The Essential Colin Wilson by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

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.'
    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 café 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 café; I am the one who is within it.
    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 brilliant . . . I am in the music. Globes of fire turn in themirrors, encircled by rings of smoke.
    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 breaking-down of all Roquentin's values. Exhaustion limits him more and more to the present, the here-now. The work of memory, which gives events sequence and coherence, is failing, leaving him more and more dependent for meaning on what he can see and touch. It is Hume's scepticism becoming instinctive, all-destroying. All he can see and touch is unrecognizable, unaided by memory; like a photograph of a familiar object taken from an unfamiliar angle. He looks at a seat, and fails to recognize it: 'I murmur: It's a seat, but the word stays on my lips. It refuses to go and put itself on the thing . . . Things are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque, stubborn, huge, and it seems ridiculous to call them seats, or to say anything at all about them. I am in the midst of things—nameless things.'
    In the park, the full nature of the revelation comes to him as he stares at the roots of a chestnut tree:
    I couldn't remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished, and with them, the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference men have traced on their surface. I was sitting . . . before this knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me . . . It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood