Sartre’s Nausea: How to live your life like a song!

So Nietzsche once said that without music, life would be a mistake. Now that’s pretty dramatic and I don’t plan to get into any Nietzsche today. But his emphasis on the importance of music and art in our lives makes for a good segue for today’s topic. So what I want to talk a bit about in this episode is Jean Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea and the important role that music plays in it. I think maybe one of the questions it asks us to consider is something like this: What would it be like to live your life like a song? 

Ok so in Sartre’s great novel Nausea, the main character, Roquentin suddenly and dramatically comes to realize something about existence. What’s revealed to him when he experiences the things around him, in certain moments, is that it’s all contingent and absurd! In other words, he comes to understand that existence can be no more justified than non-existence. Nothing is necessary, existence is not necessary, existence is without foundation. Or to put it another way, Roquentin comes to realize that things didn’t have to be this way, that they could have been otherwise, or just not be at all. And that includes him too of course! His existence too is completely contingent and without any foundation whatsoever. So it’s all this, this complete absurdity and groundlessness of existence, that makes him feel sick or gives him nausea.  

Ok, but here’s the thing: Roquentin eventually temporarily overcomes his nausea. So how does this happen? Well, his feeling of nausea begins to abate when, while sitting in an old pub, he hears an American jazz song being played on a record. So as he’s listening, what he comments on is the necessity of the music, how pure and strong it is. That’s to say, each note in the melody of the saxophone leads to the next with a necessity. As if each note had to be that way, and in that sequence, and just couldn’t have been anything else.  Now while Roquentin is listening to this, he feels like he’s in the music, and he feels like the necessity he’s experiencing in the song is bestowing a necessity on his own existence too. Everything is smooth and he moves with ease and his life makes sense. But eventually the song ends and then everything dissipates and breaks into pieces again. Contingency and disorder reinstate themselves!

Ok, so what’s the message here? Well, it’s something like this: It’s that music and literature and art confer some necessity upon this deplorably contingent world of ours and so in some sense help to justify our existence! And by the way, Sartre’s not the only one to say something like this, so did, in their own ways, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Camus, among others. 

Anyway, the point is that music elevates us from the world of meaningless existence, absurdity and contingency to one of necessity and beauty. Without art, things present themselves without rhyme or reason. Everything could have been otherwise. And in fact there’s no reason for things to exist at all. But music is the medicine to the malady of existence. It’s an anti nausea pill! It restores to us a sense that not everything is arbitrary and meaningless. It picks up all the divided pieces and turns it into a cohesive whole. It constructs fixity in a transient world. It reminds us that it’s possible to leave the viscosity of the world and attain the pure and solid cleanliness of being.  

Ok but I think that Sartre maybe has a larger counsel for us in mind here too. That’s to say, I think the larger point is that we too can and should model our life on music and melodies. In other words, we can justify our existence by turning it into a work of necessity, a work of art. And actually that’s what Roquentin resolves to do. After having experienced the wonderful music, he decides he’s going to try to take all the disorder out of his life and to really be something, and he’s going to be something by doing something, namely, he’s going to ground or justify his existence, create necessity, by writing a book. In other words, he’s going to create his own essence through the act of writing! 

But here’s the thing,  it’s not ultimately about Roquentin, is it? No, it’s about Sartre himself. Roquentin’s salvation is Sartre’s! It’s by creating the novel Nausea that he's created himself, made himself as strong and necessary as that saxophone note in that Jazz song!