Imitations of Speechlessness

Abstract: In Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea , Antoine Roquentin is sick of the mendacity of all stories: the shapeliness of stories, he says, deceives us about what life is really like. Richard Moran argues that Roquentin's criticism of stories is empty because it gives us no sense of how a story could be true to life; and, so, no sense of how any story could be false. I argue that stories can be false even if everything they say is true; and that Sartre—and others—write from an antithetical experience: they confront us with a world coming out of chaos into only partial order. Their language is not a way of pinning reality down but of immersing us in the turbulence of experience.