Reading the first half of Nausea reminded me of the few instances in my life when my mind has been altered, through sleep deprivation or through substances. The world takes on a different cast. It can be either malevolent or blissful, but usually the former, full of grotesque shapes glimpsed through the corner of the eye, or ideas dawning not with the slow surety of a realization, but with the stab of fear that is paranoia.
I recognize the state that Nausea’s narrator is in. I can appreciate it. It is amazing, how well that feeling comes through, even though the text has been translated from another language. Sartre succeeds in explaining something that is almost impossible to explain in words as you’re feeling it, much less through the written text of a novel.
Nausea’s unreliable narrator ambles through life, seeing human relationships, objects, other people and his own life from a skewed perspective. Even his memories of the past can’t be trusted; “My memories are like the coins in the devil’s purse: when it was opened, nothing was found in it but dead leaves.” The narrator admits that his interpretation of the world is insubstantial, not to be trusted. What, then, can we infer of his reality?
To paraphrase what was said in last night’s discussion, with modernity came the idea that reality is subjective, flexible, that one’s experiences were not solid, unalterable truth but instead open to a variety of interpretations. This “modern” awareness of the world is both comforting and terrifying. It is positive in the sense that one is free to shape his or her own reality, without limitation, with or without the sanction of the outside world. But that is also what is so frightening about it. Where, when, do we stop? How can we ever trust that anything is real? How is it possible to make judgments about anything, to know anything, when the basis of those judgments might well be as slippery and unreliable as our memory?
In some ways, this view of human lives gives dignity and importance to the experiences of the individual. It means that one does not have to use the yardstick of any particular arbitrary standard or canon or “expert opinion” to validate and qualify his or her own existence. This is freeing. I think, as well, this is something we all take for granted as inhabitants of a truly modern age. And yet, it makes the world such a precarious place to be. It means that, when we are stumbling around in a nauseated haze, like Sartre’s protagonist, there will be nothing solid to grab hold of, no anchor.
– Aly
