They were strolling around the square by the National Theater.
Don Fernando had dropped his arms to his sides and was staring straight ahead as he elaborated on his thoughts. Melkior watched him, tensely awaiting the results of the process.
“In buildings of this kind,” Don Fernando pointed at the theater building, “people force themselves to be naïve for a few hours. Most tragedies, if not all, are founded on false assumptions. Take Hamlet: how is it that it never occurred to him, so intelligent and consequently so full of doubts, way back in the beginning — before the play begins — that Uncle Claudius might be capable of killing his father? I mean, wasn’t the uncle a cad, a drunkard, and a lecher the whole time? Hamlet was bound to have noticed. How is it that he was not wary of the bastard rather than wondering after the fact how someone could be such a scoundrel? All right, granted, Othello is naïve (though again you feel there must be a limit to his naïveté), he could not imagine Iago to be such a beast. But whence the naïveté in Hamlet?”
“It’s his youth, his faith in life, in people, in love.” Melkior didn’t think so.
“And all of a sudden, as the tragedy begins, he ages, he no longer has faith in life, in people, in love? Isn’t this a false assumption? Is this not a false assumption that Hamlet fails to realize that his mother is a woman capable of going to bed with another man, or that Polonius is a professional Lord Chamberlain who will ‘loyally’ serve any king, or that Ophelia is a woman whom he might as well have dispatched to a nunnery long before using the same arguments, or that his school friends are young careerists who stand by their royal pal only as long as he is Crown Prince … and so on. It took his father getting murdered, his mother marrying his father’s murderer, Polonius setting a trap that Ophelia walked knowingly into as bait, his own friends sending him to his death, for him to realize finally he’d been living among scoundrels. Too late. Too late for a Hamlet, and too naïve.
“Or imagine, for instance, just how idiotic Andromache is. She thinks she’s being sly, but hers is a naïve and not at all feminine wile. To save her son she marries Pyrrhus formally, the Hyrcan beast as Hamlet described him, and immediately after the ‘cunning’ wedding she kills herself to remain faithful to Hector. How very clever! She’s met Pyrrhus’s condition for sparing her son’s life: she has ‘become his wife,’ ha, and killed herself directly afterward, double ha-ha! Tragic indeed! And what, pray, is this terrible tragedy rooted in? A goose’s logic: Pyrrhus must not kill my son now because I have done what he asked me to do. He is bound by his word. My dear fellow, don’t you see that this is a piece of nonsense, though we are asked to see it as sublimely moving? I’m asked to believe, together with the tragic hen, that Pyrrhus is a gentleman. That he won’t go berserk when he catches on to how he’s been manipulated by a birdbrain and slay her entire household, all the way down to her cat, to take his revenge. No, I’m asked to believe in human greatness. Merde!”
What’s Andromache to him or he to Andromache that he should be so wound up about her? For these were merely the advance troops, Melkior was waiting for the main body of Don Fernando’s thoughts.
Don Fernando sensed the question with the instinct of a passionate analytical thinker.
“Odd, isn’t it, that I should be talking about this?” He halted for an instant, looking Melkior in the eye in an almost provocative way. “I mean, what is Andromache to me? Or Hamlet for that matter? Or all that tragic affectation? And yet you didn’t think to bring up Horatio. That would have been an objection worth making. Tragedy presupposes faith in goodness. Horatio is pure goodness, a naïve, magnanimous fellow, and yet he’s merely a supporting character. That is why the existence of such a Horatio is not subject to doubt. He is an assumption outside the sum and substance of the tragedy, an almost accidental phenomenon. A satellite, which hasn’t quite grasped the ins and outs of the dark constellation of tragedy. That is why I permit him to be good, because he doesn’t matter.”
“So he who matters must not be good?”
“He shouldn’t … that is, he can’t. He’s responsible. He must build up his malice inside himself lest he begin believing in goodness. He must doubt. This means he must look out, watch, listen (even eavesdrop), catch words, turn them this way and that to discover their secret meaning, the menacing and dangerous idea. He will thus determine his own thinking, his attitude, his course of action. If I know there’s a scoundrel who intends to set fire to my home (and there actually is such a scoundrel), I won’t just sit by the fireside reciting ‘To be or not to be’ with tears in my eyes. I won’t sit there believing that he might not set fire to it after all … won’t wait to become a tragic character. You can be sure that I will load my rifle and sit in wait behind my window to pick the scoundrel off before he sets my home ablaze.”
“But what if the scoundrel says to himself: if I don’t torch the scoundrel’s house he’ll torch mine?”
“Never mind what the scoundrel thinks (I know anyway), the point is what he does. The point is that I must be stronger than he is, or at least more deft.”
“So if I’ve got it right, ‘preventive dehumanization’ means ruling out the possibility of there being any goodness at all, it is the theoretical destruction of goodness?”
“Yes — temporarily destroying it, until conditions arise for it to exist in a genuine sense. Being good in this world is naïve and stupid. Anyhow it is a false goodness and consequently a false tragedy. We don’t need tragedy to discover the dreadful truth. Indeed tragedy cloaks truth with the charm of art, it seduces us into enjoyment by lifting its soiled theatrical skirt coquettishly before us and showing the seamy sides of life with a fetching grin. Not even death itself is serious here. Nothing is serious, all is simply beautiful and desirable. But I want to see the truth naked, without its tragic rags. Because I know that underneath those rags lies something else tragic, a profound and genuine and terrible tragedy, one that no Racine or Shakespeare can help me with. I’m no Hamlet, I know straight from the start that my uncle means to murder my father and marry my mother, so in order to prevent it …”
“You kill him?”
“Of course, if only in theory.”
“But how can you be sure that your uncle’s going to murder?”
“How? Let’s reply with a question: why shouldn’t he murder — what’s to stop him? Why shouldn’t he, if it will get him all the pleasures he has dreamed of his whole life? You of course would not commit murder, but don’t reason in terms of yourself. Our mistake and … our irreparable oversight is precisely that — reasoning in terms of ourselves. Which the scoundrel counts on — that we’ll reason in terms of ourselves, that we won’t smell a rat. But we should reason on his terms; that is why I say we ought to watch with doubt and distrust, we ought to know beforehand. But we’re too deeply caught up with ourselves, we explore our weaknesses, believing ourselves to be some brand of terrible sinner. Meanwhile he prepares, he plots eluding notice, in perfect safety. It’s too late afterward to smack your forehead: oh if only I had known, if only I’d had an inkling! Why is it that I never saw it, never thought, never paid attention before this? Too late — the deed is done. And now we ought to take our revenge, but we’re not up to it. So we reflect: what’s the use, what is the point of revenge when our father’s gone and our mother’s sharing the murderer’s bed? We reason. ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.’ We anguish. Which is exactly what the evil uncle wants — our anguish, our physical inaction; it spells safety for him. We make tragedies for people to weep, but he chortles and enjoys being used for the making of art. Art does kill him in the tragedy (or not, as the case may be), but it kills him in an artistic, symbolic way — and he doesn’t give a fig for its symbols when he knows he’s alive. And exults in being alive. He even enjoys the symbols, in which he sees someone else rather than himself, so that he will actually shed a tear over that Someone Else’s fate, for the pleasure. Oh, we pay the scoundrel a tremendous tribute in tragedies! And in real life we leave him alone to savor his criminal plunder. We also leave him his life, which is not only undeserved but actually a threat to other lives. The scoundrel ought to be gotten rid of in time. Physically and simply, not symbolically; without ceremony and catharsis and tragi-pathos mumbo jumbo à la Aristotle.”