380
JOHN FRASER
berry Finn.
And, to revert for a moment to my bus paradigm, the
necessary spectator is present in that the viewer is compelled to bring
his full normal ethical consciousness to bear on the situation before
him, rather than becoming temporarily a simpler and cruder person
than he normally is - a Superman, a Lone Ranger and so on.
Nevertheless, an essential element seems to be to be a sizeable measure
of empathy with the violator involved. Let me give another example
from Flaubert to bring out the point a little more sharply. In the
relatively undisturbing account of Julien's massacring of the
beasts
in
Le Legende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier,
one ostensibly tiny inci–
dent seem to me rather deeply disturbing, namely the one in which
Julien, coming upon a sleeping grouse, cuts off its feet ("Bientot, il
entra dans un bois. Au bout d'une branche, un coq de bruyere en–
gourdi par Ie froid dormait la tete sous l'aile. Julien, d'un revers
d' epee, lui faucha les deux pattes, et sans Ie ramasser continua
sa
route"). One feels empathetically the benumbed defenselessness of
the creature huddled up against the cold, the shock of its awakening,
the hopelessness of its frantic struggles in the snow; one
also
feels
the casual deliberateness of the backhand stroke; and finally one
feels the impossibility of getting through to the swordsman should a
similar whim have taken him about a
human
creature - oneself.
Yet however much one deplores the act, one understands the doer of
it
and can neither hate nor despise him. And this seems to me as
it
should be.
Now, to speak in some sense favorably of certain kinds of viola–
tors has considerable pitfalls, of course. Especially acute, I think,
is
the risk of intellectualizing matters so that the violent man, especially
the violent outsider or rebel, becomes automatically the Hero and
his
victims (as in
Bonnie and Clyde)
merely squares and creeps. Emily
Bronte beautifully caught the kind of sentimentality and dishonesty
entailed in this sort of thing ("But no brutality disgusted her - I
suppose, she had an innate admiration of it,
if
only her precious
person were secure from injury!"; thus, percipiently, Heathcliff on
Isabella ) . And the French cult of Sade, as I have indicated, seems
to me an especially clear modem example of such sentimentality,
issuing as it does
in
pronouncements such as the one I quoted earlier
or in the following:
