Nausea () is a philosophical novel by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, published in 1938. It is Sartre's first novel.

The novel takes place in 'Bouville' (homophone of Boue-ville, literally, 'Mud town') a town similar to Le Havre. It comprises the thoughts and subjective experiences—in a personal diary format—of Antoine Roquentin, a melancholic and socially isolated intellectual who is residing in Bouville ostensibly for the purpose of completing a biography on a historical figure. Roquentin's growing alienation and disillusionment coincide with an increasingly intense experience of revulsion, which he calls "the Nausea", in which the people and things around him seem to lose all their familiar and recognizable qualities. Sartre's original title for the novel before publication was Melancholia.

The novel has been translated into English by Lloyd Alexander as The Diary of Antoine Roquentin

Characters

  • Antoine Roquentin – The protagonist of the novel, Antoine is a former adventurer who has been living alone in Bouville for three years. He has no friends and is out of touch with family, and often resigns himself to eavesdropping on other people's conversations and examining their actions from a distance. He settles in the seaport town of Bouville to finish his research on the life of an 18th-century political figure, the Marquis de Rollebon. During the winter of 1932 a "sweetish sickness," which he calls "the nausea", increasingly impinges on almost everything he does or enjoys. He tries to find solace in the presence of others, but exhibits signs of boredom and lack of interest when interacting with them. Because of his aloofness to the world and the people around him, he starts to doubt his own existence.
  • Anny – An English woman who was once Antoine's lover. After Antoine arranges to meet with her hoping it will ameliorate his condition, Anny makes clear to him she has changed considerably and must get on with her life.
  • Ogier P. – Generally referred to as "the self-taught man" or the Autodidact, he is a bailiff's clerk and an acquaintance of Antoine's. Ogier lives for the pursuit of knowledge and love of humanity, which inspires in Antoine much criticism and mockery, although he develops a strange compassion for him. Highly disciplined, he has spent hundreds of hours reading at the local library. He often speaks to Antoine and confides to him that he is a socialist.

Literary genre and style

400px|thumb|right|[[Le Havre: Quai de Southampton in the 1920s]]

Like many Modernist novels, La Nausée is a "city-novel", encapsulating experience within the city. It is widely assumed that Bouville in the novel is a fictional portrayal of Le Havre, where Sartre was living and teaching in the 1930s as he wrote it.

The critic William V. Spanos has used Sartre's novel as an example of "negative capability", a presentation of the uncertainty and dread of human existence so strong that the imagination cannot comprehend it.

The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel places La Nausée in a tradition of French activism: "Following on from Malraux, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus among others were all able to use the writing of novels as a powerful tool of ideological exploration." Although novelists like Sartre claim to be in rebellion against the 19th Century French novel, "they in fact owe a great deal both to its promotion of the lowly and to its ambiguous or 'poetic' aspects."

In his essay What Is Literature?, Sartre wrote, "On the one hand, the literary object has no substance but the reader's subjectivity ... But, on the other hand, the words are there like traps to arouse our feelings and to reflect them towards us ... Thus, the writer appeals to the reader's freedom to collaborate in the production of the work."

The novel, according to Sartre, is an intricate formal achievement modeled on much 18th-century fiction that was presented as a "diary discovered among the papers of...".

Hayden Carruth wonders if there are unrecognized layers of irony and humor beneath the seriousness of Nausea: "Sartre, for all his anguished disgust, can play the clown as well, and has done so often enough: a sort of fool at the metaphysical court."

Sartre described the stream of consciousness technique as one method of moving the novel from the era of Newtonian physics forward into the era of Einstein's theory of general relativity, in terms of writing style. He saw this as crucial because he felt that "narrative technique ultimately takes us back to the metaphysics of the novelist." He wanted his novelistic techniques to be compatible with his theories on the existential freedom of the individual as well as his phenomenological analyses of the unstable, shifting structures of consciousness.

As a psychological novel

Disdaining 19th-century notions that character development in novels should obey and reveal psychological law, La Nausée treats such notions as bourgeois bad faith, ignoring the contingency and inexplicability of life.

From the psychological point of view, Antoine Roquentin could be seen as an individual suffering from depression, and the Nausea itself as one of the symptoms of his condition. Unemployed, living in deprived conditions, lacking human contact, being trapped in fantasies about the 18th-century secret agent he is writing a book about, he establishes Sartre's oeuvre as a follow-up to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, or Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge in search of a precise description of schizophrenia. Rilke's character anticipates Sartre's.

However, Roquentin's predicament is not simply depression or mental illness, although his experience has pushed him to that point. Sartre presents Roquentin's difficulties as arising from man's inherent existential condition. His seemingly special situation (returning from travel, reclusiveness), which goes beyond the mere indication of his very real depression, is supposed to induce in him (and in the reader) a state that makes one more receptive to noticing an existential situation that everyone experiences, but may not be sensitive enough to let become consciously noticeable. Roquentin undergoes a strange metaphysical experience that estranges him from the world. His problems are not merely a result of personal insanity, which would be deprived of larger significance. Rather, like the characters in the Dostoevsky and Rilke novels, he is a victim of larger ideological, social, and existential forces that have brought him to the brink of insanity. Sartre's point in Nausea is to comment on our universal reaction to these common external predicaments.

As a work of philosophy

Criticism of Sartre's novels frequently centered on the tension between the philosophical and political on one side, and the novelistic and individual on the other.

Ronald Aronson describes the reaction of Albert Camus, still in Algeria and working on his own first novel, L’Étranger. At the time of the novel's release, Camus was a reviewer for an Algiers left-wing daily. Camus told a friend that he "thought a lot about the book" and it was "a very close part of [himself]." In his review, Camus wrote, "the play of the toughest and most lucid mind are at the same time both lavished and squandered." Camus felt that each of the book's chapters, taken by itself, "reaches a kind of perfection in bitterness and truth." However, he also felt that the descriptive and the philosophical aspects of the novel are not balanced, that they "don't add up to a work of art: the passage from one to the other is too rapid, too unmotivated, to evoke in the reader the deep conviction that makes the art of the novel." He likewise felt that Sartre had tipped the balance too far in depicting the repugnant features of mankind "instead of placing the reasons for his despair, at least to a certain degree, if not completely, on the elements of human greatness." Still, Camus's largely positive review led to a friendship between the two authors.

Philosopher G. J. Mattey describes an opposite judgment. He writes that Nausea "may well be Sartre's best book for the very reason that in it the intellectual and the creative artist come closest to being conjoined." Barrett says that, in other literary works and in his literary criticism, Sartre feels the pull of ideas too strongly to respond to poetry, "which is precisely that form of human expression in which the poet—and the reader who would enter the poet's world—must let Being be, to use Heidegger's phrase, and not attempt to coerce it by the will to action or the will to intellectualization."

The poet Hayden Carruth agrees with Barrett, whom he quotes, about Nausea. He writes firmly For Sartre, this realization is not intellectual comprehension of an abstract idea, but rather a lived experience of reality itself. Thus, instead of arguing abstractly for contingency, Nausea is a literary invitation to share the experience of contingency. From its earliest beginnings, Simone de Beauvoir recognised Nausea as the first robust expression of this key philosophical idea:

<blockquote>I came to realize the wealth of meaning in what he called his 'theory of contingency,' and in which were to be found already the seeds of all his ideas on being, existence, necessity, and liberty... But he wasn't making things easy for himself, for he had no intention of composing a theoretical treatise on conventional lines. He ... refused to separate philosophy from literature. In his view, Contingency was no abstract notion, but an actual dimension of real life: it would be necessary to make use of all the resources of art to make the human heart aware of that secret 'failing' which he perceived in Man and in the world around him."</blockquote>

As the project developed, Sartre intended to follow Husserl's phenomenological maxim, "to the things themselves," and lead his audience as directly as possible to the experience of reality itself, which required the art of literature rather than the abstract prose of academic philosophy.

As a novel of personal commitment

Steven Ungar compares Nausea with French novels of different periods, such as Madame de La Fayette's La Princesse de Clèves (1678), Honoré de Balzac's Le Père Goriot (1835), André Malraux's La Condition humaine (1933), and Annie Ernaux's Une femme (1988), all of which have scenes with men and women faced with choices and "provide literary expressions to concerns with personal identity that vary over time more in detail than in essence."

thumb|220px|right|Cover: 1964, 7th printing of Nausea; [[New Directions Publishers|New Directions.]]

A main theme in La Nausée is that life is meaningless unless a person makes personal commitments that give it meaning. William Barrett emphasizes that the despair and disgust in Nausea contrast with the total despair of Céline (who is quoted on the flyleaf of the French edition) that leads to nothing; rather, they are a necessary personal recognition that eventuate in "a release from disgust into heroism."

Barrett adds that, "like Adler's, Sartre's is fundamentally a masculine psychology; it misunderstands and disparages the psychology of woman. The humanity of man consists in the For-itself, the masculine component by which we choose, make projects, and generally commit ourselves to a life of action. The element of masculine protest, to use Adler's term, is strong throughout Sartre's writings ... the disgust ... of Roquentin, in Nausea, at the bloated roots of the chestnut tree ...".

Mattey elaborates further in a lecture given in Paris on 29 October 1945 (later published under the title L'existentialisme est un humanisme):<blockquote>What is meant ... by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives of him, is undefinable, it is only because he is nothing. Only afterwards will he be something, and he will have made what he will be.</blockquote>If things—and also people—are contingent, if they "just are," then we are free and we create ourselves solely through our decisions and choices.

David Drake mentions to recognize that freedom is inescapable and that therefore creating a meaning for his life is his own responsibility. "Nothing makes us act the way we do, except our own personal choice."

"But," David Clowney writes, "freedom is frightening, and it is easier to run from it into the safety of roles and realities that are defined by society, or even by your own past. To be free is to be thrown into existence with no "human nature" as an essence to define you, and no definition of the reality into which you are thrown, either. To accept this freedom is to live "authentically"; but most of us run from authenticity. In the most ordinary affairs of daily life, we face the challenge of authentic choice, and the temptation of comfortable inauthenticity. All of Roquentin's experiences are related to these themes from Sartre's philosophy."