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."
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