206
PARTISAN REVIEW
I found one interchange of dialogue to be very good deadpan
satire of this kind, though I'm afraid that Sartre wants it to be taken
straight.
It
occurs between Goetz and his mistress of the moment,
Catherine, who
is
disconcertingly dressed like the girls that hang around
the cafes of St. Germain des Pres: tight-fitting black slacks, a high–
necked jersey, and close-cropped hair shaped roundly to the head in
a style called
boule de neige;
though Catherine" does wear a pair
of
period hip-boots rather than the more customary sandals. In line with
his policy of always doing Evil, Goetz can't work up any ·enthusiasm
for Catherine unless he's sure she hates him; and this leads to some
lines which, considering the subject, are wonderfully humorless for a
Frenchman:
GOETZ-YOU dream all the time that you're going to assassinate me?
CATHERINE-SeVeral times a night.
GOETz-At least you don't forget that I dragged you in the mud
and degraded you?
CATHERINE-I take good care not to.
GOETz-And you suffer my caresses with loathing?
CATHERINE-They make me shudder.
GOETz-Splendid.
If
it ever occurs to you to swoon
ill
my arms
I'll chase you away in a minute.
When Goetz has to be converted to Good, the play, not very
tightly knit to begin with, falls apart. The trouble is that Sartre has
no story, like the Orestes-Electra-Clytemnestra myth, by which to moti–
vate his main characters in human terms. They all act in relation to
God rather than to each other, and it becomes impossible after a while
to keep up any belief in them as people. Goetz, for instance, says
casually at one point that "the boredom of Evil is that one gets
accustomed to it," and a bit later, as the result of a chance remark
that it is more difficult to do Good than Evil, he suddenly decides to
play a game of dice with God: the stakes being that,
if
Goetz loses,
he becomes converted to Good. Nothing in the dramatic action (of
which there is precious little anyhow) makes us feel Goetz's boredom
or prepares us for this conversion in terms of his character; it is a
coup de theatre
in the worst meaning of the term.
From here on, things get more and more muddled and incredible.
Goetz cheats himself in the dice game and loses, thus becoming obliged
to do Good. Nonetheless, we are supposed to assume that he accepts
his own cheating as a divine edict, and sincerely believes that "God has
chosen me to wipe out Original Sin." He decides to distribute his land
to the peasants and so set up an ideal Christian community called the
City of the Sun.
