Sartre's Nausea, doubtless very well known to you - and which I am incompetent to expound

Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea (La Nausée, 1938) is discussed in a substantial chunk of Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, most of the fifth lecture, which I remind myself was to an audience at Bryn Mawr in 1965, mostly, presumably undergraduates.

The book is doubtless very well known to you; I can’t undertake to tell you much about it, especially as it has often been regarded as standing in an unusually close relation to a body of philosophy which I am incompetent to expound.  (133)

Nausea appears to be – Sartre argued that it was – something of an anti-novel, working against whatever one thought a typical or traditional novel might be.  Kermode uses it to ask “How far is it inevitable that a novel gives a novel-shaped account of the world?” (143) and a number of variations on the question.

What kills me, first, is that Kermode’s first line is likely true.  How things have changed.  What novel, published almost twenty-seven years earlier, in English for sixteen years, could today’s lecturer use?  “The Savage Detectives is doubtless very well known to you.”  Impossible.  A new English translation of Nausea, Robert Baldick’s, had just been published.  The previous year, Sartre had declined the Nobel Prize.  Maybe the undergraduates had merely read a lot of reviews of Nausea.  Very funny.  It was a different world.

Nausea was almost completely unknown to me.  Twenty years after The Sense of an Ending, when I began paying attention, Sartre’s reputation had deflated, maybe a lot.  I do not remember him being mentioned in literary or cultural journals much; not as much as Foucault and Derrida.  Nor do I remember him from class.  We read Simone de Beauvoir in Western Civ, not Sartre.  I do remember enjoying his plays, The Flies (1943) and No Exit (1944), which I tried because they were in a Vintage International edition.  Back then, that meant “this is the good stuff.”

My understanding is that Sartre’s reputation has fallen quite a lot in France, too, but this is all relative.  He is much-read, much-discussed, just not at what must have been the exhausting level of the 1960s and 1970s, when he was the kind of figure who was in the newspaper every day, his opinion sought on every subject.  I was pleased and surprised to discover that La Nausée was within my reading level, early high school, maybe, although for ideas and interest it is more advanced.  The novel has an “existentialism for beginners” aspect, but it does not appear to be taught in French high schools at this point.  A new school edition of The Flies came out just this spring – I do not want to exaggerate.

So, poked by Kermode, I read La Nausée, in French, and plan to write about it for a couple of days, beyond today’s throat-clearing or context-setting or whatever it is.  Not only am I incompetent in the philosophy, but also in the French, so I assume I have made some basic errors in comprehension.  Not only am I incompetent in the philosophy, I now see that, as a solid materialist, I am antipathetic to it.  I take it for granted that the world outside of myself exists, that I exist, that kind of thing.  But that is all right.  I like reading about people different than me.

In the end, it is just a novel, and I have some idea how to read those.