Beyond Ennui

NAUSEA (238 pp.)--Jean-Paul Sartre --New Directions ($3).

WHAT Is LITERATURE? (306 pp.)--Jean-Paul Sartre -- Philosophical Library ($4.75).

To the U.S. public, the writing career of Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre has unreeled itself both forward and backward in the past five years. His latest plays (or what is left of them after translation) have been produced in Manhattan, while publishers have busied themselves resurrecting his prewar fiction. His second book, The Wall, a volume of short stories first published in France in 1939, was brought out in the U.S. last year (TIME, Dec. 27). It is now followed by his first and most famous novel, Nausea, a book that made a splash among Paris intellectuals in 1938. Sartre's recent essays in What Is Literature? are, by comparison, distinguished for their sanity.

Nausea is the expression in fiction of Sartre's response to being alive. Descartes, who titillated the 17th Century intellectual world, thought he was creating a new philosophy on St. Augustine's premise: "I think, therefore I am." Sartre's fundamental observation, an overstatement of something found in the writings of Kierkegaard and the German existentialist, Heidegger, may be paraphrased as "I exist and find it sickening." The experience recounted in Nausea is one of deep physical and metaphysical horror, well beyond the ennui, already sufficiently sick, that such French post-romantic writers as Baudelaire liked to wallow in.

Sweaty Me. The novel is in the form of a diary kept by a solitary scholar in 1932 in a French provincial town. Starting with mild expressions of disgust at existence, the entries run a truly resourceful gamut of the grotesque, the dispiriting, and the desperate. There is not a human being in the book who is not in some way loathsome, and the hyperconsciousness of the diarist soon gets to the point of seeing everything in a light both ghastly and obscene. One of Novelist Sartre's revelations:

"I see my hand spread out on the table. It lives -- it is me . . . It is lying on its back. It shows me its fat belly. It looks like an animal turned upside down. The fingers are the paws. I amuse myself by moving them very rapidly, like the claws of a crab which has fallen on its back . . . I can't suppress it, nor can I suppress the rest of my body, the sweaty warmth which soils my shirt . . . If I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing . . ."

Sartre's writing is occasionally much better than this pathological reverie, and in spots the book has an ingenuity and sharpness of detail worthy of first-rate talent. But the paradox of the central vision in Nausea is so forced and barefaced that most readers will not be able to accept it as anything but a perversion of the truth, a degenerated twisting of the classic experience of Western man.

Busy Reader. The essays in What Is Literature? include a long one on the situation of the writer in various epochs. Written with Sartre's characteristic energy and the faint overtones of sounder sense that he has acquired since World War II and the French resistance, it places his own writing in the same class with the work of Andre Malraux and Antoine de St. Exupery--Frenchmen of action, compelled to do their work in a time of disintegrating values when any act had to be its own justification. Thus he seems to write an apologia for such books as Nausea as having been conditioned by a certain time and place:

"Our elders wrote for idle souls, but for the public which we, in our turn, were going to address, the vacation was over. It was composed of men of our sort who, like us, were expecting war and death. For these readers without leisure, occupied without respite with a single concern, there was only one fitting subject . . . their war and their death . . ."

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