Sartre's second century

Contemporary Perspectives 189
We exist here and now, without any particular reason or cause" —words
that might be taken verbatim from any one of Roquentin's perorations on
the subject, or indeed from UExistentialisme est un humanisme
(Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946). Finally (but not exhaustively),
Murakami evokes what we might call the "nauseous worldview" in a story
whose very title—"Crabs"—resonates with Sartrean obsessions about
crustaceans and all the menacing underworld of the submarine biosphere:
"The world felt out of kilter. He could hear as it creaked through this new
orbit. Something had happened, he thought, and the world had changed." 50
Compare this with Roquentin's anxiety at the outset of his journal, the
document that will be both the record of his anguish and the vehicle of his
enquiry into it: "It's an abstract change that settles on nothing. Is it I that
have changed? If not me, then it's this room, this town, this nature; I have
to choose." 51
It goes without saying that Sartre had no monopoly of reflection upon
appearance, image and reality; upon individual limitations and our sense
of futility; or upon existential contingency and the unnameable vertigo
entailed by our apprehension of it. Nor does it follow that any
contemporary writer who alludes to or meditates upon such things is either
deliberately paying tribute to Sartre or inadvertently disclosing his
influence. Nevertheless, initially intrigued by Haruki Murakami's
provocative plagiarism of one of the best-known titles in twentieth-century
world literature, I contend that there is sufficient prima facie evidence in
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman to justify further investigation into the
Sartrean influence that the author tacitly avows. This claim is yet another
indicator, therefore, that Sartre's thought and work remain sufficiently
vibrant and dynamic to be brought into dialogue with early twenty-firstcentury
artists in different genres—here, the cinema of George Clooney or
the prose fiction of Haruki Murakami—with mutual illumination and
profit.
49 "A Toor Aunt' Story", in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, 125-42 (136).
50 "Crabs", in ibid., 209-14 (213).
51 "C'est un changement abstrait qui ne se pose sur rien. Est-ce moi qui ai changd?
Si ce n'est pas moi, alors c'est cette chambre, cette ville, cette nature; il faut
choisir" (La Nausee, 9).