If the Last Man reads Nietzsche, what then?
Sartre’s Nausea answers this question, and it’s not a pretty picture. The novel’s anti-hero, Roquentin, undertakes a distinctively modern enterprise, a diary, in order “to see clearly” and to “classify” the “small happening” of his life, which changes imperceptibly. (Hence his desk-clerking: observer of endless comings and goings.) He lacks “self-knowledge,” puzzling over the Cartesian question, Have I changed, or have objects changed? He is a man of ressentiment, for whom small, unconscious sentiments build up, resulting in angry seemingly sudden decisions—rather as a political revolution builds up under an accumulation of remembered injuries. This is the way the novel itself proceeds: through foreshadowings of the resolution in the last pages.
This burned-out Cartesian lives alone, speaks to no one. “I receive nothing, I give nothing.” “When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends.” The classical-philosophic exit is closed; eros doesn’t move him, only sex without passion. He gave up his lover because he and she lacked “the strength to bear the burden” of “implacable, torrid love.” The religious exit is also closed: “I’m neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.” His proposed exit, historiography, is turning out to be another dead end: “Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigor of the order I wish to give them, but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination.” Having invented the fact, modern man knows not what to do with it. His self-examination yields only “self-contempt.” The longer he looks at his ugly face in the mirror, the more he sees that “nothing human is left.” Self-examination leads not to self-knowledge but to a feeling: “It seems that I see my own [face] as I feel my body, through a dumb, organic sense.”
Society is no exit, either. People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends.” Humanity is sociality, but society too is empty, as seen in the card game he watches. Our time—after the Great War—is a “viscous puddle,” nauseating. (Recall Nietzsche: nausea over man is a great danger. But Roquentin is no Zarathustra.) Politics is a realm of hatred and blood, as seen in the torn campaign posters he passes. The jazz song he hears relieves the nausea for awhile, but leaves him within it; for the moment, art is no exit, either. Only the coldness and unloving purity—the opposite of viscosity—of the Boulevard Noir appeals to him: “To be nothing but coldness.” But in the end “I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.”
So Roquentin begins to define himself against. He is not Gustave Impetraz, the school inspector immortalized in stone, whose “Christian ideals” have themselves become statuesque, unloving dead authority fof the “narrow, small ideas” of the bourgeoisie. The slave-morality Nietzsche excoriated has become an enslaving morality of, by, and for the mediocre. Roquentin is not the Self-Taught Man, who represents something like the exhaustion not of Christianity but of Hegelianism, proceeding dutifully and arbitrarily through the contents of the library, starting at ‘A’ and heading toward ‘Z’—at which point, what then? The prophetic power of the religious and also the Hegelian tradtion end in Roquentin watching an old woman and seeing the future. “What advantage will accrue from its realization?”
Adventure, another attempt to make the bourgeoisie more spirited, has of course been a modern theme from the beginning. It is no exit. Adventure means that your life is a story, with beginning, middle, and end. But your life cannot be a story for you, if you are honest. Everydayness is no adventure, as Heidegger and Lukacs were also saying around this time; everydayness is banal, compromised, altogether bourgeois. It is another form of the Cartesian problem of subject and object: “a man is always a teller of tales,” “but you have to choose: live or tell.” In the grips of the Cartesian problem, Roquentin lacks the strength (or the self-deception?) to seize the Machiavellian/Cartesian solution: resoluteness, spiritedness. “When I was twenty I used to get drunk and then explain that I was a fellow in the style of Descartes. I knew I was inflating myself with heroism, but I let myself go, it pleased me. After that, the next morning I felt as sick as if I had awakened in a bed full of vomit.”
The Last Man is sick with himself. So he gives Maurice Barrès a spanking. Barrès seduced bourgeois, turn-of-the-century French youth with faux-Nietzschean patriotism and sent them into battle in the Great War, anticipated as a great adventure, there to suffer unheroic deaths. Fighting in the Great War was a practical substitute for reading Nietzsche, a substitute accessible to everyone. The Last Man is a democrat.
The Rights of Man? They are fossilized in the portraits in the Bouville Museum, portraits of haute bourgeois rulers of the town from 1875 to 1910—that is, from the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (particularly the reaction against the Paris Commune) to the futility of the modern ambition: “They had enslaved Nature: without themselves”—with their sanitation projects, their improved roads and civic betterment—”and within themselves”—the deathbed farewell to the wife, “I do not thank you, Thérèse; you have only done your duty.” They are only five-foot-tall men made to look like eminences by artists who sold themselves out. “Farewell, beautiful lilies, elegant in your painted little sanctuaries, goodbye, lovely lilies, our pride and reason for existing, good-bye you bastards.” This is the critique of the ruling bourgeoisie not by Zarathustra but by the Last Man: no spirited overcoming, only resentment.
“There is nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing,” Roquentin tells the Self-Taught Man, who yatters about socialist humanism. The Self-Taught Man claims that “All men are my friends,” has no friends, and lusts after adolescent boys. He is not even the Enlightenment figure of the misplaced abstraction Burke criticized, the philosophe who loves humanity and hates people; the Self-Taught Man lacks the strength to hate. In Carlyle’s terms, he can’t even get to the ‘Everlasting No.’ Roquentin can get to the ‘No.’ There is no reason for existing. Self-preservation, the bourgeois principle par excellence, is therefore meaningless. It too is an abstraction from reality, a mere symbol for that which exist. The humanist’s “tender, abstract soul will never let itself be touched by sense of a face”; it fends off nausea with illusions.
La nausée, c’est moi. The viscous, the “soft, monstrous masses all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness (imagery perhaps taken from Malraux’s La Voix royale, its title an ironic use of a Cartesian trope) is what really exists beneath the “veneer” of life. “The world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence”; things or facts have a “passive resistance to explanation and even to sense perception.” Only by feeling this, in “horrible ecstasy” or emptying-out, can Roquentin understand and possess ‘the nausea.’ Only the resolute admission of radical contingency, not the high-modern attempt to dominate it by politics and technology, can a man exit the Cartesian trap. Cartesian resoluteness remains, but redirected to a different branch of technē: writing of songs and stories, realms of purifying imagination. “Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance: it must invade you suddenly, master you….” This is prophetic and apocalyptic language, whereby ‘existence’ replaces the Christian Holy Spirit and the Hegelian Absolute Spirit; it also replaces the Nietzschean will to power, which makes beings seem too spirited, too youthful and resolute. “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.” This is Nietzsche for the middle-aged and disillusioned, for the Last Man. he can now meet with his old lover and come to terms with her in his own mind; he can now feel sympathy for the real person that is the Self-Taught Man, and not for his abstract ‘Humanity.” He can now wish to be transformed, not into a statue but into music, a jazz tune, and decides to write a novel—a non-ossifying art-form. In his autobiography, The Words, Sartre criticizes this final move in the novel. “I palmed off on the writer the sacred powers of the hero.” “Like all dreamers, I confused disenchantment with truth.”
Sartre himself never overcame ressentiment. One of his funniest scenes is Roquentin’s imagining of the great Doctor Rémy Parottin, surrounded by acolytes, taking a special interest in the headstrong, rebellious youth, saving the lad’s soul, enlightening him by bringing him to understand “the admirable role of the elite.” Parottin’s cure for rebellion consists of an appeal to vanity. In the last decades of his life, Sartre did nothing to discourage acolytes, and one can easily imagine him taking special interest in the most headstrong, saving/enlightening their souls with pep talks on Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara, an elite of a different sort.
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