sjp sartre and ricoeur on productive imagination-libre

SARTRE AND RICOEUR ONPRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION

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ABSTRACT: Commenting on Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of imagination, Paul Ricoeurargues that Sartre fails to address the productive nature of imaginative acts. Accordingto Ricoeur, Sartre’s examples show that he thinks of imagination in mimetic terms,neglecting its innovative and creative dimensions. Imagination, Ricoeur continues,manifests itself most clearly in fiction, wherein new meaning is created. By using fictionas the paradigm of imaginative activity, Ricoeur is able to argue against Sartre that theessence of imagination lies not in its ability to reproduce absent objects, but rather in theability to transform reality through creative acts. Motivated by the intuition that Sartrethe writer could not have forgotten to address such crucial dimensions of imagination,I examine Sartre’s philosophical and literary work, showing that not only does hedevelop a notion of productive imagination, he also puts this notion to work byarticulating the relationship between imagination, narrative, and identity formation,well before Ricoeur advanced his narrative-identity theory. I argue that Sartre, likeRicoeur and MacIntyre, another representative of narrative-theory whose criticism ofSartre I address in this essay, views imagination and narrativity as necessary conditionsfor the formation of a coherent and meaningful sense of self.

1. INTRODUCTION

In an article that examines Sartre’s theory of imagination, Paul Ricoeur

argues that Sartre fails to address the productive nature of imaginative acts.1

Lior Levy is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Haifa, Israel. Shespecializes in twentieth century European philosophy, in particular phenomenology and exis-tentialism. Her recent publications include “Reflection, Memory and Selfhood in Jean-PaulSartre’s Early Philosophy” (Forthcoming, Sartre Studies International); “Rethinking the Relation-ship between Memory and Imagination in Sartre’s The Imaginary” (The Journal of the British Societyfor Phenomenology, 2012); and “Narrative, Identity and Meaning in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea,(Iyyun, 2013). She is currently developing a Sartrean theory of narrative identity in a book-lengthmanuscript titled Creative Selves: Imagination, Memory, and Narrativity in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Thought.

1 Ricoeur expresses an ongoing dissatisfaction with Sartre’s work on imagination. He fullydevelops his criticism in “Sartre and Ryle on Imagination” (167–178), but earlier versions of his

The Southern Journal of PhilosophyVolume 52, Issue 1March 2014

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 52, Issue 1 (2014), 43–60.

ISSN 0038-4283, online ISSN 2041-6962. DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12049

43

Sartre, says Ricoeur, adopts a reproductive theory of imagination, thus

neglecting imagination’s productivity. Sartre’s examples in The Imaginary

(2004) are indicative of his preference for the pictorial model, which fails “to

liberate the image from its bondage to the . . . original of which it would be

the picture or replica” (SRI, 167). According to Ricoeur, the creative power

of imaginative consciousness manifests itself first and foremost in works of

fiction and not in images. Fiction does not simply mimic an already given

reality; it produces new meaning that has the power to change reality alto-

gether.2 Ricoeur himself considers fiction not merely as one form of imagi-

native activity among others, but as the paradigmatic expression of

imagination. Moreover, fiction, which uses the narrative form, grounds

human experience, since, Ricoeur claims: “the meaning of human existence

is itself narrative.”3 It seems then that Ricoeur’s critique of Sartre’s theory of

imagination does not merely challenge his understanding of human imagi-

nation, but also implicitly contests Sartre’s understanding of “the meaning of

human existence” and its relation to imagination.

Commentators accept Ricoeur’s critique of Sartre for the most part and

take the distinction that Ricoeur draws between their notions of imagination

as a given.4 A notable exception is Beata Stawarska, who recognizes produc-

tive dimensions of imagination in Sartre’s work and claims that these co-exist

alongside its representative, pictorial dimensions.5 Stawarska traces the non-

pictorial model back to Pierre Janet’s work on obsessive patients. Following

Janet perhaps, Stawarska focuses on Sartre’s treatment of dreams, hallucina-

tions and other pathological conditions that manifest the productive and free

dimensions of imagination. I wish to supplement Stawarska’s account by

concentrating on the role of productive imagination in aesthetic experience.

I move beyond Stawarska’s treatment of Sartre’s productive imagination in

the last part of the paper, where I examine the role of imagination in the

formation of a sense of self.

critique appear already in “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality” (123–141) and “Imagi-nation in Discourse and Action” (3–22). Abbreviations used in this article: AV refers toMacIntyre, After Virtue; IM refers to Sartre, The Imaginary; N refers to Sartre, Nausea; SRI refersto Ricoeur, “Sartre and Ryle on Imagination”; and WL refers to Sartre, What is Literature? andOther Essays.

2 As Ricoeur puts it, fiction “produces new meaning capable of generating a metamorphosisof reality” (SRI, 171).

3 Kearney (2004, 127).4 This happens, for example, in Busch (1997, 507–518), Kearney (1991), and Kearney

(2004).5 Beata Stawarska argues that alongside the prevailing pictorial theory of imagination, which

finds its inspiration in Husserl’s philosophy, Sartre conceptualizes imagination as spontaneousand self-determined, inspired by the work of Pierre Janet. See Stawarska (2005, 133–153).

44 LIOR LEVY

I argue here, then, in contrast to Ricoeur’s claim, that Sartre does

develop a notion of productive imagination. Already in The Imaginary, pub-

lished in 1940, Sartre offers reading-consciousness as an example of a con-

scious act that is not directed toward absent objects, but rather toward what

he calls an “irreal world.” Reading and writing appear again as instances of

productive imaginative activity in What is Literature?, where Sartre insists that

neither the writer nor the reader simply represent an already given reality.

Instead, both reader and writer constitute a world with their respective

imaginative acts. My aim in this paper is to offer an outline of Sartre’s

non-mimetic notion of imagination, and by so doing to rebut Ricoeur’s

criticism. To establish this, I examine Sartre’s work on imagination in light

of Ricoeur’s criticism, focusing both on The Imaginary and on his later work

on literature, What is Literature?, published in 1947. Ricoeur himself admits

that a more comprehensive understanding of Sartre’s theory of imagination

needs to draw not only on the texts that Sartre dedicates exclusively to

imagination, but also to take into account “his novels and plays, his con-

tribution to literary criticism, his monographs on Baudelaire and Genet,

and his L’Idiot de la famille” (SRI, 168). The scope of this paper does not

allow me to take all these sources into account. Instead, I will draw on

Sartre’s philosophical texts to formulate an account of his notion of pro-

ductive imagination, and will then examine Sartre’s novel Nausea (2007) to

show the manner in which this philosophical notion comes into play in a

literary work. The literary text will allow me to demonstrate that Sartre

links the productivity of imagination to the notion of narrativity, and that

he uses the latter as a crucial step in the constitution of selfhood. To

support this claim, I engage not only with Ricoeur’s criticism of Sartre’s

notion of imagination, but also with Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of the

Sartrean neglect of narrativity in After Virtue (1986). Since MacIntyre’s work

resonates with Ricoeur’s own views on narrativity, as Ricoeur himself

admits in Oneself as Another (1992), I treat the claims that he makes about

Sartre in After Virtue as a kind of continuation or development of Ricoeur’s

treatment of Sartre’s notion of imagination.6 By the end of the paper I hope

to have shown that Sartre developed a notion of narrative identity well

before Ricoeur and MacIntyre and that he sees the question of selfhood as

closely related to practices of imagination.

6 Ricoeur notes the “felicitous encounter” between his own analyses in Time and Narrative andthose in After Virtue and labors to distinguish his own position from MacIntyre’s (Ricoeur 1992,158). The similarities between the two allow me to use MacIntyre’s work as a kind of “proxy”for Ricoeur’s.

SARTRE AND RICOEUR ON PRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION 45

2. SARTRE AND RICOEUR ON ABSENCE AND IRREALITY

According to Ricoeur, Sartre’s analyses of imagination express his desire to

“rebut . . . the notion that the image is a kind of thing in the mind” (SRI, 169).

To achieve this purpose, Sartre focuses on images whose referents exist

outside the mind—caricatures, photos, or paintings of absent friends.

However, Ricoeur claims that Sartre continues to affirm the ontological

priority of the original over the image, since images often refer to objects

other than themselves, which they re-present. Sartre reduces the image-family

to “picture-family, a move that “reinforces the privilege of the original ”

(SRI, 172). Because of this, he says, Sartre is unable to develop a genuine

theory of fiction, one that focuses not on absence but on unreality and

accounts for the productivity of imagination.

While it is true that Sartre often uses examples of pictorial images in his

phenomenological analyses of imagination in the two books he dedicates to

the topic, he also discusses works of fiction and experiences of reading fiction

as examples of pictorial-free imaginative experiences. In The Imaginary he uses

reading as an opportunity to examine the role of knowledge in the constitu-

tion of the image, and his discussion allows him to re-evaluate imagination’s

relation to absence and unreality. Ricoeur thinks that Sartre’s notion of

knowledge reinforces “the key position of the original” (SRI, 171); he iden-

tifies the knowledge that shapes imagining consciousness with the knowledge

of the absent object that one intends imaginatively. Ricoeur takes the intro-

duction of a knowledge component as indicative of the fact that Sartre limits

imaginative consciousness to re-presentations of things that were first given in

experience.

However, a close reading reveals that this is not the case. Sartre defines

knowledge as “the active structure of the imagining consciousness” (IM, 61).

Hence, knowledge is not residue of past experiences that are replicated by

imagination; rather than being the content of the imaginary object, knowl-

edge is the ongoing form of its constitution. The role of knowledge in imag-

ining is most clear in reading-consciousness. The reader, Sartre insists,

intends an irreal world and does not merely restore or represent absent

objects.

In reading, one discovers an irreal world, which is “not that of perception,

but neither . . . that of mental images” (ibid., 64). Sartre uses the term

“discovery” to describe the act of reading, pointing out the fact that the

reader progresses toward what is yet to happen, and that in doing so a yet

unknown world unfolds before her. Here, Sartre seems to recognize that the

temporal structure of reading is different from that of pictorial imagination.

While images are contemporary with their consciousness—Sartre says that

46 LIOR LEVY

images are defined by the conscious acts that summon them; images disclose

at once all that they possess, which is what consciousness has invested in

them—the object of reading, the irreal world, is not contemporaneous with

each moment of reading. The irreal world gradually appears before the

reader as reading progresses. Moreover, each moment of reading builds on

previous and future acts in a way that image-consciousness does not. An

image-consciousness is a self-enclosed unit (Sartre says that the image is

“given to intuition in one piece” [ibid., 11]). Contrary to this, reading builds

upon earlier moments and on the reader’s anticipation of what is yet to come.

The reader synthesizes these different moments as he advances in reading.

One projects backward and forward, interpreting what was read in light of

what is now being read, and understanding what is now being read in light of

the anticipation of what is about to come. Sartre gives the name “knowledge”

to the synthesis between these moments of reading which allows for a mean-

ingful whole—i.e., the imaginary world of the novel—to appear.7

At the same time, Sartre emphasizes that the experience of reading is an

instance of imagining and is not as abstract as thinking, since reading puts

the reader in the presence of “concrete beings.”8 “Anna Karenina” and

“Sherlock Holmes” are not abstract concepts that one forms after reading,

nor are they names given to objects that were already encountered in expe-

rience (hence they are not representations of something absent). Instead, they

are irreal entities that become concrete as reading advances. At the same

time, their materializing presence shapes the reader’s expectations of what is

about to appear.

The emphasis on the concreteness of the irreal world, the object of

reading-consciousness, allows Sartre to preserve an imagistic aspect in

reading. Sartre describes reading as a hybrid consciousness, calling it “half-

sign and half-imagining” (ibid., 67). Knowledge is a scheme that guides

reading and allows the reader to mediate the signs of the text and the

concrete, irreal objects toward which the synthesis affected by reading is

7 As Sartre puts it, knowledge is “an internal synthesis that is characterized by a realinterpretation of its elements” (IM, 62). In other words, knowledge allows us to fuse what wasread with what is just now being read, while projecting or anticipating what is about to come(which in turn shapes what is now being read).

8 The phrase “concrete beings” could be taken as an indication of Sartre’s inability toarticulate the true sense of unreality characteristic of fictional objects. This is how Ricoeurinterprets Sartre (Ricoeur, 1979). Sartre, he says, creates symmetry between “absence as a modeof giveness of the real, and non-existence as the contrary of the real” (ibid., 126). I do not thinkthat Sartre confabulates absence with irreality. Instead, the concreteness in question concernsthe kind of synthesis that imagination effects. Sartre argues that syntheses of reading are done“in the manner of perceptual syntheses and not of signifying syntheses” (IM, 64); hence, they areconcrete and not abstract.


directed (which is no other than the imaginary world of the text). This scheme

is not general or abstract, but particular, and its particularity allows us to

constitute the imaginative object (the narrative as a whole). Already in the

short discussion of the experience of reading in The Imaginary, Sartre moves

beyond a purely pictorial model of imagination, according to which con-

sciousness uses images to direct itself to absent objects, toward a productive

notion of imagination, wherein consciousness synthesizes signs to create a

concrete, irreal object.

The discussion of reading and fiction in The Imaginary reveals that Sartre’s

and Ricoeur’s notions of imagination are not opposed, as Ricoeur suggests

and as might seem at first glance. Ricoeur too describes the imaginative

process as a sort of hybrid consciousness, calling it “both a thinking and a

seeing” (1978b, 147). According to him, imagination enables us to redescribe

reality, thus allowing the emergence of new meaning. Guided by a phenom-

enology of reading, Ricoeur says that this experience shows how “imagina-

tion radiates out in all directions, reanimating earlier experiences, awakening

dormant memories, spreading to adjacent sensorial fields” (1978a, 8). He

adopts Kant’s theory of schematism to argue that imaginative activity always

involves a sensible moment, and borrows Wittgenstein’s notion of “seeing-as”

in order to explain the mutual activity of image and language. This dual

influence is manifest in Ricoeur’s claim that “the seeing as activated in reading

ensures the joining of verbal meaning with linguistic fullness. . . . Thanks to its

character as half thought and half experience, it joins the light of sense

with the fullness of the image. In this way, the non-verbal and the verbal

are firmly united at the core of the image-ing function of language . . .”

(1981a, 207–8).

The affinities between Sartre’s and Ricoeur’s view become clearer now.

Sartre too described certain imaginative acts as “half-sign and half-

imagining,” and we find hints of the synthesis between the verbal and the

imagistic in his work as well. In reading, says Sartre, imagination allows us to

create a world, or to intend an irreal world, through linguistic signs; hence,

“to read is to realize contact with the irreal world on the signs” (IM, 64).9

Similarly to Ricoeur, who describes the reverberations of imagination, main-

taining that it has a sensible moment, and that in fact imagination creates a

meaningful whole out of a synthesis between signs and perceptual experience

(Ricoeur’s “dormant memories” and “sensorial fields”), Sartre too says that

9 Joseph Margolis expressed a similar view recently. According to Margolis, one cannotunderstand a text if one restricts oneself to the words or sentences of which the text is comprised.A prior understanding of the “world” of the text is needed “in order to understand even thestring of sentences that form the story’s verbal text” (2007, 303).

48 LIOR LEVY

the image gathers discrete pieces of meaning into a unified whole, into the

“world” of the text. Furthermore, in The Imaginary Sartre insists that the

creativity of imagination rests on its ability to mediate language and images,

and that through this act of mediation imagination gives rise to the irreal

world, which he portrays in the following words:

In this world there are plants, animals, fields, towns, people: initially those men-

tioned in the book and then a host of others that are not named but are in the

background and give this world its depth. These concrete beings are the objects of

my thoughts: Their irreal existence is the correlate of the syntheses that I effect

guided by words. That is, I effect these same syntheses in the manner of perceptual

syntheses (ibid., 64).

In fact, reading is often a forceful experience wherein readers become totally

engrossed in the plot, because imagination allows readers to face a world,

albeit an “irreal one.”10 It should be clear from this that Sartre does not

conflate absence with unreality or ignore the differences between them, as

Ricoeur suggests. In reading, imaginative consciousness does not intend an

absent world, a replica of a mental or physical world. Instead, guided by

language, imaginative consciousness creates an irreal world.

2.1 Fiction and Imagination in What is Literature?

Perhaps the few brief remarks that Sartre makes in The Imaginary are insuffi-

cient to support the claim that he develops a notion of productive imagina-

tion. To establish this, I want to examine his theory of literature in What is

Literature?, published eight years after The Imaginary. There, Sartre studies and

defines acts of reading and writing, asking not only what literature is, but what

it could and should be.

Sartre addresses the productivity of imagination in What is Literature? in his

discussion of the constitution of the text through a synthesis between the

written work and the act of reading. The act of writing or “the creative act,”

he says, “is only an incomplete and abstract moment in the production of the

10 As Sartre puts it: “in reading as in the theatre we are the presence of a world and weattribute to that world . . . complete existence in the irreal” (IM, 63). Perhaps in mentioningreading alongside the experience of watching a play, Sartre wishes to show that the experienceof reading is not so different from other forms of imagination. In reading, just as in watching aplay or a movie, a text, script, image, or action guides our consciousness. In addition to that,reading, just like other image-consciousnesses, differs in principle from ordinary perceptualexperiences inasmuch as the synthesis that it effects is spontaneous and not passive, as percep-tual synthesis (Sartre discusses this characteristic of imagination [ibid., 11–14]). I am grateful toan anonymous referee for bringing the similarities between reading and other forms of imagi-nation to my attention. For a more elaborate discussion of the similarities between reading andimaginative acts, mainly dreaming and hallucinating, see Stawarska (2005, 143–151).


work” (WL, 51). The reader exceeds what the writer has given; reading is a

form of labor that dissolves and unifies the signs of the text, leading to the

creation of an imaginary world.11 Because the act of reading is dynamic and

extends over time, the literary object, constituted by reading, “exists only in

movement” (ibid., 50). The imaginary object is not a static object, a fixed

replica of something that exists elsewhere. Instead, it develops and grows as

reading progresses and can be modified each time one returns to the text.

Again, this clearly entails that there is no fixed meaning that imagination

recovers or an absent object that it intends; in reading, one is in a constant

movement toward something that is not yet given and that needs to be

created by the joint efforts of the author and the reader. Hence, Sartre argues,

reading is composed of a host of hypotheses, of dreams followed by awakening, of

hope and deceptions. Readers are always ahead of the sentence they are reading in

a merely probable future which partly collapses and partly comes together in

proportion as they progress, which withdraws from one page to the next and forms

the moving horizon of the literary object” (ibid.).

Later, Ricoeur argues in a similar fashion. In reading, he says echoing Sartre,

“the imagination radiates out in all directions, reanimating earlier experi-

ences, awakening dormant memories, spreading to adjacent sensorial fields

(1978a, 8).

Sartre does not think that the imaginative act represents something that

was already encountered in experience. He describes the imaginative creation

constituted by the reader as “an absolute beginning” (WL, 54), sharing

Ricoeur’s idea that fiction “produces new meaning” (SRI, 171). According to

Sartre, imaginative activity does not utilize the text or base its constructions

on a pre-organized matrix of possible scenarios that the book offers. Instead,

it aims at the constitution of the text, and to that end it uses the freedom of

consciousness. The literary object is an end toward which human freedom

strives.

What is freedom? It is well known that Sartre identifies freedom with

consciousness. This is because, for him, the intentional structure of conscious-

ness entails that consciousness detaches itself from its objects and is immedi-

ately conscious not only of objects, but also of itself as different from these

objects. By linking imagination to freedom, Sartre points to the fact that the

power of imagination allows consciousness to withdraw from the world, to

11 Similarly, Ricoeur says that the imaginative process of “composition, of configuration, isnot completed in the text but in the reader.” He continues, as if reiterating Sartre’s idea, “thesense or the signification of a narrative stems from the intersection of the world of the text andthe world of the reader” (1991, 26).

50 LIOR LEVY

negate or detach itself from it.12 Sartre moves in a direction that appears later

in Ricoeur’s work, of identifying imagination with suspension or detach-

ment.13 Ricoeur uses Husserl’s notion of epoché to characterize imaginative

activity, saying “imagination is epoché.” In other words, he argues that

imaginative activity allows us to re-envision the world precisely by its ability

to suspend or bracket given and immediate meanings. As he puts it, imagi-

nations allows for “the projection of new possibilities of redescribing the world”

(1978b, 154). In a very similar fashion, Sartre introduces the connection

between imagination, withdrawal, and creation, by saying “through the

various objects which it produces . . . the creative act aims at a total renewal

of the world” (WL, 63). For Sartre, just as for Ricoeur, imagination allows

consciousness to distance itself from reality, and in so doing to “suspend the

actual.”14 This suspension is followed by an imaginative creation, which does

not merely replicate the world and its given order, but forms a new reality.15

In the later text, Sartre also returns to the topic of linguistic innovation and

the role it plays in the emergence of new meaning. Again Sartre refers to the

synthesis created by imagination, wherein past, present, and future moments

of reading are totalized into a whole that is the literary object. This object, the

irreal world that reading constitutes, is not an amalgam of the discrete

meanings of the words printed on the paper. On the contrary, particular

words gain meaning when they are read in light of the imaginary horizon of

the narrative as a whole. As Sartre puts it, “the meaning is no longer con-

tained in the words since it is it . . . that allows the significance of each of them

to be understood” (WL, 52). But neither is the irreal world a correlate of the

author’s intentions, since reading is not a direct form of communication

between author and reader. Rather, the irreal world is the holistic, imaginary

meaning that gives each particular word its “orientation” and positions it in

12 For an elaborate discussion of the freedom of consciousness and its relation to imagina-tion, see Levy (2012, 143–61).

13 Thomas Flynn argues that Sartre’s emphasis on “possibility, negativity and lack” makesimagining consciousness “the model for Sartrean consciousness tout court” (2006, 109). Byreading imagination as a leitmotif and a positive operative power in Sartre’s work, Flynn showshow unlikely it is to think, as Thomas Busch does, that “imagination all too often in Sartre’searly work meant escapism, a projection of an unreal world which lured consciousness from its‘real’ problems and effective solutions of them” (Busch 1997, 511).

14 Flynn (2006, 107). See also Flynn (1975, 431–42).15 Both Sartre and Ricoeur are aware of the ethical and political dimensions of imagination.

For Sartre, the fact that fiction has a real impact on reality requires writers to be “committed”and assume responsibility over their work. Ricoeur does not wish to commit writers and readersas Sartre does, but he is well aware of the transformative power of fiction and its ability to effectchange: “Fiction has the power to ‘remake’ reality and, within the framework of narrative fictionin particular, to remake real praxis to the extent that the text intentionally aims at a horizon ofnew reality which we may call a world” (1983, 185).


relation to the rest of the text. Hence, Sartre concludes, “the literary object

though realized through language, is never given in language” (ibid.).

3. PRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION AND NARRATIVES

We have seen in the previous two sections that, contrary to Ricoeur’s claim,

Sartre does develop a notion of productive imagination, insisting that along-

side its pictorial or sensible moments, imagination has linguistic dimensions

and a unique temporal structure. However, we may wonder what are the

consequences of such a discovery, of the fact that Sartre, like Ricoeur, thinks

of imagination not only in mimetic terms, but rather conceives it as capable

of innovation, of introducing irreality and novelty into the world.

As I noted in the first section, the notion of productive imagination is the

engine of Ricoeur’s narrative theory, which grounds his understanding of

human existence. According to Ricoeur, we create life stories out of multiple

incidents in an analogous way to the manner in which we extract a plot out

of the diverse elements in a text. Fiction, he argues, “ ‘invents’ and ‘discovers’

reality” (1979, 127), and by so doing it “contributes to making life, in the

biological sense of the word, a human life” (1991, 20). Texts are not only the

locus point of narratives, they also allow humans to interpret their lives and

introduce a form of self-understanding or reflexivity to life.16

At this point, Sartre seems to part ways with Ricoeur. By emphasizing the

immediacy of self-consciousness, the fact that consciousness always necessi-

tates self-consciousness, Sartre might seem to rule out any notion of media-

tion. Moreover, Sartre’s theory of self might seem to exclude the possibility of

articulating the self in terms of narrative. This view is not expressed directly

by Ricoeur, but Alasdair MacIntyre, another proponent of narrative theory,

espouses and uses it as a basis for his criticism of Sartre’s conception of self in

After Virtue. MacIntyre oscillates between thinking of Sartre as holding a

“no-self” doctrine (“for Sartre the self ’s self-discovery is characterized as the

discovery that the self is ‘nothing,’ is not a substance but a perpetual set of

possibilities” [AV, 32]), to thinking of the self in Sartre’s work as “a self so

detached . . . that can have no history” (ibid., 221). Under both interpreta-

tions, he concludes that a study of Sartre’s notion of self shows that its

“contrast with the narrative view of the self is clear” (ibid.).

Contrary to this, I suggest that the notion of narrative identity is a theme

in Sartre’s philosophical and literary work. The relationship between fiction

16 As Ricoeur puts it, “narrative fiction is an irreducible dimension of self-understanding”(1991, 30).

52 LIOR LEVY

and life, recounting and living, occupies Sartre, as his work—including the

multiple biographies that he wrote, his own autobiography, Words, and the

numerous treatments of the literary form of the diary in Nausea (itself a

fictional diary) and in the abundant analyses of the diaries of Gide, Stendhal,

and Amiel in his war diaries—makes clear. In the next section I offer an

analysis of the relationship between living and telling in Nausea, in hope that

this analysis will demonstrate the importance of imagination and narrativity

in the making of life.

3.1 Self, Meaning, and Narration in Nausea

Sartre’s Nausea presents its readers with the diary of Antoine Roquentin.

Framed by a short editorial note (which states that Roquentin’s journal was

published without alteration), the diary entries, some dated but most indicat-

ing only a day or time, document Roquentin’s everyday life in Bouville. But

behind the chronological order and pedantic documentation of daily routines

that the diary offers, lies a tale of Roquentin’s narrative-failure, his inability to

create a meaningful life story.

The journal opens with an undated declaration of intents: Roquentin

decides that “the best thing would be to write down events from day to day.

Keep a diary to see clearly . . .” (N, 1). What he wishes to see clearly is his life;

he wants to put it in order and endow it with meaning. Soon after, Roquentin

recounts the events that befall him, writing them down in attempt to make

sense of them. We learn that Roquentin lost sight of himself, for he confesses

that he does not even recognize his own face in the mirror: “what I see is well

below the monkey, on the fringe of the vegetable world, at the level of

jellyfish” (ibid., 17). It is the human face that reveals one’s feelings and

emotions, that appears to others as the bearer of traits, that expresses one’s

personality and humanity. Looking at himself, Roquentin does not see his

self, for his face is no longer human; it became uncanny and estranged.

Not only his sense of self, but his life as a whole disintegrates. Roquentin

confesses that he “cannot quite recapture the succession of events . . . cannot

distinguish what is important” (ibid., 8).17 He marvels at people who are able

17 Not only Roquentin is unable to fathom the events that befall him. The readers too are leftwith unanswered questions. For instance, we never learn directly if Roquentin raped andmurdered little Lucienne or not. “There is no evidence that he has rapist’s tendencies,” says onecommentator (Gore 1990, 38), whereas another concludes that “Roquentin raped and mur-dered little Lucienne” (Clayton 2009, 13). Sartre echoes Roquentin’s narrative failure in the waythat he structures the novel. The short and laconic editorial preface with which the novelcommences contributes to the readers’ inability to properly assess the text that they are aboutto read—why were the papers and notebooks of Antoine Roquentin published? Are theseposthumous texts? And, if they are worthy of publication, why aren’t we informed of


to talk about their lives; if he were in their place he would “fall over” himself.

This is because talking about one’s life requires finding some sense in it, giving

it a figure in speech. But Roquentin is unable to think of his life as meaningful.

His world is gradually emptied of meaning and he is taken over by a feeling

of the “absurd.” “The absurd” is the name that Roquentin gives to the

nauseating feeling of the collapse of all meaning, to his experience of appre-

hending reality as a full and undifferentiated mass of being.

The notion of the absurd in Nausea is usually understood on a metaphysical

plane as the awareness of the groundless nature of human existence, and the

realization that humans are essentially free and are therefore the source of all

values. This reading is not without sense; throughout the novel Roquentin

reevaluates human actions and habits as arbitrary and therefore meaningless.

“This morning I took a bath and shaved. Only when I think back over those

careful little actions, I cannot understand how I was able to make them: they

are so vain” (ibid., 157). However, even if we accept that Nausea is first and

foremost a novel about human freedom, the arbitrariness of values and the

meaninglessness of actions, we can still argue that the question of making

life meaningful, of authoring life’s meaning, is one of the novel’s central

themes.

Indeed, even MacIntyre, who thinks that Sartre does not espouse a narrative

approach, claims that in Nausea Sartre (or as he refers to him “Sartre/

Roquentin”) identifies “the intelligibility of an action with its place in a

narrative sequence” (AV, 214). The difference between Sartre and a genuine

narrative theorist, says MacIntyre, is that “Sartre/Roquentin takes it that

human actions are as such unintelligible occurrences: it is to a realization of the

metaphysical implications of this that Roquentin is brought in the course of the

novel and the practical effect upon him is to bring to an end his own project of

writing an historical autobiography. This project no longer makes sense”

(ibid.).

MacIntyre is right to note that Roquentin thinks of human actions as

“unintelligible occurrences.” Roquentin frequently addresses the meaning-

lessness of his own actions and the actions of others. Watching card players in

the cafe he comments, “Other cards fall, the hands go and come. What an

odd occupation: it doesn’t look like a game or a rite, or a habit” (N, 20). He

cannot call these actions “a game, or a rite, or a habit” because he does not

see any unifying structure to them; their goal is somewhere in the future,

Roquentin’s fate? The novel’s abrupt ending reinforces the instability of the text and rehashesRoquentin’s inability of constituting a clear narrative and a functioning self. Sartre doesnot offer his readers a resolution, and the narrative arc of the novel does not truly reach anend.

54 LIOR LEVY

absent, and all that exists in the present are meaningless physical gestures.

The question is whether we ought to identify Roquentin’s position with

Sartre’s. In other words, the question is whether Nausea, the novel (itself a

narrative), presents Roquentin’s aversion to narratives and his assessment of

actions as meaningless as the ultimate truth of human existence, or whether

in fact the novel is critical of Roquentin’s position. It seems to me that instead

of arguing in a straightforward manner in favor of a reevaluation of human

actions as “unintelligible occurrences,” Sartre makes us see the impossibility

and danger in treating life in such a manner.

What allows MacIntyre to argue thusly against Sartre is the fact that he

treats the novel as a philosophical text that is only disguised as a literary text,

but is actually only an illustration of some philosophical doctrine (the doctrine

in question, according to MacIntyre, is Emotivism.) This, I think, is wrong.

We need to remember that Nausea is first and foremost a novel, and its

philosophical insights are embodied in the concrete actions and thoughts of its

protagonist. As a novel, Nausea puts at its center a pathological condition.

Despite the fact that this is rarely discussed, Nausea is a text that portrays a

pathological state.18 Roquentin loses his physical capabilities, is affected by

“deep, deep boredom” from which he never emerges, and at times his

consciousness seems to disintegrate completely. When watching the roots of

the chestnut tree, Roquentin becomes so overwhelmed by the “black, knotty

mass” of the tree’s roots that he looses the ability to differentiate himself from

it: “existence everywhere, infinitely, in excess, forever and everywhere . . . my

very flesh throbbed and opened, abandoned itself to the universal burgeon-

ing” (ibid., 179). Roquentin fails to recognize his own face and other familiar

objects and situations (“I know it’s the Rue Boulibet but I don’t recognize it”

[ibid., 226]); he refers to his own memories as “strange images” and cannot

relate them to episodes in his life (his memories “are only the skeletons.

There’s the story of a person who does this, does that, but it isn’t I, I

have nothing in common with him” [ibid., 33]). Rather than valorizing

Roquentin’s views about the difference between narrative and life, Sartre

shows us how the lack of an organizing narrative structure can lead to a total

collapse of the very fabric of life. In other words, Sartre does not simply

express through the novel the idea that “to present human life in the form of

a narrative is always to falsify it” (AV, 214), as MacIntyre argues. Instead, he

18 To the best of my knowledge, Peter Poiana is the only one who explicitly interprets Nauseaas a novel about a pathological state. He even argues that the pathology is the real protagonistof the text (2005, 77–91). While I agree with him that this pathology is central to the novel,I think that the fact that it is a pathological state of a concrete person—the protagonistRoquentin—matters greatly. In other words, Sartre is not dealing here with pathologies ingeneral but with a particular case of disintegration of subjectivity.


shows us that without a meaningful narrative, life itself is nothing but a bare

sequence of events, random occurrences. To present human life in the form

of a narrative is neither to falsify it nor to present its truth, but rather to

transform it altogether. Nausea shows that only narrative can turn life in its

biological sense into a human life, to borrow Ricoeur’s phrase.

Let us return to Roquentin’s disorders then. Roquentin looses his sense of

self, his past appears to him as belonging to someone else, other people disgust

him. As these disorders intensify, Roquentin is unable to “get his life

together.” Quite literally, he is unable to see his life as a unified whole. At the

basis of Roquentin’s failure to order the different episodes of his life and assign

meaning to them, at the basis of his inability to recognize these episodes as

events in his life, stands, I believe, a failure of imagination.19

For Sartre, as for Ricoeur, productive imagination is a synthesizing struc-

ture that unifies past, present, and future. In this sense, imagination has a

reflective moment, as it allows one to refer back to the past and gather it

into the present and the future; or better put, it allows one to imagine

backwards, to see the past through the net of present engagements and

future projects. Sartre deprives Roquentin of such ability. In the opening

pages of his diary, Roquentin confesses that he rarely thinks about his life,

which is to say that he rarely reflects on it and tries to give meaning to it,

to impose some order on the events that comprise it. The result is,

Roquentin confesses, that “a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in

me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution

takes place.” This, he continues, has given his life “such a jerky, incoherent

aspect” (N, 5). Roquentin himself must be aware of this problem, for he

decides to keep a diary, to record daily events and put them in order. The

act of writing is no doubt an attempt to claim life back by reflecting on it

and endowing it with meaning.

Despite this, Roquentin’s efforts fail. As a historian, he attempts to

report without exaggerating, to describe without interpreting, to write without

19 Nausea was originally titled Melancholia, after Dürer’s engraving showing the winged per-sonification of melancholy sitting, paralyzed and powerless, surrounded by unused geometricalobjects. Like Dürer’s figure, Roquentin seems to suffer from acute melancholy. Objects seemuseless to him and he envies people for being able to feel something real. Roquentin’s melan-cholia can be a direct result of his disfunctioning imagination. Jennifer Church ascribes thesymptoms of depression, the crossover from feeling melancholic to finding oneself in a faded andflattened world, to a failure of imagination. According to Church, since the depressedand non-depressed perceive the same sensory information, there must be something else thatexplains the former’s experience of the world as lacking depth. She convincingly argues thatimagination is responsible for the experience of depth and the emergence of meaning, as it“effects a synthesis that produces a certain sort of experience,” which is the experience of theworld as the locus of meaning (2003, 175–187).

56 LIOR LEVY

projecting.20 But this is precisely the problem: without imaginative projection

and reflection, the facts of which life is comprised simply do not add up.

Gradually, Roquentin the historian, who has a natural inclination for collect-

ing facts, for trying to document without interfering, becomes disenchanted

with his trade. His passion for studying the historical figure of the Marquis de

Rollebon wanes. “The man begins to bore me” (ibid., 13), he says.

Instead, Roquentin becomes attracted to fiction, to writing: “It is the book

which attracts me. I feel more and more need to write” (ibid.). At the very last

diary entry, Roquentin records his thoughts about a possible way out of his

fragmented and meaningless existence. The thing that holds this promise for

him is a future book that he intends to write. Roquentin wants to write a

novel, to use his imagination to tell a story. This work of fiction would allow

him to unify his life, not only because it will be a goal toward which he will

strive, but also because it will be an anchor of meaning around which the

other events of his life will be arranged. As he says, the novel would allow

him to “remember . . . life without repugnance” (ibid., 178). The diary ends

before we learn whether Roquentin accomplished this task. But as Cam

Clayton justly points out, it is precisely the abrupt ending of the novel that

“signals that the chronological rendering of isolated moments in diary form is

no longer appropriate” (2009, 6).

Before I conclude this discussion, it is important to note that despite the

fact that Sartre ascribes transformative powers to reading, he does not assign

such powers to writing in his philosophical work. In What is Literature?, Sartre

describes writing as the projection of an already completed plot on the page.

The writer, he says, “neither foresees nor conjectures” (WL, 50–51). In other

words, the writer already knows what will end up on the page; writing does

not change her, nothing about it can take her by surprise (and therefore,

creating a narrative cannot be truly transformative). Sartre seems to be

committed to two different positions. In What is Literature?, where he explores

imagination from a theoretical perspective, he links its productivity only to

acts of reading and not to writing; but in Nausea, where he employs his

imagination as a novelist, he demonstrates through his protagonist Roquentin

the importance of productive imagination to writing, and shows that, in fact,

writing does possess transformative powers. It may be the case that in the ten

years that passed between the publication of Nausea and What is Literature?

20 Cam Clayton sees this as a form of Sartrean criticism on the conception of time as a linearsequence. Roquentin’s consciousness “is isolated in the instant” and he tries in vain to suppressthe fact that “present consciousness exists towards a future, by way of a past” (2009, 4).However, Clayton does not develop a conception of narrative to supplement his analysis ofSartrean existential temporality.


Sartre’s thoughts on the matter changed, but it is also possible that there is an

inherent tension in his work that cannot be so easily resolved. It seems to me,

however, that Sartre the novelist offers an insight into the nature and value of

narratives that escaped Sartre the philosopher at times, and that this insight

is worthy of exploration, even if it does not always cohere with views that he

expressed elsewhere.

4. CONCLUSION

Sartre’s Nausea attests not only to the productivity of imagination, but also to

its role in the constitution of a sense of self; the self is created through the

weaving of past, present, and future in a narrative. Roquentin’s diary shows

us that it takes a narrative structure to arrange life’s jerky and erratic move-

ments into a coherent stream. Where the diary failed, because it only allowed

Roquentin to document his life as a sequence of accidents, the novel will

succeed, as it will allow him to use imagination to unify this meaningless

sequence and turn it into a meaningful whole.

At one point in the novel, Roquentin says that he wants his life to be the

subject of a melody. In other words, he wishes that his life would be har-

monious as a melody, where past, present, and future are fused together.

We can see now that what he wishes for is that his life would have a

structure, that its different moments would be unified by one story, just as

the discrete notes are unified by the melody that encompasses them. In The

Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre compares the relationship between the self

and its states, actions, and qualities to the relationship between a melody

and the notes that comprise it. Just as a melody is composed of notes but

is not identical to those individual notes, Sartre thinks that the ego or self

is “composed” of states and qualities (loves, hatreds, wishes, memories, etc.),

but is not identical to them. At the same time, the self, just like the melody,

is not a substrate that supports its states and exists independently of them.

The example of the melody helps us think of the self as a relation between

the different states and episodes of life, an organizing structure or a whole

that gives meaning to its parts. As each note is heard as part of the melody,

concrete hatreds and loves become meaningful as part of the totality which

is the self. Concrete events are “notes” or moments in life’s “melody,” and

they acquire meaning by being situated in the overall unity of the self,

in the self’s story. While the events of life are the very materials from which

the self is made (I am my hatreds and loves, my shyness and my laziness),

the self is not just their amalgam. There is a dialectical relation between the

self and occurrences from which its life is made; concrete episodes are situ-

ated in the history of the self or weaved into it by the force of imagination,

58 LIOR LEVY

thus gaining meaning, but as these episodes are added to the story as whole,

the terrain of the self is being modified.21

By comparing the self to a melody, Sartre emphasized the imaginary

dimensions of the self, the fact it depends on imaginative and projective

powers. The self, he says, “constitutes the ideal and indirect . . . unity of the

infinite series of our reflected consciousness” (1991, 60). Inasmuch as the ego

is ideal, it is an imaginary object, in the sense that I have discussed above. We

see then that, contrary to Ricoeur’s claims, Sartre offers an analysis of the

nature of productive imagination in his philosophical works. I hope to have

shown, through my reading of Nausea, that Sartre’s literary work demon-

strates the same keen awareness and preoccupation with the transformative

nature of imagination and the role of narratives in authoring one’s life.22

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