La Nausée (1938) is one of the most problematic works of contemporary literature. This is not only because of the uncertainties of its meaning, but also—and more important—because of the uncertainties of its place in the chronology of "modernism." The discussion of these matters is so tangled that it is impossible to categorize it without grossly oversimplifying the issues at stake. It can be said …—and this may be one of the fundamental sources of the uncertainty—that for a long time after the publication of La Nausée, the focus of critical interest fell rather heavily on its "existential" meaning. That is, early "criticism," assuming that the novel was radically autobiographical (i.e. that Sartre and Roquentin are virtually identical), disregarded the formal dimension, more specifically the temporal process of the text—to "explain" its philosophical significance and import. And since the primary thematic emphasis is on Roquentin's agonizing discovery of the viscous realm of existence, it was invariably concluded that Sartre's existentialism at the time of writing La Nausée was limited to a phenomenological description of the contingent realm of existence which is prior to essence, or, more fully, of the alienated, virtually solipsistic, consciousness of the terrible viscosity of the absurd world…. In … failing to develop the hermeneutic lead insisted on by the contrast between the inclusive "Symboliste" novel Roquentin intends to write in the "end"—the novel which will allow him to transcend "the sin of existence"—… most early commentators concealed … the fact that La Nausée, despite Sartre's vestigial metaphysical rhetoric, is ultimately a text about the art of fiction that calls previous modes of composition into question in behalf of a new, a post-Modern, novel. (pp. 223-24)

Unfortunately, these critics have approached Sartre's art from a broadly Modernist hermeneutic perspective. They assume … the ontological priority of Form (Being) over process (temporality) and thus … are blinded by their insight to the post-Modern impulse behind Sartre's refusal of closure, or, more accurately, behind his transformation of closure (the circular narrative) into openness (what Heidegger, after Kierkegaard, calls repetition). Conditioned by the traditional expectation of formal unity, these critics pick up Roquentin's "aesthetic solution" … and develop its implications to conclude with unwarranted finality that La Nausée is a novel whose form is determined by a metaphysics which is prior to Sartre's "radical conversion" and his analogous theory of littérature engagée. They conclude, more specifically, that the novel belongs to the early Modernist tradition. (pp. 224-25)

[The] retrieval of the "art" of La Nausée from the purely philosophical speculation which has had a strange hold on the novel constitutes a genuine, if all too belated, break-through in the study of Sartre as literary artist. But it is, I think, partial. For the momentum generated by the philosophical autobiographical readings of La Nausée—and enforced by the Modernist aesthetic expectations of formal unity—has been so great, it seems, that Sartre's philosophy continues to determine largely the aesthetic interpretation; that is, these critics still tend to assume all too easily that Roquentin and Sartre are ultimately identical, that the kind of novel Roquentin promises to write is—in one way or another—the kind which Sartre has written as La Nausée. (p. 227)

I want to make the claim that the novel is not … "influenced" by or "indebted" to the antipositivist Symbolist novel. Whatever its original intention, or, more accurately, whatever Sartre's recollection of his original intention, La Nausée, unlike the novel Roquentin visualizes, can now be understood as a demystification of both formal poles of the binary Western literary tradition…. La Nausée does not ultimately look back, from the vantage point of the late 1930's, to an already triumphant—and rigidifying—early species of "Modernism," but forward, by way of repetition, to that thrust of post-Modern "anti-art" which, under the influence, above all, of the existential phenomenology of Husserl, of Merleau-Ponty, and especially of Heidegger, attempts to destroy received forms to return zu den Sachen selbst, "to the things themselves," to dis-cover (on the ontological, if not overtly on the political level) the authentic temporal experience, the historicity (not history), of modern man that the metaphysics of both the Symboliste art object and the pièce bien faite has covered over and forgotten. (pp. 231-32)

[The] emphasis of the fictional process of Sartre's novel is on Roquentin's ontological crisis. If, however, the parallel between his "visions" in the garden and on the hill overlooking the "solid, bourgeois city" is acknowledged, we realize that the personal ontological theme is not, as Murdoch and others imply, antithetical and separate from the "political" theme, but rather, that they are different manifestations of the same thing, that, in Heidegger's term, the latter is the "ontic" extension of the former. More specifically, we realize that Roquentin's discovery of the ultimate inauthenticity of "naming," i.e., of justifying existence from the end, is also a political discovery of the fraudulence of the ontotheological polis, the modern allotrope of which is the capitalistic City, which the privileged logocentric consciousness creates by self-righteously coercing existence into a stable, well-made—totalitarian—structure. Our awareness of Roquentin's discovery of the ontological/political continuum, in turn, establishes the grounds for understanding Sartre's ultimate attitude towards his protagonist's "aesthetic solution," which Murdoch quite rightly, if for the wrong reasons, feels uneasy about taking seriously. The political theme, in short, is not articulated explicitly; it is enacted by the formal process of La Nausée.

What happens to Roquentin on the ontological level is reflected analogously in the changes wrought on his imagination and on his literary ambitions by his "revelatory" experience in the park-garden. He discovers … that the form of a work of literature mirrors the author's understanding of being, thus adding the category of literary art to the categories of language (naming) and the human City as a third member of the emergent analogy of un-naming. Despite Sartre's unequivocal assertion that "a fictional technique always relates back to the novelist's metaphysics," this category constitutes the most overlooked and, ironically, the most important, dimension of La Nausée—at least from the hermeneutic vantage point of the postmodern context—if, that is, our concern is with La Nausée as a kind of fiction. (pp. 244-45)

Roquentin has experienced (and understood) the de-centering, the unnaming, in all three of its manifestations—ontological, social, and literary—that the question of Sartre's relationship to his protagonist becomes a crucial one…. [Most] interpreters simply take for granted that Roquentin is a strictly autobiographical portrait of the early Sartre and, therefore, that he is little more than a mouthpiece for the author's philosophy at the time of writing La Nausée. What I want to suggest is that, however at one with his protagonist in the destructive phase. Sartre, in fact, dissociates himself from his "constructive" efforts that, more specifically, the "form" of Sartre's novel constitutes a de-struction, an ironic revelation of at least the ambiguity, if not the bad faith, of Roquentin's aesthetic resolution of his ontological crisis.

Despite Roquentin's "vision," he cannot completely acknowledge the unnamed world he has borne witness to in the garden—nor accept the "burden of freedom" (as Sartre, borrowing from Dostoevsky and Heidegger, was to put it later) that he understands to be the essential condition of the anti-Adam in the de-centered world. As we have seen, he despises the bourgeois merchants of Bouville for trying to "arrest" the movement of this superfluous temporal realm by imposing fraudulent names—a providential rhetoric—upon it. He is especially contemptuous of their arrogant devotion, on the grounds of divine justification, to technological process, which is, he knows, a self-deceptive effort to build dikes against the primordial slime (Bouville) or, to use Heidegger's metaphor again, to chart and domesticate die unheimliche Welt, the uncanny not-at-home. But Roquentin, too, finds this same existence not only dreadful but obscenely repellent, indeed, too terrible to be endured. As entry after entry throughout his journals suggest, his disgust for the things of the external world, including human beings is (and has been) virtually total…. Thus Roquentin will work out a mode of evasion that is more subtle—so much more that most critics have failed or refused to understand it as an evasion…. (pp. 250-51)

The first moment of transcendent illumination [when a song neutralizes the Nausea] is described at the beginning of the journal when Roquentin, prepared by the preceding suggestion of "the inflexible order," the "necessity of this music," experiences the whole song at once in the silence between the dying out of the last chord and the emergence of the negress's voice. And the final and definitive moment of illumination comes in the last entry of the journal, when Roquentin discovers in the moment of epiphanic "liberation" that just as the song "is," so too, he wants to "be," a substantial essence, free from the ravages of historical time. Like all metaphysicians from Plato through Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, Roquentin is compelled by a nostalgia for lost origins. He wants … to perceive existence spatially, to annihilate the temporality which, as Heidegger insists in Sein und Zeit, defines human being (Dasein)—and its counterpart, the difference or change (the motion of becoming) that generates desire and loathing—to become something like an angel, capable, that is, of the immediate and undifferentiated knowledge, the "allatonceness," of pure intelligence. This explains Roquentin's contradictory yearning for the "higher" world beyond, which pervades his journals. It also explains his idealization of evanescence, of weightlessness which, in contrast to the weighty solidity of the middle class, Sartre, under the influence of Kierkegaard's critique of the "hovering"—the infinitely negative—ironic or aesthetic consciousness, will henceforth use in his fiction and drama to characterize the hellish "freedom towards nothing" of the disengaged man, i.e., the aesthete: Erostratus, Orestes, Matthieu Delarue and others. The form of the novel Roquentin envisages is thus clearer in his mind than he in fact claims. It will of course, be "modern." But it will be modern, not in opposition to the fiction of the 1930's, but to the positivistic well-made fiction of the bourgeois nineteenth century, in which the assured detective/psychologist (whether protagonist or reader) reigns supreme. Roquentin, that is, will not employ the melodramatic linear sense of "adventure" to work out a "realistic" form that mirrors a positivistic metaphysics and ethos…. He will begin, rather, with the privileged, i.e. teleological, moment, the concept of "adventure" as transcendental aesthetic epiphany, and seek to achieve something like geometric or, at any rate, pure form, in which "the passing moments are rid of their fat" by being coerced into a spatial mould.

Ultimately, of course, the novel he intends to write will align itself with the idealistic aesthetics implied by Socrates to his uncomprehending (because earthbound) listener Protarchus in Plato's dialogue on Pleasure, the Philebus…. More immediately, however, it will align itself with that literary tradition which has become increasingly disillusioned in the possibility of achieving dialogue with the terrible earth and, therefore, has abandoned it in the futile solipsistic pursuit of a compensatory timeless eternity of one sort or another. I am referring, of course, to the "Modernism"—that is no longer very modern by the time Sartre is writing La Nausée—which, in reaction against scientific positivism and its literary counterpart (the "realistic" or well-made work), emerged out of the "natural supernaturalism" of the Romantic movement in the consolatory aetheticism of fin de siècle literature and culminated in the ego-centric "religion" of "infinite negativity" of the Symbolist/Imagist movement—in Mallarmé, Verlaine, Proust, T. E. Hulme, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, et. al.—which Sartre however simplistically, was to inveigh against in What is Literature? Roquentin's novel, in other words, will have its origins in the neo-Platonic Modernism…. It is thus that Roquentin, like his Modernist fathers, will become the privileged maker (author) of a mystified text, and, in so doing, a perpetuater of the logocentric ontotheological tradition.

It could be argued … that, as novelist, Sartre is here acknowledging the ultimate authorial necessity to impose fictions or concordances on contingency, and, indeed, this is consistent with his thesis that man chooses himself. But as both the content … and, as we shall see, the "dis-closive," if not precisely "open," form of La Nausée itself makes clear, Sartre as phenomenologist ultimately insists against Sartre as metaphysician on respect for—perhaps even a generosity towards—the contingent and analogously, therefore, an artfulness, if not an artlessness, that valorizes such respect…. Roquentin's familiar Modernist Will to Power over existence, his disdain … for the ugliness, the squalor, of temporality and his proud Gnostic impulse to "rise" into that "other world" "above existence" by way of spatializing, of coercively in-closing, the temporality of language (which, as discourse, according to Heidegger, is equiprimordial with Dasein as Being-in-the-world), reveals Sartre's ultimately ironic attitude towards his "hero" behind his perhaps ambiguous intention.

Indeed, the parallel between Roquentin's "Platonic" aesthetics and that of the Symbolist/Imagist movement is remarkable…. Reminded of his predisposition towards Platonic beauty—towards "surfaces and solids which a lathe, or a carpenter's rule and square, produce from the straight and the round"—by this apotheosis of "necessary and irrefragable" forms "wrested from the unending flux of being" … it becomes vividly clear to us that Roquentin is thus a late descendent of the first generation of Modernists. Like them, he too is in search of illo tempore, that Golden Age at the beginning when the many was One; difference, Identity, words, the Word. (pp. 257-63)

The critics who identify Roquentin and Sartre from beginning to end and go on to say that Sartre has not yet arrived at an existential philosophy of engagement conclude that La Nausée itself is the work that Roquentin was to write. (p. 269)

What these critics are telling us, it is important to emphasize, is that Sartre's novel posits the ontological priority of form (Being) over temporality: that it is the literary equivalent of a Platonic Circle, a Byzantine mosaic, or a Symbolist novel, which means … that Sartre's Kunstwollen, to use Worringer's language, is seen to be an equivalent desire "to wrest the object of the external world out of its natural context; out of the unending flux of being, to purify it of all its dependence upon life, i.e. of everything about it that was arbitrary, to render it necessary and irrefragable to approximate it to its absolute value." (p. 270)

A Symbolist novel, despite the conservative appearance of its experimentation, is precisely what Sartre has not written. On the contrary, read temporally, or, in Heidegger's terms, with "anticipatory resoluteness" as Sartre appears to insist in his famous essay, "Francois Mauriac and Freedom," written … at about the time of the publication of the novel, the form of La Nausée is understood to be the antithesis of "gemlike Being." And it exists ultimately, as I have been suggesting, not only as an obvious destruction of the linear nineteenth-century "realistic" novel, but also, and in a way more fundamentally, of the novel Roquentin envisages—whether formulated as a Modernist novel of spatial form or, as in the case of Edith Kern, a Künstlerroman, in which the circuitous journey of the hero/author precipitates Poetry as salvation from existence. What I am suggesting is that the source is neither, say, Schlegel's Lucinde nor Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu nor Gide's The Counterfeiters nor Joyce's Portrait, but rather a proto-antinovel (which also destroys the Künstlerroman as well) like Notes from Underground. It is true that, like the Proustian novel, the "form" of Sartre's work refuses to fulfill the obsessive expectations of the bourgeois structure of consciousness for comforting, useful and rational "solutions" to the "problems" of existence. It refuses to assume the preterite structure of Eugénie Grandet, the bourgeois well-made work, in which discords are resolved in the "Aristotelian" sense of adventure, that is, by imposing a necessary plot, a causal beginning, middle, and end on the contingent. But, on the other hand, and despite the appearance of circular structure, Sartre's novel also refuses to fulfill the formal imperatives of symbolism, which, however preferable an alternative for Sartre to positivism, remained mystified (in the Tradition) because the Symbolist imagination failed to understand the spatial origins of the positivistic consciousness and, thus, its relation to Symbolist form. La Nausée … also refuses to fulfill the Symbolist version of the urge to objectify existence: the urge to solipsistic abstraction in which the discords of contingency are transcended in the "Platonic" sense of "adventure," when the privileged moment is expanded infinitely to "totalize" or encompass existence within the circular and substantial All. For in both cases … the will to power, the imposition of necessity on contingency, of objectness on nothing, negates the openendedness of existence and the "humanizing" burden of freedom. (pp. 271-73)

In other words, the structural "circularity" of La Nausée and the style of dis-covering it open up and call into question the logocentric circularity of Roquentin's autotelic novel (and the Romantic/Modernist Künstlerromane it appears to resemble)—and the providential rhetoric it generates. It discloses that in La Nausée, temporality is ontologically prior to Form, be-ing to Being. To return to Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's destructive language, it might be claimed that, unlike the Modernist novel, which, in the objectifying or aestheticizing manner of Plato and Hegel, "recollects [the essential] backwards," Sartre's La Nausée "recollects [the existential] forwards." The circuitous movement, that is, constitutes the achievement of an authentically new beginning, a "repetition," which "is the interest upon which metaphysics [read the perception of being meta-ta-physika] founders." La Nausée, in other words, as Roquentin might have said had he chosen to repeat his distinction between la vie and l'aventure, is an anti-novel. Or, at any rate, it is on the verge of becoming one.

Seen in the light of its temporally dis-covered as opposed to spatially ordered form, the ambiguous, i.e. open-ended or anti-novel, form of La Nausée serves not only the negative function of demystifying Roquentin's logocentric fictional strategy, but also the positive function of demystifying the reader's logocentric expectations of formal unity and thus … of "assigning him to himself," i.e. to his freedom in the context of contingency, of the not-at-home. On the one hand, by rejecting a telos in favor of repetition—the ontological priority of time over Being—Sartre's decentered open form undermines, reduces by violence, as it were, the reader's privileged conventional, that is, "Aristotelian," expectation of a cathartic or comforting end, an end that makes the experience of anguish safe and even pleasurable from the beginning. In the language of existential phenomenology it reduces the inauthentic impulse to objectify (or spatialize), to find an object for, dread or anxiety (Angst), which has no thing as its "object." It thus inhibits the positivistic impulse to grasp the nameless, to transform the mystery of existence into a distanced and satisfying utilitarian ontology of necessity or, to use Sartre's metaphor (which may be adapted from Heidegger), to "domesticate" the contingency of nature by way of the creation of the modern bourgeois City. On the other hand, Sartre's decentered form ironically dis-covers the idealistic Platonic/Hegelian impulse to transcend the "shame of existence" by "com-prehending" it—the counterpart of positivism in the ontotheological tradition—to be an aesthetic (angelic)—and futile—flight from Being-in-the-world. In showing Roquentin caught ambiguously between his radical temporality (difference) and his impulse to escape its imperatives for freedom in symbolic flight, Sartre undermines the teleological reader's privileged status, engages him in rather than distances him from the text and his own experience. He generates, that is, an anxious consciousness of its namelessness and of the need to confront its uncertainty responsibly. Put in another way, the emergent anti-novel form of La Nausée refuses, on the one hand, to provide answers or solutions (as the Aristotelian well-made work or, what is ultimately the same thing, the detective story, does), to the riddle of human suffering in the face of the incomprehensibility of Nothingness. On the other hand, neither does it act as a stimulant that transports us instantaneously, like Hegel's synthesis, into the totalized paradisal "other world" of circles, where questions and answers are irrelevant because contradictions have been reconciled into equilibrium, the existential either/or into the aesthetic or ironic neither/nor; in short, where difference has been recollected into identity. Rather, as the uncertain history of the interpretation of La Nausée clearly suggests, it generates the radical questions [which] … "humanizes" the reader, i.e. transforms him into a dialogic partner in the hermeneutic process.

The "form" of Sartre's La Nausée, in other words, is the fictional counterpart of the demystified "metaphysics" and "epistemology" Roquentin discovers in the public park and on the hill overlooking Bouville…. Sartre's novel …, like all fiction, is a naming that lies. What is different about La Nausée, however, is not simply that it is aware of the fact that it is a lie. More important …, it utilizes artifice to activate the reader's awareness of existence as an absence of presence. Unlike both the traditional ("Aristotelian") and Modern (Symbolist) novel, which exist to cover up difference (fill in the gaps) in the act of naming it, La Nausée make differences explicit. It is … a naming that un-names. What Sartre achieves by way of his artifice, in short, is an example of Kierkegaard's "mastered irony," which, unlike the concealing irony of Modernist literature (especially of the New Critical view of it), dis-covers to the reader his being as being-in-the-world, and thus engages him in the infinitely open-ended ambiguities of actuality.

Sartre, as I have implied throughout, is perhaps too close to the "metaphysical" Western literary tradition to perceive clearly what he is in fact doing to the fictional forms he inherits from it, too close to perceive the "Copernican revolution" that La Nausée achieves in literature…. However, once it is seen that La Nausée is essentially neither an "Aristotelian" nor a "Symbolist" novel in form and content, that, in fact, it constitutes a destruction of these, then it becomes theoretically and critically what it has been in fact for virtually every serious novelist and dramatist since its publication: the turn from Modernism to Postmodernism. With the un-naming in the park and in the fictional form of La Nausée, there is signalled the end of the privileged status not only of the beginning/middle/end of realistic works, but also of the formal closure of Symbolist works in the Western literary tradition…. (pp. 273-77)

From the point of view of the literary tradition, this turn … is a moment in the emergent postmodern effort to repeat or retrieve (wiederholen) in all its original force and for our time the tradition of the sublime, the tradition that invokes that being which is dreadful (and ennobling) precisely because the imagination cannot com-prehend (take hold of) it…. Seen in this light, the literary moment Sartre activates becomes, in turn, of course, part of the larger moment that Heidegger has referred to as the most important of postmodern projects: the "surpassing" … of the coercive, the objectifying, the in-closing metaphysical perspective of the Western ontotheological tradition for the sake of retrieving the mystery of being. (pp. 278-79)

When the form of Sartre's novel is experienced as something akin to an enactment in language of the dreadful unnaming in the park rather than a geometric shape that radiates gem-like flame, the broad parallel with Heidegger becomes evident…. What needs to be said now, at this late date in the history of modernism, is that Sartre's impulse to "surpass" the Western will to power, the obsession to grasp existence, by naming it, is more fundamental. And in its refusal to spatialize form in favor of letting be, it points to an "essential thinking" about literary language and its object that allies … the Sartre of La Nausée with Heidegger's … postmodern project (a-letheia) to dis-cover or to dis-close, and remember, the primordial be-ing as difference that a mystified and logocentric Western anthropomorphism (humanism) has buried, or closed off and forgotten. (pp. 279-80)