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- R I C H A ROW I LBUR
over heavy-handedly stamped with existentialist psychology, would
be
worthy of attention. But Sartre has not done with his audience yet. With
the closing speech he very skillfully lifts his play from the context of a
limited comment on the individual in a specific national and historical
situation to a universality where the spectator suddenly finds
himself
questioning his own conscience concerning his personal involvement
in
any use of force as a national policy. Frantz has left behind
him
a
remembrance: his recording machine with what he considers the
finest of his pleadings before the tribunal of the future. As Frantz' voice
comes from the machine, the remainder of his family leaves the stage
and Frantz' words echo to the audience across an empty stage:
The century would have been good if only man hadn't been watched
over by his cruel, timeless enemy, the carnivorous species which had
sworn to destroy him, the hairless evil animal, man. . . . The animal
hid itself, then suddenly we caught his glance in the hidden eyes of
Oul
neighbors; so we struck: legitimate preventive defense. I surprised the
animal, I struck, a man fell, and in his dying eyes I saw the animal, still
alive, myself....
The thirtieth century isn't answering. Perhaps there will be no more
centuries after our own. Perhaps a bomb will have blown out the lights.
Everything will be dead: eyes, judges, time. Tribunal of the night, you
who have been, who will be, who are, I have been! I have been! I,
Frantz, von Gerlach, here, in this room, I've taken the century on my
shoulders and said: I will answer for it. Today and for ever after.
In this closing speech Sartre tries to associate Frantz' rationalization
that all he had done had been justified by the need to save the German
people from the ravages of the Allies with the current Western position
of armed deterrence and the claim of "legitimate preventive defense"
under which it is built and could be used. The story of Frantz, his
pleas of innocence and subsequent realization of guilt, would apply to
any man or nation which might strike in what it believed to be its own
defense---and would itself prove
to
be the "carnivorous animal" lurking
within human nature.
But to what extent is this attempt to point a universal and presently
applicable moral justified by the drama itself? In a world
in
which
blows are already constantly being struck by both sides, whether by
direct force or by more convenient proxies, the truism that there can
be no 'legitimate preventive defense"
in
a nuclear world is of propaganda
rather than real value as a guide to moral decision and action. Sartre,
