A classic, a Nobel-Prize winner, the literary work of existentialism alongside Camus’ L’Etranger. How is one to feel after Nausea? How is one supposed to feel after existentialism? This not between existentialism and marxism, ther is nothing but pitiuless withering contempt, for those who have not been enlightened, who have not had the awakening to authetic humanity. That is, not a phony; there is something very similar between the astetic hippy and his concern for the fake, the fraud, the tool; and the existentialist, who sneers at the petty conventions and platitutes of the bourgeois world: the smiling youth, in love without knowing why, the quarelling couples unsure of themselves, all that being “motionless and empty, plunged in a horrible ectasy.” It is easy to be immune to this kind of writing and philosophy; I’ve read Sartre, I’ve passed my existential phase, or so I assumed that it would be easy enough to dismiss, especially Roquentin whose awareness of what he says is pettiness and bad faith is just as easily the crankiness of a loner, disaffected and isolated from any sense of meaningful human contact and construing it as enlightenment rather than failure.
And yet the Self-Taught Man. He, more than any of the overt philosophy of Nausea haunts me. Because he is, in a way, me. And Roquentin’s criticism and contempt for him is withering and crippling, especially to a young student beginning to feel that the academic and intellectual world is a trifle too serious and demanding than his dedication will allow. Self-education, autodidaticism, I have followed those paths, spent years removed from post-secondary education, from the halls of hallowed knowledge to ‘expand my mind’ in an equally cliched fashion. No discipline to my reading, no conscious effort to formulate and understand it. Just reading, and pretending reading is knowledge. That is the Self-Taught Man, who shrinks from responsibility and commitment to ‘deeper’ knowledge, whether of the history Roquentin studies or of existential truth as well. The coward’s way out: that is the question, isn’t it? Easy humanism, easy socialism, easy assurance, easy confidence in civilization, in man, in society, in love. Too easy. Struggle then? Only to see the awful energy of life; but I have, and I flee.
Almost every existentialist work I”ve read demands an extremely personal response, more so than almost any other style of novel, play or poem. The private Catholic poetry of Cesar Vallejo, or the compulsive love of surrealism do not affect me so. The novels of Victor Serge, Bruno Janieski, Ilya Ehrenberg, even Celine, do not have that same forcing of introspection, of questioning, of a claustrophibic, inescapable feeling of crisis, of personal judgement and decision and interrogation, now, now, now.
