Madam, - Lara Marlowe's account of the Sartre exhibition (June 18th), which I saw at Tolbiac a few weeks ago, leaves all the hard questions unasked. Not only that, it peddles the usual truisms on Sartre's "pro-communist" sympathies, his stance on "counter-violence" in post-colonial contexts, only to come down on the side of a Camus-type "liberalism".
I have some difficulty with the problem of staging a Sartre exhibition commemorating the centenary of his birth in 1905 at all. In the first place, Sartre himself would have hated it! Allergic to fame of all kinds, he dismissed his own as notoriety! Worse still, he would have seen in events at Tolbiac an effort to "recuperate" him on the part of the bourgeoisie, something that he resisted all his life and that Lara Marlowe's piece amply attests. Also, he hated Victor Hugo!
I don't expect your staff reporter to be a Sartre expert or to desist from sensationalist sound bites, any more than I expect her to have read the Critique of Dialectical Reason (both volumes!).
But I do expect her to resist "dumbing-down" of this kind which not only conceals its own liberal agenda but would surely make Sartre turn in his grave. - Yours, etc,
TOMMY MURTAGH, Department of French, Trinity College, Dublin.