ABSTRACT

In his short novel Nausea (1938), Jean Paul Sartre examines bourgeois French culture on the eve of war. Before the narrator leaves Bouville, the provincial harbor town where he has grown up, a town that represents the bourgeois desire for security and predictability, he takes a tram to a hill overlooking the town-to step outside of the town’s taken for grantedness, to view it from a more detached distance. It is Sunday, and he watches as the good people of Bouville flow out of the churches and into the streets, to take their afterchurch promenades along the bay. “All they have ever seen is trained water running from taps,” he says, “light which fills bulbs when you turn on the switch, half-breed, bastard trees held up with crutches.” They are given proof, over and over again each day, that the world obeys fixed and unchanging laws, that everything is controlled mechanically. Objects fall at the same rate in a vacuum, lead melts at 335 degrees centigrade, the public park is open until four p.m., the final street-car leaves the Hotel de Ville each evening at precisely 11:05 p.m. All of this gives the good bourgeoisie of Bouville a sense of security. So they are peaceful and law-abiding, if a bit morose. Every day is pretty much like the others. People go about their business. Nature, as an unpredictable force, has been banished to a realm outside the city gates. Or it has been rounded-up and placed in parks and zoos within the city where it can be carefully supervised. Yet, this security and predictability are an illusion. “What they take for constancy,” the narrator observes, “is only habit and can change tomorrow.” He questions what it might take to wake the fine people of Bouville from their sleep of reason and speculates that it might take some natural catastrophe. “Then what good would their dykes, bulwarks, power houses, furnaces and pile drivers be to them?”1