. We ignore this freedom for the most part, but note that 'ignore' is the active root verb, that is, the intention behind the noun state of 'ignorance'. As intelligent beings, we are condemned to be this free...or take responsibility for actively ignoring our responsibility, for we are responsible, whether we recognize and/or admit to it--i.e. our freedom and our power--or not.
Roquentin admits, "I am terrified...I'm afraid of what will be born and take possession of me--and drag me--where?...Shall I have to go off again, leaving my research, my book and everything else unfinished? Shall I awake in a few months, in a few years, broken, deceived, in the midst of new ruins?"[pp. 5-6]_ "What is there to fear in such a regular world? [N, p.3] Knowing not what he is afraid of, he has fear of what isn't known. Irregularity. Unpredictability. "But again, that wasn't the worst: before me, posed with a sort of indolence, was a voluminous, insipid idea. I did not see clearly what it was, but it sickened me so much I couldn't look at it."[N, p.5] But "when you want to understand something you stand in front of it, alone, without help..."[N, p.69] he resolved and, "I would like to see the truth clearly before it is too late."[N, p.6]
With this, Roquentin begins to examine the reasons he has changed so apparently abruptly in the past, and to wonder whether these changes have been mere whim, as they must seem to others, or, as they now seem to him, decisions made with apparently good reason, e.g. in anger at being used for other's purposes. "I am weighed down by the same discouragement I had in Hanoi--four years ago," he says, "when Mercier pressed me to join him and I stared at a Khmer statuette without answering. And the IDEA is there..."[N, p.36] Many other such events throughout this novel bring him to see his own projects suddenly wanting...and always, always, this comes in the face of 'the IDEA'. As when the Self-Taught Man had left his apartment after asking that irking question, whether Roquentin had ever had any adventures, he thinks, "I am alone now. Not quite alone. Hovering in front of me is still this idea...it explains nothing, it does not move, and contents itself with saying no. No, I haven't had any adventures."[N, p.36] "Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But no adventures."[N, p.37]
However, upon reflection, he reconsiders the question. "First, it seems to be a pure question of words...", but "you can call that by any name you like, in any case, it was an event which happened to ME."[N, p.37] "It isn't a question of words; I am beginning to understand. There is something to which I clung more than all the rest--without completely realizing it. It wasn't love...not glory, not money. It was...that at certain times life could take on a rare and precious quality. There was no need for extraordinary circumstances; all I asked for was a little precision. There is nothing brilliant about my life now; but from time to time, for example, when they play music in the cafes, I look back and tell myself; in old days, in London, Meknes, Tokyo, I have known great moments."[N, p.37; italics mine]
We see here that, as quickly as the memory of these great moments appear, so does the nothingness, the difference between what is and what could be, the lack of what is potential in the actual, i.e. "the other side of existence, in this other world which you can see in the distance."[N, p.176] "I have had adventures. Now I am deprived of this. I have suddenly learned, without any apparent reason, that I have been lying to myself for ten years. And naturally, everything they tell about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It is to this way of happening that I clung so tightly."[N, p.37; italics mine]
He elaborates on this "way" and describes its process: "The beginnings would have had to be real beginnings. Alas! Now I see so clearly what I wanted. Real beginnings are like a fanfare of trumpets, like the first notes of a jazz tune, cutting short tedium, making for continuity: then you say about these evenings within evenings...'Something has happened'...this paltry event is not like others: Suddenly you see that it is the beginning of a great shape whose outlines are lost in mist and you tell yourself, 'Something is beginning.'"[N, p.37] "Something is going to happen: something is waiting for me...it is over there, just at the corner of this calm street that my life is going to begin."[N, p.54] "There is something which needs me in order to come to life."[N, p.55]
Again, at the sight of the lights going on in the lighthouse on the Ile Caillebotte; "I felt my heart swell with a great feeling of adventure."[N, p.54] "Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can't describe it; it's like the Nausea and yet its 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 that I am here; I am the one who splits the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel."[N, p.54]
Here, a new and important theme arises, i.e. happiness. In such moments, Roquentin thinks with confidence, "I am the one who unifies all sounds and shapes: I cannot even conceive of anything around me being other than what it is."[N, p.54] "Time has stopped; my life has stopped: this wide window, this heavy air, blue as water, this fleshy white plant at the bottom of the water, and I myself, we form a complete and static whole: I am happy."[N, p.56]
By contrast with his earlier contention that these changes in him come from objects external to him, Roquentin reflects again here on the source of these changes in feelings, and claims now that "This feeling of adventure definitely does not come from events: I have proved it. It's rather the way in which the moments are linked together. I think this is what happens: you suddenly feel that time is passing, that each instant leads to another, this one to another, and so on; that each instant is annihilated, and that it isn't worth while to hold it back, etc., etc. And then you attribute this property to events which appear to you in the instants; what belongs to the form you carry over to the content...this is the feeling of adventure."[N, p.57; emphasis added]
Then, "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. It grows smaller, contracts as it declines, and now the end makes one with the beginning._ Following this gold spot with my eyes I think I would accept--even if I had to risk death, lose a fortune, a friend--to live it all over again, in the same circumstances, from end to end. But an adventure never returns or is prolonged."[N, p.38]
"Something is beginning in order to end: adventure does not let itself be drawn out; it only makes sense when dead...I cling to each instant with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplaceable--and yet I would not raise a finger to stop it from being annihilated. This last moment I am spending...is all going to end, I know it...I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing...and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass."[N, p.38]
"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?"[N, p.56]
Of this life, Roquentin tells: "I live alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing. I give nothing...What good is it? Every man for himself:"[N, p.7] And of others and his loneliness among them he says that "in order to exist, they also must consort with others,"[N, p.6] but "when you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends."[N, p.7] And "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."[N, p.7] "People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might say--yes, you might say, nature without humanity."[N, p.18] "I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices."[N, p.8] But actually, people are "put to sleep by looking in the mirror."[N, pp.16-17] "Each one of them has his little personal difficulty which keeps him from noticing that he exists; there isn't one of them who doesn't believe himself indispensable to something or someone.... 'No one better qualified...' And I am among them and if they look at me they must think that no one is better qualified than I to do what I'm doing. But I know. I don't look like much, but I know I exist and that they exist. And if I knew how to convince people I'd go and sit down next to that handsome white-haired gentleman and explain to him just what existence means._ I burst out laughing at the thought of the face he would make... I'd like to stop but I can't; I laugh until I cry."[N. p.111; emphasis added]
"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. It's enough to see the face they make when one of these fishy-eyed men with an inward look and with whom no agreement is possible, passes them."[N, p.8] Remembering how, as a child, he and his friends had feared the man with the boot on one foot and a slipper on the other, he remarks, "I am disturbed at being alone. I would like to tell someone what is happening to me before it is too late and before I start frightening little boys. I wish Anny were here."[N, p.9]
Of the old men playing cards, he reflects; "I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates."[N, p.21] "I looked anxiously around me: the present, nothing but the present...The true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, or even in my thoughts...we have so much difficulty imagining nothingness. Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be--and behind them...there is nothing."[N, pp.95-96; emphasis added]_
"I glance around the room and a violent disgust floods me. What am I doing here? Why did I have to get mixed up in a discussion...? Why are these people here? Why are they eating? It's true they don't know they exist. I want to leave, go to some place where I will be really in my own niche, where I will fit in...But my place is nowhere; I am unwanted, de trop."[N, p.122]
Looking at the future in the old woman: "This is time, time laid bare, coming slowly into existence, keeping us waiting, and when it does come making us sick because we realize it's been there for a long time."[N, p.31] "I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then, anything, anything could happen."[N, p.77]
And suddenly, the Nausea disappears as the Negress begins to sing, and he feels again that "something has happened."[N, p.22] The music begins and, slowly, takes him from his "unpleasant thoughts," his cynical self-pitying excuses;"Thoughts of Anny, of my wasted life. And then, still further down, Nausea, timid as dawn. But there was no music then, I was morose and calm. All the things around me were made of the same material as I, a sort of messy suffering. The world was so ugly, outside of me..."[N, p.174; emphasis added]
"Now there is this song on the saxophone. And I am ashamed. A glorious little suffering has just been born, an exemplary suffering. Four notes on the saxophone. They come and go, they seem to say: You must be like us, suffer in rhythm... I'd like to suffer that way, in rhythm, without complacence, without self-pity... But is it my fault...if I am not wanted?"[N, p.174; emphasis added] Reacting defensively then, he says, "No, they certainly can't tell me it's compassionate, this little jeweled pain which spins around above the record and dazzles me. Not even ironic...it spins and all of us...all of us abandon ourselves to existence...it has taken us unawares, in the disorder, the day to day drift: I am ashamed for myself and for what exists in front of it."[N, p.175]
"It does not exist...if I were to get up and rip this record from the table which holds it, if I were to break it in two, I wouldn't reach it. It is beyond--always beyond something, a voice, a violin note. Through layers and layers of existence, it veils itself, thin and firm, and when you want to seize it, you find only existence, you butt against existents devoid of sense. It is behind them: I don't even hear it, I hear sounds, vibrations in the air which unveil it. It does not exist because it has nothing superfluous: it is all the rest which in relation to it is superfluous. It is."[N, p.175]
"You can't say it exists. The turning record exists, the air struck by the voice which vibrates, exists, the voice which made an impression the record existed. I who listen, I exist. 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."[N, p.103]
"For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, only notes, a myriad of tiny jolts. They know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them and destroys them without even giving them time to recuperate and exist for themselves. They race, they press forward, they strike me a sharp blow in passing and are obliterated. I would like to hold them back, but I know if I succeeded in stopping one it would remain between my fingers only as a raffish languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even will it. I know few impressions stronger or more harsh."[N, p.21]
"And I, too, wanted to be. That is all I wanted; this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seed without bonds, I find the same desire again...to rid the passing moments of their fat...purify myself...to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note."[N, p.175] "That could even make an apologue: there was a poor man who got in the wrong world...and he wanted to persuade himself that he was living somewhere else, behind the canvas of paintings...behind the pages of books...behind the phonograph records... And then, after making a complete fool of himself, he understood, he opened his eyes, he saw that it was a misdeal...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... And there is something that clutches the heart: the melody is absolutely untouched by [the] tiny coughing of the needle on the record. It is so far--so far behind. 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, peal off and slip toward death, the melody stays the same, young and firm, like a pitiless witness."[N, p.176; emphasis added]
"It seems inevitable, so strong is the necessity of this music: nothing can interrupt it, nothing which comes from this time in which the world has fallen; it will stop of itself, as if by order. If I love this beautiful voice it is especially because of that: it is neither for its fullness nor its sadness, rather because it is the event for which so many notes have been preparing, from so far away, dying that it might be born."[N, p.22] All adventures have led to this moment [N, p.23]. He is happy.
To Roquentin, the music is a hopeful reminder, a promise, that "There is another happiness: outside there is this band of steel, the narrow duration of the music which traverses our time through and through, rejecting it, tearing at it with its dry little points; there is another time."[N, p.21] "[T]he music filled the room with its metallic transparency, crushing our miserable time against the walls. I am in the music."[N, p.22]
Then the music is gone, he is plunged back into the black hole of loneliness and sadness again. "So this is Nausea: this blinding evidence?... Now I know: I exist--the world exists--and I know that the world exists. That's all... Ever since that day...I was going to throw that pebble, I looked at it and then it all began: I felt that it existed."[N, p.123] "Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of 'existence.'...usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it... If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form which was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder--naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness."[N, p.127; emphasis added] "I was the root of the chestnut tree. Or rather I was entirely conscious of its existence."[N, p.131] "Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance..."[N, p.132]
Here, the theme of writing and his questioning of the validity of historical analysis and its purposes emerge again. He notes: "I feel more and more need to write--in the same proportion as I grow old, you might say."[N, p.13] "I do not need to make phrases. I write to bring certain circumstances to light. Beware of literature. I must follow the pen, without looking for words."[N, p.56] "The truth is that I can't put down my pen: I think I'm going to have the Nausea and I feel as though I'm delaying it while writing."[N, p.173] "Four pages written. Then a long moment of happiness. Must not think too much about the value of History. You ran the risk of being disgusted with it. Must not forget that de Rollebon now represents the only justification for my existence."[N, p.70]
He reflects on the statue of Gustave Impetraz before him in the square, and here we can begin to glean a political message regarding his attitude toward authority; "This place might have been gay, around 1800...Now there is something dry and evil about it, a delicate touch of horror. It comes from that fellow up there on his pedestal. When they cast this scholar in bronze, they also turned out a sorcerer...He looks. He does not live but neither is he inanimate. A mute power emanates from him, like a wind driving me backwards."[N, p.28]
This ambivalence about the past and its leaders, including Rollebon and the men in the portraits, shows up significantly time and again in Roquentin's journal, where he notes that "doctors, priests, magistrates and army officers know men through as if they had made them."[N, p.67] Like the doctor at the bar, who "never for one instant, lost an occasion of utilizing his past to the best of his ability: he has stuffed it full, used his experience on women and children, exploited them."[N, p.67] "For they had a right to everything: to life, to work, to wealth, to command, to respect, and, finally, to immortality."[N, p.83] "But for this handsome, faultless man...the beating of his heart and the mute rumblings of his organs...assumed the form of right to be instantly obeyed. For sixty years, without a halt, he had used his right to live. The slightest doubt had never crossed those magnificent gray eyes. [He] had never made a mistake. He had always done his duty... He had never weakened in his demands for his due... He had never looked any further into himself: he was a leader."[N, pp.84-85] "But his judgment went through me like a sword and questioned my very right to exist. And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn't the right to exist."[N, p.84] But then again, is it my fault if I am unwanted?
Reflecting on Rollebon and such adventures as those he had claimed to have had, Roquentin says, "Well, yes: he could have done all that, but it is not proved; I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. These are honest hypothesis 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. Not a glimmer comes from Rollebon's side. Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigour of the order I wish to give them; but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination. And I am certain that the characters in a novel would have a more genuine appearance, or, in any case, would be more agreeable."[N, p.14]
Remembering the square at Meknes: "Undoubtedly...I can re-create the scene...But I am inventing all this to make out a case...But I don't see anything anymore: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction."[N, p.32] "Nothing is left but words: I could still tell stories, tell them too well...but these are only skeletons."[N, p.33]
Roquentin finally admits that, in fact, Rollebon bores him to tears [N, p.16]: "He is cold, not carried away; he exposes nothing, he insinuates, and his method, pale and colourless, can succeed only with men of his own level, intrigues accessible to reason, politicians."[N, p.15]_ "This man was one-ideaed. Nothing more was left in him but bones, dead flesh and Pure Right. A real case of possession, I thought. Once Right has taken hold of a man exorcism cannot drive it out...It never did to make him think too much, or attract his attention to unpleasant realities, to his possible death, to the suffering of others..."[N, p.88] "The gentleman. The handsome gentleman exists. The gentleman feels that he exists...the bastards have the right to exist: 'I exist because it is my right,'... therefore I have the right not to think..."[N, p.101] "...existence takes my thoughts from behind and gently expands them from behind; someone takes me from behind, they force me to think from behind, ("..little Lucerne assaulted from behind, violated by existence from behind..."_[N, p.102]) therefore to be something, behind me, breathing in light bubbles of existence, he is the bubble of fog and desire, he is pale as death in the glass, Rollebon is dead, Antoine Roquentin is not dead..."[N, p.102].
"M. de Rollebon was my partner; he needed me in order to exist and I needed him so as not to feel my existence."[N, p.98] Then, "I suddenly woke from a dream... I wake up in front of a pad of white paper..."[N, p.98] "I had said that the past did not exist. And suddenly, noiseless, M. de Rollebon had returned to his nothingness."[N, p.96] He wrote, "'Today I gave up writing my book on the Marquis de Rollebon.'"[N, p.100]
"I think of the man out there who wrote this tune... I try to think of him through the melody... He made it. He had troubles, everything didn't work out for him the way it should have...bills to pay...a woman somewhere who wasn't thinking about him...this terrible heat wave... 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... Well, this is the first time in years that a man has seemed moving to me. I'd like to know something about him... Not at all out of humanity:_ on the contrary... Just to...be able to think about him from time to time, listening to the record. I don't suppose it would make the slightest difference to him if...someone is thinking about him. But I'd be happy if I were in his place; I envy him....no one could think of me as I think of them, with such gentleness. No one, not even Anny."[N, p.177]
Likening himself to a man who has come from the cold into a warm room, he asks, "Can you justify your existence then? Just a little?"[N, p.177] "Couldn't I try...couldn't I, in another medium?... It would have to be a book...but not a history book: history talks about what has existed...another type of book. I don't quite know which kind--but you would have to guess, behind the printed words, behind the pages, at something which would not exist, which would be above existence. A story, for example, something that could never happen, and adventure. It would have to be beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence...and they would think about my life as I think about the Negress's: as something precious and almost legendary. A book. Naturally, at first it would only be a troublesome, tiring work, it wouldn't stop me from existing or feeling that I exist. But a time would come...perhaps, because of it, I could remember my life without repugnance... And I might succeed...in accepting myself."[N, p.178]
Then at least "two of them are saved: the Jew and the Negress. Saved. They have washed themselves of the sin of existing. Not completely, of course, but as much as any man can. This idea suddenly knocks me over, because I was not even hoping for that any more. I feel something brush against me lightly and I dare not move because I am afraid it will go away. Something I didn't know any more: a sort of joy."[N, p.177]
"I understand now: one had to begin living again and the adventure was fading out."[N, p.39] "Yes, it's what I wanted--what I still want. I am so happy when a Negress sings: what summits would I not reach if my own life made the subject of the melody."[N, p.38] "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."[N, p.126]
"This moment was extraordinary....I understood the nausea, I possessed it. To tell the truth, I did not formulate my discoveries to myself. But I think it would be easy for me to put them in words now. The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. To exist is simply to be there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them. I believe there are people who have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a necessary, causal being. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, a probability which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, consequently, the perfect free gift. All is free, this park, this city and myself. When you realize that, it turns your heart upside down and everything begins to float...here is Nausea; here there is what those bastards...try to hide from themselves with their idea of their rights. But what a poor lie...no one has any rights; they are entirely free, they cannot succeed in not feeling superfluous. And in themselves, secretly, they are...sad."[N, p.131; emphasis added]
We see the karmic justice of the moral to Sartre's story then in his closing reflection. About leaving this era of his life, he says, "I savor this total oblivion into which I have fallen. I am between two cities, one knows nothing of me, the other knows me no longer. Who remembers me? Perhaps a heavy young woman in London...And is it really of me that she thinks? Besides there is that man...and I am no more for her than if I had never met her; she has suddenly emptied herself of me, and all other consciousness in the world has also emptied itself of me. It seems funny. Yet I know that I exist, that I am here,"[pp.169-170]..."existence which feels it exists,"[N, p.170] even though "I am so forgotten."[N, p.170]
"Antoine Roquentin exists for no one. That amuses me. And just what is Antoine Roquentin? An abstraction. A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness. Antoine Roquentin...and suddenly the 'I' pales, pales, and fades out." But, alas, not completely, for "consciousness...perpetuates itself...Consciousness exists as a tree, as a blade of grass. It slumbers, it grows bored...Consciousness forgotten...tries to lose itself...But it never forgets itself."[N, p.170]
"A little while ago someone said 'me', said my consciousness. Who?_ Now nothing is left but anonymous walls, anonymous consciousness."[N, p.170] "There is consciousness of this body, walking...it loses itself in nothingness. It is not between the walls, it is nowhere... There is knowledge of the consciousness. It sees through itself, peaceful and empty between the walls, freed from the man who inhabited it... Consciousness of Anny, of Anny, fat old Anny in her hotel room, consciousness of suffering and the suffering is conscious...and the body walks and there is consciousness of all that and consciousness of consciousness...a forgotten suffering--which cannot forget itself."[N, p.170]
On the other hand, "The Self-Taught Man walks in a city where he is not forgotten. People are thinking about him...he thinks: 'It hurts.' He walks, he must walk. If he stopped for one instant the high walls...would suddenly rise up around him and lock him in...the scene would begin again. He thinks: 'My God, if only I hadn't done that, if only that could not be true...'"[N, p.171] This then is the meaning that the Self-Taught Man had given to his life, he who had opted for what the American author had called, "voluntary optimism. Life has a meaning," he said, "if we choose to give it one. One must first act, throw one's self into some enterprise. Then, if one reflects, the die is already cast, one is pledged."[N, p.112]
It would seem at least rational, and even wise, to 'take' this responsibility, so to speak, i.e. to pay attention to the effects which we manifest in the world through the cause that we ourselves are, as choosing beings. And, as Sartre shows masterfully in this work, whether we take responsibility or not, our choice of actions give form to our projects and memories, from which self itself takes form. This effect seems of key importance to the good faith moral to this story, if only because "we carry them all away and they remain alive: even now they have the power to give us joy and pain."[N, p.63] What could be more fair, I wonder, which is to say, more karmic. As Anny says, it is a moral issue. [N, p.148]
We create ourselves by our work, by our expressions of melody, in whatever medium we work; we leave behind something that is beyond all existents, which alone truly exists. To be what one is capable of being, what is potential, or to live a parallel existence, in shame: this is the choice. To create work that helps others feel their shame, responsibility for what one is, what one settles for, or otherwise destines by active choice. Real, suffering, nauseous human beings leave behind them in their wake small works of great beauty, harmony, which resonate beyond their suffering to uplift the lives, the imagined potentials, of others; and (yes, really) to inspire joy, however small the doses.
So, in conclusion, the good faith moral to this story does not leave us with bad faith excuses for our condition, as a pessimistic reading might think. Rather, in his best moments, Sartre clearly wants us to take responsibility for our world, and to understand it well enough to learn how to change It, that is, the quality of our time itself, which is what consciousness is, at core. If it were as simple as writing a self-help guide, Roquentin would have gone out and read a book about it and then would have written another just like it: "if I knew how to convince people I'd go and sit down next to that handsome white-haired gentleman and explain to him just what existence means;" instead, "I laugh until I cry."[p.111]
We don't learn it there, in books, or teach it by deliberate explaining, it would seem; rather, we find it in our experience, in our own life, and only then do we find it in common with others in language, books, art, music, etc.; but we have to face it alone in our experience, and exist within the choices that we make with regard to it.
Allow me to give an account of what I take Sartre to mean by 'good faith' by way of his novel Nausea, and by contrast with claims put forth about 'bad faith' in his later more analytic work, Being and Nothingness. Sartre says precious little explicitly about this conception in either work, but he does give us license to read between the lines, where, in the closing paragraphs of Nausea, Antoine Roquentin (having failed to resuscitate history in the form of the Marquis de Rollebon) resolves to write a book about which "you would have to guess, behind the printed words, behind the pages, at something which would not exist, which would be above existence."[N, p.178] Only such a book would be of the kind that would allow him to remember his life "without repugnance."[N, p.178] My intention here then is to make a good faith attempt to uncover what Sartre might have meant by this passage and others with which it is masterfully interwoven.
One might claim a sort of eidetic reduction in this enterprise, in as much as it is an attempt to pass beyond the concrete phenomenon of this 1938 novel toward the essential meaning it might have for us all.[B&N, p.802]_ It takes reading with a special kind of empathy, perhaps, to see the inward experience of these characters as if it were our own--in form, if not in content._ But if we listen carefully to what is learned from beginning to end, and bring together moments from throughout the book in order to connect themes that repeat as he reflects on them in cycles, then we can reconstruct, in a sense, the meaning of this story, the moral, if you will. A more cynical reader might think it a pie-in-the-sky effort, too idealistic, digging as deeply as one must for a good faith moral to this tale of woe and alienation which, on the surface, seems clearly to be about bad faith. But, as looks can be deceiving (like many great novels with similar concerns) one need only withdraw into the frame of Nausea to find the level at which the agent is reflecting on the lesson's learned by the experiences revealed; and from this view, this journal-narrative proves itself to be about this process of self-reflection essentially. In this process, far more is revealed than is apparent on the surface. Sartre gives us much to go on to help us connect the many deep themes--including the relation between subjects and their objects, the phenomenon of shifting paradigms of consciousness, the project of historical analysis, the dubious value of humanism, of authority, and of writing itself; what Sartre calls "the IDEA"; of adventures, happiness, time, and perfect moments. This seems, perhaps, too much to chew on, at first--until we see how tightly interwoven these themes are in this work, and how explicit his ultimate conclusions about them prove to be.
It is significant however that Sartre footnotes any direct description of authenticity and good faith in Being and Nothingness, where he notes that, "If it is indifferent whether one is in good or in bad faith (if only because bad faith reapprehends good faith and slides to the very origin of the project of good faith) that does not mean that we can not radically escape bad faith. But this supposes a self-recovery of being which was previously corrupted._ This self-recovery we shall call authenticity, the description of which has no place here," says Sartre.[B&N, p.116]_
It is my sense that Sartre holds this possibility of self-recovery as central to the moral to Nausea, and in that he never addresses the subject directly, assumes the Taoist/Socratic view that truth cannot be described positively, i.e. cannot be specifically defined, as if captured with words, and thus known wholey from outside in. Rather, it can only be known in the experience of discovery, and thus, from the inside out._ Thus, I think Sartre intends to help us understand authenticity and good faith and self-discovery--call it what you will--by way of contrast with the experience of nothingness that life appears in the absence of good faith motives. It is the apparent lack of authenticity in many of the surface interactions of this book, indeed, this world, which is to say, the abundance of ulterior motive, which brings the very possibility of good faith living to mind._
Toward reconstruction of Sartre's intention then, I would like to examine and develop these key themes from Nausea, and to support this exegesis with analysis from Being and Nothingness, and this, in order to shed light on the good faith moral of this tale about the existential possibilities which remain, still and always, ours.
At the opening of this 1938 novel, we find our protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, lamenting the futility of keeping a journal, the problem being that one exaggerates everything unimportant, and cannot find words for that which truly matters. We are alerted then at the outset to one question to be answered; for, as he says, "In one case only it might be interesting to keep a diary; it would be if..."[N, p.3] If what? The meaning of his writing goes on to become a central and deeply woven theme throughout his journaling, which he is careful to point out is only the telling of a tale, after the fact, and there are limits to what one can say about the past. "When you want to understand something you stand in front of it, alone, without help: all the past in the world is of no use."[N, p.69]
Reflecting on his recent shift in consciousness, Roquentin thinks it at first to be "an abstract change without object."[N, p.4] "I am subject to these transformations," he says, these "veritable revolutions."[N, p.5] As he's felt at other times when his passion was dead and he experienced himself to be empty and meaningless [N, p.5], now too, he explains, objects seem to have power over him, not him over them, as he ultimately concludes should be: "Objects should not touch because they are not alive," he says, "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."[N, p.10] For example, when he held the pebble at the seashore--he thinks the Nausea to have come from the stone, he protests (somewhat too much, as if to suggest he himself knows better); "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."[N, p.11] Thus, he speculates, "Objects are not made to be touched. It is better to slip between them, avoiding them as much as possible."[N, p.122]
Like the Self-Taught Man, Roquentin finds himself stuck in the push and pull of his objective world, the absurdity, the slime, the contingency of his own existence; "the disorder, the day to day drift."[N, p.175] Reacting to the blue shirt with the purple suspenders, Roquentin insists, "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 cafe, I am the one who is within it."[N, p.19-20] We see through his and the eyes of other characters how discouraging this facticity, as Sartre calls it, is--the "brute fact of being this For-itself in the world."[B&N, 801; emphasis added] It would seem that Nausea, then, has to do with the sensation one sometimes has of tumbling out of control in a sea of external forces, i.e. the feeling of internal powerlessness (or is it merely failure to navigate?) like being drunk with imbalance. In the face of these moving constraints, apparently overwhelming from this inside-out perspective, he proclaims that, "too tell the whole truth...I am no longer free, I can no longer do what I will."[N, p.10]
But, as he notes, beware of "the way we can lie, putting reason on our side."[N, p.9] His earlier attribution of causality to the stone seems, in a considered view, to be a bad faith attempt to blame the world for his condition; to make Roquentin, effectively, a result of things over which he pretends no control, rather than to give him responsibility for being the cause of his reality, of his own happiness and or self-disgust--and he seems to already know this at the outset. We discover through the Self-Taught Man, who is clearly the cause of his own disgust and lives with the horror of knowing how responsible he is for the way others see and remember him, that we might have acted differently... when we still had the chance, the choice, But the past is the past, and we live in the present with the consequences of the choices we made there, in the past, and the dreams or dread of how we might yet be, in the future.
And yet, while we are inescapably engaged in the world, we are not entirely constrained by this facticity, so we cannot reasonably use it as an excuse for bad faith action. Try as we might to feign powerlessness among objects, we actually do have the power to act as we choose, Sartre reminds us at length in Being and Nothingness--for we are more the cause than the effect of the world around us. We ignore this freedom for the most part, but note that 'ignore' is the active root verb, that is, the intention behind the noun state of 'ignorance'. As intelligent beings, we are condemned to be this free...or take responsibility for actively ignoring our responsibility, for we are responsible, whether we recognize and/or admit to it--i.e. our freedom and our power--or not.
Roquentin admits, "I am terrified...I'm afraid of what will be born and take possession of me--and drag me--where?...Shall I have to go off again, leaving my research, my book and everything else unfinished? Shall I awake in a few months, in a few years, broken, deceived, in the midst of new ruins?"[pp. 5-6]_ "What is there to fear in such a regular world? [N, p.3] Knowing not what he is afraid of, he has fear of what isn't known. Irregularity. Unpredictability. "But again, that wasn't the worst: before me, posed with a sort of indolence, was a voluminous, insipid idea. I did not see clearly what it was, but it sickened me so much I couldn't look at it."[N, p.5] But "when you want to understand something you stand in front of it, alone, without help..."[N, p.69] he resolved and, "I would like to see the truth clearly before it is too late."[N, p.6]
With this, Roquentin begins to examine the reasons he has changed so apparently abruptly in the past, and to wonder whether these changes have been mere whim, as they must seem to others, or, as they now seem to him, decisions made with apparently good reason, e.g. in anger at being used for other's purposes. "I am weighed down by the same discouragement I had in Hanoi--four years ago," he says, "when Mercier pressed me to join him and I stared at a Khmer statuette without answering. And the IDEA is there..."[N, p.36] Many other such events throughout this novel bring him to see his own projects suddenly wanting...and always, always, this comes in the face of 'the IDEA'. As when the Self-Taught Man had left his apartment after asking that irking question, whether Roquentin had ever had any adventures, he thinks, "I am alone now. Not quite alone. Hovering in front of me is still this idea...it explains nothing, it does not move, and contents itself with saying no. No, I haven't had any adventures."[N, p.36] "Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But no adventures."[N, p.37]
However, upon reflection, he reconsiders the question. "First, it seems to be a pure question of words...", but "you can call that by any name you like, in any case, it was an event which happened to ME."[N, p.37] "It isn't a question of words; I am beginning to understand. There is something to which I clung more than all the rest--without completely realizing it. It wasn't love...not glory, not money. It was...that at certain times life could take on a rare and precious quality. There was no need for extraordinary circumstances; all I asked for was a little precision. There is nothing brilliant about my life now; but from time to time, for example, when they play music in the cafes, I look back and tell myself; in old days, in London, Meknes, Tokyo, I have known great moments."[N, p.37; italics mine]
We see here that, as quickly as the memory of these great moments appear, so does the nothingness, the difference between what is and what could be, the lack of what is potential in the actual, i.e. "the other side of existence, in this other world which you can see in the distance."[N, p.176] "I have had adventures. Now I am deprived of this. I have suddenly learned, without any apparent reason, that I have been lying to myself for ten years. And naturally, everything they tell about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It is to this way of happening that I clung so tightly."[N, p.37; italics mine]
He elaborates on this "way" and describes its process: "The beginnings would have had to be real beginnings. Alas! Now I see so clearly what I wanted. Real beginnings are like a fanfare of trumpets, like the first notes of a jazz tune, cutting short tedium, making for continuity: then you say about these evenings within evenings...'Something has happened'...this paltry event is not like others: Suddenly you see that it is the beginning of a great shape whose outlines are lost in mist and you tell yourself, 'Something is beginning.'"[N, p.37] "Something is going to happen: something is waiting for me...it is over there, just at the corner of this calm street that my life is going to begin."[N, p.54] "There is something which needs me in order to come to life."[N, p.55]
Again, at the sight of the lights going on in the lighthouse on the Ile Caillebotte; "I felt my heart swell with a great feeling of adventure."[N, p.54] "Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can't describe it; it's like the Nausea and yet its 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 that I am here; I am the one who splits the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel."[N, p.54]
Here, a new and important theme arises, i.e. happiness. In such moments, Roquentin thinks with confidence, "I am the one who unifies all sounds and shapes: I cannot even conceive of anything around me being other than what it is."[N, p.54] "Time has stopped; my life has stopped: this wide window, this heavy air, blue as water, this fleshy white plant at the bottom of the water, and I myself, we form a complete and static whole: I am happy."[N, p.56]
By contrast with his earlier contention that these changes in him come from objects external to him, Roquentin reflects again here on the source of these changes in feelings, and claims now that "This feeling of adventure definitely does not come from events: I have proved it. It's rather the way in which the moments are linked together. I think this is what happens: you suddenly feel that time is passing, that each instant leads to another, this one to another, and so on; that each instant is annihilated, and that it isn't worth while to hold it back, etc., etc. And then you attribute this property to events which appear to you in the instants; what belongs to the form you carry over to the content...this is the feeling of adventure."[N, p.57; emphasis added]
Then, "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. It grows smaller, contracts as it declines, and now the end makes one with the beginning._ Following this gold spot with my eyes I think I would accept--even if I had to risk death, lose a fortune, a friend--to live it all over again, in the same circumstances, from end to end. But an adventure never returns or is prolonged."[N, p.38]
"Something is beginning in order to end: adventure does not let itself be drawn out; it only makes sense when dead...I cling to each instant with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplaceable--and yet I would not raise a finger to stop it from being annihilated. This last moment I am spending...is all going to end, I know it...I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing...and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass."[N, p.38]
"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?"[N, p.56]
Of this life, Roquentin tells: "I live alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing. I give nothing...What good is it? Every man for himself:"[N, p.7] And of others and his loneliness among them he says that "in order to exist, they also must consort with others,"[N, p.6] but "when you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends."[N, p.7] And "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."[N, p.7] "People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked? You might say--yes, you might say, nature without humanity."[N, p.18] "I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices."[N, p.8] But actually, people are "put to sleep by looking in the mirror."[N, pp.16-17] "Each one of them has his little personal difficulty which keeps him from noticing that he exists; there isn't one of them who doesn't believe himself indispensable to something or someone.... 'No one better qualified...' And I am among them and if they look at me they must think that no one is better qualified than I to do what I'm doing. But I know. I don't look like much, but I know I exist and that they exist. And if I knew how to convince people I'd go and sit down next to that handsome white-haired gentleman and explain to him just what existence means._ I burst out laughing at the thought of the face he would make... I'd like to stop but I can't; I laugh until I cry."[N. p.111; emphasis added]
"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. It's enough to see the face they make when one of these fishy-eyed men with an inward look and with whom no agreement is possible, passes them."[N, p.8] Remembering how, as a child, he and his friends had feared the man with the boot on one foot and a slipper on the other, he remarks, "I am disturbed at being alone. I would like to tell someone what is happening to me before it is too late and before I start frightening little boys. I wish Anny were here."[N, p.9]
Of the old men playing cards, he reflects; "I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates."[N, p.21] "I looked anxiously around me: the present, nothing but the present...The true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, or even in my thoughts...we have so much difficulty imagining nothingness. Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be--and behind them...there is nothing."[N, pp.95-96; emphasis added]_
"I glance around the room and a violent disgust floods me. What am I doing here? Why did I have to get mixed up in a discussion...? Why are these people here? Why are they eating? It's true they don't know they exist. I want to leave, go to some place where I will be really in my own niche, where I will fit in...But my place is nowhere; I am unwanted, de trop."[N, p.122]
Looking at the future in the old woman: "This is time, time laid bare, coming slowly into existence, keeping us waiting, and when it does come making us sick because we realize it's been there for a long time."[N, p.31] "I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then, anything, anything could happen."[N, p.77]
And suddenly, the Nausea disappears as the Negress begins to sing, and he feels again that "something has happened."[N, p.22] The music begins and, slowly, takes him from his "unpleasant thoughts," his cynical self-pitying excuses;"Thoughts of Anny, of my wasted life. And then, still further down, Nausea, timid as dawn. But there was no music then, I was morose and calm. All the things around me were made of the same material as I, a sort of messy suffering. The world was so ugly, outside of me..."[N, p.174; emphasis added]
"Now there is this song on the saxophone. And I am ashamed. A glorious little suffering has just been born, an exemplary suffering. Four notes on the saxophone. They come and go, they seem to say: You must be like us, suffer in rhythm... I'd like to suffer that way, in rhythm, without complacence, without self-pity... But is it my fault...if I am not wanted?"[N, p.174; emphasis added] Reacting defensively then, he says, "No, they certainly can't tell me it's compassionate, this little jeweled pain which spins around above the record and dazzles me. Not even ironic...it spins and all of us...all of us abandon ourselves to existence...it has taken us unawares, in the disorder, the day to day drift: I am ashamed for myself and for what exists in front of it."[N, p.175]
"It does not exist...if I were to get up and rip this record from the table which holds it, if I were to break it in two, I wouldn't reach it. It is beyond--always beyond something, a voice, a violin note. Through layers and layers of existence, it veils itself, thin and firm, and when you want to seize it, you find only existence, you butt against existents devoid of sense. It is behind them: I don't even hear it, I hear sounds, vibrations in the air which unveil it. It does not exist because it has nothing superfluous: it is all the rest which in relation to it is superfluous. It is."[N, p.175]
"You can't say it exists. The turning record exists, the air struck by the voice which vibrates, exists, the voice which made an impression the record existed. I who listen, I exist. 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."[N, p.103]
"For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, only notes, a myriad of tiny jolts. They know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them and destroys them without even giving them time to recuperate and exist for themselves. They race, they press forward, they strike me a sharp blow in passing and are obliterated. I would like to hold them back, but I know if I succeeded in stopping one it would remain between my fingers only as a raffish languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even will it. I know few impressions stronger or more harsh."[N, p.21]
"And I, too, wanted to be. That is all I wanted; this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seed without bonds, I find the same desire again...to rid the passing moments of their fat...purify myself...to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note."[N, p.175] "That could even make an apologue: there was a poor man who got in the wrong world...and he wanted to persuade himself that he was living somewhere else, behind the canvas of paintings...behind the pages of books...behind the phonograph records... And then, after making a complete fool of himself, he understood, he opened his eyes, he saw that it was a misdeal...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... And there is something that clutches the heart: the melody is absolutely untouched by [the] tiny coughing of the needle on the record. It is so far--so far behind. 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, peal off and slip toward death, the melody stays the same, young and firm, like a pitiless witness."[N, p.176; emphasis added]
"It seems inevitable, so strong is the necessity of this music: nothing can interrupt it, nothing which comes from this time in which the world has fallen; it will stop of itself, as if by order. If I love this beautiful voice it is especially because of that: it is neither for its fullness nor its sadness, rather because it is the event for which so many notes have been preparing, from so far away, dying that it might be born."[N, p.22] All adventures have led to this moment [N, p.23]. He is happy.
To Roquentin, the music is a hopeful reminder, a promise, that "There is another happiness: outside there is this band of steel, the narrow duration of the music which traverses our time through and through, rejecting it, tearing at it with its dry little points; there is another time."[N, p.21] "[T]he music filled the room with its metallic transparency, crushing our miserable time against the walls. I am in the music."[N, p.22]
Then the music is gone, he is plunged back into the black hole of loneliness and sadness again. "So this is Nausea: this blinding evidence?... Now I know: I exist--the world exists--and I know that the world exists. That's all... Ever since that day...I was going to throw that pebble, I looked at it and then it all began: I felt that it existed."[N, p.123] "Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of 'existence.'...usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it... If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form which was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder--naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness."[N, p.127; emphasis added] "I was the root of the chestnut tree. Or rather I was entirely conscious of its existence."[N, p.131] "Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance..."[N, p.132]
Here, the theme of writing and his questioning of the validity of historical analysis and its purposes emerge again. He notes: "I feel more and more need to write--in the same proportion as I grow old, you might say."[N, p.13] "I do not need to make phrases. I write to bring certain circumstances to light. Beware of literature. I must follow the pen, without looking for words."[N, p.56] "The truth is that I can't put down my pen: I think I'm going to have the Nausea and I feel as though I'm delaying it while writing."[N, p.173] "Four pages written. Then a long moment of happiness. Must not think too much about the value of History. You ran the risk of being disgusted with it. Must not forget that de Rollebon now represents the only justification for my existence."[N, p.70]
He reflects on the statue of Gustave Impetraz before him in the square, and here we can begin to glean a political message regarding his attitude toward authority; "This place might have been gay, around 1800...Now there is something dry and evil about it, a delicate touch of horror. It comes from that fellow up there on his pedestal. When they cast this scholar in bronze, they also turned out a sorcerer...He looks. He does not live but neither is he inanimate. A mute power emanates from him, like a wind driving me backwards."[N, p.28]
This ambivalence about the past and its leaders, including Rollebon and the men in the portraits, shows up significantly time and again in Roquentin's journal, where he notes that "doctors, priests, magistrates and army officers know men through as if they had made them."[N, p.67] Like the doctor at the bar, who "never for one instant, lost an occasion of utilizing his past to the best of his ability: he has stuffed it full, used his experience on women and children, exploited them."[N, p.67] "For they had a right to everything: to life, to work, to wealth, to command, to respect, and, finally, to immortality."[N, p.83] "But for this handsome, faultless man...the beating of his heart and the mute rumblings of his organs...assumed the form of right to be instantly obeyed. For sixty years, without a halt, he had used his right to live. The slightest doubt had never crossed those magnificent gray eyes. [He] had never made a mistake. He had always done his duty... He had never weakened in his demands for his due... He had never looked any further into himself: he was a leader."[N, pp.84-85] "But his judgment went through me like a sword and questioned my very right to exist. And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn't the right to exist."[N, p.84] But then again, is it my fault if I am unwanted?
Reflecting on Rollebon and such adventures as those he had claimed to have had, Roquentin says, "Well, yes: he could have done all that, but it is not proved; I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. These are honest hypothesis 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. Not a glimmer comes from Rollebon's side. Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigour of the order I wish to give them; but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination. And I am certain that the characters in a novel would have a more genuine appearance, or, in any case, would be more agreeable."[N, p.14]
Remembering the square at Meknes: "Undoubtedly...I can re-create the scene...But I am inventing all this to make out a case...But I don't see anything anymore: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction."[N, p.32] "Nothing is left but words: I could still tell stories, tell them too well...but these are only skeletons."[N, p.33]
Roquentin finally admits that, in fact, Rollebon bores him to tears [N, p.16]: "He is cold, not carried away; he exposes nothing, he insinuates, and his method, pale and colourless, can succeed only with men of his own level, intrigues accessible to reason, politicians."[N, p.15]_ "This man was one-ideaed. Nothing more was left in him but bones, dead flesh and Pure Right. A real case of possession, I thought. Once Right has taken hold of a man exorcism cannot drive it out...It never did to make him think too much, or attract his attention to unpleasant realities, to his possible death, to the suffering of others..."[N, p.88] "The gentleman. The handsome gentleman exists. The gentleman feels that he exists...the bastards have the right to exist: 'I exist because it is my right,'... therefore I have the right not to think..."[N, p.101] "...existence takes my thoughts from behind and gently expands them from behind; someone takes me from behind, they force me to think from behind, ("..little Lucerne assaulted from behind, violated by existence from behind..."_[N, p.102]) therefore to be something, behind me, breathing in light bubbles of existence, he is the bubble of fog and desire, he is pale as death in the glass, Rollebon is dead, Antoine Roquentin is not dead..."[N, p.102].
"M. de Rollebon was my partner; he needed me in order to exist and I needed him so as not to feel my existence."[N, p.98] Then, "I suddenly woke from a dream... I wake up in front of a pad of white paper..."[N, p.98] "I had said that the past did not exist. And suddenly, noiseless, M. de Rollebon had returned to his nothingness."[N, p.96] He wrote, "'Today I gave up writing my book on the Marquis de Rollebon.'"[N, p.100]
"I think of the man out there who wrote this tune... I try to think of him through the melody... He made it. He had troubles, everything didn't work out for him the way it should have...bills to pay...a woman somewhere who wasn't thinking about him...this terrible heat wave... 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... Well, this is the first time in years that a man has seemed moving to me. I'd like to know something about him... Not at all out of humanity:_ on the contrary... Just to...be able to think about him from time to time, listening to the record. I don't suppose it would make the slightest difference to him if...someone is thinking about him. But I'd be happy if I were in his place; I envy him....no one could think of me as I think of them, with such gentleness. No one, not even Anny."[N, p.177]
Likening himself to a man who has come from the cold into a warm room, he asks, "Can you justify your existence then? Just a little?"[N, p.177] "Couldn't I try...couldn't I, in another medium?... It would have to be a book...but not a history book: history talks about what has existed...another type of book. I don't quite know which kind--but you would have to guess, behind the printed words, behind the pages, at something which would not exist, which would be above existence. A story, for example, something that could never happen, and adventure. It would have to be beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence...and they would think about my life as I think about the Negress's: as something precious and almost legendary. A book. Naturally, at first it would only be a troublesome, tiring work, it wouldn't stop me from existing or feeling that I exist. But a time would come...perhaps, because of it, I could remember my life without repugnance... And I might succeed...in accepting myself."[N, p.178]
Then at least "two of them are saved: the Jew and the Negress. Saved. They have washed themselves of the sin of existing. Not completely, of course, but as much as any man can. This idea suddenly knocks me over, because I was not even hoping for that any more. I feel something brush against me lightly and I dare not move because I am afraid it will go away. Something I didn't know any more: a sort of joy."[N, p.177]
"I understand now: one had to begin living again and the adventure was fading out."[N, p.39] "Yes, it's what I wanted--what I still want. I am so happy when a Negress sings: what summits would I not reach if my own life made the subject of the melody."[N, p.38] "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."[N, p.126]
"This moment was extraordinary....I understood the nausea, I possessed it. To tell the truth, I did not formulate my discoveries to myself. But I think it would be easy for me to put them in words now. The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. To exist is simply to be there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them. I believe there are people who have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a necessary, causal being. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, a probability which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, consequently, the perfect free gift. All is free, this park, this city and myself. When you realize that, it turns your heart upside down and everything begins to float...here is Nausea; here there is what those bastards...try to hide from themselves with their idea of their rights. But what a poor lie...no one has any rights; they are entirely free, they cannot succeed in not feeling superfluous. And in themselves, secretly, they are...sad."[N, p.131; emphasis added]
We see the karmic justice of the moral to Sartre's story then in his closing reflection. About leaving this era of his life, he says, "I savor this total oblivion into which I have fallen. I am between two cities, one knows nothing of me, the other knows me no longer. Who remembers me? Perhaps a heavy young woman in London...And is it really of me that she thinks? Besides there is that man...and I am no more for her than if I had never met her; she has suddenly emptied herself of me, and all other consciousness in the world has also emptied itself of me. It seems funny. Yet I know that I exist, that I am here,"[pp.169-170]..."existence which feels it exists,"[N, p.170] even though "I am so forgotten."[N, p.170]
"Antoine Roquentin exists for no one. That amuses me. And just what is Antoine Roquentin? An abstraction. A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness. Antoine Roquentin...and suddenly the 'I' pales, pales, and fades out." But, alas, not completely, for "consciousness...perpetuates itself...Consciousness exists as a tree, as a blade of grass. It slumbers, it grows bored...Consciousness forgotten...tries to lose itself...But it never forgets itself."[N, p.170]
"A little while ago someone said 'me', said my consciousness. Who?_ Now nothing is left but anonymous walls, anonymous consciousness."[N, p.170] "There is consciousness of this body, walking...it loses itself in nothingness. It is not between the walls, it is nowhere... There is knowledge of the consciousness. It sees through itself, peaceful and empty between the walls, freed from the man who inhabited it... Consciousness of Anny, of Anny, fat old Anny in her hotel room, consciousness of suffering and the suffering is conscious...and the body walks and there is consciousness of all that and consciousness of consciousness...a forgotten suffering--which cannot forget itself."[N, p.170]
On the other hand, "The Self-Taught Man walks in a city where he is not forgotten. People are thinking about him...he thinks: 'It hurts.' He walks, he must walk. If he stopped for one instant the high walls...would suddenly rise up around him and lock him in...the scene would begin again. He thinks: 'My God, if only I hadn't done that, if only that could not be true...'"[N, p.171] This then is the meaning that the Self-Taught Man had given to his life, he who had opted for what the American author had called, "voluntary optimism. Life has a meaning," he said, "if we choose to give it one. One must first act, throw one's self into some enterprise. Then, if one reflects, the die is already cast, one is pledged."[N, p.112]
It would seem at least rational, and even wise, to 'take' this responsibility, so to speak, i.e. to pay attention to the effects which we manifest in the world through the cause that we ourselves are, as choosing beings. And, as Sartre shows masterfully in this work, whether we take responsibility or not, our choice of actions give form to our projects and memories, from which self itself takes form. This effect seems of key importance to the good faith moral to this story, if only because "we carry them all away and they remain alive: even now they have the power to give us joy and pain."[N, p.63] What could be more fair, I wonder, which is to say, more karmic. As Anny says, it is a moral issue. [N, p.148]
We create ourselves by our work, by our expressions of melody, in whatever medium we work; we leave behind something that is beyond all existents, which alone truly exists. To be what one is capable of being, what is potential, or to live a parallel existence, in shame: this is the choice. To create work that helps others feel their shame, responsibility for what one is, what one settles for, or otherwise destines by active choice. Real, suffering, nauseous human beings leave behind them in their wake small works of great beauty, harmony, which resonate beyond their suffering to uplift the lives, the imagined potentials, of others; and (yes, really) to inspire joy, however small the doses.
So, in conclusion, the good faith moral to this story does not leave us with bad faith excuses for our condition, as a pessimistic reading might think. Rather, in his best moments, Sartre clearly wants us to take responsibility for our world, and to understand it well enough to learn how to change It, that is, the quality of our time itself, which is what consciousness is, at core. If it were as simple as writing a self-help guide, Roquentin would have gone out and read a book about it and then would have written another just like it: "if I knew how to convince people I'd go and sit down next to that handsome white-haired gentleman and explain to him just what existence means;" instead, "I laugh until I cry."[p.111]
We don't learn it there, in books, or teach it by deliberate explaining, it would seem; rather, we find it in our experience, in our own life, and only then do we find it in common with others in language, books, art, music, etc.; but we have to face it alone in our experience, and exist within the choices that we make with regard to it.