LITERATURE IN OUR TIME
The Marxists at least recognized the reality of oppression and
capitalist imperialism, of the class struggle and misery. But the effect
of dialectical materialism, as I have shown elsewhere, is to make Good
and Evil vanish conjointly. There remains only the historical process,
and then Stalinist communism does not attribute so much importance
to the individual that his sufferings and even his death cannot
be
redeemed if they help to hasten the day when power is seized.
The notion of Evil, which had been abandoned, had fallen into
the hands of some Manichaeans-anti-Semites, fascists, anarchists of
the right- who used it to justify their bitterness, their envy, and their
lack of understanding of history. That was enough to discredit it.
For political realism as for philosophical idealism Evil was not a very
serious matter.
We have been taught to take
it
seriously. It is neither our fault
nor our merit if we lived in .a time when torture has been a daily fact.
Chateaubriant, Oradour, the Rue des Saussaies, Tulle, D.achau, and
Auschwitz have all demonstrated to us that Evil
is
not an appearance,
that knowing its causes does not dispel it, that it is not opposed to
Good as a confused idea is to a clear one, that it is not the effect of
passions which might be cured, of a fear which might be overcome,
of a passing .aberration which might be excused, of an ignorance
which might be enlightened, that it can in no way be turned, brought
back, reduced, and incorporated into idealistic humanism, like that
shade of which Leibnitz has written that it
is
necessary for the glare
of daylight.
Satan, Maritain once said,
is
pure. Pure, that is, without mixture
and without remission. We have learned to know this horrible, this
irreducible purity. It blazes forth in the close and almost sexual rap–
port between the executioner and his victim. For torture is first of all
a matter of debasement; whatever the sufferings which have been
endured, it is the victim who decides, as a last resort, what the moment
is when they are unbearable and when he must talk. The supreme
irony of torture is that the sufferer, if he breaks down and talks, ap–
plies his will as a man to denying that he is .a man, makes himself
the accomplice of his executioners and, by his own movement, precipi–
tates himself into abjection. The executioner knows it; he watches for
this weakness, not only because he will obtain the information he de–
sires, but because it will prove to him once again that he is right in
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