Nausea (novel)
La Nausée by Jean-Paul Sartre.
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| Author | Jean-Paul Sartre |
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| Original title | La Nausée |
| Translator | Lloyd Alexander; Robert Baldick |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Genre | Philosophical novel |
| Published |
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| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 253 (Penguin Books edition) |
| ISBN | (US ed.) |
| OCLC | 8028693 |
Nausea (French: La Nausée) is a philosophical novel by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, published in 1938. It is Sartre's first novel and, in his opinion, one of his best works.
The novel takes place in 'Bouville' (literally, 'Mud town') a town similar to Le Havre, and it concerns a dejected historian, who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea.
French writer Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre's lifelong partner, claims that La Nausée grants consciousness a remarkable independence and gives reality the full weight of its sense.
It is one of the canonical works of existentialism. Sartre was awarded, though he ultimately declined, the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. The Nobel Foundation recognized him "for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age." Sartre was one of the few people to have declined the award, referring to it as merely a function of a bourgeois institution.
The novel has been translated into English at least twice, by Lloyd Alexander as "The Diary of Antoine Roquentin" (John Lehmann, 1949) and by Robert Baldick as "Nausea" (Penguin Books, 1965).
Like many Modernist novels, La Nausée is a "city-novel", encapsulating experience within the city. It is widely assumed that "Bouville" in the novel is a fictional portrayal of Le Havre, where Sartre was living and teaching in the 1930s as he wrote it.
The critic William V. Spanos has used Sartre's novel as an example of "negative capability", a presentation of the uncertainty and dread of human existence, so strong that the imagination cannot comprehend it.
The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel placesLa Nausée in a tradition of French activism: "Following on from Malraux, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus among others were all able to use the writing of novels as a powerful tool of ideological exploration." Although novelists like Sartre claim to be in rebellion against the 19th Century French novel, "they in fact owe a great deal both to its promotion of the lowly and to its ambiguous or 'poetic' aspects."
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