Some favorite bits of Nausea - Enjoying the ignoble marmelade

What did I especially like in Jean-Paul Sartre’s debut novel, La Nausée?  I will list many things.  Some may come from my misunderstanding of the French language.

For example, this sentence: “J’avais peur, mais j’étais surtout en colère, je trouvais ça si bête, si déplacé, je haïssais cette ignoble marmelade” (185).  “I was afraid, but mostly I was angry; I found it so stupid, so unwarranted; I hated this vile pudding.”  The narrator, Roquentin, has just had – or is writing in his journal as if he has just had – a profound experience in which he gets a glimpse of reality by staring intensely at the root of a chestnut tree.  This line comes a bit after.  The ignoble marmelade is reality, everything, or everything outside of Roquentin.  This is by far the most famous scene in the novel.

Soon after, in an long, especially novelistic scene, Roquentin has a long reunion with his ex-girlfriend, who gently expresses her despair and insists that they are never ever getting back together.  This leads the narrator – I am taking this all as psychological, rather than metaphysical – to embrace his newfound sense of freedom, of existence, while affirming his loathing of people and their fat, comfortable faces, and their popular novels (“ils écrivent des romans populistes / they write popular novels,” 217).

Won’t they be surprised, he thinks, when the forest invades the town and unleashes Lovecraftian horrors on the people, when third eyes appear in their foreheads and their tongues turn into millipedes, or maybe centipedes.  “Mille-pattes,” not sure how the French distinguish between the two.  A forest of phalli will erupt, oozing sperm and blood from their wounds.  “Alors j’éclaterai de rire, même si… / Then I will burst into laughter, even if…” (219)  I will direct you to Time’s Flow Stemmed, where Anthony thoughtfully posted the entire magnificent paragraph.

It was at this point where I realized I had to let the “philosophical” novel go, and accept that the narrator was an extreme psychological case, which is a good subject for a novel; this is not a complaint.

My other favorite scene is completely different, and sane.  It is a sketch of Sunday in a French city.  French Sundays have changed since 1938 – it is easier to shop – but maybe they have not changed that much.  This long scene, in which Roquentin wanders around looking for a place to just sit and read Eugénie Grandet, felt right to me.  Since we are fairly early in the novel, the narrator uses this section to describe the town, its streets and shops and crowds.  I especially like the exterminator across from the church, with a window display with a diorama of rats and mice sailing a ship, and being driven back to sea by some kind of poison.

J’aimais beaucoup cette boutique, elle avait un air cynique et entêté, elle rappelait avec insolence les droits de la vermine et de la crasse, à deux pas de l’église la plus coûteuse de France.  (67)

I really loved this shop; it had a cynical and stubborn air, recalling with insolence the rights of the vermin and the dirt, a couple of steps from the most costly church in France.

In Lyon, there is an exterminator a few steps from a church who has for some reason a mounted beaver in the window.  In Paris, there is a truly hideous exterminator displaying several rows of dead rats in traps.  I seem to have gotten away from the depiction of Sunday.  That seemed right, but so did the bit about the exterminator.

Roquentin gets a little Balzac read.  He for some reason copies a page directly into his journal.  Sartre puts a page of Balzac in his novel.  Now that is a real anti-novelistic gesture.

Translations are all mine; please correct them if that seem like a good use of your time.