Sartre’s Dessin Literature and the Ambiguities of the Representing Word

Abstract

Seemingly a minor part of L’Imaginaire Sartre’s literary examples therein are of great significance especially in the way they highlight the implicit yet crucial role of linguistic signs and words in his psychology of the image. While commenting on the act of reading a novel he views literary words practically as images endowing them with both an affective and representative status and illustrating the word-image through the figure of a drawing or dessin. The novel’s word-images or dessins solve an important problem in his phenomenology: in order to represent they do not need an original perception as other more typical images do. While the dessin suggests the opportune possibility of representation without presentation it also introduces ambiguity in meaning running counter to Sartre’s demand that linguistic signification be clear and transparent. Sartre attempts to contain such ambiguity by ascribing the image-like representative use of words to poetry in What’s Literature? but I argue that the dessin indeed allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the linguistic sign and representation that covers both poetry and prose. © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.