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Jean-Paul Sartre
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Jean-Paul Sartre
French philosopher and author
born June 21, 1905, Paris, France
died April 15, 1980, Paris
Main
French novelist, playwright, and exponent of Existentialism—a philosophy
acclaiming the freedom of the individual human being. He was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, but he declined it.
Early life and writings
Sartre lost his father at an early age and grew up in the home of his
maternal grandfather, Carl Schweitzer, uncle of the medical missionary
Albert Schweitzer and himself professor of German at the Sorbonne. The
boy, who wandered in the Luxembourg Gardens of Paris in search of
playmates, was small in stature and cross-eyed. His brilliant
autobiography, Les Mots (1963; Words, 1964), narrates the adventures of
the mother and child in the park as they went from group to group—in the
vain hope of being accepted—then finally retreated to the sixth floor of
their apartment “on the heights where (the) dreams dwell.” “The words”
saved the child, and his interminable pages of writing were the escape
from a world that had rejected him but that he would proceed to rebuild
in his own fancy.
Sartre went to the Lycée Henri IV in Paris and, later on, after the
remarriage of his mother, to the lycée in La Rochelle. From there he
went to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, from which he was
graduated in 1929. Sartre resisted what he called “bourgeois marriage,”
but while still a student he formed with Simone de Beauvoir a union that
remained a settled partnership in life. Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs,
Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (1958; Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter,
1959) and La Force de l’âge (1960; The Prime of Life, 1962), provide an
intimate account of Sartre’s life from student years until his middle
50s. It was also at the École Normale Supérieure and at the Sorbonne
that he met several persons who were destined to be writers of great
fame; among these were Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone Weil,
Emmanuel Mounier, Jean Hippolyte, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. From 1931
until 1945 Sartre taught in the lycées of Le Havre, Laon, and, finally,
Paris. Twice this career was interrupted, once by a year of study in
Berlin and the second time when Sartre was drafted in 1939 to serve in
World War II. He was made prisoner in 1940 and released a year later.
During his years of teaching in Le Havre, Sartre published La Nausée
(1938; Nausea, 1949), his first claim to fame. This novel, written in
the form of a diary, narrates the feeling of revulsion that a certain
Roquentin undergoes when confronted with the world of matter—not merely
the world of other people but the very awareness of his own body.
According to some critics, La Nausée must be viewed as a pathological
case, a form of neurotic escape. Most probably it must be appreciated
also as a most original, fiercely individualistic, antisocial piece of
work, containing in its pages many of the philosophical themes that
Sartre later developed.
Sartre took over the phenomenological method, which proposes careful,
unprejudiced description rather than deduction, from the German
philosopher Edmund Husserl and used it with great skill in three
successive publications: L’Imagination (1936; Imagination: A
Psychological Critique, 1962), Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions
(1939; Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, 1962), and L’Imaginaire:
Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination (1940; The Psychology of
Imagination, 1950). But it was above all in L’Être et le néant (1943;
Being and Nothingness, 1956) that Sartre revealed himself as a master of
outstanding talent. Sartre places human consciousness, or no-thingness
(néant), in opposition to being, or thingness (être). Consciousness is
not-matter and by the same token escapes all determinism. The message,
with all the implications it contains, is a hopeful one; yet the
incessant reminder that human endeavour is and remains useless makes the
book tragic as well.
Post-World War II work
Having written his defense of individual freedom and human dignity,
Sartre turned his attention to the concept of social responsibility. For
many years he had shown great concern for the poor and the disinherited
of all kinds. While a teacher, he had refused to wear a tie, as if he
could shed his social class with his tie and thus come closer to the
worker. Freedom itself, which at times in his previous writings appeared
to be a gratuitous activity that needed no particular aim or purpose to
be of value, became a tool for human struggle in his brochure
L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (1946; Existentialism and Humanism,
1948). Freedom now implied social responsibility. In his novels and
plays Sartre began to bring his ethical message to the world at large.
He started a four-volume novel in 1945 under the title Les Chemins de la
liberté, of which three were eventually written: L’Âge de raison (1945;
The Age of Reason, 1947), Le Sursis (1945; The Reprieve, 1947), and La
Mort dans l’âme (1949; Iron in the Soul, 1950; U.S. title, Troubled
Sleep, 1950). After the publication of the third volume, Sartre changed
his mind concerning the usefulness of the novel as a medium of
communication and turned back to plays.
What a writer must attempt, said Sartre, is to show man as he is.
Nowhere is man more man than when he is in action, and this is exactly
what drama portrays. He had already written in this medium during the
war, and now one play followed another: Les Mouches (produced 1943; The
Flies, 1946), Huis-clos (1944; In Camera, 1946; U.S. title, No Exit,
1946), Les Mains sales (1948; Crime passionel, 1949; U.S. title, Dirty
Hands, 1949; acting version, Red Gloves), Le Diable et le bon dieu
(1951; Lucifer and the Lord, 1953), Nekrassov (1955), and Les Séquestrés
d’Altona (1959; Loser Wins, 1959; U.S. title, The Condemned of Altona,
1960). All the plays, in their emphasis upon the raw hostility of man
toward man, seem to be predominantly pessimistic; yet, according to
Sartre’s own confession, their content does not exclude the possibility
of a morality of salvation. Other publications of the same period
include a book, Baudelaire (1947), a vaguely ethical study on the French
writer and poet Jean Genet entitled Saint Genet, comédien et martyr
(1952; Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, 1963), and innumerable articles
that were published in Les Temps Modernes, the monthly review that
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir founded and edited. These articles were
later collected in several volumes under the title Situations.
Political activities
After World War II, Sartre took an active interest in French political
movements, and his leanings to the left became more pronounced. He
became an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union, although he did not
become a member of the Communist Party. In 1954 he visited the Soviet
Union, Scandinavia, Africa, the United States, and Cuba. Upon the entry
of Soviet tanks into Budapest in 1956, however, Sartre’s hopes for
communism were sadly crushed. He wrote in Les Temps Modernes a long
article, “Le Fantôme de Staline,” that condemned both the Soviet
intervention and the submission of the French Communist Party to the
dictates of Moscow. Over the years this critical attitude opened the way
to a form of “Sartrian Socialism” that would find its expression in a
new major work, Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Eng. trans., of
the introduction only, under the title The Problem of Method, 1963; U.S.
title, Search for a Method). Sartre set out to examine critically the
Marxist dialectic and discovered that it was not livable in the Soviet
form. Although he still believed that Marxism was the only philosophy
for the current times, he conceded that it had become ossified and that,
instead of adapting itself to particular situations, it compelled the
particular to fit a predetermined universal. Whatever its fundamental,
general principles, Marxism must learn to recognize the existential
concrete circumstances that differ from one collectivity to another and
to respect the individual freedom of man. The Critique, somewhat marred
by poor construction, is in fact an impressive and beautiful book,
deserving of more attention than it has gained so far. A projected
second volume was abandoned. Instead, Sartre prepared for publication
Les Mots, for which he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature,
an offer that was refused.
Last years
From 1960 until 1971 most of Sartre’s attention went into the writing of
a four-volume study called Flaubert. Two volumes with a total of some
2,130 pages appeared in the spring of 1971. This huge enterprise aimed
at presenting the reader with a “total biography” of Gustave Flaubert,
the famous French novelist, through the use of a double tool: on the one
hand, Karl Marx’s concept of history and class and, on the other,
Sigmund Freud’s illuminations of the dark recesses of the human soul
through explorations into his childhood and family relations. Although
at times Sartre’s genius comes through and his fecundity is truly
unbelievable, the sheer volume of the work and the minutely detailed
analysis of even the slightest Flaubertian dictum hamper full enjoyment.
As if he himself were saturated by the prodigal abundance of his
writings, Sartre moved away from his desk during 1971 and did very
little writing. Under the motto that “commitment is an act, not a word,”
Sartre often went into the streets to participate in rioting, in the
sale of left-wing literature, and in other activities that in his
opinion were the way to promote “the revolution.” Paradoxically enough,
this same radical Socialist published in 1972 the third volume of the
work on Flaubert, L’Idiot de la famille, another book of such density
that only the bourgeois intellectual can read it.
The enormous productivity of Sartre came herewith to a close. His
mind, still alert and active, came through in interviews and in the
writing of scripts for motion pictures. He also worked on a book of
ethics. However, his was no longer the power of a genius in full
productivity. Sartre became blind and his health deteriorated. In April
1980 he died of a lung tumour. His very impressive funeral, attended by
some 25,000 people, was reminiscent of the burial of Victor Hugo, but
without the official recognition that his illustrious predecessor had
received. Those who were there were ordinary people, those whose rights
his pen had always defended.
Wilfrid Desan
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Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre
1905-1980
Sartre's Nausea is that rare
thing in literary history— a "philosophical" novel that succeeds
in both of its endeavors. The novel is at once a manifesto for
existentialist philosophy and a convincing work of art. In fact,
it succeeds to such an extent that it blurs the distinction
between literature and philosophy altogether. Nausea details the
experiences of thirty-year-old Antoine Roquentin, a researcher
who has settled in the French port of Bouville (a thinly
disguised Le Havre) after several years of travel. Settling
down, however, produces a series of increasingly strange
effects. As Roquentin engages in simple, everyday activities,
his understanding of the world and his place in it is
fundamentally altered. He comes to perceive the rational
solidity of existence as no more than a fragile veneer. He
experiences the "nausea" of reality, a "sweetish sickness," a
ground-level vertigo. He is appalled by the blank indifference
of inanimate objects, yet acutely conscious that each situation
he finds himself in bears the irrevocable stamp of his being. He
finds that he cannot escape from his own overwhelming presence.
This is a delicately controlled examination of freedom,
responsibility, consciousness, and time. Influenced by the
philosophy of Edmund Husserl and the literary stylings of
Dostoevsky and Kafka, Nausea is the novel that announced
existentialism to the world—a system of ideas that would go on
to become one of the most significant developments in
twentieth-century thought and culture. The notion that"existence
precedes essence"is writ large for the first time here, several
years before Sartre "formalized" his ideas in Being and
Nothingness (1943) and before the horrors of the Second World
War had intensified their impact.
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NAUSEA
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Type of work: Novel
Author: Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
Type of plot: Philosophical realism
Time of plot: The 1930s
Locale: France
First published: La Nausee, 1938 (English translation, 1949)
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In Nausea, Sartre's first novel, the
philosopher-novelist-dramatist delineates his Existentialist philosophy
through a minute analysis of the interior life of Antoine Roquentin, a
mild-mannered French historian. Roquentin experiences nausea and feels
existence to be oppressive when he learns that life has no intrinsic
meaning. Finding or making meaning thus becomes the object of
Roquentin's life.
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Principal Characters
Antoine Roquentin (an-twan' ro-kan-tan'), a philosophical man who has
settled down in Bouville, a town by the sea, to write a biography of the
Marquis de Rol-lebon, an eighteenth century European politician. During
the third year of work on the book, Roquentin notices that he has become
the victim of a strange affliction; what he calls "a sweetish sickness"
settles over him from time to time. Repelled by the malady, he seeks to
rid himself of it by spending time with the few people he knows and by
stopping work on the Rollebon book. No one can help him. In despair, he
goes to Paris, hoping to be able to write a novel, knowing that he is
never to solve the problems of his life.
Ogier P. (6-zhya' pa'), an acquaintance whom Roquentin calls "the
Self-Taught Man." To rid himself of loneliness and despair, Roquentin
unprofitably spends some time with Ogier P. Roquentin witnesses a scene
in which Ogier P., discovered to be a homosexual, is ordered to leave a
library.
Anny (a-ne'), an English girl whom Roquentin had known before he began
work on the biography. They meet in Paris. She has aged, however, and
she insults Roquentin and leaves Paris with the man who is keeping her.
Franchise (frari-swaz'), a woman who operates a cafe called the
Rendez-vous des Cheminots. She and Roquentin were once lovers on a
purely physical level. When Roquentin visits her to say good-bye before
he moves to Paris, he finds that she has a new lover and has no time for
him.
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The Story
Antoine Roquentin, a thirty-year-old Frenchman, after traveling though
Central Europe, North Africa, and the Orient, settled down in the
seaport town of Bouville to finish his historical research on the
Marquis de Rollebon, an eighteenth century figure in European politics
whose home had been at Bouville. For three years Roquentin searched the
archives of the Bouville library in order to reconstruct the nobleman's
life. All Roquentin's energies were concentrated on his task; he knew
few people in Bouville, except by sight, and he lived more in the
imaginary world he had created for the Marquis de Rollebon than in the
actual world.
In the third year of his residence in Bouville during the winter of
1932, Roquentin began to have a series of disturbing psychological
experiences, which he termed the Nausea. He felt that there was
something new about commonplace articles; even his hands seemed to take
on new aspects, to have an existence all their own. It was then that
Roquentin's loneliness seemed a terrible thing to him, for there was no
one to whom he could speak of his experiences. His only acquaintances
were Ogier P., nicknamed by Roquentin the Self-Taught Man because he was
instructing himself by reading all the books in the library, and a woman
named Frangoise, who operated a cafe called the Rendez-vous de Cheminots.
Francoise, who had become fond of Roquentin, was the outlet for his
physical sexuality, beyond which their acquaintance had not gone.
Roquentin, in his loneliness, began to think of Anny, an English girl
who had traveled with him some years before and whom he had loved; but
he had not heard from her in more than three years. Worst of all, the
Nausea came more and more often to plague Roquentin; it passed from
objects into his body through his hands, and the only way he could
describe it was that it seemed like a sweetish sickness.
One evening, shortly after the Nausea had first appeared, Roquentin went
to the cafe, only to find that Francoise was gone for a time. He watched
four men playing cards and wanted to vomit; for the first time, the
Nausea had crept upon him in a place where there were bright lights and
many people. As he listened to the music playing on a battered old
phonograph, however, the Nausea vanished. He felt as if he were inside
the music.
Strangely enough, as the days passed, the Self-Taught Man made an effort
be friendly with Roquentin. Learning that the latter had traveled a
great deal, he asked to see some of the photographs Roquentin had
collected and to hear some of Roquentin's adventures. He even went to
Roquentin's room one evening for that specific purpose. These friendly
overtures were not entirely welcomed by Roquentin, who was immersed in
his psychological problems, but he acquiesced in setting a date to have
dinner with the Self-Taught Man a few days later.
In the interval before the dinner engagement, the book about the Marquis
de Rollebon came to a halt. One day, Roquentin suddenly stopped writing
in the middle of a paragraph and knew that he would write no more,
although he had spent more than three years' labor on the work.
Roquentin suddenly felt cheated, as if his very existence had been
stolen by the Marquis de Rollebon during those years, so that the
marquis had been living in place of himself. The feeling was caused
partially by the discovery on Roquentin's part that he could never know
for certain the truth about the notorious marquis, who had used men for
his own ends during his life.
With the discovery that he was going to write no more, Roquentin also
found that there was little or no purpose in his life. Indeed, there
seemed to be no reason for his existence at all. For three years
Roquentin had not reacted to his own existence because he had been
working; now it was thrust upon him with disquieting abruptness.
Soon Roquentin received an unexpected letter from Anny, which had been
forwarded from his old address in Paris. She wrote that she was to be in
Paris for a few days and wished to see him. Roquentin looked forward to
seeing her and planned to leave Bouville for the first time in three
years to visit with her in Paris.
The following Wednesday, Roquentin and the Self-Taught Man met for their
dinner engagement. During the dinner, a rather stiff affair, the
Self-Taught Man tried to convince Roquentin that he, like the
Self-Taught Man, ought to be a socialist and a humanist, that in the
humanity of the world was to be found the true reason for the universe.
Roquentin became so disquieted that the Nausea came over him during the
discussion, and he abruptly left the restaurant.
When he visited Anny, he found her changed; she had gained weight, but
the changes that bothered him the most were those he felt rather than
saw. The interview was a dismal failure; Anny accused him of being
worthless to her and finally thrust him from the room. Later he saw Anny
getting on a train with the man who kept her, and he went back to
Bouville with a sense of numbness. He believed that both he and Anny had
outlived themselves. All that was left, he felt, was eating and
sleeping, an existence not unlike that of an inanimate object.
Roquentin remained in Bouville only a few days more. Unhappy and
lonesome, he sought out the Self-Taught Man, finding him in the library
reading to two young boys. Roquentin also sat down to read. He never did
get to open the conversation, for in the ensuing minutes, the
Self-Taught Man revealed himself as a homosexual and was brutally
ordered out of the library by a librarian. The only other person to whom
Roquentin wished to say goodbye was the congenial woman who owned the
Rendezvous des Cheminots. When he went to see her, however, she could
give him only a moment, for another man claimed her time.
Roquentin went to the railway station for the train that was to take him
to Paris. His only hope was that he might write a novel that would make
people think of his life as something precious and legendary, though he
knew that the work on such a book, unlike his attempts at the history of
the Marquis de Rollebon, could not keep from him the troublesome
problems of existence.
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Critical Evaluation
Jean-Paul Sartre published his first novel, Nausea, in 1938, just as his
existential philosophical system was taking clear shape in his mind.
This book, both a work of philosophy and a novel in the form of a diary,
explores the relationship of Antoine Roquentin to his reality—his
surroundings, his acquaintances, and his relationships. Bound to
Bouville (literally, "Mudville") by his research, Roquentin comes to
perceive his total alienation from the world of bourgeois falsehoods and
self-deceptions, but he is unable to attain an affirmation of his own
authenticity. Some readers find existential literature repellent because
those who wrote it (such as Sartre himself, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert
Camus) often deal with negative attitudes and the failures of their
characters to achieve satisfaction and the fulfillment of their beings.
Nausea is no exception, for Roquentin thinks of himself as a thing
reflected in the trap of a mirror. The Nausea which sometimes overcomes
him when he confronts real objects (a stone, a piece of paper) helps to
free him from this static conception of himself and sets him on the road
to self-discovery.
Sartre's effort to blend philosophy with literature is regarded by most
critics as successful: Abstract ideas are exemplified through specific
incidents or circumstances, and psychological subtleties are illustrated
by the use of precise dramatic details. Roquentin's first perception of
his own absurdity, for instance, occurs when he studies the shape of a
muddy stone he has picked up from the ground and is unable to throw. The
pebble seems to possess more inherent "reality" than he himself does.
The stone is, while Roquentin is becoming. Nausea seizes Roquentin as he
recognizes his own shapelessness and understands that he must somehow
find and establish his own identity and being. Men are not stones; they
shape themselves as they wish to become and to appear to others, making
philosophical progress as they face moral dilemmas.
Roquentin finds himself more than ill at ease among his fellowmen: He is
an absolute outsider. His contempt for the middle class and its values
is wittily expressed as he watches the regular Sunday morning parade of
prosperous townsfolk on the Rue Tournebride; he laughs inwardly at their
greetings and handshakes, their smiles and gestures of courtesy, their
superficial self-satisfaction. The irony reaches brilliant heights when
he later studies the portraits of the illustrious forebears of the
townsfolk and overhears the naive conversation of a couple who are
expressing reverence for the dignity of these "great" men. In a long
passage of harsh, cynical satire Roquentin mocks and reviles the
complacency of those who have not known his Nausea. During his three
years in Bouville, Roquentin has not established a significant
friendship with anyone. He constantly watches people in public places,
seeking in the faces and behavior of these strangers some sign of
authenticity, but usually discovers only some form of falseness or
self-deception. He endures his existence in a state of unbridgeable
loneliness, finding consolation only in his work.
Roquentin's relationship with the Self-Taught Man he meets at the
library is curiously indifferent. For a long time their contact is
limited to conventional exchanges. Roquentin takes no pleasure in the
other's visit to his room to look at photographs; he reluctantly accepts
an invitation to dinner, but there, suffering from an illusion of order
and meaning in the world, the Self-Taught Man annoys Roquentin with a
long harangue extolling the glories of humanism and socialism. Roquentin
leaves abruptly in disgust, no longer able to tolerate the mouthing of
commonplace ideas. The Nausea comes again shortly thereafter, as
loneliness overcomes him.
Pleased at receiving an unexpected letter from his former mistress Anny,
Roquentin realizes that he may still love her and can perhaps resolve
his spiritual dilemmas with her aid. When he visits her in Paris,
however, it becomes obvious that no such thing can happen. He finds her
aged, and she has grown weary with life; she no longer seeks to derive
"perfect moments" from "privileged situations" (a striving that
Roquentin had never understood), for she feels she has outlived herself.
In spite of Roquentin's attempt to renew their affair, Anny rejects him,
thus shattering his only hope for fulfillment through love. The split is
final, and Roquentin, disillusioned, lonely, and alone, fears he too may
have outlived himself, with only his work left to give meaning to his
life.
His research project, however, has become ever more boring to him as he
has sought to discover the "real" Marquis de Rollebon hidden behind the
historical documents, the personality behind the facts. Roquentin is
unable to discern any unity among the diverse and conflicting
impressions furnished by contemporaries who knew the marquis. As
Rollebon the man eludes him, Roquentin experiences first curiosity, then
frustration, and finally ennui with the task he has set himself.
Rollebon seems to be as shapeless as Roquentin himself, and his failure
to discover the reality of the eighteenth century politician eventually
drives the historian to abandon his project altogether. He comes finally
to question the very existence of the past, since everything seems to be
in doubt. His own definition of himself as a historian is shattered as
he stares at his reflection in a mirror, seeing himself reduced to a
mere image, lacking substance and essence.
The only pleasure and joy which Roquentin had ever experienced in
Bouville came to him from listening to an old, worn record of an
American popular song in one of his favorite cafes. The sound of the
saxophone and the black woman's voice singing the banal lyrics had
somehow transformed him and carried him into a superior realm, driving
away the Nausea temporarily. Now he imagines a Jewish-American in a hot
New York apartment creating the music and the black woman bringing it to
life with her voice. Though unknown and perhaps ultimately
insignificant, these two had saved themselves through artistic creation.
He wonders if he might justify his own existence in a similar way, by
writing a novel in which he would attempt to clarify his past and rid
himself of its repugnance. He is uncertain of the outcome as he prepares
to move to Paris, but not without hope: No longer a stone, he senses the
possibility, through creative effort, of beginning to become.
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