But he now corrects the mistaken conception of the creative act that
sees the artist imposing his mental image on the physical material to
produce the aesthetic object. Such a notion of the passage from the
imaginary to the real, Sartre implies, is another error entailed by the
illusion of immanence. The mental image, he assures us, is incommunic-
able. What is real is the artifact; what is beautiful is “a being that cannot
be given to perception and that, in its very nature, is isolated from the
universe.” What the artist produced was the object that can serve as an
analogon for whoever “grasps the image,” that is, the one who adopts the
aesthetic attitude in its regard.
Sartre extends this analysis to abstract art, where the beauty continues
to derive from real figures, colors and relations grasped by an imaging
consciousness that confers on them the role of analogon; that posits them
as irreal. Andmutatis mutandisthis same process applies to other genres.
Beethoven’sSymphony No. 7 , for example, is not “in time,” though it has
its own internal time, which flows from the first note of the allegro to the
last note of the finale. It too escapes the real: “It is givenin person, but as
absent, as being out of reach” (Imaginary 192 ). Its performance is an
analogon. Similarly, the novelist, the poet, the dramatist constitute irreal
objects through verbal analoga: “So it is not that the character isrealized
in the actor, but that the actor isirrealizedin the character” (Imaginary
191 ).^43 Sartre captures his aesthetic theory in a poetic metaphor:
form. And they likewise inherit the problem of accounting for the “qualities” of that
“determinable” object without turning it into another determinate “thing,” which simply
repeats the question that generated the matter–form distinction in the first place. In Sartre’s
case, the problem turns on the specificity of the “invitation” that the physical object poses to
the prospective viewer to see this material object as Charles VIII, for example. Sartre will
claim that it “directs” as well as “invites” by virtue of its resemblance. But this becomes
interesting as well as problematic when the resultant aesthetic object is “the Charles of flesh-
and-blood,” “the presence of Maurice Chevalier” or “the Venice that no one has ever seen43 but which we all have experienced.”
This is thematized in Sartre’s playKean, an adaptation of Alexander Dumas’s playKean ou
De ́sordre et ge ́nie, dealing among other things, with what Denis Diderot in the late eighteenth
century called the “paradox of the actor” in an essay by that title published posthumously.
Apropos ofKean, Sartre observed: “Diderot is right that the actor does not really experience
his characters feelings; but it would be wrong to suppose that he is expressing them quite
coldly, for the truth is that he experiences them unreally” (Michel Contat and Michel
Rybalka [eds.],Sartre on Theater, trans. Frank Jellinek [New York: Pantheon, 1976 ], 163 ).
See below,Chapter 15 , note 57 , where this is developed.
Conclusion 135