4.	Sartre 

4.1 Introduction

Of the four men principally discussed in this book, Sartre is the most modern, in fact he could be taken to represent the 20th century Western intellectual, a prototype, an archetype. What makes him important is that he represents 20th century alienation, a condition perhaps presaged by Nietzsche and other 19th century writers, but unique to this century. When we consider what Krishna and Whitman represent to us as possibilities for relating to our universe, there stands in the way (for the modern intellectual Westerner at least) this sense of alienation, our 'iron in the soul'. Many writers, philosophers, artists and psychologists of this century have dealt with it in various ways, and given it various names — 'angst' for one; in Sartre's famous first novel it becomes 'nausea'. Where Zarathustra can be considered the diary of a man descending into madness, Nausea is the diary of a man deeply in it, and coming to a working arrangement with it. Nietzsche's 'youngest virtue', honesty, is practised by Sartre without any of the 19th century requirement to add to it the forced exuberance of a Zarathustra, or any cheerfulness whatsoever.
Neitzsche and Huysmans delineate a 19th century alienation; a more innocent isolation and embitterment; a retreat from life even into insanity. Sartre is very sane however; he balances his alienation with a sexuality and robustness generally (he boxed and wrestled as a student, and was briefly in the army) — in his own words he fought men and fucked women. Perhaps this makes Sartre so important: a role-model for the modern disillusioned intellectual who is urged, rather than to attempt to transcend the modern condition, to struggle merely to contain his alienation. After all Sartre made a living from it. 
Nietzsche was an early influence on him: Sartre's unpublished novel "A Defeat" was the story of a love triangle based partly on Nietzsche, Richard and Cosima Wagner, and partly on his own relationships. However Sartre was more influenced in his philosophy by Husserl and Heidegger. Leaves of Grass and Zarathustra are mature works, but in this case the first published work of Sartre, Nausea, is of more interest to us.
Sartre was born in 1905, some five years after Nietzsche's death, and after the death of Sartre's father. Like Neitzsche, he grew up under the influence of his mother, and seems to have been quite a spoiled child. His early experiences of school were of being 'different' and being beaten up for it; perhaps this led to a life of siding with the marginals. He was a good scholar and entered the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1924 to study philosophy (at roughly the same time as Simone Weil — born in 1909, who incidentally did much better at her finals than Sartre). Second time round Sartre graduated first out of 76 students, and went on to be a high school teacher until 1936. Controversy followed him from the Ecole Normale Superieure, where he put on a musical review that satirised the military, to school, where he explained that 'cinema is the new literature' to outraged parents. He was committed to teaching and his students, whom he regarded as his equals, in ways that remind one of reports of Nietzsche's teaching days. 'My pedagogy is based on respect for the students and the systematic demolition of all the artificial barriers of hierarchy and authority', said Sartre. His aim for both himself and his students was intellectual honesty. He spent time with his students outside of school, and when asked once, "Why do you come to the cafe and sit with us, when you could be writing your novels?" replied, "one can always learn, even from idiots." This remark probably exemplifies his mix of comradeliness and intellectual arrogance that endeared him to a nation. The battle of wills between him and his provincial, traditionally-minded school was forgotten years later as the street in Le Havre under the school was named after him, though there are reports that the street-name has been regularly vandalised ever since.
  Towards the end of his school-teaching at Le Havre he approached the publishers Gallimard with his book, who initially refused it, but after substantial editing they agreed to publish it in 1938. Sartre's own title for the book was "Melancholia" (from Durer's engraving of the same name), which Gallimard did not like, and stipulated in the contract that he should change it. Sartre suggested "The Extraordinary Adventures of Antoine Roquentin" (the hero of the book), with a blurb on the back of the novel explaining that there were no adventures. Gallimard was not amused, but eventually saved the day with the title "Nausea", which was acceptable to all parties. The book had been eight years in the making.
Before looking at Nausea in detail, an event in 1935 may be of relevance. Sartre had been reading psychopathology as well as philosophy, and had been visiting a sanatorium for the insane where one of the doctors had been working on hallucinogenics. This friend of Sartre's agreed to inject him with mescalin, a drug derived from the peyote cactus, (and the subject of much of Castaneda's much later books). Note that this was some 20 years before Aldous Huxley started to experiment with the same drug! Sartre had a very bad trip, and never repeated the experience, though he experienced some later flashbacks. Simone de Beauvoir recalls:

He had not exactly had hallucinations, but the objects he looked at changed their appearances in the most horrifying manner: umbrellas became vultures, shoes turned into skeletons, and faces acquired monstrous characteristics, while behind him, just past the corner of his eye, swarmed crabs and polyps and grimacing Things.

The trip was during a period for of depression for him; at the age of thirty he was becoming fat and balding, and had an unhappy love affair with a student of Simone de Beauvoir's. Nausea can be seen as a record of Sartre's depression and after-effects of the drug-taking. In taking the hero of Nausea to be Sartre's alter ego, we are following the same path as with Zarathustra and Nietzsche, and opening up the criticism that one is mixing fiction with biography. I think that fiction can not be more than its author, though it can be less: what makes Nausea and Zarathustra interesting is precisely because both works carry an intensity that comes from a baring of the soul. Other commentators have also assumed that Sartre is the hero of Nausea: see Barnes, Thody and Malhotra; Sartre himself says so in Words.

4.2 Nausea

Nausea is the diary of Antoine Roquentin, a lonely writer who is working on the history of Rollebon, writing alone in his hotel room or working in the local public library. His diary records a strange shift of perception for him, as objects begin to appear to him with a sense of unreality, or heightened reality. His loneliness can be compared to Nietzsche's at the time of writing Zarathustra: it is a crushing loneliness (all the following extracts are from the translation of Nausea by Robert Baldick):

I for my part live alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anybody, I receive nothing, I give nothing. (p.13)

We may remember that this is a good indicator of madness, though Roquentin is not catatonic by any means. He does speak to a few people, mainly the patronne of the cafe, other waiters and waitresses, briefly to an ex-girlfriend, and to the only other main character in the book, the Autodidact, a clerk. His solitariness has caused a gulf to open between himself and others:

These young people amaze me; drinking their coffee, they tell clear, plausible stories. If you ask them what they did yesterday, they don't get flustered; they tell you all about it in a few words. If I were in their place, I'd start stammering. (p.17)

Throughout the book, we find references to crabs, evidence I think that Sartre's drug-experience did lead to some of what Nausea is dealing with. In this passage Roquentin reflects that as children they were aware of an old fellow, who was queer in his loneliness:

It isn't the fellow's poverty-stricken appearance which frightened us, nor the tumour he had on his neck which rubbed against the edge of his collar: but we felt that he was shaping crab-like or lobster-like thoughts in his head. (p.20)

Nausea, like its author, is archetypal, a new archetype that Nietzsche perhaps foresaw when he talked about the new honesty, the youngest of virtues, but Sartre apologises early in the book for his opening: it is not honest enough, he wants to make no claims for any 'inner' experiences of any meaning:

Why didn't I mention it? [the onset of the Nausea] It must have been out of pride, and then, too, a little awkwardness. I am not accustomed to telling myself what happens to me, so I find it hard to remember the exact succession of events, and I can't make out what is important. But now that's over and done with: I have re-read what I wrote in the Cafe Mably and it made me feel ashamed; I want no secrets, no spiritual condition, nothing ineffable; I am neither a virgin nor a priest, to play at having an inner life. (p.20/21)

Sartre has almost set the tone for a whole century of literature and philosophy in his dual rejection of the romantic and the sublime. This is a hint of what is to come in Nausea, what he is to reject in his extraordinary climax of Western thought. One can take the whole thing as tongue-in-cheek; alternatively one can take the view of Thomas King who considers that 'Sartre's writings have a theological character at odds with his professed atheism', going on to quote this passage from Being and Nothingness as an illustration: 'To be man means to reach toward being God. Or if you prefer, man fundamentally is the desire to be God.' We won't assume either the extreme of atheism or of theological intent, but take Nausea at face value however and see what comes out of it. 
Roquentin goes on to describe how objects have lost their 'object-ness' and impinge on him oddly, he finds himself no longer free in relation to them to do what he wants. He also shows another classical symptom of madness: he is caught by his reflection in the mirror, and cannot tear himself away, instead his face eventually disintegrates into the kind of horror that happens in films like Poltergeist (had Spielberg been reading Nausea that day, one wonders?). The Nausea has seized him, a spring inside him is broken. The only happiness that creeps into his numbness comes from a jazz record, Some of These Days. He seems to become the music, his arm as it moves is the music, and in this description we have the first hint of mystical union, a loss of identity, or a re-identifying with the world, like with Krishnamurti and the road-mender, or with Harding and the hills surrounding him. But this is a union gone wrong, a pathology. He drops other hints now of the mystical state, that time is disappearing, somehow connected with his memories fading; he is disturbed by the 'thin' quality of his recollections. As he goes home one day he sees the park out of the corner of his eye, and it disturbs him, for it seems to smile at him; we have again a hint of the horror that is to come, the crucial scene in the park after the flimsy structure of his life finally collapses.
His solitude is unbroken, even by the exchange of words with waiters and the Autodidact: even the discovery that the Autodidact is reading through the world's wisdom in the library in alphabetical order neither angers him nor makes him laugh. He goes out one day, only to discover it is a Sunday, and follows polite society through the main street as they greet each other, engage with each other, everybody observing the social rituals and each other, except for him. He just looks down on them, on a sea of hats, and overhears snatches of conversation; nothing touches him. Only towards evening does the Nausea, which is a growing sense that things exist in a new and independent way, suddenly have a positive sense to it, a feeling of suchness.

Here is the rue Basse-de-Vielle and the huge mass of Sainte-Cecile crouching in the shadows, its stained-glass windows glowing. The metal hat creaks. I don't know whether the world has suddenly shrunk or whether it is I who am establishing such a powerful unity between sounds and shapes: I cannot even imagine anything around me being other than it is. (p.82)

Suchness! All the mystics will recognise this sense of unity, or things being exactly as they are. Roquentin experiences a reverse of the Nausea, briefly, as an adventure, only to be brought suddenly to a halt. In his diary of the following day he regrets the long description of his happiness:

I have no need to speak in flowery language. I am writing to understand certain circumstances. I must beware of literature. I must let my pen run on, without searching for words.
What really disgusts me is having been sublime yesterday evening. When I was twenty I used to get drunk and then explain that I was a fellow in the style of Descartes. I knew very well that I was puffing myself up with heroism, but I let myself go, I enjoyed it. After that, the next day I felt as disgusted as if I had awoken in a bed full of vomit. I don't vomit when I'm drunk, but it would be better if I did. Yesterday I didn't even have the excuse of drunkenness. I got worked up like a fool. I need to clean myself up with abstract thoughts, as transparent as water. (p.85)

Sartre is wiser than Nietzsche: he knows instinctively that he must not succumb to the poetry and artistry of words that a happy moment might inspire: he must remain sober (Nietzsche's intoxication is a 19th century phenomenon, Sartre's sombre realism a 20th century one). Poor Sartre! He is being offered the real thing (we will soon see how real) and rejects it, because it comes and goes of its own volition. Nothing is greater anathema to the Western intelligentsia than waiting for something beyond one's control. Another crab reference follows in a bad dream or half-waking dream as he lies in bed with the patronne; his dreams are often like this. He receives a letter from a previous girl-friend, and one realises that the breakdown of the relationship is one reason why he has such a huge hole in his life. He has no family or friends, or house, or possessions. He complains that having a past is a property-owners luxury, for you can surround yourself with mementoes of the past, he only has a few papers, and memories that he can't bring to life anymore.
Our anti-hero sits in a cafe: an equally derelict human, Monsieur Achilles, another piece of flotsam with no memories, eyes him, and Roquentin has a horrible feeling that he will attempt a contact, a quite futile contact, for they are both beyond repair. They are saved when a real person, in the shape of the large and self-important doctor comes in; both heave a sigh of relief. The doctor looks at Roquentin's opposite number:

'Well so it's you, you old swine,' he exclaims. 'So you aren't dead yet?'
He addresses the waitress:
'You let a fellow like that in here?
He looks at the little man with his fierce eyes. A direct gaze which puts everything in its place. He explains:
'He's an old crackpot, that's what he is.' (p.99)

The doctor is the equivalent to Nietzsche's Higher Man: in this case he has brought a sense of order to the swimmingly unclassifiable suchness that the two alienated men are groping in; there is a sense of relief — well, so he is a crackpot, that explains it, after all the doctor is experienced in the world. But the experience of the doctor cuts no ice with Roquentin — he knows that the doctor is as much a jellyfish stranded on the shore as he is, cut loose in an amorphous existence which cannot be ordered with his so-called experience. The doctor attempts to bring Roquentin in on the joke but he freezes him out — the doctor is contemptuous, why even bother placing him in a category: crackpot, scoundrel, who cares? Yet he turns away, a tiny defeat. Monsieur Achille though is positively happy with the doctor's verdict, and Roquentin feels ashamed for him:

How I should like to tell him that he's being duped, that he's playing into the hands of self-important people. Professionals in experience? They have dragged out their lives in stupor and somnolence, they have married in a hurry, out of impatience, and they have made children at random. (p.101)

Sartre is almost as cruel as Nietzsche, the many-too-many theme emerging in subdued tones throughout Nausea. Roquentin has no time for anybody, he just realises that they live meaningless lives, they live on a tiny fund of real experience, and after the age of forty they trot it out like a slot-machine. With his experiences he could get himself invited to endless social occasions, he could make capital out of it for years, but instead he is trapped in a growing, aching now, where memories betray him, have lost all sustenance. The doctor has summed up Monsieur Achille as a crackpot, as the summation of all his experience, but:

He isn't an old crackpot: he is frightened. What is he frightened of? When you want to understand something, you stand in front of it, all by yourself, without any help; all the past history of the world is of no use to you. And then it disappears and what you have understood disappears with it. (p.103)

Roquentin is talking about himself of course: he is frightened. The days go by, he worries that the patron has died, but it is just an illness, Roquentin is sinking.

On the calm water, speckled with black spots, a cork was floating.
'And under the water? Haven't you thought about what there may be under the water?
A monster? A huge carapace, half embedded in the mud? A dozen pairs of claws slowly furrow the slime. The monster raises itself a little, every now and then. (p.116)

Crabs again. He spends a long time in the local museum, analysing the horribly bourgeois achievements of the dignitaries immortalised in the collection of gloomy paintings — he has nothing in common with them; leaves muttering 'farewell, you Bastards.' And suddenly his life collapses: he cannot continue with the book he is writing. He tells himself wearily:

'How on earth can I, who haven't had the strength to retain my own past, hope to save the past of somebody else?' (p.139)

The last words he had written suddenly lost their brilliance, and the room crowds in on him.

I looked anxiously around me: the present, nothing but the present. Light and solid pieces of furniture, encrusted in their present, a table, a bed, a wardrobe with a mirror — and me. The true nature of the present revealed itself: it was that which exists, and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all, neither in things nor even in my thoughts. True, I had realised a long time before that my past had escaped me. But until then I had believed that it had simply gone out of my range. (p.139)

Roquentin is stranded in the present. And his writing is finished.

Now nothing remained of him. No more than anything remained, in those traces of dry ink, of the memory of their brilliance. It was my fault: I had uttered the only words that had to be avoided: I said that the past did not exist. And straight away, noiselessly, Monsieur de Rollebon had returned to his nothingness. (p.140)

He makes one last try to revive his project, his great passion, but it is no use: Monsieur de Rollebon is dead.

Monsieur de Rollebon was my partner: he needed me in order to be and I need him in order not to feel my being.

Roquentin is painfully honest: the whole project was there so that he could prevent himself feeling his being. And now existence was taking its revenge: it was presenting itself naked to him. He does everything he can now to prevent himself moving, from moving out into the existence that surrounded him and threatened him.

Above all not move, not move ... Ah!
I couldn't prevent that shrug of the shoulders. ...
The thing which was waiting has sounded the alarm, it has pounced upon me, it is slipping into me, I am full of it. — It's nothing: I am the Thing. Existence liberated, released, surges over me. I exist.
I exist, It's sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you'd swear that it floats in the air all by itself. (p.143)

Roquentin, or Sartre, is experiencing a satori! Do we not recognise the description? Of a transforming moment when the ego disappears and the union is there, the union with the whole? Look through all the mystics, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, non-affiliated: this description occurs again and again. Only with Sartre the accompanying mood is not love and bliss but disgust. The suchness of his hand disgusts him, he tries to hide it, to be unaware of it, but hanging from the end of his arm, or in his pocket, he can feel the warmth of it; it reminds him a crab as he turns it over and watches the fat pink legs curl up. He gets up: his thoughts emerge in a sticky way, they don't flow in the normal way: he finds that if he exists it is because he hates existing: hatred and disgust. He sits down again, opens a penknife and clumsily stabs his hand; only a superficial wound. 
Only in the bar with his favourite record does the harsh existing of existence recede, but this is a temporary respite: he knows that the rigour of existence waits for him.
Roquentin had accepted an invitation to dine with the Autodidact, responding with a spontaneous 'yes', but with the inward knowledge that he would rather hang himself. The time has come; they are in the restaurant, Roquentin is going to see his old girlfriend, Anny, in four days time, otherwise there is nothing in his life. The long scene in the cafe is the backdrop to a debate between Roquentin and the Autodidact, on all kinds of subjects, but eventually — humanism. In this discussion Sartre gets to the heart of Roquentin's sickness: he does not love — at all. Roquentin is honest about it, while the Autodidact pontificates about humanism, about how he loves his fellow-men, not any particular person of course, but in an abstract way, and this gives a purpose to his life. It is almost a conversation between Zarathustra and a Higher Man again, but we have sunk into a bleaker world by far, there is no fantasy here to light up the gloom, only the natural progression of Nietzsche's newest virtue: honesty. It is an honesty applied to the most desperate of minds, an individual so alienated, and yet so widespread in the 20th century that no one notices that he is ill.

I look at the Autodidact with a little remorse: he has been looking forward all week to this luncheon, at which he would be able to tell another man about his love of man. He so rarely has the opportunity of talking. And now I have spoilt his pleasure. In point of fact he is as lonely as I am: nobody cares about him. Only he doesn't realize his solitude. Well, yes: but it wasn't up to me to open his eyes. I feel very ill at ease: I'm furious, it's true, but not with him, with Virgan and the others, all those who have poisoned that poor brain of his. If I could have them here in front of me, I'd have something to say to them, and no mistake. I shall say nothing to the Autodidact, I have nothing but sympathy for him: he is somebody like Monsieur Achille, somebody of my sort, who has deserted out of ignorance and good-will.
A burst of laughter from the Autodidact rouses me from my morose reflections:
'Forgive me, but when I think of the depth of my love for people, of the strength of the impulses which carry me towards them, and when I see us here, arguing and discussing ... it makes me want to laugh.'
I say nothing, I give a forced smile. The waitress puts a plate in front of me with a piece of chalky Camembert on it. 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 there people 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. (p.174/175)

The Autodidact then offers Roquentin some hope: 'Are you a misanthrope?' Even this would help, Roquentin could then be placed, like the crackpot; compassion could be found for him, he would be in the scheme of things. But Roquentin knows that to say yes would be one sort of trap for him, to say no another. He suddenly gets up and leaves, the Nausea overwhelms him; as he goes through the door his is aware that his abrupt exit has caused all eyes to follow him, and he wonders if they see him crab-like, and scuttling away. 

Poets! If I grabbed one of them by the lapels of his coat, if I said to him: 'Come to my help,' he would think: 'What the devil is this crab?' and would run off, leaving his coat in my hands. (p.178)

Roquentin is wandering aimlessly about after the scene in the restaurant, things appear to him 'pale and green as oysters' (which make a change from crabs!), and, with no destination in mind, he jumps on a tram. The seat that he sits on is of green leather, and it exists too strongly, it is an offence: it may as well have been the underbelly of a donkey floating upside down in a river, his feet dangling in the water. The tram is too claustrophobic, he has to get out, he pushes the conductor out of the way, and suddenly finds himself —  in the park. If you were watching this as a horror-film instead of reading it in a book, there would be music now, the sort of gut-wrenching music that informs you that hideous demonic powers have brought the hero to his slaughtering-ground; all those he trusted turn out to be agents of the devil, and the contraption has been prepared for his end: perhaps the 'wicker man' in the film of the same name (where the upright police officer becomes a human sacrifice because of his purity), or the machine in Kafka's In the Penal Colony that inscribes the crime on his body with knives. However, we are with Roquentin/Sartre in a municipal park on a sunny day, quite alone.

But I push him aside and I jump off the tram. I couldn't stand it any more. I couldn't stand things being so close any more. I push open a gate, I go through, airy existences leap about and perch on the treetops. Now I recognise myself, I know where I am: I am in the municipal park. I flop on to a bench between great black trunks, between the black, knotty hands reaching out towards the sky. A tree is scratching the earth under my feet with a black nail. I should so like to let myself go, to forget, to sleep. But I can't, I'm suffocating: existence is penetrating me all over, through the nose, through the mouth ...
And suddenly, all at once, the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen. (p.181)

I want to refer to the hero of our story as Sartre from now on: you could not possibly write the following scene without having experienced it, though whether it was a result of an extreme bout of depression, or from taking mescalin, or a combination of both, I don't know. What happens next is, for me, a critical point in Western thought, whether philosophical or literary it does not matter. Sartre describes an experience so close to the experiences of the mystics, a critical and transforming experience sometimes known as 'enlightenment', yet completely distorted and pathological. It stand for me as a symbol of the barrier for the Western mind to the process of self-knowledge, and spiritual love, for in order to come to one's divine nature, to mystical union, the Western mind, with its loss of innocence, has to confront this experience in the park. We could say that the intellectual development of the western mind in the 20th century has come from two observations: firstly that God is dead, and secondly that any encounter with naked reality is in its essence a pathological experience: the encounter either comes from madness or leads you to madness. So the West turns its back, comprehensively, on the divine essence of simple reality, and the religious are ignored through blank incomprehension. The polarisation is complete: a secular society which permits, with slight embarrassment, establishment religion as a kind of 'hobby', while science, literature, and philosophy concern themselves with other things. I am not saying, of course, that Nietzsche and Sartre are responsible: they are symptoms, and an attempt to understand them is an attempt to understand why they have shaped thought in this century, not Whitman or Jefferies.
Hazel Barnes considers that the high point of Nausea is Roquentin's 'horrible ecstasy' in the park (as does Malhotra), saying also that "Sartre has deliberately couched his description of the episode in terms which suggest that it is the reverse image of the familiar mystical experience." Barnes examines this notion from a theistic stance, though Thomas King goes further in seeing the mystical in Sartre, citing Simone de Beauvoir as saying that Sartre had studied the mystics in the early '30s.
But what happens in the park? We have the superficial coincidences with Krishnamurti and Rajneesh: they are undergoing an intense and disorientating shift in their psyches, they reach a climax where they have to rush out of an enclosing space, and they are drawn to a tree in a garden or park. And we remember how the Buddha, Krishanmurti and Rajneesh were enlightened under trees, and how Whitman spoke in completely secular, though profound, terms of the lesson of a tree. Sartre is now in the park under a tree, and the suchness of his surroundings overwhelm him; not with bliss, but with nausea. I have reproduced the section as a whole in order that it can be read unfragmented, for it is a marvellous piece of prose, while the annotations can be seen as a running commentary from the perspective of Pure Consciousness Mysticism: the issues flagged up in them are drawn together later.