Dusan Pajin, Ph.D. Belgrade
University
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"However that may be, this is the first novel
by a writer from whom we can expect everything.
(...) So painful a lucidity, indicates limitless gifts."
(A. Camus, review on La Nausee, October 20th, 1938)
It is possible to read this book in different ways – every reading starting from a different context.
1) First, I should mention the ordinary, average reader. But, who is he? The one who never expresses his impressions in writing, or a number of those who would be gathered by chance, in a street report of a TV inquisitor, asking people: "Have you read Sartre's Nausea? He seems to be present only in the number of copies sold, the number of editions, and translations.
2) A psychiatric reading could start with neurotic, or narcissistic disorders, and end with a more severe deperso- nalisation syndrom, explaining the novel as the author's struggle to write down, and control his symptoms. If one were to put together texts written in this manner, especially from a psychoanalytic standpoint, perhaps they would exceed the 2.800 pages of The Family Idiot (Sartre's psychoanalytic reading of Flaubert's life).
3) A sociological (or particularly Marxist) reading explains the book as a quasi-diary of a decadent intellectual, lost in a conflict between his classless individualism, and the everyday life of the petite bourgeoisie.
4) Existentialist reading would set Nausea somewhere between Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and phenomenology, as predecessors, and later philosophical writings of Sartre himself.
5) Prose theory points to various directions. One of the first (mentioned by Camus) was Franz Kafka. However, in the following analysis we will introduce a heretofore neglected reading, which relates the literary procédé displayed in the Nausea, to "making it strange" (ostrannenie), introduced by Shklovskij.
6) One of the latest readings relates it to psychedelic experience, considering its contents as reminiscences, and possible aftereffects of the author's mescaline episode (in 1935), at the time when he wrote the Nausea (Riedlinger, 1982).
7) Decades ago, in my book Other knowledges (1975), I quoted passages from the Nausea (1965), in order to explain some aspects of the meditative experience - especially the de-automatization of perception, related to the awareness in meditation. But, there is more to it.
In the doctrine of Buddho nausea (jiguccha) is the reflexive reaction to the subjective experience of organic... 'influences' (asava) provoked by the 'thirst' of life (tanha),' says Ñanajivako (1983: 141)1) Ñanajivako also gives a list of related terms in Pali Buddhism: disgust (anabhirati), loathsome (asubham), and repugnance (patigho).
In Pali Buddhism disgust, nausea, and revulsion are provoked, or related to four aspects of existence.
The first is the corporeality of the body. One finds a fre- quent image: a bag of skin, full of bones, slime, and foulness. The second aspect, already mentioned by Ñanajivako, is personal thirst for life, which makes one nauseated because of the constant push, or drive of instincts. A third kind of disgust is related to social relations in the family, and society in general. The discovery of loathsome, and disgusting aspects in relations, turns the (pleasurable) feeling of belonging, into its hygienic opposite (revulsion). Nauseated, one turns away from all social relations, appetites and corresponding roles, thus going forth (running away - pabbajja), eventually to join the Buddhist community (sangha), or just to roam about lonely, "as rhinoceros". The fourth aspect is life in general - experienced as endless painful transitoriness, void, without core, definite goal, or outcome.
In the Nausea one can find all these aspects.
1) Corporeality. "This thing on which I'm sitting... is called a seat. (...) It could just as well be a dead donkey, for example, swollen by the water and drifting along..." (p. 180). Sometimes human corporeality (my own, or of the other person) becomes disgusting out of small causes (with the realisation of mafunctions of the body). "That man half-lying on the seat opposite me... (has) a little parasite existence which proliferates, a chancre... The man endures, without noticing it, this little existence which is swelling..." (p. 181). "If you existed, you had to exist to that extent, to the point of mildew, blisters, obsenity" (p. 184). Nausea related to personal corporeality (body-for-itself) Sartre has further explained in Being and Nothingness. "Consciousness does not cease 'to have' a body. (...) This perpetual apprehension on the part of my for-itself of an insipid taste which I cannot place, which accompanies me even in my efforts to get away from it, and which is my taste - this is what we have described elsewhere under the name of Nausea. A dull and inescapable nausea perpetually reveals my body to my consciousness" (Sartre, 1969: p.338).
2) Passion and thirst. "What was the use of so many trees which were all identical? So many existences failed and stubbornly begun again, and once more failed - like the clumsy efforts of an insect which had fallen on its back? (I was one of those efforts)... I started laughing because I suddenly thought of the wonderful springtimes described in books, full of crackings, burstings, gigantic blossomings. There were fools who talked to you about willpower, and the struggle for life" (p. 190-1). The famous sentence from Being and Nothingness is in the same spirit: "Man is a useless passion" (Sartre, 1969: p. 615)2) The uselessness of passion — a favorite Buddhist subject. "There is no fire like lust, no grip like anger, no net like delusion - there is no river to match life's thirst" (Dhammapadam, p. 251). In Visuddhi-magga (XXI, p. 95 ff) it is said that "the ordinary man takes the five constituents of existence as 'I and mine'. (...) After entering upon the right way and seeing the three characteristics (i.e. transitoriness, suffering, and no-self - D.P.), the illusory nature of constituents is intuited as terror, and man looks for liberation.
3) Social relations. The climax of nausea caused by social relations
seems to be the "lunch episode" with Autodi- dact, ending with
Roquentin's run-away from the restaurant (the restaurant being a symbol-place
of social gathering, and appetites).
"I glance round the room and a feeling of violent disgust comes over
me. What am I doing here ? Why did I get mixed up in a discussion about
humanism ? What are these people doing here? Why are they eating? It's
true that they don't know that they exist. I want to leave, to go
somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would
fit in... but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted. (...) People. You must
love people. People are admirable. I feel like vomiting - and all of a
sudden, there it is: the Nausea" (p. 175-6). "They thought that
I was like them, that I was a man, and I deceived them. All of a sudden,
I lost the appearance of a man, and they saw a crab escaping backwards
from that all too human room" (p. 178).
This "disgust with man", and with the "all too human,"
refers also to Nietzsche, but we will attend to comparisons with Buddhism
(because Nietzsche - on the other hand - still praises willpower, struggle
for life, and blossomings). Feelings of familiarity and belonging
in relation to people—advocated by Autodidact - are flooded by nausea
and disgust. Roquentin loses the appetite for the existence
and food of man (physical food,was well as mental food - humanism - that
Autodidact tries to share with him). Then he realizes that he
has changed his genus - he is no more of the same species,
but escapes backwards, like a crab (in Buddhism, gotra-bhu, "change
of lineage"). Therefore, his place is not any more among humans (all
to human), and he runs away (Pali, pabajja).
However, there is some difference - Sartre speaks of a crab 3),
to picture the backward sneaking from social relations, while Buddhism
prefers rhinoceros. But both refer to loneliness, once familiarity and
belonging are left behind.
"Snap the fetters like a fish who breaks
the net in the water, like the fire
that does not return to a burnt spot -
go alone as the rhinoceros."
(Rhinoceros, trans. by Bh. Ñanajivako)
4) Existence. Overwhelming nausea is related to existence-
not to particular things. The absolute absurdity of existence is the cause
of nausea. "No necessary being can explain existence: contingency
is not an illusion, an appearance which can be dissipated; it is
absolute and consequently perfect gratuitousness. Everything is gratuitous:
that park, this town and myself. When you realize that... that is the Nausea"
(p. 188).
In Buddhism such feeling is related to the impermanence, no-self, and voidness
of existence. "Eye... mind, visual objects... mind objects...
corporeality... conscious- ness, etc. are void of self... void of permanency
and of anything lasting, eternal or immutable... They are coreless... Just
as a reed has no core... Having discerned voidness... He sees materiality
as impermanent, as painful, as a disease, a tumor..." (Visuddhi-magga,
XXI, p. 55-59).
Roquentin's experience has some analogies with meditative insight (in particular, sudden insight in zen). "And suddenly, all at once, the veil is torn away, I have understood. I have seen" (p. 181). This poses a partucular question: should we consider this text as an account of a personal experience of the author, or as a fiction of prose imagination? We cannot find definite clues in main biographical sources (Beauvoir, 1976; Cohen-Solal, 1987), and Sartre himself was vague about the personnal authenticity of the main contents of his novel. In The Words he said: "I was Roquentin; I used him to show, without complacency, the texture of my life" (Sartre, 1964: p.251). Later, he denied this: "What I described in the novel is not something I actually experienced myself. (1978: p. 41).
Anyway, one can also ask what is the proportion of fiction and personal experience in various mystical writings, or in passages written (for example) by Proust, as accounts of his "moments bienheureux"? For me, the question is unimportant - be as it may, I do not want to suggest that Sartre practiced meditation (can the experience be related to his drug experiments - this we shall examine later). People without similar experiences (as can be found in mystic writings), consider these writings as more or less interesting literature. Others - who recognize in them aspects of their own experiences, or belong to the particular creed (or religion) related to a particular type of mysticism - get a clue that someone has "already been there." In vero, or in fiction.
Certain stages of meditation bring a particular experience: the automatism of naming falls apart - one sees a gap between words and objects (also, the conventional character of meaning becomes obvious). There is, also, a temporary receding of the "faculty of namings - a person is speechless, unable to name even ordinary objects (this is a kind of "functional" aphasia, but should not be confused with real, traumatic aphasia, which is a consequence of brain trauma). All mystic traditions recognize periods of silence (as self-imposed discipline), but in these cases speechlessness is spontaneous. In the Nausea we find a similar experience.
"Things have broken free from their names. (...) it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of Things which cannot be given names" (p. 180).
Actually, in this experience, things do not "break free from words" - words "fall of things" - so Sartre is more to the point when he says that words refused "to settle on things", or have "melted," like veneer (p. 179).
When words melt and fall of things there are changes in perception. Things appear in an unfamiliar guise, and the feeling of proportion recedes.
"Very small and large are equal,
When boundaries are forgotten.
Very large and small are equal,
The limits cannot be seen."
(Hsin-hsin Ming - Pajin, 1992: 33).
"They (things - D.P.) are there, grotesque, stubborn, gigantic..." says Sartre (Nausea, p. 179). These and other phenomena are related to the deautomatization of perception (which is different from distortions of perception affected by psychic disorders, or drugs) 4).
In psychology, the deautomatization of perception has been recognized in experimental meditation by Diekman (1972: pp. 32, 222). The concept was already developed by Gill and Brenman (in 1959), as a general concept in psychological functioning - as the undoing of automatization by reinvesting the actions, or percepts with attention. In meditation deautomatization means the inhibition of cognition in favor of perception; attention shifts from categorization, naming and recognizing, to "pure" perception. When "wording" and recognizing stop, perception loses familiarity. In positive deautomatization the experience is enriching and opens new horizons of perception and insight.
Deautomatization can also be related to some psychic disorders, or drug effects. Deautomatization in pathological cases is related to jamais vu (term introduced by Pierre Janet), when a normally familiar situation seems totally unfamiliar (disorders like derealization, and depersonalization).
It seems that Russian Formalism (in 1914) 5) introduced the concept of deautomatization, before it was recognized in psychology. Formalists recognized that one of the main features of literature (either prose, or poetry) was to "make strange" (ostrannenie - estrangement) the habitual and the ordinary, shifting seeing and understanding out of the routine, turning the familiar into the unfamiliar, and presenting it in a novel light, or perspective, especially by a "semantic shift" effected by the trope (Erlich, 1955: p. 150). At the time they knew nothing about the similar concept (vismaya) used by Kasmiri aestheticians, or in Japanese aesthetics (concept of "strangeness" in Noh theatre of Seami), and the haiku tradition.
If the main or distinguishing feature of literature - as Formalists say - is to deautomatize our perception and understanding, by way of estrangement (ostrannenie), than Nausea is literature par excellence, being "a novel of estrangement" 6).
"To exist is simply to be there" (p. 188) -
without reason, explanation, preceding essence, or necessary being.
"What exists appears, lets itself be encountered, but you can
never deduce it" (p.188).
Sartre, also, tells us (p.183), that (a) words, and (b) diversity and individuality,
cover the mass and nakedness of existence.
"Existence had unveiled itself... it was the very stuff of things
(la pâte même des choses)" - p. 183.
This leads us to the concept of dharmadhatu, as it was understood in the Gandavyuha-sutra 7). Buddhists of the Chinese Hua-yen school listed four ways of viewing dharmadhatu. Of these four, Suzuki (1970: p. l51) considers the last one as most characteristic for Gandavyuha: < < dharmadhatu as a world where each one of its particular objects is identifiable with every other particular object, with whatever lines of separation there may be between them, all removed." A more extensive explanation comes to the following.
- Dharmadhatu is from one point different from lokadhatu (world of diversity, and individuality), while from another point it is lokadhatu. It is full of individual concrete realities.
- The individualities are fused (interpenetrating) unobstructedly (anavarana), and each one is reflected in the other, but retaining their separatness (Suzuki, 1970: p. 148).8)
However, Roquentin's experience is different (vive la difference) in the overall emotional tone. For him, existence has a somewhat persecutory appeal.
"I couldn't stand things being so close anymore. (...) I am suffocating: existence is penetrating me all over: through the eyes, through the nose, through the mouth..." (p.181).
In Buddhism disgust and nausea function as an antidote for clinging (upadana), they serve to "deconstruct" false expectations, and wrong aims of life energies and appetites. In the Nausea Roquentin seems to be overwhelmed by the disgusting, slimy appeal of existence. Perhaps this gives credit to those who explain these experiences as remnants (flashbacks) of an unresolved, bad mescaline trip, or as failure "to releive the COEX memories in their original form" (Riedlinger, 1982: p. 116).
"I shouted 'What filth! What filth' and I shook myself to get rid of that sticky dirt, but it held fast and there was so much of it, tons and tons of existence, indefinitely I was suffocating at the bottom of that huge boredom" (p.193).
Instead of finding himself at the top of the Vairochana tower,9) like Sudhana (in Gandhavyuha sutra), Roquentin finds himself at the bottom of existence. Researches of S.Grof (1980: p.26), give some clues to explain this passage. In the above quotation we find a symbolic presentation of two related situations: birth trauma (stage BMP II),10) and "cosmic engulfment". Being at the bottom, wanting to rise and get rid of the sticky dirt is related to fetal struggle to get out of the uterus. The feeling of "cosmic engulfment" is related to the experience of being sucked into a gigantic whirlpool, being swallowed by a terrifying monster, or descending into the underworld.
According to Grof (1976: p. 118), the solution to Sartre's crisis was
'transcendence'. "It eluded him," says Riedlinger (1982: p.122),
"he was fixed on the perishing aspect of Being, instead of its perpetual
rebirth".
But - did it elude him?
At the end of chapter "Six o'clock in the evening," and in chapter ‘One hour later," we find support for a contrary answer. Roquentin's (Sartre's) transcendence was not a Buddhist awakening, and maybe it - also - does not satisfy Grof’s criteria, but it led him beyond nausea - to the gentle feeling of empathy, warmth, and joy.
First we will quote a passage which can be related to BMP IV (fourth stage of birth experience, according to Grof),11) and which we understand as a positive, liberating experience of void (sunyata), of "clearing up."
"Then, all of a sudden, the park emptied as if through a big hole, the world disappeared in the same way it had come, or else I woke up..." (p. 193).
In his analysis Riedlinger (1982: p. l21) also recognizes this - that Roquentin "completed a full 'rite of passage' by reliving his birth from beginning to end."
But there is more to it, because after that Roquentin is positively overwhelmed by the park scenery. The following passage - with its subtle mysticism - is one of the most beautiful in the whole book.
"I got up, I went out. When I got to the gate, I turned round. Then the park smiled at me. (...) The smile of the trees, of the clump of laurel bushes, meant something; that was the real secret of existence. (...) Was it to me that it was addressed? I regretfully felt that I had no means of understanding. No means. Yet it was there, expectant, it resembled a gaze" (p. 193).
So the slimy and absurd appeal of existence ceded, leaving a clearance for a new experience: of communion with secret and beauty, which the Japanese aestheticians named yugen (see Deutsch, 1975: pp. 24-36).
The closing episode of the Nausea - a literary master- piece - is an exposition of a delicate feeling of empathy, and transcendence of the condition humaine. Roquentin is listening to a piece of music (old jazz tune) and falls into a reverie, imagining the personalities of the composer and the singer.
"Perhaps they thought they were lost right until the very end, drowned in existence. Yet, nobody could think about me as I think about them, with this gentle feeling. (...) I feel something timidly brushing against me and I dare not move because I am afraid it might go away... a sort of joy. (...) So you can justify your existence? Just a little?" (p.251).
Albert Camus was a very lucid writer. Somehow, at the end of his review on the Nausea he missed the point. "At the end of this voyage to the frontiers of anxiety, Mr. Sartre does seem to authorize one hope: that of the creator who achieves deliverance through writing. (...) And there is something rather comic in the lack of proportion between this final hope and the revolt which gave it birth. For, in the last resort, almost all writers know how trivial their work is when compared to certain moments of their life" (Camus, 1979: p. 169). But, some writers - and Camus must have been one of them - also know how trivial are most moments of their lives (and of all other men), when compared to certain moments of their work. Nevertheless, I pondered for a long time over this question - is there a lack of proportion in the Nausea, between hope and revolt, between "deliverance through writing" and "nausea that gave birth to writing." I ended with a gentle feeling that they (Sartre and Camus) justified their existence. Just a little, anyway. But, I do not know if anyone will, one day, feel about me as I do about them.
After the Second world war Existentialism was recognized as a definite "ism", with great influence on literature, cinematography, poetry, and plastic arts. But, in this case we have in mind a possible particular influence, on parti- cular type of abstract painting: - informal art (art informel, art brute), or "other art" (art autre).
Chapter "Six o'clock in the evening" reveals a sensibility of a painter. "Green rust covered it half way up; the bark, black and blistered, looked like boiled leather" (p. 183).
That sensibility will actually appear on paintings made during the War, several years after the first edition of the Nausea. The first among these paintings were made in France, and first exhibitions were held in 1945, in Paris. During the next fifteen years this kind of painting spread round the world, being one of the most influential styles of its time.
Perhaps a particular sensibility was "in the air", and one should not consider a direct influence. However, the heavily textured type of painting (that became a "trade mark" of informal art) - seems to be a plastic transposition of one particular frase - "the very stuff of things" - and of the whole contemplation of the chestnut trunk, described in this chapter.
1) Bhikku Ñanajivako - Cedomil Veljacic (1983) compared main Buddhist concepts with analogies from Sartre's Being and Nothingness. He leaves Nausea out of scope and mentions it only in relation to Kierkegaard's "sickness unto death" (on page 166). However, he made an in-depth analysis of disgust and nausea, as the foundation of Nietzsche's congeniality with Buddho (Ñanajivako, 1983: p. 131).
2) This could explain the above phrase: "Many men, in fact, know that the goal of their pursuit is being; an to the extent that they possess this knowledge, they refrain from appropriating things for their own sake and try to realize the symbolic appropriation of their being-in-itself. But to the extent that this attempt still shares in the spirit of seriousness and that these men can still believe that their mission of effecting the existence of the in-itself-for-itself is written in things, they are condemned in despair; for they discover at the same time that all human activities are equivalent (for they all tend to sacrifice man in order that the self cause may arise) and that all are on principle doomed to failure. Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone, or is a leader of nations" (Sartre, 1969: p. 627).
3) The crab from the Nausea could also be related to Sartre's mescaline encounter, when, in the days to follow, "especially persisted was the notion that a lobster was pursuing him" (Reidlinger. l982: p. 106). The psychoanalist would say that Roquentin-Sartre "identified with the agressor."
4) One should not confuse this experience with psychedelic experiences. This experience is steady, related with focus, atention and awareness. It is the result of a limpid. clear mind, cool like a mirror, while the psychedelic experience has a peculiar "trip" frenzy, with fast succession of associations, visions, etc., mainly out of control.
5) Janet introduced jamais vu, and Shklovskij the concept of estrangement (ostrannenie), before World War I. Later on, Brecht took over ostrannenie as Verfremdung effekt for his theory of drama -see: R. Grimm (1961): Revue de litterature Comparee N 35, s. 207-236, Paris, or Willet, J. (1959): The Theatre of B. Brecht, New York.
6) We do not know was Sartre (at the time when he wrote Nausea) familiar with Russian Formalism. Perhaps, we should also note that estrangement, as a literary concept (as understood by Formalists), and estrangement as an experience (described in the Nausea) have nothing to do with alienation (or estrangement) as it was understood in the theological, Hegelian, and Marxist tradition (see Schacht, 1971). In these traditions alienation means the estrangemeny from some essence, while estrangement in Formalism and Existenialism (as developed in the novel Nausea) is alienation from everyday experience, routine and cliché.
7) We will follow Suzuki's interpretation, skiping over peculiarities and different interpretations of dharmadhatu through Buddhist history.
8) This should not be considered Asia succession, but as a simultaneous happening.
9) As expalined by Suzuki (1970: 120-121), Vairochana Tower is the abode
of bodhisattvas who:
- understand that a world of beings is not attainable, that all things
are unborn, and without self-nature;
- are not attached to any world, and regard all the habitable worlds as
no home to live in, have no desire for habitation, refuge, and devotion,
- manifest themselves into this world for the sake of maturing of all beings;
- while entering into all kinds of thoughts, are yet in their minds
free from them (postmodernism has its Buddhist proto-history).
10) BMP (Basic perinatal memory matrice) II - Anthagonism with the mother. Related to the first clinical stage of delivery, when intrauterine contractions squeeze the fetus while the cervix is still closed, this BMP generates feelings of entrapment in a meaningless, claustrophobic world (Grof, 1976).
11) BMP IV - Separation from the mother. Corresponding to the third clinical stage of delivery, this BMP recalls a sequence of events in which propulsion through the birth canal ends with a crescendo of tension and suffering, followed by a sudden relief and relaxation (Grof, 1976).
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