Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre(1938)
Extract
Something has happened to me, I can't doubt it any more.
A historian in a provincial French cafe picks up a pebble and feels the world lurch beneath him, not because anything has changed but because he has perceived the sheer, sickening excess of existence itself. Jean-Paul Sartre published this, his first novel, in 1938, and through the diary of Antoine Roquentin constructed a phenomenology of disgust that doubles as a treatise on contingency. Objects lose their names and become obscenely present; a chestnut root reveals itself as pure, unjustifiable being. The novel insists that existence precedes essence with the force of a stomach turning. What redeems Roquentin, if anything does, is the thin melody of a jazz recording, art's capacity to create the necessity the world so conspicuously lacks.
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Camus distils the same existential crisis into a man who feels nothing, where Roquentin feels too much.
Dostoevsky's narrator drowns in the same self-awareness a century earlier, without the French cafés.
Pessoa sits in a Lisbon office and records the same nausea, but calls it disquiet and never publishes.