Sartre's second century

152 Chapter Ten
Is it not clear that shadows (and Sartre naturally avoids the word here
to describe these semblances of men) are men who have been dehumanized
and rendered ludicrous? Shadow may well be the element of all human
reality, but it is also the reality of those particular human beings
transformed into something else, possibly lobsters or crabs, by themselves
or others. In the same way as we have salauds (bastards) and laches
(cowards), Dr Rog6 and Monsieur Achille, so we have guilty homards,
and homards who are soft but hardly guilty at all. And it is difficult to
avoid the suspicion that the New York scene with which La Mort dans
Vame begins—in which the Spanish fighter Gomez encounters the
indifference of the American population to a defeated Spanish republican
cause fought in the name of "man", and in which, having uttered the mild
expletive hombre! (man!), he complains of the extreme heat and lack of
ombre (shade)—is inspired at some level by a play on words. If true, it
would mean that, for him at least, "shadow" relates to a humanist, as
opposed to idealist, conception of man, akin to that of Hoederer in Les
Mains sales (Dirty Hands), and not to its travesty.
Other marine creatures that figure in Sartre's work are shrimps
(crevettes) and jellyfish (meduses). The word meduse is one of the
contemptuous terms by which Lucien denotes Jews and foreigners, the socalled
meteques (wogs). There is nothing softer, it will be conceded, than a
jellyfish, but Medusa is also the name of the Gorgon who turns to stone all
those who look at her. In "The Childhood of a Leader", this metaphor is
highly ironic: Sartre often compares the look of the Other to the look of
Medusa; but Lucien does not need to be petrified: he has petrified himself
by choosing for himself the stupid hardness of stone. Besides the apparent
metaphor, we have, it seems, a play on words and a hidden metaphor one
of whose terms, Medusa, is endowed with lethal qualities which are the
opposite of the inoffensive and contemptible attributes to which Lucien
gives the name. Whereas Medusa turns people to stone, here we have a
"stone" who reduces them to meduses, a guilty homard and creatures of
the sea that are not necessarily guilty of anything at all.
As for crevette, this is a word used by Daniel, the so-called archangel
and would-be homosexual seducer, to describe one of his young boyfriends,
3129 as well as by Lucien of his erstwhile friend Berliac, who has
been seduced by the homosexual writer Bergere. 32 It is a word which
could well be the feminine diminutive of crabe\ and indeed one of the
cette ombre de question posde par une ombre de guerre & des apparences
d'homines" (La Mort dans Vame, 1183).
31 See L'Age de raison, 556.
32 See "L'Enfance d'un chef \ in he Mur, 359.