Nausea - A Foreword and Introduction to La Nausée

Aug 25, 2026

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Nausea, with foreword and introduction materials by Richard Howard and James Wood, traces the publication history of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée—from early rejections and debated titles to the eventual acceptance by Gallimard. The text explains how the title “Nausea” shifts from a physical illness connotation to a nickname for existential anguish. It also positions the novel as both a realistic record of 1930s everyday anxiety and a pivotal modern-fiction experiment.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages205

Reading Time5 h 16 min

AccessFree to download

A Foreword to Nausea

Sartre’s early publication history and title revisions

The meaning shift of “Nausea” and its reception

Nausea’s role in modern fiction and later works

Nausea (La Nausée) Jean-Paul Sartre Translated from the French by Lloyd Alexander Foreword by Richard Howard Introduction by James Wood A NEW DIRECTIONS PAPERBOOK A FOREWORD TO NAUSEA Richard Howard When the thirty-one-year-old Jean-Paul Sartre, a refractory philosophy teacher in Le Havre (“it is one thing to enjoy talking with your students and giving lectures, it is quite another to see yourself as a prof surrounded by other profs giving magisterial lectures and maintaining discipline in class: I didn’t like my colleagues, I didn’t like the atmosphere of the lycée”), having already published an essay L’Imagination with Alcan in 1936, submitted his first novel Melancholia to Gallimard later that same year, it was rejected, despite a favorable reader ’s report by Jean Paulhan; in an interview some thirty-five years later, Sartre remarked: “I took this hard: I had put all of myself into a book I worked on for many years; it was myself that had been rejected, my experience that had been excluded.” Sartre had begun writing what he called his “factum on contingency” at the age of twenty-six, and was subsequently to acknowledge influences ranging from Valéry and Céline to Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; he was convinced of his novel’s worth through and beyond the prestige of its derivations. Resubmitted to Gallimard in April 1937 with powerful recommendations from Charles Dullin and Pierre Bost, Sartre’s novel was at last accepted, though the title was judged “inadequate,” as were certain“raw” episodes in the text—Roquentin’s transactions with chambermaids in the Hotel Printania, details of low life in Bouville (mudville, after all), and scenes of Roquentin’s past. Sartre agreed to cuts, and suggested an alternative title: The Extraordinary Adventures of Antoine Roquentin, supplemented (and contradicted) by a bande publicitaire that would confess (or exult): “There are no adventures.” I treasure this suggestion as the sole example I can come up with of an eighteenth-century “libertine” irony in Sartre’s entire oeuvre. This too-playful formula (after all, the work had originally been called Melancholia!) was also rejected, and finally Gaston Gallimard himself came up with a title which famously prevailed for the novel itself (and in some thirty translations the world over: how deceived we should be, as the French say when they mean disappointed, if confronted today by a novel with that original, all-too-human, sentimental or psychiatric appellation) . Though Gaston Gallimard’s title has remained more closely identified with the author than that of any other of his fictions or plays, Sartre as well as Simone de Beauvoir had reservations about“nausea,” apprehensive that such title would inspire a “naturalistic” reading of his experimental metaphysical novel. But what actually happened is that the word somehow changed its meaning because of the novel’s title: capitalized and clearly in reference to the novel,“Nausea” no longer evokes physical malaise to the point of vomiting, but is a nickname for existential anguish. La Nausée was published the following April, and Sartre’s only book of short stories, Le Mur, written during the same years as the novel, was published in February 1939. It is these two works (of both Lloyd Alexander is the fortunate and gifted English translator, though I cannot resist the collegial privilege of pointing out that in a list of Annie’s personal stage properties on page 136, “shawls, turbans, mantillas, Japanese masks, pictures of Epinal,” the last item will necessarily confront the non-French reader with an enigma unless it is explained that images d’Épinal are not representations of a cotton-manufacturing town in NE France just south of Nancy, but old-fashioned conventionalized figures on printed fabrics, often affectionately collected and reproduced as illustrations in sentimental children’s books), and especially the novel in the reader ’s hands, which afford Sartre hi

FAQs

How did Sartre’s early novel and titles evolve before La Nausée was accepted?

Sartre’s first submitted novel Melancholia was rejected and later resubmitted with recommendations, while Gallimard judged the title inadequate and requested cuts. Sartre suggested alternative titling, but multiple playful and revised options were rejected before Gallimard’s final choice prevailed.

Why does the introduction argue that the word “Nausea” changes meaning because of the novel’s title?

The foreword emphasizes that, once capitalized and tied to the novel, “Nausea” no longer primarily evokes vomiting or physical malaise. Instead it functions as a nickname for existential anguish.

What is the foreword’s view of Nausea’s literary significance?

The text presents Nausea as both a primary document of everyday life and social anxiety in the 1930s and an influential departure for fiction. It is linked to narrative ambiguity, the breakdown of traditional psychology, and experimental style, shaping later French novels.

Aug 25, 2026

Upload by Liam