Sartre's second century

164 Chapter Eleven
between us. And it isn't what I want. We're two men—the difference in
our ages matters little—who know the history of philosophy and the
history of my own thought well and who are jointly working on ethics, an
ethics that will, furthermore, often be in contradiction with certain ideas
that I have had. That's not the problem. But the problem is that one doesn't
sense in our discussion your true importance in what we're doing. 17
We see here that the form of the interviews is crucially important. Because
of the form of Hope Now, the ethics Sartre hopes to sketch out is fulfilled
for the reader through an analogon. Sartre and Levy could easily have
presented their ideas as a co-authored essay, but they kept it in interview
form, ensuring that the reader would observe them shape ideas together.
But neither is Hope Now a simple transcript of a conversation. Sartre
carefully edited the dialogue and gave it a very specific title. It was
published in a particular form, and, as we see above, Sartre wants us to
understand what is happening. As with a literary work, all of this takes
place over time, which gives Hope Now a "felt" duration. Sartre and L6\y
thus create the inherent tension of literature—the tension we heard Sartre
describe to Beauvoir in Adieux, as helping to constitute a certain duration
for the reader that is both the reader's and not the reader's at the same
time 18 —while they sketch out ideas on how solidarity is possible inside
the more general tension of human coexistence.
At this point, I should clarify that when I claim that the text serves as
an analagon, or that our experience of the interviews is literary, I am not
suggesting that we consistently produce mental images when we read
Hope Now, We are not actually projecting images of Levy and Sartre
talking back and forth throughout the course of the book. But neither is
this the case when we read novels. Sartre tells us in The Imaginary that
reading is actually characterised by a "poverty of images". 19 It is only
when there is a break in the reading that we look back and imagine the
hero of the plot. Otherwise, we are engrossed in the act of reading. But
that does not mean that imaging consciousness is not at work. As readers,
we are still presented with an irreal world and that is why, according to
Sartre, we can become emotionally involved in the plot. 20 I would argue
that something similar happens with Hope Now. It presents a world to
us—indeed we feel something of the content through the text—but it is
only when we stop and think about what we have read that the images
17 Ibid., 74.
18 See Sartre, in Simone de Beauvoir, Adiewc, 211.
19 The Imaginary, 63.