Sartre’s Nausea centers on a root’s opaque being overwhelming consciousness

Evidence

I had become fascinated by him a year earlier. On a whim, I spent some of my sixteenth-birthday money on his 1938 novel Nausea, mainly because I liked the Salvador Dalí image on the Penguin cover: a bile-green rock formation and a dripping watch. I also liked the cover blurb, which called Nausea ‘a novel of the alienation of personality and the mystery of being’. I wasn’t sure what alienation meant, although I was a perfect example of it at the time. But I had no doubt that it would be my kind of book. It was indeed: when I started reading, I bonded at once with its gloomy outsider protagonist Antoine Roquentin, who spends his days drifting disconsolately around the provincial seaside town of ‘Bouville’ (modelled on Le Havre, where Sartre had been stuck as a teacher). Roquentin sits in cafés and listens to blues records instead of getting on with the biography he is supposed to be writing. He walks by the sea and throws pebbles into its grey, porridge-like depths. He goes to a park and stares at the gnarled exposed root of a chestnut tree, which looks to him like boiled leather and threatens to overwhelm him by the sheer opaque force of its being. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 83

Categorization

• XREF: Roquentin’s encounter with the chestnut root is the founding scene of Sartre’s concept of being-in-itself (en-soi) versus consciousness — this passage primes that definition which later chapters will develop explicitly. — connects to: Sartre’s nausea insight came from mescaline-tinged visions of contingency — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 333; For Sartre the body forms the inescapable background of all consciousness — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 98; Sartre divides being into free for-itself consciousness and inert in-itself matter — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 496 (+5 more)
• DEFINE: Concretizes Sartre’s central theme: the brute, opaque ‘being’ of things that resists our conceptual ordering — the moment where ontology becomes experience.

Broader Connections

• Fundamental nausea reveals the facticity of existence beneath all empirical disgusts #expands (0.95)
• Nausea reveals facticity through the body’s inescapable belonging to being #expands (0.90)
• Sartre divides being into free for-itself consciousness and inert in-itself matter #expands (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 496
• Sartre’s nausea insight came from mescaline-tinged visions of contingency #qualifies (0.82) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 333
• For Sartre the body is a willed instrument that consciousness commands #complicates (0.80) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 119
• For Sartre the body forms the inescapable background of all consciousness #expands (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 98
• Sartre’s own writings drift from lived body toward instrumental body #complicates (0.72) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 99
• Sartre’s mescaline trip produced lasting hallucinations of lobsters and staring facades #qualifies (0.70) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 332