At the Existentialist Café (17 page)

The connection between description and liberation fascinated Sartre. A writer is a person who describes, and thus a person who is free — for a person who can exactly describe what he or she experiences can also exert some control over those events. Sartre explored this link between writing and freedom again and again in his work. When I first read
Nausea
, I suspect this was part of its appeal for me. I too wanted to be able to see things fully, to experience them, to write about them — and to gain freedom. That was how I came to stand in a park trying to see the Being of a tree, and how I came to study philosophy.

In
Nausea
, art brings liberation because it captures things as they are
and
gives them an inner
necessity. They are no longer bulbous and nauseating: they make sense. Roquentin’s jazz song is the model for this process. Actually, Beauvoir tells us in her memoirs that Sartre got the idea while watching a film rather than listening to music. They were keen cinemagoers, and had a particular fondness for the comedies of Charlie
Chaplin and Buster Keaton, both of whom made films filled with balletic grace, as elegant as any song. I love the idea that Sartre’s philosophical epiphany about the necessity and freedom of art might have come from the Little Tramp.

Sartre drew on his own experience too for the other side of Roquentin’s obsession: his horror of anything fleshy, sticky or slimy. At one point, Roquentin even feels disgusted by the saliva inside his own mouth, and by his lips and his body in general —
‘wet with existence’. In
Being and Nothingness
, published in 1943, Sartre went on to give us many more pages about the physical quality of
viscosité
, or
le visqueux
— ‘viscosity’ or ‘gluey sliminess’. He wrote about the way honey pools as it is poured from a spoon, and evoked (with a shudder) the ‘moist and feminine sucking’ that occurs when a sticky substance adheres to one’s fingers. Sartre would not have liked, I suspect, the face-sucking alien in Ridley Scott’s film
Alien
, or the gelatinous
‘cuddle sponge’ in Philip K. Dick’s novel
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
— which kills in precisely the way its name suggests — or the Great Boyg in Ibsen’s
Peer Gynt
, a ‘slimy, misty’ being of no distinct form. Still less would he enjoy meeting the life form glimpsed at the end of H. G. Wells’
The Time Machine
: a blob heaving itself around on a beach, its tentacles trailing. Sartre’s horror of such things is, literally, visceral. He made so much of this imagery that, if a viscous pool or splat of anything appears on a page of philosophy, you can be fairly sure you are reading Sartre — although Gabriel
Marcel claimed the credit for first giving him the idea of writing about it in a philosophical way. Viscosity is Sartre’s way of expressing the horror of contingency. It evokes what he called ‘facticity’, meaning everything that drags us down into situations and inhibits us from flying free.

Sartre’s talent for combining personal gut responses with philosophical reasoning was one he cultivated deliberately. It sometimes took work. In a TV interview of 1972, he admitted that he had never spontaneously experienced nausea in the face of contingency himself. Another interviewee was sceptical, saying that he once saw Sartre staring at
fronds of algae in water with a disgusted expression. Wasn’t that ‘nausea’? Perhaps the truth was that Sartre was staring at the algae precisely so as to whip up the feeling and observe what it was like.

Sartre built his ideas out of his life, but his reading found its way into the mix too. It is not hard to spot signs of Heidegger in
Nausea
, though perhaps not
Being and Time
, which Sartre had not yet read in detail. The themes of
Nausea
are much closer to the ones in Heidegger’s 1929 lecture ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ — nothingness, being, and the ‘moods’ that disclose how things are. This was the published lecture that Beauvoir said they glanced at but had not been able to understand.

I’m also struck by similarities to another work: Emmanuel Levinas’ essay ‘De l’évasion’ (‘On Escape’), which appeared in
Recherches philosophiques
in 1935 while Sartre was still working on his drafts. Levinas there describes sensations that can come with insomnia or with physical nausea, especially the oppressive feeling
that something is dragging you down and holding you prisoner — a heavy, solid, undifferentiated ‘being’ that weighs on you. Levinas calls this sense of heavy, blobbish being the
‘il y a’
, or the ‘there is’. Later he would compare it to the rumbling, booming noise you hear when you put a shell to your ear, or when you are lying in an empty room as a child, unable to sleep. It feels ‘
as if the emptiness were full, as if the silence were a noise’. It is a nightmare sensation of total plenitude, leaving no space for thoughts — no inward cavern. In
Existence and Existents
, in 1947, Levinas described it as a state where beings appear to us ‘
as though they no longer composed a world’, that is, devoid of their Heideggerian network of purposes and involvements. Our natural response to all this is to want to
escape, and we find such escape in anything that restores our sense of structure and form. This could be art, music, or contact with another person.

I’m not aware of any allegation that Sartre copied this from Levinas or even that he had read the essay, though others have
observed the interesting similarities. The most likely explanation is that both men developed their thoughts in response to Husserl and Heidegger. Sartre had given up on
Being and Time
for now, having discovered in Berlin that
reading Husserl and Heidegger at the same time was too much for one brain. But in later years he found his way to Heidegger, whereas Levinas would head in the other direction, giving up all admiration for his former mentor because of his political choices. Levinas came to feel, unlike Heidegger, that people
should never accept brute Being as it is. We become civilised by
escaping
the weight that presses on us in our nightmares, not by embracing it.

One sometimes has the feeling, reading Sartre, that he did indeed borrow from other people’s ideas and even steal them, but that everything becomes so mixed with his own strange personality and vision that what emerges is perfectly original. He wrote in a state of almost trance-like concentration that lent itself to producing visionary experiences. His method was best summed up in an early letter that he wrote in 1926 to his then girlfriend Simone Jollivet, advising her on how to write. Focus on an image, he said, until you feel
‘a swelling, like
a bubble, also a sort of direction indicated to you’. This is your idea; afterwards you can clarify it and write it down.

This was essentially the phenomenological method — at least, a wildly colourful version of it, since Husserl would probably have disapproved of
Sartre’s weakness for anecdote and metaphor. While Heidegger turned Husserlian phenomenology into a kind of poetry, Sartre and
Beauvoir made it novelistic, and hence more palatable for the non-professional. In her 1945 lecture ‘The Novel and Metaphysics’, Beauvoir observed that novels by
phenomenologists were not as dull as those of some other philosophers because they described instead of explaining or putting things in categories. Phenomenologists take us to the ‘things themselves’. One might say that they follow the creative-writing mantra, ‘show, don’t tell’.

Sartre’s fiction is not always sparkling; it varies. So does Beauvoir’s, but at her best she was a more natural fiction writer than he was. She took more care over plot and language, and she subordinated raw ideas to the play of character and event more readily. She was also good at spotting where Sartre went wrong. As he struggled with revisions of the
Melancholia
manuscript in the mid-1930s, she read his drafts and urged him to inject some of the suspense they enjoyed so much in films and detective stories. He obeyed. He also appropriated this principle as his own, remarking in an interview that he had tried to make the book a whodunnit in which the clues lead the reader towards the guilty party — which was (and this is no great spoiler) ‘contingency’.

He worked hard on improving the manuscript, and kept at it while it was rejected by a series of publishers. Eventually, it found one in Gallimard, which then remained faithful to him to the end. But Gaston Gallimard himself wrote to Sartre suggesting that he think of a better title.
Melancholia
wasn’t commercial enough. Sartre suggested alternatives. Perhaps
Factum on Contingency
? (That had been the title of his earliest notes for the book in 1932.) Or how about
Essay on the Loneliness of the Mind
? When Gallimard recoiled from these, Sartre tried a new tack:
The Extraordinary Adventures of Antoine Roquentin
, to be combined with a blurb laboriously explaining the joke that there
are
no adventures.

In the end, Gallimard himself suggested the simple and startling
Nausea
. The book came out in April 1938 and was well received by critics, one of whom was Albert Camus. It made Sartre’s name.

Meanwhile, Simone de Beauvoir too was beginning to sketch out her own first novel, though it would not be published until 1943:
L’invitée
, translated into English as
She Came to Stay
. She based it on a recent three-way love affair between herself, Sartre and one of her former students, Olga Kosakiewicz. In real life, this was a fraught love triangle that drew in more people until it became a love pentagon and eventually dissolved. By the time it ended, Olga was married to Sartre’s former student Jacques-Laurent Bost, Sartre was sleeping with Olga’s sister Wanda, and Beauvoir had retired to lick her wounds — and to conduct a long, secret affair with Bost. For the novel, Beauvoir removed a few of the complications, but added a philosophical dimension, as well as a melodramatic finale involving a murder. Sartre also later fictionalised the same events as one of several narrative threads in the first volume of his
Roads of Freedom
sequence.

The differences between their novels show differences in their philosophical and personal interests. Sartre’s work was an epic exploraton of freedom, in which the love affair takes its place among other threads. Beauvoir’s interest was in the power lines of desire, observation, jealousy and control that connect people. She concentrated more on her central characters and excelled at exploring how emotions and experiences find expression through the body, perhaps in illness or in strange physical sensations, as when her protagonist’s head feels unusually
heavy as she tries to reason herself into feeling something she doesn’t feel. Beauvoir won praise for these sections from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who specialised in the phenomenology of embodiment and perception. He opened his 1945 essay ‘Metaphysics and the Novel’ with a dialogue quoted from
L’invitée
, in which the (Sartre-like) character Pierre tells the (Beauvoir-like) protagonist Françoise that he is amazed at the way a metaphysical situation can touch her in a ‘concrete’ way:

‘
But the situation is concrete,’ replies Françoise, ‘the whole meaning of my life is at stake.’

‘I’m not saying it isn’t,’ says Pierre. ‘Just the same, this ability of yours to put body and soul into living an idea is exceptional.’

This remark could apply to Beauvoir herself. Sartre bodied forth ideas in a fleshy way in
Nausea
, but never as plausibly as Beauvoir did, perhaps because she felt them more deeply. She had a kind of genius for being amazed by the world and by herself; all her life she remained a virtuoso
marveller
at things. As she said in her memoirs, this was the origin of fiction-writing: it began at those times when ‘
reality should no longer be taken for granted’.

Sartre envied her this quality. He tried to work himself up into the same state, looking at a table and repeating, ‘
It’s a table, it’s a table’ until, he said, ‘a shy thrill appeared that I’d christen joy’. But he had to force himself. It did not wash over him as it did Beauvoir. Sartre considered her talent for amazement at once the most ‘authentic’ kind of philosophy and a form of ‘philosophical poverty’, meaning perhaps that it did not lead anywhere and was insufficiently developed and conceptualised. He added, in a phrase that reflects his Heidegger-reading at the time, ‘it’s the moment at which the question transforms the questioner’.

Of all the things Beauvoir wondered at, one thing amazed her more than any other: the immensity of her own ignorance. She loved to conclude, after early debates with Sartre, ‘
I’m no longer sure
what
I think, nor whether I can be said to think at all.’ She apparently sought out men who were brilliant enough to make her feel at a loss in this way — and there were few to be found.

Before Sartre, her foil in this exercise had been her friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty. They met in 1927, when they were both nineteen: she was a student at the Sorbonne, and Merleau-Ponty was at the École normale supérieure, where Sartre also studied. Beauvoir beat Merleau-Ponty in the shared examinations in general philosophy that year: he came third and she came second. They were both beaten by another woman: Simone Weil. Merleau-Ponty befriended
Beauvoir after this because, according to her account, he was keen to meet the woman who had bested him. (Apparently he was less keen on the rather formidable Simone Weil — and Weil herself would prove unenthusiastic about Beauvoir, rebuffing her attempts at friendliness.)

Weil’s and Beauvoir’s results were extraordinary considering that they had not come through the elite
École normale supérieure system: it was not open to girls when Beauvoir began her tertiary education in 1925. It had opened to female students for just one year, in 1910, before closing the doors in 1911 and keeping them shut until 1927 — too late for her. Instead, she attended a series of girls’ schools which were not bad, but which had less exalted expectations. This was just one of the many ways in which a woman’s situation differed from a man’s in early stages of life; Beauvoir would explore such contrasts in detail in her 1949 book
The Second Sex
. Meanwhile, all she could do was study furiously, seek outlets in friendship, and rage against the limitations of her existence — which she blamed on the moral codes of her bourgeois upbringing. She was not the only one to feel this way. Sartre, also a child of the bourgeoisie, rebelled just as radically against it. Merleau-Ponty came from a similar background, but responded to it differently. He could enjoy himself quite happily in the bourgeois milieu, while pursuing his independent life elsewhere.