SARTRE AND RICOEUR ON

PRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION
L L
ABSTRACT: Commenting on Jean-Paul Sartres theory of imagination, Paul Ricoeur
argues that Sartre fails to address the productive nature of imaginative acts. According
to Ricoeur, Sartres examples show that he thinks of imagination in mimetic terms,
neglecting its innovative and creative dimensions. Imagination, Ricoeur continues,
manifests itself most clearly in ction, wherein newmeaning is created. By using ction
as the paradigm of imaginative activity, Ricoeur is able to argue against Sartre that the
essence of imagination lies not in its ability to reproduce absent objects, but rather in the
ability to transformreality through creative acts. Motivated by the intuition that Sartre
the writer could not have forgotten to address such crucial dimensions of imagination,
I examine Sartres philosophical and literary work, showing that not only does he
develop a notion of productive imagination, he also puts this notion to work by
articulating the relationship between imagination, narrative, and identity formation,
well before Ricoeur advanced his narrative-identity theory. I argue that Sartre, like
Ricoeur and MacIntyre, another representative of narrative-theory whose criticism of
Sartre I address in this essay, views imagination and narrativity as necessary conditions
for the formation of a coherent and meaningful sense of self.
1. INTRODUCTION
In an article that examines Sartres 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. She
specializes in twentieth century European philosophy, in particular phenomenology and exis-
tentialism. Her recent publications include Reection, Memory and Selfhood in Jean-Paul
Sartres Early Philosophy (Forthcoming, Sartre Studies International); Rethinking the Relation-
ship between Memory and Imagination in Sartres The Imaginary (The Journal of the British Society
for Phenomenology, 2012); and Narrative, Identity and Meaning in Jean-Paul Sartres Nausea,
(Iyyun, 2013). She is currently developing a Sartrean theory of narrative identity in a book-length
manuscript titled Creative Selves: Imagination, Memory, and Narrativity in Jean-Paul Sartres Thought.
1
Ricoeur expresses an ongoing dissatisfaction with Sartres work on imagination. He fully
develops his criticism in Sartre and Ryle on Imagination (167178), but earlier versions of his
The Southern Journal of Philosophy
Volume 52, Issue 1
March 2014
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 52, Issue 1 (2014), 4360.
ISSN 0038-4283, online ISSN 2041-6962. DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12049
43
Sartre, says Ricoeur, adopts a reproductive theory of imagination, thus
neglecting imaginations productivity. Sartres 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 rst and foremost in works of
ction 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 ction not merely as one form of imagi-
native activity among others, but as the paradigmatic expression of
imagination. Moreover, ction, which uses the narrative form, grounds
human experience, since, Ricoeur claims: the meaning of human existence
is itself narrative.
3
It seems then that Ricoeurs critique of Sartres theory of
imagination does not merely challenge his understanding of human imagi-
nation, but also implicitly contests Sartres understanding of the meaning of
human existence and its relation to imagination.
Commentators accept Ricoeurs 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 Sartres work and claims that these co-exist
alongside its representative, pictorial dimensions.
5
Stawarska traces the non-
pictorial model back to Pierre Janets work on obsessive patients. Following
Janet perhaps, Stawarska focuses on Sartres treatment of dreams, hallucina-
tions and other pathological conditions that manifest the productive and free
dimensions of imagination. I wish to supplement Stawarskas account by
concentrating on the role of productive imagination in aesthetic experience.
I move beyond Stawarskas treatment of Sartres 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 (123141) and Imagi-
nation in Discourse and Action (322). Abbreviations used in this article: AV refers to
MacIntyre, After Virtue; IM refers to Sartre, The Imaginary; N refers to Sartre, Nausea; SRI refers
to Ricoeur, Sartre and Ryle on Imagination; and WL refers to Sartre, What is Literature? and
Other Essays.
2
As Ricoeur puts it, ction produces new meaning capable of generating a metamorphosis
of reality (SRI, 171).
3
Kearney (2004, 127).
4
This happens, for example, in Busch (1997, 507518), Kearney (1991), and Kearney
(2004).
5
Beata Stawarska argues that alongside the prevailing pictorial theory of imagination, which
nds its inspiration in Husserls philosophy, Sartre conceptualizes imagination as spontaneous
and self-determined, inspired by the work of Pierre Janet. See Stawarska (2005, 133153).
44
LIOR LEVY
I argue here, then, in contrast to Ricoeurs 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 Sartres
non-mimetic notion of imagination, and by so doing to rebut Ricoeurs
criticism. To establish this, I examine Sartres work on imagination in light
of Ricoeurs 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 Sartres 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 LIdiot 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
Sartres philosophical texts to formulate an account of his notion of pro-
ductive imagination, and will then examine Sartres 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 Ricoeurs criticism of Sartres
notion of imagination, but also with Alasdair MacIntyres critique of the
Sartrean neglect of narrativity in After Virtue (1986). Since MacIntyres work
resonates with Ricoeurs 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 Ricoeurs
treatment of Sartres 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 and
those in After Virtue and labors to distinguish his own position from MacIntyres (Ricoeur 1992,
158). The similarities between the two allow me to use MacIntyres work as a kind of proxy
for Ricoeurs.
SARTRE AND RICOEUR ON PRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION
45
2. SARTRE AND RICOEUR ON ABSENCE AND IRREALITY
According to Ricoeur, Sartres 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 mindcaricatures, photos, or paintings of absent friends.
However, Ricoeur claims that Sartre continues to afrm 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 ction, 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 ction and experiences of reading ction
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 imaginations
relation to absence and unreality. Ricoeur thinks that Sartres notion of
knowledge reinforces the key position of the original (SRI, 171); he iden-
ties 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 rst given in
experience.
However, a close reading reveals that this is not the case. Sartre denes
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 consciousnessSartre says that
46
LIOR LEVY
images are dened by the conscious acts that summon them; images disclose
at once all that they possess, which is what consciousness has invested in
themthe 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 readers 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 wholei.e., the imaginary world of the novelto 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 readers 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 real
interpretation of its elements (IM, 62). In other words, knowledge allows us to fuse what was
read 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 Sartres inability to
articulate the true sense of unreality characteristic of ctional objects. This is how Ricoeur
interprets Sartre (Ricoeur, 1979). Sartre, he says, creates symmetry between absence as a mode
of giveness of the real, and non-existence as the contrary of the real (ibid., 126). I do not think
that Sartre confabulates absence with irreality. Instead, the concreteness in question concerns
the 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 are
concrete and not abstract.
SARTRE AND RICOEUR ON PRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION
47
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 ction in The Imaginary reveals that Sartres
and Ricoeurs notions of imagination are not opposed, as Ricoeur suggests
and as might seem at rst 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 elds (1978a, 8). He
adopts Kants theory of schematism to argue that imaginative activity always
involves a sensible moment, and borrows Wittgensteins notion of seeing-as
in order to explain the mutual activity of image and language. This dual
inuence is manifest in Ricoeurs 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 rmly united at the core of the image-ing function of language . . .
(1981a, 2078).
The afnities between Sartres and Ricoeurs view become clearer now.
Sartre too described certain imaginative acts as half-sign and half-
imagining, and we nd 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
(Ricoeurs dormant memories and sensorial elds), Sartre too says that
9
Joseph Margolis expressed a similar view recently. According to Margolis, one cannot
understand 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 the
string of sentences that form the storys verbal text (2007, 303).
48
LIOR LEVY
the image gathers discrete pieces of meaning into a unied 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, elds, 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
conate 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 insuf-
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
denes 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 we
attribute to that world . . . complete existence in the irreal (IM, 63). Perhaps in mentioning
reading alongside the experience of watching a play, Sartre wishes to show that the experience
of reading is not so different from other forms of imagination. In reading, just as in watching a
play 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 perceptual
experiences inasmuch as the synthesis that it effects is spontaneous and not passive, as percep-
tual synthesis (Sartre discusses this characteristic of imagination [ibid., 1114]). I am grateful to
an 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 and
imaginative acts, mainly dreaming and hallucinating, see Stawarska (2005, 143151).
SARTRE AND RICOEUR ON PRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION
49
work (WL, 51). The reader exceeds what the writer has given; reading is a
form of labor that dissolves and unies 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 xed
replica of something that exists elsewhere. Instead, it develops and grows as
reading progresses and can be modied each time one returns to the text.
Again, this clearly entails that there is no xed 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 elds
(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
Ricoeurs idea that ction 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 identies 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 conguration, is
not completed in the text but in the reader. He continues, as if reiterating Sartres idea, the
sense or the signication of a narrative stems from the intersection of the world of the text and
the 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 Ricoeurs work, of identifying imagination with suspension or detach-
ment.
13
Ricoeur uses Husserls notion of epoch to characterize imaginative
activity, saying imagination is epoch. 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 signicance of each of them
to be understood (WL, 52). But neither is the irreal world a correlate of the
authors 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, 14361).
13
Thomas Flynn argues that Sartres emphasis on possibility, negativity and lack makes
imagining consciousness the model for Sartrean consciousness tout court (2006, 109). By
reading imagination as a leitmotif and a positive operative power in Sartres work, Flynn shows
how unlikely it is to think, as Thomas Busch does, that imagination all too often in Sartres
early 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, 43142).
15
Both Sartre and Ricoeur are aware of the ethical and political dimensions of imagination.
For Sartre, the fact that ction 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 readers
as Sartre does, but he is well aware of the transformative power of ction and its ability to effect
change: Fiction has the power to remake reality and, within the framework of narrative ction
in particular, to remake real praxis to the extent that the text intentionally aims at a horizon of
new reality which we may call a world (1983, 185).
SARTRE AND RICOEUR ON PRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION
51
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 Ricoeurs 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 rst section, the notion of productive imagination is the
engine of Ricoeurs 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 reexivity 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, Sartres 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 Sartres 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 Sartres work as a self so
detached . . . that can have no history (ibid., 221). Under both interpreta-
tions, he concludes that a study of Sartres 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 Sartres philosophical and literary work. The relationship between ction
16
As Ricoeur puts it, narrative ction is an irreducible dimension of self-understanding
(1991, 30).
52
LIOR LEVY
and life, recounting and living, occupies Sartre, as his workincluding 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
ctional diary) and in the abundant analyses of the diaries of Gide, Stendhal,
and Amiel in his war diariesmakes 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
Sartres Nausea presents its readers with the diary of Antoine Roquentin.
Framed by a short editorial note (which states that Roquentins journal was
published without alteration), the diary entries, some dated but most indicat-
ing only a day or time, document Roquentins everyday life in Bouville. But
behind the chronological order and pedantic documentation of daily routines
that the diary offers, lies a tale of Roquentins 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
jellysh (ibid., 17). It is the human face that reveals ones feelings and
emotions, that appears to others as the bearer of traits, that expresses ones
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 left
with unanswered questions. For instance, we never learn directly if Roquentin raped and
murdered little Lucienne or not. There is no evidence that he has rapists tendencies, says one
commentator (Gore 1990, 38), whereas another concludes that Roquentin raped and mur-
dered little Lucienne (Clayton 2009, 13). Sartre echoes Roquentins narrative failure in the way
that he structures the novel. The short and laconic editorial preface with which the novel
commences contributes to the readers inability to properly assess the text that they are about
to readwhy were the papers and notebooks of Antoine Roquentin published? Are these
posthumous texts? And, if they are worthy of publication, why arent we informed of
SARTRE AND RICOEUR ON PRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION
53
to talk about their lives; if he were in their place he would fall over himself.
This is because talking about ones life requires nding some sense in it, giving
it a gure 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 rst 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 lifes meaning, is one of the novels central
themes.
Indeed, evenMacIntyre, who thinks that Sartre does not espouse a narrative
approach, claims that in Nausea Sartre (or as he refers to him Sartre/
Roquentin) identies 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 doesnt 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,
Roquentins fate? The novels abrupt ending reinforces the instability of the text and rehashes
Roquentins inability of constituting a clear narrative and a functioning self. Sartre does
not offer his readers a resolution, and the narrative arc of the novel does not truly reach an
end.
54
LIOR LEVY
absent, and all that exists in the present are meaningless physical gestures.
The question is whether we ought to identify Roquentins position with
Sartres. In other words, the question is whether Nausea, the novel (itself a
narrative), presents Roquentins 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 Roquentins 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 rst 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 trees roots that he looses the ability to differentiate himself from
it: existence everywhere, innitely, in excess, forever and everywhere . . . my
very esh 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 its the Rue Boulibet but I dont 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.
Theres the story of a person who does this, does that, but it isnt I, I
have nothing in common with him [ibid., 33]). Rather than valorizing
Roquentins 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 Nausea
as a novel about a pathological state. He even argues that the pathology is the real protagonist
of the text (2005, 7791). 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 personthe protagonist
Roquentinmatters greatly. In other words, Sartre is not dealing here with pathologies in
general but with a particular case of disintegration of subjectivity.
SARTRE AND RICOEUR ON PRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION
55
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 Ricoeurs phrase.
Let us return to Roquentins 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 unied whole. At the
basis of Roquentins 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 unies past, present, and future. In this sense, imagination has a
reective 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 reects 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 ne 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 reecting on it
and endowing it with meaning.
Despite this, Roquentins 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 Drers engraving showing the winged per-
sonication of melancholy sitting, paralyzed and powerless, surrounded by unused geometrical
objects. Like Drers gure, Roquentin seems to suffer from acute melancholy. Objects seem
useless to him and he envies people for being able to feel something real. Roquentins melan-
cholia can be a direct result of his disfunctioning imagination. Jennifer Church ascribes the
symptoms of depression, the crossover from feeling melancholic to nding oneself in a faded and
attened world, to a failure of imagination. According to Church, since the depressed
and non-depressed perceive the same sensory information, there must be something else that
explains the formers experience of the world as lacking depth. She convincingly argues that
imagination 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 the
world as the locus of meaning (2003, 175187).
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LIOR LEVY
projecting.
20
But this is precisely the problem: without imaginative projection
and reection, 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 gure of the Marquis de
Rollebon wanes. The man begins to bore me (ibid., 13), he says.
Instead, Roquentin becomes attracted to ction, 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 ction 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, 5051). 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 linear
sequence. Roquentins consciousness is isolated in the instant and he tries in vain to suppress
the 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 of
Sartrean existential temporality.
SARTRE AND RICOEUR ON PRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION
57
Sartres 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
Sartres 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. Roquentins diary shows
us that it takes a narrative structure to arrange lifes 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 unied by one story, just as
the discrete notes are unied 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 lifes melody, and
they acquire meaning by being situated in the overall unity of the self,
in the selfs 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 modied.
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
innite series of our reected 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 Ricoeurs 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 Sartres literary work demon-
strates the same keen awareness and preoccupation with the transformative
nature of imagination and the role of narratives in authoring ones life.
22
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21
As we saw, this very process governs reading as well.
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I am indebted to Hagi Kenaan and Iddo Landau for valuable comments and imaginative
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