Sartre's second century

154 Chapter Ten
understand, there would be no fun in hiding so effectively that seekers
would have no chance at all of finding them—or it is the unconscious
game that Freud claims criminals who leave behind incriminating clues
often play with the police. It would be invidious to claim that Sartre, of all
people, was unconscious of what he was doing; but there could indeed be a
psychological reason for these pun burials. Being well on the way to
curing himself of the illusion that words were the quintessence of things,
Sartre had nevertheless to acknowledge that literature, his chosen
vocation, was words, and that his inspiration often came from fortuitous
homonymic collisions. Of this inspiration, while not yet repudiating it
entirely, he might well—like Schiller, who deplored the musical origin of
his own writing, and unlike the punning Derridas of this world—have felt
just a little ashamed.
Works Cited
Beauvoir, Simone de. La Force de Vage. Paris: Gallimard, 1981.
Redfern, Walter. "Applying the Tourniquet: Sartre and Punning", French
Studies, vol. XXXIX, no. 3, July 1985, 298-304.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. L'Existentialisme est un humanisme. Paris: Nagel, 1965.
—. LesMots. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.
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d'Altona, in Theatre. Paris: Gallimard, 1962.
—. Le Mur ("Le Mur", "La Chambre", "Erostrate", "Intimite",
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(L'Age de raison, Le Sursis, La Mort dans Uame, Une drole d'amitie),
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Rybalka). Paris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la Pl&ade, 1981.
—. Saint Genet, comedien et martyr. Paris: Gallimard, 1952.
—. Situations, V: Colonialisme et neo-colonialisme. Paris: Gallimard,
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—. Situations, IX: Melanges. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.