Sartre

Four years before his death, Sartre gave an insightful interview to the
distinguished theater critic Bernard Dort. He insisted that “theater is the
essence of the imaginary” but that it essentially operates in a tensive
relation with the “real.” He believes that Genet “radicalizes that
[tension] in favor of the imaginary...He tries to demonstrate that
nothing happening on the stage is real; everything topples into the
imaginary.”^63 This is Sartre’s chief difficulty with Genet’s plays. But
one can recognize this same “tension” at work in all of Sartre’s discus-
sions of the imaginary. It centers on the analogon, which is introduced in
The Imaginarybut never analyzed to the degree that its pivotal use in
Sartre’s corpus calls for. So when we encounter references to “derealiza-
tion” and the constitution of “imaginary man” in the Flaubert, we must
never lose sight of the insuperable facticity (practico-inert) ingredient in
the “irreal.” That ineluctable factor will break forth in its material
forcefulness with the debacle of Sedan and the billeting of Prussian
soldiers in Flaubert’s home.

The ever-present moral question

In an earlier interview, Dort confronted Sartre with his own words
defining the “theater of situation”: “The most moving thing the theater
can show is a character creating himself, the moment of choice, of free
decision which commits him to a moral code and a whole way of life”
(ST 48 ). When asked if he still assented to the terms of this definition,
Sartre replied: “Yes and no. Yes, because I do not see any reason not to
show in the theater freedoms which in fact demystify.” As an example of
this he cites Heinrich in The Devil and the Good Lord, a character
“completely destroyed by his situation, someone who, no matter what
he does, invariably does harm, because he is in a false position.”^64 And
now he qualifies this by saying: “This is what I failed to take into
consideration in the definition you quoted to me: the limits of freedom.”
The dramatist may bring such limits to the fore in portraying the
character of the actor. Sartre believes that “Brecht has been the only
dramatist to raise problems of theater in their true terms, the only

(^63) Bernard Dort, “Sartre on Theatre: Politics and the Imagination,”Canadian Theatre Review
6432 (^1981 ):^32 –^43.
See above,Chapter 11.
406 Existential biography: Flaubert and others