A letter to Jean-Paul Sartre, written in the full knowledge that he is beyond it and was, when alive, largely uninterested in letters from American readers.
Monsieur Sartre,
I read your first novel again last month, at a kitchen table in Otaru, in a winter with snow banked above the windowsill. I was twenty-three when I read it the first time, and stupid, and I thought Nausea was a book about being too smart for the world. It is not. It is a book about being the correct amount of attentive and discovering, to your horror, that the world is not set up to withstand attention. That was your actual thesis. I missed it by twenty-five years.
Antoine Roquentin, your librarian-historian in the seaside town of Bouville, sits down on a bench in a public park and looks at the root of a chestnut tree and sees that the root is there. That it exists. That existence is not a property — this root is existent, or not existent — but a raw condition prior to property. That the root is there and could be replaced by anything else, or nothing else, and what is horrifying about this is not that existence is arbitrary, but that we spend our whole lives not noticing how arbitrary it is, and the moment we notice, we become nauseous, because we have been living inside a conspiracy of meaning that the root has never signed.
This is the scene. It is the core scene of the twentieth century. Every existentialist novel after you is arguing with that scene. Every anti-existentialist novel after you is arguing with that scene. Camus in The Stranger, four years later, gives you a character who has always seen the root clearly and is therefore not capable of being nauseous — he is already on the far side. Beckett gives you characters for whom the nausea has become the air they breathe. Thomas Bernhard turns the nausea into the rhythm of his sentences. American minimalism — Carver, early DeLillo — is your scene remapped onto a suburb. You seeded a century.
What I want to say to you — and I would not have said this at twenty-three, because at twenty-three I thought I was going to be Roquentin for a living — is that I have come to believe the scene is true but is not a philosophy. It is a symptom. The nausea Roquentin feels on the park bench is the nausea a specific kind of person feels when a specific kind of life, lived too long alone, finally allows the repressed weight of being unoccupied to show itself. Roquentin is a bachelor historian researching a dead man in a town he does not love. His nausea is not the human condition. His nausea is what happens when a sensitive and unemployed intelligence finally has to meet itself without furniture.
You would not have accepted this. You believed Roquentin’s revelation was universal, which is why you could spend the rest of your life writing Being and Nothingness and then going into politics. I am not arguing with you. I am only telling you what an older reader, not a philosopher, sees in your first novel.
What still works, sixty years later: the prose. Even in English, even in translation, the sentences have a clarity you did not match again. Your later novels are more famous. Your later novels are not better. Nausea is the young man’s book that was written by a young man who could still see his own nausea, and that is the window that closed. By the time you wrote The Age of Reason, you were a philosopher writing fiction. By the time you wrote Nausea, you were a novelist who was on the brink of figuring out you were a philosopher. The brink is the book’s value.
What does not work: the ending. The idea that Roquentin will save himself by writing a novel — a book that would be hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence — is the note of a twenty-nine-year-old who does not yet know what it is to write a book. You found out. You wrote many books. They were mostly not hard as steel. They were essays and plays and memoirs and screeds, and most of them, even the great ones, do not make people ashamed of their existence. They make people argue. Roquentin’s final hope for writing is a young writer’s hope, and it did not age well for you.
Rest easy, Monsieur Sartre. You wrote the scene on the park bench. I have been on a hundred park benches since I first read you. I have felt the root be there. I have not yet felt it be nothing. But I have come to believe that feeling it be there, without surrendering to either meaning or its absence, is a life, and perhaps the only honest one, and your book — for all its young-man excesses — is the map that got me to the bench.
With respect, and residual nausea —
CD Damitio
A related vagobond.com piece: A Question of Authority: Can There Be Authority in an Anarchist Society.
Readers and fans of Nausea will really enjoy Fucking People — my story collection about Americans on the brink of Roquentin’s park bench, without the vocabulary to name what they are on the brink of. Same root. Less French. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
