Sartre's originality, among contemporary critics of style, lies in his treatment of literary style as an objective rather than a subjective phenomenon. As against those for whom the work of art is the privileged occasion of contact with some deeper force, with the unconscious, with the personality, with Being, or with language, Sartre takes his place among the rhetoricians.

The work of art is a construct designed to produce a certain effect; the style of the work of art is the instrument with which a certain illusion of time is conveyed. The objectivity of style in the work of art shows up most clearly in its accessibility to pastiche and imitation, for pastiche remains the best way of trying on the lens of a strange new style, of seeing what the world looks like through it.

But this objectivity brings in turn another form of objectivity with it; if style is a model of time, a certain kind of optical illusion of temporality, then the number of possible styles must be in some sense limited by the number of ways time itself can be deformed or projected. And in this light Sartre's early essays on style in modern writers turn out to be, not principally reviews or occasional articles, but rather chapters of a phenomenology of different attitudes toward, different models of narrative time.

The basic problem of narrative time is that of the event and the way the novelist disposes his raw material into events, preparation for events, consequences leading from them. At this point the nature of the raw material, of the content of the novel, is of less importance, although ultimately that content—the legendary gestures of Faulkner, the social ambitions in Dos Passos, the sexual guilt of Mauriac—comes to seem symbolic of the way the story is told, emblematic of the kind of time registered in its style.

But initially style is felt as being a structure imposed on a relatively formless raw material; it is somehow an addition to it, a rearranging or reordering of it. If, in the existential formula, existence precedes essence, style, or a certain temporal structure, functions precisely as an essence with respect to the directionless unformed lived existence of the story material. For real time is, according to Sartre, a synthesis of all three temporal dimensions at once; and memories, remembered moments, carry their dead future with them, just as anticipated moments in the future are projected, not in a void, but as the future of somebody with a clearly defined past. But when we try to narrate our experiences, to put time into words, inevitably we do violence to this temporal synthesis, and we lay stress on one dimension of time to the exclusion of the others. Stylistic innovation implies precisely this new way of telling events, or rather the invention of a new illusion of the passage of time, a new projection of the temporal synthesis. (pp. 194-95)

[In L'Etre et le néant,] Sartre is reluctant to describe L'Etranger as a novel; he would rather see it in the tradition of the conte philosophique that goes back to Voltaire. Indeed, the principal tendency of everything that has preceded may be described as a defense of the novel against that rival form which the French call the récit ("narrative" or "tale" are not altogether satisfactory English equivalents). The genuine novel is for Sartre that form of narration which emphasizes, in its temporal stylization, neither the past nor the present, but rather the future. The novel exists as a form when we are thrown into the minds and experiences of characters for whom the future, for whom destiny, has not yet taken shape, who grope and invent their own destinies, living blindly within the entanglement of one another's unforeseeable actions and under the menace of history's unforeseeable development. In this perspective, the future is that which is sought passionately through the present, that which will ultimately return upon the events narrated to give them their meaning. Such a form requires an absolute nonintervention on the part of the novelist; but its open perspective, the blankness stretching before reader and character, can paradoxically be conveyed either through a completely objective or a completely subjective mode, as long as either is applied systematically throughout the work. The novelist can show us the entire stream of events through his characters' eyes, making us share their limits of vision, the imperfection of their points of view, as is the case in Joyce or Henry James; or he can withhold this subjective, psychological reality entirely and give us nothing but the external actions, the words and gestures, of his characters, in the manner of the American "behavioristic" novel of the thirties, the novel of Hemingway or Dashiell Hammett.

It is evidently difficult to draw a clear line between this genuine novel and the mixed practice of the récit. But it seems clear that if for Sartre the modern American novel stands as a kind of privileged model for what the open form ought to be, it is the French realistic tradition of the nineteenth century which furnishes the classic illustration of the motivation behind the récit. (p. 200)

In the early 1950s a new motif makes its appearance in Sartre's work: the distinction between an act and a gesture, between the real and an attitude toward it which seems to drain it of its reality, transform it into mere appearance, irrealize it, to use Sartre's term.

The groundwork for this theme had already been laid in one of Sartre's most technical and impersonal writings, L'Imaginaire …, which demonstrated the basic incompatibility between the act of perceiving and the act of imagining. Both are ways of relating to external objects, but in the second mode the object is apprehended as being absent, and my relationship to it is precisely a kind of absence. The implication of this thesis is that, contrary to popular belief, I am never in any danger of mistaking imaginary phenomena (hallucinations, obsessions, dream-images) for real ones. There is a radical difference in quality between the two experiences, the imaginary one is always known to be unreal. I therefore dispose of two possible ways of living the real world: in the first I stand in an active, practical relationship to its objects; in the second I put their reality between parentheses and live with their absence, with their idea or image. These two modes of existence point to two fundamentally opposed passions; for there can be a passion for the unreal, for the imaginary, which leads its subject to prefer imaginary feelings to real ones, psychological satisfactions to genuine ones, gestures to acts. It is in this sense that Sartre can say of a writer like Mallarmé that his literary creation is the equivalent of a destruction of the world; such a passion for the imaginary has as its motivation a kind of resentment against the real, and finds its satisfaction in a symbolic revenge upon it.

The starting point of this theory of the imaginary is, however, a theory of the real, which can be briefly summed up as follows: consciousness is basically activity; our primary relationship to the world is not a contemplative or static one, not one of knowledge but one of action and work; the "world" in the phenomenological sense is not motionless space spread out before me, but rather time, "hodological" space, a network of paths and roads, a complex organization of means and ends and projects, unveiled through the movement of my own adventures and desires. This notion, with its emphasis on the primacy of work over mere abstract knowledge, may seem Marxist in origin, indeed provides the connecting link between existentialism and Marxism in Sartre's later works; but in fact it originates directly in Heidegger. For the latter we apprehend objects first as tools and only later on as things-in-themselves, as static substances. For human reality, involved in its projects, each object is primarily a frozen project, an immobile imperative, a thing-to-be-used-in-a-certain-way—zuhanden, available, lying to hand in case of need. And just as scientific objectivity is a later, more sophisticated development among human attitudes toward the world, so also is the apprehension of the thing or object as vorhanden, as simply being there, as an entity with no evident relationship to myself. (pp. 203-04)

For Sartre the principal distinction between poetry and prose is that the reader takes a utilitarian attitude toward the latter. In it language functions as a system of signs, and the reader's mind is primarily involved, not with the signs themselves, but beyond them, with the things signified. The relationship of the reader to prose language is therefore an active, practical, transcendent one; he uses it, and like all tools it dictates by its own structure the operations necessary to use it properly. For the prose writer also language is the instrument of an act, a secondary or indirect mode of action which Sartre calls action by revelation (dévoilement). By naming things, by constructing verbal models for experiences which until then had remained formless and inchoate, the writer acts on his readers, makes it impossible for them to live as they had before (if they wish to continue to be unaware of a given feeling, for example, they must now, after it has been named, deliberately avoid thinking about it; they can no longer enjoy the uncompromised innocence of the ignorant).

Poetry on the other hand is distinguished from prose in that in it language intervenes between the reader and the abstract meanings; in poetry it is the words which are primarily apprehended, the meanings in turn become mere pretexts for an awareness of language in its materiality. Thus in poetry a practical, utilitarian attitude toward language is replaced by a contemplative one, for a doing is substituted a being. This is why for Sartre the history of modern poetry is, in terms of the lives of the poets and of their relationship to society, not one of accomplishment but one of failure: When I succeed, I pass from one practical goal to another, the means go unnoticed in the effortless progress from end to end. But when I fail, when my racket misses the ball suddenly, then the means stand out in all their materiality; I become conscious of my own body in its awkwardness, of the racket, of the disposition of space around me. So with the poet: he is able to apprehend the materiality, the being, of language with intensity only against the background of the collapse of his own real projects and of the failure of language as an instrumental means toward an end.

This distinction between an object taken as a means and one taken as an end in itself can be prolonged into the very structure of the poetic image. In the beginning Sartre tends to consider the poetic image in a relatively static fashion, as the symbol and reflection of the consciousness which conceives it. Following Bachelard, he sees the sensation, or the poetic image, as an "objective symbol of being and of the relationship of human reality to that being." Thus the images of Baudelaire are characterized by a certain spiritualized quality: objects "which can be apprehended by the senses and yet resemble consciousness. The entire effort of Baudelaire was to recuperate his consciousness, to possess it and hold it like a thing in the palm of his hands, and this is why he seizes on anything that has the look of consciousness objectified: perfumes, muffled lights, distant music, so many little closed mute consciousnesses, so many images of his unattainable existence at once taken into himself, consumed like hosts."

But here the relationship between consciousness and its product (the image, the poem, the sensation) remains one of mere reflection; later on, Sartre will conceive of it as a more dynamic interaction, particularly in those suggestive pages of Saint Genet … in which he distinguishes two basic types of modern images, the expansive and the retractile. In the first a single object ("l'aube") is felt to be an expanding multiplicity ("comme un peuple de colombes"). In such an image, basically inanimate space or externality has been apprehended as an arrested glimpse of an explosion in progress; what is lifeless and measurable has been suddenly endowed with energy and movement, felt to be a moment of a universal and dynamic progress.

The other type of image is one in which existing multiplicities are reduced to unity, in which a movement which was outward-exploding becomes circular, cyclical, in which the chaos of external objects are subordinated to the hierarchical order of the closed image. (pp. 205-07)

[These two poles of spatial configuration] reintroduce into the heart of the poetic image the distinction already described above between the practical/transcendent, the vision of the thing as a frozen use or potential project, and the irrealizing/contemplative, the category of the self-sufficient thing-in-itself. In the first kind of image the reader feels reflected back to him his own energy and generosity, his own transcendent power, "the unity which human work imposes by force on the disparate"; in the second the "whole world is represented according to the model of a hierarchical society." It is characteristic of Sartre that he sees in these two kinds of imagination a fundamental opposition between left-wing and right-wing thinking, between an open revolutionary type of thought and a closed one which wishes to contemplate permanence or eternity in the flux of things themselves. But it is no less characteristic that he furnishes a psychological explanation as well. The first, exploding type of imagery is a figure of freedom itself, of the projection of consciousness out into the world of things, of the transcending of anxiety through choice and activity; the second attempts to conjure anxiety away by suggesting perfect order, by situating consciousness, not in a dangerous indeterminacy, but in the midst of a world in which everything has its appointed place, in which values are inscribed in things themselves. (pp. 207-08)

The dynamic element in Sartre's existentialism is a Hegelian graft, the idea of the Other and of Otherness. It is this concept which completes the idea of freedom with a description of the way freedom objectifies and alienates itself in its objects…. It is this notion which permits the free consciousness of L'Etre et le néant to escape from its isolation in the monad, to discover its dimension of Being-for-other-people and its inextricable involvement in an intersubjective world. Later on, the notion of Otherness serves as a means of accounting for the relationship between the self and the institutions around it with which it must come to terms; in particular, it accounts for the paradoxical phenomenon of the divided self, the Hegelian unhappy consciousness, in which people are obliged to choose themselves as Other for Other people, to feel their center of gravity outside the self. Finally, Otherness is the source of the optical illusion of Good and Evil, of the ethical manichaeanism which results in justification for the Self and condemnation of the Other (anti-Semitism, anti-communism, racism, social stereotypes of the insane and the criminal, and so forth).

But dialectical thinking involves the setting into relationship with each other of two incommensurable realities, two phenomena which cannot be thought in the same conceptual framework. The scandal of Otherness is precisely this revelation of an underside of existence, a dimension which is out of reach, which cannot be dissolved by ordinary analytical thought, and which always turns it, reckons it into the account beforehand. (Imagine someone with a horror of other people's judgments; to escape them he always does the opposite of what people expect; at length a superior judgment falls, imprisoning him this time in a larger perspective: he is simply capricious.) The scandal of literary Otherness for literary critics is this obligation to go outside the neat world of the single conceptual framework, to make a dialectical leap from the comfortable, imminent system of forms and purely formal analysis to an unpleasantly external reality. For Marxism this external reality is the economic and social situation, the historical form which material conditions take; and the Marxist literary dialectic involves the disagreeable reminder that the major part of writers' and readers' lives is spent in the preoccupation with material questions, that the work of art, in appearance self-sufficient and above history, is conditioned (even more radically than by the purely literary history of its form and content) by such external and absolutely nonliterary phenomena as the state of book publishing in the period, the increasing enrichment and leisure of certain classes of the society, and so forth.

Merleau-Ponty has pointed out that the originality of Sartre's view of literature with respect to this materialistic dialectic is that for him the work of art is not felt to be retrospective, a product of a certain social background, but rather prospective, itself a way of choosing the social group to which it speaks and of which it will eventually become emblematic. The Otherness of the work of art for Sartre is constituted not so much by the milieu in which it originates as by the public which it calls forth for itself. (pp. 214-15)

Beside the formalist or the social and biographical methods, there is … a place for a new type of examination which would describe the work of art in terms of the public which it implies; and it is this new type of literary history which Sartre writes in Qu'est-ce que la littérature?… The logic of his position distinguishes two kinds of public, the real (that group implied by the background required to read the work), and the virtual (those groups deliberately or implicitly shut off from access to it). The various possible relationships of literature to its public will therefore tend to be governed by two kinds of possible opposition: one between real and virtual publics, the other between two different possible real publics, both of which may happen to be available to the writer at that moment of history. Sartre's history of literature amounts to a working out of the various possible combinations and permutations of these terms.

His central distinction corresponds to the more fundamental Hegelian one between abstract and concrete; for Sartre the work of art becomes concrete only to the degree that it approaches an ever widening public, one which tends toward universal readership as an outside limit. For the writer who must limit his readership severely must also limit the range of experiences treated; must translate them into the terms understood by the group, must therefore practice symbolism and abstraction as a habit of mind developed and imposed by his confining situation as a writer in a certain society. The archetype of this abstract literature is that of the Middle Ages, in which the reading of literature was limited primarily to the writers themselves, to the clerical caste which possessed the specialized technique of the written word. In such a situation, where the virtual public extends for all practical purposes to the whole of society at large, the subject matter of literature shrinks to an almost modern purity; the only available content is the literary activity itself in the form of pure spirituality, at its most abstract, in other words, religion, a symbolic apparatus in which the entirety of the concrete world is present in inverted reflection, transformed into abstraction or pure idea. (pp. 216-17)

It is characteristic that with the possibility of disengaging himself from his own class … ruled out, Sartre should turn to the kind of "internal emigration" represented by the example of Genet. The appeal to the reader was built into the very linguistic structure of Genet's work; Sartre shows in concrete detail how his poetry (pure materiality of language) is infected and undermined by an instinctive prose (a system of signs, organization by paraphrasable significations). For the appeal to the Other was at the very source of Genet's creative impulse; victim of an initially verbal trauma (accusation, being named a thief), he first experiences words as impenetrable objects, as Otherness, and his attempt as a writer is to recapture this dimension of language for himself, either to see himself from the outside as others see him, or to make them go through the same strange contradictory experience themselves, that of being looked at from the outside, of being unable to seize from the inside the language of their writer-accuser. The favorable judgment on Genet is therefore similar to that passed on Dos Passos; such literature has a value of contestation, reflects back to the middle classes their own truth in all its ugliness as seen, not from the vantage point of another class, but from a point on the very margin of their own, in Genet's case through the eyes of a criminal and outcast.

It should be added that besides this "prospective" criticism, there is also in Sartre, particularly in the existential biographies, a "retrospective" criticism as well, one which evaluates the effect of his background, his situation, on the writer. Thus both Genet and Giraudoux present medieval characteristics, have basically medieval imaginations, but this is not to be attributed to their sharing in one of those Platonic abstractions such as the medieval world view which German idealistic literary criticism used to favor. Rather, the medieval world view was itself the expression of an agricultural society, and it is to the degree that Genet's background, his life situation, was by accident agricultural in a predominantly industrial society, that certain objective similarities appear between his way of thinking and those of medieval times.

It is in the light of this reduction to the lived situation of the writer that the much discussed notion of engagement (commitment) is to be understood. The emotional logic of this idea is characteristic of Sartre: if in fact we are our situation, it seems to run, then we ought to choose to be it, with all its limitations, we should prefer a lucid awareness of it to imaginary evasions and the mystification with abstract or unreal issues. Indeed, the whole bias of Sartre's philosophy is against placelessness and against the kind of introspection in which I lose my own limits, in which I forget my observer's position in the universe and come to identify myself with privilege, absolute spirit, or whatever justification subjectivity invents in order to persuade itself of its isolation from other people, its implied superiority over other people. In literary history the form that this passion for privilege has taken is the religion of art, the attempt to escape one's own historical moment by associating one's self mentally with eternity in the form of the confraternity of art, the great tradition, or posterity. Engagement is therefore not a political notion, or a call to propaganda, but serves a primarily negative function: that of cutting away all the imaginary dimensions we give ourselves in an effort to avoid awareness of our concrete historical condition.

From a positive point of view, the idea of engagement can be seen as a theory of living literature…. [Implicit] in the idea of engagement is a limitation to the given national society itself, inasmuch as the various nations of the world have developed at unequal rates, have different social structures and face dissimilar problems, in short present different kinds of content to the writers who must work in them. Engagement thus involves a reduction to the present, both in space and time, and the advantage it holds forth is that of an immediate contact with the problems and lives of its readers in the present. The ideal is political only insofar as any really complete picture of the present in all its contradictions would ultimately have to emerge into a political dimension of things; and the criticism of engaged literature as occasional literature and mere propaganda is only a caricature of a more accurate criticism that might be made of it, namely, that it imprisons the writer perhaps too dramatically in the present, neglects the passage of time required between conception and execution as well as the lag between generations, and ultimately that it tends to reduce art to a relationship between two people of common background and situation, that is, to return the work of art to that direct interpersonal relationship which was its origin.

There is no doubt that Sartre's attitude toward literature is an ambiguous one, full of suspicion of its duplicities and illusions, its necessary indirection. Yet at the same time literature is a crucial form of self-consciousness, one which we do without only at the risk of sinking back into the animal kingdom…. (pp. 219-21)

The source of this ambiguity can be found in Sartre's idea of consciousness in general. Consciousness is a not-being, a nothingness, a withdrawal from the solid world of things and Being and a distance from it; here the value of consciousness is negative, and all our acts of consciousness in their various ways (desire, work, knowledge, imagination) constitute a negation of the given object and a heroic activity with respect to the latter's mindless passivity. But at the same time, as we have already seen in connection with the idea of engagement, Sartre is passionately unwilling to preach withdrawal from the world or refuge in the purely subjective, the mystical, the imaginary. Thus slowly the value judgment shifts around to the other side and comes to adhere to that consciousness which chooses, not negation of the world in general, but negation of that particular given object; in other words, which chooses not so much withdrawal as attachment to the immediate world around it and to its immediate objective situation.

This double movement is visible in his literary criticism as well. He visibly prefers an art which challenges society, which shows it a hostile portrait of itself, to an art at one with its public, sharing its values implicitly, serving as apologia for them. Yet in a larger sense all art is contestation in its very structure; the basest flattery forces its subject to see himself, to take the first step on the road to reflection and self-consciousness, so that the first internal judgment on various works of art as compared with one another seems to fall before this second, more global one as to the structure of art in general. In the same way, he clearly prefers an art which insists on human activity and on the practical structure of things, rather than one in which a contemplative, poetic, irrealizing relationship to them is encouraged; yet it is obvious in a larger perspective that all art is imaginary, and that even the literature of praxis represents a momentary withdrawal from the real world of means and ends. Finally, a model of the world in which the future is alive is to be preferred to one in which an exaggerated attachment to the present or past seems to shut off human possibilities. On the other hand, if all language is essentially a deformation of experience, an essence imposed on existence, then even the future-oriented style is an optical illusion, does not genuinely reflect the world but merely conveys a striking and persuasive caricature of it, in its way defends a kind of thesis. Perhaps the most fundamental example of this antinomy is to be found in the idea of freedom itself, in the apparent opposition between the structural fact that all consciousnesses are free and the moral imperative to them to become free, the implication that only some of them have done so. (pp. 221-23)

Fredric Jameson, "Three Methods in Sartre's Literary Criticism," in Modern French Criticism: From Proust and Valéry to Structuralism, edited by John K. Simon (reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press; © 1972 by The University of Chicago), University of Chicago Press, 1972, pp. 193-227.