Existence is not pleasant to see” (Contat and Rybalkai: 53 andOR 1695 ).
As Sartre gradually moved away from any pretense of a “transcendental
reduction” that would “bracket” the being-question, he remained com-
mitted to our immediate access to being that was not an essence to be
conceptualized but the terminus of an experience to be shared.
Kierkegaard had called “oblique communication” his poetic method of
inviting the reader to “suspend disbelief ” in order to experience as one’s
own what was described either as another’s or as anyone’s limiting
circumstance. Of the many situations portrayed in this story, four bear
particular significance for the philosophy that Sartre is in the process of
formulating: the nature of the subject, the relation between art and life,
the problem of humanism and, of course, the experience of nausea itself.
The spectator self
Again, the novel springs from the young Sartre’s experience of contin-
gency, love of the cinema, penchant for the imaginary, and desire to
reach the concrete rather than floating above it in academic idealist
fashion. Its second version, completed in Berlin, reflects his balance
between Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology, though the tilt
at this stage is toward Husserl. It is a diary that at first blush suggests
the product of an ego, the kind of Cartesian relation that “constitutes”
what it observes. But as the story unfolds, it is the diarist who seems
to be “constituted” by the diary, not the reverse. As the author of
Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre is exhibiting the possibility of achieving
a unity without appeal to a unifying subject. But at the same time, he is
diagnosing a (moral) malady which he will subsequently name
“inauthenticity.”
The tracing of a “non-egological” consciousness of a failing author
over a month in his life anticipates a major thesis ofBeing and Nothing-
ness, already on Sartre’s mind and the innovative character ofNausea
itself^26 – Sartre’s proposal of a consciousness free of an ego in his early
Transcendence of the Ego. Now we observe it concretized in the neurotic
behavior of the failing author.
(^26) For the chronology of Roquentin’s stay in Bouville as recounted inNausea, seeOR
1724 – 1725. The entire experience recorded in the diary spans four weeks and two days.
The spectator self 145