as Allen Tate has said, is the supreme function of art." More recently, younger French academics following Emmanuel Legeard have rather built upon cultural psychology to interpret the nausea feeling more metaphorically: «The feeling of nausea has spawned a series of implausible interpretations, but any truly involved reader should be able to apprehend through intuitive sympathy that nausea is disgust at the traumatic decomposition of the divine within existence, symptomatic of the discovery of the absurd, of the disenchantment of the world. Transcendence and providence were invented by man. Every being is meaningless "in itself". There is no God. But the experience through nausea ends up taking a positive turn: if God doesn't exist, then everything becomes possible. And that's how, with despair, true optimism begins.» As a work of philosophy Criticism of Sartre's novels frequently centered on the tension between the philosophical and political on one side, and the novelistic and individual on the other. Ronald Aronson describes the reaction of Albert Camus, still in Algeria and working on his own first novel, L’Étranger. At the time of the novel's release, Camus was a reviewer for an Algiers left-wing daily. Camus told a friend that he "thought a lot about the book" and it was "a very close part of [himself]." In his review, Camus wrote, "the play of the toughest and most lucid mind are at the same time both lavished and squandered." Camus felt that each of the book's chapters, taken by itself, "reaches a kind of perfection in bitterness and truth." However, he also felt that the descriptive and the philosophical aspects of the novel are not balanced, that they "don't add up to a work of art: the passage from one to the other is too rapid, too unmotivated, to evoke in the reader the deep conviction that makes the art of the novel." He likewise felt that Sartre had tipped the balance too far in depicting the repugnant features of mankind "instead of placing the reasons for his despair, at least to a certain degree, if not completely, on the elements of human greatness." Still, Camus's largely positive review led to a friendship between the two authors. Philosopher G. J. Mattey describes Nausea and others of Sartre's literary works as "practically philosophical treatises in literary form." In his book Irrational Man, the philosopher William Barrett, in distinction both from Camus's feeling that Nausea is