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HOLDING_ABOVE

                                             April   16/24, 2012
                                             October   6/7, 2013

                                              NAUSEA
Sartre's Roquentin never quite achieves
self-consciousness of a particular point
that to me seems quite obvious:

His ideas and attitudes are tremendously
self-flattering.  He knows he's a Real
Intellectual, and while he's friends with
an autodidact from out in the provinces
he calls The Self Taught Man, there's
more than a little condescension in the
relationship.

It seems odd that Roquentin isn't aware
of his elitism, and doesn't consider that
it might be warping his perceptions... but       Both R & S seem convinced
then I get the strong sense that Sartre          that there's something
is on his side on this one, that the             trashy about the humanism
condescention toward the untrained,              of Sartre's friend, and
amateur-class thinkers is Sartre's own.          Sartre has this "loving
                                                 all of humanity" turn out
                                                 to be a justification for
                                                 his sexual inclinations:
     Over a decade later, Sartre                 he's a frocteur and pedophile.
     lectured that "Existentialism
     is a Humanism", and tried to                     In places Roquentin gets
     explain why the usual sort of                    close to this generalized
     Humanism is wrong, and how                       love of humanity, but he
     Existentialism is a better kind,                 distrusts such things,
     and myself I think he was                        and makes fun of people
     unconvincing on both points.                     like that.

        He uses Comte's Temple of                     And yet, in many ways
        Humanity as a sort of                         it's a story about
        reducto ad slippery slope,                    an isolated intellectual
        which is a funny move,                        overcoming that isolation
        I think.                                      and coming back to
                                                      humanity...
          AUGUSTE_COMTE
                                                          (It could be I'm not
                                                          giving Sartre enough
                                                          credit.)

   Roquentin's posturing gets
   rather transparent at times.
   At one point (p. 159 of my
   trade paper ed.)  Roquentin
   displays a resentment of the        But there are already things
   Normals, and he fantasizes          out there that should wake
   about things that would snap        the sleepers (certainly
   them out of their trance.           there are these days)...
                                       if they continue to sleep,
      He imagines the sudden           what can you say about it?
      appearence of strange
      things with made-up names
      (which I like quite a bit):

         stone-eye, spider-jaws


    There's a constant attempt at holding
    above, at trying to find a high
    ground to look down from-- a feeling         (Is to surrender your
    I know a little too well.                    superiority to
                                                 "outlive yourself"?)
    There's no recognition of the silliness
    of using this impulse as your guide:
    Humanism?  Oh my, how common.

    But sometimes, things are common for
    a reason, and sometimes rejecting the
    common is to reject the obvious.
                                                       SANDPITS
    You can get yourself tangled up trying
    to be all clever and sophisticated.











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