PARIS LETTER
207
It may
be
a little hard, I must admit,
to
foresee how all this bene–
ficence is going to lead to a massacre; but a massacre is
in
the cards,
and Sartre manages to produce it on schedule. Goetz is warned by
the proletarian prophet (engagingly named Nasty, and costumed like
a leather-jacketed commissar of the early days of the Russian Revo–
lution) that the other peasants will be envious, that this will lead
to
a general peasant prising, and that this in tum will lead to a ... mas–
sacre. And believe it or not, this is exactly what happens. I suppose
the audience is expected to feel that Goetz's infatuation with God is
to blame for the whole business, but for my part, I thought that Goetz
(and God) get a raw deal in this act. Mter all, Goetz's ideal community
works out quite nicely for his own peasants; but Sartre's grim moral
seems to be that if you can't make
everybody
happy, it's a crime for
any.body
to
be
so. (Certainly an odd position for a philosopher to land
up in whose main criticism of other ethical philosophies is that they
sacrifice the individual, with only his one short life to live, to some
overriding idea of Good in general.) The other peasants, though, agree
with Sartre, and they obligingly stuff the inhabitants of Goetz's peace–
ful little pacifist community into a building and bum them alive (off–
stage) .
This series of events, understandably enough, sends Goetz into a
tailspin, and he concludes that perhaps God doesn't want
him
to mess
around in human affairs after all. Consequently, he retires into an
extreme form of asceticism, alternately torturing himself and resisting
temptation so far as humanly possible. He has a tender scene with a
water jug, which he caresses fondly without allowing himself to drink;
and Hilda, whose love he has gained, becomes quite exasperated–
certainly with good reason-when he works up a passion for her but
then, after lavishing so much affection on the water jug, insultingly
refuses to make love. (The language of this scene made the first-night
French audience, especially the ladies, gasp with horror. Sartre has since
revealed that the most pungent phrases were lifted bodily from the
writings of the Church Fathers.) The upshot of all this is that Goetz
has another interview with Heinrich, the defrocked priest whose remark
about Good had originally converted Goetz from Evil. Heinrich proceeds
to
analyze Goetz's good deeds, which tum out, on examination, to be
attempts to glorify himself, inspired not by love of
Man
but by pride
in being an Elect of God. Goetz concedes the point: " ... it wasn't
Good that rolled out of the dice-box, it was a worse Evil. What does
it
matter anyway: monster or saint, I didn't care, I wanted to
be
in–
human." At which juncture he confesses that he had been kidding
himself all along: God doesn't exist.
