Sartre, in the tradition of phenomenology, distinguishes three related but quite different structures [of existential literature]: memory, anticipation, and imagination. Something remembered, something anticipated, and something imagined are not three variations on the same perceptual theme; they are radically different modes of awareness. When I remember, I recapture a state of affairs that is real in the mode of the past: what I remember happened, and it is that happening, now past, which I search for in memory. The past event is not an unreality but a reality whose mode of being is its being past…. "In order to imagine," Sartre writes, "consciousness must be free from all specific reality and this freedom must be able to define itself by a 'being-in-the-world' which is at once the constitution and the negation of the world; the concrete situation of the consciousness in the world must at each moment serve as the singular motivation for the constitution of the unreal."

It is this simultaneous affirmation and negation of being-in-the-world which so much existential literature illustrates and explores. The particulars given in a situation are exploded by consciousness into a kind of shrapnel. Each character not only interprets the fragments of his experience but causes them to be. By irrealizing their ordinary mundane signification, the existential hero brings into being their essential qualities. These qualities arise against the background of the world, but that world is negated in the moment in which it is affirmed and is affirmed in the moment of its negation. The characters of the novel cause their world to be. In positing the unreality of their acts, they secrete the imaginary. It would seem from these remarks that a kind of literary solipsism is being advanced, that novels write themselves and read themselves and then put themselves away. To be misled here would mean that the imaginary has been treated apart from the imagining consciousness of the author and reader. This is not the case. What has been said so far about the imaginary is a shorthand for a full account of the relationship of the reader to the literary work. Without that relationship, in fact, the microcosm of literature would collapse. The being of the characters in the novel has all along been our being; their world is our responsibility. "The literary object," Sartre writes, "has no other substance than the reader's subjectivity; Raskolnikov's waiting is my waiting which I lend him. Without this impatience of the reader he would remain only a collection of signs. His hatred of the police magistrate who questions him is my hatred which has been solicited and wheedled out of me by signs, and the police magistrate himself would not exist without the hatred I have for him via Raskolnikov. That is what animates him, it is his very flesh."

The reader, too, is limited in his creativity. If the microcosm of The Trial depends on his participating consciousness, it is no less the case that participation must be along restricted lines. Everything will not do. Sartre tells us that the degree of realism and truth of Kafka's mythology is never given…. Kafka demands that we become responsible for his world, but that world remains his. The text of The Trial may be understood as a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the constitution of the art work. In order to see how we are at once free yet restricted by the novel, we must attend to its status as an aesthetic object. All of our considerations so far have led to this problem. In approaching Sartre's aesthetic we are at the same time exploring a possible line of connection between philosophy and literature. Or to put the matter in a different way, we shall be interested in the relevance of aesthetics for the theory of literature.

Suppose we get a rough summary statement of Sartre's aesthetic before us. It is something like this. The novel is an aesthetic object in so far as the reader moves from the descriptions given in the book to the imaginary microcosm toward which they point. The story by itself is not enough to reach the fictive world it promises. The characters, events, general action are all analogues, in Sartre's language, which may lead us to the aesthetic object. It is always possible to read fiction as a report of real events, or to read an historical account as fiction. The pronouncements, questions, and wonderings of Joseph K. are merely clues or guides to the microcosm of The Trial. If I take the descriptions of the life of Joseph K. as a report of true happenings or if I simply note what is said in the way in which adults at breakfast may read the messages to children on the backs of cereal boxes, then an imaginative consciousness is not functioning. The movement toward the aesthetic object is short-circuited. I find myself merely with a book in my hands. (pp. 162-65)

The central achievement [of Sartre's aesthetic], it seems to me, is the phenomenological uncovering of the imaginary as the informing structure of the literary microcosm. The imaginary is not found but constituted by consciousness. And the essential character of imagination consists in its negation of mundane existence. My being-in-the-world carries with it all along the possibility of its nihilation. In different terms, the imaginary is the implicit margin surrounding the horizon of the real. Just as the child is destined to discover his gift for dreaming, so the adult lives in a world whose limits will be announced by his imagination. But the condition for the imaginary is the paramount reality of worldly existence. It is because the imaginary is unreal that it can be deciphered. The decoding presupposes the natural language from which it was translated and transposed. Without the real the unreal is unthinkable, indeed unimaginable. Art, the province of the imaginary, returns us to reality and to the theme with which we began, the sense of reality. It is time to close the accordion. (pp. 165-66)

The non-egological theory of consciousness which Sartre advances denies Husserl's doctrine of a transcendental ego supporting or directing the acts of awareness. All knowledge is still knowledge of something, all memory is memory of something, all anticipation is anticipation of something, and all imagining is imagining of something. But the full weight is given over to the act within whose structure the meant object is located. The object of the act of consciousness is regarded neutrally; I neither affirm nor deny its real being, its objective status, its causal relations. In concerning myself phenomenologically with the act of awareness, I make a decision to attend only to what is presented, as it is presented. My ordinary believing in the world, my knowledge of its historical past, its scientific explanation, are all set aside for present purposes. In virtue of this reflexive attention I decide to pay to the stream of my own awareness, I uncover a pure field of essential relations. The objects given in that field comprise my phenomenological data. What Sartre has done with this Husserlian doctrine is to reject its transcendental condition in affirming its sovereign status. The data of consciousness are intrinsic aspects of the directionality of consciousness. My responsibility for the given is absolute. It arises and is sustained through my epistemic fiat. And since, according to Sartre, the "I" or ego is found in and through the acts of consciousness as a product of reflection, in the same way in which a fellow man is located, I am thrown out of the vortex of consciousness into the being of the world. Sartre quotes Rimbaud with approval: "I is an other."

The total result, then, of Sartre's version of a phenomenology of consciousness is to rid mind of a transcendental agent and make the acts of awareness the sole domain of our being-in-the-world. Consciousness is worldly to begin with, and its activity is thrown outward in the midst of the human condition. It is the doctrine of the directionality of consciousness which alone can account for the existentialist's sense of reality. Sartre has removed us from our place in the endless waiting line of the Hegelian Absolute, stamped our ticket, and put us on the train. With him we are en route. Far from phenomenology leading to a philosophical idealism, an avoidance of the brute features of existence, Sartre maintains that the victory of phenomenology is in a completely different direction. "The phenomenologists," he writes, "have plunged man back into the world; they have given full measure to man's agonies and sufferings, and also to his rebellions." (pp. 166-67)