Or, more plausibly, is he interpreting Flaubert’s “falling” symbolically into
the oneric world of the imaginary (as its eventual master) as prefiguring
the slide into the irreal world of Second Empire political and social life,
itself occasioned by its “fall” into institutional violence with the massacres
of 1848. This exhibits Sartre’s maximal effort to discover “what we can
know about an individual in the present state of our knowledge,” wherea`
laAristotle, we learn more from the poets than from the historians.^56
The actor and the stageIn his adaptation of Alexander Dumas’ story, Kean,aswesawin
Chapter 5 note 22 above, Sartre raises what Diderot called “the paradox
of the actor.”^57 Who is this person who seems to find his true identity
when playing roles on the stage? Sartre distinguishes the “actor” from
the “player.” The latter returns home after the performance and
becomes a person like anyone else, “whereas the actor plays himself
every second of his life...He is no longer able to recognize himself,
no longer knows who he is. And finally is no one.”^58 This theme of role-
playing has pervaded Sartre’s works: from childhood pretense, through
phenomenological description of impersonation (Maurice Chevalier) in
The Imaginaryand so forth.^59 It frequently serves to illustrate bad faith
(^56) At least regarding human nature: Aristotle.Poetics, chapterix, 1451 b.
(^57) Sartre develops his remarks about playfulness two days later when he writes:
It’s not possible to grasp oneself as consciousness without thinking that life is a game. For
what is a game, after all, but an activity of which man is the first origin: whose principles
man himself ordains and which can have consequences only according to the principles
ordained. But as soon as man grasps himself as free, and wishes to use his freedom, all his
activity is a game: he’s its first principle; he escapes the world by his nature; he himself
ordains the value and rules of his acts, and agrees to pay up only according to the rules he
has himself ordained and defined. Whence the diminished reality of the world and the
disappearance of seriousness.
(WD326)
The question he faces in that regard is whether authenticity, which he claims to be pursuing,
is going to reinstill in him the spirit of seriousness. But by distinguishing the person from the
ego, which he had rejected in his first philosophical publication (Transcendence of the Ego)as
being a thing amongst things in the world, he insists that “to grasp oneself as apersonis quite
the opposite from grasping oneself in terms of the world” (WD 327 ). See above,Chapter 5 ,
note 43.
(^58) ST 240 and 243.
(^59) See Robert D. Cumming, “Role-Playing: Sartre’s Transformation of Husserl’s Phenomen-
ology,” in Howells,Cambridge Companion to Sartre, 39 – 66.
Flaubert: the final triumph of the imaginary? 403