Sartre's second century

162 Chapter Eleven
involves an obligation on the part of the writer. We will return to the
notion of obligation and, in particular, the importance of "beginnings and
ends" in shaping relationships (both between authors and readers and
between people in general) in our analysis of Hope Now.
Putting the reader in the presence of a temporal world discloses a truth
of its own. Writing, Sartre explained to Beauvoir in that same set of
interviews, "was an activity that produced a reality, not exactly the book,
but something beyond the book. The book belonged to the imaginary, but
beyond the book there was truth." 12 The use of "something" in this
quotation is significant because it shows that Sartre was not clear about the
exact nature of the truth found in literature. Earlier in their discussion,
Beauvoir picks up on this uncertainty and asks him: "You group words
and then all of a sudden, by some unknown magic, these words disclose
the world?" Sartre responds by saying: "Yes that's how it was. Some
unknown magic indeed, because I had no idea. It was faith in language." 13
We now see perhaps the most important reason behind Sartre's
adamant separation of philosophy and literature, and it also brings us to
the third nuance I set out to discuss: the desirable ambiguity and
ineffability of literature. Surely, Sartre's approach to philosophy was
descriptive, but as a philosopher he always attempted to put forth a clear
argument. It is evident from his comments to Beauvoir, in Adieux and
elsewhere, that Sartre did not want his readers to come away from one of
his philosophical works unsure of the nature of the truth suggested. In
other words, we are not supposed to read The Imaginary and conclude:
"Sartre is telling us something about the imaginary." It was, of course, in
his literary works that Sartre was able to take the time to play with
ambiguity and ineffable truths to his heart's content.
To conclude this first section, we have seen that the primary way to
distinguish Sartre's literary endeavours from his purely philosophical
projects is to look for a style that puts us in the presence of a world. Sartre
himself made this distinction many times over, often discussing the
difference in terms of signifying and imaging consciousnesses. However,
since this distinction is more or less subjective—the genre of a given text
is not strictly determined by a set of formal properties inside the text but
by how it is experienced when read—I have tried to identify a set of
experiential qualities that take place when we find ourselves confronted
with a literary world, namely: the role of the reader; the felt duration of the
literary work; and the desired ambiguity and ineffability that are possible
12 Ibid., 216, my italics.
13 Ibid., 140.