Sartre's Nausea Research Articles

Philosophical Fiction as World Literature

Abstract This article will examine Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea from the perspectives of philosophical fiction and world literature. Philosophical fiction is a specific kind of literature that insists on its absolute modernity. However, the literary aspects of philosophical fiction place it within its political and historical context, thus threatening this pretense to universality. Our examination of Nausea will show the internal tension between philosophy and fiction and how the interplay of both of those elements informed the structure of the novel. The formal, literary aspects help further the actual philosophical content that purports to be the central focus. The implications of that interplay will lead us to a new understanding of the inner logic of world literature.

Sartre's Nausea as Liar Paradox

Sartre's Nausea as Liar Paradox

Narratology Redux

Narratology Redux

La nausea e la fine del mondo. Figure della condizione schizoide in Jean-Paul Sartre e in Ernesto de Martino

Ernesto De Martino was the first to read from an anthropological point of view Jean-Paul Sartre's novel, Nausea, as the representation of a cultural and existential crisis, a cultural apocalypse which affected the whole bourgeois modern world in the 20th century. This article reconsiders the anthropologist's analysis, and focuses on a possible comparison between the two metaphors, Sartre's nausea and De Martino's end of the world, to show how both may be read as figures of an individual pre-pathological psychic state: the schizoid condition. A phenomenological look to their autobiographical writings provides interesting insights into such a perspective.

Nausea is the Only Truly Philosophical Novel

Sartre's Nausea, as well as being a work of genius, is the only truly philosophical novel, in the sense that the philosophy is embedded in and exemplified in what happens in the novel, rather than people in the novel merely talking about philosophy. It is philosophy reified.

Nauseating Flux: Iris Murdoch on Sartre and Heraclitus

AbstractI observe Iris Murdoch's distinctive use of the word ‘flux’ in discussion of Sartre's Nausea and show that her usage is persuasive and revolutionary, first as Sartre exegesis, second as Heraclitus exegesis, and throughout as a contribution to the philosophy of language. Murdoch's usage of ‘flux’ frames a comparison of Sartre's Roquentin with other figures who have had similarly flowing experience but without nausea. Roquentin's plight is shown to be ‘a philosopher's plight’ precipitated by a defective theory of descriptive success. I then show how the Heraclitean fragments would support Murdoch's treatment of flux and on close analysis contradict the established view exemplified in the work of Wittgenstein and Jonathan Barnes. Flux is not a variety of change, and the river image ‘cannot be analysed into non‐metaphorical components without a loss of substance’.

Stomaching the Truth: Getting to the Roots of Nausea in the Work of Jean Paul Sartre and Flannery O'Connor

A comparison of Flannery O'Connor‘s stories to Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea reveals a surprising number of intertextual parallels and shared themes. Upon close examination, correlations emerge within the overarching incarnational framework of each writer, manifested in similar physical responses of characters in a world that assumes God is dead. Looking at O'Connor through the descriptive lens of Nausea serves to augment a reading of O'Connor as a Christian writer attuned to the nihilism of the modern age, and contributes to an appreciation of the complexity of her vision. Despite the existential angst permeating the work of each writer, the “lines of spiritual motion” found in O'Connor's work reveal redemption in the suffering of Jesus Christ, while Sartre, at best, finds a sort of consolation in “good” faith and art.

Gernika in Context

36 Historically Speaking September/October 2007 of Antoine Roquentin replicates in many ways the life of Jean-Paul Sartre. Thus we can fill in many of the gaps in Roquentin's life with what we know about his creator. Sartre was born and raised in Paris, he attended the Ecole normale supérieure, where he studied more literature than history, which explains his limitations as a historian. He did do his military service, it turns out. He taught high school in Le Havre, while living in hotels, which goes a long way toward explaining his depression. He benefited from an inheritance, which gave him his chance to travel. He learned about Husserl from reading about him, not from staring at chestnut trees. And he had a running relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, almost as sadomasochistic as Roquentin's relationship with Anny. But this is no excuse for what Sartre does not tell us in his novel. The universe may be disorderly, but this is no reason to take it out on us. Nature may be indifferent, but this is no reason to be insensitive. And, indeed, if we want to identify the most pungent odor seeping out from the pages of Sartre's Nausea, it is the odor of obliviousness. During the time that he was writing it, he had a chance to see the fascists and the Nazis first hand. During the time that he was completing it, Mussolini was invading Abyssinia and Hitler was remilitarizing the Rhineland. My mother, who never agonized over chestnut trees, took one look at Mussolini and decided that he was bad news, and that is one reason that I am here speaking to you today. But neither Antoine Roquentin nor Jean-Paul Sartre, in their absorption with themselves, had the sensitivity, nay the elementary common sense, to predict that the next time the trolley car parked at the Grands Bassins, it was not only heading for the slaughterhouse. It was moving right on to Dachau. Paul Sennino isprofessor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He haspublished widely on 17th-century Europe, including Louis XIV and the Origins of the Dutch War (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Gernika in Context Rob Stradling I ^^ uring the early weeks of ^B 1937 a controversial trial ^^ was proceeding at the Old Bailey. The case involved mass murder , and evoked widespread attention. Yet its details were hardly the usual gory diet of the popular press. Three men were in the dock, accused of damage to Crown property—an act described by the judge as "most dangerous and wicked." The unlikely terrorists were a university lecturer, a Nonconformist minister, and a schoolteacher. They were also, respectively , the president (Saunders Lewis) and two senior officials (Valentine and Williams) of the Welsh Nationalist Party, Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru. But the Crown—prosecuting agency as well as alleged victim— stood counter-accused by Lewis of a crime of unimaginably greater dimensions : no less than planning the massacre of noncombatant civilians by bombing action from the air in a future war. Even before September 1936, when the three saboteurs set fire to an RAF training school for pilots being built at Penyberth in north Wales, Lewis had accused the British government of pursuing a policy of defense rearmament which was tantamount to "baby-murdering." Certainly, when the bombing of Gernika occurred on April 26, 1937, the British government's response to the threat of massed bombing raids on British cities was already under way. A potential aggressor had to be deterred (as it were, Plan A); or failing that, retaliated against (Plan B). Because of Langston Hughes, Mikhail Koltsov, Ernest Hemingway, Nicolas Guillen, Madrid, 1937. Yale Collection ofAmerican Literature, Belnecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. the Penyberth trial—among other things—people were becoming aware of the practical and ethical implications of air warfare. As Orwell was soon to argue, the only way of winning a war in which the enemy dropped bombs on your mother was to drop bigger bombs on his mother. Plan B was exactly what the Allies were to carry out in World War II, and its existential logic underpins the whole policy of nuclear deterrence. Indeed, the...

Relieving Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea: Semiotics, Suicide, and the Search for God in Walker Percy's The Second Coming

Walker Percy's interest existentialism and especially work of Jean-Paul Sartre is no secret among literary critics. Kathleen Scullin has argued that Lancelot is in effect Percy's response to Sartre fiction (110); other scholars such as Lewis A. Lawson and Martin Luschei have considered Percy's first three novels--The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, and Love Ruins--along similar lines. (1) However, Percy's fifth novel, The Second Coming, has not been examined from this perspective, despite its many references to Sartre's and its status as loose sequel to The Last Gentleman. (2) I will argue that and Sartre's existentialism more generally provide a crucial context for understanding The Second Coming. First, we will see how Percy's own statements recorded conversations and speeches demand this comparison. Then, close attention to both novels will evoke The Second Coming's presentation of interdependence of transcendence and immanence, especially as explored Will's gradual confrontation with his father's suicide, his developing relationship with Allie, and his ongoing query about God's existence. Finally, a comparison of Percy's novel with will elucidate two widely debated attributes of Percy's fifth novel: its unusually well developed female character, Allie, and its uniquely happy ending. Ultimately, I aim to demonstrate how The Second Coming honestly and soberly re-presents nausea of Sartre's novel while also offering a more hopeful evaluation of both individual and communal life. I Percy's interest Sartre is regularly apparent not only his written work but also speeches and interviews. Among thirty or more references to Sartre indexed Lawson and Victor A. Kramer's Conversations with Walker Percy, we find this statement: Maybe one of most influential novels I ever read was Nausea. That was a real revelation. It's funny how something can be that important and influence you that much and be that valuable to you, and yet you can diametrically disagree with (275). Percy's profound appreciation of Sartre's novel and its unyielding examination of tenuousness of reality is evident here, but we also taste his dissatisfaction with Nausea's ultimate cynicism. Signposts a Strange Land finds Percy describing more specifically as an example of peculiar diagnostic role of novel this century (147). Percy had a particular regard for Sartre's ability to portray individual experience, and especially Sartre's onslaught on 'normal' or what is ordinarily taken for normal (147-48). Sharing Sartre's interest questioning common assumptions about good life, Percy appreciated that the apparently well are sick and apparently sick are on to truth (150). Nevertheless, his interest Sartre always remained critical. In his unique self-interview Conversations, for instance, Percy explained his contentment with an obscure life: If one lived a place like France where writers are honored, one might well end up like Sartre, a kind of literary-political pope, a savant, an academician, very sort of person Sartre made fun of Nausea (161-62). Perhaps clearest historical evidence of Percy's wish to both honor and distinguish himself from Sartre is found a 1977 lecture at Cornell University. As a conclusion to that address, Percy read and commented on a passage from The Last Gentleman. In this scene a young Will Barrett runs his hand over bark of an oak tree and wonders about his father's eventually successful suicide attempts. Will quietly asks, Is there a sign? As Percy noted to his audience, He feels he's on to something, a clue or sign, but it slips away from him. Then, Percy said something quite significant about relationship between The Last Gentleman and Nausea: I chose [to read] this passage because of its resemblance to famous scene Sartre's Nausea--in fact, it was written as a kind of counterstatement--where Roquentin is sitting a park Bouville and experiences a similar revelation as he gazes at roots and bark of a chestnut tree. …

An Existential Reading of Charles Wright's The Messenger

Twenty-five years before Farrar, Straus & Company published Charles Wright's The Messenger in 1963, Librairie Gallimard of France published Jean-Paul Sartre's novel, Nausea in 1938, and, two years before publication of Wright's The Messenger, Knopf published Walker Percy's The Moviegoer in 1961. In 2001, Sartre's and Percy's novels, unlike Wright's The Messenger, are represented as seminal works of existential On back cover of New Direction paperback edition of Nausea, publisher writes: La Nausee ... is [Sartre's] finest and most significant. is unquestionably a key novel on Twentieth Century and a landmark in Existential fiction. In Introduction to Nausea, Hayden Carruth gives a summary of principal themes of existentialism and provides an existential reading of novel. Sartre's novel is defined as an extension of existential philosophy, as a metaphysical tract, as a dramatic enactment of an existential definition of human condition. Likewise, Percy's The Moviegoer is also represented and received as a work of existential The epigraph at beginning of novel is a quote from noted Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death: the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being in despair. In his acceptance speech for National Book Award for The Moviegoer, collected in Signposts In A Strange Land, Percy speculates: It is perhaps not too farfetched to compare it [The Moviegoer] in one respect with science of pathology.... that pathology in this case has to do with of and of at very time when words like `dignity of individual' and `self-realization' are being heard more frequently than (246). Phrases such as loss of individuality and loss of identity are two key features of existentialism as defined by Martin Heidegger. Discussing The Moviergoer in his review of Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome, Sven Birkerts asserts: His novel, The Moviegoer, was a Kierkegaardian meditation on attainment of authentic selfhood. Its thrust was philosophical, not psychological (190). Like Sartre's Nausea, Percy's The Moviegoer is also represented as an extension of an existential philosophy, as a dramatic enactment of Kierkegaard's Christian existentialism. Wright's The Messenger is also an existential novel, yet it was not received and has never been represented or defined as an existential novel. The history of critical reaction to and reception of The Messenger is complicated and varied. But, it is accurate to say that text has been represented, interpreted, and defined by publisher and mainstream American and African American reviewers and critics alike, not as an existential metaphysical tract, or as a dramatic enactment of an existential definition of human condition in twentieth century, but primarily as a vehicle of sociological, political, racial, and cultural commentary or protest. This reduction of The Messenger to racial and social commentary situates it, and existential African American experience it textualizes, within a white/black binary of signification that defines white as normative and superior and represents African American as inferior, as Same, as devalued Other, or as victim of racial oppression. Within this white/black binary, which constructs social reality in United States, skin color or African ancestry is made to represent a set of denigrated experiences, and these experiences are applied to everyone who ever had an African ancestor. When The Messenger fails to reproduce white/black binary, it is ignored and repressed. is assumed to have no aesthetic value. But, The Messenger's otherness, its existentialism, which is ignored and/or repressed by publisher and its critics and reviewers, is what is most challenging and subversive to white/black binary. …

Sartre's Nausea

Sartre's Nausea

THE PROBLEM OF THE ONTOLOGY OF THE LIFE-WORLD AND THE EXISTENTIAL SITUATION IN MODERN SOCIAL SCIENCE

This article analyses three variants of a situation characteristic for modern social science called `Roquentin's situation', the main character in Sartre's Nausea who symbolises the mutual estrangement between a researchers' standpoint and their social object. The first variant is represented by the transcendentalist position of Edmund Husserl. We find Roquentin in the passages of the transcendental ego expanding the philosopher's position by a certain constellation of inner viewpoints of the social object itself. The idea of a possible ontology of the life-world appears to be an indispensable condition for this reassessment. But the lack of a sociologically worked out concept of everyday life as a self-problematising layer of the culturally formed life-world confines it to an idea ` en passant' and results in privileging the self-evidences of the philosopher as `functionary of European mankind'. Everyday life as a `paramount reality' has already become privileged in Alfred Schutz's social phenomenology. Thus emerges the intersubjective drama between the ego agens and the objective observer, which leads to the figure of the ontologist of the life-world. Schutz's solution tacitly leads to ensuring a firm position for scientific consciousness. Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology provokes the figure of the objective observer as an ontologist of the life-world as well as the figure of the philosopher as a functionary of European mankind. The ethnomethodological attitude provokes not only functioning intentionality itself, but also gains access to its own mode of functioning. Thus the peculiar mobility of the researcher's position becomes clarified as a continual gaining of marginal grounds between practical everyday worlds and scientific reality as everyday reality par excellence. In other words, Roquentin's situation here is not resolved but becomes a motif for its own incessant reproduction. We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer. (Wittgenstein 1969: 149)

Music, Archetype, and the Writer: A Jungian View , and: Beyond Modernism: Toward a New Myth Criticism (review)

Reviewed by: Music, Archetype, and the Writer: A Jungian View, and: Beyond Modernism: Toward a New Myth Criticism Philip Stevick Bettina L. Knapp . Music, Archetype, and the Writer: A Jungian View. University Park: Penn State UP, 1988. 234 pp. $24.95. Ted R. Spivey . Beyond Modernism: Toward a New Myth Criticism. Lanham: UP of America, 1988. 201 pp. pb. $12.75. An approach to music that most of us left behind in early childhood suggests the possibility of hearing the trumpet as red, the cello as blue, the oboe as sad, the flute as happy, and the Pastoral Symphony as an evocation of the storm, the calm, the hillside, and the sheep. It was an early act of aesthetic sophistication, for many of us, to decide not to assent when a teacher urged us to close our eyes, listen to the music, and hear marching giants. Music is basically abstract; we knew before we could say it. So it is that Bettina Knapp's first chapter, on E. T. A. Hoffman, comes as a bit of a jolt, a time warp perhaps, because Hoffman "transcends ordinary understanding and experiences the feel, the taste, the perfume of music and all of its associations." Knapp's discussion makes it clear that Hoffman, and his character Kreisler, should seem childlike, certainly more than a little mad, yet perfectly serious, for Kreisler's frenzied synaesthesia is in the service of a recovery of a special sense of music, its rhythms and its power to move, that Knapp calls archetypal: prelogical, of the unconscious understood in Jungian terms. [End Page 383] Her Introduction surveys both those writers she intends to treat and many more she does not, writers in various ways in touch with, or animated by, "archetypal music," rhythms, tones, harmonic relations that are a priori, elements of the collective unconscious. There is no doubt, as she pursues her Introduction, that a large number of very different writers, not all of them as exotic as Hoffman, have written with the imagination of something like the "archetypal music" she describes, seeking variously to draw upon those primal musical energies, or to see, in music, a more basic connection with the elemental properties of the mind than the other arts provide, or to attempt to energize and organize words by drawing upon the features of those archetypal modes. Still, there are problems with the book, and they are basically two. First, the theoretical underpinnings are so thoroughly and so relentlessly Jungian that a reader not already committed to Jung will find some difficulty locking into the grid. The other problem is that the premise yields different methods and different insights and some are more attractive than others. Her chapter on Baudelaire and Wagner is striking and persuasive: there is no doubt that Wagner had a profound effect on Baudelaire's sensibility. But the demonstrable effect on Baudelaire's art seems finally rather minimal. The chapter on Tolstoy's "Kreutzer Sonata," on the other hand, renders with a stylish conviction the demonic, archetypal musical force of Tolstoy's text. And the chapter on Kandinsky is the triumph of the book, illuminating the extraordinary union of image, sound, and text in that remarkable artist. Everyone knows of Joyce's involvement with music of every kind, at the deepest possible level of his creative imagination: granted that, Knapp's chapter on "Eveline" seems not to take us very much farther. And her chapter on Sartre's Nausea seems inadvertently amusing. The starting point of her analysis is Roquetin's response to the old blues song: "Some of these days/You'll miss me, honey." Well, as almost everybody knows, it's "One of these days/You're gonna miss me honey." The translated version in Knapp's analysis not only has an impossibly clunky rhythm: it makes no sense. Somehow the idea of Roquetin's kinship with Bessie Smith falls apart on the first page of the chapter and it all simply goes to confirm our conviction that, when it comes to their ability to respond to American vernacular culture, much less the archetypal resonance of a blues-based jazz lyric, the French intellectuals have never had a clue...

Albert Camus, The Stranger (review)

182Philosophy and Literature pages on prominent friends, famüiars, and rivals ofher protagonist (e.g. Nizan, Aron, Merleau-Ponty, Bataüle); and she provides a fascinating assessment of such majorjournals as Esprit, Critique, and La Nouvelle Critique. More generaUy, Boschetti's work constitutes a suggestive reflection on the reasons texts are written and read in certain ways at certain times. Boschetti's work, however, is not entirely persuasive. She often relies on conventional psychology to account for certain attitudes: for instance, Zola's depiction of professors as faüed writers is explained by his flunking his exams and his being rejected as a candidate for the Académiefrançaise (p. 16). She also frequendy takes "sociological" shortcuts: the dispositions characterizing the personalists of Esprit—they are first-generation Catholic inteUectuals who come from the upwardly mobüe and salaried provincial (lower) middle class—account for their group ethos: "an ascetic and meritocratic, spiritualist, and elitist moral rectitude" (p. 156). Above all, in her attempt to prove that cultural production and cultural success are governed by the configuration of the cultural field, she leaves litde room for individual choice and action or, if one prefers, for disorder and chance. In spite of these reservations, I believe that Boschetti succeeds in showing how much a Bourdieu-inspired sociology of culture can contribute to literary and philosophical criticism and history. University of PennsylvaniaGerald Prince Albert Camus, The Stranger, by Patrick McCarthy; xii & 109 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, $5.95 paper. The Stranger is a twentieth-century classic, a book that defined us when we read it just after World War II, a book that continues to define us but that keeps shifting and multiplying its meanings with every new reader and interpretation . It is a "landmark"—to use the word for the series in which Patrick McCarthy's book has been published—an event that signaled a turning point in the craft of fiction and in self-understanding. Though we each have our own Meursault, our own interpretation of his story, we look forward to the appearance of still another among the thousands of studies of The Stranger, to see what discoveries have been made, what meanings have been added to the top of the mountain. It is a litde like watching Sisyphus at work: there wUl always be another reading to carry up. McCarthy's contribution to die endless interpretation of The Stranger, whUe more modest than his previous book on Camus, is like it in its brashness, Reviews183 liveliness, provocativeness, and willingness to take chances. Though it avoids the jargon of recent criticism, it uses elements of theories and methodologies from structuralism to deconstruction and reaches back to Marx and Freud for ideas that will explain the text. It also strives to be a synthesis of existing interpretations of The Stranger. The book opens with "Contexts," sketches of Camus's life and the social, cultural, and historical background of The Stranger. In Chapter 2, the bulk of the study, McCarthy examines the novel episode by episode, commenting on various aspects of each in the light of concepts drawn from structuralism, psychoanalysis, sociology, and theology. A third chapter places Camus's novel in the context of other works in the cycle of the Absurd and compares TL· Stranger with Sartre's Nausea and TL· Wall. The last chapter shows how Sartre and others shaped our understanding of TL· Stranger, evaluates influences, and ends with advice for further reading and a comment on Visconti's unsuccessful film of the story. "Meursault's Languages," perhaps the most important part of McCarthy's study, points out the various kinds of utterance—or silence—used in TL· Stranger, but stresses the languages of authority (the law, the courts, lawyers, police, etc.) and dissent (Meursault and his "friends," the oppressed, generally, both honest and criminal, the Arab victims) and shows how, finally, the language of authority is subverted by its victims. McCarthy's interest in language is one of the unifying threads of his essay. Another is what he terms the "psychoanalytical novel" in TL· Stranger, the "incestuous" character of Meursault's relationship with his mother and unconscious motivation in general in the fiction. In the...

Henry James's "Obscure Hurt": Can Autobiography Serve Biography?

and bibliographies posits the kinship of autobiography and biography, ranging them both under the aegis of history as categories of the literature of reference, kinds of writing determined by their presumed basis in verifiable fact. Yet it is precisely with regard to this central identifying feature of reference to a world beyond the text that theory of autobiography today differs from the practice of biography. Thus it has become commonplace for students of autobiography to assert that the past, the ostensible primary reference of such texts, is a fiction. As Burton Pike puts it, bluntly, past does not exist.' The world of biography, on the other hand, shunning life in the fast lane, seems to have largely maintained the traditional purity of its positivistic allegiance to fact, to the past. as recoverable reality. The lesson of the fictive biographer in Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938) is all too clear: once admit a doubt about the reality of the past and the entire project of biography begins to disintegrate. Abandoning his study of the Marquis de Rollebon, Antoine Roquentin is reduced at the last in Sartre's deterministic vision to an existence without memory, almost without identity, in which consciousness bubbles up discontinuously, from moment to moment, like gas. This split between autobiography and biography on the issue of reference is unfortunate, for work in each domain has much to offer the other when it comes to defining an appropriate model for life history. For biographers who tend to take reference too much for granted, the theory and practice of autobiography are instructive, for they demonstrate that simplistic notions of biographical fact need to be enlarged in order to include modes of fiction that often constitute the experiential reality of life history. At the same time, the example of biography can help to remind us that autobiography, for all the manifold fictions in which it is implicated, is nothing if not a referen-

Sabato's El tunel and the Existential Novel

Sabato's El tunel and the Existential Novel William Nelson (bio) Critics of Sábato's El túnel are agreed (insofar as they address the matter at all) that El túnel is an existential novel, but a clear definition of the form and the evidence that fits the book to the genre are not available in the criticism. It is the purpose of the present writing to establish the terms of the "existential" novel and to present the evidence that identifies El túnel as an example of that form. According to Professor Walcutt "all literature is based on some concept of the nature of man" (4). In order to make the case that El túnel is an existential novel, it is necessary first to describe those aspects of existential thought that bear on the literary exploitation of existential concerns. A complication is that it is in the nature of existentialism to make it more appropriate to identify the assumptions by which the existentialist arrives at his position rather than to cite the details of his particular philosophic synthesis. Existentialism, with its emphasis on the personal, unique, and therefore subjective, is better described as a philosophic method than as a philosophic system. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason describes a philosophic system based on reason, but it is to a denial of the exclusivity of reason as a means for identifying the real world that existentialist thinkers have addressed themselves. Their intuitive approach [End Page 459] denies the possibility of a final solution to the problems of existence other than those painfully derived by each individual. Thus it is more accurate to speak of "existentialists" than it is to speak of an existential movement, if by the latter term is meant a group of thinkers sharing a common set of final assumptions. In its literary manifestation, existentialism shares some of the difficulties of romanticism in that it is difficult to form an exclusive and operational definition. It is possible, however, to describe the philosophical positions of the existentialists and to indicate how these positions have determined the form of their literary works. The demonstration of a thesis must incorporate both necessary conditions and sufficient conditions to be termed valid. It is necessary, therefore, but not sufficient to show that Ernesto Sábato was familiar with the existentialists and their ideas. Sábato was in Paris during the last years of the decade of the 1930s when existentialism was a part of the ideological climate. His early essays, collected under the title One and the Universe, contain the idea that man must reject the reductivity of positivistic science and return to a balance that incorporates the intuitive, the irrational, and the subjective. The statement may appear to be atypical, coming as it does from a man whose academic training through the doctorate was in theoretical physics. In his subsequent book Heterodoxy, also a collection of essays on several subjects, there is a discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading literary exponent of existentialism. Yet another collection of essays by Sábato, Men and Gears, contains an essay entitled "The Existential Reaction," which includes commentary on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Sartre, and Camus: the grand pantheon of literary existentialism. Such interest on the part of Sábato, but not all of the publications cited above, antedate the appearance of El túnel in 1948. So much for the necessary conditions—the external case. The major assumptions and directions of literary existentialism are by this time in the public domain and subject to general agreement and description (cf. Kern). Among the existential themes or ideas that have been reflected in literary works is the contrast between the private self and the public mask. Several of Kierkegaard's illustrative stories in otherwise philosophical treatises make the distinction, and it is a major theme in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. Another theme is that of the absurd man resolved to live meaningfully in a world without meaning; Sartre's Nausea is the obvious example. The man of good faith, who is determined to live authentically, is a theme implicit in all the major existentialist writings. The assertion that man's freedom is absolute...

Literature as Prophecy: Sartre's Nausea

Literature as Prophecy: Sartre's Nausea

Alberto Moravia: Fetishism and Figuration

Alberto Moravia is probably Italy's most prolific novelist, and in spite of a host of post-modernist contenders for title, he is unquestionably its most controversial. Over span of some fifty years, Moravia has published better than forty book-length works. Novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, film writer, travel writer, journalist and editor; theatre critic for Italian weekly L'Espresso; co-founder and editor of Nuovi argomenti-Moravia's presence on Italian literary scene is an insistent one. Not one week passes, it seems, that Moravia does not publish something. And everything he publishes contributes to growth of what Italians call il caso Moravia, that scandal which has continued from his first novel, The Time of Indifference (1929), down to his latest, Time of Desecration (1979). Moravia's first novel scandalized Italian public by virtue of its brutal portrayal of bourgeois life under Fascism and its inauguration of a new realism in Italian letters. The realistic portrayal of Italian society was a secondary result, so it seems, of a more primary apprehension of a psychological, even ontological problem, that of man's need for an authenticity which conditions of his life rendered impossible. Moravia has often asserted that The Time of Indifference was first Existentialist novel of Europe, as well as first genuinely Marxist and Freudian novel. The question of priority aside, this claim has a certain general validity insofar as Moravia had from first, apparently, hit upon common concern with question of authenticity that each of these movements had problematized. Predating Sartre's Nausea by nine years, The Time of Indifference is archetypical of catalogue of forms of inauthenticity which Moravia would examine persistently over course of his long writing career. The title of The Time of Indifference (Gli indifferenti, literally, the indifferent ones)' prefigures Moravia's obsessive interest in forms which inauthenticity, modes of our failures to connect meaningfully with reality, can take. Subsequent titles of his works represent a veritable anatomy of such failed connections: mistaken ambitions (Le ambizioni sbagliate, 1935); conformism (II conformista, 1951); disdain (II disprezzo, 1954); boredom (La noia, 1960); automatism and fetishism (L'automa and II feticcio, 1963); and fixation or bad faith (L'attenzione, 1965). To this list we must of course add those forms of inauthenticity examined so ironically in Moravia's last work, emptiness and desecration (La vita interiore, 1979). This last novel adds terrorism to by now familiar Moravian topoi of sex and money. Significantly, La vita interiore (Time of Desecration) was banned in Rome under Italy's obscenity laws, rekindling once again issues originally raised in 1929 with appearance of The Time of Indifference. The work has been dismissed as simply filthy by some reviewers and cited by others as proof of

The Experiences of Nausea and Adventure: An Analysis of the Opposition of Existence and Being in Sartre's Nausea

The Experiences of Nausea and Adventure: An Analysis of the Opposition of Existence and Being in Sartre's Nausea

Artistic Creation as an Act in Sartre's Nausea

Artistic Creation as an Act in Sartre's Nausea