Michael Scriven argues that in all his biographies (his “biographical
project”), Sartre aims to promote and exhibit “the belief that the value
of literature is to be found not in its institutionalized status within a
sacrosanct literary tradition but in its ability to disturb the consciousness
of the contemporary reader.”^19 To the extent that the artwork holds a
critical mirror to society, one could say that Sartre is engaged in a kind of
“committed” literature even prior toWhat is Literature?The creation of
the imaginary object, theirre ́al, for instance, depends on the cooperation
of two consciousnesses (author and reader/audience) to “derealize”
the analogon in an attitude that suspends our disbelief (the canonical
expression) and opens us to questioning the “reality” that we otherwise
take for granted.
No doubt the aesthetic attitude must be sensitized to moral values and
disvalues to achieve Sartre’s goal of commitment. Admittedly, this is
redolent of the “idealist” perspective that he will later reject, once he
has discovered the dialectic of historical materialism that is so evident
in his Flaubert study. But it does not preclude the possibility that
the properly “aesthetic” suspension, a refinement of the phenomeno-
logicalepochē, may open the door to critical assessment based on other
criteria. In fact, a moral dimension is clearly present in Sartre’s claim
that theater, literature in general and the writings of Flaubert in particu-
lar exercise the function of “uncovering” (de ́voilement) our bad faith, our
“mystification.”^20
Press, 2012 ). Expressing his dislike for “noise” made by “sound effects” introduced into
contemporary orchestral pieces, Sartre affirmed his preference for the “classical” over the
avant-garde when it came to making “music.” His generation, he admits, sees music as the
art of sounds, whereas “contemporary artists conceive of music as the art of noise, sound
being one noise among others introduced at a certain moment but capable of being replaced
by [more] noise.” Insisting that he is not opposed to new and creative music (for example, he
likes serial music and the works of composers like Scho ̈nberg, Webern, Berg and Boulez), he
wonders what has become of beauty in these new art forms. “I no longer know what this new
beauty is; do they even care about it any more?” (Obliques-Arts, 243 b– 244 a.). Remember his
preference for the early, “classical” poetry of Mallarme ́over the spatialized arrangements of
The Throw of the Dice(Le Coup de de ́s) which attracted more linguistically oriented philoso-19 phers like Foucault.
20 Scriven,EB^123.
See Christina Howells,Sartre’s Theory of Literature(London: Modern Humanities Research
Association, 1979 ), index, s.v.De ́voilement. The expression “unveiling” or “uncovering,” as a
translation of “Truth” in the Greek “alētheia” (Heidegger’s “uncoveredness”), appears
throughout Heidegger’s work, and not just in the French translation of hisVom Wesen der
388 Existential biography: Flaubert and others