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chin-up, eyes-front stare into an undefined future. (I should perhaps
remark that
Les Mouches
was first produced under the German occupa–
tion, and that everybody took it for a political allegory. Thus the future
that the French audience wanted was perfectly clear in its own mind,
and Sartre could count on this for dramatic purposes. The play, how–
ever, was put on again last season at the Vieux Colombier and was
a rather resounding flop.)
The central idea of
Le Diable et Ie Bon Dieu-as
explained by
Sartre himself in the interview already cited-is that "if
God
exists
Good and Evil are the same. This means that if the main character acts
evilly at first and then benevolently, but always in relation to God, he
gets exactly the same results: in both cases, man is destroyed. Goetz,
for example, ends up with massacres when he is evil and with other
massacres when he is good ... [But] Goetz perceives . .. the total indif–
ference of God, who allows him to act without ever manifesting Him–
self. Thus when Heinrich, who has lost his faith, points this out to
Goetz, he is obliged to conclude the non-existence of the Divinity. Then
he understands himself, and turns toward men. A morality dependent
on God can lead only to an anti-humanism. But Goetz, in the final
tableau,
accepts the relative and limited morality which suits human
destiny: he replaces the absolute by history." This is a fair summary
of Sartre's intentions. But to hold these convictions as philosophical
ideas is one thing; to project them convincingly in dramatic form is
quite another. How does Sartre go about doing so?
In the first act, he sets up Goetz as a rip-roaring robber baron
enamored of Evil for its own sake, or rather, because his orgy of Evil
is a defiance of God. Besieging the city of Worms with his army, and
determined to turn it into a holocaust, Goetz is impervious to all human
appeals. He is Evil incarnate, Evil raised to a level of superhuman
gratuitousness where it takes on a certain nobility. And Goetz has
only contempt for the priest, the proletarian prophet and the banker
who come to plead with him to play ball with their own special in–
terests rather than wiping out everything in the city. These scenes in
the first act are far and away the most successful stretch of the play,
for Sartre succeeds in bringing to life in Goetz all the age-old fascination
of the Satanic and diabolic, the combination of lucidity, power and
malevolence that give such a lurid radiance to Milton's Lucifer, Goethe's
Mephistopheles and Balzac's Vautrin. Sartre's mordant cynicism, and
his special gift for bitingly effective dialogue, have never been used to
better advantage, though they do not escape an occasional tendency
to self-caricature.
