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4. Sartre’s Bodies This quantity of vulgar unemployed men, retired members of the middle class, widowers, solicitors without jobs, schoolboys who came to copy their essay, maniacal old me—like the pathetic Carnaval who came every day in a red, light blue, or apple green suit, and a hat adorned with flowers—undoubtedly merits consideration, but are there not other libraries, and even special libraries, to open for them? Nerval, ‘‘Angélique’’ Sartre’s Autodidacticism In the film Sartre par lui-même, directed by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat, Jean-Paul Sartre, along with the fastest talker in the universe, Simone de Beauvoir, reminisces about his life, work, and engagement in the politics and culture of the twentieth century. In telling that there was a reallife model for the Autodidact, Sartre allows that part of the model was himself: The first time I talked about contingency was in a notebook I had found in the subway. It was a new notebook, with ‘‘Midy Suppositories’’ writing on it; it was obviously a notebook given to doctors. It was made like a register, with A, B, C, D, etc., and—it was perhaps this that gave me the idea to make the Autodidact, one of the characters of Nausea, a man who learns alphabetically—I put my thoughts in alphabetical order, for a simple reason, that there was an alphabetical order in that register.1 The editors of the Pléiade edition of Sartre’s fictions recount the anecdote with even greater precision: ‘‘We know that one of the characteristics of the Autodidact is to put his thoughts and especially those of others carefully in a notebook. Relative to that, let us remember that around 1922 and 1923, Sartre did the same thing in a notebook he had found in the metro, with 169 170 Sartre’s Bodies ‘Midy Suppositories’ written on it.’’2 But something is amiss: Midy suppositories did not appear on the market until 1938, the year of publication of La Nausée. So if Sartre wrote about contingency in 1922 or 1923 it certainly was not in so anal retentive a notebook. This anachronism does provide a nice means of discussing the character of the autodidact, as the representation of that character does depend, in the end, on straight-shooting and classi fication in anal-retentive, alphabetical order.3 In an earlier study, in Alcibiades at the Door, I focused on the visual component to male homosexuality in Sartre’s writing, a kind of scopophilia necessary for him to guarantee the existence of the category through a perception of ‘‘the’’ act and essential to his analyses of the matter. This chapter will not be a change of paradigm but rather a change of perspective with an analysis of the affects of homosexuality as it is articulated through and around the character of the Autodidact, followed by an analysis of the woman ’s body, as Sartre figures it, in bad faith, in ‘‘Intimité,’’ one of the lesser studied stories in Le Mur. In La Nausée, the Autodidact is ostensibly gay, one of several such characters in his work; as all readers of Sartre know, he was fascinated with the articulations of male and female homosexuality, though in different ways. Characters in works from Les Chemins de la liberté to Huisclos turn out to be queer. And the matter makes its way into his philosophy as well: the third example of bad faith in L’Être et le néant focuses on a gay man who confesses his homosexuality to a straight friend. Sartre considers both individuals to be in bad faith: the gay man should not have to confess to anyone and the straight man is in no position to forgive, accept, or pardon him. And Sartre’s literary analysis of Jean Genet’s prose focuses as well to a great extent on the bad faith that comes out of Genet’s twin problematic of crime and homosexuality. As far as ‘‘Intimité’’ is concerned, it is text that puts into perspective Sartre’s vision of women and women’s bodies. As will be seen, Sartre detours the possibilities of verisimilitude in this short story because of his heterocentric and male-dominated vision of reality in which all figures other than straight men are cast in problematic positions. Sartre’s constructions of sexualities other than the most traditional male heterosexuality are fraught with the same subversions of verisimilitude that have already been discussed in this book...

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