Call it Masochism

There it is, lying near me: green covers, yellow, stained pages, old library smell. A 1979 edition of Dgey Pe Sartre (in case your tongue has some trouble with the last name, think about a lemon, it will come back to its common shape)- Nausea. Can’t tell you how glad I am I’m done with it. When I was little past the middle of the book, I couldn’t help writing this on Facebook, ‘Reading Sartre’s Nausea is like going to a dentist who runs out of anesthetic every time I have an appointment, so I end up staring at my pain like a frog watching a horror movie.’ I was not surprised there were no reactions to my post. Who in the name of God would read Nausea in the 21st C? Or to put it better, who would read Nausea when she’s thirty? It’s a book that is usually opened when your breasts grow or your voice cracks, and you start either feeling important (in which case you don’t read the whole damn thing; you throw it in the air, let it fall and enjoy whatever’s left from the book), or you’re wondering what’s so damn interesting about being important, anyway (in which case you read the whole damn thing). Sartre must have fallen under the second category, but he overdid himself by leaving the ‘important’ part aside. That he wrote the book when he was 33 years old is something that should leave one pondering or wobbling (depending on what part of the world one finds herself). It might be that red-haired guys grow their first beard only in their thirties. (Research needs to be done). Why did I read it? Call it masochism. Aesthetic masochism. You need to read ‘gloomy’ after ‘happy’, only so you can better enjoy ‘happy’again. You need some junk food after eating only home cooked food, so your taste buds can wholly appreciate the latter. Is there a better way to explain the bitter-sweet polarity of good-and-evil that we’re constantly bathing in? It’s God’s aesthetic taste, that’s all there is to It, if you ask me.

Existentialist friends, before you kill me for good, I have to admit. Sartre is not really junk. I am becoming a fan of the law of attraction. It postulates that the more you think about something the higher the chances it will happen. And it worked. I kept wondering if you can truly say, I read a good book but I did not like it that much. I’m not going to split hairs now about what makes a good book. Let’s just put it simply: something that both entertains you or makes you want to read the book, and has got ‘substance’, or ‘truth’ in it. So vieux Sartre returned from the grave to answer my question. ‘Il est possible, mon amie. It’s a perfectly valid contradiction in terms’, he said running his long fingers through his thick red hair.

What makes Nausea a good book? Well, it is entertaining, it makes you want to flip page after page in the hope that Antoine Roquentin, a historian, will find a cure to his malaise. His Nausea comes from the impossibility to find meaning to life, and thence, his acute feeling of being in the way of existence, of not fitting anywhere, among people, or not even in nature. He is first gripped by anxiety when he tries to pick a pebble from the ground and realizes he can’t because he’s struck by its mere existence and the nothingness it ultimately contains. In a nutshell, everything that follows is Roquentin’s discoveries of the uselessness of himself (‘’I hadn’t the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe’’), of his puppet, defined-by-duty fellow people (“How happy one must be to be nothing more than a Legion of Honor and a moustache’’), the general absurdity of life (“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance’’), and of death itself (“I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives. But even my death would have been in the way”). No surprise that very few ‘events’ really happen, other than his wide range of pathological feelings which sometimes reach the extremes of paranoia (‘’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 café, I am the one who’s within it’. “I suddenly lost the appearance of a man and they saw a crab running backwards of this human room’’).

So what can a man who feels in the way of Existence do in order to get out of it? He’s permanently in search of what he calls ‘an adventure’, which actually translates as anything that could stir his interest in life again, anything that could make sense, yet all his ways out seem prone to failure: his book, sensual pleasures, love. He realizes it makes no sense to continue writing a book on Marquis Rollebon because he’s a thing of the past, and the past cannot explain existence (‘‘Existence is without memory; of the vanished it retains nothing-not even a memory’’). Finding pleasure in whores is also futile since they’re only doing their job, and as mentioned before, duty is not a good enough reason for existence. Romantic love, expressed by his love for actress Anny, also fails him. Anny escapes him twice. In the past, six years back, she could not bond with him because of a professional (but ultimately, existential) flaw, that of seeing Love as the pursuit of ‘perfect moments’(Ah, quelle illusion!) who never came into being. When they reunite, Antoine finds he's still in love with her, but Anny herself had an existential crisis realizing the grand illusion of her past existence, and of existence, in general, and regards him as a memory of the same past, which doesn’t make sense anymore (I’m not sure I understood her character completely, but I think neither did she, so no worries. The whole point in this book is there is no point. That’s why we can relax).

And relaxed we are. In spite of the uneasy ‘truths’ of this book, which make it a good book, goose bumps and all. The novel can be read as the tremendous angst (yes, I seem to like this word, see previous post) of man of all times who’s trying to make sense of his existence ( even if it may seem a little bit immature for someone to cut himself with a knife just to see if one exists or not, when one is already in their 40’s (not sure ab this detail). Sartre makes painfully accurate observations on the way people falsely define themselves through their social relationships (“People who live in society have learned 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, you might say, nature without humanity”). He laughs at man’s ability to deceive himself in order to justify his meaning in the world (“This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story”). In an absurd universe, time is also a category that can’t make sense (“I don’t know where I am anymore: do I see her motions, or do I foresee them? I can no longer distinguish present from future and yet it lasts, it happens little by little”; “The past is a landlord’s luxury”). Last but not least, Sartre faces the ultimate deception, that of the impossibility of language to define nothingness (“Black? I felt the word deflating, emptied of meaning with extraordinary rapidity. [..] I looked at the root: was it more than black or almost black?)

Call me masochistic, but I’m also optimistic. The book ends in a rather ambiguous fashion. We find Roquentin elated at hearing a jazz tune, which moves him and suddenly gives him Hope. He is stirred by the possibility that he could write a novel that could give meaning to his life and make him finally accept himself. So even if his safe line is an uncertain future, I choose to believe the novel has an optimistic ending.

All of a sudden this review has an undesired length and an incroyable air of seriousness. A light nausea encompasses the writer's stomach and her fingers turn slowly into black insects. (Hey, that’s another novel.) But I, I have learned the Sartrian lesson. Existence doesn’t make sense out of existence. We live in order to live. We make love in order to make love. We make art in order to make art. Amen and women.