Sartre's second century

150 Chapter Ten
and put it all behind him? Because he is or pretends to be convinced that
Germany is still in ruins, and that it would have been better for the whole
of humanity if his country had won the war; and perhaps, he thinks, if he
had been even more cruel and ruthless than he was, his country would
have been victorious. Are then the Crabs hard men judging soft ones, or
soft men condemning brutes? Dur (hard) and mou (soft) are adjectives that
constantly recur throughout Sartre's work, and it is to be observed that
crustaceans are hard on the outside and soft within. And are these
particular so-called crustaceans more advanced than we or, on the
contrary, are they homards, degenerate men?
For Sartre, who describes his anti-humanist humanism as an optimistic
hardness, "une durete optimiste", 23 and whose judgments are often hard,
the answer to these questions is clear: the Crabs reflect Frantz, and Frantz,
like Lucien the anti-Semite in "L'Enfance d'un chef, is a soft man who
has tried to fashion an independent personality by making himself hard.
He is a mou who has become dur, just as Lucien (with compliments to Dr
Spooner) is a doux (sweet, gentle) who becomes mur (mature). It is the
hard Frantz who condemns the soft one, and the soft one who judges the
brute. There is, too, a hidden play on words that lies at the heart of the
drama, and that possibly even inspired it: Frantz eats oysters; the
crustacean is eating himself, eating himself, that is, in a metaphorical sense
of the verb "to eat", manger, i.e. to torture, that is quite common in Sartre.
// se met a la question: he is questioning himself, i.e., in the traditional
euphemism, torturing himself—and that shortly after the publication of La
Question, the book in which Henri Alleg denounces France's use of torture
in the Algerian war, apropos of which Sartre wrote his controversial article
"UneVictoire". 24
But not all men are homards, and not all homards are brutes. There are
men of whom Sartre naturally approves, and who aspire to be des hommes
parmi les hommes, free men among equals. Furthermore, there is another
play on words to which, when considering the nature of his humanism, we
must pay attention. In their notes on La Nausee, Michel Contat and Michel
Rybalka write that, whereas the in-itself, the en-soi, is conceived in terms
of "black", noir, and "matter", mati&re, and the for-itself, the pour-soi, in
terms of "white", blanc, and "light", lumiere, human reality, la realite
humaine, often equated with the Heideggerian Dasein, is described in
L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, 58.
24 [First published in L'Express, 6 March 1958 (seized by the authorities as a
consequence), subsequently published as a postface to Alleg's book and collected
in Situations, V—Eds.]