JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

292Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic WritingsCharles VIII psychologically accompanies the visual presentation of thepainted canvas. It is not the case that two things are presentedsimultaneously: the painted canvas and the image. Rather, that paintedcanvas is seen in a special way, as something phenomenologically similarto the visual appearance of Charles VIII.Sartre tries to draw a distinction between cinema and theatre when hesays ‘A tree for a cinema-goer is a real tree, while a tree on the stage isobviously synthetic’ but this provides us at best with an inductivegeneralisation about some films and some plays. Mid-twentieth-centuryblack and white films frequently include artificial scenery and a theatre playmight deploy real trees or plants. Sartre misses the point that in watching aplay we see real people but in watching a film we see pictures of people,and each showing of a play is a performance of that play but each showingof a film is not a performance of that film.Sartre claims ‘It is not the character who becomes real in the actor, it isthe actor who becomes unreal in his character’. Hamlet never becomesnon-fictional in a performance or film showing of Hamlet but the living psychophysicalwhole human being who is the actor who plays Hamlet is negatedor ignored by an act of imagination by the audience. The audience sees theactor as Hamlet but they do not mix him up with a real prince of Denmark.Although Sartre never published any poetry, it is clear that he regardspoetry as a radical art form. He says in What is Literature?: ‘the poet isoutside language’ (p. 6). Sartre takes the neo-Hegelian view that languageis the ‘element’ in which human beings exist, rather, perhaps as fish exist inwater. With the exception of rare individuals such as Nausea’s Roquentinhuman reality is mediated by language. The world appears to us throughour language. Poets are capable of escaping this linguistic prison andperceive things in their bare particularity. With unscientific detachment theyconcatenate words in original forms to present us with newphenomenologies of things. Sartre says of the poet ‘He sees words insideout’.A work of art involves an image and what Sartre calls an ‘analogue’. Theanalogue of a work of art is its material vehicle. The analogue of a poem ora novel is the ink distributed over the page, the analogue of a painting is thewood, canvas and paint, the analogue of a character in a play is the actorwho plays that character. The existence of the analogue is a necessarycondition for the existence of the work of art, at least as a publically availableobject.