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off. 13
    Roquentin ’ s journal is an attempt to objectify what is happening to him. He searches his memory, examines his past. There was something that happened in Indo-China; a colleague had asked him to join an archaeological mission to Bengal; he was about to accept—
    . .. when suddenly I woke up from a six-year slumber ... . I couldn ’ t understand why I was in Indo-China. What was I doing there? Why was I talking to these people? Why was I dressed so oddly? ... Before me, posed with a sort of indolence, was a voluminous, insipid idea. I di4 not see clearly what it was, but it sickened me so much I couldn ’ t look at it. 1 4
    Certainly something is happening. There is his ordinary life, with its assumptions of meaning, purpose, usefulness. And there are these revelations, or, rather, these attacks of nausea, that knock the bottom out of his ordinary life. The reason is not far to seek. He is too acute and honest an observer. Like Wells, he asks of everything: to what will this lead? He never ceases to notice things. Of the café patron, he comments: ‘ When his place empties, his head empties too. ’ The lives of these people are contingent on events. If things stopped happening to them, they would stop being. Worse still are the salauds whose pictures he can look at in the town ’ s art gallery, these eminent public men, so sure of themselves, so sure that life is theirs and their existence is necessary to it. And Roquentin ’ s criticism is turning back on himself; he too has accepted meanings where he now recognizes there were none. He too is dependent on events.
    In a crowded cafe, he is afraid to look at a glass of beer. ‘ But I can ’ t explain what I see. To anyone. There: I am quietly slipping into the water ’ s depths, towards fear. ’ 15
    A few days later, again, he describes in detail the circumstances of an attack of the nausea. This time it is the braces of the cafe patron that become the focus of the sickness. Now we observe that the nausea seems to emphasize the sordidness of Roquentin ’ s surroundings. (Sartre has gone further than any previous writer in emphasizing ‘ darkness and dirt ’ ; neither Joyce nor Dostoevsky give the same sensation of the mind being trapped in physical filth.) Roquentin is overwhelmed by it, a spiritual counterpart of violent physical retching.
    ... the nausea is not inside me; I feel it out there, in the wall, in the suspenders; everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the cafe; I am the one who is within it. 16
    Like Wells, Roquentin insists on the objective nature of the revelation.
    Somebody puts on a record; it is the voice of a Negro woman singing ‘ Some of These Days ’ . The nausea disappears as he listens:
    When the voice was heard in the silence I felt my body harden and the nausea vanish; suddenly it was almost unbearable to become so hard, so brilliantI am in the music. Globes of fire turn in the mirrors, encircled by rings of smoke. 17
    There is no need to analyse this experience; it is the old, familiar aesthetic experience; art giving order and logic to chaos.
    I am touched; I feel my body at rest like a precision machine. I have had real adventures. I can recapture no detail, but I perceive the rigorous succession of events. I have crossed seas, left cities behind me, followed the course of rivers or plunged into forests, always making my way towards other cities. I have had women; I have fought with men, and never was I able to turn back any more than a record can be reversed.
    Works of art cannot affect him. Art is thought, and thought only gives the world an appearance of order to anyone weak enough to be convinced by its show. Only something as instinctively rhythmic as the blues can give him a sense of order that doesn ’ t seem false. But even that may be only a temporary refuge; deeper nervous exhaustion would cause the collapse of the sense of order, even in ‘ Some of These Days ’ .
    In the Journal, we watch the