by Ken Coates
Roquentin decides to abandon his biography of Rollebon. He finds no point in one existent trying to recreate the life of another. Moreover when Roquentin thinks of his own past he can find nothing firm or reliable but only vague memories. If he can hardly hold on to his own past, he muses, how can he understand and recreate another’s? It would be more like writing a work of fiction. He decides to abandon his project but has no idea what to do with himself. He writes, “I am free: there is absolutely no more reason for living, all the ones I have tried have given way and I can’t imagine any more of them. I am still fairly young, I still have enough strength to start again. But do I have to start again?” (209) However he decides to move to Paris and, as we shall see later, he leaves with a project of sorts in mind which gives him some hope.
Suffering: Roquentin is very much a thinker. He is introspective, self-centered and concerned primarily with metaphysical aspects of existence. He personally suffers the anguish of being a part of existence which is without any purpose or justification. But he is not unaware of the common sufferings of human beings that he encounters in Bouville.
He hears Lucie, the cleaning woman at his hotel, complaining “for the hundredth time” about her husband to the landlady. “She has an unhappy home life”, Roquentin informs us. “Her husband does not beat her, is not unfaithful to her, but he drinks, he comes home drunk every evening. I’m sure he is burning his candle at both ends …It gnaws at her…she is morose all day…..weary and sullen. I hear her humming, to keep herself from thinking” (20). “it’s there”, she says touching her throat, “it won’t go down”. I wonder if sometimes she doesn’t wish she were free of this monstrous sorrow, of these mutterings which start as soon as she stops singing….. if she doesn’t wish to suffer once and for all, to drown herself in despair”(21).
One night, while out strolling on the Boulevard Noir he notices two people. The woman was pulling the man by his sleeve. The man says, “you are going to shut your trap now, aren’t you?” ‘But the woman still keeps talking. He pushes her away roughly and leaves without looking back. Suddenly deep hoarse sounds come from her, tear at her and fill the whole street with extraordinary violence. “Charles, I beg you, you know what I told you? Charles, come back, I’ve had enough, I’m too miserable.” “Suddenly I recognize her. It is Lucie, the charwoman…This burning flesh, this face shining with sorrow. I dare not offer her my support, but she must be able to call for it if need be” (105). It is Lucie but “transfigured, beside herself, suffering with a frenzied generosity….she opens her mouth, she is suffocating…I am afraid she will fall: she is too sickly to stand this unwonted sorrow. But she does not move, she seemed turned to stone….she should be taken by the arm, led back to the lights, in the midst of people: down there one cannot suffer so acutely” (106).
On another day Roquentin looks at the local news paper. It reports a “sensational news. Little Lucienne’s body has been found…..The criminal has fled. The child was raped..and strangled (107)”. They found her body, the fingers clawing at the mud. “Her body still exists, her flesh bleeding. But she no longer exists”. Her body violated, “She felt this other flesh pushing into her own…Raped”. Roquentin cannot stop thinking of her.
The final episode concerns the Self-Taught Man.. AS Roquentin comes to return his books to the library he sees the Self-Taught Man sitting at the table with two school boys near him. He makes timid advances towards one of the boys lightly stroking his hand and whispering to him. He is spotted doing so by the librarian, a little Corsican. A fat woman sitting at a table nearby was also watching. The Corsican came up stealthily from behind watching him. “I saw you”, he shouted, ‘drunk with fury’, “I saw you this time…Don’t think I am not wise to your little game…And this is going to cost you plenty…We have courts in France for people like you”. (221-2)
The Self-Taught Man made a feeble protest but went on reading. It is as though he was not taking any notice of the Corsican. Meanwhile the two boys left. Egged on by the fat woman the Corsican resumed his violent diatribe. Suddenly he gave a little whine and crashed his fist against the Self-Taught Man’s nose. “For a second I could only see his eyes, his magnificent eyes, wide with shame and horror above a sleeve and swarthy fist….his nose began pouring blood”. “I am going”, he said, as if to himself. The Corsican hit him again. The woman next to me turned pale, her eyes were gleaming. “Rotter”, she said, “serves him right” (224).
“I caught up with the Self-Taught Man at the foot of the stairs”, writes Roquentin. “I was annoyed, ashamed at his shame, I didn’t know what to say to him. ‘Come to the drugstore with me’, I told him awkwardly. He didn’t answer…..His mouth and cheek were smeared with blood. ‘Come on’, I said, taking him by the arm. He shuddered and pulled away violently. But you can’t stay by yourself, someone has to wash your face and fix you up’ said Roquentin. ‘Let me go, I beg you, sir, let me go’. He was on the verge of hysterics: I let him go” (225). All these instances confirm Roquentin’s feeling that what he sees all around him is a sort of ‘messy suffering’.
Boredom: For Roquentin boredom is a part of existence. We are prisoners of time, which has to be passed. But time is not easily passed. “indolent, arms dangling, I go to the window. The Building Yard, the Fence, the Old Station – the Old Station, the Fence, the Building Yard. I give such a big yawn that tears come into my eyes”(45). He frequents the cinema and sometimes just goes to have something to eat in order to ‘pass the time’. Elsewhere he writes, “ I’m bored that’s all. From time to time I yawn so profoundly that tears roll down my cheek. It is a profound boredom, profound, the profound heart of existence, the very matter I am made of” (210). Roquentin knows that boredom is simply the awareness of our suspension in time. And if we do not fill up time with some activity or distraction we experience the fundamental vacuity of existence in the form of boredom. He sees a game of cards in progress at the café and thinks “they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can’t be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates” (32).
The ‘solution’ to existence: Roquentin has abandoned his biography of Rollebon and is preparing to leave for Paris. He still does not know what he will do. He has private means and does not need to ‘work’. But what is he going to do with his life, his existence, given to him, as he says, for ‘nothing’. He ruminates on these and other matters. And then a solution comes to him from unexpected quarters.
During his stay in Bouville, the only thing that freed Roquentin temporarily from his nausea and awareness of existence and even gave him a feeling of happiness was a jazz record that he heard from time to time at the café at the hotel. It was an old rag time: “Some of these days you’ll miss me honey” sung by a black woman. He found the music almost moving. As he comes to say good bye to the patronne at the hotel before leaving for Paris, Madeleine the waitress holds up his favorite record and offers to play it for one last time. The record begins. The music and the song seem to have a life of their own. As the record plays Roquentin feels that it cuts through existence, the drab, messy, formless suffering that seems to surround him. It creates a world of its own, it moves through another time. Suddenly Roquentin understands why the music affects him in the way it does (233-4). It was the tune, the melody – something that did not exist yet had a life, a presence, a reality of its own. Although it unveiled itself through existents – such as the record, the gramophone, the needle – it was beyond their reach. If I were to get up, thinks Roquentin, and rip the record in two I will not reach it because It does not exist. It is beyond, yet it is. And he too wanted to be. That “is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bounds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp precise sound of a saxophone note” (234). Roquentin realizes that that is the secret of the appeal of this rath
er insignificant piece of music. It was created by existents - perhaps a jew in New York who wrote the song and a negress who sang it – but their lives seem to him almost justified. So “the two of them are saved…. May be they thought they were lost irrevocably, drowned in existence” (236-7). Roquentin thinks of them with a tenderness that he finds moving. They had “washed themselves of the sin of existing. Not completely, of course, but as much as any man can”.
This idea suddenly knocks him over. And he thinks he too could create something that will have internal coherence and order, a life of its own. It will have to be a book but not the kind of history book he was writing. It will have to be some other kind of work. A story, a novel perhaps, that will be “beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence” (237). It will be a means of transcending existence with its time-bound and perishable nature. The work will endure and indirectly confer some meaning to his life as its creator. As he remarks, “some of its clarity might fall on my past”. And then because of it he might be able to think of his life “without repugnance” (238). With this resolution the book ends.
Nausea and existence: an assessment: Sartre’s work differs from the philosophical and literary perspectives examined earlier in that its rejection of existence is almost exclusively metaphysical. It is the contingent nature of existence that troubles Roquentin most. Although as we noted, he is not insensitive to the suffering he comes across, it is not life’s pain and suffering that makes him condemn existence. It is the encounter between the reasoning mind, his consciousness with its need for meaning and purpose and the irrational nature of existence that is the source of the feeling of absurdity and superfluity in Nausea. Anti-natalism is of course implicit in the novel but perhaps the only direct reference to it is Roquentin’s remark, “people are fools enough to have children” (212).
Roquentin’s solution to the problem of existence is typically an intellectual and aesthetic one. It is by using his existence as a means of creating a work of art – in this case a literary-philosophical one – that he hopes to ‘justify’ his existence and make it acceptable to himself. We are reminded of Zapffe’s idea of ‘sublimation’, one of the ways of coming to terms with existence. Where Sartre shares common ground with Zapffe, and to a lesser extent Benatar, is in his perception of the ways in which people evade the superfluity and absurdity of existence. For example, they do it by underpinning it with the idea of a God or creator, by defining reality in terms of social roles and relationships and by taking a benign and surface view of things, e.g. of nature, while ignoring its deeper and ugly reality. He castigates humanism for its worship of man and pooh-poohs the Self-Taught Man’s notion of giving life a meaning by making a voluntary commitment to values or a cause. Roquentin considers this kind of justification of life as a ‘lie’.
In short, all these forms of refusal to face up to the fundamental nature of existence amount to ‘bad faith’ or inauthentic modes of existence. This is important in that, ironically, later on Sartre’s existentialism will take precisely the approach suggested by the Self-Taught Man and Sartre (1948) would claim his philosophy to be a form of humanism. But in Nausea he is quite radical and uncompromising in his rejection of existence. This work is paradigmatic of the rejectionist viewpoint albeit largely from a metaphysical rather than moral standpoint. Through Roquentin’s personal predicament and anguish we can feel and experience the problem of the contingency and futility of existence.
Chapter 5: Summary and Conclusions
Rejectionism: From Philosophy to Practice
The common thread running through the religious, philosophical and literary perspectives presented in the chapters above is the rejection of existence. The reasons for saying no to existence vary somewhat as do the paths of liberation envisioned in these different narratives. Naturally the literary perspective does not prescribe a course of action but is primarily an expression of the problematic nature of existence. However what they have in common, although the emphasis varies, is the keen awareness of the pain and suffering that living creatures have to undergo and the need to end this suffering. A second and subsidiary theme is the pointlessness and futility of existence which renders the entire process, including the suffering involved, unnecessary. A corollary to all this is that the ‘good’ that life also contains can in no way be regarded as justifying the ‘evil’, with pain and suffering as the predominant features.
Rejectionism does not believe in the calculus of pain and pleasure not only because any such exercise is impossible given that there is no common unit of measurement but also because its moral condemnation of existence is based on the irremediable presence of ‘evil’ in the world. It follows that to endorse existence is to condone evil, indeed to invite evil, albeit unintentionally. It follows that those who support and endorse existence are responsible, even if indirectly, for the crimes of humanity. To summarize: the rejectionist viewpoint has a long history stretching over millennia and a core of basic beliefs. Justifiably then rejectionism may be identified as a distinct attitude to life, a more or less coherent worldview.
An important point to be made is that If rejection of existence involves value judgment, so does its acceptance. For human beings the acceptance of existence is as much an ideological stance as is its rejection. But we seem to be a long way from realizing this. Instead life is accepted as simply natural, the default position so to speak. The vast majority of people outside the developed world reproduce ‘automatically’, i.e. without any thought or conscious decision. In the absence of contraception It just happens as a byproduct of coitus and having children is considered as simply ‘natural’ and normal. Here humans behave no differently from animals. Put in its social and cultural context it can also be seen simply as ‘conventional’ behavior. In the less-developed world and among the poor, with little education and the struggle to survive, we can scarcely speak of natalist behavior in ideological terms.
But among the people of the developed world with higher standards of life and education, ‘choice’ is a reality in regard to such things as marriage, procreation, and the number and spacing of children. Here we have to speak in terms of following, consciously or otherwise, an ideology of procreation and the perpetuation of existence. For in this context we can no longer put forward the excuse of acting ‘naturally’ or traditionally. To do so would be to act in ‘bad faith’, to borrow an existential concept. It would be to evade responsibility for our act. Each person has the obligation to think for themselves and consider the nature and consequences of their action. For the point is that we have moved far along the path of development. Increasingly it is no longer the ‘natural’ that shapes our lives and conduct. Rationality and technology have together moved our lives far away from naturalistic behavior.
Not surprisingly ‘why children’ is a question that is being asked increasingly in the developed world and the answers are often confused. Respondents are frequently at a loss to find coherent reasons for their natalist behavior. As one commentator (Ventura 2007, 1) puts it, ‘Americans ask every conceivable question about children and receive endless answers from the expert and not so expert….but one most basic question goes unasked and unanswered: what are children for?’ The same writer states that one possible answer is that they are needed to carry on the species and to pass on and extend the human heritage. Apart from this the ‘biggest societal function that children serve today is to spend money or to have money spent on them’(2). His conclusion? ‘When raising a family is a choice rather than a necessity (as it used to be in pre-industrial, pre-modern societies), we are on uncharted territory without map or compass and it’s no wonder so many become irretrievably lost’ (2). Nicki DeFago (2005, 52) reports that on the rare occasion when people are asked why they became parents they are mostly ‘flummoxed’. A popular reason proffered is the ‘maternal instinct’ or ‘biological urge’ (52). Many parents do not think of it as a choice, she writes. Strong, if silent and indirect social pressure, ensures co
nformity to what is considered ‘right’. A corollary to this is that voluntary childlessness still remains taboo, a form of deviant behavior (9, 12-3).
We should note, however, as Benatar and others, e.g. Overall (2012), point out children have a wide variety of ‘uses’ or functions. Potential parents may not be conscious of these since having children is considered simply ‘normal’ or ‘natural’. But that does not mean that these parental and other interests involved are not important. Let us remind ourselves of a few of these. Starting a family, i.e. having your ‘own’ (genetically) child and raising it, is one of the principal reasons for marriage. It provides the couple with a ‘life’ together and a bond. It also locks in the parents and children in a lifelong relationship which is unique. The child is dependent on the parent until it reaches adulthood. Furthermore, in old age and illness or other situations of dependency both sides feel a moral obligation, if not also an emotional attachment, to care for the other. The emotional bonding between the parent and child remains an important intrinsic element. The upshot of all this is that the childless are likely to miss out on these and to live with the deprivations and other negatives that ensue. On the other hand they are spared the many hardships and frustrations of raising a child. In sum there are costs and benefits of childlessness whether voluntary or otherwise. Rejectionists therefore also pay a price for their choice, the deprivations being felt more acutely in old age.
Parental interests apart, we are still a long way from realizing that whether or not to support human existence is a question of moral and metaphysical choice. The individual has the right, and a duty, to say yes or no. The point is that both positions are ideological. Natalism can no longer be treated as ‘natural’ behavior that requires no justification (Overall 2012, 2-4). Why in spite of all the sufferings of human existence we wish to perpetuate it demands a clear and rational rather than an incoherent or conventional response. It is interesting to note that these issues are beginning to be recognized as important. Thus in a recent work on the philosophy of procreation, Christine Overall ( 2), who is not an anti-natalist observes ‘In contemporary Western culture….one needs to have reasons not to have children, but no reasons are required to have them’. Having children is the ‘default’ position and not having is ‘what requires explanation and justification’ (3). Indeed she argues that these ‘implicit assumptions are…. the opposite of what they ought to be’. The burden of justification ‘should rest primarily on those who choose to have children’ because bringing a new and vulnerable human being into existence needs ‘more careful justification and reasoning’ than non-procreation (3). Children cannot simply be a means to serve parental or other, e.g., societal, interests and she emphasizes the ethical dimension involved in procreation. But her logic concerning procreation could be extended to include existence itself. We take it for granted but it too needs justification. In short to the ethical dimension of procreation we need to add the metaphysical dimension. To procreate is to endorse existence with all that is implied by that decision.