A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images. But the philosophy need only spill over into the characters and action for it to stick out like a sore thumb, the plot loses its authenticity, and the novel its life.[1]
Albert Camus wrote this of his future frenemy’s first novel, La Nausée, published in 1938. “M. Sartre,” as Camus calls him, has “both lavished and squandered” his gifts.[2] La Nausée breaks the balance between philosophy and image, and “the theories do damage to the life.”[3] This philosophy would come to be called existentialism, and Camus too would be sucked into its sphere, though he denied belonging to it.[4]
Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée is the semi-autobiographical story of Antoine Roquentin, an historian living in Bouville, Mud Town, who comes to know he exists when the objects in his life trigger in him a “contingency-sickness,” or a “horror of the contingent.”[5] Sartre wrote, rewrote, and sought to publish Nausea over the years from 1931 to 1937, while living in Le Havre, Berlin, and again in Le Havre.[6] Nausea is said to be Sartre’s “most densely philosophical novel” and “the very model of a philosophical novel,” advancing “a distinctive and profound philosophical vision without ever falling short of being a pure and genuine novel.”[7]
The latter part of this statement evidences the contentious status of the generic category, ‘philosophical novel,’ and the perceived difficulty in satisfying both categories. Though philosophers have historically used plays, aphorisms, and novels to deliver their philosophy, modern philosophical movements tend not to. Existentialism is one of the few modern philosophical movements which has utilised literary forms such as the novel, the short story, and the play, and some commentators conclude that while the creative works of the existentialists “may stand alone as literature . . . they quite obviously cannot do so as philosophy.”[8]
Philosophical literature is frequently thought of simply as a vehicle for a philosophical system, but for the existentialists, literary works are the equivalents to a philosophical system, and even “yield new ways of philosophizing.”[9] For philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, literature is phenomenological, arising at the intersection of the experiencing subject and the world of objects.[10] Merleau-Ponty cites Charles Péguy (also an influence on Beauvoir), “Everyone has a metaphysics – explicit or implicit – or he [sic] does not exist,” and claims that a great novel rests on two or three philosophical ideas, with the function of a novelist “not to state these ideas thematically but to make them exist for us in the way that things exist.”[11]
In Sartre’s existentialism, called by one literary critic “a pedantic but godless theology,”[12] writing is politically “committed” (littérature engagée), meaning the writer knows “that to reveal is to change and that one can reveal only by planning to change.”[13] Sartre’s plays and novels are “strictly didactic,” and in an attempt to defend prose in What is Literature? he writes of prose as word that is lived, and that is used as a tool for making didactic disclosures.[14] Sartre’s prose writer is writing out of experience of the world toward the world to change the world.
It is Beauvoir’s aesthetic theory of the philosophical novel that “undoes traditional understandings of how a novel lays claim to philosophy.”[15] In her 1946 essay “Metaphysics and Literature,” Beauvoir argues that the primary experience of the world is one in which “the object unveils itself” to us and the novelist “recreates this experience on the level of imagination.”[16] Literature and philosophy are both ways to understand the metaphysical reality and, as such, their differences are not so great.[17] Experience for Beauvoir is not just opinion or knowledge, but also feeling, and the novel is able to embody the opacity, ambiguity, and impartiality of life in a manner not equalled by any other mode of expression.[18]
For Beauvoir the ‘true’ novel is concerned with lived human experience, something “that can never be adequately conveyed through the universal abstractness of the philosophical text.”[19] Of Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay, Merleau-Ponty writes,
From now on the tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated. When one is concerned with giving voice to the experience of the world and showing how consciousness escapes into the world, one can no longer credit oneself with attaining a perfect transparency of expression. Philosophical expression assumes the same ambiguities as literary expression, if the world is such that it cannot be expressed except in ‘stories’ and, as it were, pointed at.[20]
The project of the philosophical novel is successful, insofar as one accepts that it is in any way successful, because it emerges from the phenomenological description of human existence, “[t]hus culminating in the fact that the closest a philosophy draws itself to the study and comprehension of subjectivity, the nearer it will be to literature.”[21]
From K. Imray, "Novel as Philosophy in Images: Mr Handsome and The Look." Dissertation, Deakin University, 2020.
Notes [1] Albert Camus, “On Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée,” review of Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre, in Lyrical and Critical Essays, trans. Ellen Kennedy, ed. Philip Thody, 199–202(New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 199.
[2] Camus, “On Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée,” 200.
[3] Camus, “On Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée,” 199.
[4] Albert Camus, “Non, je ne suis pas existentialiste,” Les Nouvelles litéraires, November 15, 1945, cited in Hazel Barnes, Humanistic Existentialism: The Literature of Possibility (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959), 4, 405.
[5] Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Robert Baldick (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965); John Weightman, “Jean-Paul Sartre,” in The Novelist as Philosopher, ed. John Cruickshank,102–127 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 113; Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, 261–286 (New York: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1998), 269. [6] Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1985), 93. [7] Successive quotations from Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Vintage Books, 1991), 39; Thomas Flynn, “Jean-Paul Sartre,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2013 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/sartre/, section 6, paragraph 2, accessed 3 June 2019; Gary Cox, Sartre and Fiction (London; New York: Continuum, 2009), 80. [8] Amy M. Kleppner, “Philosophy and the Literary Medium: The Existentialist Predicament,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23, no. 2 (1964): 207–217 (214, 216). [9] Yi-Ping Ong, The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existential Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 236. [10] Iris Murdoch (“The Novelist as Metaphysician,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, 101–107 [New York: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1998], 101) lists Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus as writers of “the phenomenological novel,” with Merleau-Ponty as “their literary critic in chief.” [11] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Metaphysics and the Novel,” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1961), 26–40 (26–27). [12] Edouard Roditi, review of Baudelaire, by Jean-Paul Sartre, Poetry 77, no. 2 (1950): 100–103 (103). [13] Jean-Paul Sartre, “What is Literature?” and Other Essays, trans. Steven Ungar (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 37. [14] Murdoch, “The Novelist as Metaphysician,” 103; “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” 277. [15] Ashley King Scheu, “The Viability of the Philosophical Novel: The Case of Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay,” Hypatia 27, no. 4 (2012): 791–802 (795). [16] Eleanore Holveck, Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Lived Experience: Literature and Metaphysics (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 17. [17] Juliana de Albuquerque Katz, “Simone de Beauvoir’s Case for Philosophical Autonomy and the Possibilities within the Metaphysical Novel,” Sapere Aude – Belo Horizonte 3, no. 6 (2012): 136–147 (139). [18] Maurice Cranston, “Simone de Beauvoir,” in The Novelist as Philosopher, ed. John Cruickshank, 166–182 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 170; Ong, Simone de Beauvoir’s Theory of the Novel, 388; Katz, “Simone de Beauvoir’s Case for Philosophical Autonomy,” 139. [19] Debbie Evans, “Sartre and Beauvoir on Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and the Question of the ‘Look’,” in Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of Influence, eds Christine Daigle and Jacob Golomb, 90–115 (Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 91. Iris Murdoch (“Hegel in Modern Dress,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, 146–150 [New York: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1998], 146) calls Being and Nothingness “a very long and almost totally Hegelian work.” [20] Merleau-Ponty, “Metaphysics and the Novel,” 28. [21] Katz, “Simone de Beauvoir’s Case for Philosophical Autonomy,” 140.
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