PARTISAN REVIEW
375
capable of oneself that one instinctively resists being drawn into
sym–
pathy and approval because of the temporary lessening of one's own
vitality that would be entailed therein. And even where no ambi–
valence exists, and the victims are patently in no way to blame for
their fates, a subtle closing-off and containment of the violence can
still occur. It is distressing, for instance, to read through Guy Chap–
man's thick anthology (
Vain Glory)
of selections from firsthand
accounts of the Great War and come upon almost nothing that brings
home to one really vividly the awfulness of being a conscript in such
a war; and a similar kind of benumbment can be induced by poor
firsthand accounts of concentration camp life. The violences in such
accounts happen to other people; the assent one gives to the fact that
they
could
happen to oneself is merely notional.
But, of course, while there ,are a number of "natural" victims in
movies and novels, there are, as I have said, a number of peaceable
people to whom violences don't, and in terms of the conventions of
"entertainments,"
shouldn't
happen. I don't mean simply that "good"
people like kind old priests and loving mothers are sacrosanct. Nor
do I simply mean that likeable people who have done good things
in the course of a movie should not be gratuitously repaid with evil
at the end, even though that may sometimes be the case. (No one
who saw
The Plainsman
as a child in the thirties, I imagine, has
ever really got over the shock of Gary Cooper's being murdered at
the end of it.) What I mean
is
that, in terms of conventional re–
sponses, the reader or viewer mustn't be made to feel acutely that
what happens to this or that person is
unfair.
And I suspect rather
strongly that the feeling of unfairness generally comes when one has
been drawn into the consciousness of someone who
is
trying fairly
actively to accomplish something that one wants him to succeed in
accomplishing. The something may be quite small and undramatic,
such as eating a good dinner or, as in Maupassant's "Deux Amis,"
going out
for
a quiet day's fishing.
It
may be very dramatic, as in the
first murder in
Psycho,
where Hitchcock so masterfully cashes in on
the empathy that the audience has been building up with the process
of trying to cope with one's conscience after robbing one's boss. It
may involve more fundamental and as it were "total" drives, as in
the hero's desperate bid for freedom in Franju's
La Tete contre les
Murs.
But I think that in almost all cases the reader or viewer feels
