Ranko Marinkovic - Cyclops

“Your thought is far-reaching … and dangerous. You reveal … No, seriously now, the editor may have suggested such an affinity to me in the kind of laughter (and here I’m quoting you) Molière uses to deal with big issues. All I wanted to say was that even such a man — while being, as you put it, swinish, and while reveling in stench (which is, among other things, a well-turned phrase indeed) — even such a man has in him an integral, essential something, a nondegradable form that always manifests itself in some way, even as it revels in stench. This is what defines the personality after all. You yourself call him Thersites. So, what makes the parallel doable for you? Were nothing to him but the … fecal bath, how would he rise to the level of Thersites?”

Why’s he saying all this? It’s certainly not about Maestro. But what is it about?

“The editor, for one, thinks very highly of him — in a certain way, of course.”

“He thinks very highly of anyone who can be useful to him.”

“You’re wrong. The editor is useful himself; I daresay he’s very useful.”

Don Fernando stressed the last words with a certainty stemming from a distinct way of looking at things. “You seem to buzz around petty details and get snared by them.”

“What about his refusal to print your stuff in his paper? Do you find that useful, too?” Melkior tried to draw him out through vanity. Don Fernando smiled.

“Refusal to print my stuff? Only this one article … which is truly not suited to his paper. Or any other paper … for the time being.”

Such an air of the clandestine!

“Tell me one thing …”

“You’re sounding like Hamlet,” Don Fernando gave an almost offended smile. “Never mind — I’ll tell you everything I’m able to tell.”

“What did you write about?”

“Oh, that?” Don Fernando reflected for a moment. “About the need for preventive dehumanization … or, shedding tragedy through skepticism.”

Melkior made a stupid face.

“Is this something I could understand?”

“Maybe, if you try. You’re a theater critic, after all.”

“Then help me, for God’s sake!” cried Melkior.

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?”