Sartre's second century

The Literary-Philosophical Experience of Hope Now 161
on a stage with characters and plotlines, they will take it in as a lived
reality. When watching a play, we do not just judge the idea: we judge the
particular. In most cases it is up to us to formulate the idea from the
particular rather than the other way around.
At this point, one might raise the objection that the same could be said
about news reports or essays on particular events. A Sartrean response, I
believe, would remark, first, that these are not hard and fast distinctions,
some blurring is to be expected; and, secondly, that our experiences of
those other types of writing for the most part lack a certain temporal
quality that is characteristic of literary experiences—which brings us to
our second point: the felt duration of literary works. It is not until we read
Sartre's literature that we see his phenomenological insights take place in
time. Consider, for example, his play Dirty Hands (Les Mains sales,
1948). We watch the character Hugo slip into the identity of a communist
and become objectified throughout the course of the play. Now, in
Notebooks for an Ethics (Cahiers pour une morale, 1983), which Sartre
was working on at roughly the same time as he wrote Dirty Hands, we
find an abundance of passages in which he describes just such a
conversion phenomenologically. But the difference is that in Dirty Hands,
Hugo's conversion is not put forth as a simple event to be held in front of
consciousness, but rather as an entire mode of being and becoming that we
see, feel, and judge in time. Moreover, the felt duration of a literary work
establishes a relationship between the author and reader. In a set of
interviews with Simone de Beauvoir from 1974, later published as part of
Beauvoir's Adieux, Sartre described this relationship:
It is a question of aligning words that have a certain tension of their own
and that by this tension will bring into being the tension of the book, which
is a duration to which one commits oneself. When you begin a book you
enter into that duration. You cause your own duration to be determined in
such a manner that it now has a certain beginning, which is the beginning
of the book, and which will have an end. There exists therefore a certain
relation between the reader and a duration that is his own and that at the
same time is not his own, a relation that lasts from the moment he begins
the book until he finishes it. This supposes a complex relation between the
x l
author and the reader [...].
Sartre goes on to explain that the relationship between the author and
reader is one in which the author has to maintain this sense of duration in
the reader. Writing literature—at least, if it is to be any good—thus
Sartre, in Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux, 211.