Force

No plan survives first contact with the enemy, Field Marshal von Moltke wrote, and the same may be true of first contact with the class you are going to teach.  

One year, designing a course on philosophy and literature and meaning to favor my own tastes, I chose tales from Borges, William Golding, Eco, Calvino, and John Barth, with links to Sartre.  We would end with Lagerkvist’s novel The Dwarf.  The narrator, Piccolino,  begins “I am twenty-six inches tall, shapely and well proportioned …”.  It is a story of evil incarnate.

That was my plan.

 As I stepped into the class there was in the front row, gazing at me earnestly, a young woman of very short stature, not much greater than Piccolino’s.  

Many thoughts and feelings struck me simultaneously, the first being shame, not having thought of how abstractions and fictions may come to have a face, the second that my lecture notes on The Dwarf needed tearing up.

Unlike Field Marshal Moltke’s officers, I was allowed time to redesign the plan of battle between first contact and crucial engagement.  

Overcoming the myopia I had shared with Lagerkvist’s reviewers, I chose as theme the problem of freedom.  Not the traditional chestnut of free will versus determinism.  That, in its abstraction, becomes just another “what happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object” puzzle.   

Rather, the problem as posed in Simone Weil’s meditation on the Iliad, Le Poème de la Force. As the Iliad’s heroes, Greeks and Trojans both, act on their anger and lust of violence, the idea of their honor and revenge, are they paradigmatically free actors? Or, being gripped by emotion are they no more free than leaves blown off a tree, fluttering to the ground?   

In Borges’ The South, Juan Dahlman’s life is affected by a scratch, septicemia brings him helplessly into the hands of doctors, he comes close to dying.  On release he sets out for his ranch in the South.  At the station there, having something to eat, some country louts provoke him, he protests, they respond with insults.  An old gaucho casually tosses him a knife, without thinking he picks it up. “Dahlman bent over to pick up the dagger, and felt two things.  The first, that this almost instinctive act bound him to fight.  The second, that the weapon, in his hand, was no defense at all, but would merely serve to justify his murder.”  

There is no way out … he steps out, clutching the knife, which he does not know how to wield.  

Golding’s Free Fall is one long attempt to answer the question “When did I lose my freedom?”  Sammy Mountjoy reflects that once, he was free.  As a child in a slum, as a little boy, he was free, the taste of freedom undefinable, like the taste of potatoes.  But already as a young man he was not free anymore, “almost”, he reflects, “but not quite”. For then he had no focus but Beatrice, had been taken over by a desire that he could perhaps have set aside but it was already too late.  And the desire is ruthless: “Once a human being has lost freedom there is no end to the coils of cruelty.  I must, I must, I must. … We can only watch ourselves becoming automata; feel only terror as our alienated arms lift the instrument of their passion towards those we love.”  

In conjunction with fate and circumstance, we enslave ourselves. Or, more accurately – given how ephemeral the experience of freedom seems to be – find ourselves enslaved.  It is one of the many ways Simone Weil describes of how force turns a person, hero and victim equally, as she says, into a thing. 

During the course the young woman – I will only refer to her thus — would not talk often or much.  She wrote the assignments in a very personal, often heartfelt, way.  I felt apprehensive as we began our sessions on The Dwarf.

What is Piccolino?  He is a slave, his mother sold him.  He is an object, a piece of property bought and sold, used.  He is given as a plaything to the child Angelica, and as an object of scientific study to Bernardo, and he feels it deeply, “inside I am raging with fury”.  He struggles to define himself in face of the facts of his situation,  

“No one possesses himself!  Thus everything belongs to the others!  Don’t we even own our own faces?  … Can others own one’s own body?  I find the notion most repellent.

I, and I alone, will be the possessor of that which is mine.  Nobody else may seize it, none outrage it.  It belongs to me and nobody else”

There is no question that Piccolino’s life instantiates an unredeemed evil.  He is, in his own self-image, the Satan outside paradise: “Evil, be thou my good!”  Piccolino carries out what he takes to be the Prince’s wishes, but finds ways to go much further, murdering defenseless other dwarfs and bringing about enormous, fatal cruelty for both Angelica and the Princess. In doing so he plays the role he has constructed for himself, through denial and self-deception, as the Prince’s shadow, “his little assassin, his little bravo”.  He is not being used, demeaned, in this role, he is heroic, he is indispensable.  He has a reality, behind the appearances, “Who can guess my true identity?  It is well for them that they cannot, for if they did they would be terrified.” But what he is in fact keeps breaking through his unreliable narrative. He lives in a reality beset with contradictions.

Piccolino cannot escape what makes him someone’s property, but neither can he escape the role that alone can allow him to bear that. Where is his freedom?  

That young woman  who was there in the front row, gazing at me so earnestly, chose to write on The Dwarf for her final essay .   At the end of her paper there was a handwritten note, “This was very hard for me”.

NOTES

 Simone Weil’s, L’Iliade ou le poème de la force, written early in the war, begins “The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad, is force. Force that is managed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh flinches. A human soul appears always modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it believed itself able to handle, bent by the force that constrains it.”  (my tr.)  Les Cahiers du Sud 1940/41.

Reviewers on The Dwarf

Kirkus Review: “Embodying the malevolence of maladjustment, the evil genius of thwarted ambition, a dwarf, of renaissance Italy, tells his story. Hating normal people, contemptuous of his Princess, losing his faith in his Prince, the warped little man gets his taste of power in a war waged against a neighboring principality, poisons the enemy as they treat for truce. On his own, he poisons his Princess’ lover, betrays her young daughter and the boy she loves, and brings about the death of the Princess as she strives for pardon. Told in the first person, there is the hysterical self-justification, uncontrolled resentment, implacable anger of a frustrated ego ….” 

Milosz Puczydlowski:  “The novel’s protagonist is to be found as the embodiment of evil.” (Abstract) and “Although the Dwarf always stands behind the ruler’s acts and decisions, the influential role he plays in the novel’s plot is not obvious to the others. Yet, it goes without saying that he is the true embodiment of evil that lurks in the murky abyss of the Prince’s soul. All the calamities that afflict both the castle and the entire country have their source in the Dwarf’s deeds and speech. […]  By going deep into the Dwarf’s values and motivations one can find the genuine identity of evil.” (p. 86).  “The Ontology of Evil and Its Anthropological Moment of Freedom in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf and Plotinus’ Enneads (I.VII-VIII)” The Polish Journal of Aesthetics 56 (2020): 85-99.