differently, that man is the means by which things are manifested” (WL
48 ). But Sartre assures his long-standing commitment to ontological
realism when he adds that “to our inner certainty of being ‘revealers’ is
added that of being inessential in relation to the thing revealed”
(WL 48 ). In an anticipation of what decades will later be called “recep-
tionism” in literary theory, Sartre remarks that our “disclosing,”
whether as author or reader, is “creative” disclosing. In fact, “the
reader is conscious of disclosing in creating, of creating by disclosing”
(WL 52 ). This awareness of freedom that Sartre previously attributed
to our imaging consciousness he now seems to ascribe to interpretative
acts generally. It will open the way for similar uses in historical writing
and reading and to what we shall describe as “committed history” as
an extension of the “committed literature” that he is promoting in the
mid 1940 s.^40
Again he characterizes the production of the literary work of art,
adding that the same holds true for painting, music and sculpture, as
acts of generosity, as appeals from one freedom to another – author to
reader. If prose is utilitarian, aesthetic communication and the “joy” it
elicits “form a complex feeling but one whose structures and condition
are inseparable from one another. It is identical,” he insists, “with the
recognition of a transcendent and absolute end which, for a moment,
suspends the utilitarian round of ends-means and means-ends.”
The final goal of art, he claims, is “to recover this world by giving it to
be seen as it is, butas if it had its source in human freedom”(WL 63 – 64 ,
emphasis added).
Using terms and argument from the ontology ofBNand especially
fromThe Imaginary, Sartre offers a refined and subtle account of this
“aesthetic modification of the human project” such that it implies a
pact between human freedoms and an “image-makingconsciousness of
the world in its totality both as being and having to be”; that is, as fact
and as value. But in spite of the “momentary suspension” of the utilitar-
ian character of prose, literary prose – which is the problem species
here – does seem to demand “concrete” (read “political”) and not merely
(^40) See below,Chapter 11 and my “Committed History” in David Carr, Thomas R. Flynn and
Rudolf Makkreel (eds.),The Ethics of History(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
2004 ), 230 – 246 ; hereafterEHist.
What is Literature? 255