Sartre's second century

Hidden Wordplay in the Works of Jean-Paul Sartre 147
phonemic sequence "m-vowel-r"—marre, mort / mord, mur / mur—
exerted a certain fascination on Sartre. 17
There are in Sartre's work several word clusters that could be seen as
based on puns: for example, rond, gris, colloquial terms for "tipsy", and
the proper names Ramon Gris and Steinbock. The latter—a German name
meaning "ibex"—which can be broken down into Stein and Bock, both
redolent of beer, is allocated by Sartre to an Irishman! Both these names,
occurring in the first, eponymous story of Le Mur, might well be intended
to evoke the intoxication with death expressed in the Spanish civil war
slogan, /Viva la muerte! (Long live death!). But there is one such cluster
that stands right at the heart of Sartre's conception of humankind, and the
pun at its centre lies fairly deeply buried.
It is well known that Sartre had a horror of crustaceans, and in
particular crabs, which figure abundantly in his work. For example:
It wasn't the miserable look of this fellow that scared us, nor the tumour he
had on his neck which rubbed against the edge of his detachable collar: but
we sensed that his head was full of crab or crayfish thoughts. And that
terrorized us [...]. 18
Suddenly I lost my human appearance and they saw a crab escaping
backwards from this room that was so human. 19
But the most flagrant instance of this fixation is to be found in Les
Sequestres d'Altona where, in the unhinged mind of Frantz, the men of the
thirtieth century have become "crabs", "decapods" sitting in judgment
over the men of our generation. The crustaceans which in La Nausee are
presented as the antithesis of humankind are now themselves men. But,
truth to tell, they always have been, and the fact that Roquentin sees
himself at certain moments as a crab shows to what an extent Sartre, while
distancing himself from them, is prepared to acknowledge his kinship with
them. This obsession with crabs, crayfish, and lobsters, by which he felt
Lucien is not the only character to be compared to un mur, a wall (see for
example, Le Sursis, 904, "vous Stes un mur"; and 948, "comme si j'&ais un mur").
Also, one of the three prisoners awaiting execution in Le Mur is Mirbal (mur-balle,
"wall-bullet": death by firing squad?).
18 "Ce n'est pas l'air miserable de ce type qui nous faisait peur, ni la tumeur qu'il
avait au cou et qui frottait contre le bord de son faux col: mais nous sentions qu'il
formait dans sa tSte des pensdes de crabe ou de langouste. Et ga nous terrorisait
[...]" (La Nausee, 14).
19 "Tout d'un coup, j'ai perdu mon apparence d'homme et ils ont vu un crabe qui
s'£chappait h reculons de cette salle si humaine" (ibid., 146).