Sartre's second century

Contemporary Perspectives 187
"So, what you're telling me, Mr Murakami, is that my own guilt
feelings—feelings of which I myself was unaware—could have taken on
the form of nausea or made me hear things that were not there?"
"No, Vm not saying that", I corrected him. "You are." 39
Two things are worthy of note. First, Murakami's man speculates (in
classic Freudian fashion) that his physical dysfunction might be
symptomatic of his repressed and unconscious moral inner world. Contrast
this with Roquentin's nausea as symptomatic of his newly conscious
apprehension of the contingency of the external world. The former's gaze
is directed inwards to psychological and affective structures, the latter's
outwards to real material phenomena. It is as if Murakami has adopted
Sartre's concept of "nausea", then literally (and appositely, given the
physical effect of nausea) turned it inside-out.
Second, Murakami's rejoinder—"No, Vm not saying that [...] You are"
(and the emphases are his own)—is a disingenuous authorial sleight-ofhand
inviting the inference that he and his unnamed "friend" are, in effect,
one and the same person: symbiotic, indivisible alter egos. This
impression is reinforced by the fact that the unknown caller's last
telephonic intervention is unique: "His final call was different. First he
said my name. That was nothing new. But then he added, 'Do you know
my name?'". 40 The implication that the recipient ought to be able to guess
the identity of his caller—who might be nothing more nor less than a voice
inside his own head—is underpinned by the last line of the novella:
"Fortunately, neither he nor I have been visited by nausea or phone calls
so far." 41 The implied degree of identification between the nameless
character and his named creator is reminiscent of Sartre's explicit
reappropriation of Antoine Roquentin in Les Mots: "/ was Roquentin [...];
at the same time, I was me [...]". 42 Is it fanciful to suggest that Murakami's
nauseated artist stands in the same relationship to him as Sartre's sick-atheart
historian does to him? Are they both phantsamatic, empirical victims
of their creators' bipolar selves, the avatars of different nightmares
exteriorised in the relatively secure, cathartic and ultimately salutary
process of fictional projection?
For the time being, at least, such questions must be left hanging in the
air. But it is worth remarking that, elsewhere in this collection of short
39 "Nausea 1979", 152.
40 Ibid., 151.
41 Ibid., 153.
42 "J'etais Roquentin [...]; en meme temps j'&ais moi [...]" {Les Mots, 210,
Sartre's emphases).