It is a kind of homeopathy: one cures doubts about the Church orthe Army by the very ills of the Church and the Army. Oneinoculates the public with a contingent evil to prevent or cure anessential one. To rebel against the inhumanity of the EstablishedOrder and its values, according to this way of thinking, is an illnesswhich is common, natural, forgivable; one must not collide with ithead-on, but rather exorcize it like a possession: the patient ismade to give a representation of his illness, he is made familiarwith the very appearance of his revolt, and this revolt disappearsall the more surely since, once at a distance and the object of agaze, the Established Order is no longer anything but aManichaean compound and therefore inevitable, one which winson both counts, and is therefore beneficial. The immanent evil ofenslavement is redeemed by the transcendent good of religion,fatherland, the Church, etc. A little 'confessed' evil saves one fromacknowledging a lot of hidden evil.prejudice which cost us dearly, too dearly, which cost us too muchin scruples, in revolt, in fights and in solitude.* In Molière's Médecin malgré lui.One can trace in advertising a narrative pattern which clearlyshows the working of this new vaccine. It is found in the publicityfor Astra margarine. The episode always begins with a cry ofindignation against margarine: 'A mousse? Made with margarine?Unthinkable!' 'Margarine? Your uncle will be furious!' And thenone's eyes are opened, one's conscience becomes more pliable, andmargarine is a delicious food, tasty, digestible, economical, usefulin all circumstances. The moral at the end is well known: 'Here youare, rid of a prejudice which cost you dearly!' It is in the same waythat the Established Order relieves you of your progressiveprejudices. The Army, an absolute value? It is unthinkable: look atits vexations, its strictness, the always possible blindness of itschiefs. The Church, infallible? Alas, it is very doubtful: look at itsbigots, its powerless priests, its murderous conformism. And thencommon sense makes its reckoning: what is this trifling dross ofOrder, compared to its advantages? It is well worth the price of animmunization. What does it matter, after all, if margarine is justfat, when it goes further than butter, and costs less? What does itmatter, after all, if Order is a little brutal or a little blind, when itallows us to live cheaply? Here we are, in our turn, rid of a4142
Dominici, or the Triumph of LiteratureThe whole Dominici trial * was enacted according to a certain ideaof psychology, which happens to be, as luck would have it, that ofthe Literature of the bourgeois Establishment. Since materialevidence was uncertain or contradictory, one had to resort toevidence of a mental kind; and where could one find it, except inthe very mentality of the accusers? The motives and sequence ofactions were therefore reconstituted off-hand but without a shadowof a doubt; in the manner of those archaeologists who go andgather old stones all over the excavation site and with their cement,modern as it is, erect a delicate wayside altar of Sesostris, or else,who reconstitute a religion which has been dead for two thousandyears by drawing on the ancient fund of universal wisdom, whichis in fact nothing but their own brand of wisdom, elaborated in theschools of the Third Republic.The same applies to the 'psychology' of old Dominici. Is it reallyhis? No one knows. But one can be sure that it is indeed that of thePresiding Judge of the Assizes or the Public Prosecutor. Do thesetwo mentalities, that of the old peasant from the Alps and that ofthe judiciary, function in the same way? Nothing is less likely. Andyet it is in the name of a 'universal' psychology that old Dominicihas been condemned: descending from the charming empyrean ofbourgeois novels and essentialist psychology, Literature has justcondemned a man to the guillotine. Listen to the Public Prosecutor:'Sir Jack Drummond, I told you, was afraid. But he knows that inthe end the best may to defend oneself is to attack. So he throwshimself on this fierce-looking man and takes the old man by thethroat. Not a word is spoken. But to Gaston Dominici, the simplefact that someone should want to hold him down by both shouldersis unthinkable. It was physically impossible for him to bear thisstrength which was suddenly pitted against him.' This is crediblelike the temple of Sesostris, like the Literature of M. Genevoix.Only, to base archaeology or the novel on a 'Why not?' does not43harm anybody. But justice? Periodically, some trial, and notnecessarily fictitious like the one in Camus's The Outsider, comesto remind you that the Law is always prepared to lend you a sparebrain in order to condemn you without remorse, and that, likeCorneille, it depicts you as you should be, and not as you are.This official visit of justice to the world of the accused is madepossible thanks to an intermediate myth which is always usedabundantly by all official institutions, whether they are the Assizesor the periodicals of literary sects: the transparence anduniversality of language. The Presiding judge of the Assizes, whoreads Le Figaro, has obviously no scruples in exchanging wordswith the old 'uneducated' goatherd. Do they not have in commonthe same language, and the clearest there is, French? O wonderfulself-assurance of classical education, in which shepherds, withoutembarrassment, converse with judges! But here again, behind theprestigious (and grotesque) morality of Latin translations andessays in French, what is at stake is the head of a man.And yet the disparity of both languages, their impenetrability toeach other, have been stressed by a few journalists, and Giono hasgiven numerous examples of this in his accounts of the trial. Theirremarks show that there is no need to imagine mysterious barriers,Kafka-like misunderstandings. No: syntax, vocabulary, most of theelementary, analytical materials of language grope blindly withoutever touching, but no one has any qualms about it ('Êtes-vous alléau pont? - Allée? il n'y a pas d'allée, je le sais, j'y suis été'). *Naturally, everyone pretends to believe that it is the officiallanguage which is common sense, that of Dominici being only oneof its ethnological varieties, picturesque in its poverty. And yet,this language of the president is just as peculiar, laden as it is withunreal cliches; it is a language for school essays, not for a concretepsychology (but perhaps it is unavoidable for most men, alas, tohave the psychology of the language which they have been taught).These are in actual fact two particular uses of language whichconfront each other. But one of them has honours, law and force onits side.44
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