208
PARTISAN REVIEW
With Good and Evil both taken care of, the way is now clear for
the grand finale. Goetz had tried to stop the uprising by warning the
peasants that the better trained armies of the nobles would cut them
to pieces; and when this occurs, the peasants-with a logic that Sartre
apparently finds irreproachable- blame Goetz for their defeat. But when
they arrive to kill him, they find a changed man. Having decided that
God
doesn't exist, Goetz's character has been transformed; he wants
now only to be a "man among men"-to fight as a simple soldier
in
the ranks of the peasant army and find release from the inhuman
solitude of his continual
tete-a.-tete
with God. The peasants make Goetz
their military chief: there is no escape from the loneliness of his destiny;
and after he off-handedly stabs an insubordinate officer, just to make
clear that he means to enforce discipline, the curtain comes down in
a flurry of Existentialist paradoxes. "I shall make them hate me," Goetz
says, meaning his soldiers, "because I have no other way of loving
them; I'll give them orders because I have no other way of obeying;
I shall remain alone with the empty sky above my head since I have
no other way of being with them all. I have this war to fight and I
will fight it."
I think it should be clear by now that Sartre, to say the least, has
been anything but successful in
Le Diable et Ie Bon Dieu.
The play
is
rambling and ill-constructed, and the character of Goetz, after the first
act, totally incoherent.
If
we take his belief
in
God seriously-as we
must
if
the ending is to have any sense-then such actions as cheating
against God in the dice game, or giving himself fake stigmata to fool
the superstitious peasants, are simply incredible. But
if
he never really
believes in God, as these actions would indicate, then the wind-up
conversion from God to Man falls flat. Sartre wants to have it both
ways, and the result is sheer chaos. And even if we accept Goetz as so
arrogantly pious that he has no qualms about filling in for God whenever
the Almighty is a bit shy about manifesting a sign-even then, the
ending is still an embarrassing fizzle. There is no good reason
(either
logical or dramatic) why Goetz should throw in his lot with the
peasants after disposing of God. Goetz might no less (or no more)
convincingly have done anything under the sun: atheism and social
revolution do not have the iron-clad causal connection that Sartre,
in
his more optimistic moments, would probably like to assume.
And what are we to make of Goetz's willingness to place himself
at the head of an army of God-fearing peasants right after concluding
that
God
is dead? Does this mean that an individual, after painfully
