In Qu’est-ce que la littérature, Sartre argues that literature is neither an exercise in pure aesthetics nor a mere reflection of pre-existing conditions but always an intentional act directed toward a specific audience. He challenges the writer to take responsibility for both the act and the audience to which it is addressed. In this way, he proposes that we produce a littérature that is both engagée and existentially authentic. His position is more nuanced than has often been recognized. He does not call for a mere “Literature of Ideas,” in Nabokov's dismissive phrase, nor does he demand the production of endless romans à thèse as is often alleged (Contat and Idt 1981: x). Rather, for Sartre, the author simultaneously creates and unveils an object (1948: 55) that in turn constitutes an invitation to the reader to participate in, and make possible, this unique moment of unveiling. “Écrire, c’est faire appel au lecteur pour qu’il fasse passer à l’existence objective le dévoilement que j’ai entrepris par le moyen du langage” [“To write is to make an appeal to the reader that he make enter into objective existence the act of unveiling that I have undertaken by the means of language”] (1948: 59). The literary moment is not that of simple communication in which a pre-existing message is passed from one speaker to another, nor that of free play in which a fundamentally nonideological, floating world is created. It is rather a moment of creation between author, reader, and text in which a fundamentally new object is called into existence through an act of profoundly situated and yet transcendent unveiling: transcendent precisely in so far as the act of unveiling does not exhaust itself in the moment (1948: 74–75).

Engagement, then, is not something willed or refused, it is a fact of the authentic creative act. In calling into being an object that is fundamentally new, the literary work has changed the world from what it was prior to the conjoined acts of creation and reception that constitute it. This is true as much for mimetic forms as for more formalist ventures, since there is no attempt to present an image of the world through language that is not also the creation of a parallel world (1948: 29), or a world of difference.