Sartre and the roots of plant horror

Abstract

The most famous tree in all existential philosophy is the chestnut tree encountered by Antoine Roquentin in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1964). Roquentin’s tree is twentieth-century literature’s supreme image of alienation, unknowability, disruption, and primordial horror. Considering Sartre’s vast impact on the cultural imagination of the post-war period, it is not surprising that popular films of the period portray vegetation in its Sartrean mode, as a terrifying symbol of the unfathomable absurdity and radical contingency of human being. In fact, the entire sub-genre of plant horror, including such benchmark films as The Thing from Another World (1951), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and Day of the Triffids (1962), can be understood as subsequent iterations of Roquentin’s disturbing encounter with the chestnut tree.